Space Exploration Worldbuilding
 

This is my first post here, sorry it's so long but I don't usually have internet access so I wanted to front load it. If any of the below seems interesting, gives you ideas or is related to another post let me know! If there's any gibberish, I apologize because I'm on my girlfriends phone typing it.

I'm currently hammering out some ideas I've had for a roleplaying setting. It's designed for GURPS and I have all the relevant books and Pyramid issues. Before I start digging through statistics, though, I need to figure out some details.

I already know the general theme of what I want to run as a game - a space navy style military is exploring new star systems. Exploration in space and of planetary surfaces is the main activity. There still be some combat (personal and shipboard) as well as survival situations. Scientific study is also involved.

The setting tech level is about 10 in GURPS, they have relatively efficient spacecraft, but not torch drives - they have a lot of dV compared to SpaceX but not enough to fly around Willy nilly and ignore gravity wells.

Weapons are mostly regular firearms and some lasers. Spacecraft use the same, as well as particle beam cannons. I'm tilting strongly towards believable/conservative technology, though with some cinematic rule tweaks to help the players out so they're not just made obsolete by technology. There is no artificial gravity or teleportation. Faster than light will probably be wormholes, which are natural or at least far outside the capability of humans to recreate.

Characters should be with the crew/ship sometimes but also have an opportunity for independent decision making and some trade.

Regarding combat, but I have to be very careful because GURPS is already somewhat dangerous and people use coilguns on each other. Whatever the 'threat' is it has to be potentially survivable and allow players to use their talents or call in help so that it's a fight and not just a test of who can hit first and annihilate their target.

Add mentioned above, there is some military threat - I'm still not sure if it's other humans (prewormhole slow boat colonists who've generically engineered themselves), am intelligent alien or some non intelligent threat which is still space capable (as in Blindsight by Watts, mindless starfish aliens building superorganisms that eat radiation in space). Possibly some combination, such as slowboat colonists who've domesticated dangerous space monsters.

I'm also considering putting in mild psionics.

I'd be interested in hearing ideas and analysis for the setting. I still am not sure how to structure the mission and military to give them opportunity to go off by themselves sometimes. I'm unsure of what the Threat should be. Im also interested in alternatives to wormholes. Jump gates are interesting but can make it too easy to bring infrastructure and supplies, and I want the isolated, slow aspect of space travel to be key.

Warp and jump drives are out, unless there was a serious fuel limitation (and difficulty in getting the fuel), so that someone jumping will have to be committed to his destination as it's not possible to jump at will. Something like a limited jump drive with steep navigation requirements appeals to me as a alternative to wormholes.

One reason I thought wormholes initially is because they're not contiguous - a wormhole might lead to another galaxy a million years in the past, while across the system is one that leads to Mars orbit two days from now.

The disconnected time/long wait aspect really interests me - if I can make it work I'd like to include elements of "The Forever War" by Haldeman(sp?) and the Alastair Reynolds space operas with time diallated characters who are functionally immortal. A society actually adapted to work that way would be very interesting to portray. I want to portray the vastness of space, time and huge alien arcologies (ie "Rendezvous with Rama" , the decaying Dyson Swarm in Reynolds' "Revenger", Niven's Ringworld, etc.)

Most sci fi totally ignores these things(basically WW1/WW2 in space and aliens are everywhere butt somehow we never see them). The scientific and exploratory are the focus here, not 'human interest stories'. Plot takes a firm back seat to astrophysics.

One reason I'm interested in the wormhole our discontinuous jump type of scenario is that it allows aliens and space infrastructure to exist, whereas in our galaxy it seems they probably don't (if you light up a fusion torch drive or use radio it would be fairly obvious to anyone within several hundred light years). Wormholes allows me to avoid issues with Relativity and implausibly invisible alien civilizations as they can be on the other side of the galactic cluster instead of around the corner as required I a warp drive scenario.

Finally, I don't want to do forehead/hat aliens. While they might have some things in common with us (manipulators, math, requiring foods) I endevour to make at least some of aliens further from human beings than any organism that had ever lived on Earth - which are all cousins of ours.

Re: Space Exploration Worldbuilding
 

RogerBW's Wives and Sweethearts setting was created so as to behave like long-distance sea travel on Earth. That's done with jump points, which appear to be natural.

