ObiRonShinobi
Cadet
Joined: 15 Dec 2022
Posts: 1
Location: Sundari, Mandalore
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 Posted: Fri Dec 16, 2022 8:18 am Post subject: Converting Space speeds and Hyperdrive Backup to MGLT |
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Hello folks, I'm new here, and by way of introduction I have a question for you all- Has anyone worked on/converted the Lucasfilm MGLT chart into the WEG system or vice versa? And if so would you mind sharing that information here? The game mechanics of the Hyperdrive Backup work for narrative/playability issues but don't necessarily match what we see on the screen.
For instance, when the Falcon leaves Hoth but is having issues with its Hyperdrive it is still able to get from system to system. Granted it is a helluvalot slower, but it still gets the job done, in an FTL manner. The same is true and expressly stated in the Mandalorian in the episode "The Passenger" when Din Djarin cannot use the hyperdrive to make the trip from Tatooine to the estuary moon Trask. The mechanics of both make it "look" a lot more like the vessel is using something like warp drive from Star Trek than traveling through the hyperspace medium. The dissimilarity also would explain Han's quip to Luke, "Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations, we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?"
What the MGLT chart would seem to indicate and present is that the original sublight drive propulsion system in the Star Wars universe has over the millennia become FTL. As cited by the Wookiepedia entry, One megalight unit per hour was approximately 0.0755 light-years per hour, or about 661.38 times the speed of light. Per the MGLT chart the Falcon should have a MGLT speed of 75 which is equivalent to 49,603.5c, and the Imperial Star Destroyer a MGLT speed of 60 which is equivalent to 39,682.8c.
Range is the biggest consideration to this conversion IMHO. Obi-Wan and Luke's conversation and observations about a TIE fighter that passes them on the way to the Death Star have a direct bearing on this...
BEN: A fighter that size couldn't get this deep into space on its own.
LUKE: It must have gotten lost, been part of a convoy or something.
So range limitations must apply, or in other words- a TIE can travel REAL fast, but is unable to get from system to system. So is it capable of FTL? Yes. Is it capable of interstellar flight? No. Perhaps creating a new stat, MGLT Range, with stats of Local, Short, and Long. Local being < 2 ly, Short being <10 ly and Long being > 10 ly. Just an idea.
I am suggesting *if someone has not done it already* is to integrate what has long been used as a benchmark measure by Lucasfilm into WEG D6 Star Wars materials. Mechanics-wise this would eliminate the need for the Hyperdrive Backup and the Space stat and replace them with the Lucasfilm-derived stat, MGLT. It would take some work, and may not make any major difference to game play, but it would make for a easier conversion perhaps between the two for gamemasters and narratively for the players it might be less confusing in the end. Thanks for reading! |
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CRMcNeill
Director of Engineering
Joined: 05 Apr 2010
Posts: 16284
Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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| Posted: Fri Dec 16, 2022 12:47 pm Post subject: |
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First off, welcome to the Pit, and congratulations for swinging for the fences on your first day.
W/r/t your idea, it's important to note that MGLT doesn't convert cleanly across to SUs. Looking at your chart, for example, I can see a few example discrepancies from WEG stats.-The TIE's WEG Space of 10 would mean its MGLT should be 120, not 100.
-The Y-Wing's WEG Space of 7 would mean its MGLT should be ~87.5, not 100.
-The Falcon's Space of 8 would mean its MGLT should be 100, not 75. Now, I have done a conversion for MGLT->SUs as part of a larger stat conversion formula, using the X-Wing stats from WEG and the PC Game as a baseline. But I see no need to merge the two systems into one. It's effectively apples and oranges. The WEG system works for storytelling and gameplay, and it's what we're all familiar with it, so unless some new system is a noticeable improvement over what we've got, there's no urgent need to change it.
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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
Dark Lord of the Jedi (Owner/Admin)
Joined: 14 Apr 2008
Posts: 10408
Location: Columbus, Ohio, USA, Earth, The Solar System, The Milky Way Galaxy
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| Posted: Sat Dec 17, 2022 5:25 am Post subject: Re: Converting Space speeds and Hyperdrive Backup to MGLT |
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| ObiRonShinobi wrote: | Hello folks, I'm new here, and by way of introduction I have a question for you all...
Thanks for reading! |
Welcome! Just dive right in the deep end. I hope you'll be around for many more posts.
