Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

The GURPS Spaceships design system offers various alternatives for what is technologically possible, even at a given tech level. Most obviously, decisions have to be made about how spaceships travel faster than light, and what weapons can exist.

What choices did you make (or would you make) regarding what technology is used for spaceships?

Have you tried converting ships other people have made that use different technology? How hard was it?

On a related note, does anyone know of any online GURPS Spaceships collections?

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

I use Spaceships to design spaceships for my Traveller game (that use GURPS 4e). I have some house rules for the jump drives and a few other things, and use quite a few optional rules as well, especially when converting ships from Traveller that aren't easy fits into Spaceships.

Jump drives use the stats for 'Stardrive' engines, with the following changes:
Cost = base cost x [jump Number/2 + 0.5]
Power requirement: Jump number for two 10-minute turns, or 2 x jump number for one 10-minute turn
'Fuel' requirement: one system of liquid hydrogen per jump number.

The latter is much lower than is traditional in Traveller. However, Traveller uses volume, not mass and the conversion is closer to what I use than one might expect. More importantly, this amount gives about the right amount of mass left over for other systems, as Spaceships demands more mass for controls and armour than Traveller design systems usually do. TL9 allows jump 1 & 2, TL10 3 & 4, and TL11 5 & 6.

Contragravity is available from TL9. Reactionless thrusters are also available from TL9, but at TL9 only 'hot' thrusters are available and they have half normal acceleration (i.e. 0.5G per system). At TL10 and TL11 cold and hot thrusters are available.

Ghost Particle weapons a Traveller's 'Meson Guns', and are available at TL10, but do damage and have range as if they have 1/10th the power output. Heat Ray, Antiparticle, and Graviton weapons don't exist.

Force Screens are all automatically Reality-Stabilised, and only affect attacks that require that to affect them (which effectively means they only work vs Meson Guns, and are thus 'Meson Screens' unless Grandfather shows up with some exotic weapon and starts annihilating everyone). Nuclear Dampers are small and cheap enough that any combat vessel of 1000 tons mass or more can be assumed to have one 'for free'.

There's probably other stuff I've forgotten, and there are a bunch of campaign switches, etc. as well.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

I feel like this question is backwards.

Start with the feeling and themes of the setting and then decide what kinds of spaceships exist there.

In my supersoldiers game, I wanted both good FTL travel and a good reason for people to go into stasis during it. So, I created an FTL drive where objective (outside the ship) travel speed was measured in hundreds of times the speed of light. Then, I had subjective (inside the ship) travel speed stuck at speed-of-light. So, a 10-light-year trip might take hours of objective time, but would be four years of subjective time. I then just refused to explain how the physics worked. Nobody fully understood the physics in-universe. It wasn't important to the game. I also wanted a reason to have some in-system travel time, so ships had to jump in substantially far from stars due to radiation levels interfering with the drive. In-system, I made excessively efficient drives which used mass scooped from gas giants. The PCs had a very nice ship which could accelerate at 2g for as long as they needed to. I gave them travel times based on their characters' calculations. Again, further explanation was unnecessary. It wasn't the game's focus. I described the game as hard-science compatible. It mostly made sense, but wasn't excessively detailed.

Conversely, when we ran Star Wars, the ships had top-speed. They had a certain range before refueling. When they went close to other ships, they went "woosh" explosions in space go "boom!" And we translated entries from Wookiepedia as best we could. Sense and physics be damned. Because it wasn't that kind of game.

Edit:
My math is wrong/inconsistent. And as I remember more, I think I had days between systems rather than hours. Drives were between 500C and 3,000C

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

The last time I took a run at it I postulated two different kinds of jump drive. The first is jump gates, where artificial gates have been built to allow civilian commerce without an internal FTL drive. Because circumference is limited the large commercial vessels are modular cylinders that link up so two engines, one front and one back can slowly move engineless modules like a train.

Meanwhile the other kind of jump drive is primarily for military and exploration vessel and requires a close flyby of a sun to jump, meaning it can only be used on armoured vessels.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

By "subjective time," do you mean physiological time (so you need to have enough oxygen for ten years, for example) or time as subjectively experienced in the privacy of your own mind (so that your mind is experiencing several hours of duration for each second of physiological time)? James Blish had an odd story, "Common Time," that used the latter assumption. . . .

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

Your math isn't adding up. 10 light years at the speed of light is 10 years.