Re: Space Exploration Worldbuilding
 

Cool, I'm checking out the links right now because I've never read him.

Re: Space Exploration Worldbuilding
 

In terms of creating a billet where PCs are sometimes obligated to be with the ship but sometimes off doing their own thing, I'm reminded of a campaign taking Australian colonization as its model, where the expedition includes a few somewhat rich entrepreneurs outside the formal chain of command who are going along because they've secured a contract that lets them use convict labor; I'm going to assume you don't want a penal colony full of convict labor as your campaign premise, but the basic framework can still work depending on how you've set up the politics and economics back home. If we imagine a military or government that controls the bleeding edge tech - wormhole drives, AGI, swarm robotics - but for cultural or economic reasons has a very hard time attracting good human talent, you could wind up with a situation where people enter into employment contracts with the exploration corps in order to get access to that sweet tech, but are technically independent vendors, not crew members. When I served on a US aircraft carrier, we definitely had employees of Northrup-Grumman and similar companies on board as technical representatives; that too can serve as a model. As can the "embedded journalist" sometimes accompanying modern military units into warzones. They have a contract with the military which significantly limits their actions, but also they can't be ordered around the way a servicemember can. I'd dial that up to 11 - the regime has to bend over backwards to find technically skilled people so the techreps get a lot of private time and vacations in their contracts (and the service cannot function without techreps). Depending on the size of ship and length of mission, they can also be family members or counselors of crew rather than crew themselves. Although that may automatically make you part of the reserves.

Re: Space Exploration Worldbuilding
 

LOL I accidentally sent my reply as a report. My bad but I'm sure they'll figure it out.

Commercial exploitation is a big part of exploration so having the PCs as representing or themselves being investora makes sense.

Re: Space Exploration Worldbuilding
 

If you're using wormholes, you'll want to be careful to avoid the possibility of functional time travel. By this, I mean being able to react to events before they happen - a wormhole linking to somewhere 1 million years in the past is fine, so long as that somewhere is further than 1 million lightyears away. Note that's the primary rule you need to follow for your wormholes - it must take light longer to go from one opening of a wormhole to the other than the temporal difference between them. That's easy enough with just one wormhole to deal with - your wormhole that goes to the Mars of 2 days ago is fine so long as it's further than 2 lightdays from Mars. If you have multiple wormholes, however, things can get a bit hairier. Let's say we've got 3 wormholes. Wormhole 1 links the Mars of today to somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy 2 days in the future. 30 lightdays from Wormhole 1's Andromeda opening is the opening of Wormhole 2, which leads cotemporally (no temporal shifting) to the Backwards Galaxy. 12 lightdays from Wormhole 2's Backwards Galaxy opening is the opening of Wormhole 3, which leads to the Mars of 51 days ago. Thus, making the entire loop at lightspeed shifts you 2 days forward going through Wormhole 1 (T+2d), takes 30 days to reach Wormhole 2 (T+32d) but adds no time to go through it (still T+32d), takes 12 days to reach Wormhole 3 (T+44d), and going through it puts you on the Mars of 51 days ago (T-7d), meaning the total round trip actually subtracts 7 days. Being able to travel back in time only 7 days can actually make for a pretty decent campaign - or television show (although I'll note in the above scenario it's more about being able to get information 7 days into the past, rather than sending a person there) - but the real issue is that there's nothing preventing you from doing the loop again... and again and again, going back arbitrarily far (or at least as far back as the wormholes existed) into the past.

For further discussion on this (and possibly for some further inspiration, as the aliens there are indeed quite alien), see the Vergeworlds setting, the author of which sometimes posts here as lwcamp. In that setting, wormholes are manufactured, but there's an underlying bit of physics that can be summed up as "nature abhors a time machine" - basically, whenever some arrangement of wormholes would create a scenario that would allow for time travel, the weakest link in the wormhole network collapses a moment before such a time machine would exist. You can use a similar explanation for why the naturally-occurring (or Precursor-manufactured, or whatever) wormholes are conveniently arranged so as not to produce a time machine.

Re: Space Exploration Worldbuilding
 

From a roleplaying standpoint, pure exploration into the uninhabited unknown is hard to keep interesting week after week. Unless you're really good at creating and presenting puzzle planets (which are the staple of this genre in fiction), it turns into a lot of die rolling with only the occasional natural disaster or large carnivore attack for variety. It is often better that the setting be new to the characters, but already inhabited (at least in part).

