Playability of STL Only Interstellar travel in GURPS?

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

EDIT: Even if your comparisons to GURPS complexity are apt, isn't complexity meant to be a logarithmic scale of overall computing power?

Supposedly. I've long maintained that on the basis of stuff like brain weight and neural connections for animals pegged at various GURPS IQs that species IQ for AIs ought to have the form k + Complexity/3.

Except that once sapient that IQ should be able vary anywhere in the same range as humans without change in complexity. That's just an unfortunate side effect of defining both animal and human IQ using the same scale, the differences between points of IQ in the parts of the scale humans are on simply isn't qualitatively the same as the difference between points of IQ on the piece animals occupy.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by another_nonsense

I'm toying with the idea of running a Space Campaign with the only FTL travel coming in the form Wormholes access to which would be accessible though a number network of gates stabilized by super dense matter (Though a number of particularly advanced Artilects are rumored to have Keyhole Drives).

Anyway because of this less travelled routes have to be traversed using STL reaction drives. From what I can tell this really only really becomes feasible at TL 11 in play due to the sheer amount of time it would take.

Also has anyone run a game like this? And if so did you factor in Relativity and how did this affect play?

Ideally I'd want the PC's homeworld to develop in the background from mid-late terraforming to planetary metropolis with it's own colony worlds but I think for that I might have to resort to fudging it.

I'll offer you three ideas for such a campaign.

The first comes from my GURPS "It's totally not Warhammer 40k, honest" setting. There, too, man has the option of forging FTL connections between worlds, but you have to get there the slow way first. You can make this very interesting by setting it in the far future after a calamity. Then you have loads of star gates leading to worlds that your people have forgotten. There are hundreds of fascinating civilizations out there, but they're all human, and all lost, and it's up to your players to find them and reignite the spark of empire.

The second comes from Revelation Space. There, all travel is STL too, but you don't do "A planet a week." Instead, each star system is as rich, dynamic and interesting as the THS setting. Thus, you can spend whole sessions, whole campaigns, exploring a single system, and when you're done, you wave good-bye and move to a completely different one for another whole campaign.

Finally, Houses of the Sun. Here, travel is STL as well, but it features civilizations (houses) that are galactic in scope. Each house contains some 10,000 individuals, and they all meet up every few millennia to trade discoveries, share technology, and mingle memories. You're alone, but at the same time, you're part of something much larger. Every character is, naturally, functionally immortal, and Houses regularly outlive whole civilizations, though each individual tends to spend a lot of time in hybernation, rather than actually doing anything. Still, one of these guys (or the party) descends on some TL 8 world in his TL 12 ship full of awesome, trades, has some adventures, and then flies off again, slumbering for years, awaiting his next adventure, logging his previous adventures in anticipation of the great reunion two centuries from now.

[Dinadon]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

Now people toss out lots of fantasy suggestions on how quantum mechanics can break relativity, but if we stick to a relativistic universe there's no paradox at all when using wormholes.

As I understood it, the wormhole opens on Earth after 3 months. Thus travelling through the wormhole would send you forwards/backwards through time as appropriate, in this case the 27 years of actual travel. Admittedly this is based on my memory on a book called Black Holes I had as a kid. There it used the notion of accelerating one end of the wormhole to near c, and then sending it back to yourself. Had a nice picture to. Can I assume this doesn't actually work that way?

I also don't understand how Malloyd's paradox is suppose to work, since it doesn't explain how you got to Vega before the ship first arrived, and it uses the same ship to launch both wormholes! The second wormhole's start point on Vega will thus exist at the same time as the first wormhole's exit. You could launch a missile from Earth at a higher relative speed so it catches up, by the orders of your 54 years older selves, but that would be following the its path, not going back along it.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

He has more recently said that they can't be used as "time machines" after repeated experimentation.

Since nobody has actually demonstrated the formation of a wormhole, to the extent there are plenty of theorists who assert that it cannot be done at all, I fail to see how you can do an experiment on one. If somebody is asserting they've done some wormhole experiments that have managed to falsify relativity that should've made more of a splash. And the FTL = time travel aspect is implicit in relativity. It's *path independent* trips which can be shown to be FTL in some frames can necessarily be shown to be into the past in others, so assertions that it can be done somehow are falsifications of relativity no matter how it is done.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Dinadon

I also don't understand how Malloyd's paradox is suppose to work, since it doesn't explain how you got to Vega before the ship first arrived, and it uses the same ship to launch both wormholes! The second wormhole's start point on Vega will thus exist at the same time as the first wormhole's exit. You could launch a missile from Earth at a higher relative speed so it catches up, by the orders of your 54 years older selves, but that would be following the its path, not going back along it.

