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Mikael Hasselstein
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Joined: 20 Jul 2011
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Location: Sweden
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 Posted: Sat Oct 15, 2011 2:41 am Post subject: Astrogation Difficulty |
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So, I'm back at building the nav computer over at D6 Holocron (the alpha version is still online, I'm steadily working away at the beta version). I'd like to add a computation/script to it that offers a difficulty number, with the different modifiers in the book being options.
Base Difficulty
That means that I've had to come up with a formula that turns some given number into a difficulty number. Because the travel times is all that I have to work with, I've decided to make the difficulty based off the travel time. This also makes sense because travel times implicitly already account for both distance, route quality, and objects needed to be avoided, which is what ought to influence the difficulty of any astrogation check.
Off the top of my head, 1 difficulty per 2 hours of travel seems reasonable - more reasonable than the 1-1 ratio in the book, because that would make it more difficult to really get anywhere outside of the immediate vicinity. That calculation would also be made off the x1 hyperdrive baseline, because the speed of the drive should not make the astrogation mode or less difficult. Furthermore, this happens to line up with the example of the Coruscant-Chandrila difficulty of Easy, when my nav comp has Chandrila 19.5 hours from Coruscant (most of it because of that damned Ringali Nebula between Chandrila and Corulag).
Safety Margins
We've already discussed the subject of the modifiers to difficulty based on making the trip longer or shorter here. ZzaphodD and Fallon Kell suggested that the differences in difficulty should create a ratio difference of 5% or 10% rather than an absolute trade-in of 1 hour for every point of difficulty. Atgxtg suggested the figure of 4.1666% per hour, because this computed to one hour per day of travel. Fallon Kell thought 5% would be better for the math haters in case the given time was in hours rather than days. I think this is an excellent idea and the nav computer makes it easy for the math haters because it will do the math.
The way that I would explain this in IC-terms would be that the (IC) nav computer plots courses around objects based on standard safety margins. However, risk-averse (or low-skilled) navigators might want to give gravity wells a wider berth, and so plot routes comfortably around any possible gravity wells. That would mean longer trips. Risk-prone (or skillful) navigators in a hurry might want to shave off some time by risking closer proximity to known gravity well areas.
Beyond these things, there is the double difficulty for a hasty entry (one-rounds calculations), +30 for not having a nav computer, +5/+10 modifiers for a lightly/heavily damaged ship, and +1-30 for sundry obstacles the GM would like to throw into any particular route. All that's fine and dandy... That's mostly the RAW with just a couple of minor adjustments.
Implications
I'm just curious how you guys deal with the implications. It seems to me that the time that astrogation checks become really dire are when pirates or the Empire is on your tail. But what prevents pilots from just choosing some point just one hour, or so, away, (a Very Easy roll of just 1, doubled to 2 for hasty entry), and then an easy escape? That doesn't sound too exciting.
How does it work in your games? What is your in-game explanation? |
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Fallon Kell
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Joined: 07 Mar 2011
Posts: 1846
Location: Tacoma, WA
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| Posted: Sat Oct 15, 2011 5:26 pm Post subject: Re: Astrogation Difficulty |
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| Mikael Hasselstein wrote: | what prevents pilots from just choosing some point just one hour, or so, away, (a Very Easy roll of just 1, doubled to 2 for hasty entry), and then an easy escape? That doesn't sound too exciting.
How does it work in your games? What is your in-game explanation? |
It could be that unless that point is a known system you're actually performing hyperspace exploration, making the jump more difficult, and the jump away from that point back to a real destination even more difficult. In conjunction with this, standard Imperial doctrine might include an APB or BOLO for a ship matching the description of the rebels' to be broadcast to all nearby systems specifically to prevent a fugitive from escaping by making a one-hour jump.
