Casually letting 7 months pass in a trip to Jupiter is some mint shit
Just like back in heyday of sailing. Everything old is new again.
Yeah I've finally gotten around to watching the show just after seeing 3 body problem. Both excellent pieces of science fiction, I hope some day someone decides to televise the two other parts of the Space Odyssey novels as well. There's just something so satisfying about non-instant communication and going somewhere actually being a weighty decision rather than people just constantly bouncing between planets months apart.
Rimworld also does this, and emphasizes it quite a bit with its lore. Certainly nowhere near hard sci-fi though.
Considering my dad was part of the original D&D campaign that the books are based on, I really should read them one of these days.
Never really been a big sci fi guy before (I grew up on swords and sorcery lol), but I've recently started watching the show and the level of realism in the worldbuilding is really impressive honestly!
slice of life anime but its all cute astronaut girl shenanigans on a space ship while they wait to arrive at their destination
The first and last season share a serious plot, everything between is just slice of life shenanigans.
I like the idea of there being a serious plot going on in the background, like they're travelling for years at ~1g to a nearby star to prevent some great cosmic war or some shit. But where they're going is lightyears away so they're slowly receiving more data transmissions from their destination, on a several year lag
Idk how it'd all fit together but honestly as a concept it's not half bad
Sounds like project Hail Mary
Planetes is pretty close to that but, with earth and the moon. It's really good if you want to watch it.
Signalis Moment
That's kind of the plot of some of the characters I just posted wth⁉️⁉️
you very importantly added lesbians though
I fucking love selectively hard sci Fi
I want FTL but also taking heat dissipation, acceleration based artificial gravity, radiation shielding, and orbits into account
Exactly, I want the sci fi equivalent of Game of Thrones, where they have flying dragons but still need to consider the logistics of moving dragonslaying equipment over 200 miles.
Edit: To be clear by "Game of Thrones" I mean "A Song of Ice and Fire." I am not talking about the HBO series, which was very famously BS and unbelievable once it diverged from George RR Martin's written work.
God this is my favorite type of fiction, becuase it’s incredibly immersive and feels “Realistic” while still being sci fi/fantasy
Yep, changing one little thing and exploring deeply how society changes.
To be fair, Temaire does the dragon logistics and stuff better than GOT
Logistics are underrated
In my setting military propagandists always claim their interstellar nation has millions of ships
What they refuse to elaborate is that 95% of those are fuel and repair ships
I recently read Dune for the first time and I love the discussion between the Duke and one of his advisors about how they're having trouble predicting sandstorms because the Spacing Guild hasn't allowed them to orbit one of their frigates to act as a weather satellite.
It's their planet, it's their space-faring warship, and their ship is capable of lifting itself from the ground and propelling itself into orbit around that planet, but they aren't able to do that because of a treaty with an extremely powerful organization that is unwilling to play ball. Something about that mix of believable futuretech physics with believable politics just stood out to me.
If you're looking for realistic medieval logistics, GoT isn't it. Even ASOIAF doesn't depict logistics completely realistically.
Do you have any recommendations? I admit I was comparing it to the fantasy I've read such as LotR, so I may just have a low bar.
IDK lol I don't read much fantasy. I did read a nice critique of logistics by a historian in GoT here: https://acoup.blog/2019/10/04/collections-the-preposterous-logistics-of-the-loot-train-battle-game-of-thrones-s7e4/
Ironically LoTR tends to have relatively realistic logistics, particularly in the seige of gondor campaign. Having a realistic tone doesn't translate to actually being realistic, and having a fantastical tone doesn't necessarily mean being unrealistic.
I don't believe for one second that there is anything plausible about the troop movements of Lord of the Rings. I'm sorry, I've read too much history for that. But thanks for the link, I'll enjoy reading this, even though it's a critique of the TV show in a period past the point written by George RR Martin when I was actually talking about ASOIAF so it's not actually relevant to my first comment.
Ah my bad, you said GoT at first so my mind went to the TV show. I was using the term "relatively realistic" a bit loosely, after all LoTR is high fantasy, so realism was never a huge emphasis. LoTR is plausible as far as the scale, distance, and time is generally correct. Middle Earth is far, far smaller than the world of ASOIAF. From the Shire to Mordor is about 1000 miles, and it took the protagonists 3 books to cover the distance. For Westeros, the distance from the Wall to Dorne is 3000 miles.
That's a ridiculously large area to be nominally unified under a single political entity. The Roman Empire at its maximum extent is about 2700 miles from east to west.
All good homie
pseudo-realism my beloved.
