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Saturday, February 9, 2013

MTU - Warp drive travel times

I was playing around with soloing a few merchants, having made characters, buying a ship and looking at speculative trade.  I didn't have a subsector yet, so I was going through some of the OTU ones looking for a decent frontier area to use.  Looking at the Reft sector maps, I realized that my Jump 1 Free Trader, which cost the crew 135KCr/month couldn't go anywhere.

So I pulled out my handy dandy MgT Traveller rule book and started looking at the alternative rules for Warp Drives again.  The nice thing about the Warp Drive is that there isn't a need for a massive amount of power (ie fuel) to make your jump.  The jump rating, or in this case warp rating, is the distance in parsecs that the ship can travel in one week.  The downside?  The power plant's fuel consumption is doubled.

Not wanting to lose too much from the setting by having ships able to move 1 parsec/day, I came up with this handy chart.  Any warp above 5 is purely hypothetical.


Distance in Parsecs
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
       
Warp Speed 1   10 x x x x x x x x x
2 9 10 x x x x x x x x
3 8 9 10 x x x x x x x
4   7 8 9 10 x x x x x x
5 6 7 8 9 10 x x x x x
6 5 6 7 8 9 10 x x x x
7   4 5 6 7 8 9 10 x x x
8 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 x x
9 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 x
10   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

The x-axis is distance (parsecs) and the y-axis is speed (warp factor) with the cross-referenced result equal to time in standard days.  So for example, a ship with a W2 drive could travel 2 parsecs in 10 standard days or 1 parsec in 9 standard days.  If you engage you warp drive and travel less than the maximum allowed, you still would proceed to use the fuel required.

I believe this won't wreck some of the base assumptions used in most Traveller universes, because it will still take 6 days for the fastest ship to travel 1 parsec.  For MTU I will use a 10 day week, with 3 weeks per month, with 12 months per year, totaling 360 days or 36 weeks per standard year.


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