[Space] seeking advice for building a campaign

[Johnny Angel]

I'm working on a space campaign for a group of guys at a gaming club, and I'm having a hard time figuring out the details of space travel in the game. I understand the math as presented in GURPS Space; that's not the issue. I'm just unsure of what sort of distances and spaceship speeds I need to capture the feel that I want to present. Basically - I understand the formulas, but I'm not sure what number values I need to plug into the formulas to get what I want.

The feel that I am going for and the time scales I'm trying to get are akin to what travel aboard a sea-going vessel would have been like during the Golden Age of Piracy here on Earth. To be perfectly honest, I'm actually considering quite simply using the map as presented in Sid Meier's Pirates and redressing it to be planets, space ports, and solar systems instead of ocean and towns. The feel and presentation I'm looking for are the same, but the distances are simply bigger and the ships are faster - which produces (in my mind) similar travel times.

What are some of the number values which I should consider? What values seem reasonable for typical ship speeds?

Like I said, I understand the formulas as presented in the books; I'm just not sure which numbers to plug in there to get the feel and presentation that I want. I don't normally run space games, so I'm a little bit out of my element when it comes to starship engine schematics and performance values. If it helps any, I see space travel in this campaign as commonly working in one of two ways.

The first way is a warp drive or something similar; space flight similar to what is presented in Star Trek and/or Star Wars. You go from Point A to Point B much like you would with any other form of travel; simply at higher speeds. This is the most common way.

The second way is by folding space, and I imagine that it works similar to how jumps work in Battlestar Gallactica. The basic concept is that space is sort of a 4 Dimensional Sphere. If you imagine a galaxy as being mapped on a world globe, instead of going from Point A to Point B by travelling along the surface and curve of the globe, you find a way to travel via a more direct route. Although this method allows for faster travel, it also requires a lot of complex mathmatical equations and preperation. Even the smallest of errors can lead to ending up somewhere else. Calculations can also be effected by the presence of large celestial bodies such as planets, stars; etc, so most ships which are capable of such travel try not to plot points from near such bodies or to near such bodies. Less travel time is involved, but far more preperation is involved, and a lot more risk is involved. It's also quite expensive to have such an engine on a ship.

Some of the more well off settlements (think a spaceport or planet analogy to something like Cartegena) might have permanent rings built which have a preset set of coordinates attached to a second ring elsewhere. These rings do the calculations for this type of travel for you and allow even ships without such engines to travel in this way.

I don't expect the campaign to be hardcore hard sci-fi. Realism is important when it comes to little things such as keeping track of ammo, travel times, and things of that nature, but the big details such as how exactly space travel works aren't as important. Although I don't need to know every tiny little detail about how exactly a space engine works, I still do need to figure out what sort of speeds and engine types a typical starship in such a setting would use. The first reason is so that I know how far away to place settlements from from each other to get the feel I've previously mentioned; the second reason (and the one which the players will probably be more concerned with) is so I know which scale to use when resolving space combat.


I have Space and Spaceships. I believe that the combat system I mentioned is in Spaceships.

[vicky_molokh]

The choice of the best superluminal drive was always interesting for me. Personally, I believe some sort of hyperspace, like in Babylon-5 and Star Control II (but not flat!) would be best, though there are more details to that.

Also note that if you'ŕe using the folding space paradigm, you'll get the following results:

• Ships almost never meet each other in the 'folded' space of travel, other than if they're going between the same points. Not good for pirates.
• Travel time will be reduced non-linearly. I'm not able to provide an exact formula, but you should think of it like t=k×(s^¾)/v or somesuch, with k being an arbitrary coeffitient, v being the 'velocity' in folded space (which may or may not be constant, depending on what superscience is behind the drive), and s being truespace distance.

I probably asked more questions than I answered.

Also, check out this and this thread.

[Johnny Angel]

Originally Posted by Molokh

The choice of the best superluminal drive was always interesting for me. Personally, I believe some sort of hyperspace, like in Babylon-5 and Star Control II (but not flat!) would be best, though there are more details to that.

Also note that if you'ŕe using the folding space paradigm, you'll get the following results:

• Ships almost never meet each other in the 'folded' space of travel, other than if they're going between the same points. Not good for pirates.
• Travel time will be reduced non-linearly. I'm not able to provide an exact formula, but you should think of it like t=k×(s^¾)/v or somesuch, with k being an arbitrary coeffitient, v being the 'velocity' in folded space (which may or may not be constant, depending on what superscience is behind the drive), and s being truespace distance.

I probably asked more questions than I answered.

Also, check out this and this thread.

Thanks for the feedback. I had actually considered not using the second option of space travel [or possibly limiting it to the extremely wealthy (i.e. governments like I somewhat alluded to.)] The campaign is going to be somewhat of a space pirate campaign, so the ability to engage other ships is an important one.

The starting point of the campaign for the PCs is that they are aboard a ship known as the Nostalgia under the command of Captain Barchara, a pirate. Without typing out the whole back story and campaign set up, suffice to say that lack of loot and action combined with the sleezy (even by pirate standards) personality of the captain will (I think) prompt the crew to mutiny and hand the control of the ship over to the PCs in the process.

I explained to the players that the TL for the campaign will be somewhere between 10 and 11; with a few of the better products from 9 still lingering around. Base TL is 10; however, TL 11 items which are legality 3 or 4 may be usually bought at around +50% of the normal cost.

I have a pretty good idea about how I want the campaign to go, but I'm unsure of how big to make the area of space they are in and the details about ship speeds and distances. Like I said, the feel I'm going for is a Golden Age of Piracy type feel.

BTW, thanks for the links.

[vicky_molokh]

The need to engage other ships calls for either making hyperspace 'small' (relative to truespace), or making sure there are trade routes which can be patrolled and/or ambushed.

