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Reentry and Shields
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garhkal
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 27, 2020 1:20 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

We are not the agents you are looking for.. Cool
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 27, 2020 11:26 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Alrighty. This is long and kind of rambling, so buckle up.

I've been mucking around with this to see if I could come up with some safe speeds for flying in an atmosphere, and what kind of damage you would get if you went in too hot. To start with, there are these suggested time frames:

• Five minutes to fly from liftoff to orbit (I'm not sure where I found this one. It's entirely possible that I just made it up).
• Five minutes to fly from orbit to a safe hyperspace jump point.
• Half an hour to fly from a planet to one of its moons.
• Two to six hours to fly from one planet to the nearest planet in the system. (Two hours for relatively close terrestrial worlds; the upper limit is for flying between distant gas giants.)
• Anywhere from 10 to 48 hours to fly from a star to the outer limits of the system, depending upon distance and the presence of any hazards such as asteroid belts or gas clouds. (It takes about 15 hours to reach the outer limits of a "representative" system composed of a single yellow star and less than a dozen significant planetary bodies.)

I used these times and some generalized distances using our solar system to see what kind of speeds we were dealing with, but that way madness lies. What was clear though, was that as you traveled away from a planet through each of the above range bands, your speed increased dramatically. At first I had a 'Whut?' moment, then I saw the section in the rules talking about Space Units (SU) and how ships move at the same proportional speeds.

The problem with this is that sooner or later some player is going to be flying from orbit to the jump point while being chased and is going to want to put the hammer down to the speed the ship can travel at while flying between planets. I like to have some kind of in-universe reason why this can't be done aside from "it's the accepted practice" that you can't fly at higher speeds in the lower range bands.

I saw a thread somewhere on this site (I tried to find it to link to, but apparently my Search-Fu is weak) where it was proposed that the reason the ships in Star Wars fly the way they do is because the technologies involved in creating inertial compensators somehow tap into subspace or something, and this creates drag. This means that a ship has to keep its engine thrust on, otherwise it will slow to a stop. Ships also have aetheric rudders that make use of the same technology, which allows the ships to maneouver as if they were flying in an atmosphere.

So I'm thinking that the drag effect increases dramatically as you get closer to a gravity well. A ship moving flat out in a planet's orbit would travel a fraction of the distance in a round that a ship going flat out in deep space would. This effect is gradual. A ship flying flat out that is coming in from beyond the moon's orbit would gradually slow down the closer it got to the planet, even though it's traveling flat out the whole time. This overcomes all manner of problems for transitioning from one range band to another. As for weapon or scanner ranges, you can use whatever 'handwavium' you like to say they're affected the same way.

Once I got that out of the way, I could get back to flying in atmosphere. I'm going to assume that the flight times listed above are for a ship with a Move of 4 traveling at Cruising Speed. This means that it is 240 SU from orbit to a safe jump point and another 240 SU from orbit to the surface (4SU/round x 12 rounds/minute x 5 minutes). This number could be adjusted up or down for high- or low-gravity worlds.

The atmosphere part of the journey is only a small portion of the trip from the surface to orbit. Some rough numbers I found say that the edge of atmo is at 120 km and low orbit is at 2000 km. I decided to make the trip through atmo take 2 minutes, so the 240 SU from the surface to orbit is now broken up to 96 SU in atmo and 144 SU in space.

Now, for the whole point of this exercise, the safe speed to travel through the atmosphere and damage if you exceed it. I decided to go with a Move of 3 being the max safe speed. Going above that speed results in the ship taking damage equal to its Hull +1 pip per SU above 3, a slight modification of CRMcNeill's suggestion.

CRMcNeill wrote:
As such, it would probably be better for a ship entering atmosphere at speed to take Damage equal to their own Hull + 1 pip per SU moved that round.


Since the safe speed to fly through an atmosphere is 3, and I wanted to keep it at 2 minutes, I changed the atmosphere to 72 SU.

