Various topics have given me cause to do some musing over the last few days, regarding Rogue Trader. I'm not sure if anything I have to say is actually helpful but I thought I might as well post it anyway, so.

There've been several places where people were asking for ship names, now there's a huge mass of historical material and even more fictional material out there to mine, however these are a couple I liked, off-the-cuff, as it were (I.E. not taken from anywhere, if they are used elsewhere I'm not presently aware of it).

The Wayward Mistress

The Velvet Glove

(In a three vessel fleet) Faith , Hope and Charity

The Squeaky Wheel

The Final Word

In a couple of other threads there was some talking about jump points and gravity wells, now whatever the precise mechanics are meant to be it seems to be fairly well established that a vessel wishing to enter the Empyrean needs to get a certain minimum distance from a star. Typically, of course, your vessel is going to be near a planet(oid) rather than directly orbiting the star and noone likes to waste time by taking a longer path to where the gravity is reduced sufficiently for jump to be possible. Since planets orbit the star, the shortest path will always to be to line up the centre of the planet you are leaving with the centre of the star it orbits and fly along that axis away from them both. How much interest this to anyone, I have no idea but I was thinking about it while driving the other day, for some reason. :¬)

It is pointed out in the background that Imperial worlds have a massive variety of local political systems, full democracy with high technology included, yet we tend to assume some sort of neo-feudalism, in most cases. It might be interesting to flesh out a few worlds with some of these other set ups, especially the benign dictatorships and democratic governments - what would a character from such a world make of the culture prevailing off-planet? How would he react to the situation of a Rogue Trader vessel?

Gaidheal said:

Shortest path, yes, but not necessarily the quickest/easiest/cheapest, in energy terms, at least. That'd be to accelerate towards the planet(oid) you're orbiting from "ahead", slingshot round it along roughly the same orbital path and pile on the juice, turning a logarithmic curve away from the tangent you've just put on it's orbit (taking advantage of any other planets for grav-assist slingshots en route). It's possible that another quicker method would be to "climb" or "dive" away from the ecliptic as well as burn your way out of the gravity well, but I haven't seen or run the math on that one. From the shoe-leather version of the geometry, I suspect that the shortest path is actually yours, but offset 45° from the ecliptic.

Gaidheal said:

Definitely an interesting thing to think about. I'll mull that over for a while and throw up my own take.

Thanks for the thought provoking.

People are fond of talking about the ecliptic but it doesn't actually make that much difference - it's the gravity of the star you ultimately wish to escape and in the short term, climbing relative to the planetary surface in order to escape its gravity. The idea that planets automatically all line up on an ecliptic has been shown to not be true and in fact there is only a fairly rough eccliptic in our own star system with a couple of the planets not on it (I'm talking from memory here but I'm sure I could quickly come up with the offenders). Anyway, the slingshot idea might have some merit if 40K space vessels are indifferent to acceleration, which is to say that their maximum acceleration is capped by the engines and not a limit of some other component, such as whatever prevents the contents from becoming jam. Bear in mind that orbit is very high indeed for most of these vessels, otherwise they'd be torn apart by the various forces acting on their structure and would waste a lot of energy climbing out of the well, so slingshotting might be a bit of a waste... also, to be worth doing it'd probably tear the vessel apart, too, at least the ones of the size we're mostly considering. Meh. It all comes down to GM fiat, physics went out the window in 40K well before this. ;¬)

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not disputing that there is an ecliptic plane, but it has more to do with the relatively huge mass of Juppiter than it does with our star or any sort of inviolable principle and although the traditional planets all orbit pretty much in that plane (only Pluto having a double figure variance) the majority of other orbiting bodies do not do so because they are well beyond the 'inner' solar system.

True. If memory serves though, the fact that there are a number of significantly massive orbiting bodies in the plane of the ecliptic serves to (slightly) extend the radius of grativic distortion in that plane (causing the spherical gravity well of the solar system as a whole (primarily the sun's, as most of the other bodies of the system have a trivial or near-trivial mass in comparison) to bulge out in the middle slightly- almost a geoid shape, come to think of it).

I'm not sure the mass of Jupiter has much (if anything) to do with it, btw: my understanding of the theory is that the whole ecliptic is a result of the formation of the solar system- big cloud of randomised mass, spinning through space and closing together through mutual attraction. Some stuff spins off when its' angular momentum exceeds the orbiting velocity of the "surface" of the spinning cloud of matter that will form the sun- the escaping stuff isn't particularly big, but gravity lets it do a similar attraction/accretion bit as the sun. The fact that the cloud is of matter is spinning means that it will bulge in the equator, so most of the escaping matter will be spun off there, hence the ecliptic.

Aye, that's my understanding too but I'm not an astrophysicist, so... (two friends are though, which is handy now and then).

on the names part since my players were all big into that pirates game with the little punch out ships they have decided to name all their ships "the bonny xxxx". Currently the main one is The Bonny Lass. Heck we even use the little ships for the space combat, especially since the facing's pretty obvious on them.