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Raven Redstar
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Joined: 10 Mar 2009
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Location: Salem, OR
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| Posted: Sat Oct 15, 2011 5:38 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Base Difficulty
That means that I've had to come up with a formula that turns some given number into a difficulty number. Because the travel times is all that I have to work with, I've decided to make the difficulty based off the travel time. This also makes sense because travel times implicitly already account for both distance, route quality, and objects needed to be avoided, which is what ought to influence the difficulty of any astrogation check.
Off the top of my head, 1 difficulty per 2 hours of travel seems reasonable - more reasonable than the 1-1 ratio in the book, because that would make it more difficult to really get anywhere outside of the immediate vicinity. That calculation would also be made off the x1 hyperdrive baseline, because the speed of the drive should not make the astrogation mode or less difficult. Furthermore, this happens to line up with the example of the Coruscant-Chandrila difficulty of Easy, when my nav comp has Chandrila 19.5 hours from Coruscant (most of it because of that damned Ringali Nebula between Chandrila and Corulag). |
I'm not sure what difficulty table you're referring to in the book, in 2nd R&E, it states that:
| Quote: | Pick the Astrogation Difficulty Number. The astrogation difficulty can range from Very Easy to Heroic. Most trips have a base difficulty of Moderate, but difficulties can be much lower for easy trips (such as an Easy difficulty for a trip from Coruscant to Chandrila) or much higher for particularly perilous routes. For example, the Kessel Run requires at least
five Very Difficult astrogation rolls due to the presence of the Maw Cluster, a conglomeration of black holes and gas clouds. |
The +1 difficulty is per hour saved off of the flight time:
| Quote: | * Characters can lower their astrogation difficulties: reduce the difficulty number by one for each extra hour added to the trip.
*Characters can also plot faster routes—making the trip shorter — by adding one to the difficulty number for each hour saved. |
The problem with your 1-2 system that you're using, is that going from Coruscant to Tatooine takes 159.65 hours, so if you divide that by two: it gives you a difficulty number of 79.825, which would be rounded up to a difficulty of 80. Waaaaaaaaaaaaay too difficult.
I would think that you may want to leave inputting a difficulty number out of the program, because unfortunately, there's really no way to come up with a set in stone system. Unless you go through each planet and give it some sort of value of 1-15 based on how known or how obscure the world is, then you add the values of the two planets together to get your astrogation difficulty. So you'd be operating on a 2-30 difficulty scale, which almost equates to the Very Easy to Heroic scale that the books use. |
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Mikael Hasselstein
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Joined: 20 Jul 2011
Posts: 809
Location: Sweden
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| Posted: Sat Oct 15, 2011 6:45 pm Post subject: |
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| Fallon Kell wrote: | | It could be that unless that point is a known system you're actually performing hyperspace exploration, making the jump more difficult, and the jump away from that point back to a real destination even more difficult. In conjunction with this, standard Imperial doctrine might include an APB or BOLO for a ship matching the description of the rebels' to be broadcast to all nearby systems specifically to prevent a fugitive from escaping by making a one-hour jump. |
Okay, yes, that is a very good point - an unknown location needs to be plotted and likely is not located in the data unless it is along a known and plotted route.
All an Imperial vessel or a pirate would have to do is follow along (relatively slowly, using its sensors) to follow along. Furthermore, you're right that an unknown location would be troublesome for the nav computer to figure out where it was and how to get back to known space. It would, therefore, have to sit there a while collecting locational data, giving the pursuer time to catch up, even at a slower lightspeed pace.
| Raven Redstar wrote: | | I'm not sure what difficulty table you're referring to in the book, in 2nd R&E, it states that: |
I was referring to the table one inch below the paragraph that you cite.
| Raven Redstar wrote: | | The problem with your 1-2 system that you're using, is that going from Coruscant to Tatooine takes 159.65 hours, so if you divide that by two: it gives you a difficulty number of 79.825, which would be rounded up to a difficulty of 80. Waaaaaaaaaaaaay too difficult. |
You're right. That's why I've been thinking of a waypoint system. A waypoint system would allow for a ship to take the overall difficulty number and divide it down by the number of waypoints (+1; ie. the number of legs) to a difficulty that would be manageable.
