How to determine a good star travel speed?

[Steve]

In thinking about an interstellar setting that has a more "realistic" feel, one of the things I'm considering is speed of travel across the stars.

 

I'm considerig using for the setting a bubble of explored space that is roughly a hundred light-years across but wanting to portray it as "Age of Sail" speeds for interstellar travel. If I go with a speed of two or three light-years per week of travel, it would take months to get from the core world to the frontier. Is that too slow or about right?

 

In this setting, I'm also considering having all FTL engines travel at the same speed. The technology moves you between the stars at a set rate, and it's fixed at that speed.

[PaycheckHero]

If you want age-of-sail feel, don't allow FTL radio. The fact that sailing ships were about as out of contact with the rest of the world as a pocket universe had an enormous effect.

 

The works of H. Beam Piper (esp. Space Viking) are probably good source material for you as his FTL travel works exactly as you say (and I think age of sail travel was his model, he liked historical models). Ships in hyperspace all move at the same rate and are totally out of contact with anything outside the ship. In a voyage his crewmen likely have a lot of time without much to do, so they tended to pursue some pretty serious hobbies aboard ship.

 

Your speed can be literally anything that gives you the travel times you want, since once you're above lightspeed realism isn't any consideration at all. The only constraint is that if you want to be realistic, you'll have to have an idea of the mean stellar separation in your explored space. It does vary--IIRC the solar neighborhood is sparser than average, some areas can be denser. Knowing how far the average trip needs to go, you make the speed such that the trip takes however long you want.

[ghost-angel]

Several months across from 'civilized' to 'frontier' is a good pace for Age Of Sail campaigns, just remember you're adventures will be system or planet focused and travel between planets will be the down time in most cases.

 

As long as communication and travel are the same speed you will provide a good 'frontier' feeling to the game.

[PaycheckHero]

Several months across from 'civilized' to 'frontier' is a good pace for Age Of Sail campaigns

 

Yeah, it's pretty accurate for sailing vessel travel times on Earth, at least toward the end of the age (the time to the frontier obviously varies by how far the "frontier" is away. It could be even longer when you put together the time to do your trading and business and get back home. Sailing times have little to do with the straight-line distance and everything to do with the winds--when I did my one blue-water passage on a wooden vessel I think it was 18 days from Honolulu to San Francisco, and that was only because we'd motored for almost a week to cut across the Pacific High. If we'd sailed, the sailing route from Hawaii to the West Coast is to sail far North until you get into the Westerlies, and you end up making landfall in the vicinity of Puget Sound. Then you sail South along the coast on the shore breeze--that's the fastest way even if you're going to, say, San Diego. So I imagine even a comparatively short trip like Honolulu to San Francisco would have been well over a month for us under sail alone. As a more authentic example, the record time for the New York to San Francisco run around the horn was a bit over 89 days, but that was set by a clipper ship so fast it took a century to beat that record with a purpose-built racer without cargo. Richard Henry Dana, making the same voyage and then back in an ordinary merchant vessel was gone from home for two years. I also have a book by a man who went to sea as a boy; by the time he got back home he was two years older and had circumnavigated the globe.

 

So I'd say if you want the feel of world-wide trade under sail, think of ordinary trading voyages, perhaps involving several legs, taking as much as two or three years. That would be appropriate for a trip from a core world to the frontier and back, perhaps hitting several frontier and half-civilized worlds. If you want more the feel of the Atlantic packets, the fastest and most regular service ever done under sail, figure on the order of three weeks one-way. That would be for a trip between two important civilized worlds in the core of your Known Space.

 

Another thing to keep in mind is that except for the Atlantic Packets when they started competing with steam, ships never kept schedules; they departed when they got enough cargo to fill the hold, and they arrived when wind and weather permitted. You can use that, though most people assume space travel is more predictable than that. If you make it more predictable, you can use the early steamers as a model as well. Their range was short, so they had to hop from coaling station to coaling station. Commercial sail actually lasted until after WW II, and the reason it was economic for a century after steam was not only because there were no fuel costs but also because the range was unlimited and they could use routes the steamers could not. Running grain to and from Austraila (or tea from China) under sail meant that you could get down in the Roaring Forties and basically let gale-force winds drive you all the way (you didn't return against the prevailing weather, you just kept going all the way around). Steam ships weren't practical for that run until the Suez canal was built, and even then they were slower. So if you restrict the range of your ships and have the right star map some trips will be much longer because there isnt a direct route with fuel. There will also be systems of enormous strategic value simply because of their location, if you like politics in your game. On the other hand, if you don't want to mess with that, don't--make travel work however seems most dramatic for your campaign.

