-------- Original Message --------
 On January 25, 2018 1:04 AM, Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org> wrote:

>On 1/25/2018 12:24 AM, Tim wrote:
>>On Thu, Jan 25, 2018 at 01:14:58AM -0500, Caleuche wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I wonder how many derelict spacecraft there are out there in the
>>> traveller universe, drive systems failed, drifting at >0.01c, doomed
>>> to wander the universe with the unfortunate player characters
>>> forever. It's one way to end a campaign.
>>>It would have to be a pretty well-tuned disaster to knock out all of
>> the ship's drive systems as well as the drive systems of all carried
>> subcraft, without destroying the ship entirely.
>>
>
> Also, due to the existence of Jump, a rescue ship can always hop out
> ahead of them and match vectors.  Then it just becomes a matter of
> making sure your life support and/or low berths will last that long.
>
> Sure, it's possible that THEIR drives will fail also - these things
> happen - but at that point, your setup is looking increasingly
> contrived.  So I'm gonna say "not many".

I would imagine that this would typically be more of a problem in frontier environments, where the ship making the transfer might be the only ship in the system at the time.

As a side note to the Traveller 5 rules, if a drive only works at full acceleration within 1000 diameters of a gravitational source and then 1/100th outside of that, a ship launching from a world at 1 AU and accelerating straight toward the outer system and neglecting to note that rule, will hit the 1000 diameter distance from the sun (if it's a sun-like star) in about 5 days 19 hours. Drive performance suddenly drops and they have to decelerate at 1/100th g - and it would take 582 days 8 hours to bleed off all that velocity. As traveller drives were only supposed to have fuel to operate for 30 days, the ship would never be able to decelerate enough to return. Interstellar drifters - no drive failure required!