GURPS - Space Opera?

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by johndallman

The problem with Tales of the Solar Patrol as The GURPS Book Of Space Opera is that while it is space opera, it's in a very specific style, and space opera as a whole is a much broader category.

Which is exactly the problem TBC and Kromm have with a space opera series akin to Dungeon Fantasy: it's too broad.

GURPS Space includes space opera as a tone, feel, or mood of a campaign. Others include action-adventure, horror, romance, surreal, thriller, travelogue, and wonder. Tales of the Solar Patrol is mostly action-adventure, but can stray into space opera if the campaign is all about trying to stop the Overlord of Jupiter from conquering Earth. However, the ships aren't grand enough and the characters aren't strange enough or powerful enough to generally label it as space opera.

[weby]

Originally Posted by robkelk

all usually being idealistic until recently, where cynicism started to intrude in the style.

Well, there are few older cynical ones like Blake's 7.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

Interesting setting. Bookmarked.

Your 'racker' concept is similar to the 'fighter tree' idea that I had for Five Earths, but has a better name (and is more fully developed).

Thanks, but I cannot take credit for either the concept or the name. I knew some folks that worked on the (as far as I know unfinished) Hellfighter game, which is where I grabbed the both term and concept.

I've actually had people tell me they couldn't see a reason for the racker. It is kind of a niche bird that you don't think about until you see it in action. (I think at some point the anime VanDread had something similar, an in-combat rearming ship separate from the mothership.)

[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

Interesting setting. Bookmarked.

Your 'racker' concept is similar to the 'fighter tree' idea that I had for Five Earths, but has a better name (and is more fully developed).

It also reminds me of the Earth Corp carrier vessels discussed in C.J. Cherryh's book, Hellburner.

The Hellburner-class were fast attack craft with crews of four, attached by slings to the Earth Corp carriers during the Company Wars period in Cherryh's "Merchanter" books.

In the "Merchanter" universe, starships tended to be vast, and used a hyperdrive to jump between star systems. Upon arrival, they came booming in with high-V and acquired mass, and "pulsed" their jump vanes to dump enough V that reaction drives became useful for in-system maneuvering.

If the vessels jumped too far, they acquired so much mass (some relativity stuff applied in the Merchanter universe, but it was really fuzzy science) they could never slow down enough. If that happened, the crews were in for a "long ride" -- a trip that could take years or even decades, and (rarely) resulted in ships lost in interstellar space.

Earth Company (and Merchanter Alliance) warships took advantage of this with vastly overpowered military vessels capable of navigation feats that civilian craft simply lacked the power to match. They dropped out of jump with ungodly velocity, dumped some V, launched missiles or k-kill weaponry at known targets, and then took their time slowing down the rest of the way.

The Hellburners were small, fast and highly overpowered for their mass. Carrier vessels dropped out of hyperdrive and released the Hellburner riders, which didn't dump V and kept right on coming.

The Hellburners with their four-person crews (pilot/commander, copilot/navigator, sensors/offensive weapons, ECM/defensive weapons/damage control) screamed toward targets at high-V, launched missiles at fairly close ranges, used rail-guns for kinetic kills and blasted past. They had heavy ECM suites, superb targeting capabilities, and low detection signatures until they lit their drives. They could cross distances in a few hours that would take larger ships days to cover, because the larger ships had to slow down.

(Hellburners weren't "stealth" craft -- no ships could be, in the Merchanter universe -- but you had to be looking for them, and usually Earth Corp carrier task forces put out so much ECM and radar-spoofing crap that small riders with minimal profiles were easy to miss. I sorta got the impression -- even though Cherryh, as usual, focused on personalities and relationships instead of on tech -- Hellburners were meant to perform a Wild Weasel/SEAD role, too.)

Usually, they were able to slow down reasonably well, and dodge better than their larger targets, but speed provided their primary tactical advantage. They were tinfoil autocannons with targeting sensors and missile-racks bolted on, powered by honkin' huge engines, but no jump capabilities.

