On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 5:31 AM, Onno Meyer <[email protected]> wrote: > David wrote: ut right for the setting. > > Can you tell more? It does matter if we're talking about ships > for a colony system or a home system, and some FTL drives may > be suitable for insystem travel, at least to the outer system.
Sure. FTL is by a sort of jump drive through a fixed jump point. The location of the jump points very, from system to system, and many systems have more than one. Typically, they're found in the trailing trojan point of a gas giant's orbit, but they are found in other places. The jump drive forms a field around the ship, and the ship is roughly turned inside out twice as it moves through the wormhole. The field is of limited size: No more than 40 meters in diameter, with length of up to 1200 or so meters. The drives are expensive (several hundred million dollars) and require massive power to operate, which drives jump ships to be almost universally the maximum size that fits through the wormhole. Ships are equipped with fusion rockets, with an Isp of about 2X10^6 in a low thrust mode, and 1X10^6 in a higher thrust mode. (That's somewhat higher than vehicles, I believe. It's right on the edge of what's theoretically possible ) Military ships are sometimes equipped with anti-matter drives, heading into the Isp of 6X10^6 range. There are several thousand settled systems. These range from places where there are a few thousand people, to places with a dozen or more billions, spread from planet to station. Overall, about half of humanity lives in space. most of the people who live on planets do so on heavily populated ones. Various genefixing has happened to make living in zero gee not a health problem. (Radiation from living in space is more of one. ) So a system can be worth exploiting even if there isn't a suitable planet. -- David Scheidt [email protected] _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
