News:Players Guide - HSpace

A look a the Raggedy Edge on Serenity (Hspace)

Mal's Notes on Hspace on Serenity MUSH

The concept I had when I created Hspace was simple, do it better then anyone else out there, leave it as simple as I can, and still keep to the theme. Serenity/Firefly backbone is space travel, which takes days at a time.

There are two schools of thought on Serenity/Firefly and its layout of space; one is a single solar, and two, a cluster formation with more then one sun. If you fly around in my formation of the universe you may look at it and think I picked one or the other, the truth is I picked neither.

Trips on Serenity MUSH will take no more then 5 hours in the slowest of ships to get from one side to the other, this is for playability of the game, over favor of realism.

I wanted the system to do everything we saw in the show and movie, from EVA recovery of cargo, to repairs needed to keep you Flyin', to keeping your ship fueled, to evading detection from Alliance patrols. I also went out of my way to make sure we had all of the worlds of Serenity/Firefly available for play. Flyin' on Serenity represents real space travel as in it is truly point and shoot, you find your course, point your ship on it, and you'll eventually get there. Slow down and land.

Hspace offers a clean looking system, and many consider it to be the standard in space systems used on games. But it is not the heart and soul of spaceflight on Serenity. It is a backbone, but you, the players are its flesh, mind, and soul. Much good RP happens, watching the worlds go by, or underway having dinner in a common room. Same as Serenity, and this is the goal of the system.

To introduce you to the system, I offer the following, created by Fallon Player, so credited here and used with her permission in the players guide.

Fallon's Quick And Dirty Guide to Flying

First things first... This guide does not help in evasive maneuvers, fancy piloting, or any of that. Learn that on your own time. I cover the basics -- this will get you safely and easily to the planets you need to go to. Nothing more, nothing less. 2014-10-08 Update: A few things have changed in the HSpace system here on Serenity, but this was such a good guide, I thought it better to update than to start over. -Darling

On to the fun stuff!

There are 5 basic parts of every flight.

1. Power Up
2. Launch
3. Navigate
4. Fly
5. Land

In the sections below, all the commands you will need to take off, navigate and land are in bold capital letters with bullet points. You do not have to type them in all caps or include the bullet point. There will be variations between ships and it is impossible to cover them all, but this guide should serve.

Power Up

Before flight can happen, you need a running reactor. Most ships will have an engineer to tend to this and let you know when the ship is ready to life. However, you should still know how to head back to the reactor and start it yourself.

Before you can start it, you must man the engineering console with:

• MAN ENGINEERING

Once manning the console, you start the reactor with:

• SYSPERC REACTOR=100

You will see a nice message stating the ship has started and your reactor will begin to create power. Usually, it takes about a second per MW of power, so to fully power a ship, you may spend several minutes waiting for adequate power. SYSPERC allows you to enter power as a percentage, however, reactor power can be tailored to a specific amount of MW by using the SPOW REACTOR=## command, where ## is the specific output in MW. For now, using sysperc to set the reactor to 100 percent is the way to go.

As your reactor builds power, you will need to bring various systems online. To see which systems you must power and how much power is available, use:

• SYSREP

You will see something similar to this:

.--------------------------------------------------------------------.
| Engineering Systems Report                               Serenity  |
 >------------------------------------------------------------------<
| System               Status    Power      Stress      Damage       |
| Engines              Offline      0 (100)  0%          None        |
| Internal Computer    Offline      0 (9)    0%          None        |
| Sensor Array         Offline      0 (50)   0%          None        |
| Life Support         Offline      0 (25)   0%          None        |
| Maneuv. Thrusters    Offline      0 (50)   0%          None        |
| Comm. Array          Offline      0 (25)   0%          None        |
 >------------------------------------------------------------------<
|                        +- Computer Status -+                       |
| Power Usage: 9/9                       Surplus: 0                  |
| Consoles   : 2                         Powered: 2                  |
 >------------------------------------------------------------------<
|                        +- Reactor Status -+                        |
| Type  : Reactor                        Output: 350/350(31/350)     |
| Stress: 0%                             Damage: None                |
 >------------------------------------------------------------------<
|                          +- Fuel Status -+                         |
| Storage Level:        99%                                          |
`--------------------------------------------------------------------'

