Things I learned studying up on Captain-and-Crew Space Opera

[Mailanka]

After Combat Medic had his fightin' thread about why the Federation of Star Trek is a terrible place, I was inspired to watch DS9 again (which actually addresses many of the issues raised), which led to me exploring other, similar series, like Farscape, Blake's 7 and so on. Not just watching them, but tearing them apart, reading the director's notes, playing games related to them, studying up on the lore behind them, trying to understand what makes them tick.

It's just a thing I do. I have ADHD, I get obsessed with things.

Here are some things that popped out.

1. Star Trek spaceship design actually makes sense

The idea behind the goofy pod-and-saucer design actually makes a sort of sense. The idea is that your radioactive drives are connected to the saucer, in which your crew resides so that it can provide power and thrust, but it remains far enough away that it doesn't irradiate them.

Of course, Star Trek ruins this by having its engineers just hanging out not 10 feet from the warp core, but hey, what's a realistic depiction of radiation against the chance to see a totally cool warp drive in the background.

(Similarly, the DS9 wheel makes sense if you want to generate artificial gravity. Just spin-up the station. But, of course, they have artificial gravity and it's pointed in the wrong direction, because... I don't know why).

2. The scale of the ships makes sense too

These ships are HUGE. The Galaxy class ships of Star Trek would be SM+15 or so, and Romulan Warbirds are even bigger. Moira from Farscape is similarly gigantic, despite the fact that they only ever show like 10 people as the crew.

Of course, a simple thought experiment shows why. The ships are often described containing simply titanic amounts of energy and slinging them back and forth. The sort of masses and energies required to actually create something like an Alcubierre drive, assuming its even possible, are pretty big. And having the kind of energies in your shields necessary to stop antimatter missiles from simply vaporizing you instantly are likewise pretty titanic. Furthermore, most of these civilization seems to have advanced manufacturing means and have a vast scale. They have access to the resources of asteroids, massive populations on a variety of worlds. They are many magnitudes of order more productive than our civilization is. If they put a fraction of that into military production, the result is going to be fleets far larger than we can currently deploy, with ships far larger than we'd even think about.

The writers don't really understand any of this

As I've already pointed out, it's like the writers glimpsed better sci-fi over the horizon, and ran around recreating a soap-opera set in a world that looks vaguely like the better sci-fi, and then added bits that they thought were fun, like wooshing ships and lasers that can disintegrate people, but never seem to disintegrate bulkheads.

Or maybe they do, but they don't think the audience will

The more I watch these, the more I see that they're about a few consistent themes. The first is a sense of wonder. We watch them to see the terrible, super-woofer trembling majesty of a black hole, or the awe-inspiring wonder of the rings of an alien world glittering through the rising sun. We watch them to interact with strange aliens and stand in the cavernous maw of the ruins of a long-dead race.

At the same time, the second theme is humanity. This allows us to relate to events going on. The being that stands gaping up at those ancient ruins is a fellow much like you and me, not some robot, not some engineered being with an incomprehensible intellect, not some mobile sapient fungus. But someone like you or me. Similarly, the aliens he meets look remarkably human not just because of a limited budget, but so we can fall in love with their men or their women, so we can punch their warlord in the jaw, so we can relate to their politics. The point is to make a story that a 20th century (Captain-and-crew stuff seems very grounded in the 20th, rather than 21st century) person (especially an American. Even Farscape, despite being Australian, seems primarily aimed at Americans) can easily relate to. This goes further: Most of the drama of the story, when it isn't being driven by the Science Mystery Of The Week, is mostly a human drama. It's people falling in love or falling in hate, or circling around one another in rivalry or misplaced distrust or what have you.

There's substantial tension between these two points. The more realistically you depict the wonder, the more wondrous you make it, but the harder it is for the average person to understand that wonder. But the more understandable you make it, the more mundane it becomes. Balancing on this knife's edge is one of the things that creates many of the peculiarities of the genre, and when you slip off to one side or the other, that's where you lose audience members. Seems an unforgiving genre.

