04-16-2012, 05:11 PM | #21 |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Eindhoven, the Netherlands
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Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic
I shouldn't have said "accurate," as no depiction of force swords is likely to be "accurate" ^_^
I meant the consistent bit. Verisimilitude, not realism.
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My Blog: Mailanka's Musing. Currently Playing: Psi-Wars, a step-by-step exploration of building your own Space Opera setting, inspired by Star Wars. |
04-16-2012, 07:06 PM | #22 | |
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Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Albuquerque, NM
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Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic
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And there's a difference between someone claiming to be able to hack something and someone actually being able to hack it. Iran MAY have hacked a drone. Or it may have just have malfunctioned and tried to land somewhere mountainous. It's easier, but even now with the technology in it's infancy it's not EASY. And the more computer controlled stuff is (which is more and more necessary to keep up with the Jones', combat effectiveness-wise) the less difference there is between what you can do when you hack a pilot's computerized flight controls or hack a computer's computerized flight controls. |
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04-16-2012, 07:17 PM | #23 | |
Join Date: May 2008
Location: CA
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Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic
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04-16-2012, 08:59 PM | #24 |
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Republic of Texas; FOS
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Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic
In recent years my favorite sci-fi future has become John Morressey's "Del Whitby" galaxy. 500 years or so in the future, Old Earth was abandoned as it deteriorated and fell into ruin. Their Driveships are super-science, and last centuries with virtually no maintenance required. BUT, the effects of relativity ensure if you leave a planet, very much time spent at drive-speed mean that those that are planet bound will age double of triple your time. No one took technology to the stars because laser generators and nuclear power sources react lethally when you hit FTL. Literacy is a lost art due to the widespread dependence on vox recorders... So it's low tech sci-fi, at its best IMO.
I'm planning to start up a campaign soon, I've got some players that are interested. I suggest the books to anyone that this sort of background sounds interesting to!
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04-17-2012, 07:41 AM | #25 | |
Join Date: Feb 2011
Location: Cambridge, MA
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Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic
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Ultrascanners? Sure, we've got them. So does everyone else. Any interstellar crime syndicate worth it's salt will have a high energy wave scrambler though, so we're not going to be able to see anything until we get in real close. Reprogram a captured drone? Yeah, we could do that if we had access to a subgravitational computer matrix, but the closest one is fifty parsecs from here! Why haven't we built our own army of drones? Well, as it turns out their bodies are built from a composite duranium nanoweave, and the Evil Alliance have managed to take hold of the only planet we know of with a natural duranium supply. And so on. Both the nice thing and the difficult thing about sci-fi from the GM's perspective is the incredible complexity of the setting. It's nice because you can always add information that the characters knew the whole time, though the players may have not. But it's difficult as well, for all the reasons you mentioned. If you're talking star wars in particular, I imagine that as a world that's been TL10-11^ for so long, people just accept it without understanding all of the technology. For example, maybe every droid has some basic programming that was done so long ago no one can reproduce it; they simply use the same old existing programming as a template whenever it's time to build a new droid (which may explain why AI is so rampant, existing even in devices that don't seem to require it). |
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04-17-2012, 09:51 AM | #26 |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic
[QUOTE=Mailanka; Super-science allows things like force fields that you can only beat with magical laser swords, and pyschic crystals and sagely psychohistorians who talk about how your character was prophesied* and all such nonsense.
[/QUOTE] Prophesy is outside the province of technological viability and attempts to dress it up in "psychohistory" or whatever comes across as a combination of ham-handedness and timidity on the authors part. In principle the physics of whether a sword can decapitate an orc and the physics of whether a space missile hits or misses a given target are equally irrelevant to whether prophesy has a place in the story. The same applies with living stars, and the like. Such plot devices are equally fantastic whatever the TL and are tangential to whether or not the technology itself performs as it would under the assumption of it's existence. The fact that prophecy is more in space opera then in hard sci-fi is a literary phenomenon not a scientific one.
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04-17-2012, 10:16 AM | #27 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic
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04-17-2012, 10:21 AM | #28 |
Join Date: Nov 2009
Location: Oregon
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Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic
Indeed. Such things are pretty explicitly magical (or at the very least nowhere close to feasible with our current understanding of physics) but Space Opera already allows many magical effects. Psionics are the primary example of this, but superscience is often "sufficiently advanced" to qualify as well, especially for things like Teleportation, direct energy-to-matter conversion, and FTL travel.
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04-17-2012, 10:26 AM | #29 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic
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My point was that it is the absense or presence of prophecy is LOGICALLY irrelevant to the behavior of plot devices that are presumed to be in accordance with some rough interpretation of The-world-as-we-know-it, because the presence or absence of exceptions to the natural order is a separate question from the behavior of the natural order. From the literary point of view however, prophecy and sapient stars belong more in space opera.
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison Last edited by jason taylor; 04-17-2012 at 10:31 AM. |
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04-17-2012, 10:31 AM | #30 |
Join Date: Nov 2009
Location: Oregon
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Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic
I think his point (and the one I agree with) is that prophecy is often presented as a feature of a broader magical phenomenon (such as the Force or Psionics) which is already an established part of that setting. So of course it shows up in settings that allow magic (ie, Space Opera) rather than ones which don't (Hard Sci-Fi).
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