[Old Man]

The nice thing about such long travel times is that it makes a good place to break between sessions and story arcs. Ninety days is long enough for badly wounded PCs to convalesce, and for less-wounded PCs to spend XP.

 

You can always throw in an alien technology wormhole macguffin if the plot demands instantaneous travel.

[Cancer]

And you can introduce some kind of "FTL sickness" of still-not-understood origin to mimic the effects of scurvy during long voyages.

[ghost-angel]

Traveller is actually a decent simulation of that era put into space, if you want an example.

 

And as touched on - getting to the Frontier can take some time... and then there's all that Frontier Space to go exploring around in that can take even more time - you might not see anything even close to 'civilization' as the characters know it for a long time. All kinds of fun there.

[IndianaJoe3]

One unfinished campaign setting that I did had two modes of FTL travel. Starbridges were virtually instantaneous, but required expensive fixed infrastructure. They were used mostly to connect sector capitals and other important systems. Hyperdrives were much slower (days/light year), but required no infrastructure. This allows for a galaxy-spanning empire, but it still has isolated areas that can take weeks to get to.

[PaycheckHero]

One unfinished campaign setting that I did had two modes of FTL travel. Starbridges were virtually instantaneous' date=' but required expensive fixed infrastructure. They were used mostly to connect sector capitals and other important systems. Hyperdrives were much slower (days/light year), but required no infrastructure.[/quote']

 

That's a pretty nice idea. It would make a real difference between the core and the fringe, certainly--the investment in infrastructure in the core would maintain their economic advantage. It would also allow the GM to tweak travel times rather nicely.

[SteveZilla]

If you want age-of-sail feel' date=' don't allow FTL radio. The fact that sailing ships were about as out of contact with the rest of the world as a pocket universe had an enormous effect. The works of H. Beam Piper (esp. Space Viking) are probably good source material for you as his FTL travel works exactly as you say (and I think age of sail travel was his model, he liked historical models). Ships in hyperspace all move at the same rate and are totally out of contact with anything outside the ship. In a voyage his crewmen likely have a lot of time without much to do, so they tended to pursue some pretty serious hobbies aboard ship. Your speed can be literally anything that gives you the travel times you want, since once you're above lightspeed realism isn't any consideration at all. The only constraint is that if you want to be realistic, you'll have to have an idea of the mean stellar separation in your explored space. It does vary--IIRC the solar neighborhood is sparser than average, some areas can be denser. Knowing how far the average trip needs to go, you make the speed such that the trip takes however long you want.[/quote']

 

I'd say that it could be possible to have "FTL radio", just as long as it isn't instantaneous radio, in such a game. For instance, if the message takes a month each way from the frontier to the core and back, there can be limited contact, but there is still mostly the isolation.

[SteveZilla]

One unfinished campaign setting that I did had two modes of FTL travel. Starbridges were virtually instantaneous' date=' but required expensive fixed infrastructure. They were used mostly to connect sector capitals and other important systems. Hyperdrives were much slower (days/light year), but required no infrastructure.[/quote'] That's a pretty nice idea. It would make a real difference between the core and the fringe, certainly--the investment in infrastructure in the core would maintain their economic advantage. It would also allow the GM to tweak travel times rather nicely.

 

Can we say "Browncoats vs. Alliance"?