Coming in hot in an atmosphere can be a bumpy ride. For every two D (or part thereof) of additional damage, the Terrain Difficulty is increased by one level, as shown in the chart below:

    Move___Movement Check______Damage
    3_______As Per Terrain________None
    4______+1 difficulty level______Hull+1
    5______+1 difficulty level______Hull+2
    6______+1 difficulty level______Hull+1D
    9______+1 difficulty level______Hull+2D
    12_____+2 difficulty levels_____Hull+3D
    15_____+2 difficulty levels_____Hull+4D
    18_____+3 difficulty levels_____Hull+5D
    21_____+3 difficulty levels_____Hull+6D

Example:
The PCs are chasing after a thief who has stolen a datachip with some key intel, which he plans on selling to Jabba the Hutt. They have followed his ship, a battered old bulk freighter to the Tatooine system. After a prolonged battle and some judicious shooting, they have disabled the bulk freighter's drives and weapons.

They begin to dock their ship, a modified Ghtroc 720 (Space: 3, Hull: 4D, Shields: 2D), with the bulk freighter when to their surprise, one of the cargo bay doors is blown out and a small fighter darts away. It takes them three rounds to disengage from the bulk freighter and begin pursuit. They are currently 100 SU in from the jump point, and have another 356 SU to travel to reach the planet's surface (of which 72 SU are in atmosphere).

They recognize the fighter as a Subpro C-73 Tracker (Space: 6, Hull: 2D), and he has obviously put the pedal to the metal. He is now 42 SU ahead of them and pulling away fast. The pilot swears, tells her party members to hang on, and punches it to flat-out speed (which for their ship, isn't very fast). They can't destroy the fighter as they need the chip, and if they're too far away when the thief lands, they'll lose him in the warrens of Mos Eisley.

As they race toward the surface, the gap between them keeps getting larger. However, the pilot is confident that their quarry will have to slow significantly once he reaches the atmosphere or he'll burn up, and that their shields will allow her to catch up.

As there are no other ships in the area, the terrain is considered Very Easy, but is increased to Easy due to both ships flying flat-out. Both pilots are very experienced and have no difficulty maintaining control.

After chasing their quarry for a little over a minute, the pilot sees that he has slowed down to enter the atmosphere (Cautious Speed, Move 3). She grimly pushes on. After two minutes of chasing, she slows down to High Speed (Move 6) and orders her co-pilot to raise the shields and to transfer power from their guns to boost the shields.

As their quarry is flying at Cautious Speed with a Move of 3, he doesn't have to make any Movement rolls and his ship doesn't take any damage. The PCs' ship, however, is flying at High Speed with a Move of 6, so the pilot has to continue to make movement rolls at an Easy difficulty (Base difficulty of Very Easy, +1 level for flying at Move 6 in atmo). In addition, her ship takes 5D of damage due to the heat of re-entry (4D Hull + 1D for Move 6). The pilot gets to roll 8D to resist (4D Hull, 2D Shields, +2D for Power Transfer).

The pilot estimates that she has a little over a minute of flying time at this speed before she reaches the surface. Three rounds into the atmosphere, sparks fly as the shield generators overload and are damaged (-1D to shields). The pilot is now rolling 7D to resist (4D Hull, 1D Shields, +2D for Power Transfer). She grits her teeth and continues. Three rounds later there is a loud bang and the engineer announces that they just lost their forward guns.

Four rounds later, there is another shower of sparks as the shield generators give out completely. The pilot now only has her 4D hull to resist the heat damage. However, she is clearly gaining on the fighter. The next round the ship gives a big lurch and slows down as feedback from the extra power that was being transferred to the shields has caused damage to the sublight drives (-1 Move).

The pilot smiles, as despite the slower speed, she is clearly gaining on the thief. The smile quickly disappears as blue lightning begins to play over all of the cockpit controls. Trailing smoke, sparks, and blue lightning, the ship plummets toward the surface. The pilot shouts for everyone to brace for impact as she aims her ship for the same docking bay that her quarry has just landed in.

