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My mostly hard sci-fi campaign


tkdguy

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Re: My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

 

I calculated the travel times between other planets. Here's the list:

 

Mercury-Venus: 36.7 days

Mercury-Mars: 67.5 days

Mercury-Ceres: 84.3 days

Mercury-Jupiter: 138.9 days

Mercury-Saturn: 191.5 days

Venus-Mars: 56.6 days

Venus-Ceres: 90.6 days

Venus-Jupiter: 134.0 days

Venus-Saturn: 188.0 days

Mars-Ceres: 70.7 days

Mars-Jupiter: 121.4 days

Mars-Saturn: 179.2 days

Ceres-Jupiter: 98.7 days

Ceres-Saturn: 164.7 days

Jupiter-Saturn: 131.8 days

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Re: My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

 

Article in this month's Physics Today about space debris (Earth-orbit junk). I'm not sure if I can read it because I'm at the university or if it's wide open to everyone, but the link is here. Doesn't bear directly on your campaign, but there's enough other stray info to make it worth a read. Some interesting links in the references at the end, even if one of them requires you to register, and the registration site is at cheyennemountain.af.mil.

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Re: My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

 

The exponential accumulation of harmful debris in orbit' date=' making space around Earth too dangerous to travel in.[/quote']

 

I remember an episode of the old UFO TV series in which they were trying to squeeze some cash out of the government for space garbage cleanup. The aliens had hidden a midget robot craft out there which was attaching to SHADO's ships during reentry, ensuring a fatally-deep entry angle.

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Re: My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

 

The exponential accumulation of harmful debris in orbit' date=' making space around Earth too dangerous to travel in.[/quote']

 

That Physics Today article I linked bears on this directly. It isn't quite exponential ... though if nations continue testing anti-satellite systems it'll seem that way.

 

I found it amusing that NASA has something called the "Standard Breakup Model" for predicting debris patterns from loss of a spacecraft. That phrase seems like it belongs in a lampoon of a soap opera.

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Re: My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

 

After the war ends

 

What happens after the shooting ends depends on how bad the destruction was. I can always follow up with a post-apocalyptic campaign, but I don't exactly want to go there. So I'd take a more optimistic route and say that while there was a lot of damage done, it can be repaired, although it would realistically take years to do so.

 

The nations of Earth will have to deal with the damage done to the environment (radioactive fallout) and to its societies. Both sides may have sued for peace just to end the suffering of their citizens. Perhaps the first steps toward a world government will be taken (or not; I haven't decided yet).

 

Some colonies will not survive. They will either be rebuilt or abandoned. Others will hang on and maybe even thrive. Martian colonies may beome more connected due to commerce and terraforming projects, and perhaps Mars will host the first interplanetary Olympics in 2080. The colonies in the Jovian system will have closer ties in order to ensure their survival; this will also be the case for the colonies in Saturn's moons.

 

The concept of floating cities has been tossed around. Perhaps these will be in the planning stages in Venus and Uranus. Eventually, the moons of Uranus and Neptune will be colonized, and manned missions to Mercury's polar regions will become a reality. Finally, there will be manned missions (with an international crew) to Pluto and beyond.

 

And who knows? Maybe we will find microbes in Europa or detect alien broadcasts from distant stars. But that would be for another campaign.

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Re: My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

 

Just for grins and giggles, here's my original version of the campaign. This one was definitely more of a space opera. Maybe I can set this one a century or two after the one I'm working on now.

 

My main sources of inspiration were Battlestar Galactica (the new version) and the 2300 AD game. The starships would look like the ones from Cold Navy (see link in a previous post).

 

In this campaign, the nations of Earth have colonized other planets. I wasn't sure whether or not to allow some alien life forms (nothing truly sentient though) or simply state that planets with favorable conditions were found, and we added the plants and animals. Colonies were divided into different factions (American sector, European sector, etc.).

 

Interstellar travel was made possible via the Alcubiere warp drive. I was going to add some artificial gravity for the sake of convenience. I had decided to go with the "slugthrowers in space" option almost from the beginning, although I also considered particle accelerators as weapons. And yes, there would have been fighters as well.

 

I recently revisited this idea and thought about using the same alliances, but without Earth's nations controlling them.