I love how FTL is the one rule even some hard sci fi fans will allow just because no one wants to wait 30 years or something
I'm big HSF guy and it's like, one of those things that's totally acceptable unless you're Alistair Reynolds or you want to go insane, both of which are super valid
It's also impractical for most drama. If you decide to do a war at a neighbor star system at light speed, by the time you're there and back your empire has changed by at least a decade while you perceived the travel as instantaneous. You can't really have geopolitics in space unless your population lives a long-long time. Which is why I love the bobiverse.
This is peak ngl. FTL and maybe some Weird Spacey Cosmic Bullshit but otherwise hard as diamond is the best way to do it
Hard as diamon is the only way I do it.
Starsector is a pretty good game with all of those worldbuilding elements, if you haven't heard of it already. I quite like the writing.
All hard sci-fi has at least one speculative aspect though. Even in the expanse the hydrogen drives they use are completely speculative. Remember, acceleration at 5g will get you to theoretical light speed in about 70 days. That is absolutely wild if you can sustain 5g for extended periods, even with flip and burn mechanics. The tech in that series is seriously speculative in a lot of ways, and even does eventually involve FTL.
One of the smaller things that bothered me was the lack of lasers.
If you have a fusion drive that powerful and heat dissipation tech that somehow requires you use no radiators despite having a drive with that energy, then you can definitely field lasers
They even have ranging lasers, and I believe in the books there is one instance of a laser being used for offense
Considering they would render torpedoes useless, there is no reason not to use lasers in the setting
I just realised that the most enjoyable and fulfilling conversation I have been a part of this week happened in r/worldjerking
Ur whalecum!
This sub truly is a gem
I feefee like it's the only jerk sub I've seen that makes fun of, but also partakes in the thing they're making fun of, which greatly reduces the toxicity
Source: I'm part of multiple different other jerk subs
User deleted comment
1mo
meaningfully heat missiles quickly enough to destroy them.
If you pulse the lasers heating isn't an issue. You just blow chunks out of the missiles. In addition, even not pulsing them would still drill into the missiles. The energy is just too intense
"Not enough energy" is an engineering issue. They have plenty of energy to turn into lasers on board in the form of their fusion drive.
Also, at the distances involved, even light is slow. Missiles have the ability to move and dodge, so by the time your laser reaches its target, the missile may no longer be there.
Huh? The missiles operate closer than light seconds away in the book and show. There is no way they're dodging anything lightspeed.
In the hypothetical scenario of missiles that operate, say, 10 light minutes away, you can just laser a section of space the missile operates in (like a printer) to account for dodging.
FFS they use machine guns (gunpowder operated) for missiles in the setting
This is why I love elite dangerous. I recently saw the game and love the hard sci-fi elements to it.
No radiators tho 0/10
Jk
Maybe you will stumble upon my hard-ish sci-fi space opera TTRPG in a few years. It's progressing well and this level of sci-fi hardness is exactly what I love as well.
One of the best examples of this, and a great inspiration are the codex entries in Mass Effect.
Tell me moar about your setting!
In my own setting I use FTL as a tool for travelling interstellar distances. The space within a solar system is navigated by magnetic inertial confinement fusion and antimatter reaction drives.
So the ole' "hyperspace limited by large gravity wells" is employed.
It also prevents people from directly warping into planets as well lol.
This gives a bit more of an "age of sail" feel since travel time is still in weeks to months.
Sure! It's called "Star Paths" (or something like that, not sure if I will stick to the name in translation. Doesn't sounds as nice in English as it does in German
So I see we employ similar methods, although in this world FTL is achieved via phase-lines, streams of handwavy subspace-energy between star systems. Ships use their FTL-engines, so called phase spools to harness that energy to jump between stars. The time a jump takes depends on the intensity of the phase-line.
To detect and utilize these lines you need a living being, a psion called an Astrogator, so no automated FTL-flight is happening anytime soon.
The ships themselves need only to provide a comparatively small amount of energy, which is good because most ships still run on nuclear fission, although on the gas-core variety mostly.
Fusion for reactors and drives is just now becoming compact enough to really penetrate the market. So far mostly militaries and enormous bulk-freighters were able to use that.
So to compensate for the low energy drives, most civilised systems have lanes of pushing lasers to accelerate ships further than their drives alone could.
So the phase-lines and laser-lanes give the setting it's name. For they are the paths among the stars.
Travelling times are commonly measured in months, if not years for especially long journeys, but these times can be cut short by a more well trained Astrogator, who is generally able to drop their ship deeper into a system or initiate the jump earlier or to even chain jumps, negating the need to cross a system in STL.
This is however mostly done for player convenience, lore.wise these abilities are rather rare. Good thing then, PCs tend to be exceptional people.
I wonder, how do you keep everyone from blowing up stuff willy-nilly with antimatter? It's instability and great danger keep me from using it more.
I wonder, how do you keep everyone from blowing up stuff willy-nilly with antimatter? It's instability and great danger keep me from using it more.