Say, for example, a navigator has 4d in skill astrogation and wants to get to Tatooine from Coruscant (80 total difficulty). He could set seven intermediate waypoints and divide that total difficulty down to 8 astrogation checks with a 90% chance of success on each.
The in-character downside would be that dropping out of hyperspace at each waypoint could expose the navigator's ship to pirates or Imperial inspection, and it would take time for the nav computer to get its bearings. The navigator could choose to make those waypoints in a system or along a route away from a system. Away from systems would increase the time it took to get the bearings and compute the next leg of the route, while going in-system would run the danger of encountering Imperials or pirates, depending on the sort of system.
The ooc - downsides are that, at present, my system cannot compute what systems are along any given route and that rolling eight checks would be tedious. Regarding the specific systems, I've been thinking about how to make it do that, but I've not got that figured out yet.
The tediousness could be fixed by multiplying the probabilities and rolling once. I could write the system that calculates the compounded difficulty. So, in the example, 0.9^8=0.43 is not particularly good odds of success. So, the navigator might want to opt for 10 legs at difficulty eight, which increases the probability of success to 76%.
Now, this would dramatically put a speed premium on pilots with greater astrogation skills. You could get places faster if you had a higher skill, because someone with 6d in astrogation could make the same trip in six legs with an 88% probability of success. |
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Raven Redstar
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Joined: 10 Mar 2009
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Location: Salem, OR
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| Posted: Sat Oct 15, 2011 7:34 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | I was referring to the table one inch below the paragraph that you cite. |
This one?
| Quote: |
Modifier => Situation:
+30 => No Navigation computer or astromech droid.
Double Difficulty => Hasty Entry
+5 => Lightly Damaged Ship
+10 => Heavily Damaged Ship
-1 => Each extra hour taken on journey*
+1 => Each hour saved on journey*
+1-30 => Obstacles |
I quoted the subtext that the * modifiers refer to.
| Quote: | * Characters can lower their astrogation difficulties: reduce the difficulty number by one for each extra hour added to the trip.
*Characters can also plot faster routes—making the trip shorter — by adding one to the difficulty number for each hour saved. |
I can see where you're going, and logically it makes sense, and with the help of the program doing it for you, it's not too much of a difficulty, but I still don't see how simply assigning each system a value 1-15, wouldn't be just as simple, if not more. Then for the difficulty, your program only has to use a simple addition code to give the GM a recommended difficulty number. If it seems a little low, you could make it from 1-20, 20 for the very obscure planets like Illum or Korriban. Another serious problem with doing difficulty by distance is that some of those trips that are really long by distance, are on a major, well-mapped trade route. And the distance equation doesn't really factor that in at all.
One way that you could fix the enormous travel times, is to reverse engineer the hyperdrive scaling system. Instead of going from x2-x1/2 on most freighters, you would start at x1 being the slowest, and then go up, x2 halves the time, x3 thirds it, etc... Cap the drives at maybe x4 or x5 depending on what era you're in. I had figured on doing this for my games to more accurately reflect the advances of hyperdrive technology, making it much easier to continue games into the Legacy era where ships should be faster than in the Rebellion era. Back during the old republic, most ships had a x1 hypderdrive, and military ships had a x2, every so often the military comes up with faster hyperdrives and the old tech becomes legally available to civilians. I figure this could be considered more in line with the ridiculous speeds that ships make it around the galaxy in the movies. |
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Mikael Hasselstein
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Joined: 20 Jul 2011
Posts: 809
Location: Sweden
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| Posted: Sat Oct 15, 2011 7:53 pm Post subject: |
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| Raven Redstar wrote: | | This one? |
Yes.
| Raven Redstar wrote: | | I can see where you're going, and logically it makes sense, and with the help of the program doing it for you, it's not too much of a difficulty, but I still don't see how simply assigning each system a value 1-15, wouldn't be just as simple, if not more. |
Well, the simplicity is diminished when I have to go into my database and assign a value to each of my 1600+ systems. How would I determine the values without researching the systems just a little bit. All that research would add up considerably.