[Steve]

If you want age-of-sail feel' date=' don't allow FTL radio. The fact that sailing ships were about as out of contact with the rest of the world as a pocket universe had an enormous effect. The works of H. Beam Piper (esp. Space Viking) are probably good source material for you as his FTL travel works exactly as you say (and I think age of sail travel was his model, he liked historical models). Ships in hyperspace all move at the same rate and are totally out of contact with anything outside the ship. In a voyage his crewmen likely have a lot of time without much to do, so they tended to pursue some pretty serious hobbies aboard ship. Your speed can be literally anything that gives you the travel times you want, since once you're above lightspeed realism isn't any consideration at all. The only constraint is that if you want to be realistic, you'll have to have an idea of the mean stellar separation in your explored space. It does vary--IIRC the solar neighborhood is sparser than average, some areas can be denser. Knowing how far the average trip needs to go, you make the speed such that the trip takes however long you want.[/quote']

 

I'd say that it could be possible to have "FTL radio", just as long as it isn't instantaneous radio, in such a game. For instance, if the message takes a month each way from the frontier to the core and back, there can be limited contact, but there is still mostly the isolation.

Traveller was interesting because the ships were the only method of FTL communication. To maintain a feeling of 'Age of Sail' distance, not having "FTL radio" at all seems like the best way to go.

[sinanju]

For an "age of sail" feel I concur--don't allow FTL communication. Messages travel at the speed of light within a solar system, and at the speed of the fastest vessels between systems. If you want to steal from Traveller (well, and real life, to a degree), you might have a fleet of designated courier vessels that carry the (official) news, dispatches and mail at top speed from system to system.

 

The "hyperbridge" or "stargate" system idea could be used as well, in limited locations--think of them as the equivalents of having a Panama Canal available. You CAN get there by going around the long way, but the bridge/gate/canal makes the trip a lot shorter, and control of it can give you a huge military and economic advantage. This sort of assumes that you need a device at both ends, so that you cannot use such shortcuts to reach (or attack) hostile systems except by surprise (fly through, seize the gate and hold it against counter-attack, and hope it doesn't have a remote controlled self-destruct); otherwise, they'll just shut it down to deny you access.

 

Or the "bridge" could be a naturally occurring shortcut that may or may not exist in any particular system. Then it's even more like a canal. If a given system has such links to more than one other system, that system becomes extremely valuable real estate even if there's nothing else of much worth there. (As seen in David Weber's "Honor Harrington" novels, where the Star Kingdom of Manticore is the power it is because they control five--FIVE--such terminals linking them to systems that are otherwise months of travel away.)

 

If I were going to map your universe, I wouldn't bother with a literal map, or at best a map with Campaign Central in the center with lines out to all the other systems. I'd just create a grid showing average travel times between the planets. Look up Planet A along the side. Look up Planet B along the top--the intersection tells you how long it will take to get there.

[PaycheckHero]

I'd say that it could be possible to have "FTL radio"' date=' just as long as it isn't instantaneous radio, in such a game. For instance, if the message takes a month each way from the frontier to the core and back, there can be limited contact, but there is still mostly the isolation.[/quote']

 

Of course you can have it or not, but the OP wanted "Age of Sail" feel. Any FTL radio with change that, for reasons that may not be obvious to those of us who grew up after radio literally changed the world. If a ship got into trouble there was no possibility of calling for help or even of letting anyone know what happened. Suppose your friend takes a 3-month voyage to Remotipore on the Fat Chance. You don't expect to know whether he got there for at least six months. it could be less, if his ship encounters another, because I think it was common for ships to report encounters because it was the only possible news of them, but you can't count on that. Now suppose it's been six months and a ship arrives from Remotipore with a report that the Fat Chance hadn't been seen when she departed. Well, if that ship made a three-month passage it probably means nothing except that Fat Chance didn't make a fast passage, but you can't know. If that ship had a slow passage, maybe she left before Fat Chance was expected. In any event, that was three (or whatever) months ago. You tell your self probably Fat Chance arrived months ago, and she probably did--but you don't know what happened to her and you do know that the ocean is a chancy thing, so you probably worry anyway.

