Editing FederalSpace:Technology (section)

==== Commentary ====

'''LordDraqo''': I like this, as it feels like the Alcubierre warp that has been kicking around for a while.

'''Niles:''' I like Pseudovelocity, it's very Star Trek for starships to come to a stop when they get engine trouble.

And it means that not everyone with a starship has access to extinction level kinetic strikes. For maintaining the mood it's probably best to keep that temptation away from the PCs.


'''Shadowjack:''' …Our new-and-improved transwarp drive is the Star Trek standard, whose bubble doesn't collapse after a fraction of a second. Instead, you can just drag your ship all over space, at exponentially greater speed. Wheeeeeeeeeeee. And then, when you cut off the drive, you're conveniently deposited next to whatever you were trying to reach. Anything messes with the bubble, *bip*, you're back in normal space, but if no one's attacking you, you just kick in the drive again and away you go. This probably happens all the time during normal operations, which explains why there's always a helmsman on duty, and they don't just automate this.

Still don't want to do this in atmosphere or gravity, because you'll have to stutter the drive again, and this time it wasn't built for it. Also, there's no way we're risking a trillion-dollar warp engine down on some planet where it could get rusty or dusty or vandalized by some native with a spraypaint can.

'''Myth:''' I like that Helmsman thing. Missed it on the first read-through. I was quoting this to point out why there are Engineers, and why they seem to have an inordinate amount of pull for their place in the command structure.

Same thing, really -- Engineers always on duty, ready to kick the unstable drive in the right spot to get it moving again, adjust the field density for the average pressure of space in this part of.. um.. space, warn the Helm guy when it starts overheating, etc.

I like the idea of the whole ship-zooming-though-space thing being mostly an illusion of the passengers, with stops, drops-outs, semi-random changes in pseudovelocity, and barely-managed physics driving the whole thing, usually, in the more-or-less correct direction.

'''Shadowjack:''' From an aviation/astronautics point of view, having the Flight Engineer high up in the command structure makes a good deal of sense already—that's a good point you add to it.

Really, that description of travel is not that far off from the Original Series. I rewatched some of those old episodes a while back, and was intrigued by the difference between their technology and TNG+ technology in its failure modes. TNG+ stuff was just ''fickle''—does it work today? Oh, ionization. Never mind. Shiny, but unreliable on a metaplot level. TOS stuff, on the other hand, worked—but the ''equipment'' broke down. Plot-level failure. Those little ships were barely able to contain the powers they handled, and you really got the impression that Scotty was sweating every day just to keep things together. 

I like my starships to be a ''little'' less gum-and-baling-wire, but it's something to keep in mind. Stuff works… but it can ''break''.



'''LordDraqo:''' It occured to me that with stutter-warp, it would be possible to have the sensors sample the surrounding environment everytime that you were "at rest" in normal space, and put together a "flight-picture," from that.