Take note of the Output: numbers in the Reactor Status section of the SYSREP display. These, and all numbers, will vary according to the class of ship, but the important number to note is the 3rd number, 31 in this case. This is surplus power, the power you will use to turn on systems such as Engines, Sensors, etc. Each second, the number will increase until your reactor is at full power. It decreases as you power up systems. As the power becomes available, type the system name to turn it on. How much power a system requires is in parenthesis.

At a minimum, you will need to turn on the following systems to complete your voyage:

• LIFE
• COMPUTER
• SENSOR
• COMM
• ENGINE
• THRUSTERS
• CPOWER ON

If you get a message saying there is insufficient power for a system, wait until the surplus power is available and try again. You may have other systems aboard your ship, they can be powered up in the same manner. Once your SYSREP shows these systems active, it's time to move up to the cockpit. You do not have to unman the engineering console. That happens automatically when you leave the engine room.

Launch

Once you've moved into the cockpit, you'll need to man the console with the flight controls it can be called different things on different ships, but it will most likely be Pilot's Console, Flight Console, or something similar. Again, we'll man the console (assuming it's called the Flight Console) with:

• MAN FLIGHT or MAN PILOT'S CONSOLE or whatever your console is called.

Then, power the console with:

• CPOWER ON

And finally,

• LAUNCH or UNDOCK

You'll be rewarded with a series of system checks, followed by a trip into orbit that takes about a minute. Once in orbit, provided you are manning your console, the sensors should come alive with contacts of various planets, bases and/or ships. Take a moment to enjoy the view, because our next step will be to leave it behind.

Navigate

This is where you must have the Astrogation skill on your sheet. There are many functions to the astrogator that can be discussed at length in another document, but for basic flight, you are using only a few commands. You need to know where you are, where you are going, and the astrogator will tell you what direction to point the ship to get there. So we're in space and we want to go to, let's say, Londinium. You would:

• START HERE
• STOP AT LONDINIUM
• PLOT COURSE

Upon entering the PLOT COURSE command, you will see something similar to:

.--------------------------------------------------------------------------.
|         ORIGIN         |      DESTINATION       |      COURSE DATA       |
|   (Current Position)   |       Londinium        |  Bearing: 249/6        |
|    X:          1140    |    X:           420    | Distance: 776          |
|    Y:           430    |    Y:           150    |    Speed: 2200         |
|    Z:           -89    |    Z:           -12    |      ETA: 21m 10s      |
'--------------------------------------------------------------------------'

The numbers will be different depending on where you're starting from. The important number here is the BEARING, in this case 249/6. The first number is your HEADING from 0 to 359 degrees. The second number is your MARK from -90 to 90 degrees. So using these numbers, the command would be:

• HEAD 249 MARK 6

Please, don't use 249 and 6 unless you're actually flying from Persephone to Londinium. Use the BEARING that's provided on your screen when you type PLOT COURSE. If the second number is a negative number, don't forget to use the minus sign when entering the MARK. If your bearing is 135/-10, you would type HEAD 135 MARK -10, or for a bearing of 225/17 you would type HEAD 225 MARK 17. Easy, eh? Now let's set things in motion. First, we need to find the speed your ship is capable of. Unless you have a specific reason to draw things out, most travel is done at full speed. Get your engine specifications with:

• SPECS ENGINES

And you should see something like:

.--------------------------------------------------------------------------.
| System Specifications                                         AEC Gold-1 |
 >------------------------------------------------------------------------<
|                              +- Engines -+                               |
|                                                                          |
| Stress Tolerance: 40             Maximum Velocity : 800 MGLT             |
| Optimal Power   : 24 MW          Acceleration Rate: 10 MGLT/sec          |
|                                  Afterburners     : Yes                  |
|                                  Efficiency       : 1000 lt/fuel unit    |
`--------------------------------------------------------------------------'

This panel indicates that we have a max speed of 800 and we have afterburners to double this speed. You don't need to do this step once you've memorized how fast your particular ship travels. Knowing our maximum speed, we now type:

• SS 800

Then to double our speed,

• AFTERBURN

Congratulations! You're now hurtling through space at ludicrous speed!