With a bone-jarring thud and a deafening cruch, their abused freighter lands on top of their quarry's fighter, crushing it flat. More sparks fly and the controls catch fire, and with a groan of tortured metal, their ship breaks open like an egg. The pilot catches a glimpse of the thief as he pushes past the unresisting docking bay manager, who is staring in horror at the mess he now has to deal with.

The PCs quickly abandon ship and resume the chase on foot, marveling that they're still alive and confident that they'll catch the thief. Then they just have to find another ship and take off before Jabba's goons find them.

That's all for now.

Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions?
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garhkal
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 27, 2020 1:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Love that write up.
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 27, 2020 1:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Totally Not An ISB Agent wrote:

• Five minutes to fly from orbit to a safe hyperspace jump point.

I can't recall the exact reference, but IIRC it says elsewhere that a ship must travel at least 50 SUs away from a planet to make a safe hyperspace jump. That makes it possible to calculate at least a basic conversion formula, although the math would work better if the limit was pushed out to 60 units, which would convert directly over to 1 SU per round.

Quote:
• Half an hour to fly from a planet to one of its moons.
• Two to six hours to fly from one planet to the nearest planet in the system. (Two hours for relatively close terrestrial worlds; the upper limit is for flying between distant gas giants.)
• Anywhere from 10 to 48 hours to fly from a star to the outer limits of the system, depending upon distance and the presence of any hazards such as asteroid belts or gas clouds. (It takes about 15 hours to reach the outer limits of a "representative" system composed of a single yellow star and less than a dozen significant planetary bodies.)

The problem here is that ships very quickly start running into relativity issues, as the speeds involved are ~90-95% of the speed of light. For instance, if one assumes the "outer limits" of our solar system to be Pluto (or more specifically its average, due to Pluto's elliptical orbit), it takes light from the Sun ~33 hours to travel that far.

A simpler explanation would be for most ships to have some form of intra-system hyperdrive that permits travel at speeds consistent with the numbers listed, as well as allowing interstellar trips to nearby systems in emergencies (ala the Falcon in ESB).


Quote:
I saw a thread somewhere on this site (I tried to find it to link to, but apparently my Search-Fu is weak) where it was proposed that the reason the ships in Star Wars fly the way they do is because the technologies involved in creating inertial compensators somehow tap into subspace or something, and this creates drag. This means that a ship has to keep its engine thrust on, otherwise it will slow to a stop.

That's one of mine, although I can't recall the specific topic. Of course, I may have mentioned it in more than one place.

Quote:
So I'm thinking that the drag effect increases dramatically as you get closer to a gravity well.

The way I pictured it, the two main factors of drag were the mass being negated and the speed it was traveling. Considering the ubiquitous nature of repulsor-tech in the SWU (which pretty much negates the effects of gravity for any object so equipped), I'm hesitant to overlap the two if I don't have to.

Quote:
The atmosphere part of the journey is only a small portion of the trip from the surface to orbit.

Per WEG, the Atmospher upper limit is 50 km, but they never offer an explanation as to how they arrived at that number. The closest I ever got to an explanation for the 50-kilometer limit was a theory that air-breather craft are actually drawing in atmospheric gases to feed into an onboard fusion power plant, and that 50km on an Earth-like planet was the point where the atmospheric gases got too thin to be usable, at which point the craft had to either descend to thicker atmosphere or switch over to an internal fuel supply.

Quote:
Coming in hot in an atmosphere can be a bumpy ride. For every two D (or part thereof) of additional damage, the Terrain Difficulty is increased by one level,

Nice touch. Certainly opens up some new possibilities for Dropships, since they're specifically designed to make high-speed plunges into atmosphere.
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Darklighter79
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 29, 2020 3:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

CRMcNeill wrote:
Totally Not An ISB Agent wrote:

• Five minutes to fly from orbit to a safe hyperspace jump point.

