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Old 10-13-2017, 09:26 AM   #1
lylsyly
 
Join Date: Oct 2017
Default Tales of the Solar Patrol

Has anyone actually used this?

If so, what did you think of it? As a GM? As a Player?
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Old 10-13-2017, 11:36 AM   #2
Stormcrow
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ronkonkoma, NY
Default Re: Tales of the Solar Patrol

Sure, lots of times. Good stuff. Needs a bit of embellishment before you run it. What would you like to know?
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Old 10-13-2017, 01:32 PM   #3
lylsyly
 
Join Date: Oct 2017
Default Re: Tales of the Solar Patrol

I just came across it.

Thinking of maybe running as a break from the D&D Campaign I run. I'm pretty sure I can put together a decent game out of it. I have or have read all the old campy stuff like it.

Did your players enjoy it?
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Old 10-13-2017, 01:35 PM   #4
LoneWolf23k
 
Join Date: Sep 2004
Default Re: Tales of the Solar Patrol

I've considered using the Steampunk variation of the setting, myself, for a riff on "Space 1889".
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Old 10-13-2017, 02:07 PM   #5
Astromancer
 
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Default Re: Tales of the Solar Patrol

The setting is really very tweekable. If there are sections you dislike, they are generally easy to toss out and replace. Frankly I generally go with a more Edgar Rice Burroughs/Percivel Lowell style Mars. Leigh Brackett being the main author I swipe from.

Brackett, Bradbury, and Le Guin, are actually the best sources for story ideas to use in this setting. But do tell your story in the style of Heinlein or Asimov.
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Old 10-13-2017, 02:10 PM   #6
David Johnston2
 
Join Date: Dec 2007
Default Re: Tales of the Solar Patrol

Quote:
Originally Posted by LoneWolf23k View Post
I've considered using the Steampunk variation of the setting, myself, for a riff on "Space 1889".
I find it works very well fused with Atomic Horror.
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Old 10-13-2017, 02:20 PM   #7
Stormcrow
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ronkonkoma, NY
Default Re: Tales of the Solar Patrol

I had mixed results. It was tough to get everyone to agree exactly which retro-SF tropes applied to the setting; everyone had his own ideas, and not all were compatible. I recommend the GM especially distinguish carefully between cinematic tropes and cinematic rules, and to spell them out for the players.
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Old 10-13-2017, 03:17 PM   #8
lylsyly
 
Join Date: Oct 2017
Default Re: Tales of the Solar Patrol

I've been thinking a mish-mash of Burroughs/Heinlein/WIlliamson myself, mabe with atouch of E.E. Smith as well.
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Old 11-06-2017, 12:25 AM   #9
warellis
 
Join Date: Jan 2014
Default Re: Tales of the Solar Patrol

Looking at the realistic version:
Quote:
NO TESLA TECH
The setting remains the same – inhabited worlds abound – but there is no “Tesla tech,” atomic guns, or nega-barriers. Rather, ordinary reaction engines drive the ships that travel between worlds.

Technology is late TL8, and someone is more likely arm himself with a caseless ammo rifle than a laser gun. Ships have no artificial gravity, and space warfare is a brutal game of locking missiles and firing first, not a dance of rays and beams lighting the sky in neon.

Combined with the social realism variant, this creates a interesting combination of realistic people using realistic technology to explore a wholly unrealistic solar system.
It does make me wonder how one can create a pulpy scifi setting, like Tales of the Solar Patrol and its tropes, but at the same time have more modern ideas on computers and such.

Or would it be that everyone else is sort of divergent in their tech with Earth being the one with modern, as we think of it, technology and computers while everyone else is using stuff that looks more like an ENIAC at best?
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Old 11-06-2017, 06:46 AM   #10
mlangsdorf
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Austin, TX
Default Re: Tales of the Solar Patrol

There's nothing in the description of infomats that implies they have to be really big. They're slow, and they probably are fairly large, but a single infomat could be no larger than a modern server rack: 6' by 2' by 3' or so.

Infomats in TotSP don't have a WWW or wiki equivalent, but the development of a loosely controlled web was made possible by a series of deliberate decisions and legal cases. Other implementations of information computing could have made different decisions and decided some of the legal cases differently and resulted in much more strictly controlled systems. Historically, there were a couple of attempts to create strictly controlled information systems for mass access, and they didn't really go anywhere because they were technically inferior to the Internet/WWW and people abandoned them, but they could have happened.

I think the biggest divergence between "pulp" computers and modern computers isn't the size of the computers, but what types of calculations are cheap/easy to do. With pulp computers, image and voice recognition, speech synthesis, and responding to natural language commands are easy, but generating 3D images or calculating orbital paths are hard. I'm specifically thinking of Mike from the Moon is a Harsh Mistress: No one is particularly surprised that Mike can talk in idiomatic English and respond to ambiguously phrased voice commands or requests, but creating a video image of Adam Selene is an amazing feat that takes a measurable amount of Mike's processing resources.

In the modern world, all the stuff that the pulps thought was hard (ballistic math, 3-D image creation) is much, much easier than the stuff the pulps thought was hard. We've been able to buy home computers that could do all the math for the Apollo moon shots faster than the Apollo systems since 1985; voice commands have only really been feasible in the last few years and still require rooms full of computers running in the background.

I don't think you can create a pulp scifi setting with modern understanding of what computers can do quickly and what they do slowly. Pulp is very humanist, and a hot-shot pilot can navigate better by eye and instinct than a computer. There has never been a point in the space program when a human could plot a course faster or better than a computer could. To keep the pulp feel, you need to have computers that do basic math slowly, but that can perform natural language processing very quickly*.

All that said, I don't think that TotSP requires really large computers. Authentic portable computers are inappropriate, but a video wristwatch is a very pulp device and if you can call the mainframe and get a response, does it matter if the mainframe weighs a ton and is the size of a bookshelf versus weighing five tons and being the size of a large car?


* In the real world, natural language processing requires a huge amount of math every second, and so a computer that maxes out at 10K calcs/sec (TotSP 26) couldn't possibly do it.
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