Then 10 light-years in a "few" hours (4 hours, 20 minutes and change) is something like 20,000x the speed of light. 365.25x the speed of light would be 1 light-year per day.

I don't really care about what numbers you used. I just didn't want incorrect math propagating itself farther down this thread. Matching FTL speeds and distances is apparently not natural for many people.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

So I'm working on a fantasy campaign but I've thought a lot about a future space campaign in terms of traveling faster than light. yeah I am a geek so I sit around thinking about these things.


So in my universe you travel between the starts using on the fly wormholes. They take an immense amount of power to generate and the cost rises however long the wormhole is around. I have g-drives which allow propulsion using reactor style power plants. I assume the universal theory has panned out at some point. So most ships get up to an incredibly high speed, fill every battery on board the ship using their reactors, and then open a wormhole.

The end result is a universe something like travellers. The cost in power is related to the distance, size, and duration of the wormhole. I haven't figured those details out but if I run a space game I will. At some point the power cost becomes so prohibitive that jump beyond that distance is practically impossible.

As a note. Ships can be equipped with wormhole drives but you can go through a wormhole generated by something else. So some solar systems have space stations, incredibly huge massive space stations, that generate gates for ships traveling through. Typically you pay a fee to use these gates.

I also go with the idea that reactor power is plentiful but not limitless.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

Yes, subjective time is physiological time. Yes, you'd need years of supplies. With TL10 recycling tech, this is not a huge obstacle, but it really indicated medicsl stasis for sanity. Also, extremely reliable ships which could operate independently for years or decades.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

Thanks for catching my math. I changed my example partway through and didn't fix everything.

I had a spreadsheet when the game was active. Yes, trips were hours or days. I recall measuring drive speed in "CC" or hundreds of times the speed of light. So your example would be a 200CC engine.

For verisimilitude, I had colloquial ways of referring to such things in-universe. Because of exactly what you said. It's hard for people to conceptualize the bigness.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

I intend to use Spaceships for my Harpyias setting, but I've got a lot of custom systems (and departures) involved there. The drives are generally pseudovelocity boost reactionless drives (but change to provide real velocity - albeit not much of it - for combat, which is meant to have fighters performing roughly like WWII fighter planes, capital ships performing roughly like WWII naval vessels... which also means the combat systems from Spaceship won't really work). Reactor systems are by-and-large nonexistent, replaced by supercapacitors that largely outperform chemical energy reactors while nuclear reactors are untrusted and incredibly illegal. The preferred weapons of the setting, blasters, scale differently from Spaceships weapons (a 10 MJ blaster takes 10x the power and does twice the damage of a 1 MJ blaster, just as in default Spaceships, but is only about 5x as heavy rather than 10x; at least, that's the current intent). I haven't entirely worked out exactly how I want the shields to work, other than their ablation being slow but steady (essentially, high shield HP, low regeneration), the vessel's armor actually having an influence (the shields serve more to just weaken the attack enough armor can deal with it than absorb it outright; this may just work out as the shield benefitting from the vessel's DR), and the attacker having the option to take a penalty to lessen or even outright ignore the effect of the shield (which is often a faster route to victory than pounding the shield until it collapses).

For FTL, all the stars of note that humans can travel between (which doesn't include Sol) are extremely similar and arranged in a suspiciously-regular formation, making regular tetrahedrons where each such star is 50 light years away from 4 other such stars. Travel involves getting around 60 AU from a star (which takes around a week to reach from said star's habitable zone), transitioning to hyperspace (which doesn't require any additional hardware - the typical reactionless drives can manage this, and serve to propel the vessel forward in hyperspace), traveling for around two weeks within hyperspace, then dropping back out around 60 AU from the destination star, after which point you're looking at another week's travel to reach the habitable zone, for a total of around a month. Staying in hyperspace for longer isn't advisable - hyperspace is itself corrosive, and sticking around for longer than a couple weeks risks having your armor slough off, and once that's gone the ship and crew will be consumed in rather short order. Indeed, the damage to the vessel's armor from just two weeks is enough to make it less protective (putting invading forces at a bit of a disadvantage) until it receives proper maintenance (which typically consists of removal and replacement, with the old armor being recycled). There are workarounds, such as armoring one's vessel more heavily to give some ablative layers that can safely be sloughed off during travel, that can allow more rapid travel between non-adjacent stars, but this is rarely considered to be worth the risk.

I intend to have spacecraft be markedly more affordable, to encourage PC's owning their own (the setting is heavily inspired by Star Wars) but haven't decided exactly how I'm going to do this (although having the supercapacitors, drives, and shielding systems be rather inexpensive is going to play a big role).