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Re: My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

 

I calculated the travel times between other planets. Here's the list:

 

Mercury-Venus: 36.7 days

Mercury-Mars: 67.5 days

Mercury-Ceres: 84.3 days

Mercury-Jupiter: 138.9 days

Mercury-Saturn: 191.5 days

Venus-Mars: 56.6 days

Venus-Ceres: 90.6 days

Venus-Jupiter: 134.0 days

Venus-Saturn: 188.0 days

Mars-Ceres: 70.7 days

Mars-Jupiter: 121.4 days

Mars-Saturn: 179.2 days

Ceres-Jupiter: 98.7 days

Ceres-Saturn: 164.7 days

Jupiter-Saturn: 131.8 days

 

Is that on their closest orbits to each other? Would the planets need to be all aligned for those times?

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Re: My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

 

Is that on their closest orbits to each other? Would the planets need to be all aligned for those times?

I'd say these are just average travel times, based on their mean distances from the sun. The actual travel times would be modified by their current position. That would vary more with the inner planets, as their orbits are smaller. Jupiter and Saturn are relatively slow in their orbits, so there would be much less variation in the travel time between those two planets.

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Re: My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

 

Communication among the colonies is vital. this is how long it takes to receive a message to and from Earth, depending on the relative positions of the planets:

 

Earth to Mercury: 5.3 - 10.7 minutes

Earth to Venus: 2.8 - 5.6 minutes

Earth to Moon: 1.3 seconds

Earth to Mars: 4.5 - 8.9 minutes

Earth to Ceres: 23.3 - 46.7 minutes

Earth to Jupiter: 33.3 - 66.7 minutes

Earth to Saturn: 94.5 - 188.9 minutes

 

Satellite relays will be used to redirect the radio waves to their recipients, of course.

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Re: My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

 

Communication among the colonies is vital. this is how long it takes to receive a message to and from Earth, depending on the relative positions of the planets:

 

Earth to Mercury: 5.3 - 10.7 minutes

Earth to Venus: 2.8 - 5.6 minutes

Earth to Moon: 1.3 seconds

Earth to Mars: 4.5 - 8.9 minutes

Earth to Ceres: 23.3 - 46.7 minutes

Earth to Jupiter: 33.3 - 66.7 minutes

Earth to Saturn: 94.5 - 188.9 minutes

 

Satellite relays will be used to redirect the radio waves to their recipients, of course.

 

Funny... I'm rewatching Cosmos for some writing I'm doing that's set in the late '70s, early '80s, and I'd forgotten what a brutal place Venus is in it's nature state. (And that the Soviet's landed there first.)

 

Sorry, kind of a random thought. Keep the good stuff coming tk.

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Re: My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

 

Thanks. Just for clarification, nobody is on the surface of Venus or Mercury. However, there are space stations orbiting the planets. There are scientists attempting to terraform the inner planets.

 

I wish I had the Cosmos series. It's still one of the best astronomy series around.

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Re: My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

 

Communication among the colonies is vital. this is how long it takes to receive a message to and from Earth, depending on the relative positions of the planets:

 

Earth to Mercury: 5.3 - 10.7 minutes

Earth to Venus: 2.8 - 5.6 minutes

Earth to Moon: 1.3 seconds

Earth to Mars: 4.5 - 8.9 minutes

Earth to Ceres: 23.3 - 46.7 minutes

Earth to Jupiter: 33.3 - 66.7 minutes

Earth to Saturn: 94.5 - 188.9 minutes

 

Satellite relays will be used to redirect the radio waves to their recipients, of course.

 

And they'll have to be, in some relatively rare intervals; the solar atmosphere blocks effective communication with radio waves rather further out than is true for visible light. How far that is depends on frequency, and I'm having difficulty finding out hard numbers for that.

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Re: My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

 

Thanks. Just for clarification, nobody is on the surface of Venus or Mercury. However, there are space stations orbiting the planets. There are scientists attempting to terraform the inner planets.

 

I wish I had the Cosmos series. It's still one of the best astronomy series around.

 

If you have Netflix/Blockbuster you can rent... I'm showing it to my wife, who is just a shade too young to have seen it when it came on PBS. The DVDs I'm watching have little updates that Sagan recorded 10 years after the original air date.

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