09-20-2017, 06:31 PM | #81 |
Join Date: Jan 2014
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Re: Spitballing a Space Opera Boxed Set
Just kicking around this concept in comparison with DF.
OK, so Dungeon Fantasy has a few traits that make it particularly adaptable to an RPG boxset. As I understand them, they are:
Now let’s do these for space opera:
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09-20-2017, 06:52 PM | #82 |
Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: The Land of Enchantment
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Re: Spitballing a Space Opera Boxed Set
When I think "what do I want for a space opera setting", I answer myself "Traveller, but not so ridiculous." I just need a little suspension of disbelief, and I haven't had that with Traveller for a long time. Uplifted dogs? Anthropomorphic cat people? Ew.
So I guess put me in the Worked Setting camp, rather than the Generic camp. I'd need a 3D starmap, for starters. Hell, I'd buy a well-executed map of the stars within 50 or so light years of Earth on it's own. As it is, though, you need to use a computer and software to have any realism there (I've done it). Also no antigravity or reactionless thrusters, though I have long thought that a warp drive with subwarp capability is an ideal scifi RPG mechanism. 2300AD was the closest thing I ever had to an ideal scifi setting and that's essentially what it used. But it's just too dated. And was too technologically conservative. And the starmap is wrong almost everywhere you look. Another problem would be keeping up with real-life exoplanets as they are discovered, but I don't think many are within 50y anyway. The Ten Worlds setting for AV:T is pretty awesome, but too limited in scope. The idea of a setting in the period of recovery after a Long Night intrigues me, a la The New Era. It would allow tropes such as planets with differing tech levels, ruins, etc. I like the idea of a resurgent polity that is obsessed with "reuniting humanity"- under it's own hegemony, of course- rather like the obsession that the Chinese have with One China. Of course, the worlds that have been on their own for a few hundred years will have different thoughts. For a setting to have the needed space opera tropes the biggest need is to make interstellar trade (and warfare) viable. To do that you need cheap ground-to-orbit transport, and cheap and timely interstellar transport. Yes, reactionless thrusters are the traditional solution to the former, but I hate them as simply too unrealistic. For the cheap ground-to-orbit there are a lot of other options that are not terribly viable in the foreseeable future but which are at least physically possible. (Cheap fusion powering laser launches, beanstalks, Lofstrom loops, etc.) For the interstellar bit, well, that's why I like warp-with-subwarp. It also lets you easily tool around inside solar systems without reactionless drives instead of turning the setting into just a few radii around inhabited planets, which is what jump drives or gates without reactionless drives do. And most hyperdrives do too. I also like the idea of strategic spacelanes and strategic systems. To do that you need a limit on how far a star drive can take you. Again, 2300AD did this well with its 7.7ly limit, which created such strategic lanes and systems. With such spacelanes you don't need a physically accurate starmap; a subway-style map will do, which is handy. I've had bits and pieces of a setting like this in my mind for years, but I'll probably never write it down. It presumes that Earth is destroyed and the One China polity is now based out of Mars, which is why recovery has been so slow- there were economic issues, and they were sort of occupied with survival for a while. But I was going to make most world one TL lower than them. The disaster that destroyed Earth (and led to total economic collapse in the setting, since Earth was so dominant) was AI-instigated, and so true AI is illegal a la Frank Herbert's Dune. This is because with true AI it's hard to avoid a THS-like setting, which isn't very space-operatic. Space opera is iron-willed men with guns, not combat between AI-driven cybershells or transhumans. There could still be some damned capable autonomous drones, though.
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I'd need to get a grant and go shoot a thousand goats to figure it out. Last edited by acrosome; 09-20-2017 at 07:27 PM. |
09-20-2017, 07:07 PM | #83 | ||
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: The plutonium rich regions of Washington State
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Re: Spitballing a Space Opera Boxed Set
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http://panoptesv.com/RPGs/Settings/V...s/TheVerge.php (it's still a long way from being done, though, especially when I get distracted by things like illustrating alien biospheres rather than describing the main planets or how characters fit in to the game mechanics.) Luke |
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09-20-2017, 07:21 PM | #84 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Spitballing a Space Opera Boxed Set
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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. Space Opera ships _must_ go "Whoosh!" and generally carry Our Heroes forward at a rapid pace relative to the scale of the setting. I'm pretty sure most _do_ want antigravity and reactionless thrusters and don't want a warp drive as limited as the one seen in 2300. 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.
