I'm sending the following without commenting to the final essay appended due
to lack of time today.
Have fun!
Rob Dean
You can lead a Horde to water, but you can't make it drink....
- ------------------------------
The following discussion of Agility is from GEnie:
************
Topic 8 Sub: Traveller Q&A
Get the official answers to your questions. Answered by the writ-
ers/Designers of MegaTraveller.
************
------------
Category 11, Topic 8
Message 331 Sat Aug 17, 1991
R.DEAN14 [Rob Dean] at 20:24 EDT
OK. Stupid questions department, and I would appreciate knowing
whether any answers are official. I've had this discussion with
various people on the Internet Traveller Mailing List.
How do I calculate agility? If I have a ship with a 100MW power
plant, a drive that uses 60MW, 5MW of parasitic power (controls,
etc.) and 30MW of life support, with no weapons (just to keep
discussion simple) how much power do I use in the agility calcu-
lation?
Preferred answers on the TML are 5MW (what's left after every-
thing else is powered), 65MW (what's left after everything except
the maneuver drive is powered), and 60MW (the maximum input to
the drive, regardless of any 5MW of left over power).
MY opinion is 60...but I could be wrong.
Rob Dean
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Category 11, Topic 8
Message 332 Sun Aug 18, 1991
C.BUSH3 [Clay] at 01:55 EDT
5 MW. (Short and simple answer.)
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Category 11, Topic 8
Message 333 Sun Aug 18, 1991
S.OLSON4 at 14:34
EDT
Clay's right, 5 is the amount you use for calculating agility.
Scott
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Category 11, Topic 8
Message 336 Wed Aug 21, 1991
R.DEAN14 [Rob Dean] at 18:34
EDT
My cohort in crime on the Internet TML, Scott Kellogg, pleaded
with me to repost this fairly long message that we concocted a
few weeks ago on the subject of spaceship agility. Please bear
with me...we were a little surprised at the short '5MW of course-
'answer uptopic, so figured that it would best for you to see
where we were coming from.
Hope this uploads OK....
Date: Tue, 6 Aug 1991 14:22 CDT
From: [email removed]
Subject: (2729) Revised Agility
Calculation Formula
<Text of TML Message 2729 deleted>
------------
Category 11, Topic 8
Message 337 Wed Aug 21, 1991
S.OLSON4 at 20:21 EDT
Rob,
Hmmmmm.... I had a rather long and heated discussion/argu-
ment with Joe about this type of a topic a couple years ago. I
was holding that Agility should be limited by manuever, but I
lost (temporarily, anyway). The major difference between High
Guard and MT is that Agility and Manuever are no longer related
AT ALL. Your ability to manuever doesn't affect your agility, or
vice versa. The old disengagement rules made no sense when they
were written, let alone now: you disengage by running away from
the enemy, not by turning tight circles. If you're turning
faster than I am, but I'm faster, you can only get away IF I lose
contact with you.
Now, if you WANT to chop your manuever capability to increase
your agility, that's fine, but excess power means what's said in
the last sentence: "Excess power is the powerleft over from the
power plant after all the crafts other components have been
powered." Looks clear enough to me.
Where did you get that "when the ship is in emergency status,
the ship suddenly goes to agility=2"? I can't find anything that
suggests that result.
"Double-Dipping" makes sense and would be legal as I read the
rules: nothing prevents you from parceling out the available
power in whatever manner you see fit, AS LONG AS YOU DON'T USE
THE SAME MW IN TWO PLACES AT ONCE. After all, that's like getting
something for nothing.....
Scott
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Category 11, Topic 8
Message 338 Wed Aug 21, 1991
R.DEAN14 [Rob Dean] at 21:06 EDT
Where I come from (-8, when it says "after all the craft's
_other_" components have been powered", I have to wonder--Other
than what? Given that on p.94 right column of my printing of the
Ref's Manual the Emergency Agility rule says that I can cut power
to my weapons and gain an agility equal to my manuever drive
rating, I was left with the impression that agility had something
to do with maneuver. (-8
As someone who cut my teeth on vector movement in Triplanetary
(in 1976), I _know_ that a rotating ship is a ballistic, not an
evading, target, so I reject the current 'explanation' for agili-
ty the same way I reject the maneuver rule that says that I can
move any number of hexes up to my current speed or circle in the
same hex. Give me a break... we have to accept a few 'Physics
Nullifiers' (tm) to play this game, but not that one. Anyway, by
the rules I have, what Scott says is true. If I have a merchant
ship with no weapons, I can declare an emergency agility equal
to my maneuver rating, which has nothing to do with breaking off
under the current hex grid combat rules.