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

I completely agree, and this is how I design my star drives.

Lawmen of Borlo needed a setting where world about a resource rush could reach population centers quickly and then take a decently long time for people to get there, but it still made sense to have the galaxy sparsely seeded with settlements. I used a jump-drive system that could make extremely long jumps, but with a low degree of accuracy (a 20,000 ly jump had a 25% margin of error). Smaller jumps had better accuracy. I think each jump took about a week. Jumping to around exceptionally large stars/black holes let you get better accuracy, and the solar system had built a hideously expensive artificial anomaly that gave a similar performance boost. We never actually went to space, but the basics of the system came up a bunch, because they determined what resources where and weren't available.

I've got a setting I played a couple of games in about exploring the stars with a stardrive for the first time. I used warp drives with speeds from around 5c to 100c, depending on circumstance. I had "roads" of space that were "easier to warp", and an alien civilization built around those. Every new world was a big deal, and each voyage was a big deal... which was the point, because it was an exploration game.


I've got an expansive space empire setting I hope to play with soon, where I'm trying to do a kitchen sink treatment. Its FTL connects different pockets of time and space via a jump drive with jump points that are sensitive to time, and they may be open hourly or maybe only every six months. This lets me present isolated networks of "territory" that have a given culture. And cut off areas if they prove to be problematic, or tell the PC's they only have to stall the invaders for two months instead of defeating them.


Dreadstormers uses Jump drives with a 5 day lapse and take two jumps to get between close systems. I needed time for the players to take over the ship, and the travel time is their clock. I also am using jump drive like traveller because the ship was designed for a "everything is on fire" scenario, and I wanted an excuse to fill the ship with flamable hydrogen bricks. And to make the machinery involved as troublesome as possible, so we have a spinning jump core, capacitors to dump energy into it, and plasma emmiters to flood hyperspace with hydrogen to inflate the bubble of reality.


Space Boarders I never answered those questions for. The players didn't drive ships, they boarded them violently.

Ok, that's cool and unique. Well done.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

In my space setting, the C limit is a function of the curvature of space. FTL drives work by transiting 'subspace', thereby going 'straight' rather than around the curve. Accordingly, travel time is still distance related, but much faster than C.

Internal subspace drives appear at TL10, but rudimentary subspace gates are possible at TL9.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

It seems that the greatest factor of speedup you could get would be equal to π, and that you could only get that if you were going to a destination that was diametrically opposed to yours on the great hypersphere of space. Or are you envisioning space as being elaborately folded, like a paper napkin or something?

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

In my space opera game, I used a "6 lightyears per week" (just under one lightyear per day) maximum FTL speed using the hyperdrive method, with a minor increase based on the MoS of Navigation (Hyperspace) rolls. Piloting (Hyperspace) was out as I was using "cannot change course once in hyperspace until you drop out" as a thing.

I also used waste heat signatures on reactionless engines that weren't the Hot Reactionless option, so that more sluggish ships (using the Standard and Rotary Reactionless options) also had waste heat. I've also made those pseudovelocity, with a top speed equaling 10×G mps (e.g. a 1G engine hits a sustainable 10 mps, while a 10G engine hits a sustainable 100 mps). In this case, "mps" is the actual speed, not delta-V.


As for a ship collection, http://dagwood.sandwich.net/venture/ships.pdf is what I made (though it's not the most recent update). There are a few things in there which are adaptations of some Star Wars, Wing Commander, and even Star Trek ships, although most of it is my own creation.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

I wanted a setting that allowed small groups to use spacecraft of modest size and low (relative) cost to make interstellar journeys, but at the same time I didn't want the full implications of such a tech level.

So most interstellar travel in my Orichalcum Universe takes place through a combination of small ground-to-orbit (or in some cases interplanetary-capable) vessels, which dock with or are carried within enormous FTL vessels called 'star carriers'. The small ships don't have their own onboard FTL drives.

So an interstellar journey might consist of boarding your personal ship at the spaceport (or stretch of level ground on a primitive world) and flying up to parking orbit, where you dock with or are taken within a huge space-to-space star carrier. Such a star carrier might be able to carry your ship and dozens or occasionally hundreds of others. Of course, this FTL ride is not free!

When the star carrier goes into orbit around the destination planet, you fly down in your own ship and land. Thus a personal spacecraft, able to make ground-to-orbit or sometimes Earth-to-Luna trips on its own, can take you on an interstellar journey.