It doesn't seem to have made a lasting cultural impact
If I dig through sci-fi art on Deviat Art or elsewhere, what I mostly find are lots of battlesuits, lots of power armor, lots of robots, lots of cyborgs, lots of skimpily dressed alien-chicks or creepy bug-aliens. I see lots of Star Wars, lots of 40k, lots of generic cyberpunk or military sci-fi. I see lots of long, "rod"-style spaceships. I see very little that seems inspired by Star Trek or other Captain-and-crew sci-fi. When people create something similar, it seems more retro "This is what I imagine sci-fi looked like in the 50s" rather than some re-imagined version of a captain-and-crew genre.

To be clear, for me, the defining tropes are: relatively mundane humans wearing jumpsuits with funny/simplistic designs, wielding rayguns, who explore worlds populated by humans-in-rubber-suit aliens, while their primary focus of tension is usually on controlling the ship itself. That is, it would play like the Artemis Bridge Simulator or FTL, rather than like Mass Effect or Halo.

I can find some artwork inspired directly by star trek, but rarely do they depict new characters (unless, weirdly, they are furries). I almost never see "I'm trying to do something like star trek, only different," though I see tons of Deus Ex knock-offs, or Shadowrun knock-offs, or Starship Trooper knock-offs, or Aliens knock-offs.

It didn't used to be that way, I think. Perhaps Captain-and-Crews cultural cachet has faded and we're drifting more towards planetary romance and space spy-and-mercenary action. Star Trek is increasingly depicted in a "retro" fashion. It's out of date. Old fashioned.

Finding that balance and that cultural interest makes Captain-and-crew gaming hard

Players have a mind of their own. They won't conveniently forget the Solution Of The Week when you have your back turned. If you let them phaser through a solid wall one session, they'll demand to know why they can't phaser through all walls.

The solution seems to either run it as a genre-based game, or to get onto that knife's edge the same way the original writers did. In the first case, you run it like a Supers game, or use a system like Marvel Heroic or Fate or Drama System, and the reason you can't use the Science Solution Of the Weak is that it's not an Aspect this week, or you don't have the drama points, or it's bad form. This is about emulating the genre, then, about creating an accurate depiction of what writers do.

The other would be to find some way to allow enough wonder and consistency into the game without it destroying the player's ability to relate. You still have to introduce some arbitrary elements (what Ultra-tech calls "Safe tech,") like, "We have robots, but they're dumb, and you don't have Power Armor" and "Only the cyborg race has cybernetics. Nobody else does because reasons" and so on. If can't really play down the destructiveness of the weaponry without giving the heroes a consistent reason they're not being instantly blown away (like "You all have modulate force fields, here's how they work).

Fortunately, these arbitrary decisions do allow for the building of some interesting gameplay. Players need to be willing to buy into space elves and bumpy-forehead aliens who all, amazingly, speak English (and laugh at jokes in English because, apparently, translator microbes are that good) and ships that swoosh through space rather than float silently through an endless void. But I expect anyone who gets into such a game knows what they're getting into. Decrying the inaccuracy of the xenobiology while x-beams are scattering off your conformal force screen and you're using a dermal regenerator on your fallen buddy seems... misplaced.

[Sarge]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

1. Star Trek spaceship design actually makes sense

It does, to a limited extent.

Armed crew section. Unarmed secondary/scientific/medical section. And then the antimatter engines outboard on pods well away from the rest of the ship in case they need to be jettisoned. Although I suspect that the writers didn't design it with that level of forethought in mind, it just kinda worked out that way.

Originally Posted by Mailanka

2. The scale of the ships makes sense too

Yes. Lots of energy means the ship needs to be big.

Originally Posted by Mailanka

The writers don't really understand any of this

I think that's been demonstrated. Repeatedly.

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Or maybe they do, but they don't think the audience will

No. They're just copying sci-fi tropes from sci-fi novels. The authors who wrote those novels understand the concepts, the people who write for the TV shows are just imitating that.

Originally Posted by Mailanka

It doesn't seem to have made a lasting cultural impact

Sure it has. Flip cell phones that look remarkably like the old Star Trek communicators. Lots of the stock phrases entering pop culture vocabulary. Who's more well known world-wide? Darth Vader or Captain Kirk? It's hard to tell.

