Cepheus Review: Off World Travel
TOC
BOOK TWO: STARSHIPS AND INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL
Chapter 6 - Off World Travel
Interplanetary Travel
Our first page is a re-introduction to our old friend from CT, the acceleration equation.
This is followed by a very helpful pre-calculated table of common distances including orbit, and safe jump ranges for various sized worlds, and how long it would take at various acceleration rates.
One note for reaching jump points - unlike traveling to another stellar body, you likely aren’t boosting approximately halfway out and flipping to decelerate - why bother? Nothing in CT says you have to be relatively still compared to anything, and given the likely relative velocity differences between star systems you’re already compensating for, that little bit of difference is nothing. As to “preplotted jumps” - OK, so why wouldn’t you plot it for a straight acceleration instead of trying to get to relative-zero for the world you’re clearing?
Interstellar Travel
I found this interesting - and slightly more specific than CT:
To enter Jump, a vessel needs a properly aligned hull Jump grid, a suitable set of course vectors (called a Jump Plot), and a working and properly fueled Jump drive.
This implies the jump plots aren’t simply for coordinates but also account for your entry vector, meaning that once your jump is plotted, you’re locked into a course to reach a specific point in space at a specific velocity (direction and speed).
Certainly makes piracy a tad more predictable, though preplotted tapes are also likely randomized…. one hopes. A clever pirate may bribe or otherwise extort or blackmail the guys setting up the prepaid plot parameters.
A few interesting things are added to the mechanics. Jump plots are actually pretty easy for shorter jumps (+4, - # of parsecs) so that a jump one plot calculation for a navigator-1 character requires a 4 or better. You know whether or not you failed.
Mechanically the transition to jump requires an engineering roll, and the “effect” of that impacts your jump success roll.
Jumps are roughly one week (148 hours plus 6d6). Where in CT it’s inferred that you can do jumps under a parsec such as across a star system, here it is explicitly allowed to do sub-parsec jumps.
Jump Success and Failures
You roll 2D6 at a target of zero to not misjump. So far, so good, but…
add the effect of your engineering check to the die roll
subtract 1 for every month since the jump was plotted (most relevant to jump tapes)
-2 per jump drive hit in combat
-2 if using unrefined fuel
-8 if within 100 diameters of a planet / large gravity well.
Also, any result under an 8 is inaccurate, and requires extra travel time in the target system.
Notably, a significant engineering fuckup can render a misjump possible under otherwise ideal conditions. An unlucky roll with unrefined fuel is just as likely as in CT, but being within 100 diameters is much less forgiving than in CT - it’s almost inherently inaccurate and more likely to be a misjump. Outright destroyed appears to be off the table though.
Not that being 1-36 parsecs, average of roughly 12, in a random direction isn’t often the next best thing to a death sentence.
Also, even inaccurate jumps are hard on ship and crew:
In both cases, the emergence is extremely hard. The vessel takes the equivalent of a critical hit from the discordant transition. In addition, everyone aboard the vessel suffers severe headaches, nausea and even nosebleeds for several hours before and after the ship emerges from Jump space.
Starship Procedures and Standard Operations
Passage
Much like CT, some rules relevant to ship construction start cropping up early.
A ship must provide sufficient accommodation for its crew; normally this means one stateroom per two crewmembers (this is termed double-occupancy). Any remaining stateroom space may be used to carry passengers. Passengers cannot share accommodation with crew, with the exception of working passage. Normally, one passenger per small stateroom and two per large stateroom room can be carried.
High passages cost Cr10,000, attention from a steward, and 1000Kg of luggage. If you want to bring your custom air car, you’ll have to pay for the cargo haul, but an ultralight aircraft that can be folded up may fit. Explicit rules are in place for double occupancy, previously strictly forbidden.
There’s also a hard and fast rule for how many passengers a steward can handle based on Steward skill.
Middle passage still offers a shallow discount for significantly worse food and entertainment options and the chance to get bumped. The low passage rules have a slightly easier target for survival, and a better chance of a medic successfully bump the odds.
