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Hyperspace & Astrogation Project
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Whill
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 10, 2020 9:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sure.

CRMcNeill wrote:
The System Patrol Ship, for example, would find a lot of utility in being able to use a x12 or x15 hyperdrive to rapidly move from point to point in a system, chasing intruders and other incidents, and the in-system travel times posited by WEG make a lot more sense if there's some sort of "low-end" FTL drive involved.

That would make sense.
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CRMcNeill
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 12, 2020 11:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Stumbled across this here.

CRMcNeill wrote:
Zarn wrote:
So in that sense, if you have access to heaps of low-powered hyperdrives, you might actually have outsystem carriers that drop off starfighters which then jump en-masse insystem...

That's a very intriguing idea. Having starfighters equipped with hyperdrives in the x10 range or greater would make them heavily dependent on transport by carriers, yet still have the stand-off strike capability that carrier aircraft made so useful. Obviously, the rules for the classic era are pretty well set, but something like this could be used pre-Clone Wars.

Plus, if the carrier is deployed somewhere within a few lightyears, it would still be able to exercise some real-time control over the strike group (possibly with a Comm-Scan Control & Relay Platform, ala the SWU equivalent of an E-2 Hawkeye).

It's on topic, so I figured I'd port it over. At the moment, I'm picturing fighters grouped into short-range (TIE like, no FTL capability at all), mid-range (slow hyperdrive, mostly for intra-system work) and long-range (starfighters equipped with true interstellar hyperdrives).

In fact, something like this makes a lot more sense for the fighters we see in the prequels: make things like the Actis and the Aethersprite mid-range fighters with x10/x12 hyperdrives. Use the booster rings to jump somewhere in the outer reaches of a system (where it can't be easily tracked down and stolen/destroyed), then use their own intrasystem hyperdrive to jump in close to the planet.
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The Bissler
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 14, 2020 5:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

interesting thread!

I've had a few issues with Hyperdrive in the last few weeks, primarily to do with the adventure outline for Assault on Repair Station M13 from the Classic Campaigns supplement. In the outline, it says that there are TIEs in the Repair Station which fly off to deal with another Rebel attack in a neighbouring system.

This was problematic to me, partly because I know from game mechanics that TIEs don't have hyperdrive, but even more because Obi-Wan specifically talks about it in Episode IV (on the approach to the Death Star). So, instead, I decided that the TIEs would be scrambled to an orbiting space station that the Rebel NPCs would now attack. Problem fixed.

...except my PCs thought it would be a wonderful idea to attack the Repair Station before the Rebels attacked the orbiting space station. Now the PCs have to deal with the TIEs scrambling from the Repair Station on the ground AND those from the orbiting Space Platform. They are hopelessly outnumbered. Half of the team are on a YT-1300 providing an air assault, and the other half are running amok inside the installation. This is where it was left last week.

The team on the YT-1300 have been messaging me today asking if they can override the safety protocols on the hyperdrive so they can make the jump to hyperspace while in the planet's atmosphere - before the TIE reinforcements arrive. I know that this has precedent in Rogue One (the one moment that irked me in that film).

So, I've ruled that if they disable the hyperdrive protocols (Easy Languages to communicate with the ship's computer & Moderate Computer Programming roll to do so), then they can attempt a Astrogation Roll to try an inside atmosphere hyperdrive jump - but that the difficulty will be Heroic and so will likely require a Force Point to successfully achieve.

I'm hoping it's a compromise that will deter future reliance on this device to escape ship to ship combat.
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CRMcNeill
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 14, 2020 7:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have just the thing you're looking for.
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The Bissler
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 15, 2020 6:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

CRMcNeill wrote:
I have just the thing you're looking for.


Very cool. cheers!

They are still fighting on the base and we are headed for week 4 of this mission! It's utter carnage and it's still unclear if they intend to fight on or will try a hyperspace jump while in atmosphere so I'll keep this to hand!
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CRMcNeill
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 31, 2022 9:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

So, this has been on the back burner for a while, but I've been putting some thought into it re: the High-End / Low-End Navcomputer topic. As part of my stat upgrade, I've added the option of Shield Control Dice (as in, Fire Control, but for Shields). This in turn got me thinking of other ship systems that might benefit from "Control" dice, and then I remembered that I had already suggested it in the above link.

However, I've run into a small snag in the sense that adding Astrogation Control Dice to a stat also necessitates putting work in on the Hyperdrive project. Now, I had elsewhere suggested basing Astrogation Difficulty on how well traveled a route is, but the more I think about it, the more I think that the length of the jump itself also needs to be taken into account. As in, all other things being equal, a route that is 12 hours long should be more difficult to calculate than a route that is 4 hours long.