I have no strong objection to going off in my own little corner
and playing the way I like, but I hate to see things like this
crop up in what is supposed to be a (generally) reality based
game.
Rob Dean
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The following is an email message from GEnie:
Item 8057512 91/08/22 03:26
From: B.BORICH Bryan J. Borich
To: R.DEAN14 Robert S. Dean
cc: B.BORICH Bryan J. Borich
Sub: Agility in MT
THE FOLLOWING IS AN ARTICLE FROM SS&V #1:
AGILITY
By Bryan Borich
With thanks to
Mike Mikesh
[This discussion took place prior to the development of SoPM1
and therefore, there might be some conflict with the presumptions
made here that haven't been fully analyzed in relation to that
book, though some updating has been attempted].
When Megatraveller came out, a change in the ship rules
occurred concerning maneuver drives and the ship's agility.
Previous to MT, these two abilities tended to intertwine (i.e.
there was a strong relationship between a ship's ability to
maneuver and it's ability to dodge, reflected by it's agility).
In MT ship design this connectivity between the two now no longer
occurs, a ship's agility has no relationship to it's maneuver
drive.
This alteration tended to cause some initial concern among
designer's since reasoning tended to reside with the idea that
agility and ability to maneuver should be intertwined.
A way around this problem was given by considering the way
maneuver drives worked and how agility works and then considering
inertial compensators as a possible solution.
According to SoPM1 inertial compensators are directed by the
main computer in response to normal ship inertia from moving
about and maneuvering. Inertial compensators that are involved
in this process are initially available at TL 10.
When one looks at the effect of maneuver drives installed on
a vessel one notices that the mass of the ship has no effect on
the drives ability to propel the vessel, this is of course an
advantage of using either gravitic or thruster technology. Now
taking a look at the design of a ship's agility, the ship's mass
plays an important role here, therefore the heavier the ship the
less agility it tended to display (can't go below zero though).
Taking these things into account a theory occured that as-
sumed that a more primitive form of inertial compensators is
built into the ships as part of the maneuver drives and hull
structural members. These inertial compensators are simple in
design and are available at TL9 (in actuality the major differ-
ence between the TL9 and TL10 compensators is the computer elec-
tronics and the fine tuning necessary, requiring that environmen-
tal compensators be built through the entire ship where it is
needed to protect the crew and cargo).
These structural compensators have a limited ability to
negate the
mass of a vessel while trying to use agility however because of
insufficient power levels for the basic unit. By increasing the
power however, added ability to move in different directions is
added, thus increasing the vessel's "agility". This does cause
more stress to the vessels structure however and makes it more
difficult for the Environmental compensators to dampen the maneu-
vers involved.
Inertial compensators still have a limit as to their ability
to negate mass, and when this is exceeded (which does not occur
under normal speed and mass considerations that occur with cur-
rent ship design, this is also why maneuver 6 cannot be exceeded,
as at that point you would need to continually overdrive the
structural inertial compensators and thus burn them out), one
needs to apply more power, therefore you still run into the
lightspeed problem (needing infinite energy to move the infinite
mass essentially).
In an actual emergency situation, a vessel could jury-rig
controls bypassing the normal energy conduits and feeding extra
power into the compensators (always presuming the ship had enough
power that could be diverted from other uses).
To jury-rig a bypass,
Difficult, 10 minutes, Engineering, Education, Hazardous
Bypassing involves the transfer of power from one source
(such as a weapons system, life support system, staterooms, or
similar system) to another.
(C) Bryan Borich 1990
(Excuse the poor quality of the writing, I was probably
rushing and trying to do to many things at the same time when I
threw it together)
Feel free to post the above to the TML, and include the
disclaimer.
=END=