Introduction
Stutterwarp is the one declared physics violation in the 2300AD universe that is a feature, rather than a bug. During the 3 editions under Colin, stutterwarp has changed somewhat.
In 2320AD, we were forbidden from making any changes to canon, and so stutterwarp was discovered on schedule, and worked the same way. In the 1st Mongoose edition, things moved well away from the established canon. In the 2nd Mongoose edition, some disastrous visits from the "good idea fairy," that creature who whispers in all 2LT's ears to the chagrin of their Pl Sgt, have left stutterwarp itself broken, and the history in a bit of a shambles.
I don't have the 2nd edition core set (ask me when the PDF is 25 euros or less), so don't know what changes Colin made there, but I can see from comments on the Mongoose boards there are some random changes. I do have the Aerospace Engineers Guide, and will comment on stutterwarp in that.
As a note, I will only give references once, when they are introduced, and not again if they are used multiple times.
A Short Note
In the process, I dumped 2320AD and 1st edition Mong 2k3 into MS Word and hit compare. Mong 2k3 (1st ed) absolutely is just an edited version of 2320AD. This of course shows in things like the colony table showing everyone on Hochbaden being dead - an event that occurred in 2301. Errors like the French military junta continuing until 2299 are present in both, with identical text. (2320AD, pg 53 and Mong 2300AD 1st ed, pg 20) In fact, the Junta fell in 2293, Ruffin was elected President in 2294, re-elected in 2298 and crowned Emperor in the same year. (2300AD Adventurer's Guide, pg 66)
PART 1: CHANGES IN GAME HISTORY RELATED TO STUTTERWARP
The Discovery of Stutterwarp
In prime GDW canon, the theoretical basis of the stutterwarp was an experiment carried out at CERN in French Switzerland in 2086 (2300AD Adventurer's Guide, pgs 64-5), and the first actual drive built by a consortium of French, British and German (not Bavarian, "German") scientists there in 2136. The flash-to-bang for the discovery of the Jerome effect to actually having a working drive was 50 years. This was installed on an unmanned probe and launched at Alpha Centauri that year. (Nyotekundu SB, pg 4). Notably, it arrived in 2137, so it must have been late in the year. (Colonial Atlas pgs 4-5) There is some indication that stutterwarp drives were slow, as the first manned ship (by the ESA) arrived insystem in 2139.
The ESA lacked tantalum. The British brokered Azanian entry into ESA in exchange for tantalum, and in 2139, the same year the manned survey ship went to Tirane, ESAS Pathfinder surveyed the nearer systems of the French Arm. At the time, the stutterwarp didn't have a 7.7 ly range. The unmanned probe to Alpha Centauri had to carry multiple drives, dump them as they filled and power up a new one. ESAS Pathfinder was also in this era, and would have burned through 12 drives in it's run.
The Colonial Atlas says an Argentine probe followed in 2138, with Japanese and American ones soonafter. However, America's first stutterwarp effort was joint with Australia, and was an unmanned probe Connestoga to Barnard's Star in 2155, followed by the first American-Australian starship (Crux Australis) being the (assumidly) first ship to go to Barnard's Star in 2157. (Earth/Cybertech SB, pg 40) America didn't return to manned orbital spaceflight until 2151, and probably built their first national starship (Hermes) in the 2160's or so. (Colonial Atlas pg 85) Generally, the writer of the Tirane article kept confusing America, Australia and Argentina, and this is probably an example of it.
The improvements that led to a "modern" stutterwarp with 7.7 ly range etc. were published in 2147, and from then on the need for multiple drive vessels etc. was obviated. (Challenge Magazine, Issue 28, pgs 41-42)
Here I should note that in Challenge 30 (pg 38) gives different dates; 2080 for Jerome's experiment, and 2126 for the first ESA starship (Prometheus). It also gives different politics. Challenge articles aren't canon, and these statements are overwritten by the Nyotekundu Sourcebook. This was retconned in 2300AD 2nd edition (Adventurer's Guide, pg 22) with Jerome performing an initial experiment in Grenoble, and then the CERN experiments of 2086 giving the basis of stutterwarp. The first probe is launched in 2136.
