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<blockquote data-quote="see" data-source="post: 8741982" data-attributes="member: 10531"><p>Which was <em>utterly silly</em>. The reason things entering Earth's atmosphere burn (whether meteors or spacecraft) is because they are moving at many multiples of the speed of sound, which means massive friction heating with the air that can't get out of the way. Spelljammers at tactical speed (2e)/flying speed (5e) don't move faster than the speed of sound in atmosphere, and acceleration from falling ends at the speed of the object's terminal velocity, also well short of burning.</p><p></p><p></p><p>With extremely weird numbers that were completely unrelated to the speed at which a ship moved or the depth of the atmosphere, and which consequently was easily exploited to break settings (launch from an Earth-sized world in 40 minutes, travel a short distance out and back at 4 million mph, land on the other side of the world -- around the world in 90 minutes).</p><p></p><p>Now, on the other hand, the 5e implicit numbers based on atmosphere thickness, while very good at avoiding world-breaking shenanigans, also make it very slow to visit planets. After all, if a planet has an atmosphere thickness equal to its diameter, then taking off from an approximately Earth-sized world (c. 8,000 miles in diameter) to out of the atmosphere at the speed of a Damselfly (8 mph) takes roughly 40 <em>days</em>.</p><p></p><p>This means in 5e you need the DM to either handwave launch/landing times (if only by not actually calculating them like I just did), or largely confine your travel to small bodies.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="see, post: 8741982, member: 10531"] Which was [I]utterly silly[/I]. The reason things entering Earth's atmosphere burn (whether meteors or spacecraft) is because they are moving at many multiples of the speed of sound, which means massive friction heating with the air that can't get out of the way. Spelljammers at tactical speed (2e)/flying speed (5e) don't move faster than the speed of sound in atmosphere, and acceleration from falling ends at the speed of the object's terminal velocity, also well short of burning. With extremely weird numbers that were completely unrelated to the speed at which a ship moved or the depth of the atmosphere, and which consequently was easily exploited to break settings (launch from an Earth-sized world in 40 minutes, travel a short distance out and back at 4 million mph, land on the other side of the world -- around the world in 90 minutes). Now, on the other hand, the 5e implicit numbers based on atmosphere thickness, while very good at avoiding world-breaking shenanigans, also make it very slow to visit planets. After all, if a planet has an atmosphere thickness equal to its diameter, then taking off from an approximately Earth-sized world (c. 8,000 miles in diameter) to out of the atmosphere at the speed of a Damselfly (8 mph) takes roughly 40 [I]days[/I]. This means in 5e you need the DM to either handwave launch/landing times (if only by not actually calculating them like I just did), or largely confine your travel to small bodies. [/QUOTE]
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