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Old 02-23-2016, 11:52 PM   #51
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Default Re: [Game] Generate a Space Trader Setting

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Originally Posted by Daigoro View Post
It is the easiest-to-game solution- is that why you chose it, or for effects on the setting? We can see what a couple of other people think too.
The main reason is the effect on the setting, keep the ships diverse.
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Old 02-24-2016, 06:13 AM   #52
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Default Re: [Game] Generate a Space Trader Setting

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Question 34
Villain

Did you see the episode of 60 Arc Minutes that came in on the last shuttle? It was all about this real bad guy that everyone thinks is horrible, but no one's doing anything about him? What was his name again?
Ah, yes! The 700 year-old dictator of North Korea, Kim Sun-Rok. Of course, the dictator of North Korea part is mostly honorary, like 90% of the population moved off-planet five hundred years ago or something. Now he's lording over an entire planet somewhere. Just recently, he said he was going to test a gravitic weapon. Let me tell you, turning off gravity is a lot worse than you would think!

Question 35: What do people do for fun in the 32nd century?
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Old 02-24-2016, 07:25 AM   #53
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Default Re: [Game] Generate a Space Trader Setting

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Question 35: What do people do for fun in the 32nd century?
Smartass Answer: Drink some beer! XD

Actual Answer: Earth-grav places still play the usual sports: Football, Rugby, Lacrosse, American Football, Baseball, Basketball, etc. There's also the usual card games, though the rules have changed over time. One game derived from a cross between Blackjack and Poker uses cards that are basically LED displays with a small computer chip and wireless receiver with a value that can change based on signals sent to it from the "deck", with three cards in the hand. Values of the cards range from -10 to 10, with two cards in the deck numbered 0.

Low-Grav and Zero-G environments have three-dimensional sports supported by strap-on wings.

Some planets have even gone so far as to become essentially non-stop retro-faires based on various time periods, from Classical Greece to the Golden Age of Space Piracy, back before the jump drive was invented.

Question: What's the common trade language?

Auxiliary Question: How many alien races still need to be named/fleshed out?
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Old 02-24-2016, 08:02 AM   #54
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Default Re: [Game] Generate a Space Trader Setting

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Question: What's the common trade language?
If you're trading where humans dominate, you can generally get pretty far with Afrikaans, English, German, and Vietnamese. In any major human spaceport, there is at least 100 interpreters who know all four. With Divergers, Mandarin Chinese, French, Spanish, and Turkish are popular, though some smaller languages fall into small niches. Between humans and other species, constructed languages are the norm, the most popular being Tenwyn-Omnilang. Most only use these only to trade, because it is hard to express anything deep in them.

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Auxiliary Question: How many alien races still need to be named/fleshed out?
1 Humanoid, 4 Non-Humanoid.

Question: Aside from FTL, what forms of superscience are available (if any)?
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Old 02-24-2016, 10:34 AM   #55
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Default Re: [Game] Generate a Space Trader Setting

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Question: Aside from FTL, what forms of superscience are available (if any)?
Oh, tons, I kid you not! Every day you'll get a couple million datafeeds about the infinite-energy reactor, the revolutionary warp engine, the psionic brain nanites, AND the talk-to-space-whales translator kit.

But outside of spam email, the only straight superscience is a practical spin-off of research into the higgs, a short-range force field used as energy shields and to get the most out of conventional engines. As a ship system, it's a standard energy shield. It's too large to be man-portable, although a tank might have one. These basically allow us to presume that low-superscience thrusters are in, and give ships a little bit more resiliency. There may be a few experiments on the fringes, but it's hard to say what else exists. Certainly there are rather more substantial rumors of gravity manipulation in secret labs.

The precursors, however... well, several artifacts are bewildering. One record notes that an artifact resembling a cup found at 524 Solov somehow switched the minds of two explorers without moving the brains. The artifact disappeared into the criminal underground shortly therafter. A different artifact, this one a kind of coffer or crate, was found in the center of a kilometer-wide dead zone on an otherwise lush planet. No hazardous radiation was detected, and eventually scouts collected the crate and brought it in for study. Attempts to x-ray or examine the interior of the object were stymied by persistent equipment failures, and an attempt to use a robot to open the crate in a sealed environment resulted in everything -- down to single-celled life -- within about 500 meters dying instantly. This despite the fact that a nuclear bomb could have gone off in the containment chamber safely. The local space forces swooped in and secured the artifact. All that's known now is that top men are looking into it. Top. Men.

