Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

A tramp freighter would need to keep costs down. Why bother with an expensive drive for exploring the stars when you can use a cheap drive to jump right to the stars you want?

I need to do more thinking on the last two questions.

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

If you have FTL radio, you don't have independent, small merchants who haul speculative adventure cargoes -- at least, not for long. So, the question is, what sorts of campaigns would you want to encourage?

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

That would depend on the effective range. FTL communications limited to inside a solar system wouldn't have the same effect as interstellar range FTL communications.

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

I generally detest FTL communications/sensors. I prefer to have my PCs depend on news brought by courier spacecraft. Of course, I also like having it that strong AI cannot survive FTL travel, so FTL travel depends on living creatures (AI plagues are restricted to STL travel).

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

{The Farfarers}


Riffing off LeGuin some more for my space setting, I plan to introduce Cetian Mathematics, though I'll give it another name. In LeGuin's Hainish novels, the Cetians are a human group that was settled on a planet called Centaurus. They developed a form of mathematics that surpasses any Terran mathematics the same way the Hindu-Arabic numbers surpass Roman numerals. Thus with their mathematics Mathematics is a mental hard skill rather than a mental very hard skill. It's simply easier to do and think math using Cetian mathematics.

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

Was there a reason it wasn't developed prior to the Celtians? Just no one had thought of it?

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

I also have a dislike for FTL communications and sensors. In my own space opera setting, FTL drives operate off a hyperdrive model, with specialized exploration/S&R/SWACS spacecraft for long-range sensors. FTL radio does exist, but is nowhere near as fast as the slowest courier ships out there; at most, it'll eliminate communications lag in a star system, but a message from, say, Earth to Alpha Centauri will still take several weeks (a courier could make the trip in a matter of hours taking it easy, or minutes if he's in a rush and doesn't mind suffering a bout of hyperspace compression sickness).

I can somewhat justify FTL radios using my setting's "advanced" physics and the "hyperspace onion" model I'm using, but I can't really justify Star Trek-esque realtime FTL sensors.

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

I read a novel by Charles Stross in which he used quantum entanglement devices for FTL communication.

They had limited capacity (measured in bits, each entangled particle being one bit), the bits were not reusable and you had to physical separate the paired devices at STL travel speeds. Oh and they were probably grotesquely expensive but I don't remember.

So they were rare, communication capacity was limited and you had to get the device to a given destination in order to use it.

Apparently it's not a workable method anyway but seems like it would allow limited FTL communication in a sci-fi setting.

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

{The Farfarers}

The Cetians seem to simply have developed the best mathematics. The Greeks were brilliant, but would you want to use their number system to balance your checkbook?

In LeGuin's Hainish novels, some human groups invent certain elements of culture, others don't. One character in VASTER THAN EMPIRES AND MORE SLOW is said to come from a world where they never invented either the wheel or chasity.

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

I'm pretty sure the price is not mentioned, but given who the limited number of people who have them work for, you can be sure it's eye-watering.