It also means you can't just leave anytime you want! You have to wait for the next available star carrier to show up. Otherwise, you're not going anywhere (except maybe orbit). The natives may be restless and looking to skin you alive, but that doesn't mean you can get away for another two weeks or two months or whatever when the star carrier makes its rounds. So it's possible to easily strand a player party on one planet without being too arbitrary about it.

Since most star carriers follow a strict schedule, it also means that you'd better be ready when it does show up. If the star carrier is up there in orbit waiting and will leave in another 24 hours, it's a bad time for your engineer to have the Number Two rocket motor dismantled! If you don't get your ship flying in time, you'll miss your ride and be stuck until the next carrier comes by. Which might be soon on a settled, civilized world, or might be next year on a backwater planet.

Star carriers vary widely in size, cost, and comfort. Most star carriers have the passengers live aboard their own vessels inside the hold or docked to the exterior (though the carrier usually provides them with 'shore power' and consumables, because that's safer and easier to heat-manage than letting everybody run their own power plants inside the hold, and of course it's also a revenue stream). Many star carriers, but not all, also offer luxurious accommodations for wealthier passengers.

It's possible to build an FTL drive into a small ship, but it's not usually done, because FTL drives are (relatively) cheap to operate but budget-breakingly expensive to construct. Thus most small atmosphere-capable FTL ships are military (and even the military uses them sparingly).

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

Something like the latter. Not folded though, just a sharper curvature than euclidian geometry conceives. Maybe more like a tight spiral. And higher power drives available at higher TLs allow entry into subspace at greater angles/velocities.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

That reminds me of the onion analogy I use for describing how hyperspace works: RealSpace is the "skin" of the "onion", and you travel through hyperspace/wormhole shortcuts passing "deeper" into the "onion". While in theory this could result in instantaneous travel, to do so would compress anything passing through it into a singularity, hence why the safe speeds are measured in single digit lightyears per week.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

That's an amazing coincidence because, while I hadn't mentioned it, my multiverse model is also an onion 'shape', although somewhat different than your description.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

I have a setting where travel is instantaneous outside the ship, and very fast but still fairly slow on a cosmic scale inside the ship. Insert some technobabble here about bubbles and time/space manipulation. The setting also doesn't have advanced enough AIs or automation to just make complete cryosleep viable, and there's no FTL communication (or at least none that fit in a ship). So there's a certain "wild west" vibe, and interstellar polities can only grow so big. Ships will sometimes just disappear and never return.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

Can the current level of automation handle short jaunts? It occurs to me there would be a variety of applications of this if an automated system can jump the ship back and forth in a relatively small area - you could age cheese/wine, grow crops, mine prodigious quantities of cryptocurrency (likely resulting in that market being completely non-viable, but you could use the same methods for other time-consuming computations, like brute-force decryption), and so forth, all in a matter of moments. Even if the vessels must be manned (and you aren't unethical enough to force people to man it so you can get a good 8-year-old tawny port in an instant), you could potentially leverage it to "instantly" train people - a ship leaves with batch of fresh recruits and comes back with fully-trained soldiers (or whatever you trained them for) only seconds later. A society that embraced this could be incredibly adaptable, "instantly" training people for whatever role is needed right now.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

If someone can come up with a backronym for "OGRE drive" I would be very happy.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

It's the O that I find trickiest.

Opalescent Gravitic Reaction Engine
Oppositional Gravitic Reaction Engine
Ordinate Gravitic Reaction Engine
Orthopositronium Gravitic Reaction Engine
Overdamped Gravitic Reaction Engine
Ornery Goblins Riding Elephants

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

This one wins. Doubly so if OGREs explode randomly.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

I mean, onion is sitting right there in the question.

OnionSpace Gravitic Realm Expansor Drive
OnionSpace Geometry RealSpace Emulator Drive
OnionSpace Gödel-Riemann-Einstein Drive
OnionShell Generalised Reality Equi-valence Drive

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

How about the OrthoGraphic Reversal Engine?


Orthographic has the normal meaning of presenting a three dimensional object in two dimensions, for context.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

Building on this one a little:
O'Reilly-Gödel-Riemann-Einstein Drive
Ogawa-Gödel-Riemann-Einstein Drive
Oberto-Gödel-Riemann-Einstein Drive
Opeyemi-Gödel-Riemann-Einstein Drive

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

Onion Graphing Relativity Emancipating Drive (it analyzes the "onion" spacetime is shaped as, and frees the ship from the "can't go past lightspeed" bit of relativity).

