On 11Oct2020 1939, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:
> 10 hours is more like what I'd have thought. In MT, you could probably
> (unless the task was invariant in some way) be able to take a cautious
> approach, drop difficulty to Easy (3+) and just take 20 hours. Given
> MT's higher skill levels as a rule, Routine isn't all that dangerous
> and you aren't going to easily score an exceptional failure even at
> Routine.
At routine (7+) and a half-decent flight team (I'd allow pilot and
astrogator to work together to use the best in each skill) for say a
total of +3, you need a 4+ (though that does still leave 2 as an
exceptional failure). The problem is that it's hazardous, so that
snake-eyes messes you up no matter what.
>
> I'm curious what ocean refueling means... am I floating my ship? Or am
> I hovering on grav and just letting a big vacuum tube down?  Can I
> land on a nice sandy beach and suck from the lagoon? How about an
> inland freshwater lake? Or even (scandal) someone's remote reservoir?
> And there's not exactly much to say about the effects of taints, the
> odds of sucking up flaura, fauna or soils/bacteria, etc.
I'd assume you're floating, or parked on a beach. Hovering would be
/possibl//e/ in a ship with contragrav, but probably hard on the systems
and asking for 'exciting' mishaps if things go bad. As for contaminants,
that's when interesting taints, sea monsters getting jammed in the pump
intakes, and so on, come into play.

My players do a lot of wilderness refuelling, because it's in the 1200s
and there's lots of wilderness out there. Their preferred method is to
find a gas giant outside the frostline that has lots of junk or nice
rings, and find a lump of ice floating that they can hack up/melt and
refine. Failing that, icecaps on worlds, and failing that oceans.
Icecaps don't generally have a lot of people or wildlife, you see.
Oceans sometimes have annoying wildlife, and weather matter more there,
too. They strenuously avoid gas giant refuelling - going that deep into
a gas giant's gravity well is time consuming, and means you likely have
a long way to run if someone jumps you. Also, it's comparatively unsafe.
Thus it's both dangerous and slow. Of the other choices, they see it as
a range from fast/dangerous to slow/safe, going Ocean - Icecap - icy rock.

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Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>