You are misinterpreting the Speed section: It says “A spelljamming ship automatically slows to its flying speed when it comes CLOSE to something big enough to have its own air envelope and gravity plane” (Emphasis added). It does NOT say you can’t go to Spelljamming speed if you are affected by something else’s gravity or air envelope, it just says you have to be a certain distance from that thing that has a gravity plain and air envelope. What is considered “close” enough to cause a ship to slow? The max range for encounters according to the Starting Encounter Distance table is 1,000 feet. It doesn’t say you need to be outside an air envelope to go to spelljamming speed; it just says you can’t be close to that thing that has an air envelope, which is defined as 1,000 ft. or under. So once you are a thousand and one feet off the surface of the planet (which is 0.1895833 miles), you can enter Spelljamming speed. Edit: Sylvnfox makes a good point about the departure speed in the helm section. I think you probably slow within 1,000 feet, but can’t leave until 1 mile away. Makes sense if you don’t want players to be able to easily run away from every encounter you throw at them.
under spelljammer helm it says that once the ship is 1 mile away from a gravity sorce it can go into spelljamming speed. I think whoever wrote this made a mistake and added "in space" yet at the end of chapter 1 of the adventure it says that once you board the ship it lifts off then is through the clouds and into space. implying that a ship CAN enter spelljamming speed when in an atmosphere.
ah yes, that is correct, so a DM can say that once you leave a planet's surface you can increase speed significantly to get your ship out of the planets gravity
Now I'm coming up with the idea of a Pirate ship full of creatures that don't need to breathe just stewing in poisonous gases, coming up from under other ships vertical while the smaller ship is horizontal and wreaking the target with gravity shifting and toxic gas.
The spell jammer monster compendium that was release for free on D&D Beyond a bit ago has some robotic monsters in it that don't need to breathe and have the ability to contest the spell jammer helm magically to attempt to control the your ship.
To me the core reason that they were very light on details that are in the DMG is to maximize the forward comparability of the book with OneDnD. As the DMG is going to be re-written in 2024 and it also reduces the number pages spent on reiterating info. All while ensuring that it will not conflict with any future changes they make, including any changes to where said info will be located in the future.
For anyone wondering how spelljamming works, it takes the earth/ toril 67000 miles per hour that it moves, since you create your own gravity plane the moment you aren't touching toril you can drift or move(since we are a ship, so let's say the 5 & 1/2mph ship.) Now, moving opposite of Toril's orbit means that 67000mph ÷ 60 min= about 1116 miles per minute. So it should take you roughly 5 minutes to leave Toril's air envelope. The confusion happening is between how air envelopes and gravity planes interact. No problem 👍 P.S. Checked atmosphere height I'm getting 62 miles high from sea level, Spelljammer Speed mentioned you can move at the faster speed once in space, so I suppose it would take the ship's slower speed to leave first. 62÷5 & 1/2 mph. 11.27 hours, then either allow the spelljammer ai adjustment to go opposite of orbit or go warp speed.(Unsafe?) Also the ai can bring you on incoming orbit when coming back. Post post script, just read the spelljamming helm part,if the ship is in space & no other objects weighing more than one ton are within 1 mile of it... you can warp. So, even at ship speed, you just need to travel at worst, from a planet's sea/ undersea level + 1 mile outside the atmosphere. So, using the previous example, 11.27 hours + 10 min. 55 sec. (1 mile being covered at 5 1/2 mph.)
Read the part on drifting with the part on falling, asked if a pc that jumps counts as floating and whether or not merged envelopes mean they entered it. Found a post explaining they don't want ships using gravity to tear ships apart with angles or people upside down on a ship to plummet to a planet's surface. So, read gravitational planes and it says they are both in effect and just like with ship to planet interactions, only when they touch does the greater gravity of a planet or ship hp take effect. So, unless you're about five feet away( according to book) and ready an action to board the other ship by jumping, I assume you'll just fall and oscillate then drift away from your ship. A few homebrews that make sense, if I can jump X feet to make it to the other ship and touch it, I think is fair. If you jumped off the ship while it turned so the gravity plane overlapped with their ship and you touched it, that should work. Lastly, it noted in drifting that you're pulled along with the ship and only drift away at 10 feet per min. If going the opposite direction of the planet's orbit using your own speed, you don't want to add it moving away from you because of this part of the rules, then you could try to "hop" warp for just a minute to move past the air envelope. There, I think that all solves 17-19 page problems/ confusion. As for floating, seems like only when falling overboard will it happen, or if you're free floating in space already. I will now work on the Hadozee that are jumping out the spelljammer issue and whether or not they just oscillate within their ship's gravity plane. My guess is, since they can glide in air, they should be able to actively move away from the spelljammer's gravity plane's range. Then have the planet's gravity plane affect them. (Let me know when they errata it so I can fix it then too.) Note- You know, for Wotc to work so hard on preventing higher hp ships from using their gravity plane as a weapon, it seems to me that a RAW interpretation could undo it by simply tying a rope to a bolt. Your bolt hits a ship, both ships are touching via rope.