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

My general preference is to design my drives around the story type I want. For example, in a space opera setting I have drive fields where it's mostly pointless to shoot at the ship from outside the field, but you can intercept and merge drive fields to allow close range combat, including boarding actions; to prevent this from just turning into a missile duel, drive fields require psionic ability (reasonably common among humans and aliens, but nonexistent for computers) from their pilots.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

Optimal-Geometric-Residual Engine

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

I have an after the long night setting, where things were mostly TL10 / near TL11 before the nanoburn wars.

After the wars, the main human location is TL9, with most other planets less than that (some down to TL4 or 5 before climbing back up during the night).

The superscience available: Artificial Gravity, Rotary Reactionless Drives, and Hyperdrives. All powered by exotic post-transuranic alloys; the manufacture of these "PTU"s are the limiting valve for high TL societies. Reactionless drives have a "limit" of about 0.05c, due to "relativistic effects causing the metastable PTU alloys destabilize due to the relativistic quantum effects that make them metastable failing". Technobable at its finest. I also use the "accelerator tube limits" design switch on. Not that it affects the PCs much at TL9, but there are higher TL races about.

Hyperdrive speed is 1 pc/day per drive, with navigation rolls affecting how close you get to your target. Longer shunts are harder (-1 per pc), and with most ships having 0.1 or 0.2g acceleration, being way off is time consuming.

Communication (with no FTL radio) is via "comm cyclers": autonomous hyperdrive probes with extensive communication systems and 5 pc/day speed, that just go back and forth between worlds. Survey and military ships will carry one or two for emergencies.

The Kaa were the aggressors in the wars, and are around but TL8. They have hyperdrives, but are one-tenth the speed, but also have cloaking technology. The Engai are present too, at TL12 withwarp drives that are x100 speed, subwarp fast reactionless drives, and all the medical tech you can find in the book.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

You don't mention contragravity lift. Do you include that in "Artificial Gravity" or are real starships orbital only with some sort of HEDM shuttle or aomething like that?

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

Oh, another thing I like for spaceship drives: warp drives function even at low altitudes, but they have a speed that is inversely dependent on the local gravitational field. A drive that can reach 100 m/s near Earth (G=10m/s^2) can reach 170 km/s in stellar orbit at 1 AU (G=5.9e-3 m/s) and more than 30c in deep space (G=1e-10m/s). This guarantees that most travel time is spent in relatively interesting locations (it works out that time to escape is linear in gravitational potential and can be computed as (speed at current distance) * (distance to center of object)).

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

The reactionless drives in my Harpyias setting function somewhat-similarly, although there it's simply dependent on distance from the system's star rather than any gravitational interactions. Each of the setting's Aetheric Stars (those that hyperspace travel can travel between, and thus the only ones the PC's would ever be visiting) have 12 orbits of note - one each at one each at 0.25 AU, 0.41 AU, 0.67 AU, 1.11 AU, 1.84 AU, 3 AU, 5 AU, 8.25 AU, 13.6 AU, 22.45 AU, 37 AU, and finally 61.15 AU. The first 11 typically have something in them - a planet or asteroid field - while the last is where ships are able to transition into and out of hyperspace. The further you get from the central star, the faster the ship goes, such that a typical vessel takes around 1 day to travel between two orbits (regardless of if this is the "short" 0.16 AU jaunt between the first two orbits or the 24.15 AU expanse between the last two).

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

30c isn't very fast. That works out to 1 ly every 12 days or a bit more than 50 days to Alpha Centauri.

I've seen calculations that put the average distance to stars with Earth-like planets at 200 ly. That's 6.5 years with your drive.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

Great concept, but, like Fred said, that scale still gives a very long travel time.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

That's a deliberately slow example. It also takes 18 hours to escape Earth and more than a week for solar escape.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

In terms of interstelar travel Alpha Centauri is as quick as it gets. There might even be a reason to go there. Alpha Centauri a+b are both the right sort of stars to produce an Earth-like planet.

There is very little reason to go just to the heliopause.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

For my space opera setting:

Faster-than-Light Drives and Communications
Faster-than-light travel consists of shunting the craft into a sidereal aspect of the universe commonly known as hyperspace. Hyperspace exists alongside "RealSpace" in a manner that is best modeled using the analogy of an onion. RealSpace is the "skin" of the onion, with hyperspace existing in layers "beneath" the "skin." The "deeper" into hyperspace one travels, the shorter the distance between two points in RealSpace becomes. This happens because space, according to Einsteinian physics, is curved; by cutting through hyperspace, the curve becomes closer to a straight line.