That's the point. It's a demonstration of how the (I think aphysical) assertion holding the wormhole open for the trip somehow means the clocks on Earth and the ship remain synchronized produces causality violations. The system in which the clocks *don't* stay synchronized, so the two ends of the wormhole age at different rates and passing through a pair of them with different time differentials in the opposite order they were established takes you into the past by the difference between the two differentials is the more usual formulation of wormhole paradoxes. You're stuck with one or the other.

[Gizensha]

Originally Posted by malloyd

No, you fire it back along the ship's *normal* space track. Since it can't travel FTL with respect to Vega, and 6 months after it left Terra from the standpoint of Vega it had not arrived there yet, when you get there via the second wormhole, the first one doesn't exist yet. Yes it makes no sense. That's the point. FTL travel in a relativistic universe is equivalent to time travel, and inherently causes paradoxes like this.

I prefer the phrasiology 'Causality, FTL, Relativity - Pick any two,' myself...

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I said it didn't break conservation laws.

However, in terms of something even vaguely like human ability to interact with the real world? No, I don't see many signs of that at all. The futurists who are forever predicting it just around the corner are goofy.

Take the "prediction" in 2001:A Space Odyssey of the HAL 9000 just 30 years in the future. That turned out to be grossly wrong bit it didn't look silly then. I doubt that the predictors of Human-like (but superior in some ways) AI just 30 years from _now_ are going to be any more accurate.

AI is always 30 years in the future like flying cars and fusion power and I've been through too many iterations of this not to be cynical.

Whilst, yes, it is clearly 'a miracle happens here' technology, it is one that seems inevitable.

...I'd just predict at least 100 years, probably more, we'll both be dead by the time human-level AI comes online. (There are some interesting things going on reguarding computer generated jokes, and even in the 70s we had very good language parsers [A contemporary of Elizah, and despite doing something more impressive than Elizah, was overshadowed by the algorithm that parroted back whatever you told it in the style of a psychiatrist] - Neither of those are AI, though)

(I also thought the standard prediction was 50 years for AI and Fusion - Flying cars I thought we had the tech for them but not the ability to make them in a commercially viable manner, and I'm not anticipating that rectifying itself any time soon)

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

You haven't? There's quite a lot of AI development, and some futurist or another is always predicting a breakthrough in mere decades.

Right along with fusion power and the cure for aging.

Of course the problem with software based PCs is that they aren't going to be able to do much when they get there. No bodies, no tools. And whatever they are is going to be so alien as to be difficult to roleplay. For example I find it difficult to imagine why they are going.

In order to make this concept concept work in general, we need a comparatively cheap method of going between stars. The wormhole drive doesn't work with the premise because if wormholes were that easy the wormhole network would quickly envelope the whole of inhabited space.

Assume we are using a TL 11 Fusion Rocket. That's 180 MPS delta v per tank. What we need is to get up to the speed where we can use a ramscoop to refuel. Ramscoops are unrealistic, but not as unrealistic as wormhole transit networks. That means we need 9 fuel tanks. The 1.4 delta v modifier for that many tanks puts us over the threshold. One engine. One layer of armor. One habitat, One VRF beam weapon just to remove obstacles. , one shuttle bay, One power plant, One ram scoop. One chemical refinery. One space left over.

The result is a somewhat unrealistic vessel that can accelerate at 0.0005 gs...more or less forever. It adds up, but I'd still recommend slingshotting on your way out. Still it should be adequate to get from point to point in under a century.

That being said, what is the intending mission? Why is this ship travelling from star to star? Colonist transport?

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Right along with fusion power and the cure for aging.

Sure but somehow wormholes can work at face value.

Of course the problem with software based PCs is that they aren't going to be able to do much when they get there. No bodies, no tools.

The spacecraft is the body and it's also the tools.

For example I find it difficult to imagine why they are going.

Why go anywhere, anyway? Interstellar travel is hard to justify period. In this particular case, I gather they are seeding a wormhole network.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Sure but somehow wormholes can work at face value.
The spacecraft is the body and it's also the tools. Why go anywhere anyway. Interstellar travel is hard to justify period. In this particular case, I gather they are seeding a wormhole network.

Why would you need something intelligent for that? How is a "cloud of smart matter" a spaceship, anyway? In any case, not only is that probably TL 12 or 12+, it isn't what the OP was looking for. The OP was looking for a interstellar setting outside of the core wormhole civilisation. The wormhole net would grow slowly if at all.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Why would you need something intelligent for that?

You don't, unless you want them to be the PCs. Maybe they are motivated by scientific curiosity?