*first difficulty snipped*
The angle I was playing for Moondance's 'fast transit' ability was that the reason for the longer, 'standard' time was that the handwavium applied along the 'outer hull' of more normal craft sort of dried out and went away when you heated it beyond a certain point.
At the start, the thing was a giant tent that floated along - with its cargo - entirely on the basis of handwaving; heck, it was held together by it.
And that last bit gives me the heebie-jeebies, and would have changed the instant the cash to reinforce it became available.
So now you've got a giant floating golf ball. As the owner becomes able to afford them, it gains things like a mundane life support system, an actual pressure hull, federally certified avionics, and all those other security blankets - the handwavium becomes more and more concerned with propulsion, and pretty soon the only place it's needed is in the engine room.
So now what's stopping you from going fast? (In atmospheric terms - for interplanetary work, the thing's still a slug) Well, a lack of insulation and the fact that the outer hull will still melt... but that's soluble, too.
So, it was a whole evolutionary process - when the handwavium was needed everywhere, the entire ship was simple enough to make keeping track of it doable. When that changed, though, the complicated parts didn't need handwaved - that was the point of changing them. By the time the heat-armor is added, it's almost entirely a mundane ship... by certain standards of mundane, anyway.
Ja, -n
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"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"
The angle I was playing for Moondance's 'fast transit' ability was that the reason for the longer, 'standard' time was that the handwavium applied along the 'outer hull' of more normal craft sort of dried out and went away when you heated it beyond a certain point.
At the start, the thing was a giant tent that floated along - with its cargo - entirely on the basis of handwaving; heck, it was held together by it.
And that last bit gives me the heebie-jeebies, and would have changed the instant the cash to reinforce it became available.
So now you've got a giant floating golf ball. As the owner becomes able to afford them, it gains things like a mundane life support system, an actual pressure hull, federally certified avionics, and all those other security blankets - the handwavium becomes more and more concerned with propulsion, and pretty soon the only place it's needed is in the engine room.
So now what's stopping you from going fast? (In atmospheric terms - for interplanetary work, the thing's still a slug) Well, a lack of insulation and the fact that the outer hull will still melt... but that's soluble, too.
So, it was a whole evolutionary process - when the handwavium was needed everywhere, the entire ship was simple enough to make keeping track of it doable. When that changed, though, the complicated parts didn't need handwaved - that was the point of changing them. By the time the heat-armor is added, it's almost entirely a mundane ship... by certain standards of mundane, anyway.
Quote:Point. My suggestion regarding this, though, would be that individual people cannot determine their own quirks. The GM, or the rest of the community, get to inflict them.
Part of the point of handwavium to me was the stage after you get your vehicle of choice, after you breed up your appropriately-sized block of the stuff, after you apply thing B to thing A, but before you actually can use it, where you figure out what bizarre little details there are that you're just going to have to live with/compensate for. That's one of the major things that keeps space in the hands of the Fen, rather than the wage-slaves.
Ja, -n
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"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"