Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 jlpinli40 Dec 04, 2008 7:32:30	after reading every spelljammer i have fallem in love with the campaign .now onto the questions 1.how large is a ship air envelope / 30 t 20 bl keel is 55' long ? 2when do 2 ships air evelope lap when there in the same hex ? or is it automatic with the larger ship? 3.does the crew from the smaller envelope end up on the larger by default .? 4.how close does a ship have to be to a body of gravity be to drop to tactile speed? 5.how many hexes apart can each ship see it self in wild space with no cover? 6.how do i figure a ships solid mass? 7. is a ships speed based in points from a helm/ 8.how long in the flow does it take to reach from one crystal sphere to another 10-100 ? what days turns / do i just role % dice and thats how long ? this one realy bugs me. thanks for all your help any answers would help with a new campaign
#2 dulsi Dec 04, 2008 21:28:51	8.how long in the flow does it take to reach from one crystal sphere to another 10-100 ? what days turns / do i just role % dice and thats how long ? this one realy bugs me. I don't know the answers to the other questions of the top of my head. The Guide to the Spheres gives some distances in it. Other people have made similar maps before. The simplest answers is whatever works for your adventure.
#3 bigmac Dec 05, 2008 8:51:36	after reading every spelljammer i have fallem in love with the campaign .now onto the questions 1.how large is a ship air envelope / 30 t 20 bl keel is 55' long ? Page 7 of Concordance of Arcane Space is the place to look for this. The air envelope is three times the size of the object at its centre. So if your ship is 55 foot long its air envelope preceeds it by 55 feet and follows it by another 55 feet (or 165 feet in total length). However, it isn't quite as cut and dry as this - if you look at that picture, you will see that it is only showing a cross section of the air envelopethat is an eliptical shape. The air envelope is obviously a three dimensional shape. If you actually want to work out the internal volume or the surface area of this "invisible rugby ball", you are going to do a bit of mathematical calculation. (A mathematical calculation that I don't think is worth the work. I'd recommend a bit of handwaving here.) Now if the air envelope follows the same rules for width and height it would be some sort of three dimensional eliptical shape. But if if only is eliptical on its long side and is circular in the other two dimensions it might be a shape called a prolate spheroid. The original rules, just don't give this much level of detail. 2when do 2 ships air evelope lap when there in the same hex ? or is it automatic with the larger ship? By "lap" I am assuming you mean "overlap". Air envelopes do not automatically overlap, but if a ship is large enough to nearly fill one hex, that might cause another ship to crash into it or at least bump into its air envelope. Each hex is 500 yard across, so if an object is 167 yards long it will have an air envelope that totally fills the hex*. If two objects in the same hex have air envelopes that are half of that (84 yards long) they will have air envelopes that are 250 yards across and their air will "bump" into the other ship's "air". Most ships are much smaller than this, so bumping air is not a certainty. * = Don't forget that rugby ball shape. Unless you have big ships, I would only have the air "mix" when a ship rams another ship, or does a "shearing" attack on another ship. 3.does the crew from the smaller envelope end up on the larger by default .? I don't understand what you mean. I'm guessing that English might be your second language. My guess is that you are asking if the crew of the smaller ship fall onto the larger ship. If that isn't what you want to know, you will have to ask your question again (and reword it). Looking at what I said above, it isn't a certainty that the smaller ship will fall into the air envelope of the larger ship, so if it flys past, but doesn't touch, the crew will be OK. But if a small ship (like a flitter) travelled into the air envelope of a large ship (like a nautiloid) and was flying upside-down when it got into that air envelope, the crew of the ship would be pulled upwards and would fall towards the gravity plane (or the deck) of the larger ship. Exactly where they land depends on where they are when they fall. I would suggest you decide this randomly. Falling onto a deck will hurt. Falling into the gravity plane, will not hurt, but will cause a crewman to float slowly towards the edge of the gravity plane and then drop into open space. Actually, if you scan the rules, you will see that people are discouraged from flying upside down. Spelljamming ships turn the same way as they approach each other (so both have a common up and down). This is the spacefarer etiquette when ships approach and anyone who deliberately approaches upside down is generally assumed to be hostile. Think of this as being similar to shaking hands. That was originally done to assure someone that you were not holding a weapon in your right hand (which is most people's weapon hand). Even pirates would probably approach a ship pointed the right way up, as they would want to give the opposing ship false sense of security until the last possible moment (and wouldn't want their own crew to be dragged overboard or hit on the head with falling boxes). 4.how close does a ship have to be to a body of gravity be to drop to tactile speed? That is "tactical" speed - not "tactile" speed. "Tactical" means "combat-thinking", "tactile" is about touching things. A captain will only drop to "tactile speed" if he is in a bar dancing with an aperusa woman! ;) This is in Concordance of Arcane Space - Chapter 4: Movement & Combat. It should be in the Tactical Movement section on page 55, but is actually burried in the Travelling in Wildspace section on pages 52-53. Only a body that is 10 tons or larger will cause a ship to drop to Tactical Speed. So if two flitters fly towards each other at spelljamming speed, they will both zip straight past each other without slowing down. Now I've only answered half of your question. I can't work out how far an object's gravitation pull extends. Spelljammer, assumes that if a GM rolls for a random encounter the ships will slow down. A captain playing "chicken" and trying to zip past another ship, is something a GM might want to allow, but unless someone else knows where the rule is, you would need to houserule this. 5.how many hexes apart