D-Drive, Privateer 2, and Continuity

[capi3101]

Wait, duh, it's a jump drive - from the playguide: "Tri-System space consists of pockets of local space connected by jumps. If there is no planet or major space station in a pocket, it is marked by a navigation buoy. To move from nav point to nav point along your route, you will have to activate your jump drives and jump. Before you can activate your jump drives, you must select a destination with the nav map... it will turn green when your jump drives are powered up and you can jump."

It doesn't behave like a jump drive, though...when you hit "jump", your ship starts accelerating and then it does a flyby of the camera. Were it a jump drive, there would be a "flash of light and neutrinos", wouldn't there?

Looked at Star*Soldier again for P2 references this morning. Rein Ertrobs...that was a good one...

 

[Bandit LOAF]

It doesn't behave like a jump drive, though...when you hit "jump", your ship starts accelerating and then it does a flyby of the camera. Were it a jump drive, there would be a "flash of light and neutrinos", wouldn't there?

I'd say there's very little continuity in terms of what a jump 'looks like,' from ships blinking out in the original game to a 2D wormhole in space on Academy to that 'comet' cinematic in the original Privateer to the giant multi-ship space hole in Wing Commander III.

We do hear about how drives can be calibrated *not* to give off the flash, it's likely that a hundred years later that kind of technology has moved from stealth craft to the mainstream market.

Looked at Star*Soldier again for P2 references this morning. Rein Ertrobs...that was a good one...

This one was actually carried over from the now-unused Privateer Online (second attempt) timeline. You can find a copy here: https://www.wcnews.com/news/2394

 

[capi3101]

I'd say there's very little continuity in terms of what a jump 'looks like,' from ships blinking out in the original game to a 2D wormhole in space on Academy to that 'comet' cinematic in the original Privateer to the giant multi-ship space hole in Wing Commander III.

Okay...good point. Though for the record, I think the type of jump you see in WC1, WC2 and Privateer are all the same (just from different perspectives). One could argue that the Academy one is the same as well, but you wind up seeing it because it's a pulsar jump (if that's the one you're talking about). WC3 and on, it's definitely different. I am *still* not convinced the FTL drive in the Tri-System is an Akwende jump drive.

We do hear about how drives can be calibrated *not* to give off the flash, it's likely that a hundred years later that kind of technology has moved from stealth craft to the mainstream market.

Probably, for Confederation craft anyway. But as the Tri-System is not part of Confed...

...naw, I don't wanna go there. That's going to lead to a circular argument, I think.

This one was actually carried over from the now-unused Privateer Online (second attempt) timeline. You can find a copy here: https://www.wcnews.com/news/2394

Ah, more source material for WCRPG's timeline!!! <drool />.
I was wondering what I was going to do for the years after 2681; what I've got up there now is probably insufficient...

 

[Bandit LOAF]

Okay...good point. Though for the record, I think the type of jump you see in WC1, WC2 and Privateer are all the same (just from different perspectives). One could argue that the Academy one is the same as well, but you wind up seeing it because it's a pulsar jump (if that's the one you're talking about). WC3 and on, it's definitely different. I am *still* not convinced the FTL drive in the Tri-System is an Akwende jump drive.

It's certainly possible that it's not the same technology as in the other games... but whatever it is, it's called a jump drive.

You see jumps in a few different episodes of Wing Commander Academy and they're all the same as the pulsar episode (although Thrakhath's flagship makes a different and notably fancier 'hole' to go through when it jumps at one point.) We see time spent 'in jump' in another episode, too (The Last One Left, Blair is writing a letter while the 'Claw is in jump space.) Wing Commander IV also has a jump transit that takes time: there's a scene on the Intrepid's bridge where you see the jump transit out the viewscreen as a travel through a Sliders-style CGI tube.

Ah, more source material for WCRPG's timeline!!! <drool />.
I was wondering what I was going to do for the years after 2681; what I've got up there now is probably insufficient...

Heh, enjoy... but be warned that that proposal had a very different vision than ended up happening with Wing Commander Arena (the Nephilim just kind of... disappear... instead of fighting a horrifying galactic war.) And much of it is a little weird because it's oriented at "explaining" MMO elements that would have been needed for the game (like clones for replacing your player after they're shot down.)