My first answer is, of course there is no problem with you doing this in your game if this works for you and your players. It is your SWU, so it should work however you want. The way things work in the films or game as published don't matter if you feel they should work a different way, but based on your citations, live-action Star Wars media is important to you...
| CRMcNeill wrote: | W/r/t your idea, it's important to note that MGLT doesn't convert cleanly across to SUs. Looking at your chart, for example, I can see a few example discrepancies from WEG stats.[list]-The TIE's WEG Space of 10 would mean its MGLT should be 120, not 100.
-The Y-Wing's WEG Space of 7 would mean its MGLT should be ~87.5, not 100.
-The Falcon's Space of 8 would mean its MGLT should be 100, not 75. |
I may be wrong, but I didn't read it as him suggesting there is a uniform conversion standard. I read it as MGLT just replacing the WEG Space stat, so the ships that aren't on the ILM napkin art would be have stats created that approximate the MGLT "system". And since ships with different Space scores have the same MGLT, an exact conversion formula would depend on which one you choose to be the basis of them all.
| ObiRonShinobi wrote: | | Has anyone worked on/converted the Lucasfilm MGLT chart into the WEG system or vice versa? And if so would you mind sharing that information here? |
To my knowledge, no one has already formally done this, but I admit that even I haven't read all threads on this forum, especially the oldest ones that were already here before I was. And if anyone has done this work, they are likely no longer here so wouldn't see this. But I hope I'm wrong. There is a Search feature of the forum you can use to search for posts with "MGLT".
| Quote: | The game mechanics of the Hyperdrive Backup work for narrative/playability issues but don't necessarily match what we see on the screen.
For instance, when the Falcon leaves Hoth but is having issues with its Hyperdrive it is still able to get from system to system. Granted it is a helluvalot slower, but it still gets the job done, in an FTL manner. |
I agree that the Falcon got from system to system in a slower FTL manner, but the Backup Hyperdrive was invented to explain how the Falcon got to the Bespin system while the main hyperdrive was non-functional.
While it is true that we do not see the Falcon jump to lightspeed, we only see a few fleeting seconds of the start and end of the journey, so there is also no evidence that they didn't use a backup hyperdrive. There is no dialogue about this in the film. It is a premise of backup hyperdrive tech that besides it being slower, it is short range. The maps of the galaxy put the Hoth, Anoat, and Bespin system close together to jive with that concept ("close" on a galactic scale, of course).
| Quote: | | ...expressly stated in the Mandalorian in the episode "The Passenger" when Din Djarin cannot use the hyperdrive to make the trip from Tatooine to the estuary moon Trask. |
That's the one with the Frog Lady eggs and all those spider-creatures, right? It being expressly stated that they can't travel lightspeed makes this case markedly different than TESB, and much more problematic. It seems most likely to me that Jon Favreau, like Lucas before him, just doesn't really care too much about the science (fact or fiction) involved. The explanations for these things are only important to us. The Disney Canon Mandalorian is overtly at odds with science in a way that TESB isn't, because TESB is left more vague and open to interpretation.
| Quote: | | The mechanics of both make it "look" a lot more like the vessel is using something like warp drive from Star Trek than traveling through the hyperspace medium. |
I've only seen TM episode in question twice, so I don't know it like TESB which I had seen 100 times by 1997 (and last saw on the big screen earlier this year). I also happen to be a huge Star Trek fan. I definitely did not at all get the impression in either case that there anything like warp drive going on. My impression was that they simply don't care about the realities of the vast distances between star systems. They probably feel that ships in SW travel the speed of plot, and there are two basic categories for speed. Fast and much faster.
| Quote: | | The dissimilarity also would explain Han's quip to Luke, "Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations, we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?" |
That dialogue is already explained by the concept of massive objects in realspace casting a gravity shadow into hyperspace, which works exactly the same for primary and secondary hyperdrives. That simply means things that are a space hazzard in realspace, like stars and supernovae, are also hazards in the hyperspace dimension, a miraculous universe where you don't have to worry about most other realspace physics.
| Quote: | | What the MGLT chart would seem to indicate and present is that the original sublight drive propulsion system in the Star Wars universe has over the millennia become FTL. |
The napkin chart was an ILM reference for RotJ. In the film, the TIEs are never shown to travel in hyperspace, while Falcon and all the rebel starfighters make the same lightspeed jump at the same time (from Sullust to Endor), so in this case they happened to travel the exact same speed in hyperspace. The napkin was not used to make hyperdrive speeds relative, so the only reference it could possible be for is sublight speeds during the Battle of Endor. The term "Megalight" just seems like more gobbledegook that doesn't actually mean anything but sounds cool to ILM (or maybe they were hoping to impress their boss).
