T5 states: 
If a ship has a drive capable of acceleration in Gs greater than world surface gravity, it may land or leave using that drive. Wings may increase drive acceleration.

If a ship does not have a drive capable of Gs greater than world surface gravity, it must instead use Safe Boost or Safe Reentry.

Safe Boost and Safe Reentry in turn for time to orbit of 5 hours x world size. The logic behind this isn't further explained that I see. 



On Wed, May 6, 2020 at 7:27 AM <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

A question that some of the earlier versions of the game never really discussed...

If you have a 1G manouver drive, how do you lift off of a 1G planet?

And noting that many planets could easily have upwards of 1.3Gs, even the nicely habitable ones, this is kind of important.

And if you are going to get close to higher gravity planets, do you really need a massive manouver drive?

There's also the question of how humans survive on high G planets (or really low G planets) when the TL of the planet is not sufficient (or perhaps the economy/government not sufficient) to support a constant AG field in all residences...

(Really, in assessing how good a planet would be to live on, before you have the tech and power resources to ignore all the constraints, one should look at water, clean air, radiation, atmospheric gas mixes, atmo partial pressures, and gravity... and no Traveller system building I've seen does that)

I'm curious how TNE, T4, T5, MgT1-2 handle this kind of issue. I think somewhere in MT they indicated you could overdrive your AG or thrusters for a period of time to climb to orbit....

.... but I don't think they mentioned impacts to lifespan/overhaul timings.... nor did they address (AFAIK) the fact that if I can generate extra Gs to lift off, couldn't I use that in combat to survive engagements?

Has any version of the game really thought this out entirely and in a consistent way?

(Also, how does this change once you drop below AG tech? I'm guessing everything before that needs lots of propulsive power).

I suppose landings on higher G planets also require an ability to cope, but you can sometimes use aerodynamic streamlining or partial streamlining and your orbit/attitude to mitigate (I think... not being an astronaut or pilot... not sure). But the getting back up is a harder thing.

Or should most starports have assistive launchers (and what would that mean for ship design - a standard underside with attachment points)?

Thoughts?

TomB

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