Re: TNE Drives

>Stutterwarp ships are actually "not there" along most of there flight path--
>they only occupy a small part of the space they pass through. In addition,
>they are fast enough to outrun any weapon that does not travel at the speed
>of light, or use a faster stutterwarp. A ship with stutterwarp is very hard
>to hit--sort of like a factor 9 black globe that never overloads. Therefore,
>all ship weapons in _2300AD_ are either lasers or particle beams that can be
>aimed precisely enough to hit a target when it "is there".

One idea we came up with in the PBEM would allow a ship to become
virtually unhittable.  With the enormous distances ship-to-ship
combat takes, there is often a significant lag in the time it takes
for the light from one ship to reach the other - i.e. for a fraction
of a second, you don't see the ship that's just jumped in, however
they can see you since you've been sitting there reflecting light
for as long as you've been there.

The equipment we used was a teleporter, but a stutterwarp could
easily take the same place assuming you can control the direction
of the stutterwarp to a certain degree (This is the first I've heard
of stutterwarps).  If you can induce enough random motion into your
stutterwarp flight path, you become a practically unhittable target.
The opposing ship only has the light they receive to gague your position
by, and that info is at least a fraction of a second old (off by a
couple hundred km at least if I read correctly how stutterwarps work),
and your flight path is nearly unpredicatable, hence any light-speed
weapon will miss.  Meanwhile, the ship doing the stutterwarping always
has a good target because the other ship isn't jumping all over the
place.

You could do something similar with M-6 if you were far enough away
from the opposing ship, but you need to be able to change directions
and positions really quickly for this to be an effective tactic.
- --
John H. Kim
[email removed]
[email removed]