Coolant [Spaceships]

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

That's fair criticism....

If I were interested in space opera then I would describe the relevant capabilities of spacecraft, perhaps in terms of some sort of game rules, and still avoid the technobabble. That might involve such statements as "to engage warp, a starship must have enough kinetic energy to be gravitationally unbound, i.e. travelling at system escape velocity" and "when a starship materialises out of warp is is stationary with respect to the barycentre of the system; how close it is to the desired exit point is determined by MoS on the astrogator's skill roll", and "spaceships are built using TL10 limited-superscience fusion torch reaction engines per Spaceships p.23."

That sort of thing is the cool content of a game centred on spaceship manoeuvring, its cyber-pirates and techno-ninjas. It is still the case that every word you write about how forcefields allow the fusion rocket to produce exhaust velocities above 9 km/s without temperatures above the sublimation point of graphite comes out of your budget for pirates and ninjas. Besides which, if your experience it anything like mine, all technobabble is either laughable gibberish to the players who studied physics, or else it allows them to drive a gold-plated Rolls-Royce through the loopholes it creates.

There is an explanation somewhere of the difference between SF and sci-fi that goes like this: "The hero asks the Professor how her time-machine works. In SF you get a page and a half about relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Garden of the Forking Paths. In sci-fi the Professor says "Sit in this seat here, shut the door, turn the power switch to 'on'. Then set the target date on this dial here, and push the big yellow button."

My advice remains that you ought to minimise the technobabble, and write as little as possible about the ways your setting violates relativity etc. A sci-fi setting is a magic trick, and it is best not to draw readers' attention to the sleights of hand. Save your word count for the cool content, and direct reader's attention away from the bits that challenge suspension-of-disbelief.

I think I might mostly agree in slightly different terms: It's important that it be understood how setting technology works at the level that the gameplay engages with it.

In most games that will range from 'customer' (only cares about the broad results and maybe the price) through 'advanced user' (needs to know the behavior in detail so that they can use or abuse it in special circumstances), with maybe some forays into 'technician' (some knowledge of what's in the box and what happens if you mess with the components). This can vary between different kinds of tech, and different play groups using the same setting are likely to have different priorities.

It's probably very rare for a game to actually want to deal with tech, especially superscience tech, at what I might call 'engineer' (advanced knowledge of the effects of all the components, and how they work together to produce the device behavior) or 'scientist' (can explain the principles by which the finest level of components produce their effects) levels. Even if the PCs do work on that level, the people at the table probably won't.