It's confined within levitating antihydrogen ice balls. You need immense energy to keep it levitated and cooled
Its instability is why people don't use it to blow stuff up. Normally for explosives you want to be able to control them.
Antimatter factories are also large and cumbersome, so producing it is quite expensive as well.
It would not be economical as a weapon since it's so difficult to handle, and nukes are less expensive and more stable.
Antimatter is very interesting to explore when fusion just isn't fast enough anymoar; for example, space combat. For my setting, the acceleration produced by antimatter engines is so great that liquid immersion and breathing is required so passengers don't turn into red paste.
For your setting how close can ships get to the star system before needing to exit hyperspace?
If it's decently far, and the travel times are already quite long going FTL in interstellar distances, then you'd extend the length of your journey.
I tend to give as much speed for in-system travel as possible (hence using antimatter) because FTL is something I as the worldbuilder can control since it's pure fiction, but I can't control what theoretical physics can allow for different propulsion methods. So changing FTL speed allows me to modulate the speed of the 'verse better.
So to compensate for the low energy drives, most civilised systems have lanes of pushing lasers to accelerate ships further than their drives alone could
Interesting! I love the concept of laser propulsion. It's honestly underexplored. Though I do wonder how you deal with the much slower speed in uncivilized systems tho. Hence why I think antimatter drives could be a fine addition, since players will have more choice exploring uncivilized systems without taking forever.
Please check out Matterbeam's blog (ToughSF)
It's very useful, and most of the stuff dealing with space in my setting are from there. My favorite articles are the fusion highways (upgraded version of laser highways), stealth in space (yes, it's possible!), Macron Accelerators, casaba howitzers, and the article series about warships (he goes into detail about the various weapons like lasers and missiles).
And obviously atomic rockets is another good one.
Hmm, that is a good way to contain it. I like the detail in AR's article, that power failure wouldn't be IMMEDIATELY catastrophic since the magnets of the container are superconductors.
I assume they can hold their field as long as they are kept cold?
I feel like the price factor is just about the only thing holding AM back then. If your warships need to use AM-fuel already, putting some more into weapons shouldn't be too big of an issue.
You are going to turn into a cloud of radiation and funni particles anyway once containment fails. And if a torpedo/missile is shot down while outside your ship, that won't be too much of an issue, except for maybe the resulting explosion blinding some sensors. But that would also happen either way.
But then again, yeah, classic nukes are already enough to deal with pretty much any problem. If you hit someone with 20kt of TNT equivalent or 200 in a much smaller package, isn't going to make a difference to them.
For my setting, acceleration is still relatively low. That is certainly going to increase as time passes though. The people are still in a very wild-west phase of space exploration. Lot's of blank space on the maps, only few seriously major population centres that pump put new tech, which takes it's sweet time to get to the frontiers.
We even had incidents like STL colony ships arriving at their destination, just to find them already colonised by people born 200 years later. In fact there is a concerted effort by some self-styled philanthropists to look for colony ships in old records and find them to "save" them.
Which is difficult because they tend to be in the interstellar medium, which is hard to reach, as phase lines usually begin and end at the inner edges of a system. For Sol that is somewhere between this side of Uranus and Pluto's orbit, usually.
But yeah, I started to run into the "ships are too slow" problem recently. The setting wasn't really intended as a TTRPG but slowly became one and for the sake of player's interest some major up-teching is needed. Especially for the mentioned exploration of uncivilised space.
At least I should make high-thrust serious-whoop-ass torch ships more easily available for players and intended enemies and just leave civilians at slow speeds.
Can't have everyone and their grandma flying around with ships that would kill a habitat due to a minor navigation mistake.
Also still thinking about if I should keep induced gravity tech (read: typical handwavium artificial gravity) in the setting or leave that to the realm of magic. In it's most advanced form it would basically be an inertia dampener, although at the cost of absurd heat generation.
But putting people into essentially sarcophagi filled with breathable liquid is so nightmarishly fun, that I want to use that more and more. And EVE Online style pilot capsules are going to be a thing sooner or later anyway.
And yeah... Magic is a thing that one can encounter, it's just one of the forms of psionics, but it still needs to (mostly) obey the laws of thermodynamics.
But that is certainly a thing DMs and players will be able to dial to their liking, just like the rest of the more fantastical elements of the setting.
Atomic Rockets and ToughSF gave me sooooo many sleepless nights of non-stop reading, it's unreal. Learned a lot from them, although I have a major issue with understanding a lot of the math. But at least I get the vibes and basic principles.
My favourite thing on AR are probably Curie Fountain Radiators. And of course the entire section about weapons. And all the different options for drives!
At least I should make high-thrust serious-whoop-ass torch ships more easily available for players and intended enemies and just leave civilians at slow speeds.
