Sublight vs. Atmospheric Drive

[CRMcNeill]

[garhkal]

I have used this in the past..

Depending on the ship’s speed decides how long it will take to get down. Sublight Speed
9+ requires only 9 rounds
5-8 gives a transit time of 11 rounds
4 or less pushes it to 14 rounds.

Once orbit has been achieved, it will take a MINIMUM of 6 rounds to get to a ‘clear enough’ location for a hyper jump.
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[vanir]

Our house rules developed from starship engineering systems for Players to design their own vessels, so that certain rules always apply by type:

space transports are required for full navcomputers or energy reactors.
starfighters can only have limited navcomputers or astromech plugs, and power generators (APU).

this is partly so I can work starfighter combat like jet combat, so our starfighters do a virtual combat simulator style of gameplay, with ECM phases and target locks and all that bizzo, it's actually really fun and smooth once you get the hang of it.

starfighters that are fitted with high power systems, like shields and repulsordrives actually power them by the main engines, like jets do. The power generator is only used during the start up procedure or during emergencies as a redundancy (eg. losing an engine doesn't immediately mean losing cabin pressurisation, the APU will compensate).


Some like TIE of course don't even have that much, they use solar cells to charge capacitor banks for the start up procedure and fly in atmosphere using thrust vectoring and speed, they're largely ballistic and don't even have a landing cycle, they're grabbed by a tractor beam and pulled onto the racks under tower control.
I don't think TIE could even function in air properly too close to the ground, but if you kept at least 10km up with a good speed you could bounce off atmosphere layers and do the skimming technique high altitude pilots use.


It is specified by the way that starfighters will go much faster in atmosphere with full front deflector shields on. It is just that they are generally built to operate in a vacuum and don't handle things like supersonic compression very well I presume, without shields.


Anyways for many small craft, atmospheric flight is done with the main engines on. Just not necessarily producing any more than idle thrust.



Our house rule for the actual effect of gunning the ion drives in atmosphere is simple. At any safe height, where the ion-stream created by the exhaust isn't going to be lethal to a starport population, you can boot the throttle and make orbit within a couple of rounds.
You can choose to fly the old fasioned way in "atmospheric mode" so to speak, but when I wrote out a Pilots Handbook for the Y-Wing, using actual combat flight manuals for real world aircraft as a guide, I found it most resembled realistic procedure and technologies, if the repulsorlift engines in spacecraft are referred to as taxiing engines, and used for taxiing.
Atmospheric flight in a starship would be considered "on approach" or "taxiing" is what I'm saying. As soon as you bring the main engines up to power, you're going to be eating up starlight at a fast rate.