Steampunk, Space and Aliens

[scc]

OK every so often a very weird steampunk/space campaign idea demands some attention from my head.

So the setting is the moons of a Jovian planet, three of which are habitable. Humanity evolved on one and has just enough tech to colonize the other two, which are taking the thematic place of Africa.

Currently I'm thinking that including aliens might be interesting, but as of yet I have very few firms ideas about them, they should be:

• Genre appropriate, that is conform to what people from that era thought aliens would be like, or what is likely to appear in modern fiction based upon those ideas
• Not be stupid, the campaign is going to be hard science, so no ideas based upon scientific concepts that have since been disputed
• A good stand in for Africans, so era views on Africans should apply to them
• And potential player characters

[Gef]

It's not African, but I'd give natives of one of the two other moons telecom, natural radio, if the humans haven't invented it yet, and brainstorm more scientifically plausible capabilities that would seem like magic to humans, maybe a "curse" carried by a parasite.

How close genetically are the different biomes? Independently evolved, or did life start on one and colonize the others in waves, maybe because of vulcanism? Were the three moons actually one big moon at some point?

[Flyndaran]

Steampunk as most people use it requires pseudoscience.
And you're going to need some hand waving having one habitable moon, let alone three.
I'm not sure what you want if you want plausible impossibilities.

Edit: I don't mean to "thread-crap". I just don't think you're going to get what you want the way you phrased things.

[scc]

Originally Posted by Gef

It's not African, but I'd give natives of one of the two other moons telecom, natural radio, if the humans haven't invented it yet, and brainstorm more scientifically plausible capabilities that would seem like magic to humans, maybe a "curse" carried by a parasite.

I figure that radio would be one of the very few prerequisites for making the setting work, other wise you'd be forced to use physical couriers to move messages back and forth, landing SSTO's wouldn't be able to talk to control towers and lots of other *FUN* stuff would be happening.

I also figure the natives are TL 1 or 2, but not likely to be any higher. Somehow humans have figured out how to talk to them

Originally Posted by Gef

How close genetically are the different biomes? Independently evolved, or did life start on one and colonize the others in waves, maybe because of vulcanism? Were the three moons actually one big moon at some point?

Single source of LIFE the moon humanity comes from and then panspermia spreads it throughout the system

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Steampunk as most people use it requires pseudoscience.
And you're going to need some hand waving having one habitable moon, let alone three.
I'm not sure what you want if you want plausible impossibilities.

Edit: I don't mean to "thread-crap". I just don't think you're going to get what you want the way you phrased things.

Improbably yes, implausible no. It's steampunk more because of divergent paths of development then different laws of physics. If looked up into the sky and saw other worlds you'd probably want to go there someday and the steampunk comes from the fact that there's been a very focused development of flight, especially spaceflight, so when someone comes along with a wacky idea that seems like it might work, well they're probably more likely to get funded and as there's now a reason to go there.

Personally I reckon that powered flight would have been achieved sometime mid TL4 when someone got the bright idea to put some rockets onto a glider developed by someone like da Vinci

[mikeejimbo]

Wildlife is terrifying, but natural-looking. There are beasts that are two stories tall with impossibly thick skin - they shrug off most conventional small arms. Their legs are the size of tree trunks and they can crush you without even noticing. Being charged by one is a death sentence. Interestingly, they're herbivores - they evolved these traits as a defense mechanism against the predators, which are smart, swift, and agile, with claws as sharp as men can made blades. They hunt in packs but mostly pick off smaller prey animals, such as the herds of wild grazers that can run as fast as any of the land-based vehicles you can make, with wicked sharp horns.

In short, just take African animals and turn them up to 11.

[ericthered]

Are humanoid aliens 'stupid' in your view? That's the number one decision you need to make in designing these aliens. And given the genre you're working with, they probably don't break suspense of disbelief... probably.

Once you've made that decision, its just a matter of either browsing through existing aliens or using the SPACE generation table to build something that you like. We have a thread on 0-point space opera aliens. Fiction is rife with ideas.

So give us a narrower scope, particuarly in terms of humanoid vs. nonhumanoid.

I'm going to guess reptilemen are off the table?

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

And you're going to need some hand waving having one habitable moon, let alone three.

A habitable moon isn't a huge stretch. There are issues, but there are issues with habitable worlds generally, and yet Earth exists.

Gas giants sometimes end up close to their stars, you just need to assume that the gas giant in question landed up in the goldilocks zone when the pushing and shoving was done. In a galaxy of stars, that's probably happened many times.

You need bigger bodies than the Galilean satellites, with a higher percentage of rock and metal and less ice. The former you can get by assuming the protostellar cloud was richer in heavy elements than Sol's (probably younger than Sol too). The ice you can assume boiled off during a period during the early formation when the gas giant was really close to the primary.

A bigger problem is tide-lock. You might be able to have a human-habitable (broadly defined) world tide-locked to a gas giant, but it's iffy. So you need to assume the moons orbit further out from their gas giant than the Galilean moons do with Jupiter.

The biggest issue is having three human-habitable moons of one gas giant. That's not probable, to put it mildly, unless there is some natural process producing such that we don't know about. But that might be harnessable as a story-hook. Maybe the moons are the product of terraforming work in the deep past (by human standards), and the terraforming aliens (or whoever) left some powerful plot devices lying around.

(That might even explain part of the schizo-tech aspects of the setting.)

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by scc

OK every so often a very weird steampunk/space campaign idea demands some attention from my head.

So the setting is the moons of a Jovian planet, three of which are habitable. Humanity evolved on one and has just enough tech to colonize the other two, which are taking the thematic place of Africa.

Currently I'm thinking that including aliens might be interesting, but as of yet I have very few firms ideas about them, they should be:

• Genre appropriate, that is conform to what people from that era thought aliens would be like, or what is likely to appear in modern fiction based upon those ideas
• Not be stupid, the campaign is going to be hard science, so no ideas based upon scientific concepts that have since been disputed
• A good stand in for Africans, so era views on Africans should apply to them
• And potential player characters

They would need a good grasp on chemistry and metallurgy to make rocket fuel and vacuum sealed compartments with enough oxygen. Here's a thought. Maybe they are seriously rocket oriented. They never came up with the concept of a "firing chamber". Their "rifles" and "cannon" are actually railguns that shoot little missiles with stabilising fins. So they never thought of the internal combustion engine. Good metallurgy means that their boilers can be very high pressure. They haven't figured out much about electricity so they use really sophisticated Babbage computers. The moons could be comparatively low gravity to make achieving lift off easier. Which means muscle powered flight becomes more practical.

[dcarson]

To replace radio use heliographs. One of the Space 1889 adventures is about a sabotage attempt on the almost completed orbital heliograph that will allow communications with mars faster then sending a ship. A image of it is at http://mateengreenway.com/steampunk/Harbinger.jpg.

[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by dcarson

To replace radio use heliographs. One of the Space 1889 adventures is about a sabotage attempt on the almost completed orbital heliograph that will allow communications with mars faster then sending a ship. A image of it is at http://mateengreenway.com/steampunk/Harbinger.jpg.

Okay. That's a seriously cool site. I like how he came up with all sorts of ways to use liftwood. :)