Pyramid #3/79: Space Atlas

[Kromm]

From our sunny home
Outward into the heavens
To worlds round the stars

— A cosmic explorer

Roleplaying campaigns require settings – and with few exceptions, settings need details to be interesting. "The story of the people with no background in the land with no place names" is rarely very exciting or memorable! Creating and elaborating on a world is a lot of work, however – especially when it's a literal world hanging in space, around its own distant star, to be reached using speculative technologies. You really can't assume anything in that case, which can mean a lot of long nights (and caffeine) for the GM.

Fortunately, GURPS has always been good about providing resources to help out. GURPS Space offers systems for working out the details of faraway star systems and planets, and of alien races and their civilizations. If you go further back, you'll find the whole GURPS Space Atlas series. And now there's Pyramid #3/79: Space Atlas:

• What do you get when you combine hermaphormorphic parahumans, fringe religion, a civil war, a psi-disease infestation, and self-aware colonies of altered humans living with dinosaur-like creatures? The answer is Ostara, a world tailor-made for exciting adventures. David Pulver headlines this month's issue, providing a believable history for this strange planet, plus full planetary statistics, two racial templates, a new disease, and three unique examples of fauna.
  
  
• Every sci-fi game needs the occasional "mystery star system" where things are spooky and strange, and Christopher Rice's The Vanishing Sun will certainly leave your players scratching their heads. This system appears on no charts, draws travelers from across the galaxy, converts people into eternally young "Quicksilver-Born," and even features a massive, enigmatic cube floating out by the asteroid belt. Better start untangling these puzzles now!
  
  
• History and myth are rife with oracles – strange, special folk who offered insight that seemed to lead people to their fate. Introduce this concept to your games with The SkipTime Hub of the OceanWe. J. Edward Tremlett's OceanWe can divine the choices any person or race should make, and their motivations aren't even sinister. But the source of their abilities is also the catalyst for a division within the OceanWe – one that may turn bloody, drawing in half the galaxy.
  
  
• In many campaigns, the specific details of travel time are handwaved or simplified: your reactionless rockets or warp drive get you there "in time." But if reaction mass, orbital transfers, and delta-V are important considerations at your gaming table, you may need more than what even GURPS Space and GURPS Spaceships provide. Halfway to Anywhere tackles the math of orbital mechanics head-on, with clear formulae, guidelines, look-up tables, examples, and more.
  
  
• How would your campaign change if faster-than-light travel was impossible . . . except via one specific artifact of limited use? Homeword Unbound introduces the Archway, a gate capable of transferring one person from anywhere to Earth – always back to Earth – with whatever gear he can successfully "visualize" coming with him. This unique artifact has the potential to change a campaign in unexpected ways.
  
  
• And at the edge of the map you'll find our usual features, including a Random Thought Table to help the GM maintain the sense of awe and wonder, and Odds and Ends that shed more light on the OceanWe and the Archway.

— PK & Kromm

[Refplace]

Yay for Halfway to Anywhere making it in here!

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Refplace

Yay for Halfway to Anywhere making it in here!

After Warden raised that discussion about orbital mechanics, I realized how little I actually knew, and I became curious about it, for a low-key "scavengers of the Solar System" idea that's bouncing around in my head, and, tada, I now have an article about it! Hooray!

That's a lot of reading to do.

[Steven Marsh]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

After Warden raised that discussion about orbital mechanics, I realized how little I actually knew, and I became curious about it, for a low-key "scavengers of the Solar System" idea that's bouncing around in my head, and, tada, I now have an article about it! Hooray!

Pyramid: Invading your mind and stealing your thoughts since 1993.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Steven Marsh

Pyramid: Invading your mind and stealing your thoughts since 1993.

You joke, but this isn't the first time I thought "You know, I really need X for my game..." only to have Pyramid publish that exact article, though usually it's Douglas Cole who writes those articles.

[Christopher R. Rice]

Is my brain playing tricks on me or is the Eidetic Memory column by David missing?

[dataweaver]

Originally Posted by Refplace

Yay for Halfway to Anywhere making it in here!

Great title! I heard of it when reading an article by Isaac Asimov about a discussion he had had with Robert Heinlein, discussing Heinlein's then-upcoming story “the Man Who Sold the Moon” (a story about the challenges to be faced in reaching the moon), and a difficulty an earlier story he had written was causing him: in that earlier story, he had established the ability to achieve Earth orbit with little trouble; Asimov said something like “Oh, I see; once you're in Earth Orbit, you're halfway to the moon”, and Heinlein responded “no; once you're in Earth Orbit, you're halfway to anywhere!”

