Questions....

[Captain Amado]

Can any one explain to me how the system reliability modifiers work AND/OR any details on extended actions and the like?

Thanks!

Captain Amado

C.O. U.S.S. Beowulf

[RaconteurX]

Originally posted by Captain Amado
Can any one explain to me how the system reliability modifiers work AND/OR any details on extended actions and the like?

Re-read Chapter Seven of the Narrator's Guide more thoroughly and you will have the answer to your first question. There is a brief summary of reliability modifiers on p. 137 of the NG, and specific rules governing their use throughout Chapter Seven (the sections on Reinforcing Shields and Emergency Repairs, for example). As for your latter query, the complete rules for extended tests can be found on p. 85 of the NG. In brief, an extended test is used to resolve complex or lengthy actions in dramatic circumstances. Each roll requires an amount of time (the "time interval", set by the narrator) to make, and its result is added to the overall test total. When the test total equally or exceeds the extended target number, the objective has been met.

EXAMPLE: Lt. Commander Tavas Sloane, Chief Engineer of the S.S. Artemis, must install a new set of dilithium crystals, calibrate them, and cold-start the warp engines in eight minutes to avert the ship's headlong plunge into Earth's atmosphere at superluminal velocity. The time interval is one minute, the base TN is (15x8=) 120. Tavas is both a Miracle Worker when it comes to Propulsion Engineering (performs tasks in half the base action time) and Meticulous (+1 cumulative per round), his Intellect modifier is +2, and his Propulsion Engineering skill is +4.

Tavas' first roll is (6+2+4=) 12, taking him thirty seconds. His second roll is (6+2+4+1=) 13, taking another thirty seconds. With seven minutes to go, Tavas has a test total of 25. His third roll is (9+2+4+2=) 17, and his fourth is (4+2+4+3=) 13. With six minutes remaining, Tavas' test total is now 55. His fifth roll is a whopping (15+2+4+4=) 25, while his sixth is an average (7+2+4+5=) 18. With five minutes to go, Tavas has a very sizable test total of 98. His seventh and eight rolls are average too, being (7+2+4+6=) 19 and (7+2+4+7=) 20 respectively. However, his test total is now 137, well over the TN of 120, and Tavas has completed his task with a full four minutes to spare.

[Dan Gurden]

Originally posted by RaconteurX

EXAMPLE: Lt. Commander Tavas Sloane, Chief Engineer of the S.S. Artemis, must install a new set of dilithium crystals, calibrate them, and cold-start the warp engines in eight minutes to avert the ship's headlong plunge into Earth's atmosphere at superluminal velocity.

Although on a techno-babble point alone. If the Warp-Engines are offline, how is the ship travelling at faster than light velocitiies??? And how would starting the warp engines alter this speed?

Not that this has relevance to the actual query, just the techno-babble.

[Darth Sarcastic]

It has something to do with the interaction between the Flux-Capacitor, the Daystrom Feedback Interocetor and the Neutron Flush Maxtrix Stabilizer. Back in the days they didn't have the N.F.M.S. , they had to re-adjust the Heisenberg compensator and re-boot the Hemmingway.

You asked for techno-bable...I gave you techno-bable. I know, I know, you're all asking what's a Hemmignway...go ask his wife. Hemming-weigh?....put down the broken whiskey bottle.

[RaconteurX]

Originally posted by Dan Gurden
If the Warp-Engines are offline, how is the ship travelling at faster than light velocitiies???

I used perfectly ordinary physics as a guideline, namely the Law of Conservation of Momentum. Not Trek canon, but it works for my example.

And how would starting the warp engines alter this speed?

By applying warp power to slow the ship's forward motion, or at least divert its course by the few crucial degrees necessary to avoid the planet. Ah, the perils of time travel via the solar slingshot method...

[aelius]

Unfortunatly for your example the Law of Conservation of Momentum is bypassed by the warp engines. When the warp drive fails, the ship drops to sublight speeds.
This is not only stated in the tech manual, but is the way it always worked on screen.
The only time they managed to conserve warp momentum was in the "warp drive is destroying space" ep, and they spent a whole day "saturating the warp nacelles" (whatever that means) to do it.

[RaconteurX]

Originally posted by aelius
This is not only stated in the tech manual, but is the way it always worked on screen.

As I said in an earlier post, "Not Trek canon, but it works for my example." I do not own the Tech Manual at the moment, and frankly do not care what it may say about what happened in a game session I played a few weeks before GenCon. My apologies if this offends your sensibilities, but our narrator gave us a situation to deal with and it would have disrupted my in-character immersion and that of my fellow players to quibble over some tidbit of obscure lore which my character would not know regardless.

The play's the thing, as Billy Shakespeare would say, and I'm the Method Actor sort.

The pseudoscientific explanation I came up with (as the player of our august Chief Engineer) for why our Enterprise-era ship did not drop out of warp is that the subspace shockwave through which we passed as (a result of Artemis' crossing of a temporal threshold) shattered our dilithium array and created a resonance which propagated the warp bubble beyond the point at which it should have collapsed... hence Artemis' superluminal momentum after the actual loss of warp power (our narrator loves it when we provide him with in-character insights like this, whether canonically correct or not).

Oh, and to get back to Amado's initial question, the reliability modifier of Artemis' Type III warp drives (+2) should have been added to all my rolls, something both our narrator and I forgot in all the excitement. Tavas would have had a test total of 29 after one minute, 63 after two minutes, 110 after three minutes, and 131 after three-and-a-half minutes... shaving thirty seconds off his time from my original example.