On the Rock of Bral's sails, just as you would need to throw a ladder with enough force to break from the ship's air envelope to let the planet's gravity plane keep it from floating back to the ship's plane, the sails need to "shoot" air with enough force to go beyond its air envelope to nudge the rock in a certain direction. Don't ask me to validate those jolly rowboat oars as capable of paddling through wildspace, you'd need to throw them in the opposite direction you wanted to travel. As for why they don't oscillate and float on the plane, I'll give it a possible out and say runes carved into them let the spelljammer helm give off some mobile hotspot signal, like a spelljammer extension. The fish, make sense. They're obviously evolved to have small antigravity fields like a spelljamming helm organ, but it's probably weaker which is why they only are seen in wildspace, astral sea, or small bodies like a space base or asteroid. No clue how they breath other than they're like those fish that can breathe outside of water. Mudskippers? Or evolved some other method. Also, although I say evolved, I only mean it as adaptation to space and prefer to think of them as the fish ancestors.
Yes, if you were able to jump with enough force to pass your ship's envelope and enter an opposition ship's envelope (if envelopes are merged you need to enter into part of their envelope that isn't overlapping.) you would fall toward that ship's gravity plane.
I feel whoever decided the spelljammer ship's speed didn't bother doing the math on how long it would take it to escape a planet's atmosphere and gravitational pull
under spelljammer helm it says that once the ship is 1 mile away from a gravity sorce it can go into spelljamming speed. I think whoever wrote this made a mistake and added "in space" yet at the end of chapter 1 of the adventure it says that once you board the ship it lifts off then is through the clouds and into space. implying that a ship CAN enter spelljamming speed when in an atmosphere.
In the 2 years that I've been DM'ing this was something i was most excited for. Sad to say I cant even figure out WotC was thinking when creating this.
It takes some considering for designing the interior of ships that have rooms on the underside gravity plane. Cargo would have to be entirely under nets or on special sized shelves so it doesn’t crush itself when the gravity switches instantaneously. That could lend for a lot of comedy the first time that happens so maybe that’s a feature, not a bug. There’s got to be some clever tricks one could do with that too. I wonder if there is a way you could tell if an air envelope was poisonous before getting into it. It would be a real dirty trick for a crew of undead or constructs to fly around with toxic air and gas smaller ships.
Don't worry Earth has a very small air envelope compared to worlds in wild space. Our atmosphere can't not be survived in long by humans at altitudes of 4 miles or higher (Everest is taller than that though). The Carmen line is at 62 miles, but the ecosphere still has measurable particle density out to 6200 miles.
For anyone wondering how spelljamming works, it takes the earth/ toril 67000 miles per hour that it moves, since you create your own gravity plane the moment you aren't touching toril you can drift or move(since we are a ship, so let's say the 5 & 1/2mph ship.) Now, moving opposite of Toril's orbit means that 67000mph ÷ 60 min= about 1116 miles per minute. So it should take you roughly 5 minutes to leave Toril's air envelope. The confusion happening is between how air envelopes and gravity planes interact. No problem 👍 P.S. Checked atmosphere height I'm getting 62 miles high from sea level, Spelljammer Speed mentioned you can move at the faster speed once in space, so I suppose it would take the ship's slower speed to leave first. 62÷5 & 1/2 mph. 11.27 hours, then either allow the spelljammer ai adjustment to go opposite of orbit or go warp speed.(Unsafe?) Also the ai can bring you on incoming orbit when coming back.
So when slowing from Wildspace cruising speed (100,000,000 miles per day; 4,166,666.67 miles per hour) to normal movement speed in a gravity plane or air envelope, how fast is the deceleration? Because, I mean… yikes. The deadliest part of space exploration isn’t hurtling through the cosmos - it’s the sudden stop at the end.
There is no such thing as inertia, in Spelljammer. You just stop dead, with zero problems. Note that you can also slam into space creatures, like scavvers, at spelljamming speed, and they suddenly appear in your ship's air envelope, totally unharmed. And they will then move in to attack your crew.
@@gknightbc6204 It's not "artificial gravity". The gravity in Spelljammer is a totally natural part of nature. (It does not turn off, if the helm goes down or if the helm is destroyed.)
So rounding a little in spelljammer the earth has a gravity “well” of 24,000 miles. 8k for the size of the earth itself and then 8 in every direct. So to leave earth and hit “wildspace” you need to travel 8k miles off the surface of earth. The problem is the average ship’s speed in a gravity well is only 35 feet per round, 60 if you dash. So roughly 4 and 8 mph respectively. That means to leave earth’s gravity will take you 2 thousand hours (84 days) or 1 thousand (42 days) respectively.
God really gotta think of home brew for a book that’s not even out in the UK yet. I’d personally say just from watching these videos a 3rd speed should’ve been talked about like the 4mph being “combat speed” then “cruising speed” maybe an x20 multiplier for full regular speed and then “warp speed” which is the 100 million miles a day speed the cruising speed might need tweaking but like 1 extra line of text would’ve been all that needed and I came up with this in 30 seconds and it doesn’t sound that problematic
They need to do their math on planetary atmospheres again. They also need to define a breathable atmosphere, as our at 8000mile diameter planet has roughly a 60 mile atmospheric envelope. Oh, and that's not all breatheable or dense enough to breathe. 5000 mile air envelope? LMAO
Does it ever state at what point an air envelope includes gravity? Like how big does something need to be to have gravity? On that as well, things absolutely can burn in space if everything has an air envelope around it.
but truth is that most earth-like planets only have an air envelope of 7-8 miles; I think the problem is factoring air envelopes for planets vs objects or ships, also, most planets don't have breathable atmospheres, specially asteroids
It does seem like the reboot designers screwed up, when they threw away the original rules of celestial bodies being Size A, Size B, Size C, etc and expanded the atmospheres a lot.
