Things I learned studying up on Captain-and-Crew Space Opera

[thrash]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

DS9's design is also particularly baffling. I believe I mentioned that, but in case I didn't: Clearly round to generate spin-gravity, but with artificial gravity being applied perpendicular to what would be the spin-gravity's direction. This is very much what I mean: It's like they've seen wheel-designs, imitated them, but clearly don't understand them.

I'm pretty sure this and the horizontal decks in the ships are examples of the writers not wanting to overtax the imagination of the (intended, perceived) audience. Said audience grew up in a 1g field, with floors that are flat and run horizontally -- especially in large ships like aircraft carriers, which were an explicit influence on the look-and-feel of the original Enterprise. Vertically stacked decks (like a skyscraper) were a possibility, but more difficult to visualize, tie together, and make interesting: cf., Azhanti High Lightning from GDW. Arrangements that are not possible under 1g are even more difficult to keep track of, both for the audience and the writers.

2001 was able to make it work by showing the entire gravity wheel at once, and then the connections to the rest of the ship. On an episodic TV series, it would be necessary to remind viewers of the arrangement just about every week. I also strongly suspect that any attempt to depict (e.g.) a rotating circular station would result in silliness like CJ Cherryh's ships that dock to the rim of a spinning wheel, rather than its hub.

Edit to add: Silly from an engineering standpoint but probably necessary from a dramatic point of view, in that if all your arrivals and departures are confined to one small zone on the station (the hub) your stories are mostly constrained to start and end there as well. Hard to have surprise visitors, sudden escapes, fights that range from bar to docks, etc., etc., when everyone and everything has to pass through Station Customs and Quarrantine.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Viewports at all don't make sense, but then I'm beginning to let a little Atomic Rockets leak into my space opera

I love the smell of Atomic Rockets in the space opera. It smells like… victory.

There's also the "as small as is practical for players." A captain-and-crew features about 10 people, with the sense of "there are more crew, who can occasionally die." The problem I have with a Galaxy Class-scale ship is, first of all, it would never make sense to send a bridge crew down when you have over 1000 crewmen on your ship. And second, if you're playing the characters managing that, you're swiftly going to run into "This is a game of logistics, not a game of adventure."

I've had several cracks at it, usually with ships 1,700 tonnes to 3,000 tons and with complements 38 to 45.

So when I settled on a ship-size, it had a crew size of more like 200, large enough to have some crew to shift around and get a sense of scale, but not so many that it stops making sense that the bridge crew might have a more direct hand in things (especially given how very elite they inevitably are at the point totals you tend to see in this sort of action-adventure game)

I have variously tried getting the players to play the characters who ought to go on adventures and having each player play one character in each of the departments of the ship that deals with one sort of adventure, and each have one voice at the big table when policy decisions are made. I really think that ought to work; I haven't got it to do so yet but I think that has been the result of the difficulties of remote roleplaying when the GM lives in rural Australia.

There are moments when I'm watching these that I suddenly get a sense that the writers are putting screwy crap in there just to put screwy crap in there, because they think "That's what the nerds will like." Farscape and Firefly seem much more respectful of their audience. They both get silly, but it's the sort of silly you see at the RPG table, where friends are having fun with something, rather than this notion that a literary major is being made to write "some crap" and is making fun of his audience.

Yeah, I think that is both contemptuous and contemptible.

Sure, call it what you will. The point is that genre is often about exploring fanciful and spectacular concepts or settings. People see amazing artwork and say "I wanna go there!"

It ought to be, but all too often the scenery is spectacular but doesn't have enough substance and consistency to it to support exploration, and the concepts are grandly named but muddled and self-contradictory.

The real benefit of sci-fi, as opposed to Fantasy and (usually, hopefully) horror, is that sci-fi could be real. Saturn isn't just something some artist came up with, it's actually a place with beautiful, icy rings and amazing moons. There really are going to be aliens out there somewhere.

Something like that, but not exactly. At least the concepts are real, and are amenable to understanding and exploration. Doors open up with "Aha!"s rather than being slammed in your face with "Just because" and "never mind".

Captain-and-crew Space Opera, though, often only looks at this rather obliquely. Much of it (Farscape especially, which just had magic as a matter of course and doesn't pretend its anything else) is just fantasy in space. We have our elves and our goblins and our magic and we reskin it slightly. The idea is to grab the tropes people already know and give them to them with a space-y twist. Which is fine.

Following a lead that Isaac Asimov established in one of his essays, I distinguish the playground of ideas and knowledge as "SF" and the re-skinned adventure yarns as "sci fi". Unlike Asimov I think there can be good sci fi. I don't hold sci fi to the standards of SF. Scientific and technical points don't have to be important to sci fi, but that doesn't mean that you can tell a good story if you fill it up with nonsense. A lot of the things that bad sci-fi writers excuse as making their stories better are the equivalent of making the USA a county in Scotland, or having a gas-operated rifle fail when it ran out of gas. Such things don't make the story better, they make it garbage.

But I happen to think think that the best examples of captain-and-crew space opera manage to meld their human drama with the spectacle of real science and use the one to enhance and explain the other. But that's tricky to master, and I'm even having a hard time explaining what I mean.

You mean like how Hill St. Blues managed to interweave touching human drama with technically realistic police work?

Well, a lot of British sci-fi seems primarily written with a British audience in mind, though I expect that's more true of older British Sci-fi. Doctor Who seems aimed at both sides of the Atlantic currently.

There are a lot fewer restrictions on international trade in media products now than there were in the days of the original Doctor Who. Though for some bizarre reason DVDs treat Australia as part of South America.

They actually used to write the word {tech} in the scripts. As in "Captain, the tech is teching the tech!"

"Don't bother me now, I'm busy swooning over my lost love. I can't be bothered with tech right now!"

"But if we don't tech, then the tech will tech the tech right up the tech!"

"Fine! Then tech the tech. Engage!"

With {tech} as a placeholder for whatever technobabble they would come up with. The scripts literally worked this way.

So I've heard. that's obviously not an approach that is going to give any sort of realism or consistency to the technical constraints. It all but guarantees that the tech will do whatever one writer wants one week and not do what another writer, working independently, doesn't want the next. And this I understand is what we find in Star Trek. And it affects distances, speeds, and adjacency too.

Which has been eclipsed by smartphones.

Just so.

I don't think it has to be either-or, and please don't mistake my teasing of the genre as distaste. I grew up with it, and I'm still watching it. It was a successful genre, though it has certainly faded in popularity. I want to understand why it was popular and what it needs to translate to the tabletop.

For the players to have agency (that is, for them to be able to appreciate their characters' situation, form a plan to deal with it, put the plan into action, and have the plan work out even if with contingencies needing to be dealt with), the technology and the astrography have to be consistent. "Speed of plot" and nonsense like that disables the character players and undermines tension.

Interpersonal drama is crafted via careful selection of disadvantages (you could even go a step further and create the web that Drama System has, but I think that's a step too far for GURPS).

Maybe, but that has to be done consultatively and with GM guidance.

I think it is well worth ensuring player buy-in and discussing a group template.

At that point, I think you have a pretty viable game.

This is my Great White Whale. But I agree with you that it ought to work.