[Space] seeking advice for building a campaign

[Johnny Angel]

I'm working on a space campaign for a group of guys at a gaming club, and I'm having a hard time figuring out the details of space travel in the game. I understand the math as presented in GURPS Space; that's not the issue. I'm just unsure of what sort of distances and spaceship speeds I need to capture the feel that I want to present. Basically - I understand the formulas, but I'm not sure what number values I need to plug into the formulas to get what I want.

The feel that I am going for and the time scales I'm trying to get are akin to what travel aboard a sea-going vessel would have been like during the Golden Age of Piracy here on Earth. To be perfectly honest, I'm actually considering quite simply using the map as presented in Sid Meier's Pirates and redressing it to be planets, space ports, and solar systems instead of ocean and towns. The feel and presentation I'm looking for are the same, but the distances are simply bigger and the ships are faster - which produces (in my mind) similar travel times.

What are some of the number values which I should consider? What values seem reasonable for typical ship speeds?

Like I said, I understand the formulas as presented in the books; I'm just not sure which numbers to plug in there to get the feel and presentation that I want. I don't normally run space games, so I'm a little bit out of my element when it comes to starship engine schematics and performance values. If it helps any, I see space travel in this campaign as commonly working in one of two ways.

The first way is a warp drive or something similar; space flight similar to what is presented in Star Trek and/or Star Wars. You go from Point A to Point B much like you would with any other form of travel; simply at higher speeds. This is the most common way.

The second way is by folding space, and I imagine that it works similar to how jumps work in Battlestar Gallactica. The basic concept is that space is sort of a 4 Dimensional Sphere. If you imagine a galaxy as being mapped on a world globe, instead of going from Point A to Point B by travelling along the surface and curve of the globe, you find a way to travel via a more direct route. Although this method allows for faster travel, it also requires a lot of complex mathmatical equations and preperation. Even the smallest of errors can lead to ending up somewhere else. Calculations can also be effected by the presence of large celestial bodies such as planets, stars; etc, so most ships which are capable of such travel try not to plot points from near such bodies or to near such bodies. Less travel time is involved, but far more preperation is involved, and a lot more risk is involved. It's also quite expensive to have such an engine on a ship.

Some of the more well off settlements (think a spaceport or planet analogy to something like Cartegena) might have permanent rings built which have a preset set of coordinates attached to a second ring elsewhere. These rings do the calculations for this type of travel for you and allow even ships without such engines to travel in this way.

I don't expect the campaign to be hardcore hard sci-fi. Realism is important when it comes to little things such as keeping track of ammo, travel times, and things of that nature, but the big details such as how exactly space travel works aren't as important. Although I don't need to know every tiny little detail about how exactly a space engine works, I still do need to figure out what sort of speeds and engine types a typical starship in such a setting would use. The first reason is so that I know how far away to place settlements from from each other to get the feel I've previously mentioned; the second reason (and the one which the players will probably be more concerned with) is so I know which scale to use when resolving space combat.


I have Space and Spaceships. I believe that the combat system I mentioned is in Spaceships.