Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic

[borithan]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Trying to find the tactical logic of STTNG (and the other non-TOS Trek series) is futile, there isn't any such tactical logic to find.

I would accept that. It isn't a military show, and often the tactics make little sense (though less often than some critics suggest).

The STTNG phasers are short-ranged, lack power, lack a sight, are hard to conceal, I don't recall seeing them used for wide-beam effect (though I could be wrong about that)...of course the total lack of tactical competence displayed by STTNG characters doesn't help.

While I can accept "lack a sight," and the fact that they are ergonomic nightmares (though they did improve slightly through the whole TNG and post TNG run), we see little suggesting what their range might be. Yes, it looks like their effective range should be quite short, as they would be next to impossible to aim, but the actual physical limits on the beams are never discussed. Now, I would posit that they are indeed quite short, as the Federation is unlikely to want random beams missing their target and flying off large distances to cause collatoral damage somewhere else, but that is never explicitly stated.

Hard to conceal? Well, the "hand phaser" still exists. Geordie has the one where he deals with the unbelievably stupid Pakleds (not a good episode). Like the original phaser it forms part of the bigger "pistol" type, except in this case the weapon breaks open and the hand phaser slots inside.

Lacking power? They generally use them on stun (which makes sense for the less martial power like the Federation), though they have been used to disintigrate objects (like in TOS) and blow rock faces apart. They have also demonstrated wide beam on more than one occasion (Used to dig a tunnel in TNG, sweep rooms for changelings in DS9, and to stun the whole bridge crew at once in Voyager). Various sources suggest range is [I]very[I] limited with this setting (10 metres or so), but that is never stated on the show itself.

The best way to describe the phasers (particularly in TNG onwards) is that they are massively inconsistent in their results. Sometimes maximum power causes rock faces to explode violently. Sometimes it causes rock faces to vanish with no other effect. Sometimes people are disintegrated when killed, sometimes they just fall over, sometimes they are "wounded". Now, this can be partially explained by the various settings (The technical manual suggests 16 power settings with various other beam settings), but often it is just down to the weapon doing exactly what the plot wants. Just as many modern films have people "shrugging off" minor gun shot wounds, people in Star Trek can "shrug off" being shot with a phaser, if that is the desired result by the plot.

As far as projectile weapons being better against the Borg: We don't actually know that. There is nothing saying the Borg couldn't adapt to that as well, especially as Worf (not the most technically minded) could create a personal field that deflected bullets from a communicator. It is probably just the case that they don't normally face projectile weapons and so are not normally set up for defending themselves against it.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Trying to find the tactical logic of STTNG (and the other non-TOS Trek series) is futile, there isn't any such tactical logic to find.

*snip*

...of course the total lack of tactical competence displayed by STTNG characters doesn't help.

This is a great example of what I'm talking about when it comes to space opera, verisimilitude and GURPS. This whole discussion is, in fact.

In Star Trek, as borithan says, phasers do whatever the plot requires them to do. Note that in some episodes, they can vaporize rock with it, but in other episodes, a phaser blast will hit a bit of cover and leave a scorch mark. In a ship, this makes sense (you wouldn't want to blow away the ship) but in an open setting, there's no particularly good reason not to just vaporize your opponent's cover.

If I created a not-Star Trek Space Opera where I included disintegrator pistols and rifles that also had "kill" and "stun" settings, single shots rather than RoF 10 and with a -2 on ACC, but including the wide-beam setting as a possibility (shorter range, but acts as a cone), then I expect players will see the value of such weapons, but regardless of what I want from a given plot, I cannot expect the players to intuitively know that I want them to use them. If they don't want to leave bodies, then they won't. If their opponents take cover, they'll destroy the cover. If they're fighting large swarms in small quarters, they'll switch to wide-beams. Even if the setting has a no military doctrine worth discussing, the players will develop one as a matter of SOP, because that's what players do.

Thus, it seems useful to me to understand the implications of what I introduce and to understand how to control it well before I put it into the hands of the players. It's true that Space Opera "can" be as sloppy as Star Trek, but I don't think that it needs to be.

[Michael Thayne]

Before people talk about how uploading is superscience, I recommend they read this:

Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap

You can debate the identity question, or whether they're really be conscious, and stuff like that (and I personally am agnostic on the consciousness issue) but various philosophical positions are compatible with the tech working. Indeed, the philosophical debates can be assumed to be ongoing in a setting like THS, which is probably why few people decide to become ghosts until they're near death anyway.

As for the original poster's question:

AI: If you want a TL 11 campaign to be about biosapients, you basically have to declare arbitrary limits on AI capabilities. Give them all Hidebound, Low Empathy, and No Sense of Humor, and require their modular abilities to be taken with the Limited Integration limitation. And make them hardware-based, not software, to prevent the "invest a a lot of money training one, then make lots of copies" trick.

