(Old) FTL Engines - LSFN/Design GitHub Wiki

= = Description Engines whose purpose is to allow the ship to travel faster than light. We have a choice between mechanisms:

  • Warp drive: The ship simply travels a great deal faster than at sub-light speeds
  • Jump drive: The ship performs an instantaneous translation, requires some form of charging and cool-down period
  • Improbability drive: The ship's position is now a probability distribution, specifically, normally distributed. The more energy that is fed into the drive, the greater the standard deviation of the distribution. Turning off the drive fixes the ship's position according to a random variable taken from the distribution.
  • Improbable jump drive: A combination of the above two. The helm sets a direction and a distance, the ship will jump the correct distance but the further the ship jumps, the further from the straight line of travel the ship will end up.

We discussed briefly having realistic scale, I think this would imply in-system (solar system that is) jumps of some sort:

  • Circumference of Earth: ~4*10^7 metres.
  • Distance of Earth from Sun ~1AU or 1.5 * 10^11 metres.
  • Speed of light: 3 * 10^8 metres/second
  • Seconds in an hour: 3.6 * 10^3

In the interest of fun, we likely want to encourage a bit of slower-than-light chasing, skirmishing and hide-and-seek goings on when one ship is outmatched, rather than just jumping away right now. Some ideas that might help with that:

  • Proximity to gravity wells prevents FTL. Star Wars approach.
  • Charging mechanic with some incentive not to have FTL engines charged for getaway all the time (e.g. holding your charge consume energy).
  • Some way of tracking FTL movement, so you can continue your pursuit. BSG approach.

Any other suggestions?

I think the charging mechanic is good, with no option to hold charge (in fact, beyond a certain point in the process, but before the actual jump, the decision is irreversible?) to avoid people "powergaming" ships with crazy reactors / energy capacity... -- Carrier

I suggest having a negative effect for partially charging then not jumping / holding charge. We could have the FTL drive rapidly overheat when it is charged (this would also discourage consecutive jumps). Another alternative is to claim that the physics of the drive demands that after any charging is performed the ship must jump once charging stops; in other words, you cannot rip half a hole in the space-time continuum.

Conversely, I wonder if we can come up with a mission where you want to do something weird with over/under/repeatedly charging the FTL engines in the name of science?