Do rift drives have inertia?

[Greyaxe]

I dont think they do. Opinions.

[glitterboy2098]

since all a rift drive is is creating a large portal to another universe, passing through, and then making another portal back, I'm not sure what your asking.

a Rift is going to be stationary. it cannot be moved by interaction with the environment, and i know of no magic that can make one move.

vessels passing through a rift are effected by inertia as normal for the dimension they are in.


view it like the 'hyperspace' gates/drive from Babylon 5, your opening a hole somewhere else, and passing through. the laws of physics will be unaffected, so if your coasting on inertia, you'll coast right through. the description of the 'whitespace' rift drives use as a shortcut sounds like normal laws of motion in in effect, so inertia works normally there.

[Braden Campbell]

No...but they do suffer from time dilation.

If you could fold space, which apparently you cannot in the Three Galaxies, the trip would be instantaneous...travelling without moving, as Frank Herbert might say.

Instead, the Rift drive takes a shortcut through the "flux dimension" to re-emerge at another point in realspace.

The trip seems to take no time at all for the people onboard the rifting ship... however, time passes normally for the rest of the universe. As an example:a rift-ship capable of going 5 light-years per hour jumps to another star system 25 light-years away. For the crew onboard, it just takes the briefest of moments. For an outside observer, 5 hours go by.

What this means is that, by harnessing the power of rifts, a magic ship can leap from one point in the universe to any other point... just as I can cross million of light-years instantly by walking through a dimensional portal. This makes Splugorthian raiders especially deadly, as they can now pop out of nowhere, steal a bunch of slave stock, and leap back home before you can possibly scramble a defense.

[glitterboy2098]

If you could fold space, which apparently you cannot in the Three Galaxies, the trip would be instantaneous...traveling without moving, as Frank Herbert might say.

actually, you probably could, if it wasn't for all the CG drives running around twisting up space.

of course, 'Fold Drives' from Robotech don't actually fold space.. weirdly..

the 'jump drive' type folding space drive hasn't shown up, probably because of the navigation problem. with CG drives twisting space to provide propulsive effect, you can't get an accurate map of the natural folds of space to navigate by. you'd start a fold, only to have your destination bent away from you as some CG craft goes shooting by halfway across the galaxy, in a butterfly effect.

in the 'sheet of paper' example of folding space, such misfolds would be trying to fold on the dotted line, only to have your elbow jarred halfway so the ends don't line up.

[Greyaxe]

No...but they do suffer from time dilation.

If you could fold space, which apparently you cannot in the Three Galaxies, the trip would be instantaneous...travelling without moving, as Frank Herbert might say.

Instead, the Rift drive takes a shortcut through the "flux dimension" to re-emerge at another point in realspace.

The trip seems to take no time at all for the people onboard the rifting ship... however, time passes normally for the rest of the universe. As an example:a rift-ship capable of going 5 light-years per hour jumps to another star system 25 light-years away. For the crew onboard, it just takes the briefest of moments. For an outside observer, 5 hours go by.

What this means is that, by harnessing the power of rifts, a magic ship can leap from one point in the universe to any other point... just as I can cross million of light-years instantly by walking through a dimensional portal. This makes Splugorthian raiders especially deadly, as they can now pop out of nowhere, steal a bunch of slave stock, and leap back home before you can possibly scramble a defense.

Alright then mr smarty pants, here is another question. Can a rift drive reappear on a selected nexus point and can that nexus point be within a planetary body?

[Braden Campbell]

Alright then mr smarty pants, here is another question. Can a rift drive reappear on a selected nexus point and can that nexus point be within a planetary body?

I'll counter with this: would you rather play in a game setting where a Splugorth cruiser has to come down from space, or one where said cruiser suddenly appears over your home town giving you 0 chance to defend yourself?







Personally, no, you can't rift-drive onto a planetary location; but as with all of the above, there is nothing in the game setting/mechanics to say one way or another. GM's call.

[Greyaxe]

Alright then mr smarty pants, here is another question. Can a rift drive reappear on a selected nexus point and can that nexus point be within a planetary body?

I'll counter with this: would you rather play in a game setting where a Splugorth cruiser has to come down from space, or one where said cruiser suddenly appears over your home town giving you 0 chance to defend yourself?







