How do your Star Heroes get around?

[Deucex]

Re: How do your Star Heroes get around?

 

I've toyed with 2 main ftl forms. The first is stable wormholes. They are hard to detect but easy to use. interestingly enough the wormhole entry points tend to cluster around solar systems. I wonder why that could be. Travel through them is instantainious but traveling to and from then happens at normal speeds thru the use of steam vent drives and solar sails. The steam vent drives are fueled with Ice mined from asteroids and moons.

 

 

The other form of travel I toyed with is dimensional portals. Instead of traveling through space, players travel between dimensions. I always liked the idea of aether space. Dimensions are bubbles of reality floating in Aether space, some can be linked to directly via strings, some you need to travel via ship to in aether space. The further you travel the more exotic the dimensions get. Oh yeah, there are things, ancient and monsterous, that live in the void between dimensions. This works for both hard SF and Fantasy, or a mixture of the two.

[Tom Carman]

Re: How do your Star Heroes get around?

 

For STL in my campaign, I had a complex database/spreadsheet that would figure reaction mass and speed, acceleration, freefall and deceleration times. It was tied into a moving model of the solar system so that you were traveling between the planets based on where they were at the time, not their orbital distance form the sun. Saturn and Jupiter can vary tremendously in distance based upon their relative positions in the solar system, for instance. Unfortunately, I ran into a mathematical wall. I don't know calculus, so the planets were considered stationary once the course was plotted and fuel allocated.

 

It was while doing the research for this that I became aware that Larry Niven's fusion drives are pretty darn magically efficient.

 

Keith "None of the players really cared..." Curtis

 

The Space 1889 game had an interesting approach to this. Of course, that system only cared about the trip time, not things like reaction mass. The short version is that it was based on the average distance between the planets you are traveling between and the speed of the ship, modified by your astrogation skill in plotting an efficient course. The ship's actual position at any given time was more a plot issue.

[Nyrath]

Re: How do your Star Heroes get around?

 

The Space 1889The short version is that it was based on the average distance between the planets you are traveling between and the speed of the ship

Given two planets, the "superior" planet is the one farthest from the primary star, and the "inferior" planet is the one closest to the primary.

 

If you think a bit, you will realize that the average distance between the two is equal to the distance between the superior planet and the primary star.

 

Say A is the distance between the superior and the primary, and B is the distance between the inferior and the primary.

When the two planets are closest, the separation between the two planets is A - B. When the two planets are farthest, the separation is A + B. Therefore the average distance is A.

[keithcurtis]

Re: How do your Star Heroes get around?

 

The Space 1889 game had an interesting approach to this. Of course' date=' that system only cared about the trip time, not things like reaction mass. The short version is that it was based on the average distance between the planets you are traveling between and the speed of the ship, modified by your astrogation skill in plotting an efficient course. The ship's actual position at any given time was more a plot issue.[/quote']

That's a good way to run it for a non-science centered game. I was trying to go nuts and bolts with that campaign. No artificial gravity, nano-technological miracles, teleportation or that stuff.

 

Keith "Ships traveling at the speed of plot" Curtis

[TheRavenIs]

Re: How do your Star Heroes get around?

 

Ok, my 1000th post and I do it here.

 

I have used so many different ways for my PC's to get from place to place that the one thing I learned most is ...... remember that no matter how you do it ...... make if fun for the players and easy for you the GM.