Just a quick update to say that I’ve posted an excel file showing the Stutterwarp Drive limit distances for pretty much every celestial body that anyone is likely to encounter in 2300AD, from the largest star to the smallest moon or ‘dwarf planet’.
I determined the distance of the “Threshold” (where Stutterwarp drops from FTL to sub-FTL) and the “Wall” (where it drops from sub-FTL to orbital velocity) by calculating the distance at which the gravitational field strength was 0.0001G (0.001 m/s²) and 0.1G (1 m/s²) – those distances are shown in AU in the red columns in the spreadsheet and are the most accurate numbers to use. Note that the Wall distance is also the maximum distance within which drives can be discharged around that body.
For comparison purposes, I also calculated the distances according to the formulae provided on pg 265 of the MGT 2300AD corebook – to calculate the limits for planets and sub-stellar objects, I extrapolated the formulae to use mass values measured in Jupiter Masses and Earth Masses. Note that the formula used in 2300AD to determine the stutterwarp threshold of any given planet is wrong (stutterwarp limits are nothing to do with planetary radius, and this formula produced results that are nothing like the real numbers for such worlds) – I’ve ignored it completely, so you should use the results from the table in the spreadsheet instead.
All distances are measured from the centre of the body. Note that the Wall distances for the smallest objects shown in the table may not actually be above the planetary surface, which means that (a) stutterwarp drives can continue to be used at sub-FTL speeds right up down the surface of these objects and (b) the drives cannot be discharged around these bodies.
You can download the excel spreadsheet here:
http://evildrganymede.net/rpg/2300AD/2300AD_stutterwarp_limits.xlsx
You can imagine a ship being stalled out of stutterwarp if it accidentally gets near a rogue planet or micro black hole.
Mr Teufel, the chances of that happening are astronomically (pun intended) low. Inside solar systems, all bodies big enough would be tracked, and the interstellar space is very, very empty.
Of course, most of the time astronomically unprobable things happen to PCs, so it could happen 😉
Yeah, it won’t happen. The chance that a ship would accidentally intersect any limits of a rogue planet or anything else in interstellar or interplanetary space are so ridiculously low that for all intents and purposes it’s impossible. If it did happen to PCs – and they survived to tell the tale – they’d be the stuff of space legend (that most people wouldn’t believe).