 

Now suppose another couple of months passes and another ship reports that the Fat Chance still hadn't arrived in Remotipore when she departed. What do you know. Well, you know that three months earlier (or however long the reporting ship's passage took), Fat Chance was two months overdue. Do you worry? Oh, yeah, but there isn't much you can do. If she's not in Remotipore now, she's not two months overdue, she's five, but you have no way of knowing which. No one is going to go looking, because *you can't find anything on the ocean.* Seriously--it's tough today unless you've got an EPIRB to follow. So there is nothing you can do but wait. And that's the problem--unlike today, there was a reasonable chance that a ship even a couple of months late might still not have been lost, because unlike today a functioning ship can't tell anyone anything. Sailing ships were a lot more self-sufficient than you might think, for a number of reasons, so its entirely possible that she was damaged but not sunk and managed to get to an isolated island or cove to make repairs. Certainly there were ships that eventually got to their destination months overdue. I heard of one ship that got beat up enough trying over and over again to beat around the horn that the captain turned her around and went the long way around the world (with the prevailing weather instead of against it) because he thought that was a better bet at that point. So in many cases you couldn't get closure--were they lost, or perhaps just marooned somewhere? The silence, I think, was worse than certainty that you'd lost someone.

 

The bottom line is that uncertainty and silence is kind of the hallmark of travel in the days of sail. Even if FTL radio is as slow as a ship, the ability to get off a Mayday or any sort of report changes things *profoundly*. Ships would make mandatory routine updates, say a daily position and condition report, so that even if something happens that prevents them from reporting it, you would know at least to the day that something went wrong, and have a fairly good idea where and when. If you do get off a message, you can tell what you're going to try to do and where you should be looked for. Even if that news gets to you months late, it's *far* better than the silence of the sea. Maybe that isn't what the OP wanted, but you can't have the age of sail experience without that terrible silence and uncertainty. This actually didn't change that much with steamships, not initially. the Titanic carried radio gear, but it was regarded more as a premium service for well-heeled passengers than emergency gear and wasn't mandatory. It also only had a range of a couple hundred miles, as amateurs hadn't yet discovered that higher frequencies skip off the ionosphere.

 

An excellently written book that really hammers home how alone and out of touch you were if something went wrong is _In The Heart Of The Sea_, about the loss of the whaling ship Essex after being rammed by a sperm whale, apparently Melville's inspiration (or one of them) for Moby Dick.

[PaycheckHero]

If you want to steal from Traveller (well, and real life, to a degree), you might have a fleet of designated courier vessels that carry the (official) news, dispatches and mail at top speed from system to system.

 

 

That is, of course, very age-of-sail, as they did precisely that--send dispatches on a fast sloop (in that context, sloop refers to a small vessel, not a particular rig). However, any technology that will let you go between the stars would let you automate things, and old-school SF usually fails to address that. I do I seem to recall reading a story where the author mentions sending "message torpedos," which I think is precisely what would happen. The other thing is that if you don't have some kind of normal-space reactionless drive (and if you do that, you've given up another step of near-future realism, so you have to think about it), having people on board is crippling for a lot of purposes, so it would be a good idea to automate shipping if possible so you can boost to the jump point (or whatever) at 50g's instead of 5. (This doesn't apply if you've decided that in-system economy shipping is done with lightsails and the ITN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network), so that accelerations are extremely low for routine shipping).

 

So I think the GM has to make a dramatic choice:

 

1. Ignore it. You want everything manned, make everything manned.

 

2. Automate everything that has a big advantage automated. Nothing says you have to make it just like age-of-sail, in fact it may be more convincing to show that your future is internally consistent rather than simply a slave to a model.

 

3. Do what Pournelle did and make your FTL method do horrible things to electronics, so that you really do need a crew, at least to bring all the systems down before the jump and bring them up cleanly afterward. This becomes a critical plot point in Mote in God's Eye, which I highly recommend as a different take on an age-of-sail like model (I'll say more about this below). It's not totally convincing, as it seems unlikely that someone wouldn't figure out a way around anything that the human nervous system can survive (in fact, purely mechanical computers are possible and may even be efficient if done at the nano-scale, so you could probably make something with enough capability to shut down and bring back up the main electronic systems). That said, you're allowed a certain amount of Authorial Fiat, so if it's important to you just do what you want. Realism on most things is there to give you a fig leaf for doing unrealistic things with the most dramatic elements. :-)

 

 

Or the "bridge" could be a naturally occurring shortcut that may or may not exist in any particular system. Then it's even more like a canal. If a given system has such links to more than one other system, that system becomes extremely valuable real estate even if there's nothing else of much worth there. (As seen in David Weber's "Honor Harrington" novels, where the Star Kingdom of Manticore is the power it is because they control five--FIVE--such terminals linking them to systems that are otherwise months of travel away.)