Probably the best idea. Torchships can be more experimental, so only a few have access to them. Perhaps it's mostly pioneers, and they're very small because the fuel is expensive. Perhaps fusion is the best choice for you here. Maybe MCIF? At 1g or even 2g you won't need liquid breathing at all.
Also still thinking about if I should keep induced gravity tech (read: typical handwavium artificial gravity) in the setting
The main issue is that this tech now has to be present in every aspect of society. Depending on how it's operated, it'd probably be used in construction (even on planets), basic appliances, medicine, etc, considering being able to produce significant gravity without amass chance is huge.
Which is all just more writing and introducing possiblity for "why don't they just do this?"
If acceleration is so low, you can just opt for spin gravity in those ships with a spinning hab section. Another option is to just not care about gravity on ships. Passengers just have to constantly excercise or take muscle preservation drugs to not waste away, and they'll just have to deal with living in 0g like astronauts of today do. This might fit your wild west setting better.
And yeah... Magic is a thing that one can encounter, it's just one of the forms of psionics, but it still needs to (mostly) obey the laws of thermodynamics
Tell me moar about psionics! How does it operate outside of letting ppl go FTL?
PS: regarding antimatter again, I find for weaponry casaba howitzers are the best for range. Anything that produces a massive explosion actually has pitiful range in space, hence the need to concentrate it.
Which is once again why nukes are superior here, as you can make casaba howitzers with them
I'm so sorry, I kind of got myself into a big writing mood and kind of fabricated a way too big and slightly inconsistent lore-dump. Please don't feel obligated to read all this.
I also had to split it into many posts.
regarding antimatter again, I find for weaponry casaba howitzers are the best for range. Anything that produces a massive explosion actually has pitiful range in space, hence the need to concentrate it
I personally like them too. It's a pretty ingenious design and also sounds completely batshit insane to anyone who isn't already familiar with the idea... And even then it's still a bit out there.
But my favourite are just good old kinetics. Railguns for shorter ranges, missiles for longer distances. Firing a cluster of a couple dozen 25kg slugs that are about as smart as a bee at someone just is an unbeatable image in my head.
Sure, point defence is going to hit some of them, but as Rule Nr. 1 of warfare says: If brute force does not work, you are not using enough of it.
Particle beams are pretty cool too, though. Actually, anything that can reasonably hit and reduce a target to slag and other similar products is pretty cool.
So, psionics, as I said, this is definitely more the fantastical part of the setting and pretty far removed from actual hardness. First part is gonna have be deep-fluff background on the origins of psionics, not necessarily ultra important but I needed to write it out in English at some point anyway. Second part is going to deal with psionics themselves.
PART 1:
The universe there can be viewed like an onion. Every layer is a space, a dimension and we, our bodies, minds exist at the classic 3rd dimension.
2nd (and technically 1st layer too) is sub- or infraspace. This is where I put phase-lines and waves (which are used for baseline FTL communication, but that has big drawbacks).
Opposite to that, in the ultra direction we find hyperspace, an umbrella term for all higher dimensions that humans and pretty much all other species have no business dealing with.
But there are natives to these spaces and one of those native species, a billion or so years ago, encountered dangers it could no deal with. Thus it decided, in it's eternal, galaxy-brain wisdom to flee, fold itself down, reduce itself and just avoid it's enemies in lower-energy areas of the hypercosmos.
Those beings eventually became known as Iridians and they were vastly beyond anything poor 3-dimensional meatbags could even imagine.
So these effectively god-like beings did as they were used to and fought and hunted and ruled for a very, very long time. Many things happened, their old enemies pursued them, they fought a galaxy-shattering war, gained, lost and re-gained bodies, and when they didn't rest in what they call Long Dreams, (phases where the entire species became as one, united and unconsciously conscious), they were generally dicks towards anyone else.
Until they encountered the Gardeners, that is, extragalactic machines even more ancient than the Iridians are, with one purpose: To sow and care for life wherever they go. Kind of the opposite of your average grey goo swarm.
The Iridians, up until then pretty much inconsiderate towards any other life saw the Gardener's slow, slow and utterly careful and dedicated work and began to reconsider their own role: Up until now they had behaved like it suited them, wilful and quite honestly childish.
So, over another long time span they decided to just watch. Watch life as it unfolded. Civilisations rose and fell in a still badly damaged galaxy but without ever encountering one another. Even where two intelligent species arose near to one another, they often missed one another by a hair's breadth, separated only by a gulf of time.
But the Iridians had long since learned of phase-lines, to utilise the flows of energy between the stars to travel. Although their old war had disturbed the network, they knew that it would once return to stability again. So, they thought, why not enable others to use these energies as well? In fact, why not enhance life in general, give out gifts of power instead of careless destruction?