Thus we have our basic timeline for the stutterwarp:
- 2080 = Jerome jumps a single hydrogen atom in the Grenoble accelerator
- 2086 = Work at CERN in French Switzerland gives the theoretical basis of stutterwarp
- 2136 = actual drive, first probe (probably named Prometheus)
- 2139 = actual starships flying, Tirane survey
- 2147 = improvements leading to the 7.7 ly range.
2320AD's history section is essentially a copy-paste job from GDW, and whilst it has both 2080 (pg 307) and 2086 (pgs 8 and 209) for the discovery of the Jerome effect, it tracks prime canon with a 2136 first starship, 2163 AC War etc. It adds that second generation stutterwarps became available ca. 2167, which I assumed was OM/NC tech. However, in later work he defines this as the pre-modern (< 7.7 ly range etc.) drive.
Mongoose 1st edition rewrites the dates thus:
- 2080 - Jerome performs his experiment (pg 263)
- 2088 - Melbourne Accords first signed (pg 23)
- 2103 - Jerome dies (pg 263)
- 2112 - Zombie Jerome performs his experiment, again (pg 6)
- 2119 - Melbourne Accords first signed, again (pg 6)
- 2136 - first unmanned stutterwarp probe (pg 263)
- 2144 - first starship (with a 7.7 ly range?) (pg 263)
- 2146 - first starship, again (pg 6)
- 2149-54: Alpha Centauri War, ending with ESA signing the Melbourne Accords (pg 7)
- 2183: ESA signs the Melbourne Accords, ending the Alpha Centauri War, again (pg 6)
Mongoose 2nd edition, as initially published, had 2105 for Jerome's experiment and 2132 for the first starship, but with the precursor unmanned probes being launched in 2136 still. The AEG says that generation I drives were more susceptible to an "inversion" (i.e. were shorter ranged), and warp efficiencies should be divided by 10 (AEG, pg 118). It moves the adoption of generation II drives (i.e. "normal" drives) to 2190 (AEG, pg 108). This alone should probably push back settlement of Tirane into the 2190's, and we should have a roughly 30 year frameshift. Including the insystem parts, a warp 1 vessel takes 8.9 days to go from Earth to Tirane (Tirane is officially 1.41 AU from the FTL shelf). A generation I vessel is thus on the 3 months each way time scale. This means conventional power is impossible to utilise (unless six months fuel is carried), and all vessels need nuclear reactors. A vessel could not make many trips per year, and the colony ships to Neubayern or Queen Alice's Star would take years for a round trip. This should reduce the population of those worlds be a factor of ca. 4.
Early Starships and the Melbourne Accords
The Melbourne Accords accords were signed in 2099 in prime-canon (AG, pg 64), but in 2320AD were signed in 2099 (pg 7, a copy-and-paste from prime canon), or 2088 (pg 58) or in the 2160's (pg 73). 1st edition Mongoose is a copy-paste effort from 2320AD but some of the dates are edited. 2088 is repeated (pg 23), as is the end of the Alpha Centauri War (pg 33, but see in a couple of sentences). However, the dates are edited in the history text to change 2099 to 2119. (pg 6) The date of ESA signature, which ended the Alpha Centauri War, is given as 2183 instead of 2163.
Yes, Mongoose 2k3 moves the Alpha Centauri War by 20 years. This should frame shift the whole of Human settlement by 20 years. Except, it hasn't. The ESA colonies on Tirane were still settled in 2167 - all of them. Even the colonies which were settled later are still listed as being settled in 2167. Why is Argentina fighting to be allowed to place a colony on Tirane in 2183 when they already did so in 2167?
As a further note, OQC was absolute in core 2300AD. No ship had ever successfully run the blockade. Mong 2k3 proclaims L-4 is outside the jurisdiction of OQC, which is probably is. (pg 31) However, this completely misses the point - when entering OQC's jurisdiction (i.e. heading to Earth) at that point it is either searched, or destroyed. It makes the bold claim that lighting up a nuclear thermal rocket in Earth orbit won't be seen.
