Subj:	TRAVELLER digest 392
Date:	95-08-27 08:37:32 EDT
From:	traveller@mpgn.com
Sender:	traveller@mpgn.com
Reply-to:	traveller@mpgn.com
To:	traveller@mpgn.com (Multiple recipients of list)

			    TRAVELLER Digest 392

Topics covered in this issue include:

  1) Hiding exhaust plumes
	by "Brendan O'Donovan" <Brendan@odonovan.demon.co.uk>
  2) Re: Missiles
	by "Brendan O'Donovan" <Brendan@odonovan.demon.co.uk>
  3) Re: Plasma Trails, Missiles, and Relativity
	by merrick@Rt66.com (Merrick Burkhardt)
  4) Re: Missiles
	by merrick@Rt66.com (Merrick Burkhardt)
  5) Re: Missiles
	by merrick@Rt66.com (Merrick Burkhardt)
  6) More Colonization Cost Ideas
	by Steven Bonneville <bonnevil@itlabs.umn.edu>
  7) Mertactor Climate
	by Wesley.Esser@hd62.haledorr.com
  8) Re: Purpose of RICE
	by jeff.zeitlin@execnet.com (JEFF ZEITLIN)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Sat, 26 Aug 1995 12:30:26 GMT
From: "Brendan O'Donovan" <Brendan@odonovan.demon.co.uk>
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Hiding exhaust plumes
Message-ID: <71@odonovan.demon.co.uk>


Okay, I was wrong about exhaust visibility, I found out where I, er, 'lost' a

few decimal places.
The tactical problems of the exhaust are least significant to large fleets,
who 
want people to see and engage them. However, for corsairs, the traders trying
to 
sneak past the corsairs, covert operations etc. (all the stuff which is
likely 
to involve the players) it is a bit of a downer. 
A few ideas on ways to get round it:
1/Black globes. In traveller, black globes have two distinct sides - the
outside 
absorbs energy and shunts it to the ship, and the inside destroys the
generator 
if it absorbs any significant amount of energy (otherwise it would be
possible 
to make some maneuver burns with the field up). Under the heading 'Important 
Note' in FFS it mentions that if a large mass comes in contact with the
shield, 
then the shield is destroyed  - as it trys to cool the mass to absolute zero.

Imagine a field put up 'inside out', with the drive exhaust passing through
it. 
Now it absorbs the energy from the exhaust, cooling it so it's invisible and 
giving all the energy back to the ship. This energy could then be put back
into 
the drive itself, allowing HEPlaR to realistically (within the bounds of the 
universe as presented in TNE, not the real world as such) be as efficient as
it 
is presented, because there is no energy wasted in producing a hot exhaust.
The 
amount of matter in the exhaust is well within the bounds of what a black
globe 
can cope with (50 tons displacement as a single object - the exhaust is more 
spread out than this). 
This 100% conversion of heat to electricity means that a miniature inverted 
black globe could be used as a key component in any power plant, surrounding 
the hot reactor core. Previously, I had always wondered why there was a big
jump 
in fusion plant power output between TL14 and TL15, but black globes are 
introduced at TL15, so this seems to tie in (could still be a coincidence,
but 
this is a nice explanation). An inverted black globe used to cover the
exhaust 
could be probably be focussed down to a disc, so the ship could still see out

around it. This is still only a solution at TL15+ though.
(Side thought - The black globe description mentions that a lot of a jump 
drive's mass is in HPGs, which can be used for the black globe's energy
buffer - 
perhaps they could be used for a spinal weapon too?)

2/Better Ion drives - Another alternative is using a drive which doesn't work

through thermal expansion of a gas. The ion drive presented in FFS is of 
marginal use as a spaceship drive, but what if an improved version became 
available at TL12 or so? An improved version could sacrifice some of the fuel

efficiency for greater thrust, and possibly be run off hydrogen, if the fuel
was 
subjected to high frequency radiation before use to ionise the hydrogen. High

thrust versions might not be 'inhabited planet-friendly' though, as they
could 
end up like low powered particle accelerators, but it might have a lower 
visibility than HEPlaR