 

 

I don't know that book, sounds interesting. What you describe is more or less Pournelle's system so again I recommend mining it for ideas and comparing to something like Space Viking and the other Piper books. It gives you a very different version than Space Viking (which I mentioned earlier); in SV most travel time is spent in hyperspace and the ships have extremely effective normal space drives, which is more what we think of for classic space opera SF. In Pournelle's version, the actual jump takes no time at all, but depending on the location of the jump points you could spend months in-system on either end going from planet to jump point in the departure system and then jump point to planet (or another jump point) on the other end. (Pournelle knows a lot more science than Piper knew, or cared more, and so he acknowledges how long in-system travel could be whereas Piper's ships are so capable in normal space it's more like Star Wars travel times (except, of course, in SW you don't spend thousands of hours in hyperspace as you do in Piper's future). Pournelle's system is also less like age of sail (and I suppose more like age of steam after the Hams figured out you could skip HF off the ionosphere) in that of course during the trip to the jump point you are in radio contact with the departure system and after the jump you're in radio contact with the destination system, so you explicitly do *not* have the isolation I mentioned unless you're travelling through uninhabited systems (and realistically, there would be at the very minimum robot communications stations to leave messages with on even low-traffic routes, as the benefits would be incredibly cheap).

 

The issue of whether the jump points are natural is a great one. One very different system would be to not have an alternative FTL system at all, but rather require that the other end of a gate be sent via normal space. This would have profound effects on both how quickly a civilization can spread (at a fraction of the speed of light) even if travel afterwards is much quicker, and really create bottlenecks as you won't have near as many jump routes and so those that do exist will be that much more valuable. It will also have radical effects on inter-species politics, if you have spacefaring aliens; interstellar war would be nigh-impossible if you aren't willing to wait centuries for your troops to get there (and if you are, I can't imagine a logistical system that would allow you to win against the resources of a system that has had decades to centuries to prepare and develop better technology than you had when you left--it would make a modern amphibious landing look like a cakewalk by comparison). The only wars would I suppose be possible between species that had previously agreed to set up a gate for trade and then had a falling out--and even then, I'd guess that it would be trivial to just destroy the gate, completely eliminating the attacker's logistical tail.

 

 

If I were going to map your universe, I wouldn't bother with a literal map, or at best a map with Campaign Central in the center with lines out to all the other systems. I'd just create a grid showing average travel times between the planets. Look up Planet A along the side. Look up Planet B along the top--the intersection tells you how long it will take to get there.

 

If you have a lot of jump points, I agree that the map is effectively a graph and the distances just don't matter (something Pournelle points out for his system). You could always just get a copy of the old Imperium game and use the game board for your map. :-)

[IndianaJoe3]

I do I seem to recall reading a story where the author mentions sending "message torpedos' date='" which I think is precisely what would happen.[/quote']

 

The old Starfire board game had something like that, and Weber probably used it elsewhere. I think they were called, "courier drones" were used to send messages through jump points and uninhabited systems.

 

[dmjalund]

similar to carrier pigeons i guess

[sinanju]

I agree with Paycheckhero that Jerry Pournelle's future history (the CoDominium universe, which later got re-used in The Mote in God's Eye, with Larry Niven) is a good "age of sail"-style universe...in some ways. Given that jump points allowed for instantaneous travel between systems it doesn't fit exactly, but the spread of news was limited to the speed of the fastest ships, and travel within a system could be time-consuming (especially on commercial ships which tended to coast long distances to save fuel) or difficult (on military ships which would boost at high gees, turnover and decelerate at high gees to get there fast). No magical reactionless drives or artificial gravity. Spacers endured zero-g or had to deal with acceleration issues.