If they dispersed, too far, the carrier vessels had to maneuver to recover them. If they stuck around for long enough to get targeted, themselves, they died.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Dammann

would "Science Fiction Adventuring" or something similar work better?

How about "Science-Fiction Adventure in the Far Fature"?

(I've got some great ideas for cover art, too. Minimalist yet striking.)

[(E)]

The tech options are complicated too. Interesting but complicated.

Two extremes would be Peter f Hamiltons more recent works. Very high tech, massively integrated into every aspect of life. The other end of the extreme would be david gunns maximum offense series which started off with the protagonists running around in a battlefield not too far removed from ww1.

Atrophied technology is common ish in space opera.

Digression: firepower vs armour. Many space operas seem to have armour (defensive screens etc) having the upper hand over attacks.

[robkelk]

Originally Posted by weby

Well, there are few older cynical ones like Blake's 7.

Which is why I said "usually". One can always find exceptions to any general rule (even this one).

[Mr_Sandman]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I really don't consider any of those last three to be space opera. Granted, they aren't hard science fiction (though I could make a case for Bujold's being an author of biological hard sf). But science fiction doesn't split into hard sf and space opera with nothing left over; there are other forms of sf. All three of these works are largely social science fiction; and if that's "soft sf" it's still closer to hard sf than it is to space opera.

For that matter, even though TSP cites Heinlein's juveniles as a source, they really aren't space opera at all. In fact Willy Ley wrote that they set the standard for scientifically rigorous sf, at a level too high for a lot of other authors to reach; and most of them have substantial social science fiction elements too. Their relevance to TSP is not in style of storytelling but in setting—the first six are all set in the solar system as it used to be envisioned before we had accurate planetological data. The same is true of the Lucky Starr novels, though they're neither as well written nor as sophisticated as social sf.

That's not to say you shouldn't try to do a campaign based on Star Trek or one of the Heinlein juveniles (they don't have a unified setting). It just wouldn't be "space opera" as I understand it: No larger than life heroes, no grand space battles with fleets of millions of starships, regular attention to legal and social issues that go beyond simple adventure plots. I think the closest Heinlein comes to space opera is the stereovision serial that Hazel Stone writes in The Rolling Stones, "The Scourge of the Spaceways"—and the whole Stone family poke fun at it.

Thinking about it, you're right; I wouldn't necessarily call Star Trek, Vorkosigan or Foundation archetypical examples of space opera. They all have some traditional elements of space opera: action/adventure (Foundation less so than the others), space travel, large scope (Foundation to the greatest extent and Vorkosigan to the least), war/military, but they use those elements to frame primarily social science fiction. I think that Star Trek certainly does have larger than life characters (TOS at least), and has featured some relatively large space battles, if not on the scale of millions of ships.

I think if someone want to produce GURPS Space Opera, whether it was a series, book or Pyramid article, the first step would be defining what the important elements of space opera are, in a way that a large portion of the potential market could agree with.

My take on space opera would include:

• focus on action and adventure,
• large scale setting and action (not confined to one planet, usually not to one system, unless it is a highly populated system with lots of inhabited worlds/moons/stations, such as TSP or Firefly),
• high stakes (entire populations of worlds or even galactic empires are threatened or affected),
• larger than life heroes and villains,
• usually an optimistic tone,
• often dealing with war, military action, space piracy, or armed conflict of some type, on a scale larger than individual fights.

Anyone else have other ideas of what 'space opera' is?

[dcarson]

Like zeppelins are a possible marker of alternate history exploding planets are a mark of space opera. Star Trek (TOS) did have a couple of those.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by dcarson

Like zeppelins are a possible marker of alternate history exploding planets are a mark of space opera. Star Trek (TOS) did have a couple of those.

Not obligatory but characteristic. It wasn't for nothing that Edmond Hamilton was nicknamed "World-Wrecker."