Drives for use in the atmosphere are another problem. Using air instead of
lhyd 
is a good idea, but it wouldn't generate as much thrust as hydrogen plasma,
as 
it is harder to heat oxygen/nitrogen. This means that they expand less and so

generate lower thrust. Still, you don't need much thrust inside the
atmosphere 
when you've got contra grav. A gentle, planet-friendly drive could give a
push, 
and then the ship (if it was streamlined enough) could just coast gently up 
through the atmosphere, as there's no gravity to stop it. On densely
inhabited 
planets, where the high volume of traffic and lack of space around cities
makes 
using HEPlaR too hazardous, spaceports could provide a launch tube to fire 
spacecraft up and away from the planet without them needing to fire their 
engines at all. 'Time to orbit' is a strange chart, as the G-Turn
expenditures 
on it only apply if the launching craft is trying to reach orbital velocity,
to 
intercept a spacestation or something. If all the ship wants to do is to
reach 
orbital _altitude_, then it could expend much less thrust, and then rely on
its 
contragrav instead of freefall to keep it up from the planet.

And about the fluorine, sorry, I was thinking one thing and writing another -

organic fluorine compounds are stable, but would break up in the high energy 
radiation from a fusion drive.

Comments, suggestions, corrections? (probably :-) 
-- 
Brendan 


------------------------------

Date: Sat, 26 Aug 1995 13:30:29 GMT
From: "Brendan O'Donovan" <Brendan@odonovan.demon.co.uk>
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Re: Missiles
Message-ID: <72@odonovan.demon.co.uk>

:From the message dated Friday 25, August 1995 :

> Impact missiles are dead, dead, dead.  :-) 

Impact missiles are sick and bedridden in standard combat, but you could make
a 
useable one for some situations -

Traders, and battleship fleets on transit, not expecting combat, would
usually 
make insystem burns in a very straight, predictable manner, so as to keep the

transit time as low as possible, and the fuel expenditure likewise as low as 
possible. An undetected ship could launch a missile from a very long way off,

which could accelerate to get a reasonable velocity for impact and
interception 
purposes, and then shut down its engines. It could then raise a miniature
black 
globe (you'd need to expand the table in defensive systems to include some
much 
smaller generators), and providing it was small enough, the sensor task to 
detect it could be subject to +6 or so difficulty modifiers. This would mean 
that there would be simply no way for a ship to see this missile and avoid it
at 
any range (You may want to allow some chance to see it at very close range,
but 
only enough to shoot it down, not to move out of the way) . However, the
missile 
wouldn't be able to maneuver, so this would only work if the position and
path 
of the target was known exactly, so the tactical uses of the missile would be

limited, but still significant. It could be used against:

Orbiting space platforms
Ships in predictable transit
Ships in a fixed air/space traffic control holding pattern
Ships linked to ships allied to the missile craft and so not thrusting
   - Adventure Idea: RCES stretch clipper docks with smallish Guild vessel
for 
diplomatic talks. The clipper is destroyed, while other ships from both sides

look on. Initially a third party should be suspected - no guild personnel had

left their ship, so explosives could not have been planted, none of the guild

vessels (appeared to) fire any weapons. Characters could get involved in 
detective work with the sensor logs, on the guild vessels (finding fire
control 
solutions but no firing records, coded mesages and transmissions to the
asteroid 
belt nearby). Clues from this lead the players to a missle silo hidden in an 
asteroid. Once the guild is found out they have a fight on their hands, but
if 
they win they can at least capture the technology and return it to the RCES. 
There it will be examined, and changes to operating procedures could be made,

introducing randomness into the RCES craft's maneuver patterns to protect 
against missile attacks.

This missile can only really be used once against an enemy (once they have 
identified what hit them, and if they survive to spread word), as it is
simple 
to defend against once it is known about. For this reason I haven't actually 
designed one, just use it as a plot device.

Some merchant ships don't have any lasers at all, so you could use homing
KKMs 
against them. - Anyone want to design a 5MJ socket laser to sell to the
traders?

>
----------------------------*-------------------------*-----------------------
> Joseph L. "Chepe" Lockett   | "Nullum magnum ingenium | GURPS fan, Amiga
user,
> jlockett@hanszen.rice.edu   |  sine mixtura dementiae | Shakespearean
scholar,
> http://www.io.com/~jlockett |  fuit." -- Seneca       | actor and director.
>
----------------------------*-------------------------*-----------------------
> 

-- 
Brendan 

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 26 Aug 1995 12:07:21 -0600 (MDT)
From: merrick@Rt66.com (Merrick Burkhardt)
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Re: Plasma Trails, Missiles, and Relativity
Message-ID: <9508261807.AA07456@Rt66.com>

Hi,
 
> > 
> > Huh?  This would *help* KE missiles.  They can use passive homing, and
since
> > they're small, you might not ever know you're locked on.  Remember that 
> > missiles (for the most part) don't use fusion drives of any sort, they're
> > chemical rockets.  And lasers aren't very good since using the sensor
rules 
> > you'd never even see them :) (in BL, anyway)
> 
> There is _no_way_, at canonical Traveller distances and speeds, that
missiles
> will be able to use normal, impact-capable chemical rockets, unless they're
> the size of Saturn V's.  The speeds and vectors involved, the precise
> targeting adjustments needed to reach and strike a ship, are horrendous.