Personally, no, you can't rift-drive onto a planetary location; but as with all of the above, there is nothing in the game setting/mechanics to say one way or another. GM's call.

This may surprise you but im cool with the zero chance thing, because that makes the Splugorth and the UWW the most fearfull ships in the 3G, even more frightning than the Transgalactic empire, which they appear to be.

[KLM]

Mind you, there are methods which prevent the use of a
Nexus by unwanted magic users.

Other methods are clairvoyance-based/augmented
sensors.

Adios
KLM

[Greyaxe]

This may surprise you but im cool with the zero chance thing, because that makes the Splugorth and the UWW the most fearfull ships in the 3G, even more frightning than the Transgalactic empire, which they appear to be.

I love this thing
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/jacksonsdc/kdac.htm

A little unbalancing i would knock a d6 off the main gun and reduce the atmosphere speed to mach one or less. The crew and carried military units is too small for the size of the ship as well. Otehrwise its cool. I liked the writeup about the Kitanni.

[glitterboy2098]

he trip seems to take no time at all for the people onboard the rifting ship... however, time passes normally for the rest of the universe. As an example:a rift-ship capable of going 5 light-years per hour jumps to another star system 25 light-years away. For the crew onboard, it just takes the briefest of moments. For an outside observer, 5 hours go by.

i just noticed this. i hate to disagree with the expert here, but according to the books, i believe Rift travel is a point to point drive, not one with LYH ratings.

you open a rifts, pass through, send a few seconds in the flux, and emerge through another rift at the destination.

but the time dilation thing still sounds cool
since the Megaverse builder talked about how time can flow at different rates, just tie it into the flux dimension itself, with a simple formula to define the rate.

[KLM]

Somehow magic users were always able to open a Rift,
step through, and be there (and even then) where they
wanted to travel (well, usually).

Now, Rift drives first open a portal to the "flux dimension"
and then back to the reality. Why it is... I cannot figure
it out.

Whatever is the case: somehow, Dwarven Iron ships
ARE able to travel en masse, as it was demonstrated
before the forming of the UWW.

Adios
KLM

[Braden Campbell]

Somehow magic users were always able to open a Rift,
step through, and be there (and even then) where they
wanted to travel (well, usually).

Agreed. That's why I propose (and use in my own games) the "instantaneous travel with acquired time-debt" method, as mentioned in my first post.

[Rallan]

Alright then mr smarty pants, here is another question. Can a rift drive reappear on a selected nexus point and can that nexus point be within a planetary body?

I'll counter with this: would you rather play in a game setting where a Splugorth cruiser has to come down from space, or one where said cruiser suddenly appears over your home town giving you 0 chance to defend yourself?

And I'll counter with this:

If you were the captain of a Splugorth cruiser, would you really want to pop out of a Rift so close to the ground that the other side could just drive a few tank divisions over and open fire?

[Rallan]

Alright then mr smarty pants, here is another question. Can a rift drive reappear on a selected nexus point and can that nexus point be within a planetary body?

I'll counter with this: would you rather play in a game setting where a Splugorth cruiser has to come down from space, or one where said cruiser suddenly appears over your home town giving you 0 chance to defend yourself?







Personally, no, you can't rift-drive onto a planetary location; but as with all of the above, there is nothing in the game setting/mechanics to say one way or another. GM's call.

This may surprise you but im cool with the zero chance thing, because that makes the Splugorth and the UWW the most fearfull ships in the 3G, even more frightning than the Transgalactic empire, which they appear to be.

Not by much though. In a setting where the major nations contain thousands and thousands of inhabited worlds, the offensive fleets they field are going to make the defenses of most solar systems seem laughably insignificant by comparison. It doesn't matter that the CCW and TGE fleets can't just pop up anywhere the way rift-drive ships can, because if either civilization just sends a tiny fraction of its total military strength at your homeworld, it'll be fielding an armada with ten or a hundred times the power of your world's defensive fleet. And don't expect reinforcements soon enough to make a difference, because at a rate of less than 10 lightyears an hour, not enough fleets from allied worlds are going to be able to get there until the invaders have scored a decisive victory for the fleet and had plenty of time to rain weapons of mass destruction down on the planet's surface. Compared to that sort of raw firepower, the fact that Splugorth and UWW fleets can actually appear on your planet's surface if they want to is a relatively small advantage.