[Humabout]

~puts his shovel away~

Just thought I'd try to breathe a touch of life back into this again.

I have recently launched my first rocket (IRL) and thought I'd share the results, so people might learn from my own experience.

Despite a rather tumultuous design and fabrication experience, we did lift off on time and achieve roughly average apogee despite it being generally about 10% lower than the ideal predicted height. We are chalking this up to a mix of random variables (it was windy and we had to launch at an angle into the wind so we had a chance of recovering our rocket, plus random added weight in the form of unexpected tape, glue, paint, fillets, etc.; plus just the randomness inherent to models vs. reality.) So, if you are using Halfway to Anywhere, I'd suggest that it is a best case scenario, and GMs who want things to go wrong (or players who want to design for the unexpected) should consider a 10% difference in performance from the calculations - and not in your favor.

All of that said, the GM should never be afraid to fudge in the favor of plot. After all, Armageddon wouldn't have been a very enjoyable movie if Bruce Willis et al died on launch....

A full review of the design, launch, and results experience will be posted on my blog this week. See my signature for details.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Humabout

~puts his shovel away~

Just thought I'd try to breathe a touch of life back into this again.

I have recently launched my first rocket (IRL) and thought I'd share the results, so people might learn from my own experience.

Despite a rather tumultuous design and fabrication experience, we did lift off on time and achieve roughly average apogee despite it being generally about 10% lower than the ideal predicted height. We are chalking this up to a mix of random variables (it was windy and we had to launch at an angle into the wind so we had a chance of recovering our rocket, plus random added weight in the form of unexpected tape, glue, paint, fillets, etc.; plus just the randomness inherent to models vs. reality.) So, if you are using Halfway to Anywhere, I'd suggest that it is a best case scenario, and GMs who want things to go wrong (or players who want to design for the unexpected) should consider a 10% difference in performance from the calculations - and not in your favor.

All of that said, the GM should never be afraid to fudge in the favor of plot. After all, Armageddon wouldn't have been a very enjoyable movie if Bruce Willis et al died on launch....

A full review of the design, launch, and results experience will be posted on my blog this week. See my signature for details.

I've wanted to use your Halfway to Anywhere rules for awhile, and I will, once I start my work on Echoes in the Dark, and I've actually been struggling with exactly that: What do you do on a miss? Of course, you might get lost, and getting lost in the Solar System might be bad (as in lethally campaign-ending). A 10% loss on Delta-V might be okay, but it varies between no big deal and lethally campaign ending. If you're going to have Navigation rolls, failures should have interesting consequences, rather than spell a big game over, or a minor inconvenience.

[Humabout]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

I've wanted to use your Halfway to Anywhere rules for awhile, and I will, once I start my work on Echoes in the Dark, and I've actually been struggling with exactly that: What do you do on a miss? Of course, you might get lost, and getting lost in the Solar System might be bad (as in lethally campaign-ending). A 10% loss on Delta-V might be okay, but it varies between no big deal and lethally campaign ending. If you're going to have Navigation rolls, failures should have interesting consequences, rather than spell a big game over, or a minor inconvenience.

This I totally understand. Halfway to Anywhere was originally developed so I knew how much dV to assign to spaceships I designed. It grew from there, but frankly, screwing up a Navigation roll in a hard sci-fi game should be dire. I know that isn't fun, which is why I generally wouldn't count that against a PC or expect a PC to make that roll. Of course, that doesn't fit everyone's games.

I think if I were requiring Navigation rolls for plotting orbital transfers, I'd make a failure result in using up 10% more fuel or using up all remaining fuel, whichever is less dire. Frex, if you botch a Nav roll to get to Mars, at the least, you'll get to Mars, but you might not have fuel to get back to Earth, which provides an adventure hook. If you aim for the moon, with dV to spare, you might lose profits because you burn extra fuel on a failure. Regardless, on a crit fail, you should probably be in deep trouble, as determined by the GM (start making Mechanic or Engineering rolls to pull an Apolo 13 out of your butt).

But again, this is really up to the GM. Halfway is meant as a guideline for GMs so they have bounds one what to expect of PCs' spaceships.