Thus, the Starseed program was born. With techniques gleaned from the always mysterious Gardeners the Iridians started to experiment with the fundamentals of life itself, tried to make it more like themselves and eventually they succeeded.
They constructed vast and immeasurably complex machines, the Starseed to go out into the Galaxy and find worlds that harboured young life and influence it to grow in certain directions.
The Starseed was also supposed to protect their planets from greater catastrophes and the Iridian's old enemies.
Many of them got lost in space, never to be seen again, others however found their targets and planted themselves successfully. And one other got damaged during a swing-by manoeuvre around a neutron star and split into three. One of those fragments would later hit Earth and while the actual star seed component would still work, it's braking drives did not. That killed a certain genus of large lizards. Oh well. The other two fragments would later also find suitable worlds and so mankind has two relatively close relatives running around the galaxy, as the starseed was after all one and the same and it had certain aesthetic imaginations for it's future spawn.
Many millions of years later we finally get to the point where we are now and by various happenstance the sleeping starseed-genes started to awake. Be it by long exposure to zero gravity, heightened doses of ionizing radiation or encounters with hyperspace energies, psionics would slowly start to show up in people that are accordingly called "psions".
PART 2:
Often the first and definitely the most obvious psions are Mages. But apart from the mage specific changes in appearance, psions tend to have different colorations of hair, skin, eyes etc. from their kin or other noticeable mutations. (Basically just an excuse to have anime protagonist looking MFs)
They come with plenty of biological differences to their baseline relatives.
They have a vastly more dense neural system, in some cases they have twice as many neurons. Their bodies grow cell complexes that can be compared to those of an electric eel. They charge themselves with biochemical energy gained from the Mages enhanced metabolism, which they can release through specific impulses fired by the extra nerves.
This energy is conducted through a different set of altered extra neurons and released through special skin cells which transform this now electrochemical energy into heat and virtual particles.
And those particles are where the actual magic happens. Special organelles in the brain of a Mage are able to influence energy fields around them, causing the virtual particles to turn into actual ones, mostly photons, in turn causing a mage to be always surrounded by their so called "glamour" a very noticeable aura that subconsciously takes a form that somewhat represents the mages personality.
At the same time, a Mage's brain is surrounded by a special membrane which enables them to compartmentalise their consciousness, split themselves into multiple streams and concentrate on different actions simultaneously. (This interacts with the game's "focus" resource, a characters ability to keep up multiple buffs, spells or other abilities. mages are usually much better at this than other characters.)
Another mutation of the brain is the telepathic node, an organ able to receive and send radio waves, enabling a mage to communicate wordlessly with others, sometimes even across language barriers, as long as they share at least some cultural context. They can, however not generally make sense of the encoding of "artificial" radio waves, unlike technopaths (see below).
Once they get some training in, Mages are able to control this process consciously and focus the particle streams into many different effect. From a simple burst of microwaves or a tightly bundled burst of photons (MASERS and LASERS, yay!) to remotely moving objects (telekinesis) or surrounding their bodies in dense fields to protect or strengthen themselves (I CAST FIST!), their abilities are many.
They are however limited by whatever energy their bodies can provide and without significant cybernetic or biosynthetic augmentation they tend to be underwhelming compared to your average fantasy sorcerer. Unless, of course, they learn to utilise external energies. Then it is only a matter of how cool they can keep their bodies and on how many things they can focus their brains at once.
So most mages are, when trained for battle, a considerable threat, but not much worse than any other soldier, just much more versatile. But every now and then extraordinarily powerful mages show up, able to channel vast quantities of hyperspace energies and those can be nuclear-level threats, leading to some places being very cautious with mages or requiring them outright to be fitted with a blocker, which essentially cripples their abilities temporarily.
Astrogators are often the next kind of psions. Their appearance is initially exclusive to populaces born in zero-to-low-G environments and some other environmental factors.
People born with active Astrogator genes are blessed with an innate sense for spatial recognition, mathematics and process huge amounts of information effortlessly.
Once they reach maturity another change takes place: An extra organ, deep inside their brain fully grows and awakens as a kind of third eye, an eye able to see the phase-lines in the firnament, forever changing the Astrogators perception of reality. They inherently know the necessary physics to have phase spools constructed and all their instincts want to drive them into the stars. They are born to live in the void and many will never return to their home worlds.
They are able to link up to their ships via relatively simple cybernetics or even old-school controls and steer it into the right place and time to initiate phase jumps.
For inexperienced astrogators this requires much effort and specific directions and speeds for the ship. The more experienced ones however can jump in any way they please and often learn to enter and exit systems much deeper in the gravity well.
Very rare cases are even able to execute short-distance jumps akin to teleportation or dive their ship into subspace while remaining stationary, effectively becoming perfectly invisible - but also blind.
Thanks for the longposts, love seeing the detail in ppl's worlds.