Still, it might make for markedly different styles of warfare. A civilization with conventional CG-drive ships would be able to strike at will in enemy space, popping up in overwhelming strength without warning to shatter small defensive fleets and destroy whatever it chooses to on the target planet's surface, but the need to get the hell out of dodge before the defenders' main fleet turns up to drive them away means that they'd have to settle for a war of attrition rather than conquest. If the CCW and TGE ever go for a no-holds barred war, the best bet for both sides is to have huge battlegroups just target enemy systems at random, utterly destroy everything of value, move onto the next target, and hope that they gradually destroy the enemy's capacity to support a fleet quicker than the enemy is destroying them.

The smaller Splugorth and UWW civs just don't have the luxury of being able to do that on anywhere near the scale of their larger neigbhours though, but travel via rift (especially if they ditch the spaceships altogether and use Pyramids) means that they can dump an army on a planet's surface more or less instantly, score sweeping blitzkrieg victories against an inferior enemy (one world won't have the terrestrial military might to fend off the combined might of the UWW or a Splugorth collective), port enough starships and ground-to-space weaponry to hold the planet's fairly modest home fleet at bay, and quickly establish a situation where the enemy needs to either mount a counter-offensive or resort to destroying one of its own worlds to drive the invaders out. Coordinate it with the arrival of a conventional fleet, and you can even do a simultaneous terrestrial and orbital assault.

The only downside to invading via dimensional rifts would be the PPE cost, but even that's pretty easily solved. I'm sure these guys have long since figured out that blood sacrifice on a massive scale is a very efficient way of fuelling this sort of PPE-expensive endeavour, and have long since realised that a few fish finger factories and an extensive network of fish farms will be more than enough to meet their demands (and provide troops in the invasion force with a near limitless supply of tasty crumbed fish treats ).

[Rallan]

err... what flux dimension?

another detail you missed.

Still, it might make for markedly different styles of warfare. A civilization with conventional CG-drive ships would be able to strike at will in enemy space, popping up in overwhelming strength without warning to shatter small defensive fleets and destroy whatever it chooses to on the target planet's surface, but the need to get the hell out of dodge before the defenders' main fleet turns up to drive them away means that they'd have

???

FTL travel disturbs the normal space-time continuum for 1 to 10 lightyears, meaning sensors. nothing preventing a planet from having sensors and detecting what's approaching.

exactly how the sensors work is up in the air due to crappy writing. good bet when they detect ships at range, they can commo @ x10 speed of FTL ships for reinforcements or warnings.

Bah, damn people with damn Phase World sourcebooks I never got around to buying. There weren't no namby-pamby sensors in the good ol' days

Still, the general principle is still sound. Any decent-sized invasion fleet by the TGE or CCW will dwarf the defensive fleet of your average TGE or CCW solar system. If they've got early warning systems that give them several hours' notice, you just need to travel in a large enough group to dwarf the defensive fleets of all the solar systems within several hours' travel of your target (hardly a big deal, since that's likely to be only a handful). They should still easily have the capacity to get in, crush a planet's defenses and all the reinforcements that were able to arrive in time, move on to repeat with another few targets, and get out before the enemy can arrive in force (either by concentrating reinforcements from enough surrounding worlds, or when one of its own humungous attack fleets gets to the area). Even if there aren't effective countermeasures against the early warning system, this sort of massed invasion and scorched earth trick should work indefinitely as long as you don't penetrate deep into areas that are thoroughly controlled by the enemy and you don't accidentally pick targets that just happen to have one of the main enemy fleets within easy reinforcing distance.

likely that ships will be numerous (eg, attack a group of planets in concert) and put a hurting on them all. if you're attacking planet by planet over a large region, don't expect a long campaign before someone figures out what your objectives are.

