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Old 02-24-2020, 04:07 PM   #41
Aldric
 
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Default Re: Coolant [Spaceships]

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Originally Posted by Agemegos View Post
Umm. Speed in what frame of reference? If you are about to discard the Principle of Relativity, it's best not to draw attention to the Theory of Relativity right at the point where you do it.

My earnest advice is that an inertialess, reactionless, pseudovelocity, or FTL drive cannot be made convincing, and the more you try the more you draw attention to the exact spot that you want players to look away from. Get over heavy ground as light as you can. Tell players the operational characteristic of your superscience as briefly and baldly as possible, flush the pseudoscientific rationalisation, and pass quickly to some other point of interest, such as technoninjas, pirate catgirls, and the Neo-Confucian Space Empire. Players don't worry about physics problems while their techo-youxia are flirting with the guards on the air-gangway of a pirate-catgirl space-cruiser.
I'm sold on the catgirls! Pirate or not. Who cares how it flies, as long as we fly with them ?
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Old 02-24-2020, 07:54 PM   #42
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Default Re: Coolant [Spaceships]

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Originally Posted by Agemegos View Post

My earnest advice is that an inertialess, reactionless, pseudovelocity, or FTL drive cannot be made convincing, and the more you try the more you draw attention to the exact spot that you want players to look away from.
My take as well.

The thing that WMD spaceships actually points at is a way more fundamental problem than your ships can kill cities. It is that a space drive that can kill cities is also a power plant comparable to the generating capacity of some nations. A culture so rich people so downscale they are willing to live as adventurers have access to private generators that could power Belgium is so alien to our experience it's tough to tell meaningful stories about it at all. You are *already* ignoring so many other utterly transformative effects of vast amounts of energy being available that ignoring one more (you can use it to build really big bombs....) is basically trivial. It apparently is the one people see it is being ignored most easily, but those others are still there in "reality", it's just nobody is pointing them out.
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Old 02-24-2020, 08:39 PM   #43
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Default Re: Coolant [Spaceships]

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Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
It's understandable but linguistically funny to talk about being "sensitive to relativistic effects" in a way that is clearly discarding the lack of a privileged reference frame that is the nominal bedrock of relativity.
I found an interesting thing called Bell's spaceship paradox...which I plan to wave around the same area as "the reactionless drive is enabled by hitherto unknown subatomic forces found in meta-stable alloys of super-heavy post transuranic elements." The ability of these materials to affect space-time in a way that violates classical and relativistic physics is due to relativity rearing its head at an atomic and sub-atomic level. As for what inertial frame...it could be relative to the frame of the location where the PTU alloy was manufactured...or to some unknown "ground state" of space-time. Other superscience in this setting is a hyper drive that works by shifting mass into the bulk from the current brane, so a "ground state" may make be useful for describing that.

It's superscience...it's all about how creative you can get with the technobabble. FWIW, I do run some of these by a PhD astrophysicist, just to get a feel for how hard I'm shredding real physics.
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Old 02-24-2020, 09:41 PM   #44
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Default Re: Coolant [Spaceships]

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I found an interesting thing called Bell's spaceship paradox...which I plan to wave around the same area as "the reactionless drive is enabled by hitherto unknown subatomic forces found in meta-stable alloys of super-heavy post transuranic elements." The ability of these materials to affect space-time in a way that violates classical and relativistic physics is due to relativity rearing its head at an atomic and sub-atomic level. As for what inertial frame...it could be relative to the frame of the location where the PTU alloy was manufactured...or to some unknown "ground state" of space-time. Other superscience in this setting is a hyper drive that works by shifting mass into the bulk from the current brane, so a "ground state" may make be useful for describing that.

It's superscience...it's all about how creative you can get with the technobabble. FWIW, I do run some of these by a PhD astrophysicist, just to get a feel for how hard I'm shredding real physics.
Once you're at privileging a frame of reference, you run back into the pre-relativistic implications of stuff not being at rest relative to the ether. If you're speed limited in a particular frame of reference, you can go over to a place where the local masses of note are moving at high velocity relative to that frame, and stuff winds up being really weird. That's why people often try to have speed limits somehow be tied to nearby gravity wells...

Though to be fair if you don't have FTL as well, traveling far enough from home for that to come up might be prohibitive.
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Old 02-24-2020, 10:15 PM   #45
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Default Re: Coolant [Spaceships]

Some GMs tell me that they struggle to get players to read more than one A4 side of background material — about 800 words if you use small type.

I am a brutally verbose GM, demand that my players read 9,750 words of introduction to my SF setting, and find that that definitely deters some players who are otherwise keen.

How much do you want to ask your players to read? Of that budget, how many words do you want to invest in spinning a tissue of nonsense that sounds like physics? Every word you write about unknown subatomic forces found in meta-stable alloys of super-heavy post transuranic elements is one less word that players will read about Nexus 7 bioroid ninjas.

In the player's introduction to my interstellar SF setting, here is the whole text of what I wrote about the FTL drive:
An Eichberger drive allows a starship to travel at 1,000 times the speed of light.
If a player were to ask me "in what frame of reference?" I would answer "let me tell you about the parahuman elves and dwarves on Beleriand, and why they have orcs." If the player said "relativity, causality, and FTL travel: you can only pick two!" I'd say "I choose causality and FTL travel. Let me tell you about Nahal, the planet where they don't believe in men and women."