| Raven Redstar wrote: | | Another serious problem with doing difficulty by distance is that some of those trips that are really long by distance, are on a major, well-mapped trade route. And the distance equation doesn't really factor that in at all. |
The numbers in my system are already in terms of travel times; not in terms of absolute distance. I assure you that travel along the major routes takes much less time for the same distances than more obscure routes do.
| Raven Redstar wrote: | | One way that you could fix the enormous travel times, is to reverse engineer the hyperdrive scaling system. |
I see what you're saying. Regarding just the travel times, people can plug whatever figures they want to into my system and it will spit out the travel time modified by that number.
However, the difficulty calculator I am designing now would calculate difficulties irrespective of the hyperdrive multiplier. I would like to keep it that way, but it would make the difficulty calculator unusable for people who want to adjust their own scales, without which they also scale the difficulty proportionally. |
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atgxtg
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| Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 11:40 am Post subject: |
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I think ting difficulty to travel time is a bad idea.
For one thing it will make a long trip along a major route more difficult that a short hob though a dangerous patch of space.
Secondly, what's to stop someone from setting a bunch of waypoints to lower the difficulty? For example, someone flying the Tatooine to Coruscant run (difficlty 80) could pick 20 waypoints Or then increase the difficulty of each waypoint to save time. For instance with shaving 6 hours off each waypoint.
In the end it will just increase the number of rolls make during a trip, and greatly increase the chances of a hyperspace mishap.
Rather than waypoints and multiple rolls, I think it would be better to set the difficulty based on the obstacles on the trip, and then let the captain adjust the difficulty by adjusting the time.
Rather than a 1 for 1 difficulty rate, I'd suggest either:
1) Kick the difficulty up by 1 level per leg in the trip, or
2) Use the old 1 for 1 method, but apply it BEFORE the hyperdrive multiplier., or
3) Adjust the difficulty as a percentage of the travelt time. Say each 10% adjustment is +/-2 or +/-5. +5 for 10% would be very easy to run. |
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Bren
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| Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 2:41 pm Post subject: Re: Astrogation Difficulty |
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| Mikael Hasselstein wrote: | | Because the travel times is all that I have to work with, I've decided to make the difficulty based off the travel time. |
I think difficulty and travel time are completely unrelated.
It seems to me that difficulty should relate to other things aside from travel time.(1) Existence of Navigation hazards along the chosen route e.g. nebulae and gas clouds increase the difficulty - we see the routes in the Elrood Sector Map avoid both The Drift and the Degan Gas Clouds, black holes and black hole clusters - think the Maw and the region around Kessel, and the Beacon in the Sisar Run sourcebook causes increased navigation difficulty whenever the Beacon is particularly active.
(2) Rarity or commoness of the route chosen.
(3) Availability of large-scale, up-to-date navigation database support. For example, I would expect that an Imperial-class starport can provide good navigation support especially when jumping to a common destination, whereas a dirt field provides no support no matter the destination desired.
(4) Possibly how out of date the starting nagivation coordinates are. Astromech units can download a fixed number of routes. One would assume that those routes must need adjustment to account for galactic motion and without a full-size nav computer those routes may become more hazardous. |
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Mikael Hasselstein
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Joined: 20 Jul 2011
Posts: 809
Location: Sweden
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| Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 5:47 pm Post subject: Re: Astrogation Difficulty |
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| Bren wrote: | | It seems to me that difficulty should relate to other things aside from travel time. |
All the things you mention, however, (in my mind) already factor into travel times. If there are more obstacles or more unknown factors due to the route being less-frequently traveled, it will take more time to avoid them. So, in my mind, the travel times already take these things into account.