True, unless you're dealing in traveller canon, not reality...  frequently 2
different things, but we're gaming in traveller, not reality :)

> Try the math involved: you'll find the same result GDW did.  When they made

The assertion that GDW did the math on anything seems far-fetched to me... 
they can't even be bothered with play-testing, much less math.

> space combat ranges as long as they "ought" to be, they simultaneously
forced
> themselves into invoking "gravitic focussing" to make lasers practical, and
> sounded the death-knell for conventional impact missiles.  Instead,
missiles
> should be more like 2300 AD's unmanned drones, built and equipped exactly
like
> small craft except for the lack of crew.

True, but that just changes how they get to the target, not what they do when
they get there.
 
> Note that I've never designed a Traveller missile.  Looking up the relevant

> info, I find that FFS, on p. 146, confirms that "most space missiles use
> EAPlaC solid-fuel thrusters", defined on FFS p. 70 defined as
"Electrothermal 
> Augmented Plasma Combustion" (as opposed to HEPlaR's "High-Efficiency
Plasma
> Recombustion", which we know does not "combust" using oxygen -- a
misnomer?)
> I'd warrant that EAPlaC's are closer to fusion rockets (which share their
tech
> level) or HEPlaR's than the earlier, pure chemical rockets: they'd use a
high-
> energy power source (fission or fusion) to heat and expel reaction mass,
> something like the Nerva rockets the US experimented with briefly.

Agreed, they're all crazy propulsion systems.  HEPlaR is a fusion Nerva far
as
I can tell.  If you do the math on HEPlaR, it has to be what FFS calls a
"fusion rocket" regardless (just to give the exhaust the KE it has) :-)
 
> Whatever the propulsion method, if it involves "plasma" then your exhaust
> is going to have the same problems as those we've discussed for larger
craft.

OK, so missiles sigs are higher regardless of type.  If you fix that, then
you
might even be able to get a lock on most of them (assuming they don't coast 
into your hex, *then* light up at 12gs when it's too late for you to do much.

> Given the grotesque ranges and efficiencies given to lasers, the target has
> plenty of time to shoot a contact missile full of holes before it reaches
> him. 

But you have an absolute limit on the number of shots you can fire in the
canon of TNE (800).  And 5% of tasks *always* fail.  The TNE (and the real,
what
a surprise they match :) universe is an uncertain place.

> The far more practical solution is to use the same advantage against
> him, and design a missile to sneak up to within a BL hex or more (a far
> simpler task than nosing right up to the hull!) and destroy itself to pump
> a detonation laser: as the canonical TNE material describes.

Try to kill the 15,000 missiles a Tigress could launch using BL.  Hell try
locking on a single missle in BL.  Canon TNE on this is garbage.  If you
can't
have contact missiles because it's impossible to miss them, then why is it
that
you can't even *lock* them a reasonable fraction of the time.  At what point
does the "sneak up within a BL hex" end, and the "it's impossible not to 
detect, lock, and shoot down an infinite number of missiles with one, or even
*no* directed energy weapons" begin?

> 
> Impact missiles are dead, dead, dead.  :-) 
 
Nope.  I'll grant that missiles might have bigger signatures due to high-
energy exhaust, but as it stands you can't hit 'em in the rules too well (and
the rules *are* canon).  Also, det laser missiles go off in the same hex for
the most part.  The less than 3 minutes it takes your 12g missile to get to
the
middle of the hex is 10 shots at a ROF of 100.  How does your laser shoot 100

missiles down when 5% will always miss (task=easy)?  What about my free
trader
that just had its laser shot off by that pirate?  What about that dead
maneuver
drive on the Patrol Cruiser?  Dead powerplant, too.  How does it shoot down
the
easy to kill contact missile?  Oh yeah, my sensors got toasted 15 minutes
ago,
how do I see the missile?

