Subject: Re: Megatraveller starships
Adrian Hurt in message 305 asks,
>A few questions on starships in MegaTraveller.
>1. The new explanation of jump drives (i.e. a large power plant driving a net
>integral to the ship's hull) is official - it's in the Referee's manual.
>Given this, why can't you damage a ship's jump capability with mere surface
>damage? The starship combat damage tables are lifted straight from High Guard,
>and you can only harm the target's jump drive with an internal explosion or
>critical hit.
Nope. I heard these questions asked at a con, and according to Miller et al,
the Lathimum (? is that correct? a rare earth metal I think) grid around the
hull is not that fragile; its basically a grid about the ship which is about
a meter apart, so the jump navigators can compensate if you are missing large
parts of it. If you were actually missing large parts of your *hull* you
might be risking a misjump and have to deal with the possibility of having
a large hunk of jump space portrude into your ship. Not nice.
>2. Can you use the jump drive's power plant as a source of a lot of power for
>a short time?
Definitely not! Although the jump drive and the ship's power plant both supply
power they serve different requirements. The jump drive's burns all its fuel
very quickly and cannot sustain itself for the normal day to day run of the
ship's systems. It cannot be altered to operated in any sort of "slow" mode.
And you cannot adapt the power plant to shunt energy through the crystals;
it just does not produce enough power, in the necessary amount of time.
You cannot adapt one to the other's use. If your jump drive and power plant are
gone, you are not dead yet; you've got batteries so you still have air,
(although I'd turn off the artificial gravity--it does kinda put a strain on
the power requirements)
Interestingly enough, jump is unlimited as far as how big a thing you want to
send. At very high tech levels you can send entire planets through jump; its
an engineering problem rather than a theoretical one. Conceivably, you could
have some spare grid, put it around an interesting asteroid, modify your
computers and jump with both your ship and the asteroid you had found.
Fred Schiff - You can kill and maim with your Zen gun.
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