Illness yesterday, training delivery this morning, and small speaking engagement tonight; real life busy-ness has kept me occupied in good and not-so-good ways.

As a result, no progress on various projects, though I did enjoy staring in bewilderment at my fantasy space engine calculations while I was sick.

I wrote this? What does it mean?

I have the same feeling about my literary theory class' final essay. 🙂

    I worked on two things last night:

• My ongoing project to convert The Fantasy Trip spells to The Black Hack
• The Spelljammer idea that took hold in my brain yesterday.

As far as the Spelljammer idea, I came up with a psuedo-scientific way to explain how the engine would work and followed it up with a thoroughly D&D method to make the engine work. In short, ether (from the Ethereal plane) is converted into a substance that can be manipulated by magnets and electricity. That substance shoots out the other end of the tube to provide thrust. Once out of the tube, it turns back into ether.

The device that converts the ether is psionic. As a result, the engineer is either psionic or has someone in their crew that is so the conversion of ether can happen manually if the devices fail.

Last night, I did calculations to determine the thrust for these tubes to get a rough idea of how fast a given ship can accelerate through space.

Then began work to make an engine rating system similar to BattleTech or Centurion Legion. In essence, an engine will have a number rating. Once the calculations for the ship being built are completed, the mass of the ship divided by the engine rating will determine the acceleration for the ship.

The goal is have a single number to determine adjustments to dice rolls for the ship to do the things it does.

    Keith J Davies has pointed out to me that every post here usually builds on the one before. Even when I change the subject, I usually reference earlier posts here.

I'll try to provide a bit more explanation. As someone that studied The Cantos (Ezra Pound) for a grade, I understand that having some kind of map is helpful.