WotC should write examples that don't contradict the rules they write and the other examples for those rules: Shouldn't the block of wood have an air envelope of 7 feet by 8 feet by 9 feet? Longest Dimension = 3 feet so we add 6 feet (3 feet times 2) to all dimensions to get to 7x8x9, not 3x6x9. RAW thia makes something like a 50ft rope, uncoiled and straightened one of the best air reservoires: just take the rope with you and you have a cylinder of more than 100 feet diameter and 150 feet in length (around 1.2 million cubic feet of air) which should give you around a week of breathable air ...
@@Zarlos01 according to a company constructing panic rooms (did not fact check their numbers), it's around a day If you aren't too active. But realism and rules generally don't mesh well
By my calculations getting out of the atmosphere of the planet described would take almost a full day 23 hours or 142 combat turns. Note the bombard is almost the slowest ship in the fleet and is really not generally used for atmospheric operation. It can land on water though. Most of the ships take 2 to 5 hours to leave the atmosphere. This is not rocket science. lol. Also in Older spelljammer rules the crew can manipulate the sails, fins, etc to increase the speed. The problem is that they dropped the crew skills and made the sails redundant in 5e. Someone either did not understand the earlier versions or did not care. Its easy fixed.
12:05 You have misinterpreted the 5,000 mile diameter planet with the 15,000 mile atmosphere. You said that people need to travel 7,500 miles to get from the planet to Wildspace, but you would need to be 2,500 miles below the surface of the world, at the world's core, to have to travel that far. Spelljammer follows the rule of thirds, when it comes to air envelopes. The central third is the physical object (ship, asteroid or world) and the outer two thirds are all the empty air that is attracted to that object. So what we have is 5,000 miiles of air above the north pole, 5,000 miles of air below the south pole, and 5,000 miles of air to either side of the world, at the equator. It's still a big distance. But it's only the extra distance you get from having half of that air on each side of the object.
I think you are looking at it alittle wrong. the 5,000 planet you would only need go 5,000 mile to get out of the air pocket since you are already on the planet. IE it is the since of the thing that you have to go from it since you area already on the surface of it. Mind you it would still be at 4mph 1,250 hours or a little over 52 days to get out of it.
"The envelope of breathable air that forms around an object extends out from its surface equal to the *longest dimension* of its form. For example, a spherical planet 5,000 miles in diameter has an air envelope 15,000 miles in diameter, with the planet at the center of it. An air envelope need not be spherical, for example, a block of wood *1 foot by 2 feet by 3 feet* is surrounded by a more-or-less rectangular envelope of air 3 feet by 6 feet by 9 feet." Is that right for the wooden block example? The longest dimension of that is 3 feet, so the envelope should extend 3 feet from each side, so it'd be 7 feet by 8 feet by 9 feet. Or am I reading this incorrectly?
Sounds like they were changing their mind, while writing the reboot. But in 2e Spelljammer, any object displaces an air envelope three times it's length. So a 3 foot long plank attracks 3 foot of air at each end. (And the volume is 3x3x3 the volume of the original object, so 27 times as big.)
what happens when a person who is inside a ship crosses its gravity plane? how do you do that? is there some kind of contraption do they just fall from one deck to the next? stairs wont work and unless you want to be upside-down ladders are out too, i cant find a clear answer on this.
No. You never fall. When you go down to the lowest deck on the normal gravity side of the ship down is below your feet. But, as you pass through that deck, down switches to up. So, rather than you being accelerated through the hole, you are actually pushed back towards that deck. Have you ever dived into a swimming pool and been pushed back to the surface, by buoyancy? Well it's like that only more so. You have to kind of jump through the hole, to get enough momentum (towards the keel of the ship) that, when you enter the reverse gravity, you have enough speed to get your feet onto the underside of that deck. And, if you are a groundling and screw up, you would bob up and down until your belt lined up with the graviity plane. The rest of the crew would probably laugh at your predicament.
These two pages were.. disappointing to say the least.In Gravity planes they tell us about falling through a gravity plane and oscillating back and forth through it endlessly until 'something causes it to stop'. On the same page they have a separate falling section where we get told the exact same thing, with the addition of that there's no damage involved in falling back and forth through the plane. Between those entries is Drifting, where we get a semi-contradictory statement of what happens when an unconscious sailor or unsecured crate falls over the side of a ship. Those would begin to drift away from the ship along the gravity plane at 10 feet per minute, with zero mention of oscillating through the plane or how or if that would interact with drifting. So in the span of a single page we have a rule for falling through the gravity plane with nothing in the way to stop you, then an example for drifting that more or less ignores that rule by making no mention of it, followed immediately in the next section by a repetition of the original rule with the addendum that such falling causes zero damage because of course there's no impact. Whereas original Spelljammer makes it clear you oscillate back and forth through the plane but lose distance each time until you settle more or less bobbing at the gravity plane and then are pushed out towards the edge of the air envelope.