There is a drawback. In theory hyperspace should permit instantaneous travel between two points; in practice, however, the most common speed for a hyperdrive is 6 lightyears per week. The effective maximum speed at which organic life can survive is five lightyears per day (35 lightyears per week). This is because the physical nature of hyperspace puts a strain on one's body and mind; the strain gets worse the deeper into hyperspace one goes. Those who travel through hyperspace report nausea, dizziness, headaches, vomiting, and an inability to concentrate – and those are the milder side effects from short trips at slow speeds. A number of travelers have fallen unconscious, and a few, notably the elderly and severely ill, have fallen into comas or died.

The physical nature of hyperspace is also unsettling to biological minds when viewed directly while in transit. Information dating back to the Human-Pondrur Wars and as recently as the Glrrü War have reported people going insane when visually exposed to hyperspace. Because those who have viewed recordings of hyperspace do not exhibit any tendency towards insanity, even when making the transit at the time, it can be inferred there are elements of hyperspace which cannot be recorded and yet are picked up by one's subconscious when viewed directly.

Travel through hyperspace is best performed along one of the well-mapped trade routes that cover the Sol Sector. Outside the Sol Sector sit a number of regions that are not that well charted. Gravitational anomalies, particularly unmapped brown dwarfs and rogue planets, have been known to drop a ship out of hyperspace without warning. A Navigation (Hyperspace) roll is required to successfully plot a course, with the Sol Sector gaining a +4 to the skill due to being well-charted.

While faster-than-light transportation has become commonplace, the secret to efficient faster-than-light communications remains elusive. At present, real-time hyperspace communications are limited to a range of 500 A.U.s, and even this requires massive relay stations on both ends.

Communications
Radio communications is still in use on the frontier. In the Sol Sector, however, gravity-ripple comlinks have become standard. Like the cell phone networks of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, comlink networks can operate worldwide, providing real-time holographic communications. A comlink usually has to "link up" to a larger computer network, usually one of the worldwide or space station computer networks, although larger ships such as cruisers, carriers, and battleships can host comlink networks as well. Only the military or the most affluent can afford holographic communications; most comlinks are still voice-only.

Most comlinks come with a translation program to translate conversations between the user's native language and Trade Pidgin, with both languages at Accented or better proficiency. In essence, this means that two or more people speaking different languages can communicate almost in real-time, as all comlinks involved will be translating to a common language.

Augmented and Virtual Reality
Many HUDs, helmet visors, goggles, and vid-glasses have a link to the public identification systems, providing "augmented reality" to anyone who can afford the monthly fees (which is nearly everyone; PCs can count it as part of their monthly Cost of Living). Because of a lack of FTL communications, the public databases – which include "mug shots" of all identified people, weapons, and vehicles – must regularly be updated through sharing information with interstellar ships. Due to regular traffic, it is very hard to live "off the grid" in the Sol Sector, but much easier out in the frontier where updates are less regular; a newly-settled colony from a recently-awakened sleeper ship would probably have information that is 100-200 years out of date.

Virtual reality, however, has been the subject of much debate. Because it has shown to be psychologically addictive – many people in the past have wasted away living virtual lives that, to them, were more 'real' than their real lives – virtual reality is banned on nearly every world and station in the Sol Sector. This makes VR equipment, particularly VR suits, neural interface cyberware, and virtual environment software, hot commodities on the black market.

Ranged Weapons
The most common personal weapons encountered are blasters, weapons that fire charged particle beams. Lasers in the IR to UV bands are still popular on the frontier. All ranged weapons come standard with laser sights and a HUD link which ties into the HUD display of most standard combat helmets. Outside military circles, however, the ability to outshoot an opponent without relying on these systems is held in high regard.

Melee Weapons
Superfine blades (UT163), monowire blades and whips (UT163), vibroblades (UT164), hyperdense blades (UT164), and force swords (UT166) are quite common; vibro-knives are especially common among the criminal element, and Kronaks love hyperdense axes. It should be noted that hyperdense blades are able to parry force swords without taking damage themselves. Force swords have the innate ability to deflect blaster and ion fire (lasers are generally too fast to parry, and sonic weapons project a cone the force sword cannot parry), although a character should have Enhanced Time Sense or Precognitive Parry in order to parry blaster fire.