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Finding that balance and that cultural interest makes Captain-and-crew gaming hard

Players have a mind of their own. They won't conveniently forget the Solution Of The Week when you have your back turned. If you let them phaser through a solid wall one session, they'll demand to know why they can't phaser through all walls.

Yes. A GM running a game has to be a lot more consistent with properties of both objects and people than TV writers have to be. Although, I think that most of the more successful shows do that as well. Their consistency adds to their appeal, even for non-gamers and non-geeks.

I've always thought that the best way to do a Star Trek type game or TV show would be to have the Captain not be the star of the show/game. Instead the Captain should be someone who's respected and powerful and someone to whom the players/star of the show talks to only when he has no other choice or is in trouble. Much like the Admiral in JAG, the DA in Law and Order, or the station's captain in most police shows.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Sarge

I've always thought that the best way to do a Star Trek type game or TV show would be to have the Captain not be the star of the show/game. Instead the Captain should be someone who's respected and powerful and someone to whom the players/star of the show talks to only when he has no other choice or is in trouble.

I've tried that. It was a constant stream of, "What do you want us to do now, captain?" "Solve the problem for us, captain."

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Sarge

I've always thought that the best way to do a Star Trek type game or TV show would be to have the Captain not be the star of the show/game. Instead the Captain should be someone who's respected and powerful and someone to whom the players/star of the show talks to only when he has no other choice or is in trouble. Much like the Admiral in JAG, the DA in Law and Order, or the station's captain in most police shows.

Outside of Star Trek TOS and Andromeda, the captain doesn't seem that very central. TNG often focused on other characters, Blake's 7 wasn't that centralized (though perhaps I haven't seen enough of it), DS9 likewise had lots of plot for characters other than Sisko, and Farscape doesn't even HAVE a captain (while still following all the tropes of Captain-and-Crew).

GURPS Spaceships actually does a lot of work in making the other roles shine quite nicely, and the only remaining thing is making sure the captain doesn't just order around the other PCs excessively.

No, my real concern is more "How do I make these physics reasonable and consistent?" Mostly that came out of understanding just how much more lethal the UT guns are than what's depicted in most of these shows (for real hilarity, compare a simple plasma battle rifle to the collateral damage table in GURPS powers. You get millions of dollars of damage per shot, as it's an explosive, burning attack in excess of 10d). A RoF 10 laser beam is a freaking torch, carving through walls and sawing people in half. Never mind the disintegrators (which are stupidly powerful, but surprisingly close to the actual numbers cited in Star Trek. There's an episode in DS9 where Kira notes the power output of a phaser and, indeed, it lines up nicely with what's depicted in the book, ie somewhere in the vicinity of 6dx10, or "Like a laser, but with cosmic power."

[Sarge]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

I've tried that. It was a constant stream of, "What do you want us to do now, captain?" "Solve the problem for us, captain."

The way to solve that is to make the players a little bit afraid to talk to the Captain.

Be stern with them. If it's something that they should have been able to solve on their own then make sure that the Captain tells them that. At the top of his lungs, or in a calm and disappointed tone of voice, depending on the Captain's personality. And then have it stick by docking them XP at the end of the mission/quest/adventure/whatever you call it. Do that a time or two and the players will be going out of their way and jumping through hoops to avoid bringing any problems to the Captain.

Which will inevitably lead to the next problem; getting in trouble for not bringing stuff to the Captain's attention as soon as they should have. :)

If you and your players are up to it it makes for an interesting tightrope to walk, and it can give the Captain a lot of personality. Not only will they have a lot of respect for the Captain, if you do it right, but it can even lead to a player outburst along the lines of "Uh, oh! The Captain's going to deal with it personally. Those <aliens of the week> are soooo screwed now!"

Originally Posted by Mailanka

No, my real concern is more "How do I make these physics reasonable and consistent?"

What works for me is to treat Star Trek as a kids show that basically depicts how the world is.

