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Old 10-08-2013, 09:30 AM   #1
Dangerious P. Cats
 
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Default Help with mix and match space sci fi

I'm building a sic fi space campaign by taking bits and pieces of different sci if shows, games and movies and squishing them with some modification into the one setting. In some cases I'm only taking the technology and aesthetic of a sci fi and imposing my own social structure on it (as is the case with the humans in the campaign), while in other cases I'm taking alien races wholesale. The motivation behind this is that I get a fairly well tailored setting that the players will still have a fair degree of familiarity to. The campaign is going to focus on two human worlds in a state of Cold War that is rather hot on the frontiers of colonised space (wars in colonies breaking out and being backed by each faction, colonies being sabotaged or manipulated, etc), with various aliens being injected in to make things more complicated. The only real tenants of the setting are that space travel takes a long time between inhabitable systems and communication is not advanced enough to be faster than physically sending a ship.

I was hoping for some suggestions from the hivemind for which sci fi to take the antagonist human faction from. The player's faction is going to take their technology, weapons, ships, etc from the humans in BattleStar Galactica (the 2000's series) and I wanted another sci if with a similar approach to technology (guns that fire bullets, long and difficult surgeries for medicine, etc) as well as be an equivalent tech level. I'm trying to limit what I use to television series or film (maybe games) since it's easy to show a player who hasn't seen the relevant series an episode or two, while books can become somewhat difficult. Any ideas would be welcome.

I'm also wondering which aliens would be interesting to inject into a human on human conflict and how you might modify them to better mix with the tech level described above and/or any other aliens you think would be good to include.
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Old 10-08-2013, 01:50 PM   #2
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Default Re: Help with mix and match space sci fi

Perhaps Babylon 5? They avoid slugthrowers on the station, but ship's weapons are physical projectiles, and medicine isn't magic.
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Old 10-08-2013, 05:33 PM   #3
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Default Re: Help with mix and match space sci fi

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Originally Posted by patchwork View Post
Perhaps Babylon 5? They avoid slugthrowers on the station, but ship's weapons are physical projectiles, and medicine isn't magic.
Medicine isn't magic on B5 except when it's an alien device such as the ep where June Lockhart guested.

Also, B5's Earthfleet ships and other with similar tech do not use projectiles. Their big guns are the same as the small handguns we see used most. They are plasma contained in some sort of "bottle". They are significantly slower than light and may sometimes be intercepted in flight. This disrupts the bottle and prevents the plasma from hitting it's target.

I can't think of another live action series that used projectiles in space combat the way nBSG did. There are some animes that did though. Cowboy Bebop for one and the earlier Gundams for another. Maybe Outlaw Star too.

Go to paper and you could use the works of H. Beam Piper. I think his collapsium armored ships with their rapid-fire nuclear warhead guns would make hash out of nBSG ships but they didn't use beams.
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Old 10-08-2013, 08:03 PM   #4
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Default Re: Help with mix and match space sci fi

Doing away with books greatly limits things, but you could go for something like Starship Troopers. The movie would fit an antagonist faction even better, since Verhoeven added a thick layer of satirical fascism and propaganda to an otherwise straight book. The humans are hilariously militaristic, with implausibly brutal boot camps, a huge infantry force, ineffective weapons and inane Braveheart-charge tactics. It's semi-obvious that the war is either a way to distract the population or to cull the lower classes.

Another movie-faction that comes to mind are the Necromongers from The Chronicles of Riddick - a vast nomadic fleet of religious zealots with advanced weapons and brainwashing technology, stumbling onto colonies and converting the population by force. That'll give the campaign a more mystical, space-fantasy vibe.

If you're willing to take examples from videogames, Mass Effect offers a lot of them. The Turians, for example, have a society built around obligatory military service. You can pilfer ideas from here.
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Old 10-09-2013, 03:03 AM   #5
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Default Re: Help with mix and match space sci fi

I like the idea of using the starship troopers film as the basis of re the antagonists (should probably come up with a name as some point). The tech works and they fit well thematically also. The only other series I could think of that used bullet weapons space was firefly, though the series ended too quickly for there to be much detail into the alliance ships.
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