 |
| An orbital habitat from a previous campaign |
 |
| Sword Worlds Sector in 1115 |
The setting will be the Sword Worlds, in the Spinward Marches shortly after the Fifth Frontier War (1107 to 1110), which did not go particularly well for the Sword Worlds. The characters penultimate term will be during the war itself, the final term being during the aftermath and the formation of the Border Worlds.
I'll be using the Sword Worlds character generation rules written by Shannon Appelcline published in Signs and Portents #80 by Mongoose Games.
The big tweak I'll be making to the rules is jump travel. Rather than the classic 1 week jump system, I'll be using a more warp drive type method drawing on the SF works of Ian Banks amongst other sources for how the black boxes work. I'll write up the rule mechanisms in a post of its own, but the principle is that the fuel efficiency will vary dependant on the drive rating, actual speed travelled, the wear and tear on the drive and the skill of the engineer.
I'll have to check out the Signs and Portents article - I wasn't aware of it.
ReplyDeleteSpace Opera had an interesting "Warp Drive" type star drive where someone (the Navigator) works out the distance to be travelled and plugs it into a formula that includes the drive size and which gives the time taken to make the trip and the amount of fuel used.
I've worked out a spreadsheet that will calculate the fuel use taking into account the wear and tear on the drive, engineer and navigator rolls and the jump drive rating. The idea is to be able to use the standard traveller ship construction rules (and all the standard ships) but be able to reinterpret the rule mechanisms.
DeleteThe problem I've always had with the standard traveller mechanisms is the economics don't seem to work. I'd expect as TL improves fuel efficiency to get better, but its always 10% per parsec regardless.
The formulae I've knocked up allow you to throttle up for extra speed, or travel more slowly to conserve fuel. So a higher TL J-drive can be run at less than 6 parsecs per week for a fuel saving. This might make the economics more attractive to your small interstellar businessman.