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+--- Thread: Travel time inRP? (/showthread.php?tid=131419)
Travel time inRP? - Mister_X - 07-09-2015
So this is something I can never really get right. Obviously due to game mechanics and system size it takes mere minutes to travel across systems and you need less than an hour to go from one side of Sirius to the other. But how do we display the travel time in roleplay? I imagine it would take hours inRP to pass one system and several days maybe even weeks to go from for example New Berlin to Tau 23. So how do you solve this issue inRP?
RE: Travel time inRP? - jammi - 07-09-2015
Generally speaking I'd advise ignoring/glossing over it entirely. Do what you will inside your own head, but if you're trying to justify Freelancer's scale and physics, that way madness lies.
RE: Travel time inRP? - l3wt - 07-09-2015
Jammi's entirely correct, disregard the size/distance/velocity as seen in the gameplay entirely if you don't want to end up with nonsense. Just extend time expended in what you're trying to write to what you think is reasonable. Important thing is, you should remain internally consistent about it, if something takes X amount of time for travel route Y, don't backpedal and drastically change that amount of time for similar routes only for plot convenience.
RE: Travel time inRP? - Haste - 07-09-2015
Well, don't Tradelanes claim to accelerate ships to superluminal speeds? In that case gameplay might not be that inaccurate tbh.
Probably easiest to just find a way "around" mentioning travel times though, ye.
RE: Travel time inRP? - Commissar - 07-13-2015
I can confirm what Jammi said. I tried to puzzle it out. Three excel spreadsheets and a padded room later, I've given up trying to reconcile what appears in-game with the real world scale you'd expect from a star system. You just get ludicrous figures, and common sense issues besides (how are those tradelanes not burning up in Manhattan's atmosphere, for instance).
So, as a stand-in, I usually assume 1-2 days for a ship travelling via the jumpgate/tradelane network to cross a system, and many times more for ships travelling without it (for reference, a ship accelerating/decelerating constantly at 1G would take about eighteen days to travel for Earth to Pluto. Space is big, and constant travel at that speed has energy requirements that anything less potent than antimatter is going to struggle to supply, but you can only go so deep with sci-fi reasoning.) I tend to assume that jumpholes form on the outer edges of a solar system and adjust travel times accordingly. It's worth considering that no matter how fast your ship gets, it's still likely to need to stop reasonably regularly for maintenance, refuelling, and resupply.
FTL travel, like the lanes are meant to provide, brings with it all sorts of issues (hello, causality called. They'd like you to stop messing with cause and effect, please), so I just tend to take the lazy route and ignore it.
If you're determined to pull up some figures, there are a few tools that could be handy:
So, as a stand-in, I usually assume 1-2 days for a ship travelling via the jumpgate/tradelane network to cross a system, and many times more for ships travelling without it (for reference, a ship accelerating/decelerating constantly at 1G would take about eighteen days to travel for Earth to Pluto. Space is big, and constant travel at that speed has energy requirements that anything less potent than antimatter is going to struggle to supply, but you can only go so deep with sci-fi reasoning.) I tend to assume that jumpholes form on the outer edges of a solar system and adjust travel times accordingly. It's worth considering that no matter how fast your ship gets, it's still likely to need to stop reasonably regularly for maintenance, refuelling, and resupply.
FTL travel, like the lanes are meant to provide, brings with it all sorts of issues (hello, causality called. They'd like you to stop messing with cause and effect, please), so I just tend to take the lazy route and ignore it.
If you're determined to pull up some figures, there are a few tools that could be handy:
1. Relativistic Star Ship Calculator
Calculates travel times for a constant-acceleration starship, and the time dilation involved for when you get going really fast. It's also got a table of some common distances that're handy for scale.
2. Mission Table
A list of various possible routes (again, in the solar system) and a guide to the power required for them. It can be handy to consider just how much energy your ship might be slinging around. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense for a rag tag freighter to be capable of moving quick enough to crack a planet, so common sense is a handy guide to what sort of speed your ship should be capable of.
Calculates travel times for a constant-acceleration starship, and the time dilation involved for when you get going really fast. It's also got a table of some common distances that're handy for scale.
2. Mission Table
A list of various possible routes (again, in the solar system) and a guide to the power required for them. It can be handy to consider just how much energy your ship might be slinging around. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense for a rag tag freighter to be capable of moving quick enough to crack a planet, so common sense is a handy guide to what sort of speed your ship should be capable of.