Besides, what if the target isn't eavading?  At the point when a det laser
would
fire, the contact missile spreads a big cloud of nasty pellets that will
cross
the certain path of the target with X pellets per kiloliter (this would be
fractional, for sure) such that more or less for every 100tons of target 
displacement there would be 1 pellet.  You'd have the same chance to shoot it
down that you do for a det-laser.  Now you have 10E6 targets smaller than
your
beam cross section (laser).  Hell, how do you *see* them?  If you do how do
you 
kill them?

Given that contact missiles would, and should work (under the conditions that
*no* defense is perfect, especially one that doesn't exist), I agree that the
plasma coming out the back-end would make lock-on easier (or at the least
a bogey detection).  

-Merrick

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 26 Aug 1995 12:14:30 -0600 (MDT)
From: merrick@Rt66.com (Merrick Burkhardt)
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Re: Missiles
Message-ID: <9508261814.AA07732@Rt66.com>

 
>Some merchant ships don't have any lasers at all, so you could use homing
KKMs 
>against them.- Anyone want to design a 5MJ socket laser to sell to the
traders?
> 
> Brendan 
> 

I have a 16 MJ laser for just that purpose.  It does -15 diffmods, and is
around
1 ton displacement.  I'll post it this weekend if I get the chance.  I would
only put this on a CT/MT era ships (in quantity, that is) since I assume
they'd
all have to have common firecontrol computers so they all won't pick the same

target to shoot.  I deal in CT stuff, mostly, so would this really be an
issue?

Seems it would require an integration of nav/FC computers that might be
dangerous if you have the Virus around... 

-Merrick


------------------------------

Date: Sat, 26 Aug 1995 12:19:13 -0600 (MDT)
From: merrick@Rt66.com (Merrick Burkhardt)
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Re: Missiles
Message-ID: <9508261819.AA07951@Rt66.com>

> 
> I have a 16 MJ laser for just that purpose.  It does -15 diffmods, and is
arou
							^^^
							-5

DOH!

Merrick

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 26 Aug 1995 14:21:16 -0500
From: Steven Bonneville <bonnevil@itlabs.umn.edu>
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: More Colonization Cost Ideas
Message-ID: <199508261921.OAA05286@betty.itlabs.umn.edu>

One more thought on the cost to send a colonist to Tarsus from Fornice:

Yesterday, I said that you could use a Tukera frieghter to send about
150 colonists to Tarsus from Fornice for "kCr 76700 per colonist".  
I meant to say "Cr 76700, or kCr 77".  

Now, I assumed that Fornice chartered a frieghter at standard rates,
and that it was less than 40 years old so that it still had to pay
off the mortgage.  But what if it doesn't?  The mortgage that needed
to be paid during the charter was about kCr 6700.  The charter fee was
about kCr 8500.  Let's say that the Imperial government wants to
encourage colonization, and lets old ships reduce the fixed charter
fee by the same amount that they used to pay the bank in mortgage
payments.  The charter fee is then only kCr 1800 or so for the 150
colonists to get from Fornice to Tarsus.  Supplies are still kCr 20
per colonist, or kCr 3000 total.  The start-up fee per colonist just
dropped to a possible minimum of kCr 32 each. 

The reason that you might not want to drop the price that low is 
that you'll probably want to spend some money earned by the profitable
old ships to pay off the mortgages on the new ships.  But since they'll
be earning money too, you will be able to drop the colonization charter
cost to some degree and still earn a decent profit.  And considering
how long well-maintained ships in the Wilds have lasted in the New
Era, there could be a lot of old ships in operation in the Imperium. 

The more I think about this, the more it seems that the fixed passage
costs "mandated by the Imperial Ministry of Transportation" exist to
keep the megacorporation express-route liners from undercutting the
fares of the small start-up tramp freighters.  Once a company is over
forty years old, it's going to start getting some nice profits from
the older freighters.