So, what I'm thinking is having the Base Astrogation Difficulty for a hyperspace jump be equal to the jump's hours in length, modified by the following multipliers for how well-traveled the route is:
    Heavily-Traveled Route = x1/2
    Commonly-Traveled Route = x1
    Rarely-Traveled Route = x2
    Uncommon Route = x3
    "You want to go where?" = x5
Ships will then be assigned Astrogation Control dice (stacks with the crew's Astrogation skill on the Crew Skills section).

I'm also strongly considering throwing out the Maximum Jumps on the Limited Navcomputers and simply giving them penalties, like -1D for the X-Wing's 10-jump Limit, and -2D or 3D for the 2-jump limit on fighters like the A-Wing and B-Wing. On the other end of the spectrum, large ships like Star Destroyers and the like would be rated in the 3D or 4D range, representing their much greater computing and data storage capacity.

Nothing concrete at the moment, but I've been chewing on this for a while and wanted to get it written down.
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Whill
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 31, 2022 11:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

What problems with RAW do these house rules address?
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CRMcNeill
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 31, 2022 11:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Whill wrote:
What problems with RAW do these house rules address?

Per the RAW, the Astrogation Difficulty can vary from Very Easy to Heroic (literally, anything), with most being at Moderate. That's an incredibly vague statement, with no criteria established as to why a jump may be more or less difficult than Moderate.

Now, as I've been chewing over this, the two main criteria I have discerned about how difficult a route is to calculate are 1) jump duration (longer jump = more legs, more course changes, etc), and 2) how accurate the navigation data for the route is (which is a direct result of how many ships travel the route, and then contribute their flight recorder data to the BoSS nav-data pipeline).

Thus, the house rule provides a framework for the GM to generate an appropriate Difficulty for a given route, based on the two above criteria. A longer course is more difficult to calculate than a shorter one, but this is either worsened or offset by how much information is available about the route itself. Once that baseline has been established, the GM can go with it, or apply modifiers as they see fit.
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CRMcNeill
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 01, 2023 7:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Naturally, this is just a first draft, and the equation can be modified if testing or gameplay determines that the resulting Difficulty numbers are too high or too low.

EDIT: A less math-intensive approach would be to have jumps be one Difficulty level for every day of duration.
    Duration in Days = Difficulty
    1 or less = Very Easy
    1-2 = Easy
    3 = Moderate
    etc

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CRMcNeill
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 08, 2023 1:18 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

A thought re what I posted here:

One of my biggest complaints about starfighters using hyperdrive rings is that, once the fighter has disconnected from the ring, the ring itself is vulnerable to attack, and the fighter is effectively tied to a single egress point that they have to return to (the ring's coordinates) in order to escape the system.

But what if the fighters in questioned are equipped with a smaller, slower hyperdrive in the x10 or x12 range, and use the hyperdrive booster ring to augment the much slower integrated hyperdrive? A fighter could easily drop out of hyperspace somewhere well outside sensor range of his destination, then use the slower integrated drive to enter the system itself. That way, he'll still have tactical freedom and mobility within the target system, and his hyperdrive booster ring will be a needle in a haystack for anyone other than the fighter pilot himself (since he's the one who parked it in the first place).

I'm thinking it also makes more sense as an interim technological step to have starfighter hyperdrives go "no hyperdrive" -> "slow internal hyperdrive supplemented by booster ring" -> "full capability internal hyperdrive" than it does for them to make the major technological leap that skips the middle step.

Anyway, that's my thought for the night.
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CRMcNeill
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 15, 2025 1:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

A thought re: in-system hyperspace use. The in-system travel times are highly unrealistic for interplanetary travel. The benchmark for an Earth-type system is 15 hours travel time from the star to the outer system. By comparison, it took Voyager 2 twelve years to reach Neptune, with an average speed over 55,000 kph. A starship covering a similar distance on sublight drives would have to be traveling an average velocity ~0.36c (assuming my math is right). Not exactly implausible, but a little too hard-sci-fi for my tastes.

However, an alternative occurred to me recently: treat the in-system travel guidelines as base travel times for in-system hyperspace jumps, then apply the ship’s hyperdrive multiplier against them. Obviously, there’d need to be some sort of standard for generating Astrogation Difficulties, but that shouldn’t be too hard to hammer out.

Thoughts?
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Whill
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 22, 2025 7:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

CRMcNeill wrote:
Thoughts?

While I agree that the "sublight benchmarks" are too fast for sublight travel, your idea just makes them way too slow for a jump through hyperspace, where ships move at thousands of times the speed of light. Doing math, most in-system jumps should only take seconds.