Another strange effect: The ships gravity plane is suppress by entering the air envelope of another ship with more hit points, but when its a planet it only vanishes when you land?
@@sylvnfox true, there are possibilities to enter the air envelope without entering the gravity plane of the other ship which still leaves the point where you keep your gravity plane as long as you do not touch down on a planet, which is also strange
I'm not familiar with the previous iterations of Spelljammer, is it intended to take place entirely within one solar system? Or are there any kind of FTL portals? 100 million miles per day sounds like a lot but on a galactic scale its a snails pace... like a century to travel one system over.
In 2e Crystal Spheres encased Wildspace Solar Systems, you needed specific spells to pass through and between them was the Phlogiston. Now there’s no barrier so when you get to the edge of the Wildspace solar system you enter the Astral Sea.
@@baynemacgregor8441 WOTC's rewrite makes this seems very generic and uninspired. The Astral Plane/Sea is supposed to be a realm of thought, and this book makes it seem like regular material space.
Well I guess our universe has much weaker air envelopes than Wildspace. Real world Earth has an equatorial diameter of 7926.382 miles (12756.274km) and a polar diameter of 7899.806 miles (12713.504km). It's an oblate spheroid but not by much. Yes, the Earths atmosphere has measurable particle density out to approximately 6200 miles, but approximately 62 miles (100 km) is the Carmen line, the defined boundary to "space". The International space station orbits at about an altitude of about 254 miles. Also not even a Tibetan can survive breathing the thin atmosphere of 4 miles and up without assistance. Just some things to think about. Also 100,000,000 (100 million) miles in 24 hours is more than 4million miles in an hour, which is handy for traveling inside a Star system such as Sols and much faster than the fastest recorded meteorite to hit Earth. (So if something doesn't have an air bubble is it not slowed down when it hits one?... ideas for kinetic strike weapons). However it is 0.0062131872 the speed of light, interstellar travel to the star closest to Sol, about 7 light years away, would take more than 1120 years. I'm assuming taking a Spelljammer into the Astral see allows for exiting and reentering the material plane at different places faster than traveling within the material plane. Also also modern air and space craft, break some of these rules about speed and engagement range.
Luckily in the speed section it explicitly says its up to the DM/GM how close the ship must be to another entity for the speed reduction because that ship would take weeks to land or leave the example planet.
under spelljammer helm it says that once the ship is 1 mile away from a gravity sorce it can go into spelljamming speed. I think whoever wrote this made a mistake and added "in space" yet at the end of chapter 1 of the adventure it says that once you board the ship it lifts off then is through the clouds and into space. implying that a ship CAN enter spelljamming speed when in an atmosphere.
@@sylvnfox Going to "spelljamming speed" (around 1,160 miles/second) in atmosphere is going to be a very brief, but fiery, experience... I know, it's magic...
correct, Earth's breathable atmosphere extends about 7.5 miles, Earth being less than 4,000 miles, so air envelopes around planets in SJ 5e are completely off. So using this math, a 4,000 mile planet has an air envelope of roughly 8 miles
Of course, this is fantasy. Gravity doesn’t work the same nor atmospheres. Spelljammer has always had these fantasy-physics. There are discworlds, planetoids held together with vines of a giant plant, cube worlds and more.
Planetary atmospheres are 3x the diameter of the planet? Absurd. I could accept something along the lines of a 100-mile high atmosphere, but there is only so far a suspension of disbelief can cover.
These Spelljammer rules have always been the first thing in the bin for me. All the nonsense about air envelopes and super speed just doesn't fit into my fantasy games. The dumbass way helns work included.
You are misinterpreting the Speed section:
It says “A spelljamming ship automatically slows to its flying speed when it comes CLOSE to something big enough to have its own air envelope and gravity plane” (Emphasis added).
It does NOT say you can’t go to Spelljamming speed if you are affected by something else’s gravity or air envelope, it just says you have to be a certain distance from that thing that has a gravity plain and air envelope.
What is considered “close” enough to cause a ship to slow? The max range for encounters according to the Starting Encounter Distance table is 1,000 feet.
It doesn’t say you need to be outside an air envelope to go to spelljamming speed; it just says you can’t be close to that thing that has an air envelope, which is defined as 1,000 ft. or under.
So once you are a thousand and one feet off the surface of the planet (which is 0.1895833 miles), you can enter Spelljamming speed.
Edit: Sylvnfox makes a good point about the departure speed in the helm section. I think you probably slow within 1,000 feet, but can’t leave until 1 mile away.
Makes sense if you don’t want players to be able to easily run away from every encounter you throw at them.
Thanks for the explanation!