can each ship see it self in wild space with no cover? Again, I can't quite follow your meaning here. Ships don't have eyes, so can't see themselves. But you obviously are not saying that they do see themselves. If it wasn't for the word "cover" I would wonder if you were asking how far away can a ship see another ship. IIRC, "cover" is only used for 3rd edition rules. If you are playing Spelljammer with 3e, you need to be aware that Beyond the Moons has not yet finished converting over all the rules. So you might need to houserule this. If you are using AD&D, then ignore any 3e references I make in this answer. But the word "cover" implies you are asking about combat. The crew of one ship, can definately see any other ship that is at tactical range. So unless someone has a gigantic invisibilty spell, there is no concealment in wildspace (unless you fly into a nebular or other space cloud). I would say that "cover" is only available if two (or more) ships are in an asteroid field and one ship hides behind an asteroid. 6.how do i figure a ships solid mass? That isn't easy. If you have read through the rules, you will already know that the ship tons are actually "tons of air" - not "tons of mass". Some people like to suggest that there is a link between the two, but that just isn't possible. Anyone can build a ship from alternative materials and the rules give both a wooden hammership and a brass hammership the same mass. Silverblade (the 3D artist who hangs around here) might be able to use one of his 3D spelljamming ships to estimate the mass of a given type of spelljamming ship, but he has been forced to tweak many ship designs, so his calculations will not be canon. But if you really want to know that sort of thing, he is your best shot. 7. is a ships speed based in points from a helm/ This is a fairly complex question to answer. Firstly Spelljammer uses something called a Ship's Raiting to calculate ship movement. Secondly some ships are good at manouvering, but other ships are bad at manouvering and have to pay points of SR to turn. So ship movement does not equal one hex per point of SR unless you are going in a straight line. OK, now I've got that out of the way, I'm going to prempt your next question: "what is SR?" Ship's Raiting (SR) is dependent on the type of spelljamming helm and (sometimes) on the helmsman using the helm. Some helms create a fixed amount of SR. But the two that use helmsmen, turn spellcasting ability into SR. A minor helm is less good at turning spells into SR. A major helm is better at turning spells into SR. There is a table on page 34 of Concordance of Arcane Space that tells you the exact amount of SR you get from a priest or wizard. If you are using another type of spellcaster to power a helm, I suggest you look up the rules to find out their effective spellcasting level. For some classes, the spellcasting level is lower than the experience level. (The original rules don't say what to do with other spellcasters, but it doesn't make sense for a character with a low spellcasting level to be able to spelljam better than they can cast spells.) Given that each PC/NPC has a fixed SR on a minor helm and another fixed SR on a major helm, you might want to note a character's two SR stats on their character sheet. (But don't forget to recalculate when the characters go up in level.) Once you have your SR, you know the maximum number of hexes that a ship can travel through in a straight line. As I already said, the quality of the ship (its Manouverability Class) may cause it to "burn up" SR if the ship turns, but if you know what ship's you are using, you can create a small "cheat sheet" that tells you how much SR to subtract if any of your ships try to turn. (If a ship has a really bad MC, the best tactics for the PCs or NPCs flying it, might be to fly forwards at top speed and try to accelerate back to spelljamming speed. If a ship has a great MC, it might want to turn to a new direction before flying away. However, if a ship has a very low SR it will be caught up by an enemy ship that has a big SR, before it can escape.) 8.how long in the flow does it take to reach from one crystal sphere to another 10-100 ? what days turns / do i just role % dice and thats how long ? this one realy bugs me. You have alredy been given an answer to this. The main thing about the Phlogiston, is that some bits are a lot thicker than other bits. The thick bits are called Phlogiston rivers and are a bit like the jet stream in Earth's upper atmosphere. If a helmsman is good at stearing into a flow current, he can cause his ship to be dragged along at top speed and can travel epic distances in a very short time. Conversly if a helmsman doesn't stay near the centre of the current (or drops out of it entirely) he accidentally makes the journey take a lot longer. The dice rolling method that the AD&D Adventures in Space boxed set gives you results that simulate a normal helmsman who is trying to dip into the flow and get dragged along to a random crystal sphere. If you want to go beyond that and allow helmsmen to use Phlogiston Maps to navigate from one sphere to another, or to allow crewmen to drop some sort of "chip log" into the rainbow ocean, they might be able to measure their current flow speed (in knots) and help the helmsman stay in the fastest part of the flow. The basic system is the easiest one, but you can easily use things like this to create house rules that expand on the original rules. And you can easily build on Paul's information, to create a table of journey times that you can reuse when PCs make the same trip again. thanks for all your help any answers would help with a new campaign I hope that some of this helped. I suggest you read through the sections of Concordance of Arcane Space (CoAS) and Lorebook of the Void (LotV) again and make some notes that tell you where all the important rules are. If my guess is right, and English is your second language, you might want to translate a few of the rules, so that you can show them to your players. And if you are not 100 percent certain about any rule (during the middle of a game session) play by the spirit of the rules, rather than the letter of the rules. Rather than let your game come to a stall, feel free to let the players know that they are trying to do something that wasn't planned for and you are going to make a GM's call on it this time, and then think about what to do next time they want to do the same thing. Trying to be 100 percent right will just slow your combat sessions down too much. Good luck!