So keep the look and general idea, but also go with weapons being more powerful. But make sure that the PC's adversaries know that as well.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

1. Star Trek spaceship design actually makes sense

The idea behind the goofy pod-and-saucer design actually makes a sort of sense. The idea is that your radioactive drives are connected to the saucer, in which your crew resides so that it can provide power and thrust, but it remains far enough away that it doesn't irradiate them.

A distributed structure makes sense as you explain. But other features of the ship design are odd, such as arranging the decks so that the thrust axis is in their plane rather than normal to it, which would be sensible. Also, using force fields instead of transparent material in viewing ports is nearly suicidal.

2. The scale of the ships makes sense too

These ships are HUGE. The Galaxy class ships of Star Trek would be SM+15 or so, and Romulan Warbirds are even bigger. Moira from Farscape is similarly gigantic, despite the fact that they only ever show like 10 people as the crew.

Of course, a simple thought experiment shows why. The ships are often described containing simply titanic amounts of energy and slinging them back and forth. The sort of masses and energies required to actually create something like an Alcubierre drive, assuming its even possible, are pretty big.

Well, that only makes sense if there are minimum scales or significant sublinearities involved. If a smaller ship requires less energy than a big one then these titanic numbers are seen as imposing reasons to keep ships as small as possible.

The writers don't really understand any of this

What the writers understand is delivering an acceptable soap-opera script on schedule, week after week, like clockwork. And a very important ability that is. Few SF writers (exceptions include Asimov and Ellison) have the output rate to produce weekly scripts.

As I've already pointed out, it's like the writers glimpsed better sci-fi over the horizon, and ran around recreating a soap-opera set in a world that looks vaguely like the better sci-fi, and then added bits that they thought were fun, like wooshing ships and lasers that can disintegrate people, but never seem to disintegrate bulkheads.

Well put.

Or maybe they do, but they don't think the audience will

One of the things that consistently gets my goat is being patronised.

The first is a sense of wonder.

I'm never really clear about what people mean by "sensawunda": I'm afraid that it is meaningless bibble-babble trotted out as an excuse for not bothering to make sense, where in fact wonder is only possible where you expect things to make sense. The things you cite as examples I would call "spectacle" rather than "sense of wonder".

At the same time, the second theme is humanity. This allows us to relate to events going on. The being that stands gaping up at those ancient ruins is a fellow much like you and me, not some robot, not some engineered being with an incomprehensible intellect, not some mobile sapient fungus.

Yes indeed. John W. Campbell's challenge ("Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man or better than a man, but not like a man.")* calls for a tour de force of imagination and SF writing, but it is far from clear that if it were to succeed the result would be affecting. We might admire its virtuosity but be very little engaged or moved by the plight of an unfathomable character. And appreciation of SF virtuosity is exactly what the producers and writers least expect from their audiences. (They are most likely realistic in that respect.)

The point is to make a story that a 20th century (Captain-and-crew stuff seems very grounded in the 20th, rather than 21st century) person (especially an American. Even Farscape, despite being Australian, seems primarily aimed at Americans) can easily relate to.

Farscape was made in Australia, mostly for budgetary reason back before the mining boom gave us a dollar overvalued by 40–50%. But the USA has 75% of the Western, English-speaking, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) audience, so anyone who produces genre content in English and does it for a buck writes it for Americans.

There's substantial tension between these two points. The more realistically you depict the wonder, the more wondrous you make it, but the harder it is for the average person to understand that wonder. But the more understandable you make it, the more mundane it becomes. Balancing on this knife's edge is one of the things that creates many of the peculiarities of the genre, and when you slip off to one side or the other, that's where you lose audience members. Seems an unforgiving genre.

The shame of it, I think, is that the writers and producers (of sci-fi in general, not just of captain-and-crew stuff) have no thought of showing their audiences how to appreciate the wonders of science and futurism. They treat it as impossible, and undermine their audiences and themselves with inconsistency and meaningless techno-babble.

It's very disappointing, especially as TNG seems to be very wordy anyway. Might as well talk about something that makes sense!

It doesn't seem to have made a lasting cultural impact

I agree with you, but we're about to be swarmed by fans pointing out that Star Trek's communicators inspired the clam-shell format for mobile phones.