I can't recall the exact reference, but IIRC it says elsewhere that a ship must travel at least 50 SUs away from a planet to make a safe hyperspace jump. That makes it possible to calculate at least a basic conversion formula, although the math would work better if the limit was pushed out to 60 units, which would convert directly over to 1 SU per round.


So it would be like: the distance to jump point is measured in rounds?

Anyway, when I recall escape from Naboo, Tatooine or Bespin, ships had to quite far from the planet (Coruscant is obvious reason due to heavy traffic in the region). Same for the exit points over Geonosis or Endor.


CRMcNeill wrote:
Totally Not An ISB Agent wrote:
• Half an hour to fly from a planet to one of its moons.
• Two to six hours to fly from one planet to the nearest planet in the system. (Two hours for relatively close terrestrial worlds; the upper limit is for flying between distant gas giants.)
• Anywhere from 10 to 48 hours to fly from a star to the outer limits of the system, depending upon distance and the presence of any hazards such as asteroid belts or gas clouds. (It takes about 15 hours to reach the outer limits of a "representative" system composed of a single yellow star and less than a dozen significant planetary bodies.)

The problem here is that ships very quickly start running into relativity issues, as the speeds involved are ~90-95% of the speed of light. For instance, if one assumes the "outer limits" of our solar system to be Pluto (or more specifically its average, due to Pluto's elliptical orbit), it takes light from the Sun ~33 hours to travel that far.


Pluto is 6 bln km from the Sun. Light takes an av. 5,5 hrs to get there. So if these are outer limits, the ship's speed would be around 0.4 c (10 hrs flight) or app. 0.1 c (48 hrs flight). A these I assume are cruising speeds as anything higher takes a toll on an engine.
Funny part is...the ship can go to complete stop in 2 rounds regardless of speed, so nice acceleration is present here. Just breaking distance is greater.
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 07, 2020 9:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

CRMcNeill wrote:
I can't recall the exact reference, but IIRC it says elsewhere that a ship must travel at least 50 SUs away from a planet to make a safe hyperspace jump. That makes it possible to calculate at least a basic conversion formula, although the math would work better if the limit was pushed out to 60 units, which would convert directly over to 1 SU per round.

This rang a bell, so I took a look around and it's in the blue 2nd Ed rulebook. Interestingly, it didn't make it into R&E or REUP.

Quote:
The problem here is that ships very quickly start running into relativity issues, as the speeds involved are ~90-95% of the speed of light. For instance, if one assumes the "outer limits" of our solar system to be Pluto (or more specifically its average, due to Pluto's elliptical orbit), it takes light from the Sun ~33 hours to travel that far.

A simpler explanation would be for most ships to have some form of intra-system hyperdrive that permits travel at speeds consistent with the numbers listed, as well as allowing interstellar trips to nearby systems in emergencies (ala the Falcon in ESB).

Yeah, the speeds get pretty crazy. That's why I shied away from using real world numbers.

Quote:
The way I pictured it, the two main factors of drag were the mass being negated and the speed it was traveling. Considering the ubiquitous nature of repulsor-tech in the SWU (which pretty much negates the effects of gravity for any object so equipped), I'm hesitant to overlap the two if I don't have to.

Fair point. I guess I always saw the tech involved in repulsorlifts, artificial gravity, and inertial compensators as being somewhat related, but not necessarily the same.

Quote:
Per WEG, the Atmospher upper limit is 50 km, but they never offer an explanation as to how they arrived at that number. The closest I ever got to an explanation for the 50-kilometer limit was a theory that air-breather craft are actually drawing in atmospheric gases to feed into an onboard fusion power plant, and that 50km on an Earth-like planet was the point where the atmospheric gases got too thin to be usable, at which point the craft had to either descend to thicker atmosphere or switch over to an internal fuel supply.

I don't recall ever seeing a 50 km limit, but that reason sounds plausible. Could it also be an upper limit for repulsorlifts?

Quote:
Nice touch. Certainly opens up some new possibilities for Dropships, since they're specifically designed to make high-speed plunges into atmosphere.

