Tweaking FTL Systems
Tweaking FTL Systems (just to keep it interesting!) posted in Spaceships & Vehicles forum comment posted by cobalt_phoenix Hello again, everyone!
I decided while working on the Warships scaling system to try just playing around with various FTL systems. Nothing was intended to be permanent, and was mostly just intended to see what would happen and figure out how that may impact gameplay.
As such, I did come up with a couple of interesting ideas, and decided to share them here and to see if anyone else has something interesting to add.
For right now, there are only two of these, but I actually kind of like them.
FTL DRIVES DON'T PROVIDE PROPULSIONSo the first idea is pretty simple. What happens if the various FTL drives don't actually provide propulsion power?
While this can't be applied to every drive system, a number of the more commonly used systems could be effected by this. Specifically, the stardrive, the drivewave generator, the hyperdrive, and the warp drive. In all of these systems, the drive is what gives the ship its FTL speed directly, and the amount of power/proportional size of the drive has an impact on that speed.
But what happens if they only provide the means for FTL, but rely on the ships sublight engines for actual propulsion? Not much else is changed, just this one aspect.
There are a couple of good examples in popular science fiction for this.
In the Mass Effect universe, the mass effect core doesn't propel the ship, and instead only negates the ship's mass to allow for FTL speeds using normal propulsion. This is a direct FTL system, so it can be represented by the warp drive in Alternity.
In the Halo universe, the slipspace drives only drop the ship into slipspace, and the vessel then needs to traverse this alternate dimension with its normal engines to reach its destination. As an indirect FTL system, this seems to be closest to the hyperdrive in Alternity.
Now just imagine applying this to the stardrive. The drive itself only puts the ship into drivespace, where it will remain for 121 hours. To get anywhere, the ship has to use its sublight engines. After 121 hours, the ship returns to realspace.
There are, of course, potentials to allow for increased speeds, either through increasing the power to the drive on activation, or by increase the proportional size of the drive mounted in the ship. The latter is an actual part of the MEU, as can be seen with the
Normandy's disproportionally large mass effect core to allow it to travel faster.
Personally, I can see potential in this tweak. It could allow for smaller vessels to gain superiority or at least parity with larger ships in most campaign settings. It would probably be easier to apply this to GMG/Starship designs, since they included cruise speeds for the various sublight engines, though Warships could have their FTL speeds be based on their acceleration ratings (perhaps take their acceleration values and divide them by 10, and declaring that as the ship's speed in light-years per unit time).
This can also mean that navigation is not complete after the ship activates its drive, and vessels could alter their courses after the activation.
BOOSTING THE RANGE ON THE TACH RIFLESI've given a lot of thought on the tach rifles (the baseline tach rifle and the super tach rifle), and I have to say they have rapidly become two of my favorite additions to Warships. The reason why is simple: they have
sooo much potential!
So as a refresher, the tach rifle and super tach rifle, as written in Warships, fire projectiles that are tachyon rockets. They spend only a brief moment in FTL before returning to realspace, where they are intended to hit the target. Since these weapons rely on energy transformation at PL7, and the only FTL system available alongside them is the hyperdrive, it is likely safe to assume that the projectiles travel through hyperspace. I personally think that you can use a variant of the hyperdrive attached to the muzzle of a rail cannon to explain how they work, too, but that is just my opinion (the drive would create an unstable hyperspace entry point, and through manipulating the instability, the unguided solid metal slugs would drop back at a desired range; this makes the ammo much cheaper).
Regardless of how you want to imagine it, these weapons use indirect FTL to boost the speed of the projectile to allow them to reach the target faster. This doesn't increase their kinetic energy, just reduces the time-of-flight before impact.
Now think about it: this is indirect FTL, so the projectiles
should be able to pass
through solid objects in real space. This is a projectile cannon which can reach its maximum range faster than any beam weapon, and doesn't require line-of-sight with the target!
These shells can go right through an asteroid or friendly ship to impact a target with the only issue being how to aim the weapons at the target.
So here is the tweak: what happens if you increase their FTL speeds?
Originally, the tach rifle has a range of 6/8/10 megameters (or hexes, however you wish to put it), while the super tach rifle has a range of 8/10/14 megameters. They are also only traveling at an "infinitesimal moment", though it isn't stated what that actual means.
So lets say that the rounds are able to stay in hyperspace for anywhere between one thousandth to one hundredth of a second (0.001 to 0.01 seconds).
The speed of light is roughly 300 megameters per second.
If they travel at the speed of light for that length of time, the rounds would travel between 0.3 and 3.0 megameters.
At 10 times the speed of light, though, that gets bumped up to 3 and 30 megameters.
If you ramp it up to the slowest drive speeds for the hyperdrive at PL7 (1 ly/day), that is roughly 365 times the speed of light. That is a range of about 110 to 1100 megameters, which would be well outside of combat sensor range.
This sort of tweak could give civilizations with energy transformation technology at PL7 the ability to fire salvos that make the best missile weapons look like point-defense guns! And they can potentially bypass nearly any object that stands between the launcher and the target, so hiding behind a planet only makes it harder for them to hit you rather than providing protection.
Now, one last part of this tweak would be that there is a minimum range for these weapons. I would think that they can't be used against any target within the short-range category, so they are only able to hit targets in the medium and long categories. That would also mean that all attacks with tach rifles would suffer from the normal range penalties (+1 at medium, +2 at long), and you don't get to have a shot that isn't so penalized. There is also the fact that you could be shooting blind, which would add more penalties.
However, I still think this would be interesting, as it would provide an interesting requirement to naval fleets. Heavy and super-heavy warships armed with tach rifles, standing off at a huge distance, receiving targeting data from destroyers, frigates, and/or fighters deployed as a scouting force. Direct-action capital ships (such as battleships) would also likely employ spotting/scouting craft, similar to the spotting planes used in WWII and the Pioneer drones used by the Iowa-class battleships following their refits in the 1980s.
It may actually be similar to what may happen once real-world navies start being able to deploy railguns on their ships. Since railguns can hit targets at a couple of hundred kilometers range, surface targets are likely too far away for the firing ship to actually detect them via radar, and rely instead on aircraft or other ships to provide targeting data.
So that's it for now. Hopefully, someone sees some fun with these tweaks!
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