Finding that balance and that cultural interest makes Captain-and-crew gaming hard

Players have a mind of their own. They won't conveniently forget the Solution Of The Week when you have your back turned. If you let them phaser through a solid wall one session, they'll demand to know why they can't phaser through all walls.

Indeed. However there are plenty of people who play Star Trek RPGs and LARP, even mustering the enthusiasm to make excellent costumes and do very creditable make-up. You and I who like to pits our wits against a situation as perhaps short-sighted when we neglect those gamers who like to play out interpersonal drama (soap opera) in front of an imaginary green-screen.

The solution seems to either run it as a genre-based game, or to get onto that knife's edge the same way the original writers did.

In the first case, you run it like a Supers game, or use a system like Marvel Heroic or Fate or Drama System, and the reason you can't use the Science Solution Of the Weak is that it's not an Aspect this week, or you don't have the drama points, or it's bad form. This is about emulating the genre, then, about creating an accurate depiction of what writers do.

The other would be to find some way to allow enough wonder and consistency into the game without it destroying the player's ability to relate.

<snip>

Fortunately, these arbitrary decisions do allow for the building of some interesting gameplay. Players need to be willing to buy into space elves and bumpy-forehead aliens who all, amazingly, speak English (and laugh at jokes in English because, apparently, translator microbes are that good) and ships that swoosh through space rather than float silently through an endless void. But I expect anyone who gets into such a game knows what they're getting into.

In this as in much else, it is desperately important to know your players.

And to quote a great man "A good GM always knows his limitations."

Decrying the inaccuracy of the xenobiology while x-beams are scattering off your conformal force screen and you're using a dermal regenerator on your fallen buddy seems... misplaced.

Quite.

* Part of the reason that his writers disappointed him in this is that he also insisted that humans always had to triumph over aliens, a revolting requirement that Asimov (for instance) avoided writing aliens rather than submit to.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Sarge

The way to solve that is to make the players a little bit afraid to talk to the Captain.

Be stern with them. If it's something that they should have been able to solve on their own then make sure that the Captain tells them that. At the top of his lungs, or in a calm and disappointed tone of voice, depending on the Captain's personality. And then have it stick by docking them XP at the end of the mission/quest/adventure/whatever you call it. Do that a time or two and the players will be going out of their way and jumping through hoops to avoid bringing any problems to the Captain.

Nope. I did exactly that, and when they (a) failed to get detailed orders out of the captain and (b) screwed up, they blamed the captain for their failure and made him out to be an idiot who couldn't effectively command the mission.

I have been left very wary of any RPG in which the PCs are directly under the command of a present superior.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

A distributed structure makes sense as you explain. But other features of the ship design are odd, such as arranging the decks so that the thrust axis is in their plane rather than normal to it, which would be sensible.

DS9's design is also particularly baffling. I believe I mentioned that, but in case I didn't: Clearly round to generate spin-gravity, but with artificial gravity being applied perpendicular to what would be the spin-gravity's direction. This is very much what I mean: It's like they've seen wheel-designs, imitated them, but clearly don't understand them.

Also, using force fields instead of transparent material in viewing ports is nearly suicidal.

Viewports at all don't make sense, but then I'm beginning to let a little Atomic Rockets leak into my space opera, which is a questionable proposition at best (all that scientific accuracy might begin to dissolve the fluff and dream of space opera)

Well, that only makes sense if there are minimum scales or significant sublinearities involved. If a smaller ship requires less energy than a big one then these titanic numbers are seen as imposing reasons to keep ships as small as possible.

There's also the "as small as is practical for players." A captain-and-crew features about 10 people, with the sense of "there are more crew, who can occasionally die." The problem I have with a Galaxy Class-scale ship is, first of all, it would never make sense to send a bridge crew down when you have over 1000 crewmen on your ship. And second, if you're playing the characters managing that, you're swiftly going to run into "This is a game of logistics, not a game of adventure."

So when I settled on a ship-size, it had a crew size of more like 200, large enough to have some crew to shift around and get a sense of scale, but not so many that it stops making sense that the bridge crew might have a more direct hand in things (especially given how very elite they inevitably are at the point totals you tend to see in this sort of action-adventure game)

One of the things that consistently gets my goat is being patronised.

