More about movement. Vectors can only be changed in the movement phase, including gravitational effects. Acceleration is limited by the ship's M-drive, which means 2 inches per G of acceleration. So, a standard Free Trader (1G) can't change its vector by more than 2 inches in a single phase. Of course, you can constantly accelerate, which will get your vector speed pretty high in a hurry.
Ah, but there's a catch: your vector acceleration can't exceed the M-drive's size rating. I wonder why that is; it's not like there's anything in space to slow you down, so in theory, you can accelerate to near-relativistic speeds before mass increases to the point where you can't produce enough thrust to move any faster. But it would take a long, long time to get to that point, far longer than a typical space battle, even for the ship with the best engine possible (such as a 200-ton ship with a level-F M-drive, which has a max accel of 6Gs). Now...what is the ship's M-drive size rating? I'm going back to the engine pages, but it's not clear. Unless I'm reading the whole thing wrong, which is certainly possible. Old-school games are good for that.
Let's try that again. The text reads, "The total acceleration in a turn in inches may not exceed the size rating of the M-drive." Okay, now it looks a bit different. In a single movement phase, you can't accelerate than your ship's size rating. So, the 200-ton ship with an F M-drive can accelerate as many as twelve inches in a movement phase, but no more. Okay, that makes more sense. Except that it's just reiterating what the last paragraph of the text was saying. No wonder it was confusing. There's no practical limit to the length of the new vector (which would be the total accumulated acceleration). Got it. Oh, and if the ship's engine is damaged, the accel drops to whatever the new letter allows. So, if that Type-F drive gets knocked down to a Type-C drive, then you're limited to the 3G acceleration, or 6 inches of velocity increase per turn.
Good, so it looks like we've got the basics of starship movement down pat. Now...planets and how they can mess up your ship.
Planets get their own character sheet/data card. It's a lot less complex than the starship data card, but this one has math. Be afraid. Oh, wait...we're sci-fi geeks. Math is our thing.
Holy...okay, so at this point there's no way to actually calculate these formulas, since we haven't got any data on any planets yet. And that doesn't arrive until Book 3. But, to do these formulas, we need to know the planet's diameter and density. The four formulas are R (Radius) = D (diameter)/2; G (gravity?) = K (density?) times R/4, or one-quarter of the planet's radius; M = G cubed, and L = 4 times the square root of M/G. For the fourth one, though, you use multiple values of G to get a series of numbers, stopping when you're used the same 'G' you got in the second formula.
I told you this was going to get complex. After you've got the 'L' formulas done, you get to draw circles with a compass and ruler to show how far the planet's gravity extends in concentric, expanding circles around the planet. Got all that?
The last sentence on the page continues on page 27, so I'll go to that one next time.
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