[CODA] Co-axial Warp Drives?

[Gabe Mitchell]

Has anyone established any sort of game mechanic for co-axial warp drives? Starships has Transwarp and Quantum Slipstream Drives mentioned and their own place on the tables, but there's only vague mention at best about co-axial warp drives, and I'm looking for some sort of mechanic I can use for a co-axial warp drive for a new starship design I'm trying to work up.

[Tobian]

Well I can't seem to find anything particularly no. However I wouldn't have thought a Co-axial Warp drive was a good idea - purelly because it is a short cut system - you can just fold space from one location to another - even transwarp drives have speed limits!

Rules I would suggest would be:
If you are installing an alien drive, i suggest you read the modifications section in KW's new suplement 'expanded operations' which can be found in this area of the forums.. To give you a base idea of a TN for them to install it on their ship.

The Next problem would be correctly jumping from one region to another - I would say a hard Space sciences - stellar cartography roll to get it exactly where you want it and not inide a star or a planet etc - TN20+

Then I would say the crew would then have to operate it. As was seen in Voyager when it appeared, was that it was rather temperamental and unstable, so it would require a complex TN to initiate it corectly (engineering TN15-20) - and then a piloting roll of about TN15 to then successfuly arrive at your location.

Perhaps the Engineering roll would affect how the piloting roll turned out - as if they didn't get enough - then the system begins to fail and you either have t have a good pilot to rescue the ship, or a nasty accident happens

[IceGiant]

Tobians idea looks good.
And I was thinking of maximum distance traveled of half a light year per day. It would mean that it would take 13 years to travel the distance voyager did, but it's quicker and not too fast (I think).
That's assuming you made all your rolls.

Could be neat

[Tobian]

You aren't going to be able to go very much further than your long range sensors maximum range. While ling range sensors can extend as far as 17-18 lightyears ahead, that's at a lower resolution, so you might hit an asteroid. I would say no more than 5 lightyears for a guaranteed jump. Of course a culture who uses these might have set up a series of subspace beacons which outline locations which are safe to jump too, but Starfleet hasn't!

[Gabe Mitchell]

Hmm... sounds vaguely Star Wars-ish (or perhaps something akin to Babylon 5's jump gates). I always figured that Starfleet would have set up some kind of subspace beacon system (at least for the busy routes, Earth-Vulcan, for example) as a sort of navigational aid, but I guess I'm wrong about that.

At any rate, I do appreciate the ideas a great deal.

[qerlin]

You could give the system limitations, like I did for the QSD in our camapign: you have to navigate to a specific spot, no variations -- make the calculations difficult or the pirce of failure high, so they don't want to use it as much. If it's a new system, make some of the difficulties higher due to unfamiliarity with how the system works.

Limiting them to what they can scan on sensors, or to areas with accurate maps of space would be good, too.

You can always dazzle the players with b.s. for why they can't just warp space and arrive in Andormeda in zero-time. And if they insist on power-gaming you...off their characters!

[Tobian]

Yes Starfleet does have a vast navigational beacon network for it's ships - but the thing is those beacons aren't neccessarily transmitting data which tells the craft where it needs to be. To use the maritime example - a Buoy will be there as a warning marker - if you were to suddenly arrive at that spot you have a 50/50 chance of materialising in the shallow or the deep zone, which the Bouy marks! Yes you could have the Buoys upgraded to transmit much more complex astrometric data to passing ships, but then that's alot of beacons to upgrade!

Perhaps an adventure could be themed around two such beacons which are used to help compensate for the sensor limitations over range (basically souped up deep space probes) In an effective way they could grant the Helm officer a bonus to his piloting roll, but he could still make an error in judgement! (or just a mistake!)