There are moments when I'm watching these that I suddenly get a sense that the writers are putting screwy crap in there just to put screwy crap in there, because they think "That's what the nerds will like." Farscape and Firefly seem much more respectful of their audience. They both get silly, but it's the sort of silly you see at the RPG table, where friends are having fun with something, rather than this notion that a literary major is being made to write "some crap" and is making fun of his audience.

The things you cite as examples I would call "spectacle" rather than "sense of wonder".

Sure, call it what you will. The point is that genre is often about exploring fanciful and spectacular concepts or settings. People see amazing artwork and say "I wanna go there!"

The real benefit of sci-fi, as opposed to Fantasy and (usually, hopefully) horror, is that sci-fi could be real. Saturn isn't just something some artist came up with, it's actually a place with beautiful, icy rings and amazing moons. There really are going to be aliens out there somewhere.

Captain-and-crew Space Opera, though, often only looks at this rather obliquely. Much of it (Farscape especially, which just had magic as a matter of course and doesn't pretend its anything else) is just fantasy in space. We have our elves and our goblins and our magic and we reskin it slightly. The idea is to grab the tropes people already know and give them to them with a space-y twist. Which is fine.

But I happen to think think that the best examples of captain-and-crew space opera manage to meld their human drama with the spectacle of real science and use the one to enhance and explain the other. But that's tricky to master, and I'm even having a hard time explaining what I mean.

Farscape was made in Australia, mostly for budgetary reason back before the mining boom gave us a dollar overvalued by 40–50%. But the USA has 75% of the Western, English-speaking, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) audience, so anyone who produces genre content in English and does it for a buck writes it for Americans.

Well, a lot of British sci-fi seems primarily written with a British audience in mind, though I expect that's more true of older British Sci-fi. Doctor Who seems aimed at both sides of the Atlantic currently.

The shame of it, I think, is that the writers and producers (of sci-fi in general, not just of captain-and-crew stuff) have no thought of showing their audiences how to appreciate the wonders of science and futurism. They treat it as impossible, and undermine their audiences and themselves with inconsistency and meaningless techno-babble.

It's very disappointing, especially as TNG seems to be very wordy anyway. Might as well talk about something that makes sense!

They actually used to write the word {tech} in the scripts. As in "Captain, the tech is teching the tech!"

"Don't bother me now, I'm busy swooning over my lost love. I can't be bothered with tech right now!"

"But if we don't tech, then the tech will tech the tech right up the tech!"

"Fine! Then tech the tech. Engage!"

With {tech} as a placeholder for whatever technobabble they would come up with. The scripts literally worked this way.

I agree with you, but we're about to be swarmed by fans pointing out that Star Trek's communicators inspired the clam-shell format for mobile phones.

Which has been eclipsed by smartphones.

I'm not saying it had no cultural impact, but I don't see much current impact. When it comes to fan fiction or fan art, or what people discuss or game, or what their video games look like, Star Trek seems increasingly distant and "retro." It's becoming a specific taste. Even Guardians of the Galaxy, which looks set to kick off a whole new spate of Space Opera, resembles Star Wars more than Star Trek (though I have yet to see it. No spoilers!)

Indeed. However there are plenty of people who play Star Trek RPGs and LARP, even mustering the enthusiasm to make excellent costumes and do very creditable make-up. You and I who like to pits our wits against a situation as perhaps short-sighted when we neglect those gamers who like to play out interpersonal drama (soap opera) in front of an imaginary green-screen.

I don't think it has to be either-or, and please don't mistake my teasing of the genre as distaste. I grew up with it, and I'm still watching it. It was a successful genre, though it has certainly faded in popularity. I want to understand why it was popular and what it needs to translate to the tabletop. Interpersonal drama is absolutely one of them. The way Captain-and-crew is designed could easily play out as a Drama System game where all the science challenges and the zappy lasers in space get swept under the Procedural rug and the meat of the gameplay are these 10 or so tightly bound characters regularly interacting from week to week.

