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CRMcNeill
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 Posted: Sat Nov 13, 2021 6:41 pm Post subject: High Velocity Hyper-Exit |
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A while back, I posted an Expanded List of Hyperspace Mishaps. I was perusing it again today and I found something of particular interest:High Delta: Normally when a ship exits hyperspace, it will be moving reasonably slowly relative to its destination. In a high-delta exit, the ship arrives still moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, and must use its sub-space drives to slow down drastically. This will take time and costs fuel (as determined by the GM), and causes many captains to cuss up a blue streak. On the other hand, sometimes a high delta is useful; no-one local will be able to intercept you unless they have considerable numbers of fast craft already set up and waiting. For this reason, military scouts often use high delta maneuvers. That last part is particularly interesting. I've always played it that you come out of hyperspace at the same speed you went in, but the idea of deliberately tweaking your exit from hyperspace such that you're traveling a much higher velocity than you went in could come in handy, both in circumstances as described above and for smugglers or tramp freighters who wish to avoid pirates or other forms of ambush waiting at the jump point.
Of course, it's probably also highly illegal, and earns you an intense and unforgiving inspection from Customs, along with a stern talking to at the absolute minimum, if you do it in an inhabited system...
Is this something you'd allow in your campaign, and if so, how would you do the rules?
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MrNexx
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| Posted: Sat Nov 13, 2021 6:46 pm Post subject: |
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I'd probably allow them to enter into the system at full-out speed or greater, and require a piloting roll to maintain control... but apply a penalty to attempts to target them, especially if they're not expecting a high-delta exit.
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Whill
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| Posted: Sat Nov 13, 2021 7:47 pm Post subject: Re: High Velocity Hyper-Exit |
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You would cover a lot of distance past your exit point in realspace. It could be dangerous in a star system.
One problem of moving appreciable fraction of the speed of light in realspace is time dilation, so more time would pass outside the ship than inside. You would in a sense be 'time traveling' into the future (at a faster rate than those not moving relativistic speeds).
Unless you buy into "relativity shields" which were not added to address any existing problem with canon. They were only added for the sake of an interesting sounding in-universe news story when a ship's shields had failed and a man from the past appeared in the present. This wasn't a compelling reason to add them into continuity in the first place (a side story in an online newsite meant to build hype for AotC). If moving in realspace only involves non-relativistic speeds, then there is no need for relative shields.
| CRMcNeill wrote: | | Is this something you'd allow in your campaign |
Personally, I don't think so. I still see the exit out of hyperspace being the same speed as the entrance as inherent to the way hyperspace works, so I don't see a way to force it to work differently. But for those that want to allow that, got for it.
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CRMcNeill
Director of Engineering
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Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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| Posted: Sat Nov 13, 2021 8:59 pm Post subject: |
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I think the two big question w/r/t relativity issues are 1) exactly what is "an appreciable fraction of lightspeed?" and 2) how long will the ship stay there?
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.
The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index
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garhkal
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| Posted: Sun Nov 14, 2021 4:04 am Post subject: Re: High Velocity Hyper-Exit |
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| CRMcNeill wrote: |
Is this something you'd allow in your campaign, and if so, how would you do the rules? |
I have done it in the past, but it has the major risk, if you come out too close to the planet's gravity well, you may get major damage, burning through the atmosphere..
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Whill
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| Posted: Sun Nov 14, 2021 3:06 pm Post subject: |
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| CRMcNeill wrote: | | I think the two big question w/r/t relativity issues are 1) exactly what is "an appreciable fraction of lightspeed?" and 2) how long will the ship stay there? |
It's relative (I normally intend my puns but no pun intended here). And those two are interrelated. The shorter the time frame, the less time dilation. Traveling 50% the speed of light for 1 second of the ship's time would not be much over a second to an outside observer traveling much more slowly, but even that short of a time would cover an incredible amount of distance. And you can't just stop instantly going that fast...
It would be very difficult to control the time and distance, and it would be easy to overshoot your mark. But I feel it would be even easier to destroy your ship. Could Star Wars ships even survive going that fast in realspace?
Even if they could survive traveling that fast, another big factor would be deceleration. This goes far beyond what structural integrity you get from what particle shields was designed for. And this also goes far beyond the normal conditions that inertial compensators have to work with. High sublight speed combat is nothing compared to this. Even if they could survive the speed, Star Wars ships could not slow down quickly from relativistic speeds without destroying themselves, so they would have to slow down very gradually. And that means, longer timeframes traveling relativistic speeds (so more time dilation), and a vast distance being covered. It doesn't seem practical.
And considering all that, it also just seems like way too much power for any pilot of any ship to have. There comes a point where the premise of 'anything is possible if you roll high enough' gets ridiculous.
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garhkal
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| Posted: Sun Nov 14, 2021 4:58 pm Post subject: |
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| Whill wrote: |
...And considering all that, it also just seems like way too much power for any pilot of any ship to have. There comes a point where the premise of 'anything is possible if you roll high enough' gets ridiculous. |
That is why i hold to the mantra of there ARE times the DM should just "SAY NO" it can't be done.