SOPs
Not much to write home about - a standard schedule followed by most commercial ships with time for jump, followed by transit to planet, the usual week or so portside for taking on or offloading cargo and passengers or tourism, then takeoff to jump. There are no tables embedded in teh text but it refers to possible encounters with pirates or patrol craft.
Expenses
This list will look familiar to anyone used to CT, or paying bills as an adult.
Mortgage
If a ship was purchased using a loan, even if part of it was paid off when mustering out, there may still be a payment due. This section is less than entirely clear because you have to be familiar with later rules to understand why the total price works out to 220% rather than 200% when paying 1/240th of the cost over 480 months (40 years). IIRC that total 220% includes the 20% downpayment.
Salaries
Pilots, engineers, medics, and so on, including which ones are optional, how many you need, and how much they cost.
Fuel
Costs for refined fuel, as well as the expected sources of unrefined fuel - gas giants and water - are here.
Life Support
The high cost of life support (2000/stateroom) explains at least part of why the cost differential between high and middle passage is so low, outside of “how desperate are you to avoid the risks of cold sleep.” What’s new here though is that life support is consumed per stateroom regardless of occupancy. The rules also go deeper into emergency usage, and outline a standard for setting aside additional life support supplies in cargo.
Maintenance
Ships, much like real world boats, require constant maintenance, with rising chances of failure if you miss it. No real changes here.
Revenue
We also meet our old friends bulk cargo, passengers, mail, charters, and what the odds are for how many of each. Players are also free to buy specific cargos on spec. Tables for the latter are in a separate chapter.
Miscellaneous
Interestingly, there are more rules here that are not only beyond the scope of CT’s descriptions, but also feel like they belong in ship construction more than in operations. Assuming the ship construction rules don’t review these requirements, you’ll need to keep this chapter open when you’re building a ship.
Airlocks and Cargo Hatches
Cool - there’s now a specific standard - where the CT Traveller Book rules don’t even bring it up outside of survival tents in equipment. at least 1 per 100 tons, and like all external non-manual hatches, can be secured from the bridge. This generally are big enough to fit three people in vacc suits, so usually two squares. maybe one depending on how the doors operate. Docking to transfer people and boarding are possible through airlocks as well. Streamlined ships can land, and most cargo ships have a cargo hatch that can facilitate moving cargo. Note - this is not an airlock.
Security
There is more here than in CT on this subject. CT had anti-hijack and a few notes on how that included locking down the bridge access and otehr outside hatches. Here, the rules specifically discuss physical security - locks and types of locks - as well as cyber security. In the latter case, very basic security software comes installed, but it is strongly encouraged to get something more resilient to prevent hijackers from taking over the ships computer through the x-station or other entertainment consoles.
Other security measures include the presumed default of alarms and manipulating gravity - though many ship hijackers likely have as much zero-g experience as the average spacer - up through more active optionally installed measures like sleep gas, or venting the ship.
Planetary Travel
A few short paragraphs are spent on hiring local transport (taxis, rail, etc), and the odds of having encounters with the law or customs. There is a new and interesting table with modifiers for things like bar fights and how they affect your odds of talking to the cops, especially as law level gets higher.
For more innocent infractions - just being an obvious offworlder and not quite acting as if they belong there - it just may be a paperwork check. If you’re in a bar fight, the cops will likely throw fists and batons.
Interestingly, there is actually a sentencing table for results if a character gets arrested.
Conclusion
A few new things that look pretty cool, a few elaborations on CT rules, and a few old things just more so - namely incorporating things that affect ship construction outside of the ship construction rules.
Interestingly, instead of segueing directly from ship travel and economics to construction and thence combat, the next chapter will be trade.
Meet Our Friends
The Last Redoubt is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Please also join the Pilum Press Discord and/or the Autarch Discord. Pilum is the publisher of several books and short story collections including Shagduk and Thune’s Vision. Autarch is the home of the Adventurer Conquerer King RPG.