 

The Honor Harrington series did use some of the same ideas as Pournelle, but they actually had THREE FTL drive systems, each with their own limitations and advantages. There were the jump points, which allowed instantaneous travel between linked systems--but which were hard to find initially, and once discovered could be fortified against incursions. You had "gravity currents" in hyperspace which allowed really, really fast travel--but which could destroy ships not specifically equipped to detect and ride them (they were a real threat to 'standard' FTL-drive ships for centuries in-universe, before someone figured out how to "surf" them, then they became very valuable travel routes). And standard FTL, the slowest of the three. Unlike Pournelle's uiverse, where the ONLY way to travel FTL was via jump points, in the Harrington universe hostile forces CAN reach a system without having to brave the defenses of the womrhole junctions, it's just slow--and coordinating attacks is almost impossible.

[Steve]

I like the idea of jump points, since they can be established as navigation destinations. One advantage would be that trade stations could be set up near a system's jump point (like Babylon Five).

 

One thing I am considering doing with star travel is establishing maximum distances to jump, much like how Traveller does it. But fuel is not the limiter, heat accumulation is. I read about this concept in a sci-if story (I think). In hyperspace, heat on a ship has nowhere to go, so the vessel has to drop back into normal space periodically to dump heat.

 

If I establish my FTL travel at Traveller-like rates (1 parsec/week), limited by a vessel's heat capacity, then most vessels can only go for 1 parsec per jump. Maybe military vessels have larger heat sinks and could go for 2-3 parsecs per jump. I'm wondering what a good heat dump rate would be? An hour seems too short to vent heat, but twelve hours seems too long. Maybe six hours?

 

Perhaps jump points represent a kind of hyperspace freeway, where it is easier to move from system to system, but they have to be charted to use. Regular FTL is slower but can be done once a vessel is far enough from a star's gravity well. The periodic drops to normal space could also allow for navigational readings, since travel through hyperspace is not exact.

[sinanju]

It's your campaign, so you can set it up however you like. In Pournelle's (and Webers' and others' universes) naturally occurring jump points are of fixed distances--they simply exist (or don't exist) between Point A and Point B. And you can only jump to Point B from Point A. Anywhere else and you just burn up a lot of fuel and go nowhere. That's rather different than the Traveller approach, where as long as you're far enough from a star (or planet), you can jump out from anywhere. That difference will radically alter how navigation (and warfare) works. In fact, Pournelle set up his fictional universe to require jump points precisely because he felt that if a ship can jump in anywhere from anywhere, there's no real hope of mounting a defense. The enemy can pop in, hammer your planet, and pop out again. With defined jump points, you can fortify them against attack.

 

The issue of shedding excess heat in hyperspace... That's an issue in normal space, in the real world. One of the reasons the space shuttles spent so much time in orbit with the cargo bay doors open was so they could more effectively radiate excess heat from the shuttle's interior. Space is already either very hot (or very cold). Is hyperspace even warmer?

 

Maybe it isn't an issue of dumping heat. Maybe hyperspace has bad effects on human beings (and aliens). You have to start making CON saves if you stay in hyperspace too long--or you become hysterical/catatonic/otherwise useless, or you have to be sedated. In that case, military vessels might select crewmen who have the highest resistance, and/or use drugs, to tough it out. Commercial vessels will just drop out of hyper periodically to rest. (And if unfriendly folk know this, and know where they tend to do that...piracy could be a possibility.)

 

Larry Niven limited the distance vessels could travel in hyperspace with the idea of the "blind spot". Human eyes can't see hyperspace. If you look out a window at hyperspace, your mind tries to blot it out, so you don't see the window, just a blank expanse of bulkhead. And it works on your nerves. Even the best pilots, who don't even try to look outside--they just navigate by instrument--need to drop out of hyper occasionally to look around and reassure themselves that the real world still exists.

[Tom Carman]

Maybe it isn't an issue of dumping heat. Maybe hyperspace has bad effects on human beings (and aliens). You have to start making CON saves if you stay in hyperspace too long--or you become hysterical/catatonic/otherwise useless' date=' or you have to be sedated. In that case, military vessels might select crewmen who have the highest resistance, and/or use drugs, to tough it out. Commercial vessels will just drop out of hyper periodically to rest. (And if unfriendly folk know this, and know where they tend to do that...piracy could be a possibility.)[/quote']

In C.J. Cherryh's Merchanter/Company War books, you need very precise navigation because once a ship jumps to hyperspace it can't maneuver and needs a significant gravity well to pull it out again. Human minds can't deal with hyperspace conditions, so crew and passengers are drugged up before the jump. Longer jumps take a bigger toll on the body, and you need recovery time in between. Some alien races are hit harder than humans by hyperspace, some can "zone out" during jump without needing drugs... and some are reputed to actually function (to some degree) while in hyperspace. Having your ship infested with some vermin that can move and breed in hyper is very, very bad.