But this seems to be only part of it. Captain-and-crew thrives off of the science-of-the-week, and I think I have a good handle on how to make that gameable (as opposed to "A science thing has happened! Quick, save against science to fix it! Well done science-character, you have saved the day by rolling well!"). It also thrives on this sort of comic-book space-action of vast armadas of CG ships shooting sparkly, colorful beams at one another while actors dramatically run around smokey sets shouting at one another. And it's also about seeing these really awesome and inspiring costumes and sets, so as to spark the imagination.

Interpersonal drama is crafted via careful selection of disadvantages (you could even go a step further and create the web that Drama System has, but I think that's a step too far for GURPS). The swoopy spaceships are handled nicely via the GURPS Spaceships rules (Which feels like a tabletop version of the Artemis Bridge Simulator or FTL, which is exactly what we want), and as I've said I've already got a structure for handling the Science of the Week. Generating the spectacle will mostly come from the GM himself, but we can facilitate the creation of cool new races and civilizations at the drop of a hat for those who lack the inspiration currently.

At that point, I think you have a pretty viable game.

[thrash]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

DS9's design is also particularly baffling. I believe I mentioned that, but in case I didn't: Clearly round to generate spin-gravity, but with artificial gravity being applied perpendicular to what would be the spin-gravity's direction. This is very much what I mean: It's like they've seen wheel-designs, imitated them, but clearly don't understand them.

I'm pretty sure this and the horizontal decks in the ships are examples of the writers not wanting to overtax the imagination of the (intended, perceived) audience. Said audience grew up in a 1g field, with floors that are flat and run horizontally -- especially in large ships like aircraft carriers, which were an explicit influence on the look-and-feel of the original Enterprise. Vertically stacked decks (like a skyscraper) were a possibility, but more difficult to visualize, tie together, and make interesting: cf., Azhanti High Lightning from GDW. Arrangements that are not possible under 1g are even more difficult to keep track of, both for the audience and the writers.

2001 was able to make it work by showing the entire gravity wheel at once, and then the connections to the rest of the ship. On an episodic TV series, it would be necessary to remind viewers of the arrangement just about every week. I also strongly suspect that any attempt to depict (e.g.) a rotating circular station would result in silliness like CJ Cherryh's ships that dock to the rim of a spinning wheel, rather than its hub.

Edit to add: Silly from an engineering standpoint but probably necessary from a dramatic point of view, in that if all your arrivals and departures are confined to one small zone on the station (the hub) your stories are mostly constrained to start and end there as well. Hard to have surprise visitors, sudden escapes, fights that range from bar to docks, etc., etc., when everyone and everything has to pass through Station Customs and Quarrantine.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Viewports at all don't make sense, but then I'm beginning to let a little Atomic Rockets leak into my space opera

I love the smell of Atomic Rockets in the space opera. It smells like… victory.

There's also the "as small as is practical for players." A captain-and-crew features about 10 people, with the sense of "there are more crew, who can occasionally die." The problem I have with a Galaxy Class-scale ship is, first of all, it would never make sense to send a bridge crew down when you have over 1000 crewmen on your ship. And second, if you're playing the characters managing that, you're swiftly going to run into "This is a game of logistics, not a game of adventure."

I've had several cracks at it, usually with ships 1,700 tonnes to 3,000 tons and with complements 38 to 45.

So when I settled on a ship-size, it had a crew size of more like 200, large enough to have some crew to shift around and get a sense of scale, but not so many that it stops making sense that the bridge crew might have a more direct hand in things (especially given how very elite they inevitably are at the point totals you tend to see in this sort of action-adventure game)

I have variously tried getting the players to play the characters who ought to go on adventures and having each player play one character in each of the departments of the ship that deals with one sort of adventure, and each have one voice at the big table when policy decisions are made. I really think that ought to work; I haven't got it to do so yet but I think that has been the result of the difficulties of remote roleplaying when the GM lives in rural Australia.

There are moments when I'm watching these that I suddenly get a sense that the writers are putting screwy crap in there just to put screwy crap in there, because they think "That's what the nerds will like." Farscape and Firefly seem much more respectful of their audience. They both get silly, but it's the sort of silly you see at the RPG table, where friends are having fun with something, rather than this notion that a literary major is being made to write "some crap" and is making fun of his audience.