Well I'm working on the assumption that it's going to be the most obvious objective for both sides in the first place, and that the main reason the TGE and CCW haven't had a truly major war lately is because neither wants to shoulder the expense of trying to outlast the other in a planet-by-planet war of annihilation. When your opponent is as big as these guys, the longer you spend trying to hang onto enemy territory, the more time you're giving him to bring in reinforcements from further afield and deliver a truly crushing blow. There just wouldn't be much incentive for either side to try and capture enemy worlds relatively unscathed early in such a war, because the frontier would quickly devolve into a hotly contested no-mans land dozens or hundreds of lightyears deep, with both sides able to field immensely destructive offensive fleets, but neither side able to defend every single possible target against such a fleet. Apart from strategically vital worlds (which you'd post a mega-fleet all of its own at), everywhere would be too thinly defended to deal with a major invasion force, so until you're confident that you've got the enemy on the ropes the only viable options you've got are to have your offensive fleets ravage his worlds without mercy while staying two steps ahead of his defensive fleets, and have your defensive fleets chase after his offensive fleets as quickly as possible, and just pray his economy collapses before yours does.

Edit: this also might be the reason Rift Jump Drives take Time so the trip, which disturbs time/space can be detected. of course there's nothing preventing anyone from saying the disturbance of the Rift during instantaneous transport does the same. Unfortunately the books weren't written logically.

Sounds like another good reason for skipping rift jump drives altogether and just rifting armies in the old fashioned way. Everything about rift jump drives reeks of a nerf for no reason other than to make sure they don't have an edge over normal FTL travel, so why bother with 'em? Stone Pyramids work. Dimensional rifts work. Blood sacrifice on a mass scale works. How hard can it be to open a bunch of ordinary, old-fashioned rifts and drive an army through it? I mean the Splugorth conquer entire worlds from other dimensions this way, so I don't see why they'd want to dick about with space travel in the three galaxies when they can slip underneath the space radar by invading the way they know best.

[KLM]

First, Rift-driven ship can only span 20 ly's in one jump,
and that is not that impossible for forward observation
systems (be they outposts or just probes) to detect
them.
In that regard they are not that more difficult to intercept,
than CG driven ships.

The second topic is the problem of sudden strikes.
I mean, if we put our current weapon technology on
a starship (even a sattelite) it would be able to eradicate
life as we know it on a planet. Yet, in the 3G setting,
it looks like someone needs some shiny superweapon
to destroy planets and - for no obvious reasons -
generally most players (not the player characters,
but power blocks) skip the idea of just blasting away the
enemy's home system.

An (ancient) pact? If so, who enforces that? And
so on, and so on....

Adios
KLM

[Esckey]

Planetary Shields? Satillite Defense network? Planetary weapons capable of hitting things in orbit around the moon?

[Rallan]

Is Rallan trying to bring down the PW setting?.....

Nah, there's limitations on this sort of thing.

For starters, what I'm proposing for the TGE and CCW is just how they'd act in a total war. It's highly unlikely under normal circumstances that they'd ever actually do this, because it would be humungously expensive and you wouldn't have "winners" per se, you'd just have one guy who's been completely decimated and had to surrender because he couldn't carry on the fight, and another guy who's pummeled his enemy into submission but who's absolutely crippled himself and left himself wide open to invasion by a third party in the process.

And for the Splugorth and UWW, well, they just don't have the resources or the will to do that sort of invasion on a mass scale. The Splugorth aren't a unified political entity, and even if they were, a systematic war of conquest would bring down the wrath of both the CCW (who don't want folks just running around invading everything) and the TGE (who are always looking for a chance to lay some smackdown on their former overlords). And the UWW as a whole frowns on member planets instigating wars because it knows that while it's a big fish in Three Galaxies politics, it's nowhere near being the biggest, and it would be unable to survive if it accidentally triggered the wrath of the CCW or TGE.

Basically yeah, if a major war broke out, common sense alone tells us that it would bring down the Phase World setting, because it's a setting where there just aren't any really cunning plot devices that make it hard to wage incredibly destructive wars. But fortunately the sheer size of the gap between offensive and defensive capacity on all sides means a sort of Mutually Assured Destruction attitude means that the major powers are far more likely to duke it out through proxies in limited conflicts rather than risk escalating hostilities into an all-out war between the big guys.

[Rallan]

Planetary Shields? Satillite Defense network? Planetary weapons capable of hitting things in orbit around the moon?

