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Old 11-19-2007, 09:55 PM   #21
Gamer_Zer0
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Default Re: How Hard is your Science Fiction?

I'm more of a guy that as long it works,i don't care about the how,unless its a part of the plot and thas they way my group is too...
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Old 11-19-2007, 11:10 PM   #22
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Default Re: How Hard is your Science Fiction?

I like hard science. Gritty as sin, but with a lil funk to it. Like between Cowboy Bebop and the Aliens movies.

At those levels, our players can make basic assumptions about technology and how it works, and can relate to the cultures around them. None of the guys I know are terribly great thespians so the more at home a game is, the better I play.

Having issues with the incapabilities of some technologies leaves room for great plots. FTL comm doesn't exist? Well how are messages sent? Ship teleports in range of a planet and broadcasts data into a satellite system. Space Pony Express. Another thing is that people are still well-off mortal in gritty sci-fi so people dont charge into battles like gung-ho morons.
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Old 11-21-2007, 02:41 AM   #23
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Default Re: How Hard is your Science Fiction?

I've been working on a science fiction for over a year, and it's fairly hard, although not entirely. I had decided to limit the tech to the ones being researched, or at least seriously being considered.

My original vision was closer to space opera. I had started out using the 2300 AD colonies, which could be reached by starships using the Alcubierre Warp Drive. Military starships had at least one squadron of fighters. Space elevators were common. Artificial gravity had been invented.

Somewhere along the way, the science got harder. I eliminated FTL and artificial gravity and limited the scope of the campaign to the solar system. There are colonies from Mercury to Saturn. While some are international, most belong to one country. There is one space elevator on Earth, and another on Mars. I didn't remove fighters altogether, but I limited them to suborbital space planes or short-range vehicles on board space stations.

It's not completely hard. There are still battles in space in this campaign. Th ships are armed with missiles and railguns (I decided lasers are a bit too cliche, so I didn't use them).

I decided to leave aliens and droids out of the picture, so I wouldn't have to deal with them. The campaign would revolve around the struggle for supremacy in space among the nations of Earth.
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Old 11-21-2007, 03:55 PM   #24
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Default Re: How Hard is your Science Fiction?

I think, if I were brewing up my own setting, I'd probably do a "Two Miracle" setting; probably FTL drives and artificial gravity (but maybe not contra-gravity). Unless I were going ultra-hard (which I already have some ideas about) and did something in the (reletively) near future about humanity's first pushes out into space (like to stay there and mine asteroids and live on Mars and stuff). I don't have a problem with softer stuff... I'm just saying if I had my druthers.

Now, when you throw player preferences into the mix, I might be convinced to run with a setting one of them comes up with, or come up with something that had a feel they wanted to explore. Of course, to a certain extent, if they want something that feels like Star Trek, well... We could just run Star Trek.

One thing that I've struggled with when thinking about a setting based in this area of the Galaxy is... we know where the stars are and stuff. I'd love to have some convenient thing that told me how far apart given stars were from each other so I could calculate travel times. I wrote a program that would do this in Python a while ago, but I didn't build the database that would make it actually useful, you know? Maybe I'll take another stab at it some day and actually make it good. Have to learn more of some language.
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Old 11-21-2007, 06:12 PM   #25
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: How Hard is your Science Fiction?

Quote:
Originally Posted by OneSeventeen
One thing that I've struggled with when thinking about a setting based in this area of the Galaxy is... we know where the stars are and stuff.
We're not actually doing as well on that as you'd think.In one magazine article I read it was estimated that half the G,K and M class mainsequenbce stars with 25 light years have not had their distances determined precisely

25 light years isn't that far to go when you're looking for Earth-like planets either. The "named" stars in Earth's vicinity are almost all unsuitable. You need to weed out all the close binaries, everthing over around an F8 and things that have left the main sequence (there goes Sirius on 2 counts).

Anyway, you start looking for Earth-like planets in Earth's vicinity (loosely defined) and you're probably going to be ending up with stars that have catalog numbers instead of names.

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