Yeah, I think that is both contemptuous and contemptible.

Sure, call it what you will. The point is that genre is often about exploring fanciful and spectacular concepts or settings. People see amazing artwork and say "I wanna go there!"

It ought to be, but all too often the scenery is spectacular but doesn't have enough substance and consistency to it to support exploration, and the concepts are grandly named but muddled and self-contradictory.

The real benefit of sci-fi, as opposed to Fantasy and (usually, hopefully) horror, is that sci-fi could be real. Saturn isn't just something some artist came up with, it's actually a place with beautiful, icy rings and amazing moons. There really are going to be aliens out there somewhere.

Something like that, but not exactly. At least the concepts are real, and are amenable to understanding and exploration. Doors open up with "Aha!"s rather than being slammed in your face with "Just because" and "never mind".

Captain-and-crew Space Opera, though, often only looks at this rather obliquely. Much of it (Farscape especially, which just had magic as a matter of course and doesn't pretend its anything else) is just fantasy in space. We have our elves and our goblins and our magic and we reskin it slightly. The idea is to grab the tropes people already know and give them to them with a space-y twist. Which is fine.

Following a lead that Isaac Asimov established in one of his essays, I distinguish the playground of ideas and knowledge as "SF" and the re-skinned adventure yarns as "sci fi". Unlike Asimov I think there can be good sci fi. I don't hold sci fi to the standards of SF. Scientific and technical points don't have to be important to sci fi, but that doesn't mean that you can tell a good story if you fill it up with nonsense. A lot of the things that bad sci-fi writers excuse as making their stories better are the equivalent of making the USA a county in Scotland, or having a gas-operated rifle fail when it ran out of gas. Such things don't make the story better, they make it garbage.

But I happen to think think that the best examples of captain-and-crew space opera manage to meld their human drama with the spectacle of real science and use the one to enhance and explain the other. But that's tricky to master, and I'm even having a hard time explaining what I mean.

You mean like how Hill St. Blues managed to interweave touching human drama with technically realistic police work?

Well, a lot of British sci-fi seems primarily written with a British audience in mind, though I expect that's more true of older British Sci-fi. Doctor Who seems aimed at both sides of the Atlantic currently.

There are a lot fewer restrictions on international trade in media products now than there were in the days of the original Doctor Who. Though for some bizarre reason DVDs treat Australia as part of South America.

They actually used to write the word {tech} in the scripts. As in "Captain, the tech is teching the tech!"

"Don't bother me now, I'm busy swooning over my lost love. I can't be bothered with tech right now!"

"But if we don't tech, then the tech will tech the tech right up the tech!"

"Fine! Then tech the tech. Engage!"

With {tech} as a placeholder for whatever technobabble they would come up with. The scripts literally worked this way.

So I've heard. that's obviously not an approach that is going to give any sort of realism or consistency to the technical constraints. It all but guarantees that the tech will do whatever one writer wants one week and not do what another writer, working independently, doesn't want the next. And this I understand is what we find in Star Trek. And it affects distances, speeds, and adjacency too.

Which has been eclipsed by smartphones.

Just so.

I don't think it has to be either-or, and please don't mistake my teasing of the genre as distaste. I grew up with it, and I'm still watching it. It was a successful genre, though it has certainly faded in popularity. I want to understand why it was popular and what it needs to translate to the tabletop.

For the players to have agency (that is, for them to be able to appreciate their characters' situation, form a plan to deal with it, put the plan into action, and have the plan work out even if with contingencies needing to be dealt with), the technology and the astrography have to be consistent. "Speed of plot" and nonsense like that disables the character players and undermines tension.

Interpersonal drama is crafted via careful selection of disadvantages (you could even go a step further and create the web that Drama System has, but I think that's a step too far for GURPS).

Maybe, but that has to be done consultatively and with GM guidance.

I think it is well worth ensuring player buy-in and discussing a group template.

At that point, I think you have a pretty viable game.

This is my Great White Whale. But I agree with you that it ought to work.