 

[capi3101]

Heh, enjoy... but be warned that that proposal had a very different vision than ended up happening with Wing Commander Arena

.....ugh. I see what you mean. And I don't suppose there are any canonical sources for what did happen "officially" either.
I might still be able to incorporate some of those entries...the ones on the Green Plague, for example.

New question, probably off-topic at this point but I've been thinking about it and wanted to ask. The JumpFAQ article mentions that a Pilgrim traitor ultimately got an enhanced Morvan Drive installed on TCS Olympus, and that the enhanced drive enabled the ship to hop across entire Sectors in one go (I haven't read Pilgrim Stars (yet); I assume these events are chronicled there). My question is this: would that enhanced Hopper Drive have remained solely in Pilgrim hands based on what happens in the book, or did the Confederation get a hold of it?

Underlying question: would Confed explorer ships be using enhanced Hopper Drives by the year 2701, or are they using the same old thing?

Impetus: saw something in the Star*Soldier classified ads that set me to pondering...

 

[Bandit LOAF]

.....ugh. I see what you mean. And I don't suppose there are any canonical sources for what did happen "officially" either.

Nothing beyond hints in Star*Soldier; when we were asked to come up with a setting for Arena, the directive was that we shouldn't include any real detail about the Nephilim war in case a future game wanted to use the setting. I don't think it's likely that will ever happen, but that was the producer's worry.

New question, probably off-topic at this point but I've been thinking about it and wanted to ask. The JumpFAQ article mentions that a Pilgrim traitor ultimately got an enhanced Morvan Drive installed on TCS Olympus, and that the enhanced drive enabled the ship to hop across entire Sectors in one go (I haven't read Pilgrim Stars (yet); I assume these events are chronicled there). My question is this: would that enhanced Hopper Drive have remained solely in Pilgrim hands based on what happens in the book, or did the Confederation get a hold of it?

Underlying question: would Confed explorer ships be using enhanced Hopper Drives by the year 2701, or are they using the same old thing?

Yes, this is a big part of Pilgrim Stars/Pilgrim Truth. The Olympus is never recovered and probably should be left that way... since an FTL technology that lets you jump wherever you want is a bit of a 'world breaker.'

 

[capi3101]

Nothing beyond hints in Star*Soldier; when we were asked to come up with a setting for Arena, the directive was that we shouldn't include any real detail about the Nephilim war in case a future game wanted to use the setting. I don't think it's likely that will ever happen, but that was the producer's worry.

Yeah, scoured through Star*Soldier the other day; saw a bunch of 'em.

Yes, this is a big part of Pilgrim Stars/Pilgrim Truth. The Olympus is never recovered and probably should be left that way... since an FTL technology that lets you jump wherever you want is a bit of a 'world breaker.'

Had that exact same thought when I was reading through the POL timeline and came across references to "skip drives". I might mention them as a special situation for WCRPG, but leave it at that.

Well, okay. That leads me to a conclusion about where the Tri-System has to be located...

Gonna have to take some license with the WCRPG timeline, it seems.


Back on topic, I read through the transcripts of the P2 cinematics. Hugo Carmichael asks Arris if he's got D-Drive as part of the conversation prior to his plotline mission.....

 

[Wojo]

You could always take a leaf from bsg when it comes to explanation. . . Anhur being the original human origin world and earth a colony. . . And any contact between the tri system and confed is hushed up, exactly like the talon pilot rescue mission. Could make a good little storyline, official and unofficial contact between the two civilizations etc. etc. It would resolve the jump drive tech issue, as there is evidence in the bex colonization story that FTL travel has been around for at least hundreds of years. . . But again, that mention of ww1 tech kind of kills that too... Argh. At times I really wish that p2 had never been shoehorned into the WC universe. Did they realize what they were doing to us!?!?

 

[capi3101]

At times I really wish that p2 had never been shoehorned into the WC universe. Did they realize what they were doing to us!?!?

Probably, but that's what makes it fun, right?

