Please Critique My Space Opera FTL Concept

[bitbyter]

So I've been working on a Gurps Space Opera Campaign off and on over the last 6 months or so and I think I am pretty much satisfied with this part of it. I'd love for the community to take a look at my FTL Concepts and see if you can come up with any play or campaign issues (economic, cultural, military tactics, etc) I may have overlooked / not thought of.

Most of the concepts / tech involved has been borrowed or adapted form many TV, Movie and Literature sources, while not totally original I think I've achieved the feel I wanted.

1. Space combat: feels like WWII naval movies with the suspense of submarine sneak attacks from DriveSpace.

2. Melee weapons still have a place in ship board combat due to the perceptive difficulties while in DriveSpace.

3. There is still much to learn about DriveSpace and the alien tech that allows travel through it. Commonwealth scientists think they have a pretty good understanding of how the tech works and can build limited new tech related to the original alien tech. How it all works is still very theoretical with may competing theories.

4. While FTL travel is reliable, it is expensive and stressful to living beings.

5. PC class ships tend to be either mortgaged, inherited, stolen or provided by a patron.

6. Explored space is arranged similar to SW with developed Core worlds, Expansion zones and Fringe space.

7. The Interstellar Commonwealth is the major power, made up of several races (alien as well as modified humans) and the main human empire. There are other non-commonwealth empires as well (human & non-human) some on good terms with the Commonwealth, some not.

Please see the attached file for more on the actual FTL concepts:

DriveSpace PDF

[BrockNicholson]

It sounds fun. A couple of questions:

1: Does anything live in drivespace? If not why not, if yes, what and is it aware of us?

2: What happens to the area immediately surrounding a ship as it translates to drivespace? Does air rush in to fill the vacuum, does it get hot, and so on.

[bitbyter]

There are rumors of lifeforms in Hyperspace but mostly they are considered myths.

?? Space is a vacuum, there is no air to "rush in". Translating to DriveSpace cannot be done inside a gravity well (planets atmosphere).

[sn0wball]

To me as a non-native speaker, the name DriveSpace sounds very unlike space opera and more like a Windows tool.

Using melee weapons because of perceptive difficultuties sounds good, but what about robots/AI, for example ? Also, players might be tempted to use full-auto weapons despite all perceptive difficulties, reasoning than some bullets might hit anyway. Same is even more true for grenades, flamethrowers or other area effect weapons. To achieve a fencing in space effect you might refine this further.

[bitbyter]

Robots / AI shouldn't be an issue as due to their computer minds they would have to be shutdown in DriveSpace or be specially designed to function in DriveSpace. Which could happen but I would probably make it a plot point in the campaign (new corp figures out how to do it and created DriveSpace security bots).

Thanks for mentioning automatic and area effect weapons. Exactly the campaign loophole I was looking for. I didn't even consider these weapons.

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by bitbyter

Thanks for mentioning automatic and area effect weapons. Exactly the campaign loophole I was looking for. I didn't even consider these weapons.

This was my concern as well - if there are perception issues, an area effect weapon is going to be my weapon of choice. If you want to limit everyone to melee weapons the easiest way is to make it a solid tactical decision - if attackers / defenders are going to be armored (and why wouldn't they be?) then you need some decent armor penetration in your weapons... but a ranged armor-piercing weapon is going to tear through vital systems in most ships, and if you are interested in that kind of damage then it is probably not necessary to board.

[giant.robot]

Originally Posted by sn0wball

To me as a non-native speaker, the name DriveSpace sounds very unlike space opera and more like a Windows tool.

As a native English speaker the name "DriveSpace" sounds like a Windows tool as well.

[mhd]

Originally Posted by giant.robot

As a native English speaker the name "DriveSpace" sounds like a Windows tool as well.

Windows? Whippersnappers.

I remember putting DRVSPACE.BIN in my CONFIG.SYS. Twice each day, both times uphill!

[Ulzgoroth]

Drive Space sounds like a perfectly acceptable name for such a thing. Yes, it's maybe a little silly sounding and could be a system utility, but SF naming often goes that way.

CamelCase naming is a little problematic though. It's problematic to pronounce and sounds like marketing-speak. I've seen things named that way in scientific literature, IIRC, but I sort of doubt that such a name would survive contact with the general public. What do people who aren't trying to pronounce the trademark/express their technical in-knowledge call it?


As for boarding, what is the motive for boarding combat? If one ship wants to board another, what stops the victim from shredding the attacker with an HMG or something similar? Typically it's hard to justify hostile boarding of a spaceship unless the defenders prefer death to surrender, but lack the means to scuttle their own ship.

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

As for boarding, what is the motive for boarding combat? If one ship wants to board another, what stops the victim from shredding the attacker with an HMG or something similar?

The motive is to capture the ship or (rarely) destroy it from within when destroying it without is too difficult. In many cases the boarded vessel lacks the resources to repel the boarding - a military vessel with Marines boarding a civilian or near-civilian vessel, for example, although even military vessels are generally poorly designed to repel boarders once they are inside. The biggest obstacle to boarding is the difficulty of getting close enough!

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Typically it's hard to justify hostile boarding of a spaceship unless the defenders prefer death to surrender, but lack the means to scuttle their own ship.

If the crew prefers death to surrender then boarding is generally going to be unsuccessful, although in many cases poor communication among the crew can still result in successful action.