Right now the PC in my campaign is travelling under cover as a consultant bathyscaphist on a sailing ship on Paradise I, and he has just figured out that the crew are plotting to mutiny after he recovers the McGuffin from the deep. His mission being (1) to make sure that the cabin boy comes to no great harm, and (2) to plant certain fakes among the archaeological material recovered from a wrecked space-ship. The player has things to do that are more fun than picking the holes in technobabble. He would rather figure out why his mysterious bosses care about an innkeeper's orphan on a backwater planet than what frame of reference is privileged in the workings of Galactic Spaceways' liner operations.
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Old 02-24-2020, 10:32 PM   #46
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Default Re: Coolant [Spaceships]

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Originally Posted by Agemegos View Post
Some GMs tell me that they struggle to get players to read more than one A4 side of background material — about 800 words if you use small type.

I am a brutally verbose GM, demand that my players read 9,750 words of introduction to my SF setting, and find that that definitely deters some players who are otherwise keen.

How much do you want to ask your players to read? Of that budget, how many words do you want to invest in spinning a tissue of nonsense that sounds like physics? Every word you write about unknown subatomic forces found in meta-stable alloys of super-heavy post transuranic elements is one less word that players will read about Nexus 7 bioroid ninjas.

In the player's introduction to my interstellar SF setting, here is the whole text of what I wrote about the FTL drive:
An Eichberger drive allows a starship to travel at 1,000 times the speed of light.
If a player were to ask me "in what frame of reference?" I would answer "let me tell you about the parahuman elves and dwarves on Beleriand, and why they have orcs." If the player said "relativity, causality, and FTL travel: you can only pick two!" I'd say "I choose causality and FTL travel. Let me tell you about Nahal, the planet where they don't believe in men and women."

Right now the PC in my campaign is travelling under cover as a consultant bathyscaphist on a sailing ship on Paradise I, and he has just figured out that the crew are plotting to mutiny after he recovers the McGuffin from the deep. His mission being (1) to make sure that the cabin boy comes to no great harm, and (2) to plant certain fakes among the archaeological material recovered from a wrecked space-ship. The player has things to do that are more fun than picking the holes in technobabble. He would rather figure out why his mysterious bosses care about an innkeeper's orphan on a backwater planet than what frame of reference is privileged in the workings of Galactic Spaceways' liner operations.
You've kind of centered 'I'm not interested in spaceship maneuvering and don't want my players to be either' there. Which isn't necessarily something you'll find total agreement with...
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Old 02-24-2020, 11:49 PM   #47
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Default Re: Coolant [Spaceships]

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You've kind of centered 'I'm not interested in spaceship maneuvering and don't want my players to be either' there. Which isn't necessarily something you'll find total agreement with...
That's fair criticism....

If I were interested in space opera then I would describe the relevant capabilities of spacecraft, perhaps in terms of some sort of game rules, and still avoid the technobabble. That might involve such statements as "to engage warp, a starship must have enough kinetic energy to be gravitationally unbound, i.e. travelling at system escape velocity" and "when a starship materialises out of warp is is stationary with respect to the barycentre of the system; how close it is to the desired exit point is determined by MoS on the astrogator's skill roll", and "spaceships are built using TL10 limited-superscience fusion torch reaction engines per Spaceships p.23."

That sort of thing is the cool content of a game centred on spaceship manoeuvring, its cyber-pirates and techno-ninjas. It is still the case that every word you write about how forcefields allow the fusion rocket to produce exhaust velocities above 9 km/s without temperatures above the sublimation point of graphite comes out of your budget for pirates and ninjas. Besides which, if your experience it anything like mine, all technobabble is either laughable gibberish to the players who studied physics, or else it allows them to drive a gold-plated Rolls-Royce through the loopholes it creates.

There is an explanation somewhere of the difference between SF and sci-fi that goes like this: "The hero asks the Professor how her time-machine works. In SF you get a page and a half about relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Garden of the Forking Paths. In sci-fi the Professor says "Sit in this seat here, shut the door, turn the power switch to 'on'. Then set the target date on this dial here, and push the big yellow button."

My advice remains that you ought to minimise the technobabble, and write as little as possible about the ways your setting violates relativity etc. A sci-fi setting is a magic trick, and it is best not to draw readers' attention to the sleights of hand. Save your word count for the cool content, and direct reader's attention away from the bits that challenge suspension-of-disbelief.
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Old 02-25-2020, 12:06 AM   #48
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Default Re: Coolant [Spaceships]

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Originally Posted by Agemegos View Post
My advice remains that you ought to minimise the technobabble, and write as little as possible about the ways your setting violates relativity etc. A sci-fi setting is a magic trick, and it is best not to draw readers' attention to the sleights of hand. Save your word count for the cool content, and direct reader's attention away from the bits that challenge suspension-of-disbelief.
That's great from the point of view of gms and sf writers. I cringe in reading Asimov's older robot stories where he talkes about vaccum tubes and such. The more readable stories today just said "it's a robot" and went on with the story.
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Old 02-25-2020, 08:54 AM   #49
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Default Re: Coolant [Spaceships]

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That's fair criticism....
As a counterpoint I've never had a player who said "Boo" about relativity.

The closest I've ever really come to interest in technobabble was one who thought it was sort of cool that the ship carried water in it's tanks and that it split that into hydrgen and oxygen with the oxygen going to the matter converter in main propulsion while the hydrogen went to make all other required superscience.

Of course, that was the player who didn't work with computers. Everyone else does do that to some degree and since i don't I never say anything about how computers work in my SF games. One of those guys did think it was cool that his TL10 wristwatch had an exabyte of storage space.
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Old 02-25-2020, 09:33 AM   #50
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Default Re: Coolant [Spaceships]

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As a counterpoint I've never had a player who said "Boo" about relativity.
I have pointed out that a particular interstellar travel system was rather dubious in terms of General Relativity, but I've only done this in-character, as a character who'd been created as an expert on it. Since a mystery was emerging that was clearly to do with malfunctions of the system, I regarded this as helping the GM, and they seemed to take it the same way.
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