Flight

Thus, every so often, check out 'plot course' again. You may need to make adjustments to your heading (using 'sh ###m#'). This will keep you properly on course. You will need to do this more regularly the closer you get to your destination.

Now back to the instructions:

• noburn - When Distance reads about 100, turn the afterburners off. This will begin slowing you down for entering atmo.
• ss 120 - Once you're around 20 "clicks" out, drop your speed down in preparation for landing.
• srep - Find your contact. It's going to have a rather low number for Distance.
• scan #### - This gives basic information on your contact. What you're looking for is the Landing Locations.
• land ####/# - When distance is around 5, land.

Kev's hints on figuring when to stop

Now you've figured out how to fly to a planet, now you might be wanting to know how to spend less time on your approach to the planet, knowing when precisely to cut off the engines. The good news is that you can figure out precisely when to do it, and it doesn't require all that tricky of math. For starters you need to get a bit of info about the engines on the ship youre on, you can do this with:

• specs engines - This tells you your max cruising velocity and your de/acceleration which is what you need, you'll see something like this...

.--------------------------------------------------------------------------.
| System Specifications                                                    |
 >------------------------------------------------------------------------<
|                              +- Engines -+                               |
|                                                                          |
| Stress Tolerance: 45             Maximum Velocity : 1080 MGLT            |
| Optimal Power   : 55 MW          Acceleration Rate: 45 MGLT/sec          |
|                                  Afterburners     : Yes                  |
|                                  Efficiency       : 1000 lt/fuel unit    |
`--------------------------------------------------------------------------'

Now for starters you're gonna want to know how many seconds it takes your ship to come to a complete stop. This can be done by dividing the your speed by the acceleration rate:

• 2160 (afterburning speed) / 45 = 48 seconds to fully stop

So now you know how many seconds it takes your ship to stop, now to figure out how far it takes your ship to stop. Because your ship decelerates at a steady rate, the average speed per hour while stopping is half of the starting speed. So given those specs, and assuming you're traveling at 2,160 clicks per hour, the math to figure out the average distance per second while stopping works as:

• 2160 (afterburning speed) / 2 = 1080 (average clicks per hour speed while stopping) / 60 minutes per hour / 60 seconds per minute = .3 average clicks per second traveled while stopping.

So now finish all this math, you just need to multiply the average distance you're traveling per second with the total time spent stopping:

• .3 cps * 48 seconds = 14.4 clicks to bring the ship to a complete stop.

Now HSpace is pretty forgiving, to land at a planet you need to be within 10 clicks of it. So in this case, as long as you cut afterburners and engines within a window of 24.4 to 4.4 clicks, you still would stop within landing distance of the planet. Saving you a few minutes of time slowly coasting up on the planet to land on it.

What to do if you overshoot

Sometimes you'll stop the ship either too early or too late. This isn't a big problem. First thing you need to do is set an intercept course with the planet you're trying to land on. This is done with the command inter <X> where <X> is the contact number that you get from srep. Next, you do ss 300 (if you overshot by a lot, you can do a higher speed and slow down when you get closer). Finally, when you're within 10 clicks of your planet, you're ready to land.

Done!

You're done! That wasn't so hard, was it? Of course not. That's the rookie (or lazy) way of doing things. You can, of course, from this extrapolate other methods for flying, but for that... well, you're on your own.