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Whill
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| Posted: Sun Nov 14, 2021 5:34 pm Post subject: |
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| garhkal wrote: | | Whill wrote: | | ...And considering all that, it also just seems like way too much power for any pilot of any ship to have. There comes a point where the premise of 'anything is possible if you roll high enough' gets ridiculous. |
That is why i hold to the mantra of there ARE times the DM should just "SAY NO" it can't be done. |
I agree, but PCs are not players. When a player thinks the PC should be able to try something that should be viewed as impossible in-universe, I will sometimes call for a Very Easy applicable roll and then word my response to the player as, "Your PC has no reason to believe that would even be possible."
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CRMcNeill
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Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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| Posted: Sun Nov 14, 2021 5:38 pm Post subject: |
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| Whill wrote: | | Could Star Wars ships even survive going that fast in realspace? |
For me, it keys on exactly how acceleration compensators function. For the purposes of my own headcanon (specifically, to justify why ships in the WEG rules have maximum speeds when they should theoretically just be able to keep on accelerating), I've gone with the idea that the Acc-Comp dumps the inertial energy externally, creating a space-time distortion that increases in direct proportion to the mass of the ship times the speed it's traveling. At a certain point, the ship simply can't generate enough thrust to overcome the drag of Acc-Comp, reaching equilibrium, and thus top speed. The only way to make a ship go faster is to increase the size and/or power of the drives (which takes up increasingly large percentages of the ship's internal volume), allowing the ship to push "harder" against the output of the Acc-Comp.
But the top speed is limited solely by how hard the drive can push. In this scenario, the drive wouldn't be trying to push; the ship itself would basically be sling-shoting off the excess momentum of a high-delta hyperspace exit, and "etheric braking" down to more normal velocities. So the question becomes, exactly how much extra speed would the acc-comp be able to handle?
In the Power Transfer rules, we hypothesized that a ship would need to divert auxiliary power to the engines to be able to travel at All-Out; maybe something similar here where the ship diverts auxiliary power to the Acc-Comp to handle a short period of very high speeds while the ship drags down to a more sedate velocity?
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.
The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index
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CRMcNeill
Director of Engineering
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Posts: 16320
Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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| Posted: Sun Nov 14, 2021 5:39 pm Post subject: |
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| Whill wrote: | | I agree, but PCs are not players. When a player thinks the PC should be able to try something that should be viewed as impossible in-universe, I will sometimes call for a Very Easy applicable roll and then word my response to the player as, "Your PC has no reason to believe that would even be possible." |
I like this. Of course, it opens the door to the PC having a Wild Dice failure cascade and failing that roll so they think it's possible.
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.
The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index
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Whill
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| Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2021 4:19 pm Post subject: |
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| CRMcNeill wrote: | | Whill wrote: | | ...Could Star Wars ships even survive going that fast in realspace?... |
For me, it keys on exactly how acceleration compensators function. For the purposes of my own headcanon (specifically, to justify why ships in the WEG rules have maximum speeds when they should theoretically just be able to keep on accelerating), I've gone with the idea that the Acc-Comp dumps the inertial energy externally, creating a space-time distortion that increases in direct proportion to the mass of the ship times the speed it's traveling. At a certain point, the ship simply can't generate enough thrust to overcome the drag of Acc-Comp, reaching equilibrium, and thus top speed. The only way to make a ship go faster is to increase the size and/or power of the drives (which takes up increasingly large percentages of the ship's internal volume), allowing the ship to push "harder" against the output of the Acc-Comp.
But the top speed is limited solely by how hard the drive can push. In this scenario, the drive wouldn't be trying to push; the ship itself would basically be sling-shoting off the excess momentum of a high-delta hyperspace exit, and "etheric braking" down to more normal velocities. So the question becomes, exactly how much extra speed would the acc-comp be able to handle?
In the Power Transfer rules, we hypothesized that a ship would need to divert auxiliary power to the engines to be able to travel at All-Out; maybe something similar here where the ship diverts auxiliary power to the Acc-Comp to handle a short period of very high speeds while the ship drags down to a more sedate velocity? |
The rest of my last post addresses this. Even if the ship can survive that high speed and the inertial compensator can handle slowing the ship down safely, time dilation is applicable during the slow down from relativistic speeds.
I'm not sure what the attraction is to this idea. Physics is fun but this doesn't feel Star Wars at all. It's a lot of hoops to jump through to work it out, but whatever flies your ship.
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CRMcNeill
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Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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| Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2021 5:00 pm Post subject: |
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| Whill wrote: | | The rest of my last post addresses this. Even if the ship can survive that high speed and the inertial compensator can handle slowing the ship down safely, time dilation is applicable during the slow down from relativistic speeds. |
I'm not arguing that; I'm just not certain it's a big enough factor to matter in gameplay. Seeing as Star Wars ships travel at the speed of the plot in space, there's no real way to measure exactly how fast their base speed is, or how much faster this trick would make ships go for a few brief moments. However, basing it on the capacity of the inertial compensator does provide a simple baseline for this trick by tying it to the ship's existing speed, which can then be used as a multiplier.