You seem to be overly beholden to the game's sublight benchmarks, which were just some author typing stuff that sounded good in the moment without doing any math. I do not see any sort of value in venerating the game's figures in such a way to bother making them correct.
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 24, 2025 6:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I treat those benchmarks as if they are minimum sublight speed, that is to say “Space: 1”, an A-Wing (RAW) travels 12 times faster at cruising speed. At all out speed, it’s moving 48 times faster. A micro jump should put you on the opposite side of the solar system in seconds. of course that comes with all the dangers of jumping in hyperspace inside a solar system.
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PostPosted: Sat Sep 27, 2025 5:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Whill wrote:
CRMcNeill wrote:
Thoughts?

While I agree that the "sublight benchmarks" are too fast for sublight travel, your idea just makes them way too slow for a jump through hyperspace, where ships move at thousands of times the speed of light. Doing math, most in-system jumps should only take seconds.

Previously I’ve described the hyperdrive multiplier as being an aggregate of multiple performance metrics: not just speed, but acceleration, deceleration, ability to negotiate curves at high speeds, etc. To use a car analogy, just because a car can go 80mph on a wide-open interstate highway doesn’t mean it can (or should) do so in a residential neighborhood or crowded parking lot.

While distances in a star system are much lower, the system itself is also more crowded, with multiple planets, moons, asteroids and their attendant mass shadows. The premise here is that a ship making an in-system jump doesn’t have the time or room to accelerate to the velocities it might achieve on one of the major hyperlanes.

Quote:
You seem to be overly beholden to the game's sublight benchmarks, which were just some author typing stuff that sounded good in the moment without doing any math. I do not see any sort of value in venerating the game's figures in such a way to bother making them correct.

I’ve more than demonstrated that I’m willing to throw out bits of the rules and fluff if I can’t get them to work. I’m also more than willing to keep said bits if I can find a realistic way to do so.
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PostPosted: Sun Sep 28, 2025 9:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

FVBonura wrote:
A micro jump should put you on the opposite side of the solar system in seconds. of course that comes with all the dangers of jumping in hyperspace inside a solar system.

This we completely agree on.

Quote:
I treat those benchmarks as if they are minimum sublight speed, that is to say “Space: 1”, an A-Wing (RAW) travels 12 times faster at cruising speed. At all out speed, it’s moving 48 times faster.

This is going in the opposite direction by making sublight speed even faster than what Charles was suggesting. I am fine with the RAW convention of the vagueness of Space Units keeping exact sublight speeds unknown, but in my SWU they are still nowhere near as fast as 0.36c. Not even A-wings going All-Out. Ships traveling sublight at a third of the speed of light would destroy my disbelief suspension. Sublight speeds are way below that for me.

CRMcNeill wrote:
Previously I’ve described the hyperdrive multiplier as being an aggregate of multiple performance metrics: not just speed, but acceleration, deceleration, ability to negotiate curves at high speeds, etc. To use a car analogy, just because a car can go 80mph on a wide-open interstate highway doesn’t mean it can (or should) do so in a residential neighborhood or crowded parking lot.

While distances in a star system are much lower, the system itself is also more crowded, with multiple planets, moons, asteroids and their attendant mass shadows. The premise here is that a ship making an in-system jump doesn’t have the time or room to accelerate to the velocities it might achieve on one of the major hyperlanes.

I'm down with all that, but not quite to the degree you are.

0.36c, even with the factors you mentioned, is way too slow for hyperspace travel in my SWU. In my premise of hyperspace, it isn't just the case that the laws of physics allow for FTL. Hyperspace is by its very nature a "high speed" dimension where it is impossible for anything to travel any significant distance at less than the speed of light. A ship's hyperdrive opens a portal between dimensions in front of it, and the nature of hyperspace (being a higher velocity and thus higher pressure dimension) "sucks" the ship into hyperspace where it quickly accelerates to FTL speeds. Speeds can vary in hyperspace because the energies of hyperspace can be harnessed by starships differently. Coming out of hyperspace is opening a portal back to realspace which quickly decelerates the ship to speeds too slow for hyperspace, thus ejecting the ship back into realspace (with the momentum it had when it entered hyperspace). I remember this being an unpopular theory in the discussions about "parking" stationary objects in hyperspace, which is strictly impossible in my SWU.

The calculated speed of the sublight benchmark is too fast for sublight and too slow for hyperspace, so I just chuck it completely.

Quote:
Thoughts?

In my SWU, the term "lightspeed" has existed for thousands of years but it originated in the term "faster-than-light speeds" which was eventually colloquially shortened to "lightspeed". With your premise, where the factors you mentioned can slow ships traveling in hyperspace down to lower than c, then sure, that benchmark could be a microjump. In my SWU, the slowest possible speed in hyperspace is still faster than c, so that doesn't work for me.
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