Okay, that seems way more reasonable. It would take a ship 151 rounds (5,280/35) to get a mile away, which is just over 15 minutes.
under spelljammer helm it says that once the ship is 1 mile away from a gravity sorce it can go into spelljamming speed. I think whoever wrote this made a mistake and added "in space" yet at the end of chapter 1 of the adventure it says that once you board the ship it lifts off then is through the clouds and into space. implying that a ship CAN enter spelljamming speed when in an atmosphere.
ah yes, that is correct, so a DM can say that once you leave a planet's surface you can increase speed significantly to get your ship out of the planets gravity
Now I'm coming up with the idea of a Pirate ship full of creatures that don't need to breathe just stewing in poisonous gases, coming up from under other ships vertical while the smaller ship is horizontal and wreaking the target with gravity shifting and toxic gas.
The spell jammer monster compendium that was release for free on D&D Beyond a bit ago has some robotic monsters in it that don't need to breathe and have the ability to contest the spell jammer helm magically to attempt to control the your ship.
To me the core reason that they were very light on details that are in the DMG is to maximize the forward comparability of the book with OneDnD. As the DMG is going to be re-written in 2024 and it also reduces the number pages spent on reiterating info. All while ensuring that it will not conflict with any future changes they make, including any changes to where said info will be located in the future.
yeah I thought of this too, they basically want you to reference the DMG
For anyone wondering how spelljamming works, it takes the earth/ toril 67000 miles per hour that it moves, since you create your own gravity plane the moment you aren't touching toril you can drift or move(since we are a ship, so let's say the 5 & 1/2mph ship.) Now, moving opposite of Toril's orbit means that 67000mph ÷ 60 min= about 1116 miles per minute. So it should take you roughly 5 minutes to leave Toril's air envelope. The confusion happening is between how air envelopes and gravity planes interact. No problem 👍
P.S. Checked atmosphere height I'm getting 62 miles high from sea level, Spelljammer Speed mentioned you can move at the faster speed once in space, so I suppose it would take the ship's slower speed to leave first. 62÷5 & 1/2 mph.
11.27 hours, then either allow the spelljammer ai adjustment to go opposite of orbit or go warp speed.(Unsafe?)
Also the ai can bring you on incoming orbit when coming back.
Post post script, just read the spelljamming helm part,if the ship is in space & no other objects weighing more than one ton are within 1 mile of it... you can warp. So, even at ship speed, you just need to travel at worst, from a planet's sea/ undersea level + 1 mile outside the atmosphere.
So, using the previous example, 11.27 hours + 10 min. 55 sec.
(1 mile being covered at 5 1/2 mph.)
Read the part on drifting with the part on falling, asked if a pc that jumps counts as floating and whether or not merged envelopes mean they entered it. Found a post explaining they don't want ships using gravity to tear ships apart with angles or people upside down on a ship to plummet to a planet's surface. So, read gravitational planes and it says they are both in effect and just like with ship to planet interactions, only when they touch does the greater gravity of a planet or ship hp take effect. So, unless you're about five feet away( according to book) and ready an action to board the other ship by jumping, I assume you'll just fall and oscillate then drift away from your ship. A few homebrews that make sense, if I can jump X feet to make it to the other ship and touch it, I think is fair. If you jumped off the ship while it turned so the gravity plane overlapped with their ship and you touched it, that should work. Lastly, it noted in drifting that you're pulled along with the ship and only drift away at 10 feet per min. If going the opposite direction of the planet's orbit using your own speed, you don't want to add it moving away from you because of this part of the rules, then you could try to "hop" warp for just a minute to move past the air envelope. There, I think that all solves 17-19 page problems/ confusion.
As for floating, seems like only when falling overboard will it happen, or if you're free floating in space already.
I will now work on the Hadozee that are jumping out the spelljammer issue and whether or not they just oscillate within their ship's gravity plane. My guess is, since they can glide in air, they should be able to actively move away from the spelljammer's gravity plane's range. Then have the planet's gravity plane affect them. (Let me know when they errata it so I can fix it then too.)
Note- You know, for Wotc to work so hard on preventing higher hp ships from using their gravity plane as a weapon, it seems to me that a RAW interpretation could undo it by simply tying a rope to a bolt. Your bolt hits a ship, both ships are touching via rope.
On the Rock of Bral's sails, just as you would need to throw a ladder with enough force to break from the ship's air envelope to let the planet's gravity plane keep it from floating back to the ship's plane, the sails need to "shoot" air with enough force to go beyond its air envelope to nudge the rock in a certain direction. Don't ask me to validate those jolly rowboat oars as capable of paddling through wildspace, you'd need to throw them in the opposite direction you wanted to travel. As for why they don't oscillate and float on the plane, I'll give it a possible out and say runes carved into them let the spelljammer helm give off some mobile hotspot signal, like a spelljammer extension. The fish, make sense. They're obviously evolved to have small antigravity fields like a spelljamming helm organ, but it's probably weaker which is why they only are seen in wildspace, astral sea, or small bodies like a space base or asteroid. No clue how they breath other than they're like those fish that can breathe outside of water. Mudskippers? Or evolved some other method. Also, although I say evolved, I only mean it as adaptation to space and prefer to think of them as the fish ancestors.
Yes, if you were able to jump with enough force to pass your ship's envelope and enter an opposition ship's envelope (if envelopes are merged you need to enter into part of their envelope that isn't overlapping.) you would fall toward that ship's gravity plane.
