Quote:
Originally Posted by acrosome
A large part of the debate is coming down to "worked setting" versus "toolkit." And I have to say that I fail to see how GURPS: Space isn't already the latter.
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This I've agreed with since the last thread on this came up a few months back. While you can be light on the details of the galactic governments and enemies of a "worked setting" and offer some options to tailor it (for instance, by offering a few possible TL's to use, say TL10^ in the fringes and backwaters, TL11^ in the frontiers and colonies, and TL12^ in the core worlds), the more of a "toolkit" you make the box set the less of a "grab-and-play" box set you are making it. You, of necessity, need to narrow the focus down quite a bit in order to figure out what can be chopped away to reduce overall complexity for new players.
Quote:
Originally Posted by acrosome
Also, I'll point out that reactionless thrusters cause more problems than they solve. First, eventually someone is going to approach light speed and the hairy math involved with relativity. Second- but closely related- is that eventually someone will use one to crack a planet.
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I handwave away that problem by declaring that reactionless thrusters cannot accelerate beyond 1/10th light speed. For [insert technobabble] reasons. While 0.1c means a ship can make a very effective bomb if it hit a planet, so would a very effective bomb. (and if 0.1c is too fast for your taste, make it 0.01c, or 0.001c). Or just make them inertialless - so you can smack into the planet at 0.999c but as soon as you start to come into contact with the atmosphere the ship comes to an abrupt halt without exploding because it sheds it's inertia into the aether or something.
But, seriously, there are several good reasons to have reactionless thrusters. First, it removes the rocket equation from being necessary - or it removes a completely unrealistic but simpler rule to replace the rocket equation from needing to be implemented. It makes it so ships can land on a planet without needing to refuel with hundreds or thousands of tons before taking off again (the space shuttle burned nearly 2000 tons of fuel, and it would be considered a medium sized planetary shuttle by genre conventions). In other words it drastically simplifies space travel, since realistic rocket science kind of sucks and does not fit the genre of Space Opera at all.