But my favourite are just good old kinetics. Railguns for shorter ranges, missiles for longer distances. Firing a cluster of a couple dozen 25kg slugs that are about as smart as a bee at someone just is an unbeatable image in my head.
If you have casaba howitzers, lasers, and particle beams kinetics may get outranged. Railguns might not propel the projectiles fast enough to hit moving ships.
However, if you want to keep kinetics, Macron Accelerators are great.
Jeebus,now that's an idea I had not seen yet. Wasn't impressed at first, but the addition of nuclear fuel to the Macrons makes it so much better. Definitely going to keep that in mind once the weapon rework happens. Matter Besm doing their name all honours, haha.
FTL space combat but there's still broadside cannon fire and the ships still use sails aka webermaxxing
You have just described my goals for the TTRPG I'm making lol I really want it grounded in the real stuff we have to think about in space so that players feel like competent astronauts facing realistic-ish problems like the ones you mentioned :)
Tell me moar about ur TTRPG
There was another guy in the thread that mentioned making a TTRPG as well lol
I saw that I wasn't the only one haha what are the odds?
And the working title for my game right now is "EVA" because it's really all about exploring hazardous environments, scavenging what you can from derelicts, and fighting off the things that go bump in the void. At the moment I'm kind of missing the big "hook" that most RPGs have, like a strong core identity for the player characters that makes people want to play. For now they're just the brave few who leave the safety of a breathable atmosphere to bring vital resources back home, and I'm just calling them EVA operators.
The general idea is that players will co-own a small ship and upgrade it over time, even replacing it once they outgrow it and need something bigger. Ships are all built vertically like in The Expanse and use Nuclear Salt Water Rockets because they're plausible and very powerful, but also inherently dangerous (which is a good thing because I really want to go for that industrial, cassette-futurism, "everything is a massive machine that could kill you if it breaks" vibe that movies like Alien and games like Dead Space have). Every major system is powered by a nuclear isomer battery, which is another speculative-but-plausible technology that is intrinsically dangerous lol and I picture them like the batteries that power titans in Titanfall; big and heavy, but still carriable. So power management may actually involve physically moving batteries around the ship (terrible ship design, still thinking on it, but could make for dramatic mid-battle engineering scenes).
One thing a friend recently inspired me to do was a blackjack-style heat mechanic for the ship. So the ship would have a heat limit and you can increase power to different systems at the cost of gaining a random amount of heat. If you go over your heat limit then the ship has to shut down the powered system to purge all of its heat, like going bust in blackjack. I like this because it's resource management with a touch of uncertainty mixed in to keep things interesting. Haven't fleshed it out much, but tech-wise I was thinking coolant would be a ferrofluid that is sprayed out of the ship to cool before being magnetically recollected (I was delighted to find that there is a real-life paper on using ferrofluids in liquid droplet radiators for this exact reason, so that's pretty cool!).
I'm also abandoning classic inventory systems in favour of strapping items to parts of your space suit, since you don't have room for a big backpack when your oxygen tank and maybe thrusters are taking that space. So getting shot in the right arm could be pretty bad if that's where you strapped your volatile power cells...
Anyway, that's the gist haha I feel like I've dumped a bit too much info, but I'd be happy to answer any questions you have :) I'm really enjoying making it and I feel like I'm getting close to playtesting soon.
fighting off the things that go bump in the void.
Can you explain this a bit more? Maybe this could be the main draw of your game.
One thing a friend recently inspired me to do was a blackjack-style heat mechanic for the ship
Realistically life support and other systems don't account for most of the heat; that would be the engines.
It's a cool in game mechanic so you can implement it in your setting, but I think things like weapon operation and accelerating hard should increase heat the most.
So power management may actually involve physically moving batteries around the ship (terrible ship design, still thinking on it, but could make for dramatic mid-battle engineering scenes).
If you have a nuclear salt water rocket then you already produce enough energy to power other systems in your ship many times over. It doesn't make sense to have a bunch of heavy batteries.
tech-wise I was thinking coolant would be a ferrofluid that is sprayed out of the ship to cool before being magnetically recollected
Yes, and a cool mechanic could be that having radiators active would mean you have to limit your acceleration or risk losing coolant, which adds more dimensions to heat management
Since some amount will always be lost after a trip, coolant should be something players always have to think about and replace.
Another thing you might want to consider considering how low tech the setting is would be whipple shielding.
You'd have to replace this frequently as it gets damaged by a bunch of space debris or after a battle. Of course, the more layers you put the more protection you have, but it comes at the cost of slower acceleration.
The general idea is that players will co-own a small ship and upgrade it over time, even replacing it once they outgrow it and need something bigger
Interesting! Could also include a psychological aspect to it maybe? Crew might need some stimulation in space or go insane, so adding amenity pods, VR, spending some time on planets, or conversational AI might be necessary as you spend more time in space.