It sounds like they need an Errata for taking off from a planet or celestial body already. Also something for ship to ship combat.
For my homebrew fixes I'm pulling the rules out of the original for that.
Not exactly, looks like the magic item description for the Spelljamming Helm answers this (pointed out by someone on the Beyond discord)
I feel whoever decided the spelljammer ship's speed didn't bother doing the math on how long it would take it to escape a planet's atmosphere and gravitational pull
correct; in 2e the time was based on the size of the planet and calculated in turns, e.g., escaping Toril's atmosphere was 4 turns to reach Wildspace
under spelljammer helm it says that once the ship is 1 mile away from a gravity sorce it can go into spelljamming speed. I think whoever wrote this made a mistake and added "in space" yet at the end of chapter 1 of the adventure it says that once you board the ship it lifts off then is through the clouds and into space. implying that a ship CAN enter spelljamming speed when in an atmosphere.
Yeah speed is obviously combat speed and they didn't think out the atmosphere problem.
I'm curious about tweeting Crawford and seeing what he says.
@@jamesfoster9613 i am sure it is erata. stuf like this slips into every book from every company
@@sylvnfox oh most assuredly, but it would also be nice to know sooner. I'm just as likely to houserule it until then.
In the 2 years that I've been DM'ing this was something i was most excited for. Sad to say I cant even figure out WotC was thinking when creating this.
It takes some considering for designing the interior of ships that have rooms on the underside gravity plane. Cargo would have to be entirely under nets or on special sized shelves so it doesn’t crush itself when the gravity switches instantaneously. That could lend for a lot of comedy the first time that happens so maybe that’s a feature, not a bug. There’s got to be some clever tricks one could do with that too.
I wonder if there is a way you could tell if an air envelope was poisonous before getting into it. It would be a real dirty trick for a crew of undead or constructs to fly around with toxic air and gas smaller ships.
At 300 miles an hour it would take over half a day to breach earth's atmosphere. Good god there's got to be a better way. It's 41 days at listed speed
62 miles to break it. Don't confuse the many layers. If oxygen is the factor, I'd argue that it's substantially less than 62 anyways
Don't worry Earth has a very small air envelope compared to worlds in wild space. Our atmosphere can't not be survived in long by humans at altitudes of 4 miles or higher (Everest is taller than that though). The Carmen line is at 62 miles, but the ecosphere still has measurable particle density out to 6200 miles.
For anyone wondering how spelljamming works, it takes the earth/ toril 67000 miles per hour that it moves, since you create your own gravity plane the moment you aren't touching toril you can drift or move(since we are a ship, so let's say the 5 & 1/2mph ship.) Now, moving opposite of Toril's orbit means that 67000mph ÷ 60 min= about 1116 miles per minute. So it should take you roughly 5 minutes to leave Toril's air envelope. The confusion happening is between how air envelopes and gravity planes interact. No problem 👍
P.S. Checked atmosphere height I'm getting 62 miles high from sea level, Spelljammer Speed mentioned you can move at the faster speed once in space, so I suppose it would take the ship's slower speed to leave first. 62÷5 & 1/2 mph.
11.27 hours, then either allow the spelljammer ai adjustment to go opposite of orbit or go warp speed.(Unsafe?) Also the ai can bring you on incoming orbit when coming back.
In 2e yes the gravity plane only extended to the edge of the air envilope. And is what causes the air envilope.
So when slowing from Wildspace cruising speed (100,000,000 miles per day; 4,166,666.67 miles per hour) to normal movement speed in a gravity plane or air envelope, how fast is the deceleration?
Because, I mean… yikes. The deadliest part of space exploration isn’t hurtling through the cosmos - it’s the sudden stop at the end.
You have artificial gravity on all things, strong enough to keep people on decks - all inertia is handled magically.
There is no such thing as inertia, in Spelljammer. You just stop dead, with zero problems.
Note that you can also slam into space creatures, like scavvers, at spelljamming speed, and they suddenly appear in your ship's air envelope, totally unharmed. And they will then move in to attack your crew.
@@gknightbc6204 It's not "artificial gravity". The gravity in Spelljammer is a totally natural part of nature. (It does not turn off, if the helm goes down or if the helm is destroyed.)
Nice, wonder if Fizbands has any monsters with gravity powers....if only there was a video that covered the fizbands monsters
So rounding a little in spelljammer the earth has a gravity “well” of 24,000 miles. 8k for the size of the earth itself and then 8 in every direct. So to leave earth and hit “wildspace” you need to travel 8k miles off the surface of earth. The problem is the average ship’s speed in a gravity well is only 35 feet per round, 60 if you dash. So roughly 4 and 8 mph respectively.
That means to leave earth’s gravity will take you 2 thousand hours (84 days) or 1 thousand (42 days) respectively.
God really gotta think of home brew for a book that’s not even out in the UK yet. I’d personally say just from watching these videos a 3rd speed should’ve been talked about like the 4mph being “combat speed” then “cruising speed” maybe an x20 multiplier for full regular speed and then “warp speed” which is the 100 million miles a day speed the cruising speed might need tweaking but like 1 extra line of text would’ve been all that needed and I came up with this in 30 seconds and it doesn’t sound that problematic
They need to do their math on planetary atmospheres again. They also need to define a breathable atmosphere, as our at 8000mile diameter planet has roughly a 60 mile atmospheric envelope. Oh, and that's not all breatheable or dense enough to breathe.