  Steve Bonneville
  <bonn0015@gold.tc.umn.edu>


------------------------------

Date: Sat, 26 Aug 1995 20:46:20 -0400
From: Wesley.Esser@hd62.haledorr.com
To: Rob Miracle <traveller@MPGN.COM>
Subject: Mertactor Climate
Message-ID: <"646*/G=Wesley/S=Esser/OU=hd62/O=hale and
dorr/PRMD=haledorr/ADMD=mci/C=US/"@MHS>







     >>I still think that you can stuff the soils with chemicals and the 
     air with
     CO2 as much as you like but without water it's still going to be a 
     desert.
     However, I don't know enough about the subject to be dogmatic about 
     it.
     <<

     >Me either.  Let's leave it to the chemists.  Seriously though, anyone 
     who opts to use my Mertactor description can translate my statement 
     about the verdant landscape of the planet as "only on the oceanic 
     coasts" or "only in Mertactor's large river valleys" or however they 
     want to.  I envisioned the standard atmosphere, the presence of 20 
     percent water and the fact that my World Builder's Handbook die roll 
     indicated that the planet had native life, to mean that the landscape 
     was verdant.  To what degree, I'll leave to the individual Trav 
     player.<

     I think that Christopher may be right about the planet being fairly
lush, without having to resort to funny chemicals or anything.  It seems to
me (any climatologists out there feel free to correct me) that the amount
of rainfall at a given point on a planets surface would depend on how much
water the winds could carry to that area.

    Mertactor is tiny (about 1/4 the circumference of Terra), but it has
the same atmospheric density as Terra.  You would expect that the winds
would have the same strength and the same water carrying ability as winds
on Terra, so that a point of land at a given distance from the sea would
have the same water content on Terra or on Mertactor.  Add in the effect of
the low gravity (.25G), and you would get winds that moved 4 times the
distance as they would on Terra.  

    The amount of moisture the winds can carry is the other major factor.
The actual area of Mertactor's hydrosphere is fairly small, so the winds
would spend less time over the water, but I think that there would be
sufficient time for the atmosphere to absorb it's maximum carrying capacity
of water.

    Combine these two circumstances and you would get a world where the
winds carry a load of water equal to that on Terra up to four times the
distance.  The overall lushness of the planet would depend heavily on the
layout of the oceans and mountain ranges.  If the hydrosphere were
concentrated in one or a few compact seas, then areas that were outside of
the reach of the seagoing winds would be common, and you would have
deserts.  Likewise you would have deserts if there were high mountains
blocking the ocean winds (although these would likely have a corresponding
lush area on the oceanward side, as in the Amazon).  If there were a number
of small and medium sized seas and lakes you would probably have fewer
areas that were far enough from the ocean winds to be true desert.  In
either case you would expect fairly extensive areas of semi-desert/
savannah/high plains type areas, where there was a reasonably regular,
albeit meager, rainfall.  I would also expect areas of mediterranean-type
climate, particularly along the leeward coasts of the seas - reasonable
seasonal moisture, but not extending terribly far into the continental
interior.  In all I would think that there would be plenty of large areas
of lush vegetation, quite sufficient for a population of 60 million.  Think
of something like Australia - lush coastal areas, some rainforests, and a
variety of desert and semi-desert outback areas.  A planet is a big place,
even a small one like Mertactor, and there would seem to me unlikely that
it could have one uniform climate.  Mertactor has a total dry land area
about 45% that of Terra - plenty of room for 60 million to find some nice,
habitable areas.

Wes Esser
wesley.esser@haledorr.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Of course my employers, as lawyers, would most likely have an opinion on
this, but I'd rather not ask them just now."

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 25 Aug 95 18:55:00 -0500
From: jeff.zeitlin@execnet.com (JEFF ZEITLIN)
To: TRAVELLER@MPGN.COM
Subject: Re: Purpose of RICE
Message-ID: <8AFD46F.0100055432.uuout@execnet.com>


Dave Ranke writes...

T::>Hans Rancke then said:

T::>> Hmmm... perhaps we've been arguing at cross-purposes. I thought that
these
 ::>> RICE papers were supposed to describe things as they might be in the
GDW
 ::>> universe.

T::>Can we have a decision on this please?

 Well, as the self-appointed Chief Archivist (I came up with the
 concept...), I envisioned RICE as a way of fleshing out areas that
 GDW didn't (and probably couldn't and shouldn't).  My point of
 view is that anything in the RICE papers should be at least
 grossly consistent with The Universe According To GDW.  I
 certainly don't see any gross problems with any of the RICE
 material posted to date.

 FWIW, Glisten was me, not Alvin Plummera.  Alvin has, however,
 been the most prolific RICE research associate to date.

==========================================================================
Jeff Zeitlin                                      jeff.zeitlin@execnet.com
---
  OLXWin 1.00a  Chief Archivist, Regency Institute for Cultural Education

------------------------------

End of TRAVELLER Digest 392
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