Wow, thanks for the ideas!
In regards to things that go bump in the void, it was deliberately vague, but what I'm thinking of is natural hazards, xenofauna, and maybe some cosmic horrors beyond human comprehension. I really want to make natural and man-made hazards actually interesting and dangerous though. I want it to be fun to "fight" radiation, fires, etc.
I'm still on the fence about how power management will work. I love the idea of big chunky batteries that can be swapped around, but I'm realising now I could achieve the same result by having fuses/relays throughout the ship which serve the same mechanical purpose. So I can still have my puzzle game of which system to power when you're short on relays, while still using the engines for power.
I'm not sure if I will enforce the reduced acceleration for active radiators, mainly because one of the big things I'd want people to be using their heat for is actually pushing the thrusters a little harder. I'll think on it... Maybe I'll separate heat generation from cooling, so you can freely generate heat but when you generate too much and have to dump that heat, you lose coolant as well if you're accelerating too hard. That could also be an upgradeable stat for radiators, magnetic field strength i.e. the acceleration limit before you start losing coolant.
I do already have ship armour, though I've made no reference to it as "whipple shielding" because I wanted to keep the terminology familiar and also because the in-game armour is effective against actual weapons so it's a bit more than whipple shielding. But it works exactly as you described, increases the ship's payload mass which reduces the maximum acceleration of the ship.
I haven't looked into long-term effects of space travel yet but those are cool ideas! They're all cool ideas, thanks for taking the time :)
Thanks for clarifying!
I want it to be fun to "fight" radiation, fires, etc.
What are radiation fires? Are you referring to breaches in the ship's hull?
That could also be an upgradeable stat for radiators, magnetic field strength i.e. the acceleration limit before you start losing coolant.
Are you planning to have one radiator type? Or will there be multiple? For example the large fan-like ones don't have an issue with losing coolant.
That's not "radiation fires", I was listing hazards. Radiation is one, fire is another, etc.
I haven't thought about different radiator types yet, I've not fleshed out the baseline mechanics enough yet to start adding more content and diversifying things. In game development terms, it's not feature-complete yet so I haven't put much thought into just how many different types of radiator/engine/weapon/etc. I'll have. But do you know the name of the type of radiator you're referring to? I only know of liquid droplet radiators and radiator fins, I haven't read about fan-based radiators in space.
EDIT: Sometimes I repeat myself a little bit without making my point haha but what I meant about not being feature-complete is that it's not worth it to make much content if the mechanics they're built on are subject to change. Though sometimes I think I've got something nailed down, start fleshing out some content, then overhaul it and start again lol
That's not "radiation fires", I was listing hazards. Radiation is one, fire is another, etc.
Oops, I was reading on super low brightness haha.
But do you know the name of the type of radiator you're referring to? I only know of liquid droplet radiators and radiator fins, I haven't read about fan-based radiators in space.
My bad, I meant fin radiators. They kind of look like fan blades.
Atomic Rockets has a list of radiators tho
Regarding wanting to have players constantly manage ship resources, you can make the mechanic replacing heat pumps and clearing coolant blockages that normally appear from standard operation rather than moving batteries. It's something that can serve the same purpose while being more realistic for a ship that would produce its own power.
It also ties into the heat management system as well
Atomic Rockets is such a good resource, I'll make sure to look back over it again when I've locked in the mechanics and need ideas for more content. My original approach to the setting was to pick a way that was the "standard" way all ships/tech did things, to keep it simple, but I would for sure like to include different types of radiator and other things once I feel I've got the core mechanics down and it's just a matter of choosing what numbers, passive traits, etc. to give the different types. Fin radiators are iconic so I of course have to include them at some point haha
And yeah maintaining the heat system would absolutely fit the vibe of what I'm going for as well. I still like the idea of power relays/fuses that can be shorted or damaged (replacing what batteries would have been), but no reason I can't have both. Heat management being disabled would, in current game mechanics, only prevent you from pushing your systems beyond standard operation, while power being disconnected would fully disable the system. And they would likely be vulnerable to different forms of attack. EMP is a sci-fi staple that could deal damage directly to power relays. Anything that increases heat beyond safe levels would cause more heat pump failures, I would think, so maybe some kind of energy weapon could do that. Or maybe your ship has the acceleration advantage so you can force them to burn hotter to try to keep up with you.
Thanks again for your ideas, it really helps to get an outside perspective :)
Currently working on a setting like this. Hard sci-fi except for one (1) ship with an alcubierre drive (which also has artificial gravity bc if you can bend space for propulsion you can bend space for gravity). The warp drive is based on Erik Lentz's paper from a couple years ago because they don't require magic negative mass to work, although I'm not sure about the whole causality violation thing.
Which paper is this?