Forcing Melee: Tales of the Solar Patrol (p. 31) deals with this by making it very dangerous to fire an "atomic gun" inside a spaceship. The table with miss effects may be a bit exaggerated, but this probably still should be true in settings that try to work out the "logical" implications of UT and SS weaponry.

Also, your comments about beam weapons vs. force swords made me think: why do you have to choose? You could have a setting where all of the empire's elite troops have been genetically engineered with limited precognitive abilities, and armed with field-jacketed x-ray lasers that incorporate force bayonets. How's that for space opera?

There are also some very mundane reasons to encourage use of melee attacks that can be used in a THS or modern spy game as well, as Kromm once pointed out.

Close-up ship battles: This shows up in space opera a lot, but I wonder how essential to the genre it is. Star Wars wouldn't be Star Wars without the attack run on the Death Star, dodging asteroids, etc., but the main thing Star Trek gets out of such close-up battles is that by having them close-up, it becomes possible to show the audience the battle from a 3rd-person perspective.

Also, there's no reason big space battles have to play a big role in space opera. They were only an occasional feature of Star Trek, and the Serenity didn't even have weapons!

[Opellulo]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

We've discussed restrictions, both cultural and technological, but these tend to remove possible technologies, or possibly mitigate them ("We have advanced medicine but no augmentation because of cultural issues.") And people have talked about story-based restrictions ("We could snipe him from a mile away, but we won't because...") but while these will work for a session, they won't work for world-building.

In particular, what I tend to find in Space Opera settings is this: Technology that at least looks advanced compared to modern technology, thus clearly announcing that the setting is "sci-fi," but the capabilities of the technology don't necessarily violate the premise of the space opera in question.

Consider our disintegrators-and-force swords space-pirate game. If we want space-pirates in the sense of cutlasses and blackpowder pistols, then single-shot disintegrators might start to fit the bill (though it wouldn't be clear to me why they wouldn't snipe at one another with their sniper rifles).

There seem to be three ways to do this sort of world-building. First, you counter technology with technology. By creating speed-activated force fields that explode like a nuclear blast when high-powered weapons are used against them, Dune introduces a believable technological counter to ranged UT, and gives us the knife-fights we expect from Dune.

The second is to introduce house-rules or cinematic switches that justify certain tropes. The Mecha Pyramid article introduces a rule that increases the damage inflicted by high levels of strength, better allowing two mecha to punch one another to death, thus justifying the fist-fights you often see mecha get into in anime.

Finally, you can alter the technology directly. Of the three, I like this option the least, because you run the risk of coming across as unrealistic. If we replace M16s with single-shot, short-ranged disintegrators that seem particularly bad at penetrating cover (phaser) or with short-ranged gyrocs that are more expensive but no more likely to kill people, then players might simply choose to get cheaper but as effective TL 8 weapons, if those become an option.

But still: What suggestions or experiences does the Hive Mind have regarding these methods?

This is a very valid point on a narrative side: "The same with X" sci-fi is the most common but this for a very simple reason: audience's understanding.
While everyone could imagine the look and meaning of a "lightsaber", "blaster pistol" or "combat armour" this become more and more difficult as you introduce less known and tangible elements that require specific scietific knowledge: What's a nanite? How it works? What's the morphology of a totally alien specie? And so on.

In RPG the same is valid for your players: you could create the most believable hard sci-fi setting ever, but if your player cannot undestand it, it becomes pointless.

To me a good sci-fi setting should be plausible, not scientifically correct plus it should be consistent and mantain reciprocity in its elements. Japaneses are Masters at this: 2001 nights, Gunbuster, Planetes, Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor are some of the best "hard sci-fi" setting ever.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

Also, your comments about beam weapons vs. force swords made me think: why do you have to choose? You could have a setting where all of the empire's elite troops have been genetically engineered with limited precognitive abilities, and armed with field-jacketed x-ray lasers that incorporate force bayonets. How's that for space opera?

You're adapting the space opera to the realities of GURPS, and that's great. At least one of my space opera settings does much the same thing, and I find UT eminently compatible with the modernish Action-Thriller (that is, it's very easy to do a Space Opera version of the Bourne Identitiy, Call of Duty 3, or Black Hawk Down)

What we have in the force swords vs beam weapons discussion is the presumption that we want force swords to be iconic, powerful and useful, but this tends to be negated by the fact that ranged weapons are so superior. In your example, you've simply acknowledged this, and then force swords become relegated to "force bayonets" and lose their iconic status.

To quote Alton Brown: "...because then you have scrambled eggs. And there's nothing wrong with scrambled eggs. But we're making an omelette, not scrambled eggs."

