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Ten Forward / Re: Fastfood Rampage Thread
« Last post by knightstorm on November 21, 2023, 05:42:34 pm »
They should have given him a refund.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VnwQW9hO7f8
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Engineering / Re: Interesting stuff about SpaceX Starship (hate the name)
« Last post by Nemesis on November 20, 2023, 12:00:20 pm »
I don't know how official this is but I've seen it reported that the next Starship flight is tentatively in December no precise date.  I'd expect it to slip into January or February as adjustments are made to "ensure" a more successful flight.

Falcon Heavy flies on Dec 7th.
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Engineering / Re: Interesting stuff about SpaceX Starship (hate the name)
« Last post by Captain Adam on November 18, 2023, 08:44:51 am »
Very exciting times, I just hope we live long enough to see the fruits of all this labor. At least a Martian touchdown would be nice. First few steps of mankind being sent back to earth.
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Engineering / Re: Interesting stuff about SpaceX Starship (hate the name)
« Last post by Nemesis on November 18, 2023, 07:24:25 am »
Details are lacking at this point but Starship did launch and achieve separation.  The 1st stage did their flip maneuver and seemed to ignite the engines for return then exploded.  The 2nd stage had full ignition and after nearly full burn time the signal was lost with apparent self destruct. 

Not a full success but still far better than the naysayers claimed would happen (they predicted it would at best explode on separation due to the hot staging).

How successful the deluge plate was still needs to be revealed.  Was there damage?

Not a full success but still a very good test.
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Engineering / Re: Interesting stuff about SpaceX Starship (hate the name)
« Last post by Nemesis on November 17, 2023, 10:12:27 am »
Starship now set for Saturday Nov. 18th morning.  They had to remove the hot staging ring and replace a faulty grid fin actuator.

Two Falcon 9 are also launching Saturday morning.

I don't have details but there are reports of a Chinese company landing a booster.  I don't know if this is one that flew to orbit or just a up and down low level flight.

The Chinese rocket was the equivalent of the SpaceX starhopper.  It went up less than 200 meters never achieved anything like a high velocity.  Its landing legs are permanently deployed and it bounced pretty high on landing.  29 meters tall.
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Engineering / Re: Interesting stuff about SpaceX Starship (hate the name)
« Last post by Nemesis on November 11, 2023, 09:42:36 am »
Looks possible for a launch this Friday of the 2nd Starship attempt at orbit.

A Falcon 9 has now done 18 flights. 
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Ten Forward / Re: What madness has this year driven you to do?
« Last post by Nemesis on October 28, 2023, 01:49:01 pm »
Traveller is notorious for the ease of death.

I understand that they have a robots book that allows you to do a lot of deadly stuff by remote, lose assets not characters.
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Ten Forward / Re: What madness has this year driven you to do?
« Last post by Panzergranate on October 27, 2023, 03:18:04 pm »
I played two games of Traveller, at my local SDMS wargaming club, back in the 1980's. In both games, I became a collateral casualty after another (impetuous dumbass) player set off a booby trap. In one, I was attempting to rescue them as the booby trap detonated. In both instances, it was the same player who set off the booby trap, killing himself and me, plus seriously wounding a few other players. The moral of the tale is (A) don't wear a red shirt when in a scavenger party and (B) don't stand next to another player whose character is wearing a red shirt.
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Ten Forward / Re: What madness has this year driven you to do?
« Last post by Nemesis on October 22, 2023, 01:31:12 pm »
I'm playing around with the Traveller rules (hard to get legitimate up to date copies locally) designing my own setting, designing ships, creating adventure ideas and background characters.  Still no group but even just working with things to implement my ideas is fun.

One of the things I didn't like was the space prospecting rules.  The most common asteroid size is 1 million tons (Traveller ship tons which is about 14 metric tons).  1 ton asteroids are as rare as asteroids in the 100s of kilometers.  I ran two groups of characters (1 of them twice) through the rules and the group I ran through twice each time found 2 asteroids with wealth in the trillion credit region.  The 2nd hit up to about 850 billion.  Both of these were in weeks.  I'm reworking this to make the 1 ton asteroid the most common and that most really large asteroids will have already been prospected and if valuable claimed if there is an active belt industry.

The Scavenger/Belter class has serious issues, they can't roll the skill to pilot the one ship designed for them.  They can't roll the sensor skill for prospecting, the gunner skill to operate the laser drill for mining the Profession (Belter) skill doesn't have a definition as to what it covers.  Oddly though they can't pilot the ship they can get astrogation which is useless for any type of ship they can pilot as they can't have jump drive.  The newest edition of the ship removes the mining drones and puts a much smaller laser drill on a 4 ton craft to do the mining.  The ship mounted laser drill ONLY EXISTS for this mining so why would they make another one that is smaller and less useful?  The ship one is still in the new rules.  The jump net which could make mining even iron ore moderately profitable (and pay your ship mortgage) isn't on the ship and no mention is made of it being a common retrofit, it is even CHEAP compared to most things on the ship.

Now I don't have the current edition core rule book with the class in it just the prior edition (I have the current edition High Guard book with ship design though).

The world rolling rules don't allow for any planet that would really qualify as a super Earth.  Back when the original game was designed that would be acceptable as no exoplanets let alone super Earths had been detected, now they have.  The updates should reflect that.  You can roll a planet with one guy on it and a Class A Starport?  So I plan on revising those rules based on the 1980s Scout book to roll entire solar systems not just the inhabited world and whether there are asteroids and gas giants which is all that is in the most recent rules I have access to.  There are no rules for atmosphere types on none habitable worlds either.  No moons.

Odd that a game this old hasn't had more modernization.  At least computers are now assumed to have negligible tonnage rather than taking tons of space as in the early editions.
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Ten Forward / Re: What madness has this year driven you to do?
« Last post by Panzergranate on October 21, 2023, 05:38:17 pm »
I re-joined my old wargaming club, the South Dorset Military Society, after a 20 year absence. That was back in June 2022. Since then, at club meetings I've played several SFB games, a few English Civil War battles, taken part in a American Civil War tournament, played a few WW2 battles and played in a 2 day massive Napoleonic's 15mm. Borodino wargame versus the Worthing Wargaming Club.
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