On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 05:38:17PM -0700, Amber Witherspoon wrote:
> Positing one change to the jump drive: Jump Exit can take place within
> up to 100D of an object with natural gravity (assuming, effectively,
> the gravity tides model, and there is a penalty for the further away
> from the 100D limit that you aim to jump to), but Jump Entry requires
> being at or beyond the 1000D limit.

That doesn't really change much, except for one case: time-critical
cargoes can be delivered somewhat faster, but at substantially greater
cost if the starship jumps all the way in.  The increased cost comes
from the fact that the very expensive starship drives have to remain
idle for another week getting out again.

> Bonus Round! Create some variant of the games presumed economics and
> figure out what the effects of that would be, especially in this
> model. Such as cheap spacecraft (everything space worthy costs 25% of
> book)

I think the biggest change toward "starships chug around in system a
lot longer" would be specifically cheaper jump drives & fuel tanks.
Under standard rules, any starship is very much more expensive than a
similar capacity of mere spacecraft.

If you increased outgoing jump limits but dropped jump drive costs
significantly, then the penalty for having unused jump drives sitting
around doing nothing insystem is correspondingly reduced.  There would
be a threshold where the cost for a starship to travel only outward
drops below the cost of a spacecraft to travel both ways from an
outsystem port.

- Tim