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Fred Brackin |
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09-20-2017, 07:40 PM | #85 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: The Land of Enchantment
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Re: Spitballing a Space Opera Boxed Set
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But I also wanted to comment thusly: 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. It is clearly space-operatic, as opposed to hard scifi, cyberpunk, transhuman, or whatever you want to call the other genres. So this notional boxed set would best be done as a worked setting IMHO. 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. I hate reactionless thrusters... :P And anyone on this thread who hasn't already read the Atomic Rockets website in it's entirety needs to do so RIGHT NOW. At the very least you need to know the differences between technobabble, unobtainium, handwavium, and McGuffinite.
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I'd need to get a grant and go shoot a thousand goats to figure it out. Last edited by acrosome; 09-20-2017 at 08:00 PM. |
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09-20-2017, 07:51 PM | #86 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Binghamton, NY, USA. Near the river Styx in the 5th Circle.
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Re: Spitballing a Space Opera Boxed Set
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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:
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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Eric B. Smith GURPS Data File Coordinator GURPSLand I shall pull the pin from this healing grenade and... Kaboom-baya. Last edited by ericbsmith; 09-20-2017 at 08:10 PM. |
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09-20-2017, 08:13 PM | #87 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Binghamton, NY, USA. Near the river Styx in the 5th Circle.
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Re: Spitballing a Space Opera Boxed Set
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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.
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Eric B. Smith GURPS Data File Coordinator GURPSLand I shall pull the pin from this healing grenade and... Kaboom-baya. Last edited by ericbsmith; 09-20-2017 at 08:33 PM. |
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09-20-2017, 08:24 PM | #88 | |
Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: The Land of Enchantment
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Re: Spitballing a Space Opera Boxed Set
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:) See? They suck. If you make it the local star, well, you have just made the local star the heart of creation, and what about all the other ships around all the other stars? Any reactionless drive is going to raise some damned uncomfortable questions, and the people in the circles in which I move will come up with all of them. Not that a subwarp drive doesn't raise questions, mind you. Two that jump immediately to mind include "what happens when you're moving at a good clip and the engine fails or gets turned off?" and "what happens when the ship hits something?" Because the ship is hitting hydrogen molecules all the time at the very least. But these questions are a lot less Earth-shattering than the ones that reactionless drives raise. Believe me, I am familiar with all of the various ways to try and make reactionless drives work in a setting. I just find them all unfulfilling and all things considered I thing warp-with-subwarp solves the most problems while creating the least problems. But I've made my case, so I can sign off, now.
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I'd need to get a grant and go shoot a thousand goats to figure it out. Last edited by acrosome; 09-20-2017 at 08:36 PM. |
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09-20-2017, 08:34 PM | #89 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Binghamton, NY, USA. Near the river Styx in the 5th Circle.
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Re: Spitballing a Space Opera Boxed Set
It doesn't matter. The answers to these questions don't matter because the effects you are worrying about are literally waved away as a genre convention. That's the part of Space Opera you seem to be missing.
In Star Trek or Star Wars or Babylon 5 or Dark Matter or The Orville or Galaxy Quest or Farscape or Stargate or Dune or Andromeda or Battlestar Galactica or Known Space or Ender Wiggin Saga or... the list goes on and on... these questions simply don't come up because they are ignored as a matter of convention. It can be safely assumed by the viewer that there is a good in-universe explanation, but you don't need to worry about it. You simply can't take a Reactionless drive and crack a planet with it. For [insert technobabble] reasons. It is literally a genre trope of Space Opera.
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Eric B. Smith GURPS Data File Coordinator GURPSLand I shall pull the pin from this healing grenade and... Kaboom-baya. Last edited by ericbsmith; 09-20-2017 at 08:44 PM. |
09-20-2017, 08:58 PM | #90 |
Join Date: Oct 2014
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Re: Spitballing a Space Opera Boxed Set
I don't think you need to use reactionless thrusters to get where you want to go. Space opera tends to assume some stupidly powerful engines, powerful enough that most gravity wells are just an annoyance at worst. If that's the case, then why not just say 1 tank of fuel gets you x AU? The engines are torch drives so we can assume that they're using brachistochrone flight profiles rather than hohmann flight profiles. Burn halfway there and then burn the rest of the way to brake at your destination. No need for giving Sir Newton the finger.
As for the map, I'd say either get reasonably close to the real thing as you can or put it in another galaxy far, far away and skip the headache of trying to collate the latest data for the local interstellar neighborhood. If you really want to use the Milky Way, though, you can do what I'm doing and base the map off this one from the Galaxy Map site. For the curious, here is the one I'm working on. Besides, why would you want a reactionless drive anyway? You miss out on the lances of thermonuclear fire as ships desperately try to dodge out of the way of incoming fire, or as they try for a Souza maneuver. |
Tags |
boxed sets, sci fi, space opera |
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