At the beginning of Luke's trench run in the Battle of Yavin, he said, "We're going in full throttle." All the films explicitly demonstrate that sublight speeds are less than the speed of light and non-relativistic speeds at that, really far less than speed of light. If an X-wing's sublight speed was really superlight speed, then ships could attack before they are even seen.
MGLT is referencing sublight speed because the napkin indicates that Falcon is relatively slow, while according to lore the Falcon is only the fastest ship as far as lightspeed goes. The Legends Wookieepedia article about the napkin chart does not at all indicate sublight has become FTL. And on the chart, MGLT itself is clearly a unit of measuring speed, but when they brought it into the EU by the X-wing game, they clumsily added a "per hour" to the speed thus making MGLT a unit of distance, which was not the original intention.
| Quote: | | As cited by the Wookiepedia entry, One megalight unit per hour was approximately 0.0755 light-years per hour, or about 661.38 times the speed of light. Per the MGLT chart the Falcon should have a MGLT speed of 75 which is equivalent to 49,603.5c, and the Imperial Star Destroyer a MGLT speed of 60 which is equivalent to 39,682.8c. |
For clarity, here you are referring to the Disney Canon Wookieepedia article. I see they have already done what you are proposing here, except that Canon is explicitly stating that these superlight "sublight" speeds are FTL in realspace while the faster "lightspeed" FTL is in hyperspace. The point of hyperspace is because it is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light in realspace. Even Lucas, who wrote the word "binary" as a droid language, wrote "parsecs" as a unit of time, and put an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere with Earth sea level air pressure on a gas giant (Bespin), knew and embraced the impossibility of traveling faster than the speed of light in realspace for his space opera. That's why he used the sci-fi concept of hyperspace. I can't understate this enough: Any FTL travel without hyperspace defeats the whole purpose of having hyperspace in the first place!
Not to mention that the acceleration to and deceleration from any FTL speeds in realspace would pass through relativistic speeds (those significantly near but under the speed of light) would include time dilation, thus pilots would find that many years have gone by on planetary time while they were on a quick "sublight" journey. Oy vey! Hyperspace completely bypasses relativity by entering and exiting hyperspace at non-relativistic speeds.
| Quote: | | Range is the biggest consideration to this conversion IMHO. Obi-Wan and Luke's conversation and observations about a TIE fighter that passes them on the way to the Death Star have a direct bearing on this... |
Let me translate this for you under the longtime existing paradigm of backup hyperdrives...
| Quote: | BEN: No, it's a short-range fighter.... A fighter that size couldn't get this deep into space on its own. <That ship doesn't have any hyperdrive, and Bail would have told me if there were any Imperial bases in the Alderaan system.>
LUKE: It must have gotten lost, been part of a convoy or something. <I'm just a farm boy who has never left my home planet so I'm not sure how space works.> |
However, the EU established that those Naboo starfighters at the beginning of AotC actually attached to Senator Amidala's big silver ship for the hyperspace journey that happened just before the ship arrived at Coruscant. No, still not exactly the expected meaning of the word "convoy" but maybe that is what Luke was getting at.
| Quote: | So range limitations must apply, or in other words- a TIE can travel REAL fast, but is unable to get from system to system. So is it capable of FTL? Yes. Is it capable of interstellar flight? No. Perhaps creating a new stat, MGLT Range, with stats of Local, Short, and Long. Local being < 2 ly, Short being <10 ly and Long being > 10 ly. Just an idea.
I am suggesting *if someone has not done it already* is to integrate what has long been used as a benchmark measure by Lucasfilm into WEG D6 Star Wars materials. Mechanics-wise this would eliminate the need for the Hyperdrive Backup and the Space stat and replace them with the Lucasfilm-derived stat, MGLT. It would take some work, and may not make any major difference to game play, but it would make for a easier conversion perhaps between the two for gamemasters and narratively for the players it might be less confusing in the end. |
Range is another big stopper for this proposed system. We don't know the actual distances between most planets and systems, and that is why the existing game rules completely eliminates any need for them, which therefore eliminates any need to know the exact speeds of "lightspeed" travel. All we have and need is a standard journey duration with a x1 hyperdrive. Then we can do the math for slower or faster drives, and the astrogation rules of adding or subtracting time to the journey. And even the standard duration is not primarily based on distance anyway. It is based on how well known the route is.
We all can and should do whatever we want for our games, and since this is a public forum, I have responding accordingly.
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