Todd--
That's one way to slice the math, but such a ship wouldn't really be a 4G
ship, but a 1G ship in four planes (1Gx4). And since those four planes
don't correspond to the six degrees of freedom, thrust in those six
degrees would be compound thrust so would be less than 1G.
I'd be inclined to say that you compute the power, mass, volume, and
surface area for X number of Gs for your hull, then install as many of
those as you want, although you don't need power for all of them at the
same time. You reach diminishing returns pretty fast on anything except a
forward-pointing braking thruster in case you decide you want to be able
to decelerate in the direction your ship is pointing. And there would be
big implications for hull streamlining as well.
The traditional "flames come out the back" model ends up solving too many
problems, not the least of which is that once you really dig into the 6
degrees of freedom issue you're calling into question the whole flat map
abstraction which is just too hard and clumsy for traditional tabletop
games.
> You could go with the multiple thrust bells, each one reducing the thrust
> of the main bell at the back to provide it in another direction.
>
> I.e. a Ship with 4G of thrust puts in 3 extra bells at points of a
> tetragon (so there are 4 thrust bells each equidistant from the other),
> but the ship only has 1G of thrust on each (so the mass demand of the
> three extra bells is made up by the smaller bell in the rear). Great for
> system defense as it is nimble, but poor on the chase as it only has 1G of
> thrust.
>
> http://clowder.net/hop/tetships/tetships.html
> (The extension of the Babylon 5 Starfury concept)
>
>
> Todd Kes
>
> --------------------------------------------
> On Thu, 4/23/15, [Traveller_TNE]
> <> wrote:
>
> By the way, here's another thing we
> didn't do in FFS, talk about how many
> different axes of thrust you can have. The assumption is
> always that
> you've got the one big "thrust bell" at the back and you
> change your
> attitude to point the thrust in whatever direction you need
> to bend your
> vector. Logically you could build a ship with "thrust bells"
> on multiple
> axes so you could change vectors without having to change
> attitude, but
> that didn't fit with 99.9% of what people usually want to
> build, so we didn't take the time.
>
That's one way to slice the math, but such a ship wouldn't really be a 4G
ship, but a 1G ship in four planes (1Gx4). And since those four planes
don't correspond to the six degrees of freedom, thrust in those six
degrees would be compound thrust so would be less than 1G.
I'd be inclined to say that you compute the power, mass, volume, and
surface area for X number of Gs for your hull, then install as many of
those as you want, although you don't need power for all of them at the
same time. You reach diminishing returns pretty fast on anything except a
forward-pointing braking thruster in case you decide you want to be able
to decelerate in the direction your ship is pointing. And there would be
big implications for hull streamlining as well.
The traditional "flames come out the back" model ends up solving too many
problems, not the least of which is that once you really dig into the 6
degrees of freedom issue you're calling into question the whole flat map
abstraction which is just too hard and clumsy for traditional tabletop
games.
> You could go with the multiple thrust bells, each one reducing the thrust
> of the main bell at the back to provide it in another direction.
>
> I.e. a Ship with 4G of thrust puts in 3 extra bells at points of a
> tetragon (so there are 4 thrust bells each equidistant from the other),
> but the ship only has 1G of thrust on each (so the mass demand of the
> three extra bells is made up by the smaller bell in the rear). Great for
> system defense as it is nimble, but poor on the chase as it only has 1G of
> thrust.
>
> http://clowder.net/hop/tetships/tetships.html
> (The extension of the Babylon 5 Starfury concept)
>
>
> Todd Kes
>
> --------------------------------------------
> On Thu, 4/23/15, [Traveller_TNE]
> <> wrote:
>
> By the way, here's another thing we
> didn't do in FFS, talk about how many
> different axes of thrust you can have. The assumption is
> always that
> you've got the one big "thrust bell" at the back and you
> change your
> attitude to point the thrust in whatever direction you need
> to bend your
> vector. Logically you could build a ship with "thrust bells"
> on multiple
> axes so you could change vectors without having to change
> attitude, but
> that didn't fit with 99.9% of what people usually want to
> build, so we didn't take the time.
>