I haven't really looked at stats for dropships. Do they have really good shields?

Darklighter79 wrote:
Funny part is...the ship can go to complete stop in 2 rounds regardless of speed, so nice acceleration is present here. Just breaking distance is greater.

You're in for a world of hurt if your inertial compensators go offline.

So the 2nd Ed book has this tidbit of information as well:

Quote:
When ships are within a planet's gravity well, or near any other object that has a gravity well, such as the Death Star space station, they must use the Atmosphere rating to represent how fast their "Move" is. Most ships will have to fly at their Atmosphere speed until they reach a height of 120 kilometers (for planets that are normally considered habitable), at which point they are in space.

I always assumed that a ship's atmosphere speed was meant for low-altitude flying using their repulsorlifts, and they would use their main drive to head for space.

Anyway, using this rule means that a ship with a Move of 4 (top speed in atmo of 800 km/h) will take 9 minutes to reach space when going all-out. If we go with the 50 km upper limit for atmo, it will take the ship 3.75 minutes to reach space. The space shuttle took about 8.5 minutes to reach space, but it also ended up traveling about 28000 km/h, a wee bit faster than 800 km/h. 28000 km/h was also roughly the shuttle's re-entry speed.

So maybe the accepted practice is to use the repulsorlifts (atmosphere speed) below a certain altitude (say 10 km) so you don't run over slow moving airspeeders or cause an excessive amount of noise. You can kick in the main drive as soon as you lift off if you're in a hurry, but it could land you a hefty fine.

I'm keeping the idea that it is 5 minutes traveling from a safe jump point (or arrival point) to low orbit in ship with a Move of 4 going at Cruising Speed, and that it takes an additional 5 minutes at safe speeds to go from low orbit to the planet's surface.

Here's how I've broken the times down now:
  • 5 minutes with a Move of 4 traveling at Cruising speed to go from a safe jump point to low orbit (240 units).
  • 0.5 minutes with a Move of 4 traveling at Cruising speed to go from low orbit to the edge of the atmosphere (24 units).
  • 1.5 minutes traveling at Move 3 (safe speed) to go from the edge of atmo to an altitude of 10 km (54 units).
  • 3 minutes at going at 200 km/h (Move 4 Cruising Speed) to go from an altitude of 10 km to the surface (20 units).

And here are a few examples:

Code:
Ship with a Move 4 coming in at standard safe speed                    Distance   Rounds   Minutes
Safe jump point to low orbit at 4 SU/round                              240 SU     60        5   
Low orbit to the edge of the atmosphere at 4 su/round                    24 SU      6       0.5   
Edge of atmo to an altitude of 10 km at 3 su/round                       54 SU     18       1.5   
An altitude of 10000 meters (10 km) to the surface at 280 meters/round  10000 m    36        3

This ship takes a total of 120 rounds (10 minutes) to travel from a safe jump point to the surface when traveling at a safe speed.

Code:
Ship with a move 4 coming in at high speed              Distance   Rounds   Minutes
Safe jump point to low orbit at 8 su/round              240 SU       30      2.5
Low orbit to the edge of the atmosphere at 8 su/round    24 SU        3      0.25
Edge of atmo to an altitude of 10 km at 8 su/round       54 SU      6.75     0.56
An altitude of 10 km to the surface at 8 su/round        20 SU       2.5     0.21

This ship takes a total of 42.25 rounds (3.52 minutes) to travel from a safe jump point to the surface when traveling at high speed. Of this, 9.5 rounds are traveling in atmo at an unsafe speed. I would round this up to 10 rounds, then add a round of safe speed for landing, which gives a total of 43 rounds (3.58 minutes). For each of those 10 rounds of flying in atmo, the pilot has to make Piloting checks at +1 difficulty level, and the ship takes Hull+1D+2 damage.

