On Sat, 8 Jun 2024 21:28:17 +0100, Timothy Collinson wrote:

>Now I've finished catching up with some other duties, I can turn once again
>to TML after a week away and a week rather overwhelmed by being unplugged
>for seven days.
>
>Sitting in a hot tub overlooking Bywater (which felt very Hobbitish), the
>thought came to me about  a Jump Fluctuator.  But I can't tell if it's a
>Belbin 'plant' idea that's one of the 99 out of 100 that should be
>dismissed, or an idea worth pursuing.  You can judge.

Somehow, while I do see a Hobbit as enjoying a hot bath, I think of this in
terms of lots of soapy water and suds, not so much soaking and relaxing.
Other than that, hot water is (in fact) a good way to get ideas to dredge
themselves up from the odd nooks and crannies that make up the several
underlayers of the human mind...

>Now, oddly, I really thought Traveller and MegaTraveller had dice rolled
>'weeks' in Jump to give some variance, but now I come to look it up,
>apparently not.  Even though the text says "about a week". Paint me
>surprised, I was sure there were some rules for some slight variation.
>TNE: "one week" but a D6 table: 1=6 days, 2-5 = 7 days, 6 = 8 days
>T4: 150-175 hours (no means for determining that I can see)
>Mongoose: 148 hours + 6D
>ORMV (other rulesets may vary - I've not gone through them all)

I do seem to recall that CT and MT both _stated_ that jump was 'a week,
plus or minus ten percent', but I don't actually recall any official rules
for playing with that ten percent. Although it was written with a somewhat
different intent, I suppose you could use "The Color of Jumpspace",
Freelance Traveller July 2013 and
www.freelancetraveller.com/features/rules/jumptune.html to implement that
variation...

Obviously, one can apply additional modifiers or boons/banes to the various
rolls; for example, if the ship is behind on maintenance, the event roll
might take a bane, where a failure on the roll means that your navigator
can't make an observation because s/he's helping the engineer straighten
out the frammistan on the drive's potrzebie unit, which really should have
been replaced at the last maintenance but wasn't because, well, the bank
balance wasn't looking so good...

>So, I must have just imbibed it with TNE or MgT and thought it had always
>been that way.  Not to worry, the thought still stands.  The dice rolls of
>MgT tend to average around fairly limited variations of mostly just hours
>(I presume because of the averaging effects of rolling 6D).  I wondered
>what might happen if you could fit a device that *randomly* shortened them
>or lengthened them by 1-3 days.
>
>Roll your usual Jump duration and then roll a + or - die and then a D3 for
>the number of days to subtract or add.  (There may be cleverer ways of
>doing that but my math(s) skill and rule design ability are, as ever
>limited).  I've not come up with any 'science' on *why* it should be a day
>or 24 hours.

'Days' is very much too coarse a granulation for jump variance; even one
full day puts you outside the ten-percent boundary. Hours is better. Ten
percent of a week is about two-thirds of a day. If a device exists that
lets you - under certain circumstances - shave a day or more off the length
of a jump, any ship that has it and successfully uses it is going to be
pulled apart to find out _why_, in hopes that whatever it is can be
controlled so that "one jump = one week" will be a thing of the past. Even
a navigator who gets consistently good results from "The Color of
Jumpspace" will probably have ... difficulties ... retaining a job. Or
freedom.

>The idea is that if you're in a desperate hurry you activate the fluctuator
>for a 50/50 chance of coming out sooner than you might expect (but with the
>risk you could take longer).  Presumably there are some situations where
>that would be an acceptable risk.

I suspect that in most cases, this will be to Get Away From The Big Baddie.
In which case, it's likely that three days late will be just as useful as
three days early. If it's to Prevent The McGuffin From Disasterating, you'd
better not figure on succeeding at Getting There Too Soon, since it's even
odds that you'll Get There Too Late, or, depending on what the
Disasteration is, Not At All.

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