Coolant [Spaceships]

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

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.

I think I might mostly agree in slightly different terms: It's important that it be understood how setting technology works at the level that the gameplay engages with it.

In most games that will range from 'customer' (only cares about the broad results and maybe the price) through 'advanced user' (needs to know the behavior in detail so that they can use or abuse it in special circumstances), with maybe some forays into 'technician' (some knowledge of what's in the box and what happens if you mess with the components). This can vary between different kinds of tech, and different play groups using the same setting are likely to have different priorities.

It's probably very rare for a game to actually want to deal with tech, especially superscience tech, at what I might call 'engineer' (advanced knowledge of the effects of all the components, and how they work together to produce the device behavior) or 'scientist' (can explain the principles by which the finest level of components produce their effects) levels. Even if the PCs do work on that level, the people at the table probably won't.

[AlexanderHowl]

Of course, an interesting application would be coolant for FTL. If normal radiators have diminished functionality during FTL, then venting coolant may be the only way to survive FTL travel. Strangely enough, this may also function as a fuel tank multiplier situation if the FTL 'impulse' (and the waste heat) is reduced by the reduction in mass.

If we assume one component of coolant is vented per three parsecs traveled, with a speed of three parsecs per week, then we end up with a situation similar to Traveller (smaller systems allow for slower travel). Coolant depots will be a valued part of any system and any spaceship without refineries will depend on them for survival. Emergency FTL systems would presumably take up one space and include a FTL drive capable of traveling one parsec per day, an emergency power plant capable of powering it, and enough coolant for one week of travel, allowing them to travel up to one parsec.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Emergency FTL systems would presumably take up one space and include a FTL drive capable of traveling one parsec per day, an emergency power plant capable of powering it, and enough coolant for one week of travel, allowing them to travel up to one parsec.

What kind of emergency would that be useful in? For reference, the nearest stars to Sol are more than one parsec away...

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

What kind of emergency would that be useful in? For reference, the nearest stars to Sol are more than one parsec away...

One parsec per day and seven days of endurance gives a range of nearly 23 light-years. In my setting the average nearest-neighbour distance of inhabited planets is about sixteen light-years.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

One parsec per day and seven days of endurance gives a range of nearly 23 light-years. In my setting the average nearest-neighbour distance of inhabited planets is about sixteen light-years.

This is true, and I overlooked the self-inconsistency in the post. However, the part of it that's incompatible with the rest of the paragraph is the "one week of travel", not the "up to one parsec" conclusion.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

If we assume one component of coolant is vented per three parsecs traveled, with a speed of three parsecs per week, then we end up with a situation similar to Traveller (smaller systems allow for slower travel). Coolant depots will be a valued part of any system and any spaceship without refineries will depend on them for survival. Emergency FTL systems would presumably take up one space and include a FTL drive capable of traveling one parsec per day, an emergency power plant capable of powering it, and enough coolant for one week of travel, allowing them to travel up to one parsec.

I'm going to assume you mean the emergency backup FTL is meant to travel one parsec per week, as otherwise your math doesn't add up and there's no reason to use the "main" FTL drive, which vents more coolant to travel at less than half the speed of the "emergency" FTL drive. This brings back the problem that you may be rather unlikely to find yourself within 1 parsec of a spaceport when you have a problem that disables your main drive. Using that 1 parsec reach to get back onto a major shipping route may be doable, however, after which you're drifting with a distress signal, hoping someone will stop and help.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

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

Lucky you. I've been grilled at length about how and whether my suggested star drives conserve energy, momentum, angular momentum, and baryon number, lectured about how they enable closed timelike paths, and ambushed with calculations about the effect on them of the galactic gravitational field, by five players with relevant advanced degrees. And that's not including using quantum mechanics to calculate the speed of a kind of stutterwarp drive that I didn't even suggest, calculating the blue-shift of light reflected by a light sail, and calculating the explosive yield of submunitions in an RKK weapon.

I've had a geography student challenge me about the population of a planet, two linguists go off for months about linguistic diversity, three lawyers argue about details of the laws and court procedures, a statistician calculate the minimum suicide rate among Imperial heirs that could be distinguished from baseline, and an economist engage me in a searching inquistion about the Imperial budget and the financial economics of the Imperial crown.

The linguists are a particularly interesting case, because they played happily for years in the setting while it had no representation of multiple languages. But they cavilled sharply when I added a couple of sentences to the history explaining about a couple of centuries of language loss on Old Earth, early colonies getting diverse immigrants with International Standard as their language in common, late immigration from the monoglot Earth of 2350, and the importance of references and recorded materials in Standard during the Age of Isolation. They were happy with a universal language until I tried to explain it.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Lucky you. I've been grilled at length

Are you in a University town? That all sounds terribly diverse. Ther closest I've come is a wide variety of computer geeks. Plus the many college students from back in the day, a lady with a Bio degree who did hazmat for NASA, a couple of house moms, a retail clerk, a nursing student and a travelling salesman. No, the travelling salesman isn't interested in math either. He uses GPS for route planning. I'm not even sure he'd get the joke I was trying to sneak in there.

Anyway, when it comes to interest in geeky detail; I've got jsut a couple of people with something like my compulsive reading habits but mostly just for urban fantasy these days. Beyond that and computers that it's pretty much taken as a given that I have more details about "stuff" then anyone else really wants to listen to.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Are you in a University town? That all sounds terribly diverse.

Not any more, but my roleplaying circles back in the day were formed on campus at the University of New South Wales and the Australian National University.

[AlexanderHowl]

Back in my hometown, we have a gaming group at the local college that's almost forty years old, and we still have some of the original members drop in on occasion. With fifty active student members and around a thousand alumni, it is quite easy to get a game. I would run two games a semester and be beating people off with a stick, and I was only the third most popular GM (the most popular was running four games a semester).

Anyway, I think I like the coolant idea for FTL more and more. Combined with a gravitation exclusion zone equal to (40 × [square root] of objects mass in Sols]), you end up with the edge of a system being a very busy place. The majority of the action would occur within 1 AU of the edge of the exclusion zone (to prevent suprise FTL attacks) where the refueling depots would be located due to access to volatiles.

Pirates and smugglers would have their own refueling depots in interstellar space, protected by anonymity and by distance, and they would prey on ships as they came out of FTL and run before the authorities could catch them. Of course, the authorities could easily come knocking, so most such depots would be temporary, just operating for a couple of months before relocating a couple of light months away. Abandoned depots, with buried cargo or hidden nanostasis hostages, would be a prime adventure location.