Missiles rule in realistic space combat. Lasers make decent point defense weapons, but don't deliver enough damage at range to be main weapons. Particle beams are directed radiation weapons -- effective, but dying from radiation sickness is the opposite of heroic.

No "trade" without someone to trade with. This is what I mean about uninhabited = boring.

The more, the merrier. Having a collapsed Precursor civilization on the wormhole network gives you people to meet and trade with (potentially with languages similar enough to gloss over linguistic challenges), ruins to explore, and a mystery to solve: what caused the collapse?

One problem with wormhole networks is that it is very hard to come up with reasons why they should be multiply connected (e.g., A -> B -> C -> A). Without this, the network takes the form of a tree diagram, which forces you to back up when you want to explore a new branch. It's not impossible, but also not what we usually mean by "network." An artificial wormhole network (created by the Precursors, say) may not have this problem.

There is a class of mathematical problems called "non-deterministic, polynomial time, complete" or "NP-complete." These have the property that computing solutions can take an extraordinarily long time, but checking that a particular solution works can be very quick. If your jump drive or probability drive navigation is this class of problem, you might need a super-computer at home base to generate the navigation data, but the ship can just plug in the solution and run it. If the solutions are time-dependent, the ship might show up with a set of return coordinates they can't use until the designated departure time -- in three weeks, or whatever. If the ship gets in trouble or wants to explore, the onboard computer can generate a solution but it takes weeks or months.

Re: Space Exploration Worldbuilding
 

I think you're definitely going about your world-building the right way. Start with themes and work backward to your world.

Here's my thought: How about if wormholes are present as a matter of stellar mechanics, but must be activated by a ship's drive. This is how it worked in A Mote in God's Eye. They link solar systems, most having one or two some having more. Sometimes, rarely, the opening is actually within the star's corona. There's no way to know from the far end, but it's a nasty shock when you pop out. Only very specially designed ships can even think about making such jumps. The Sol system is one such system. But only for another 25 years as the jump point drifts out of the sun due to the slow motion of the stars around us.

About 20 years ago, the smoking husk of a ship emerged from the sun. No survivors. But we learned a lot. We were able to reverse engineer the drive and several other systems. We learned about jump points and that aliens existed. We also learned that there was a ticking clock until massive alien contact was upon us.

Now, the most advanced human spacecraft ever designed dives into the sun to learn more about the greater galaxy. They have two primary goals: Acquire alien technology to advance the human race. Assess possible threats from outside our solar system. They are also under orders to protect the secret of our existence for as long as possible.

The ship is highly automated. There are only [players] crew members aboard. They're highly competent, but must fill all roles between them. They're the landing party, the bridge crew, the doctor, everything. Supplies are limited, and O2 is heavy, so fewer people means longer mission.

Once out in the galaxy, they find trading hubs, jobs to do in exchange for galactic currency, uneasy alliances, and also that many of the nearby systems are just unexplored. So, it would be a good idea to explore them.

They find their ship to be uniquely suited to some of these jobs due to the extremely heavy armor. Also, everyone assumes they are either a tough exploration ship or a warship from some unknown species due to the strangely tough design.

Now, the crew is buying/trading in alien technology, adding new weapons to the ship, navigating alliances with aliens of various psychology and trying to stay alive through it all. In between everything, they've got big question mark systems 2-3 jumps from Earth which could be uninhabited or could be secret pirate/military bases or could be the spawning ground for the dreaded crystal plague.

Yes, a lot of this is silly. But I think it gets you where you want to go.

Re: Space Exploration Worldbuilding
 

It's functionally impossible for me to reply to you folks with quotations as I'd like to, this Android touch keyboard is garbage.

On the topic of time travel and wormholes that's the first thing I thought of. Essentially, wormholes are (believed to be) natural phenomena which originate from the early universe. They are randomly placed (But moved by gravity a bit), they link random locations, and all wormholes that were too close collapsed instantly because of the energy loop that occurs where light reaches the other end before it leaves.. There's absolutely no way to know where or when they lead without hopping through and can only be detected at close range. They're pointlike objects and they don't so much open as collapse the ship uniformly into a Time=0 state and emerge without any noticeable effects.