In addition to the above, any metal sword or polearm can be made into a "blastsword". This replaces any thrusting impaling damage with a thrusting crushing attack linked to a 2d (5) burn attack. This modification is an additional +$600 to the price of the weapon (double if a HT-2 (3) stun setting is added), applied after any modifiers such as superfine, vibroblade, or hyperdense, but before any ornamentation modifiers. Most blastswords are also equipped with a basket hilt for no additional charge; treat a hit from the basket hilt as a loaded fist (thr cr).

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

Spacecraft Systems

Armor Systems
The following armor systems are available in the setting: Ice (SS1:11), Stone (SS1:11), Iron (SS7:6), Steel (SS1:11), Light Alloy (SS1:11), Metallic Laminate (SS1:12), Advanced Metallic Laminate (SS1:12), Nanocomposite (SS1:12), and Diamoindoid (SS1:13). Ice and Stone are most commonly encountered in bases built inside of or designed to look like comets and asteroids, respectively. Light Alloy and Metallic Laminate are usually used in the manufacture of civilian spacecraft, while Nanocomposite and Diamondoid are normally encountered on military vessels.

Atmospheric Systems
Certain systems aren't likely to be found in this document as systems for spacecraft, but are still used in the setting for purely atmospheric craft. Most atmospheric craft in use in the Sol Sector use Contragravity Lifters (SS1:14) and some form of propulsion, and don't exceed SM +8. The Afterburning Turbofan (SS7:10), Gasbag (SS7:9), Helicopter Rotor (SS7:10), Jet Engine (SS1:19), Fusion Air-Ram (SS7:10), Maneuver Enhancement (SS7:11), Ornithopter Wings (SS7:12), and Turbofan (SS7:10) are all available for purely atmospheric craft.

Reaction Engines
The most common reaction engines are the Fusion Torch (SS1:23) and Plasma Torch (SS7:16), the latter usually operating in a low-thrust, high-efficiency mode. The Super Fusion Torch (SS1:23) has just been invented, but has yet to reach full production; it may, however, be found on certain unique experimental craft. The Fusion Torch and Plasma Torch engines are often built for aerospace operations with the Ram-Rocket option (SS1:30).

Reactionless Engines
The Rotary Reactionless Engine (SS1:24) may not be placed in a Central hull section. This engine otherwise resembles the Standard and Hot Reactionless Engines (SS1:24), but designed for very low thrust.

The Super Reactionless Engine (SS1:24) has not yet been invented.

All Reactionless Engines are given the Waste Heat Signature setting switch (see below). In addition, they are all pseudo-velocity drives, producing pseudo-velocity thrust equal to 10 mps times their acceleration in G.

Space Sails
Many pleasure craft or scout craft may be encountered using a sail system in the area inside a system's snow line. While the Lightsail (SS1:25) is the most common, the Magsail (SS1:25) and Radioisotope Sail (SS7:17) systems are also available. Most of the time, these systems are found on pleasure craft used by the idle rich. In fact, a lightsail race is held annually at the Nantucket station in the Procyon system.

Lightspeed and Stardrive Engines
The only Stardrive Engine (SS1:25) available is a hyperdrive. Unlike the model described in Spaceships, additional hyperdrives do not increase speed; instead, a second unit may be used as a backup drive. The most common speed for a hyperdrive is 6 lightyears per week, although this can optionally be boosted by one additional lightyear that week for every point of a margin of success on the Navigation (Hyperspace) roll. The effective maximum speed at which organic life can survive is five lightyears per day (35 lightyears per week).

The Lightspeed Drive (SS7:11) is also available, but rarely seen outside of antiques dating back to the Human-Pondrur Wars.

Weaponry Systems
The following beam weapons are available: Laser, Electromagnetic Disruptor, Particle Beam, Plasma, UV Laser, Antiparticle, Tractor, and X-Ray Laser. The Electromagnetic Disruptor is usually called an "Ion Beam" or "Ion Cannon". The most common weapons used are the Improved Particle Beam, Improved Ion Cannon, and Improved UV Laser; Tractor Beams are not uncommon as well, but usually only see use by and against pirates and smugglers.