Atgxtg, I think it's already established that you think much of what I've developed is a bad idea. I can understand that Bren might not have understood that I already factor obstacles and route qualities into my travel times, but you and I have gone back and forth on this ad nauseum. So for you to make that point seems disingenuous to me. |
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Bren
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| Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 5:59 pm Post subject: Re: Astrogation Difficulty |
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| Mikael Hasselstein wrote: | | All the things you mention, however, (in my mind) already factor into travel times. If there are more obstacles or more unknown factors due to the route being less-frequently traveled, it will take more time to avoid them. So, in my mind, the travel times already take these things into account. |
OK. Correlating time and difficulty is a flaw from my point of view. I think there should be short duration, high difficulty routes as well as long duration, easy to moderate difficulty routes. Sort of a high road, low road approach. If the system can't accomodate that, then I see that as a system flaw.
I understand why you want to do that since it is easier to implement with your database. It just doesn't work for my vision (or past GM practice) for hyperspace routes and difficulties. So I will bow out of this thread. Carry on. |
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Mikael Hasselstein
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| Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 6:40 pm Post subject: Re: Astrogation Difficulty |
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| Bren wrote: | | I understand why you want to do that since it is easier to implement with your database. It just doesn't work for my vision (or past GM practice) for hyperspace routes and difficulties. So I will bow out of this thread. Carry on. |
That's fair enough. I see where you're coming from. I think that because I assume that the travel times are a function of several variables - all of which you mention - that I already generally account for the things that you want to.
As for some particularly difficult short little routes, that would not - I think - be something that would be a part of the regular flow of hyperspace traffic. I don't presume that my system covers all the rare nooks and crannies of the galaxy. |
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atgxtg
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| Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2011 11:43 am Post subject: Re: Astrogation Difficulty |
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| Mikael Hasselstein wrote: | | Atgxtg, I think it's already established that you think much of what I've developed is a bad idea. I can understand that Bren might not have understood that I already factor obstacles and route qualities into my travel times, but you and I have gone back and forth on this ad nauseum. So for you to make that point seems disingenuous to me. |
It is a completely different point, so I thought it was worth mentioning. It has nothing to do with you travel times vs. the films, but with a potntial loophiole that waypoints open up.
Basically, if you use waypoints, what's to keep a character from diving a trip into a large number of waypoints to cut the difficulty down, and then increase the difficulty to shave time off the trip?
For example, if Tatooine to Coruscant takes 160 hours and is difficulty 80, what's to keep somebody from dividing that into ten difficulty 8 way points and then shave two or four hours off each leg by upping the difficulty? Or take 20 waypoints? |
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Mikael Hasselstein
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| Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2011 11:51 am Post subject: Re: Astrogation Difficulty |
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| atgxtg wrote: | | Basically, if you use waypoints, what's to keep a character from diving a trip into a large number of waypoints to cut the difficulty down, and then increase the difficulty to shave time off the trip? |
Nothing would stop the character from doing so. It gives the character the ability to modulate the relationship between time taken and risk.
Now, I do think that there should be a cost in time to using a waypoint.
If the ship's navigator puts a waypoint in a place between space systems, it should take a long time for the nav computer to calibrate its location in order to make the next jump. That's because it is going to have to work out its precise location based on a set of distant objects which it will have to identify.
If the ship's navigator puts a waypoint in a place near a system, it will be easier for the nav computer to locate itself, but being near a system opens the ship up to the danger of pirates and Imperial patrols. These are things a GM can introduce at her discretion. |
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jmanski
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| Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2011 2:09 pm Post subject: |
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I don't mean to siderail, but the time it takes a navcomputer to crunch the numbers is probably something to consider, as well. So perhaps your short trip has a higher difficulty if the navcomputer is not allowed to calculate for its full duration, but a longer trip can have a lower difficulty if you allow the computer to calculate longer.
And remember any waypoints would be slowed by recalulation.
And maybe different computers grant a different bonus (or penalty) to the Astrogation difficulty?
Just some thoughts.
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Mikael Hasselstein
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Joined: 20 Jul 2011
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Location: Sweden
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| Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2011 2:17 pm Post subject: |
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| jmanski wrote: | | Just some thoughts. |
Yes, I am thinking along the same lines that you are. |
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