There will be aliens and other stuff, probably even mass combat if wet Erin the campaign long enough, the game is focused on exploration they are definitely military affiliated. Thanks for the suggestions and keep them coming! I'll reply later when I have more time to type on thisthing.

Re: Space Exploration Worldbuilding
 

(writer of the Wives and Sweethearts campaign here)

I like to put the jump zones (natural or artificial, specific points or just "where you can turn on the FTL drive") a long way out from where the useful planets are.

If you have realistic space drives it takes a very long time to get anywhere, because there is no drive that has both high thrust and high endurance (specific impulse, or mps per tank in Spaceships terms). At TL10, the antimatter plasma rocket is your best bet for endurance with 120mps per tank, but it only develops 0.01G. The highest-endurance TL10 drive that gives you a "high-performance spacecraft" (0.1G) with just one unit is external pulsed plasma at a mere 8mps/tank.

This gets you isolation, but it fouls up endurance, because by the time you've crossed a few systems to go in to look at things and then back out to the jump zone your tanks are dry.

Put the jump zones closer in, and you can make more system crossings but you get less isolation.

Couriers are also a concern: if your FTL allows them to travel directly across multiple systems, you lose isolation. In W&S a fast message is sent by radio to the jump point where a courier is on station, the courier jumps and transmits it by radio (hours of delay) to the courier at the next jump point… but this requires a network of couriers, which implies a reasonably solid civilisational infrastructure.

Re: Space Exploration Worldbuilding
 

The 'trick' with small arms is to make them do no more damage than modern guns (so about 2-3d for a pistol and 5-7d for a rifle) and to instead show their improved performance in improved penetration modifiers. The gauss rifles and lasers in Ultra-Techa good example of this. The other thing is (and here is where the UT guns are too good) is to not increase accuracy too much. The laser rifle in UT is stunningly good because of the combination Acc12 and RoF 10, its low recoil, and reasonable damage. Even the gauss rifle is good in skilled hands (in less skilled hands the pi- damage makes it less than great), and in fact it's probably about what you want in a gun for your game - unskilled people probably won't outright kill PCs with it, but a skilled shooter (like a PC who's a professional combatant probably is) can do great things with it.

Re: Space Exploration Worldbuilding
 

I'm going to be custom designing much of the tech based on my own calculations and pet design ideas - UT is a reference but not a shopping list for PCs. The Pyramid articles for designing Cutting Edge and UT armor, as well as the one for designing blasters and lasers, will be used extensively.

I appreciate the advice on jump drives. However one thing that stops me from using it is my desire to have travel be extremely long rang and somewhat discontiguous. If I could figure out a rationale for why only some jump points are known or valid I'd be down for it. For example: - maybe there's a set of viable jumps from any given system, like the lagrange points or electron orbits, and these could lead almost anywhere. Trying to jump 'between' these points either sends you to one of the valid points or kills you. Likewise, calculating a jump could require planetary Super computers so ships can't try jumping on the fly - at least not safely. They need specific precalculated navigation data that only these computers can provide. Every system has different valid bands. But again this is basically just wormholes renamed.

I'd also appreciate some advice on psionics. I have Powers, Supers, the Psionic Campaigns and Psis books plus the Pyramid issue Psis II currently and I've looked through them all. But I would like to try to keep psi somewhat more 'realistic' or controlled. Telekinesis in particular screams to allow reactionless drives which I don't want to do. I'm not necessarily opposed to powerful Psis but i don't want what they do to be obviously magic. Telepathy, for example, should be limited by light speed and compatible brains. So I'm going to have too modify some of the powers. Most of them would be more plausible if confined to physical contact, since then it can be explained by physiology and the nervous system utilizing some bodily energy. But lifting two tons at a hundred feet without burning yourself alive sith waste heat seems very dubious from a physics perspective.

Re: Space Exploration Worldbuilding
 

Well, as everyone's said, work out what you want the FTL drive to do, then come up with the justification for it. It's not as though we had any actually plausible methods of achieving it that you had to work round.

As for psi, this is mostly a special effect rather than a formal rules definition. Taking reaction into account is always good: the TK who lifts half a ton puts half a ton of load through their legs.

Re: Space Exploration Worldbuilding
 

What if jump points are one-way affairs? Make them relatively easy to calculate from point-of-origin, but impossible from another system.