I've always taken the alcubierre drive to need negative mass so this is new
You: Injecting long space journeys into veins
Me: Enjoying settings where the entire society goes into cryosleep every two weeks to keep their clocks synched with interstellar civilization
We: Are largely the same and have you read Lockstep by Karl Schroeder?
Just looked it up and I am definitely liking that concept
Concept good, execution solid and so many details considered. I like the dude's work
In my transhumanpunk world only modified humans can travel in space as the speed is slow so voyages are long and biology is resource intensive.
based, fuck baselines
Fuck 'em meatbags
Gundam is far from Hard SF but I always appreciate how its space settings are mostly near earth orbit instead of fully going interplanetary/stellar. People forget how much space we still have around planet Earth.
I honestly like my sci-fi in a medium quality since I always like to bend the rules in some places while keeping realism in others.
Months? Lmao naive for you to think this is enought to travel between star systems...
3 years between mars and earth + croyopods. take or leave
Road trip story BUT IN SPACE like how cool is that instead of beep boop we’re already there
Fr tho, why people be hating on realism?
(Cant even have cool aliens or space empires)
WHy pEOpLe HATE ReaLiSM? ):
As much of a valid point as "Fantasy sucks cuz i can't have robots and lasers in it!" or "Sci-Fi sucks because i can't have wizards and dragons in it!". Indeed, if you aim for a setting highly plausible to real-world principles, then you can't have those. Your space empires simply don't match with the genre.
And then, realism is more of a expectation of what can realistically happen within a world, rather than a rule on to how hard you have to stick to the constraints of the real world's worldbuilding, imo at least.
How are space empires not matching with the genre? There is nothing about the concept of a space empire that violates laws of physics in the same way FTL or reactionless drives do. How practical in real life they would be is up for debate, but I think it's reductionist to straight up say that your setting isn't hard sci-fi if it contains a space empire.
The same applies to aliens. Yes, there's the question of how didn't we notice them, but again, their existence by itself doesn't violate any physical laws. You could have an alien civilisation and still have the setting be pretty hard.
Direct this reply at the other guy; i agree that if you try hard enough, you can make these work in hard sci-fi.
Neither of these is disallowed by the virtue of the setting being hard sci-fi.
Monopole conversion drive go AAAAAAAAAAA*
I'm a simple modosophont.
Hate archaillects, love archaillect ultratech. Simple as.
Read about Lancer chief. It’s all about the absolute mess of politics and culture that occurs when planets have centuries pass between outside contact. Also, kick ass mechs.
Cryosleep? Generation ships? Lol just make everyone biologically stop aging, immortality ftw
Based and Isaac Arthur-pilled
Me playing terra Invicta: my 5 ship mars invasion force gets intercepted by aliens 3 times in their 20 week journey from mercury to mars. Miraculously, 2 out of the 5 ships complete their mission a week late despite heavy damage that I thought would cause a mission kill.
I want a hard sci fi story about immortal space people where slow interstellar travel is the norm, and people are more than happy to spend a few decades on ornate spaceliners and get up to all sorts of debauchery while bored there.
They don't stay awake the whole time but the Shatterlings in House of Suns are delightfully decadent without being assholes about it. Basically they're all stupendously rich socialites who decided they wanted to experience as much of the galaxy as they could, light lag be damned. The answer to being in several places at once was to "shatter" into thousands of not-quite-copies who each individually do a galactic circuit and meet up to share experiences every 10k years or so. Two of said Shatterlings from the Gentian Line are treated as especially debauched for contriving to cross paths on their tours which are meant to be solitary (going together defeats the founding notion of "travel as widely as possible").
is this a 2001: a space odyssey reference?
Nah, wormhole-creating rocket
Why?
Lol, just months? YOUR WORK ISN'T SCI FI UNLESS PEOPLE TAKE YEARS TO GET TO THE OUTER SOLAR SYSTEM, YOU POSSER!!
be me, STL interstellar trader
hemirelativistic ship means it'll be decades before I'm back at best
ansible bandwidth is fucking expensive and local yokels have fuck all worth trading
better set up a cargo cult around producing my desired outputs
even if society's collapsed (again) in my absence there'll be something worth taking
The idea is that you're both Hari Sheldon plotting the passage of generations and the Bene Gesserit seeding messianic propaganda as a contingency plan. Only trouble is that other trader crews are doing the same and the fallout of a war fought using memetic weapons throw several spanners in the works as you're away. Best pray that there aren't any of the post-human leftovers of the latter stumbling about too but otherwise you're free to grapple with posterity as profit dictates.
If Blindsight can get away with having vampires and still be hard scifi then I can get away with brain-water computers enabling telepathy and telekinetics in my hard scifi.
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The Expanse books casually treating weeks/month long trips as the norm for the universe