[Steve]

I think I'm leaning more towards having hyperspace/jumpspace travel require human pilots rather than allowing total electronic control. I'll have to dig out my old copy of "Mote In God's Eye" to see the effects electronics suffer in that novel.

 

I suppose I could shrink the bubble of explored space and slow star travel speeds down because I don't need a huge area to work with. I like the idea of early star exploration and that the "frontier" is months away from the core world/worlds. I could slow travel speeds to a light-year per week and shrink the bubble to fifty or sixty light-years in diameter.

[Xavier Onassiss]

That was the decision I made with my own setting. I settled on a region roughly 50 light years across (with a few outliers) and FTL drives with limited speeds and ranges. The "FTL1.0" had a range of 8 light years, and an effective speed of 64c. (Slightly over 1 light year per week.) Its available routes strongly resembled those of the old "2300AD" star map, which featured an arbitrary 7.7 light year limit. The FTL1.0 was an obsolete drive, replaced by the FTL2.0 model, with a 9 light year range and a speed of 81c, which opened up a lot more routes between nearby stars. At the time my campaign begins, state-of-the-art spacecraft are equipped with the shiny new FTL3.0, with a 10 light year range and a top speed of 100c. But very few new star drives are being built in the aftermath of Terra's destruction....

 

I've play-tested the above extensively: travel times for starships at 90 to 100c tend to be 3 to 6 weeks between star systems, with 4 to 5 weeks being most typical. Having an upper limit on the starships' range is important: it makes every system along the way significant. In my setting, it's necessary to re-calibrate the star drive near a large mass between transits. Whatever rationale you use, if you want interstellar space to feel like an ocean, it helps if every single island is important.

 

Another key point to consider: has the same star drive always been in use? I created several maps, starting with the old, short-range drive, and observed how the routes changed as technology advanced and the longer-range drives made new connections available. This established which star systems had the oldest settlements, which ones had ports which were no longer in use and had become "backwaters", and which ones had seen recent surges in traffic, and thus were experiencing an economic boom.

 

Keeping your campaign within a relatively small volume of space makes this process much easier, of course.

[Steve]

Xavier makes good points on the travel times, and I like his idea of combining speed and maximum travel distances before "recalibration" becomes necessary.

 

Another aspect I have been pondering is the idea of setting a minimum distance you can travel at FTL speeds. If a drive's technological underpinnings are set so that it cannot travel less than a light-year at a bare minimum, that eliminates using it for in-system travel, especially when combined with other limits like a need to stay a certain minimum distance outside of a gravity well.

 

Being able to jump a light-hour or a light-minute allows quick travel inside a stellar system, but gives a softer-tech feel to space travel. I admit that FTL is soft science, so I like limits on it like Traveller and other harder sci-fi settings established.

[sinanju]

I think I'm leaning more towards having hyperspace/jumpspace travel require human pilots rather than allowing total electronic control.

 

In addition to the issue of the "blind spot" I referenced earlier, Larry Niven's Known Space universe also required human pilots because the "mass pointer" (the device that pilots used to navigate while in hyperspace) was a psionic device--only living minds could use it, so auto-pilots couldn't be relied upon. (They were fine for letting the pilot leave the bridge; you only had to check the mass pointer every few hours to make sure you weren't getting dangerously close to a star or planet. But you couldn't depend on an auto-pilot for the whole trip.)

 

Another key point to consider: has the same star drive always been in use? I created several maps, starting with the old, short-range drive, and observed how the routes changed as technology advanced and the longer-range drives made new connections available. This established which star systems had the oldest settlements, which ones had ports which were no longer in use and had become "backwaters", and which ones had seen recent surges in traffic, and thus were experiencing an economic boom.

 

I like this idea a lot. If I were going to run a space-based campaign, I'd definitely use it. I like the idea of giving the campaign environment some real history and seeing how things had changed over time.