[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by weby

Is there gravitic manipulation? and again how easy/cheap if there is?

How difficult is it to get into orbit? That's a question whose importance is almost always underestimated, to an extreme degree, by worldbuilders who aren't schooled in written science fiction (especially script writers for movies and TV shows, and of course those novel writers who can only write soft science fiction).

Today at TL8, it's very, very difficult, very, very expensive, and quite dangerous to get into orbit. And actually not notably improved relative to mid TL7.

Any kind of gravity manipulation, or any kind of reactionless drive, is going to make is a lot easier, a lot cheaper, a lot faster, a lot safer, and a lot less uncomfortable, to get up into orbit.

And I beleive it was Heinlein who said that once you had gotten from the ground up into orbit (especially from sea surface Earth up into low orbit) then congratulations - you're aleady half-way to anywhere.

Does the OP want his setting to have CasualInterplanetaryTravel?

Is intersteller travel casual? In my long blog entry on possibilities, I touch upon the vastly different emergent consequences of different FTL travel dynamics.

I have a personal fondness for settings featuring hibernation technology, e.g. the 1980s movies such as "Outland" and "Alien" (or the novel "Heart of the Comet" by Brin and Benford - not that I think that blog entry of mine is particularly good, to be honest).

Part of the reason is that I tend to see it as an attempt at a using a sub-genre marker (there's a blog entry, or partial blog entry, in there, but I haven't written it yet), on behalf of the writer, especially movie/TV script writers, to signal to the audience that their setting is an aversion of the casualness of Star Wars where you just push the big button and then the ship flies to where you want to go.

"No, no, this is a serious setting, It's gritty and ... stuff. If you want to go somewhere, then that's a serious endavour."

The same method probably works on roleplayers. If they become aware of "hypersleep coffins" or widespread use of "hibernation tech" then they'll get more of a Traveller'ish vibe than a Star Wars/Star Trek vibe. They'll probably understand, on some level, that going places will take time and cost resources. It won't be trivial. It won't be casual.

That their characters will be much more bound to the place they're in, at least in terms of a solar system, and quite possibly even in terms of planet or moon - every time I think about it, in terms of my own space opera setting (the mildly silly one) I realize how much time it takes to get from any planet to any other planet. You're not in a solar system. Rather, you're in a particular place in a solar system. And that place is very particular. You can get anywhere else, sure, but it'll take days or months.



Which probably leads to the biggest question of all: What's the setting's conflict or conflicts about? What is there to fight for?

At higher TLs, if you extrapolate realitically, the answer tends to be "not much".

Iain M. Banks describes it well in "A Few Notes..." how once you get up out of the "gravity well", and if you have the technology to make your machines make more machines for you, then you can break away from the society you came from and set up on your own, fairly easily (that's how the "Culture" came to be, but it's obviously something that happens often in that setting - they're unique or nearly unique for reasons other than that).

So, to use a Danish phrase, if you don't like the smell in the bakery, you can just leave. It's possible to leave. You don't need to be 10 million people to pack up your stuff and leave.

If religious groups think that there's too much atheism, bans on circumcision of males under 18, e.g., then they can leave (and if they manage to take their kids with them, then there's really nothing atheist society can get to get those kids back, or even if atheist society were able to protect the kids, the religious people can just some new kids once they've left the atheist society).

Or if the religious guys win, then the atheists can go off and live somewhere in the Oorth Cloud, on their own, and have the kind of freedoms that they ascribe value to.

So why fight? When you can just part ways and go live in separate corners of the solar system?

There are plenty of asteroids, plenty of hydrogen, plenty of solar influx.

It's non-trivial to find something to actually motivate large groups of people to fight each other (even indirectly with unmanned drones - those still cost resources to build and run), once you get past a certain TL. Unless you go retro-tech.



I've opted for what GURPs terms Limited Super-Science in my mildly silly space opera setting.

It's optimistic about fusion torch drives and anti-matter torch drives, and fusion-pellet drives (and the radiological impact is surprisingly small, meaning many of those drive systems can be used to take off from the surface of a densely populated terrestrial planet), but there is no gravity control, and no reactionless drives. There's no real super Super-Science. To use superheroes as an analogy, you can get something like Spiderman, but no Superman, nor the Fantastic Four.

Anti-matter is also rather expensive to produce. Still thousands of times cheaper, probably even a lot more than thousands, than for us here and now, but that doesn't mean it isn't expensive.

One polity in mysetting, the Lazian Empire, somehow has access to large amounts of AM, probably because they've found a gigantic pre-Interregnum cache of it, or maybe a large facility to produce it, and they use that to expand their sphere of influence drastically, since it's basically cheap for them because they found it, whereas everyone else has to produce it.

Fortunately, for everyone else, they're not a united empire, but rather defined by large clans engaged in perpetual rivalry ("Lazian" comes from one of the seven hills of the ancient megapolis of Rome, not incidentally), so they're not as big a threat as they could be. And they're not even nasty conquerors, either. A bit more interfering than Traveller's Imperium, and anyway in the grand scheme of things it's just one small polity, in a huge galaxy.

So the "theme" of this setting tends to be the recovery of civilization, trying to climb back up the "Tech Level" ladder (of course I don't use GURPS' TL system - it's not as if Sagatafl's TeL system is particularly well defined above the renaissance levels, but it is a bit different) after yet another galaxy-wide "civilisational collapse" into a dark age of barbarism and primitive technology (I think GURPS Space tends to call it "The Long Night", whereas Asimov called it the "interregnum" in his "Foundation" trilogy - which by the way like Star Wars most definitely has no prequels or sequls).

That setting lends itself to a wide variety of adventures, but no grand quests to save the entire universe (let alone a mere galaxy), so the world is really more of a background for intrigues or action-adventuring, as opposed to the much more active "thing" that my Ärth historical fantasy setting is. And it's also Ärth I intend to use for RPGs. The space opera one certainly can be used for that too, but I've built it as a setting for novels and novellas to write, not for interactive fiction use.