GURPS Space campaign setting

[combatmedic]

Excellent suggestions for the telegraph. I'll have to think a bit more about it.

To answer Greystar's question; yes, most of the colonies remember Earth.

[combatmedic]

Note on history: the setting is probably five centuries or more in the future. Time enough for plenty of STL expansion, extensive terraforming,etc. Not so far things become totally unrecogizable.

[MrId]

I like these sorts of settings. I prefer the 'pony express' paradigm to the 'telegraph' paradigm, but make the transmitter suitably huge or expensive, and the two can coexist, and help to separate "core" from "frontier" planets. A planet's really made it if they have a space elevator and a FTL radio switchboard.

I usually don't go into too much detail about the superscience technologies, as I usually only think of FTL as a way to get from point A to point B and use more realistic technologies after that. How fast is FTL? What are the restrictions on it's use? I like the Traveller rule: You need to be 100 diameters from a body to use FTL -- which forces the use of reaction drives to get to 100 diameters. I think I might stretch it to 500 or 1000 diameters for my setting, but its only a suggestion. It really depends on (a) STL delta-v and (b) how long you want voyages to take.

I'd recommend, if you haven't already checked it out, Atomic Rockets. Even if you don't use any of the math on the site, it contains a lot of general information and quotes from Heinlein and similar authors. It's very useful for designing settings like this.

As for aliens, I like the K'kree, Dryone, and Hivers from Traveller, the Soro and Night Brothers from Uplift (which has a number of non-anthropomorphic aliens) and the Puppeteers from Ringworld (but don't use them and the Hivers).

[combatmedic]

MrId, ATOMIC ROCKETS freakin' rocks! It's totally awesome. I'm adding it to my favorites. I'll defintely use this to help design my universe.

[combatmedic]

Just an idea: what about an alien race that hitches rides on comets, remora style? They could tether their ships to a comet and ride in it's tail. Maybe they could gather useful matter from the comets, as well. Nothing else on them yet. Just thought that would be a cool way for aliens to get around without FTL ships. Maybe they hang out in Oort clouds, waiting to latch onto passing comets.

Oh, and I am assuming comets brought the necessary components for life to Earth, as well as other worlds. I like that theory.

[Captain-Captain]

Originally Posted by Pomphis

I like to combine them. Telegraphs as something huge and terribly expensive and only available on major worlds and the most advanced super-dreadnought flagships, pony express everywhere else.

Rather than "Telegraph Stage" use a computer based analogy, since you will be able to type out the message and send it more or less unread by operators at either end. (This is a reaction to Bill Baldwin's Helmsman series, where communications officers decoded messages by hand and delivered them to the person they were sent to, knowing what it said.

Just tell the players FTL radio transmits at about 300 baud. I expect close to PERFECT comprehension by anyone who had a computer in the late 80s.

[Anaraxes]

Two parameters to consider for the interstellar telegraph: bandwidth and propagation rate. Bandwidth (how much data you can communicate) has been discussed. On Earth, the propagation delay of the telegraph was negligible (milliseconds), so people think of it as instantaneous. The FTL telegraph, however, might still take time to travel. If the signal propagates at 1 light year / week, it takes a month to get a message from Centauri to Earth (regardless of what that message says). Or perhaps it's instantaneous, so you can have interactive conversations.

Low bandwidth mediums will probably have data compression. Historically, many businesses used commercial codes, where short letter groups would stand for entire concepts like "place order for product X" or "build new factory". The codes were not just security, so no one could read them, but also compression, so that they only had to pay to send a few "words" rather than a paragraph of English text. Commonly needed concepts will take fewer bits to express than more unusual ones. (So, a single flash probably means "PCs have broken law and are headed your way; stop them at all costs"...)

If the telegraph is about the same speed as ships, then the only reason to use it would be cost. If it's slower, it'd better be a lot cheaper than ships. If it's very expensive, even though it's faster than ships, it's only used in great urgency, perhaps just by planetary governments.

Do you want the galaxy to have a modern feel, where cops can always radio ahead to stop you, you can easily call for help if you get into trouble, or log into the InterstellarNet to check on that one item you forgot before you took off? Take away the telecommunications, and it's more of a Age of Sail sort of feel, where people can escape to obscure planets to hide out, frigate captains have to rely on thier own judgement rather than just calling the Admiral back at Starfleet, and major events like revolutions have time to develop before anyone knows about them and can react.

[Sanity]

I have been thinking about something similar for my own background two years ago, and I was going with bandwidth and cost.

"FTL Communication" was in the form of establisdhed wormholes where lasers were used to send signals. An aberration of FTL jump technology, that required extensive (as in: expensive and big) hardware, with high cost associated - on BOTH ends, dedicated. And the wormhole was just a tenth of a milimeter in diameter. Good enough for a laser beam in both directions, but nothing more. Give it 10mbit bandwidth. Enough for radio, news, video artifacts, stock data - but making a video phone call was exorbitant expensive.

Naturally ONLY major worlds had one or more communication stations (each providing one link only). And they had to be 100 diameter from any body ;) Very vulnerable. And they had to know where to target, roughly ;)

HUgh communication ships by the military could also work as endpoints, but they were the equivalent of a dreadnought, basically ONLY for the comm equipment. You put one or two into a hugh fleet, but that is it - no way solves the communicatoin problems. Keep the PC's out of the wealthy planets, and it is by courier again.

[Pomphis]

Originally Posted by Bandii

What is the basis for the Telegraph? Does it overcome the whole in-system light-lag problem?

I use two. Subether coms basically exist so that I do not have to care about light-lag inside the inner system. Very short range, maybe some light hours, and maybe 1,000 c, so there is noticeable but small lag when talking earth-jupiter for example. They are comparatively cheap and small. I use the Traveller mesoncoms for them. Relay lines are possible, but require lots of waystations due to the short (in interstellar terms) range. Nullspace coms are huge, expensive and faster and used between major worlds.

[combatmedic]

I've not read the Polesotechnic stories. I do like Anderson's work, so I'll have to check those out.