I think 50-100 star systems should suffice to keep a good share of grey or black ports scattered around, and keep enough trade routes to keep things interesting. You should probably make sure the interstellar journey will typically last 1-6 months (i.e. from shortest profitable route to the 'diameter of the known galaxy') if you want to keep an Age of the Sail feel.

You probably want your hyperspace to be exitable up to 50-500 AU from a star, to avoid choke points and allow the Royal Navy (or whatever) to go on some wild goose chases. Given that, you're probably also interested in using reactionless and inertialess drives (or at least hyperdynamic ones), to avoid having drives used as planetkillers, and to avoid having in-system flights taking longer than interstellar ones.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Johnny Angel

The campaign is going to be somewhat of a space pirate campaign, so the ability to engage other ships is an important one.

The solution I used for empowering space piracy was to require a series of jumps through uninhabited systems.

For example, in the average area of space in my last campaign there were usually 3-5 uninhabitable systems between systems with Earth-like planets. You could do asteroid mining and such like in the empty systems but the asteroid belts weren't even close to the jump points.

As to time the weeks or months typical to Age of Sail travel may be a little too long for your game. The fewer trips per year a ship makes the more money it has to earn per trip.

This either favors big ships and quite possibly convoys of them or reduces the amount of economic activity in space.

In the Age of Sail the ships were really pretty cheap (or at least they were easy to build which is mostly the same thing) and the labor to man the ships was even cheaper. This might not translate well into an ultra-tech parallel.

Also, to duplicate an Age of Sail feel you're going to need to make ships very independent. No having to spend 2 weeks out of every year at a major system to get an overhaul. No buying expensive fuel or munitions either. Repairs and maintenance will have to be capable of being done in the field with little or no external aid.

There should be little or no FTL communications either.

A purely game mechanical thing to be mentioned is that in games like Gurps if you give players a long period of game time where basically nothing's happening they will want to train up their skills instead of just sit there.

I put trip times between planets at an average of 1 week between frontier worlds and at least 2 months to the major core worlds and it seemed to work well enough.

[vicky_molokh]

Oh yes, making cheap ships is important for almost any Age-of-Sailish campaign in spaaace. Same with No FTL Comms.

The difference between price of goods and of ships is a big issue.

[Johnny Angel]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

The solution I used for empowering space piracy was to require a series of jumps through uninhabited systems.

For example, in the average area of space in my last campaign there were usually 3-5 uninhabitable systems between systems with Earth-like planets. You could do asteroid mining and such like in the empty systems but the asteroid belts weren't even close to the jump points.

As to time the weeks or months typical to Age of Sail travel may be a little too long for your game. The fewer trips per year a ship makes the more money it has to earn per trip.

This either favors big ships and quite possibly convoys of them or reduces the amount of economic activity in space.

In the Age of Sail the ships were really pretty cheap (or at least they were easy to build which is mostly the same thing) and the labor to man the ships was even cheaper. This might not translate well into an ultra-tech parallel.

Also, to duplicate an Age of Sail feel you're going to need to make ships very independent. No having to spend 2 weeks out of every year at a major system to get an overhaul. No buying expensive fuel or munitions either. Repairs and maintenance will have to be capable of being done in the field with little or no external aid.

There should be little or no FTL communications either.

A purely game mechanical thing to be mentioned is that in games like Gurps if you give players a long period of game time where basically nothing's happening they will want to train up their skills instead of just sit there.

I put trip times between planets at an average of 1 week between frontier worlds and at least 2 months to the major core worlds and it seemed to work well enough.

I imagine that being independent might possibly be one of the motivations for piracy (in addition to other motivations.) "Captain, we're running low on rum."

One of the ways I was planning on creating an Age of Sail type feel was by having several powerful factions - somewhat of a futuristic analogy to Britain, France, and Spain. Newer technologies have made travelling longer distances possible; as such, there are new worlds and wonders -complete with new opportunities to exploit them. Ideally, this makes for an atmosphere in which a particular nation might look the other way in regards to piracy if the pirate activity of a particular ship is hurting a rival faction.

I do know that giving the PCs downtime will make them want to train up their skills, and that's perfectly fine. In many instances I am going to have uneventful travel time be passed by during real life time between game sessions. I am also using the alternate rule for maintaining skills. Obviously, one exception to having time pass between game sessions will be if we end a session on a cliffhanger or in the midst of combat or something of that nature. Otherwise, at the end of the session I plan to ask everyone what they have their characters do during their down time. I figure at least some amount of downtime will be used to heal from injuries and research potential opportunities for raids, loot, etc.

Convoys and big ships is something I had in mind. I can imagine something similar to the Spanish Treasure fleet being the dream score, but also being something which is extremely risky.

As for the ship of the PCs... As I mentioned in a previous post, they are currently under the command of someone who I will portray as someone who (I assume) they won't want to work under. This is a window of opportunity I am giving them as a way to gain a ship. The Nostalgia is an old cargo ship which has been upgraded to better serve smuggling and pirate activities; some of the upgrades include armor, a faster (although somewhat unreliable*) engine, and weapons.

*One of the rumors which is currently circulating about the captain is that he went with a cheaper option when it came to some ship repairs at a previous stop so as to be able to keep more of the loot for himself. This effects the crew in two different ways: 1) It causes the ship to be less capable than it would otherwise be, and 2) It cheats them out of money because part of the reason given for why not as much loot was given out from a previous score was that repairs for the ship were needed.

[tshiggins]

Vicky's links are good, if you want to go that way.

Here's another thread; if you check out page 5, you can see my write-up of how 2300 AD stutterwarp works. It may meet your needs, as well.

http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread...rp+2300&page=5