5000 mile air envelope? LMAO
Does it ever state at what point an air envelope includes gravity?
Like how big does something need to be to have gravity?
On that as well, things absolutely can burn in space if everything has an air envelope around it.
Ships have to be 1 ton so I guess anything weighing more than 2K pounds.
5000 miles from the surface, that's like 1,000 hours, or 40 days...
but truth is that most earth-like planets only have an air envelope of 7-8 miles; I think the problem is factoring air envelopes for planets vs objects or ships, also, most planets don't have breathable atmospheres, specially asteroids
It does seem like the reboot designers screwed up, when they threw away the original rules of celestial bodies being Size A, Size B, Size C, etc and expanded the atmospheres a lot.
@@DavidShepheard yeah but as has been mentioned this level of rules complexity doesn't fit the 5e design philosophy
Presumably it is the gravity plane that holds the air to the ship.
WotC should write examples that don't contradict the rules they write and the other examples for those rules:
Shouldn't the block of wood have an air envelope of 7 feet by 8 feet by 9 feet? Longest Dimension = 3 feet so we add 6 feet (3 feet times 2) to all dimensions to get to 7x8x9, not 3x6x9.
RAW thia makes something like a 50ft rope, uncoiled and straightened one of the best air reservoires: just take the rope with you and you have a cylinder of more than 100 feet diameter and 150 feet in length (around 1.2 million cubic feet of air) which should give you around a week of breathable air ...
And I disagree with the duration of the air envelop, a 5 foot³ of air to the average oxigen consumption of a human would be closer to 1 hour.
@@Zarlos01 according to a company constructing panic rooms (did not fact check their numbers), it's around a day If you aren't too active. But realism and rules generally don't mesh well
By my calculations getting out of the atmosphere of the planet described would take almost a full day 23 hours or 142 combat turns. Note the bombard is almost the slowest ship in the fleet and is really not generally used for atmospheric operation. It can land on water though. Most of the ships take 2 to 5 hours to leave the atmosphere. This is not rocket science. lol. Also in Older spelljammer rules the crew can manipulate the sails, fins, etc to increase the speed. The problem is that they dropped the crew skills and made the sails redundant in 5e. Someone either did not understand the earlier versions or did not care. Its easy fixed.
12:05 You have misinterpreted the 5,000 mile diameter planet with the 15,000 mile atmosphere.
You said that people need to travel 7,500 miles to get from the planet to Wildspace, but you would need to be 2,500 miles below the surface of the world, at the world's core, to have to travel that far.
Spelljammer follows the rule of thirds, when it comes to air envelopes. The central third is the physical object (ship, asteroid or world) and the outer two thirds are all the empty air that is attracted to that object.
So what we have is 5,000 miiles of air above the north pole, 5,000 miles of air below the south pole, and 5,000 miles of air to either side of the world, at the equator.
It's still a big distance. But it's only the extra distance you get from having half of that air on each side of the object.
I think you are looking at it alittle wrong. the 5,000 planet you would only need go 5,000 mile to get out of the air pocket since you are already on the planet. IE it is the since of the thing that you have to go from it since you area already on the surface of it. Mind you it would still be at 4mph 1,250 hours or a little over 52 days to get out of it.
"The envelope of breathable air that forms around an object extends out from its surface equal to the *longest dimension* of its form. For example, a spherical planet 5,000 miles in diameter has an air envelope 15,000 miles in diameter, with the planet at the center of it. An air envelope need not be spherical, for example, a block of wood *1 foot by 2 feet by 3 feet* is surrounded by a more-or-less rectangular envelope of air 3 feet by 6 feet by 9 feet."
Is that right for the wooden block example? The longest dimension of that is 3 feet, so the envelope should extend 3 feet from each side, so it'd be 7 feet by 8 feet by 9 feet. Or am I reading this incorrectly?
Sounds like they were changing their mind, while writing the reboot.
But in 2e Spelljammer, any object displaces an air envelope three times it's length. So a 3 foot long plank attracks 3 foot of air at each end. (And the volume is 3x3x3 the volume of the original object, so 27 times as big.)
what happens when a person who is inside a ship crosses its gravity plane? how do you do that? is there some kind of contraption do they just fall from one deck to the next? stairs wont work and unless you want to be upside-down ladders are out too, i cant find a clear answer on this.
No. You never fall.
When you go down to the lowest deck on the normal gravity side of the ship down is below your feet.
But, as you pass through that deck, down switches to up.
So, rather than you being accelerated through the hole, you are actually pushed back towards that deck.
Have you ever dived into a swimming pool and been pushed back to the surface, by buoyancy? Well it's like that only more so.
You have to kind of jump through the hole, to get enough momentum (towards the keel of the ship) that, when you enter the reverse gravity, you have enough speed to get your feet onto the underside of that deck.
And, if you are a groundling and screw up, you would bob up and down until your belt lined up with the graviity plane. The rest of the crew would probably laugh at your predicament.