Then, you have some well-known routes. They're established, safe circles. Some great ones are even bi-directional or even a three-system loop.

Then, there are some places where scouts or automated probes have jumped out but never returned. Did they run into hostiles? Suffer a malfunction? Keep exploring for decades? or... What? If each system has 2-4 jump destinations, then it's very likely you'll eventually find your way home. But there will still be some places which haven't been explored because the access junctions have problems of one kind or another.

Brave explorers are needed to go map these routes. Sketchy folk sell supposed "maps" to systems which are off the typically traveled trade routes. Perhaps garnered from those aliens which don't communicate so well with others. Or perhaps they claim to have made the harrowing journey once themselves.

Re: Space Exploration Worldbuilding
 

I've been writing a lot of stuff since I last posted. I ended up going with randomly located wormholes. The Sol civilization texh level is about 10, with fusion being fairly new. There are almost 400 billion people in the Sol system, which is not a lot considering it's 3820. There are literally millions of quasi government social institutions which overlap in a seemingly chaotic but surprisingly functional manner.

The wormhole travel method was discovered 120 years ago, and people living around Saturn to Uranus (called the Mountain due to its position in the system's gravity well) managed to form a combine with a quasi-military force to concentrate development and exploration. There are about 60 vaguely mapped core systems with infrastructure and/or commercial value, with roughly 500 more believed to be connected to a network (these systems were drone examined only).

I went through the David Weber/Chris Weuve Astromilitary building process on Atomic Rockets, developing a Singularity Survey Service which is the primary exploratory organization. It has about 4.4 trillions (in GURPS dollars) yearly budget, and I have s breakdown of that into various maintenance and construction activities, plus R&D and missions.

Having they background I created the first system (the 3Body System) which ended up with three stars, two planetary groups, lots of gas giants and ice moons plus one jungle garden world. This latter has an orbit of 56 hours facing each side.

Local life is occasionally sessile and made of a carbon-Silicon matrix with temperature change and water playing a major role in biological processes.

I created the intelligent locals, Squeals, who are square shaped 3300lb creatures dwelling on the broad banks of deep rivers. About TL2, though more 0+2 given their planet and the types of life on it. Squeals use woven mineral fabrics. They're a water-based lifeform, a kind of mineralized jelly that forms hard carbon spines around itself by electrochemical processes. They have developed agriculture and live in hives which raise only one offspring at a time from egg to adulthood (they reproduce with two sexes). Over the past few thousand years a tribal structure of related or allied hives has grown to help defend the long waterways and their crops. They're not really mobile on land and use gills, so 'Hydraulic Empires' in the literal sense are growing up among these canals and rivers.
They're also compulsively playful, curious and congenial. They've got poor eyesight but ultrasonic sonar and discriminatory taste, their main means of communication is sonar.

20 years ago a mining colony outpost was set up near what was a Squeal frontier base. This base,the Tiger Cage, is focused on infrastructure and basic study of resource locations, native threats, etc. Most of the native life is so drastically different that it's sometimes unaware of the humans around it and Tiger Cage has found plastic and concrete is reasonably effective for keeping out potentially troublesome pet rocks.

Humans have barely noticed the Squeals and generally don't consider them sentient, but the Squeals have noticed them. They are also starting to resent having their fields torn up so humans can run fission electrolysis plants along the Great Valley. Aside from having some stuff stolen near the river the humans don't suspect the Squeals are at all interested in them.

The characters are on the crew of one of the newest Survey frontier vessels, SM +12 with both a fusion rocket and Orion drive, which is to survey both planetary systems and check in with the outpost (who expect the rest of the colonists within two years).

The Posthumans, genetically engineered slowboat cyborgs, have hidden devices to spy on the system and want to domesticate squeals as underwater mechanics.

Re: Space Exploration Worldbuilding
 

So, they're cubes. And they're gelatinous.

Is this going to be a stand-up fight, sir, or another bug hunt dungeon crawl?

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Unless the PCs get extremely trigger happy they shouldn't end up fighting the Squeals. More the Posthuman robot forces. Squeals have somr cool biological traits but are no match for TL10 gauss cannons.

Re: Space Exploration Worldbuilding
 

Presumably not randomly distributed in space as a whole? If so, just about all of them would be in interstellar space. Random within star systems? Within system planes?