I do have to admit that P2 is causing me to have to do a lot more work than I had originally planned with getting some aspects of the game together. But then again, so is Morvan Drive. That one's giving me one royal headache...I mean, a ship can average a speed of 10C, and yet can travel 20-35% of a light year in one hop? Those numbers don't mesh well, unless you toss out the one hop per day and replace it with "one hop every few days". Translating that into a game system's been some kind of fun, lemme tell you.

In any case, for WCRPG, I'm not going to say how Anhur came to be settled by humans during the middle of the Dark Ages (let that one be settled by the GMs, I say), I am going to say that the FTL propulsion they're using is the D-Drive (the first Hugo Carmichael cinematic cinched it up for me), and I am going to say how far the Tri-System is away from Sol (using a canonically-based best guess; I have no intention of suggesting what Sector it may correspond to, though, and I think I may need to start a thread over it).

Scratch that. Just realized one of my assumptions was bad when it came to saying where the Tri-System might be...

 

[Ijuin]

Back on topic, I read through the transcripts of the P2 cinematics. Hugo Carmichael asks Arris if he's got D-Drive as part of the conversation prior to his plotline mission.....

The fact that he has to ask at all sounds to me as though Carmichael considers it reasonable for Arris to be traveling the Tri-System with his ship without having D-Drive. Perhaps there are interplanetary ferry ships that carry small craft for paying passengers?

 

[capi3101]

https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/TEMP_Privateer_2_Script
Here's the relevant part of the quote (in 35_S.TGV):

ARRIS: Let me help you somehow.
CARMICHAEL: You? Help me? You got a ship? You got d-drive?
ARRIS: Yeah.
CARMICHAEL: Well, so have I, and I'm going to Hephaestus. It's a long journey and nasty things can happen when you're flying alone. So, if you're so keen to play the good samaritan, you can watch my ass, okay?

If you read the whole thing, Carmichael wasn't asking because he considers it reasonable for Arris to be travelling without a D-Drive, he was asking because he was either being sarcastic or questioning Arris's intelligence...

In other words, a smart person would be travelling the system with a D-Drive.

 

[quaker2k8]

In the very beginning of the game, Arris has just barely enough money to buy the cheapest ship. For that sum, the doctors who treat him consider him quite wealthy. Affording this kind of mobility surely is a status symbol in the Tri System and Carmichael is a snob, so talking like this may be just his normal habit, even when talking to a privateer who obviously is well enough equipped. There are probably also ships that can not jump, though we don't see any of them in the game IIRC.

 

[Ijuin]

If commodity prices are anything to go by (e.g. less than 10 credits a ton wholesale for grain or beer, IIRC), then the 15,000 credits or so that Arris starts out with probably amounts to a couple years' worth of salary for middle-class people. Prices for spacecraft in the game are more representative of modern prices of aircraft rather than automobiles. I would expect that most people buy tickets on commercial spacelines for their travel.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

Argh. At times I really wish that p2 had never been shoehorned into the WC universe. Did they realize what they were doing to us!?!?

Haha, they did not. But I love it, personally. This whole extra little world that you can take or leave as you like. You know, in RPG terms it's kind of like one of those extra detailed Dungeons and Dragons expansion settings... something like Forgotten Realms to Wing Commander's... regular D&D.

Good catch on the d-drive in the dialogue... although I think all it tells me is that d-drives and jump drives are the same thing (or at least that the Tri-System calls d-drives jump drives, since the term is used throughout the documentation.)

 

[RC1207]

Don't work so hard on adapting something that was not really very adapted to the WC Universe.
I just played the game once, as it was released, so I don't remember much of it. But it felt very "Blade Runner" and nothing like WC. My overall feeling was that the story could happen on just one planet, maybe earth in the future and maybe that d-drive or ship was the only way out of that planet.
I'd say skip it all together, it's like Caravan of Courage. Take it or leave it.

 

[capi3101]

Well, I would, except I've already finished work on the chapter that includes it. It is set up where players are free to ignore its very existence if they so choose (like a number of other things in-game); really, the only time someone would have to deal with d-drive at all would be if they were visiting the Tri-System.