These two pages were.. disappointing to say the least.In Gravity planes they tell us about falling through a gravity plane and oscillating back and forth through it endlessly until 'something causes it to stop'. On the same page they have a separate falling section where we get told the exact same thing, with the addition of that there's no damage involved in falling back and forth through the plane. Between those entries is Drifting, where we get a semi-contradictory statement of what happens when an unconscious sailor or unsecured crate falls over the side of a ship. Those would begin to drift away from the ship along the gravity plane at 10 feet per minute, with zero mention of oscillating through the plane or how or if that would interact with drifting. So in the span of a single page we have a rule for falling through the gravity plane with nothing in the way to stop you, then an example for drifting that more or less ignores that rule by making no mention of it, followed immediately in the next section by a repetition of the original rule with the addendum that such falling causes zero damage because of course there's no impact. Whereas original Spelljammer makes it clear you oscillate back and forth through the plane but lose distance each time until you settle more or less bobbing at the gravity plane and then are pushed out towards the edge of the air envelope.
Another strange effect:
The ships gravity plane is suppress by entering the air envelope of another ship with more hit points, but when its a planet it only vanishes when you land?
the gravity of the ship with the fewer HP is suppressed when it enters the gravity plane of another ship
@@sylvnfox true, there are possibilities to enter the air envelope without entering the gravity plane of the other ship
which still leaves the point where you keep your gravity plane as long as you do not touch down on a planet, which is also strange
I'm not familiar with the previous iterations of Spelljammer, is it intended to take place entirely within one solar system? Or are there any kind of FTL portals? 100 million miles per day sounds like a lot but on a galactic scale its a snails pace... like a century to travel one system over.
In 2e Crystal Spheres encased Wildspace Solar Systems, you needed specific spells to pass through and between them was the Phlogiston.
Now there’s no barrier so when you get to the edge of the Wildspace solar system you enter the Astral Sea.
@@baynemacgregor8441 WOTC's rewrite makes this seems very generic and uninspired. The Astral Plane/Sea is supposed to be a realm of thought, and this book makes it seem like regular material space.
Well I guess our universe has much weaker air envelopes than Wildspace.
Real world Earth has an equatorial diameter of 7926.382 miles (12756.274km) and a polar diameter of 7899.806 miles (12713.504km). It's an oblate spheroid but not by much.
Yes, the Earths atmosphere has measurable particle density out to approximately 6200 miles, but approximately 62 miles (100 km) is the Carmen line, the defined boundary to "space". The International space station orbits at about an altitude of about 254 miles. Also not even a Tibetan can survive breathing the thin atmosphere of 4 miles and up without assistance.
Just some things to think about.
Also 100,000,000 (100 million) miles in 24 hours is more than 4million miles in an hour, which is handy for traveling inside a Star system such as Sols and much faster than the fastest recorded meteorite to hit Earth. (So if something doesn't have an air bubble is it not slowed down when it hits one?... ideas for kinetic strike weapons). However it is 0.0062131872 the speed of light, interstellar travel to the star closest to Sol, about 7 light years away, would take more than 1120 years.
I'm assuming taking a Spelljammer into the Astral see allows for exiting and reentering the material plane at different places faster than traveling within the material plane.
Also also modern air and space craft, break some of these rules about speed and engagement range.
Luckily in the speed section it explicitly says its up to the DM/GM how close the ship must be to another entity for the speed reduction because that ship would take weeks to land or leave the example planet.
I’m still lost on the drifting rules
👍🏻
It would take 78 days to get of the planet at 4 miles an hour
under spelljammer helm it says that once the ship is 1 mile away from a gravity sorce it can go into spelljamming speed. I think whoever wrote this made a mistake and added "in space" yet at the end of chapter 1 of the adventure it says that once you board the ship it lifts off then is through the clouds and into space. implying that a ship CAN enter spelljamming speed when in an atmosphere.
@@sylvnfox Going to "spelljamming speed" (around 1,160 miles/second) in atmosphere is going to be a very brief, but fiery, experience... I know, it's magic...
72 days for the Bombard to travel that 7000 miles. SMH
Guys guys relax it only takes 52 days to leave the gravitational pull of a planet 😂 ONLY 52
The atmosphere math they used is not correct when compared to the earth.
correct, Earth's breathable atmosphere extends about 7.5 miles, Earth being less than 4,000 miles, so air envelopes around planets in SJ 5e are completely off. So using this math, a 4,000 mile planet has an air envelope of roughly 8 miles
Of course, this is fantasy. Gravity doesn’t work the same nor atmospheres. Spelljammer has always had these fantasy-physics. There are discworlds, planetoids held together with vines of a giant plant, cube worlds and more.
@@baynemacgregor8441 I can't believe you actually had to explicitly state this (but thank you for doing so). Sigh...
I am more disappointed in this than the lack of ship combat mechanics
Planetary atmospheres are 3x the diameter of the planet? Absurd. I could accept something along the lines of a 100-mile high atmosphere, but there is only so far a suspension of disbelief can cover.
These Spelljammer rules have always been the first thing in the bin for me. All the nonsense about air envelopes and super speed just doesn't fit into my fantasy games. The dumbass way helns work included.