Electromagnetic Guns and standard Missile Launchers are also available in the setting; missiles are much more prevalent than guns. Warp Missile Launchers (SS1:29) are not available.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

Rotary reactionless drives are probably sufficient to make HEDM, etc. uneconomic and unnecessary.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

No, rotary reactionless only provides 0.1 G per unit. Getting off Earth or a world with similar gravity would require 11 units and Phantasm specified that in his setting they may not be placed in a Central Hull location.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

It might be possible to fly to orbit with wings, though it's a bit nasty.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

You probably can't do it with Spaceships. With 0.5-0.6 Gs your atmospheric max is going to be extremely low. To dupilicate X-15 performance you'd need 6 Gs and an X-15 can't actually make it to orbit.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

Yeah, we had a big thread on that pulling out all of the mathmatical stops from vehicles. The conclusion was that if you can get off the ground with your thrust and lift, and we don't run into a weird speed at which lift stops working, you should be able to slowly ramp up your total speed and altitude with a reactionless drive until you are in orbit.



I think it took 16 hours or something silly like that.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

The problem is mostly that you have to remain in the upper atmosphere until you are going fast enough that you can skip up and not return to atmosphere before you hit orbital velocity, which may mean trying to fly at mach 20 or something.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

My bad - I was going by memory and thought it was 0.5G per unit. Yeah, that's going to make life difficult without CG.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

When you get to G that low, you're probably also going to want to calculate the G of the ship itself. Figure the mass as a fraction of Earth mass (5.878e21 tons) and the nominal radius* as a fraction of Earth's radius (6.975e6 yards), then use the normal gravity equation (Gs=M/R^2, where Gs is "surface" gravity, M is Earth masses, and R is Earth radii). For instance, an SM+8 ship massing 1000 tons and 50 yards long comes to M=1.7012589316093909493024838380401e-19 Earth masses, R=3.5842293906810035842293906810036e-6 Earth radii, Gs=1.3242769649540660088465464443688e-8G or about 1.2977914256549846886696155154814e-7m/s^2, which you will note is nearly 1300 times greater than your deep space gravity figure.

(With the exception of acceleration, where I used meters/s^2 to match the unit of acceleration in the quoted post, I used standard, non-metric units to conform with GURPS units, for simplicity. I used whatever precision Google returned for the constants related to M and R, and whatever precision my calculator provided otherwise.)

*Call it half the length for simplicity. The difference is actually very small between different human-scale ships.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

I actually had a germ of an idea for a setting, might get developed, might not, who knows. The basic idea was that NASA develops a working FTL warp drive in 1982. All other technology remains the same. The power requirements are low enough that you can run it with a fission reactor, but it's very slow by the usual science fiction standards, 12-16c tops. So a trip to Alpha Centauri takes 3-4 months, and an expedition to Tau Ceti takes a couple of years round trip. Project Timberwind is a huge success, so advanced fission drives are the pinnacle of reaction engines. Starships look like what we might imagine a long-term Jupiter mission would look like: large, expensive ships with spin habitats, closed-cycle life support systems, greenhouses, etc. Many of them custom-built for their missions. Still lots of brushed metal panels and white insulating fabric.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

I honestly didn't end up using it. I'm running the kind of Star Wars type of world where buying little space-ship shuttle capable of flying off from a planet and entering 'hyperspace' isn't much more expensive than buying a big car.

Spaceship battles are also mostly a Star Wars-style dogfight unless it is big ships sniping stations or each other with artillery.

I don't have GURPS Spaceships currently, but from what I've read it is fairly realistic even with using "^"-tech, and I'm guessing it wouldn't be useful for my setting where small ships fight like WWII airplanes (fighters, bombers, ...) and the big ones are more like various (naval) ships of war that might (depending on the ship's design) even fly right up to other big space-ships and give them a broadside.

Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
 

Not exactly tech in 'my' setting but given I stumbled across this recently and people may find it interesting...

https://www.afrl.af.mil/Portals/90/D...nce_number.pdf

Its a discussion of the potential course of directed energy technologies (weapons especially) at least as far as the air force is concerned.


I may post things of interest if I can find them. Two of the ideas (and how I stumbled on it) was news articles about the near future viability of Ultrashort pulse lasers by both the air force and army (meaning we're a step closer from just CW lasers to actual atomic-rockets style laser weapons.. perhaps as soon as next year by some claims I've seen) And the idea that certain kinds of directed energy technology might create a sort of 'localized forcefield' pinpoint defense - not so much a bubble shield ala Star Trek but more like Macross/Independence War pinpoint barriers or Babylon 5 interceptors.

Which is still awesome because knowing what is possible or plausible is a big step to defining what you want as internally consistent technology in your setting. Or at least, in mine.