Jumpers and Exploration
In 2nd edition Mong 2k3 there is a new visit from the good idea fairy in the form of "jumpers." If they were in 1st edition, it wasn't in the rules book. These jumpers were separatists or cultists who left Earth for the stars 2130-2170. One should note that in 2130, in all versions, the stutterwarp drive hasn't been invented yet. In the Mongoose continuity, when the last jumpers leave, ESA perhaps hasn't even sent their first colony ships to Tirane, triggering the Alpha Centauri War (which appears to have happened in 2182 rather than than 2162 in that continuity).
The idea that religious whackjobs are building or buying starships before the great powers and heading off into the big black stretches incredulousness. That they got as far as Paulo, Doris (which Colin renamed Kanata for no good reason) and Avalon > 100 years before the professional explorers stretches it further. Doris is 81.69 real light years, and with the insystem journey components the ship would need at least 3 years to reach it. All of the crossings except one are > 3.85 ly (the early drive limit in prime canon which is alluded to in Mongoose).
Then there is the question of how they navigated?
When entering an unexplored system, the first question is where can I discharge? Some explorers can get around this by jettisoning the charged drive if necessary, because they can carry a spare. Without knowing this, you are looking for a body to discharge at, whilst the drive is charged. Now, the techniques used for exoplanet hunting generally don't work. We can only see a fraction of planets, and no increases in resolution etc. will compensate for there literally being no signal. Thus, when an explorer enters a system, they are reliant on their own sensors, or those of probes, to find a reasonable body to discharge the drive at.
Without belabouring the point, there has to be some limiting factor to explain why Man's forward exploration moved forward at about one star system per decade. The counterpoint is, of course, the Bayern module, but that can be explained away perhaps by advances in technology in the 150-odd years since the Jumper times.
Why is The History so Inconsistent?
2300AD/2320AD under Colin Dunn has made major revisions in the history etc., but they are inconsistent. Colin started by just doing a copy-paste text dump of the original GDW history sections etc. in 2320AD, and hence these are consistent. However, when he wrote about the history outside of the copy-paste, significant errors crept in.
In Mong 2k3 1st edition, he made some deliberate changes to dates etc., to compensate for a later Twilight War, whilst making the nature of the Twilight War nebulous, and attempting to drop the name "Twilight War," (which still appears six times in the book). The Twilight War now took place in the 2020's. Hence many events were shifted back about 20-30 years. However, dependent events did not, leading to effect happening before cause in places.
The other problem was revealed in a now deleted post by Colin - he is not referencing the source material as he is writing.
When Colin started writing his version of Invasion, he posted a snippet of what he'd written to the facebook group. It was less than awesome. Apart from nonsensical military tactics (akin to a fighter pilot in ACM landing their plane and then standing on the wing with their sidearm), and random gender swapping of established characters, he got basic facts like names of people wrong. When questioned, he admitted he doesn't check the original materials when writing, and simply writes what he remembers they said, and then never goes back to check. Hence the drift. Nothing is checked before the first draft is published (when those buying it get a chance to correct it before printing).
Take a simple thing, like the name of the American cruiser killed at Arcturus in 2299. Colin used my article on the Kennedy as his original source. For 2320AD he added some names for post 2301 ships, and in Mong he deleted some of them (inconsistently), and changed a few. However, the Sanchez wasn't on my list of active ships because she'd been destroyed, and so Colin never copied it over. Rather than looking it up, he made a name up. The other ship named in primary canon was the Jefferson, and she was one of those names that was deleted. Yes, neither of the ships that fought at Arcturus in 2299 exist in Mong 2k3. Oh, and amongst the names I made up, I got President Pemberton's first name wrong; I had 1st ed. Twilight: 2000, and Deanna Pemberton didn't get her Christian name until the 2nd ed., which I didn't own. Mea culpa.
So there we have an answer - nothing is checked, not even against the same book. Changes are made with no consideration of the consequences. Colin is following woozles. He made mistakes extracting things back in 2320AD, and he is now referencing that rather than the original source material. Further, he isn't cross-checking what he wrote (hence two or three different backstories for the Aconit etc.)
Future Work
I will write one more part on stutterwarp, examining the physics changes Colin has made. Combined the two parts were at ca. 5,000 words. Then a piece on genetic engineering and the Pentapods. If I never get round to writing it, GDW's technology was realistic. Mong's really, really isn't. The Mongoose version of 2300AD is stuck in
I won't get round to that this year though.
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