In short, Artifacts can do anything the GM wants, but anything with superscience is going to be one of a kind.

Though uncommon, events like these put heavy restrictions on trade in precursor artifacts, and encourage huge prices even on simple alien statuettes, on the off chance they turn lead into gold or gold into useful hydrogen. Finding or acquiring a precursor artifact is a shortcut to wealth and danger for the average venture trader.

Question: What do starships actually look like?

Last edited by PTTG; 02-24-2016 at 03:37 PM.
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Old 02-24-2016, 11:17 AM   #56
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Default Re: [Game] Generate a Space Trader Setting

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Working on it.
Yeah, that's a huge and intimidating question. Feel free to only answer part of it.
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Old 02-24-2016, 12:51 PM   #57
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Default Re: [Game] Generate a Space Trader Setting

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Would that be sortition? I hadn't heard of either so I'm trying to look it up.
You and apparently my spellchecker.

Sorry about that my spelling is quite poor without computer assistance. That is exactly what it was meant to be, I was supposed to add a link but my youngest son decided to wake up and took pretty much the rest of the evening to settle again.
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Old 02-24-2016, 02:02 PM   #58
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Default Re: [Game] Generate a Space Trader Setting

Early human jump capable ships worked most effectively with a largely spherical lay out until the development of the feild manipulation formulas for the Titleist generator. (Magnetic field generator).

The next wave of designs tended towards a teardrop shape to reduce drag when "Skimming" that is to say when you take a ship very close to a gas giant to collect raw gas to process into jump fuel. Exploration vessels these days typically carry smaller scoop drones to extract the raw material for fuel. Time consuming but safer.

The current level of shielding technology allows for a wider range a ship designs though. Cylindrical sections are common on long haul vessels for spin gravity. Though very small vessels as well as cheap ones usually make do with Bola sleeping quarters

Some of the very latest ships are looking more streamlined as newer "structural reinforcement generators" replace older inefficient "projected" shields.
You have seen the demo's haven't you. They wire up a piece of tinfoil to that huge machine and you try to put a hole in it with a hammer.

Question
What did the trader William Swift do with fortune he got when he sold that planetary fragment. The one containing organic material from the Xylysus home world.

Followup superscience question.
Artifical gravity exists (Kim Sun-Rok) how good is it? What are the limitations?

Edit
trying to keep the tech in line with PTTGs shield level.
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Old 02-24-2016, 03:39 PM   #59
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Default Re: [Game] Generate a Space Trader Setting

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Followup superscience question.
Artifical gravity exists (Kim Sun-Rok) how good is it? What are the limitations?

Edit
trying to keep the tech in line with PTTGs shield level.
Yeah, I realized that after. I've tweaked it to leave it an open question for now - it might be that Sun-Rok found an Artifact and is trying to reverse-engineer it, might be that his scientists are actually playing with gravatons, and it might be that it's just annother rumor.
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Old 02-24-2016, 06:12 PM   #60
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Default Re: [Game] Generate a Space Trader Setting

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Question
What did the trader William Swift do with fortune he got when he sold that planetary fragment. The one containing organic material from the Xylysus home world.
Answer: That is one of the big unsolved mysteries of all time. Swift's fortune - and some say the organic material itself, which was stolen from the lab after it was discovered - disappeared from known space ten years after being awarded, as did Swift himself. Rumors abound as to what happened, from Swift attempting to plot a single jump to the Andromeda Galaxy to him flying into a black hole, taking the fortune (and the fragment?) with him. Treasure hunters scour the galaxy looking for Swift's lost ship.

Question: What was the name and class of Swift's ship, and what significance does the name have to him, personally?
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Ranoc, a Muskets-and-Magery Renaissance Fantasy Setting
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