Code:
Ship with a move 6 coming in at standard safe speed                    Distance   Rounds   Minutes
Safe jump point to low orbit at 6 su/round                              240 SU      40      3.33
Low orbit to the edge of the atmosphere at 6 su/round                    24 SU       4      0.33
Edge of atmo to an altitude of 10 km at 3 su/round                       54 SU      18      1.5
An altitude of 10000 meters (10 km) to the surface at 330 meters/round  10000 m     30      2.5

This ship takes a total of 92 rounds (7.66 minutes) to travel from a safe jump point to the surface when traveling at a safe speed.

Code:
Ship with a move 6 coming in at high speed              Distance   Rounds   Minutes
Safe jump point to low orbit at 12 su/round              240 SU      20      1.67
Low orbit to the edge of the atmosphere at 12 su/round   24 SU       2       0.17
Edge of atmo to an altitude of 10 km at 12 su/round      54 SU      4.5      0.38
An altitude of 10 km to the surface at 12 su/round       20 SU      1.67     0.14

This ship takes a total of 28.17 rounds (2.36 minutes) to travel from a safe jump point to the surface when traveling at high speed. Of this, 6.17 rounds are traveling in atmo at an unsafe speed. I would round this up to 7 rounds, then add a round of safe speed for landing, which gives a total of 29 rounds (2.42 minutes). For each of those 7 rounds of flying in atmo, the pilot has to make Piloting checks at +2 difficulty level, and the ship takes Hull+3D damage. I hope he has good shields.

So, thoughts?
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CRMcNeill
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 08, 2020 3:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Darklighter79 wrote:
Pluto is 6 bln km from the Sun. Light takes an av. 5,5 hrs to get there. So if these are outer limits, the ship's speed would be around 0.4 c (10 hrs flight) or app. 0.1 c (48 hrs flight). A these I assume are cruising speeds as anything higher takes a toll on an engine.
Funny part is...the ship can go to complete stop in 2 rounds regardless of speed, so nice acceleration is present here. Just breaking distance is greater.

You know, it took me a while to figure out how I screwed this up. I did the math on the Calculator App on my iPhone, and didn't realize that, in normal mode, the calculator only goes up to 9 digits, so I was dividing six-hundred-million instead of six billion. The results I was getting were either way too high or way too low.
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CRMcNeill
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 08, 2020 4:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Totally Not An ISB Agent wrote:
This rang a bell, so I took a look around and it's in the blue 2nd Ed rulebook. Interestingly, it didn't make it into R&E or REUP.

Interesting, indeed. Still, there's no rule saying you can't put it back in (or something like it).

Quote:
I don't recall ever seeing a 50 km limit, but that reason sounds plausible. Could it also be an upper limit for repulsorlifts?

Per the novel adaptation of the original film, repulsorlifts were effective out to a distance of "six times the planetary diameter" of an Earth-like planet (can't remember if they were referring to Tatooine or Alderaan, but whatever).

Quote:
I haven't really looked at stats for dropships. Do they have really good shields?

Not really. There are four official examples - the MT-191, the F7 "Landing Brick", the AIC-4 and the Warlord - and they all only have 1D in Shields (the Warlord's are tougher because it's Capital-Scale). But then, I don't think anyone's looked at this particular aspect of shields, and dropships would be an obvious application for high-speed atmospheric entry.

And if you can hammer out something, I'm not averse to re-doing some stats, either.

Quote:
I always assumed that a ship's atmosphere speed was meant for low-altitude flying using their repulsorlifts, and they would use their main drive to head for space.

This is part of why I'm leaning toward reverting to the 1E Speed Codes, since trying to apply such low real-world numbers to ships that can travel at significant fractions of c even before engaging their hyperdrive has resulted in one of the more obvious barriers to suspension of disbelief among the more technically-minded fans.

Quote:
So, thoughts?

Looks good, if a bit crunchy, but so long as the crunch is mostly to show how you got from Point A to Point D, then it's all fine. I would suggest, rather than using a ship with Space 4 as a baseline, just go with absolute SU values, which just gives PCs a goal number to shoot for, rather than having to do the math in their heads of how their Space 5 or Space 7 ship compares to a Space 4.
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