Also, the ability to manipulate the flow of time has been a part of the EU all the way back to Han Solo at Star's End, so the presence of temporal shielding is only a small step from that. The only purpose it really needs to serve is as a technobabble reason as to why relativity wouldn't be a factor the players or the GMs would have to worry about.
| Quote: | | I'm not sure what the attraction is to this idea. |
Because it's a fun idea that adds more detail and depth to hyperdrives and hyperspace, as well as adding another tool to a PCs bag of tricks that's useful under certain circumstances, and not worth the consequences under most of the others.
| Quote: | | Physics is fun but this doesn't feel Star Wars at all. |
I agree, which is why I don't think I'll factor in relativistic time dilation to what is otherwise a pretty neat trick. Allowing the characters to perform a difficult maneuver to evade potential ambushers, while simultaneously setting off every warning alarm in the system that someone is up to no good feels exactly like Star Wars. All that's needed is to work out the specifics of what it does and come up with a few good reasons why it doesn't happen all the time, as well as potential consequences and limitations.
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.
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MrNexx
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| Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2021 7:54 pm Post subject: |
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| Whill wrote: | Could Star Wars ships even survive going that fast in realspace?
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FWIW, The High Republic says "Yes". "Light of the Jedi" opens with the "Hyperspace Disaster", where a container ship breaks up in hyperspace, hurling its modules into realspace at close to the speed of light. Several of those modules were unpowered but inhabited colony modules; they survived, and even without Jedi intervention, it's implied that they would have survived until they plowed into the sun or a planet (which would have been really bad for everyone).
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CRMcNeill
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| Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2021 8:19 pm Post subject: |
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| MrNexx wrote: | | FWIW, The High Republic says "Yes". "Light of the Jedi" opens with the "Hyperspace Disaster", where a container ship breaks up in hyperspace, hurling its modules into realspace at close to the speed of light. Several of those modules were unpowered but inhabited colony modules; they survived, and even without Jedi intervention, it's implied that they would have survived until they plowed into the sun or a planet (which would have been really bad for everyone). |
I'm a little iffy on the "breaking up in hyperspace"; based on what we know about the nature of hyperspace, any physical object gets obliterated as soon as it loses the protection of its hyperspace field. If the accident occurred such that the container ship dropped into realspace before its field failed, that's more plausible. Of course, "inhabited colony modules" aren't the same as a ship with its own integrated drives and inertial compensator...
On a side note, this reminds me of the Homestead/Bumblebee-Class from the Serenity RPG. Pretty useless ship for adventurers, but might make some interesting background for an encounter of some kind.
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Whill
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| Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2021 11:00 pm Post subject: |
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| MrNexx wrote: | | FWIW, The High Republic says "Yes". "Light of the Jedi" opens with the "Hyperspace Disaster", where a container ship breaks up in hyperspace, hurling its modules into realspace at close to the speed of light. Several of those modules were unpowered but inhabited colony modules; they survived, and even without Jedi intervention, it's implied that they would have survived until they plowed into the sun or a planet (which would have been really bad for everyone). |
Thanks. And TCWs7 dumped cargo at lightspeed. And TLJ did a lightspeed kamikaze attack. And TRoS had lightspeed skipping.
| CRMcNeill wrote: | | Quote: | | Physics is fun but this doesn't feel Star Wars at all. |
I agree, which is why I don't think I'll factor in relativistic time dilation to what is otherwise a pretty neat trick. Allowing the characters to perform a difficult maneuver to evade potential ambushers, while simultaneously setting off every warning alarm in the system that someone is up to no good feels exactly like Star Wars. All that's needed is to work out the specifics of what it does and come up with a few good reasons why it doesn't happen all the time, as well as potential consequences and limitations. |
Go for it. It definitely needs reasons why we haven't seen it happen before.
Lightspeed is a huge handwave as it is. SW FTL existing entirely in another dimension, with ships leaving and entering realspace at sublight (non-relativistic) speeds, completely bypasses relativity. It's how SW FTL even works for me. Bringing relativistic speeds into SW without time dilation is a cheat to a cheat. I feel it undoes a major premise of galactic society in Star Wars.
As I pointed out above, "relativistic shielding" is completely unnecessary for how FTL works in SW. It wasn't invented to solve or explain anything – It is completely superfluous in the franchise, made for a fictional newsite story to build hype for AotC. And "time-stasis" crates or whatever don't make sense with the explanation given because time is interwoven into the fabric of space, so how can you freeze time in a crate but freely move the frozen time through space? It would make more sense if time-stasis crates weren't actually freezing time and had another explanation for preserving something. It could be just a colorful name for something.
But thanks for making it clear this depends on gaining the boon of relativistic speed while ignoring the drawback of time dilation. When I was 18, I wrote a paper on special relativity that was more than half of my Physics grade that quarter, so I don't have access to the level of disbelief suspension this would require for me, so I'll bow out of the conversation.
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