01-06-2016, 06:17 PM | #41 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ronkonkoma, NY
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Re: GURPS - Space Opera?
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GURPS Space includes space opera as a tone, feel, or mood of a campaign. Others include action-adventure, horror, romance, surreal, thriller, travelogue, and wonder. Tales of the Solar Patrol is mostly action-adventure, but can stray into space opera if the campaign is all about trying to stop the Overlord of Jupiter from conquering Earth. However, the ships aren't grand enough and the characters aren't strange enough or powerful enough to generally label it as space opera. |
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01-06-2016, 06:34 PM | #42 |
Join Date: Oct 2008
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Re: GURPS - Space Opera?
Well, there are few older cynical ones like Blake's 7.
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01-06-2016, 06:52 PM | #43 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: On the road again...
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Re: GURPS - Space Opera?
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I've actually had people tell me they couldn't see a reason for the racker. It is kind of a niche bird that you don't think about until you see it in action. (I think at some point the anime VanDread had something similar, an in-combat rearming ship separate from the mothership.)
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01-06-2016, 08:41 PM | #44 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Denver, Colorado
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Re: GURPS - Space Opera?
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The Hellburner-class were fast attack craft with crews of four, attached by slings to the Earth Corp carriers during the Company Wars period in Cherryh's "Merchanter" books. In the "Merchanter" universe, starships tended to be vast, and used a hyperdrive to jump between star systems. Upon arrival, they came booming in with high-V and acquired mass, and "pulsed" their jump vanes to dump enough V that reaction drives became useful for in-system maneuvering. If the vessels jumped too far, they acquired so much mass (some relativity stuff applied in the Merchanter universe, but it was really fuzzy science) they could never slow down enough. If that happened, the crews were in for a "long ride" -- a trip that could take years or even decades, and (rarely) resulted in ships lost in interstellar space. Earth Company (and Merchanter Alliance) warships took advantage of this with vastly overpowered military vessels capable of navigation feats that civilian craft simply lacked the power to match. They dropped out of jump with ungodly velocity, dumped some V, launched missiles or k-kill weaponry at known targets, and then took their time slowing down the rest of the way. The Hellburners were small, fast and highly overpowered for their mass. Carrier vessels dropped out of hyperdrive and released the Hellburner riders, which didn't dump V and kept right on coming. The Hellburners with their four-person crews (pilot/commander, copilot/navigator, sensors/offensive weapons, ECM/defensive weapons/damage control) screamed toward targets at high-V, launched missiles at fairly close ranges, used rail-guns for kinetic kills and blasted past. They had heavy ECM suites, superb targeting capabilities, and low detection signatures until they lit their drives. They could cross distances in a few hours that would take larger ships days to cover, because the larger ships had to slow down. (Hellburners weren't "stealth" craft -- no ships could be, in the Merchanter universe -- but you had to be looking for them, and usually Earth Corp carrier task forces put out so much ECM and radar-spoofing crap that small riders with minimal profiles were easy to miss. I sorta got the impression -- even though Cherryh, as usual, focused on personalities and relationships instead of on tech -- Hellburners were meant to perform a Wild Weasel/SEAD role, too.) Usually, they were able to slow down reasonably well, and dodge better than their larger targets, but speed provided their primary tactical advantage. They were tinfoil autocannons with targeting sensors and missile-racks bolted on, powered by honkin' huge engines, but no jump capabilities. If they dispersed, too far, the carrier vessels had to maneuver to recover them. If they stuck around for long enough to get targeted, themselves, they died.
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-- MXLP:9 [JD=1, DK=1, DM-M=1, M(FAW)=1, SS=2, Nym=1 (nose coffee), sj=1 (nose cocoa), Maz=1] "Some days, I just don't know what to think." -Daryl Dixon. Last edited by tshiggins; 01-06-2016 at 08:51 PM. |
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01-06-2016, 09:09 PM | #45 |
Join Date: Sep 2007
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Re: GURPS - Space Opera?
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01-06-2016, 09:47 PM | #46 |
Join Date: Jul 2014
Location: New Zealand.
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Re: GURPS - Space Opera?
The tech options are complicated too. Interesting but complicated.
Two extremes would be Peter f Hamiltons more recent works. Very high tech, massively integrated into every aspect of life. The other end of the extreme would be david gunns maximum offense series which started off with the protagonists running around in a battlefield not too far removed from ww1. Atrophied technology is common ish in space opera. Digression: firepower vs armour. Many space operas seem to have armour (defensive screens etc) having the upper hand over attacks.
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01-07-2016, 11:02 AM | #47 |
Untitled
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: between keyboard and chair
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Re: GURPS - Space Opera?
Which is why I said "usually". One can always find exceptions to any general rule (even this one).
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Rob Kelk “Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.” – Bernard Baruch, Deming (New Mexico) Headlight, 6 January 1950 No longer reading these forums regularly. |
01-07-2016, 02:42 PM | #48 | |
Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: L.I., NY
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Re: GURPS - Space Opera?
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I think if someone want to produce GURPS Space Opera, whether it was a series, book or Pyramid article, the first step would be defining what the important elements of space opera are, in a way that a large portion of the potential market could agree with. My take on space opera would include:
Anyone else have other ideas of what 'space opera' is? |
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01-07-2016, 02:55 PM | #49 |
Join Date: Mar 2008
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Re: GURPS - Space Opera?
Like zeppelins are a possible marker of alternate history exploding planets are a mark of space opera. Star Trek (TOS) did have a couple of those.
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01-07-2016, 05:06 PM | #50 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: GURPS - Space Opera?
Not obligatory but characteristic. It wasn't for nothing that Edmond Hamilton was nicknamed "World-Wrecker."
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