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

You're adapting the space opera to the realities of GURPS, and that's great. At least one of my space opera settings does much the same thing, and I find UT eminently compatible with the modernish Action-Thriller (that is, it's very easy to do a Space Opera version of the Bourne Identitiy, Call of Duty 3, or Black Hawk Down)

What we have in the force swords vs beam weapons discussion is the presumption that we want force swords to be iconic, powerful and useful, but this tends to be negated by the fact that ranged weapons are so superior. In your example, you've simply acknowledged this, and then force swords become relegated to "force bayonets" and lose their iconic status.

To quote Alton Brown: "...because then you have scrambled eggs. And there's nothing wrong with scrambled eggs. But we're making an omelette, not scrambled eggs."

Oh, I wasn't terribly clear about this. The point of specifying precognitive abilities is that they have precognitive parry, so they're combining Jedi-style parrying of beams with the ability to attack at a range. So they're "powerful and useful" in the same way they are in Star Wars, it's just that the setting also acknowledges range is a big deal.

[kdtipa]

I've posted a few times about how the given story in a session can be used to provide situations where it is more likely that close up combat occur, but that doesn't seem to be a very popular choice. I give up. I'll try to think of things you could do. Though I like that bit in the thread about accepting that space opera is going to need a little willful suspension of disbelief. :)

Personal Thought Controlled Teleporters
Computer tech can't handle the abstraction necessary to target a teleport. The human mind however is excellent as a way to conceptualize a destination relative to current position. So a person can teleport with these gadgets, but they do use a lot of power, so there's a cool-down between uses and only a certain number of jumps before it needs a recharge. But the action itself is a free action.

The idea makes it so that a person has to go with the teleport, and it can be easily explained that the devices can't handle much more than the person and their gear without being huge devices. So space ships could teleport short distances (within visual range of the pilot), and people using the personal sized ones can teleport a few times using this small backpack sized device, but you couldn't just teleport explosives into your enemy's base without going along for the ride. Maybe the act of teleporting also sets off unstable matter... so carrying some kinds of explosives is a bad idea.

This gives melee types the ability to jump into the fray without getting shot at on the way.

It doesn't address sniping. Doesn't reduce the usefulness of shooting from a distance, but does make it possible to rely on a melee weapon in a lot of cases. Just an idea.

[Gnome]

I think ultimately it all depends on setting.

Space pirates? Advanced cloaking devices make it impossible to detect ships from a distance, so pirates have to try to sneak in close, then board before the victims get a chance to make a run for it. Once on a ship, I think "force cutlasses" are a believable primary weapon, especially with the ability to parry enemy fire. Throw in some genetic engineering to give our pirates just the edge they need...

Future super-spies? The need for discretion can probably justify whatever trope you're going for. Maybe most civilized areas simply don't allow blasters, and scan everyone for weapons, or for certain restricted weapons.

Maybe you could give us a better idea of a setting? Space Opera is quite broad.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Fresh new brain? I thought we were talking about THS style ghosting, which is completely realistic if really really hard to do.

It's meaningless to say that THS style ghosting is realistic, since we don't know enough about how the brain works and what it does to make such an assessment. We don't really know what all of the functions and processes of the brain are and do, and we don't know if the processes of the brain are the full story of consciousness. If they are the whole story, we still don't know if all of those processes can even exist/occur in other, non-biological structures or not. We're mostly just guessing.

Thus saying it's 'realistic' is like a natural philosopher from 1600 assessing the 'realism' of a nuclear fission plant vs. a phlogiston concentrator. From his POV, both are equally magical or equally realistic.

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

It's meaningless to say that THS style ghosting is realistic, since we don't know enough about how the brain works and what it does to make such an assessment. We don't really know what all of the functions and processes of the brain are and do, and we don't know if the processes of the brain are the full story of consciousness. If they are the whole story, we still don't know if all of those processes can even exist/occur in other, non-biological structures or not. We're mostly just guessing.

Thus saying it's 'realistic' is like a natural philosopher from 1600 assessing the 'realism' of a nuclear fission plant vs. a phlogiston concentrator. From his POV, both are equally magical or equally realistic.

You're sowing doubt with reasonable sounding arguments, but "we still don't know if all of those processes can even exist/occur in other, non-biological structures or not" is nonsensical. You can model anything physical with a sophisticated enough computer, even if your model doesn't work in exactly the same way as what it is modeling. A sufficiently advanced model's outputs are indistinguishable from reality's outputs.

We have no reason to believe that there is some non-physical component of intelligence, and implying because we don't know for SURE it isn't "realistic" is simply ignoring the definition of realism in reference to science fiction. We have no reason to suspect it wouldn't work, only that it may be difficult. But not in a "beyond the capabilities of engineering to create" kind of difficult, simply "needs (lots) more study and development" kind of way.