“In space, no one can hear you snore.”
I chewed on this for a good while, but unfortunately this is a case where art imitates life – there’s just no way under Heavy Gear’s published rules to get from a world like Earth to a Gate continuously or quickly at realistic rates of acceleration*.
Using online calculators like this one, I realized that no spacecraft published for the game is capable of making the trip in one go. The only way to do it is just like a real spacecraft – accelerate as much as your fuel will allow, coast until you approach the Gate, come to a stop, transit the Gate, then do the whole thing again to get to your destination. You have to trade time for fuel.
Even though the mechanics of FTL travel are different in Heavy Gear, as far as the characters are concerned it’s just like the Alien franchise – they’ll be in suspended animation for most or all of the trip. So only worry about it if you need to.
If you’re just taking your campaign to another world, the simplest thing is to say the characters prepare themselves as best they can (with maybe a “1980s-movie-training-montage” reference thrown in), and after a suitable amount of time they arrive at their destination. Keep your story moving forward.
If you want to play a planet-hopping campaign in the Heavy Gear setting, though, I have a simple retcon for you: Make Gawaine Di Smit a historical figure. Her discovery in the Black Talon Field Guide of the “micro-Gates” which break open the Gate Web was a deus ex machina, the necessary plot device to justify the story in Activision’s Heavy Gear II PC game and to get the next part of the canon storyline going (as far as it did). But if that discovery is pushed back even to the late TN 1800s, the entire setting makes much more sense.
Interstellar travel is no longer limited to enormous (and enormously expensive) Gateships in deep space, but can be achieved with smaller vessels much closer to the main worlds in each system. Suspended animation is still necessary because of the physiological effects of Gate travel, but travel between worlds is now measured in days and weeks rather than months. Micro-Gates make Earth’s invasion fleets feasible, the spacecraft that were published actually work, and last but not least a small ship crewed by Player Characters becomes a valid campaign option.
This retcon is best applied by saying that Earth discovers micro-Gates after its Third World War, giving the New Earth Commonwealth the “cheap and fast” way it needs to conquer its former colonies. Later, during the War of the Alliance, Di Smit becomes head of the team tasked to figure out how Earth could put so many ships over Terra Nova. Her reverse engineering of Earth’s newest Gatedrive technology, and the theoretical basis behind it, leads to her own discovery of micro-Gates, which jump-starts Terra Nova’s space programs through the TN 1920s and 1930s.
This was staring me in the face for years, and is now part of Heavy Gear: Infinite Tango. Gate travel is now much more like FTL “jumps” in Babylon 5, which I think is a much better fit.
* For whatever reason, this was the one time realism in Heavy Gear was explicitly thrown out.
I wrote one of the ships in Spacecraft Compendium 2 (the Luna-class tender), and I gave it a “combat speed” value of 3 and and a “top speed” value of 6. This meant that under the rules in Tactical Space Support, the Luna was supposed to have a normal acceleration rate of 0.3g, and a maximum acceleration of 0.6g. When the book was published, though, those numbers were multiplied by 10. Other values should have been updated in the writeup to reflect that change, but everything else was the same, and all of the other entries in both Compendiums had the same boost in performance.
At some point during the editing phase of those books, someone decided to give Heavy Gear’s spacecraft Star Trek-style impulse engines. I have no idea why.
Banzaidyne IV 