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Old 09-20-2017, 07:51 PM   #86
ericbsmith
 
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Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Binghamton, NY, USA. Near the river Styx in the 5th Circle.
Default Re: Spitballing a Space Opera Boxed Set

Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
50 ly is too narrow a scale, especially if you're trying to spray-paint a gloss of realism over your action adventure framework. From past discussions we could only come up with 6 candidate stars within 40 ly and I think you'd be lucky to come up with 1 Earth-like planet is 6 chances.

Due to its' cinematic nature Space Opera can be luckier than that but if you want that glossy overlay of realism the ability to cover greater distances would be helpful.
Personally, I always took that as a good thing. Like, a really good thing. The sheer scale of the galaxy means you probably have to travel a larger distance to get to Earthlike planets, but it also means that on the larger scale you can stick an Earthlike planet or a really weird phenomenon just about anywhere and it won't be "unrealistic" in that it won't be out of place. A galactic arm is approximately 300 parsecs thick, 1,100 parsecs wide, 10,000 parsecs long, and it contains billions of stars. This makes it a good scale to set a wide spanning "exploration" campaign in while leaving huge tracts of space unexplored or simply beyond contact. However, a galactic arm contains more than enough stars to place whatever you want wherever you want. It also contains enough stars that it's possible for a weird phenomenon to be missed just about anywhere. The dimensions are reasonably flat so that you can meaningfully carve up 2-dimensional borders for your galactic empires along the galactic plane.

I honestly would never set a campaign in an area smaller than a galactic arm for this reason. I could see upping the scale to the entire galaxy if you want a more "urbanized" galactic empire with little or no exploration. I just don't see the appeal of decreasing the scale down to 50-ly or 100-ly because you simply wind up with hundreds or thousands of stars which are accurately mapped but simply boring for adventures since they won't have habitual planets.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
If you go with Hyperspace or Jump drives one of the major reasons you do it is to avoid the complexity and limitations of a realspace map.
OTOH, if the scale is big enough (such as a galactic arm) the complexities of a realspace map tend to smooth out, so the only things needing to be mentioned are the separations between galactic arms and the astrogation phenomenon you want to insert for local color (i.e. the Brier Patch or Badlands which appear in Star Trek). And, of course, any important worlds that have been settled or explored.

Of course, this makes all FTL drives almost identical in practice unless you place extra limitations on some of them - such as a lack of FTL communication or sensors that is common in settings that use Hyperdrives or Jump drives. Or the requirement of finding a specific jumppoint within a solar system.

Personally, I've always liked the idea of having relatively slow Warp drives and relatively fast, expensive, and one-way Jump Gates. So the core worlds can afford Jump Gates but the frontier worlds can't, meaning that the core worlds are very urbanized and are all culturally and technologically very similar but the frontier worlds are much more independent minded and self-sufficient.
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Last edited by ericbsmith; 09-20-2017 at 08:10 PM.
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