Wouldn't be enough. A single world will have the defense budget of, well, a whole planet. Which is impressive enough on the surface of it. A world with a decent economy should easily be able to field at least a few carriers (or other capital ships, depending on what they want), dozens and dozens of smaller ships, and hundreds or even thousands of figther craft and armed defense satellites. More than enough to deter pirates, terrorists, rebels, and other crazy folks. Thing is, that's not gonna count for diddly in a major war. The major fleets of the CCW and TGE are probably equivalent to maybe 5 to 10% of all the planetary defense forces in their empire combined. And in the event of an all-out war, they could probably lean on member planets and get them all to contribute 5 to 10% of the strength of their defense forces to the war effort. With an armada like that, you've easily got the numbers and the firepower to split it into a whole bunch of smaller groups, all with enough grunt to overwhelm the defense force of several solar systems simultaneously.

Basically it'd be like the 300 Spartans vs the Persian army. Only in space, there's no such thing as bottlenecks in the terrain to stop the little guys from being overwhelmed.

[Rallan]

True, Rallan. What I see are two very possible scenario should the both of them start a war....

1. some within their "empires" might take the opportunity to break away.

Oh totally. And while the big war's distracting the central government, others might take the opportunity to take care of some grudges they have against planets that aren't part of their empire. And there'll be plenty of third parties allying with the big two. And smugglers galore working around embargoes and blockades, and black marketeers profiting on wartime shortages, and pirates as far as the eye can see taking advantage of the fact that the fleets are too busy guarding the frontier to patrol the "safe" areas of space. And lord only knows what else.

2. idiots like the sploogies might take a chunk out of each side no matter who wins in the end.

I think we can safely assume that the Splugorth aren't idiots. You don't survive for tens of thousands of years, carve out your own little interdimensional empire, and survive the constant schemes being hatched by folks who hate the Splugorth (everyone from True Atlanteans and other champions of light, through to business rivals like other Splugorth or the folks at Naruni Enterprises, through to stone-cold beings of pure evil who are still annoyed at the time you sold them a Greatest Rune Weapon that was actually just a $150 Home Shopping Network LotR commemorative sword), by being an idiot.

If the CCW and TGE went to war, all the Splugorth would very politely sit on the sidelines and wait, doing nothing beyond maybe "acquiring" a few independent worlds that neither the CCW nor the TGE were on good diplomatic terms with. Then they'd wait some more, rubbing their little tentacles together with glee and desperately hoping that neither side sues for peace. Being Splugorth, they might even take a few precautions to pre-emptively sabotage the peace process. Having "independent" journalists covering the whole conflict, always ready to publicise the hell out of any unforgivably atrocities that either side might commit. Sending out small detachments of replica CCW or TGE ships to shoot the heck out of neutral shipping or defenceless civilians. Or just plain old mind control or assassination of crucial politicians.

Partly for fun, but mainly because they'll make out like bandits just as long as the war is nice and bloody. If one side collapses spectacularly, the Splugorth will want to be ready to sweep in and invade all the really choice worlds that they've been keeping their eye on, preferably before the other side gets their first and blows up all the stuff that made it attractive. And if it collapses spectacularly enough, they might even be able to continue after the war is over, because it won't have enough of a fleet left to fend them off. If both sides collapse spectacularly (unlikely, but it could happen), then it's feeding time at the aquarium for your sploogs. And of course if the war just drags on and on and on... well, the Splugorth were selling arms, technology, raw materials, and everything else imaginable loooong before Naruni decided it wanted to be the universe's biggest arms dealer. And of course a good long war is loads of fun, especially if it's someone else's war.

[Rallan]

might also sell either sides their military services...

Probably not until later on in the piece. You wouldn't want to ally yourself with one side just for the hell of it and then two years later find out you've backed the losing horse and now have an angry intergalactic empire ready to teach you a lesson about taking up arms against it.

[Rallan]

Plus in the meantime, there's more profitable ways of making a fortune from war. All those pirates taking advantage of the way the navy doesn't have time for anything except chasing the enemy, and those smugglers making a fortune running blockades? They can't exactly go to respectable, law-abiding spaceports to offload their goods and get their repairs