Wild Black Yonder (working title)

[Dog Pants]

I've mentioned a few times that I've been working slowly on a game for a little while now, a light RPG set in space. I've got a few anchor points laid out and elaborated on some of the fun parts, but I've got a few basic components that I really need to develop before I continue, and I'd like some suggestions and feedback from anyone interested. The high level concept is of a paper RPG which is focussed more on the starships than the characters, developed over a series of outings which allow players to return to base and rearm, reconfigure, and improve their ship(s). Because of the lower emphasis on character development and an available random element I'm hoping to introduce more of a Roguelike aspect of just seeing how long you can survive. The system should be flexible enough to cater for games ranging from a traditional RPG, with a GM and players working as a team on board a ship, with ground parties and alien love, to a randomly generated solo adventure.

The point I've reached is that of the combat system. At its basic level it's no different from any other game - two sets of stats attempt to hit each other in order to cause damage. I'm fairly set on the specifics of how ships will go about attacking and defending, but not on the actual maths and dice of it. Here's the turn sequence I've jotted down as a baseline;

Scanning
- Roll sensors +resolution –ECM -range
- Gains character Information about enemy ship, depending on success; race<class<components<damage sustained
Initiative
Movement
- How can this be tracked with no board? Could a computer board be used?
Attacking
- Gunnery skill + fire control +/- modifiers (range, accuracy, jamming)
- Vs Helmsmanship/pilot + manoeuvrability/speed
Damaging
- Energy weapons' damaged reduced by shields
- Target shield load increased according to damage absorbed, may overload and shut down if too much is taken
- All weapon damage reduced by armour
- Armour becomes more damaged, less effective
- Damage effects are applied to components & crew
Admin
- Morale checks
- Ammo checks?
- Fire?
- Power, heat tracking
- Shield dissipates load (heat?)

Initiative - I have a big problem with initiative. I want two things from the system; I don't want it to be random so that players can use it tactically, and I want it to lead players into making 'blind hand' decisions. What I mean by blind hand decisions is that thing that Frozen Synapse has where you make your choices without knowing what other ships are doing, then have to ride out the results. This could make life easier for the solo aspect of the game. Unfortunately the solo thing adds a whole raft of other problems, not least of which is how to maintain some element of tactical surprise when you're controlling the enemy ships too. I have a few thoughts on that, but none I'm happy with;
- Choose your tactics before a battle and let the results unfold, like Gratuitous Space Battles
- Only roll for the random factors of NPC ships when they come into play, mid battle, so they aren't known until the last moment
- Remove all movement and have abstract combat tracking
- Crazy paper AI system, rolling on behaviour tables with adjustments for the situation

Once I have a combat system I can start building on the extra stuff I have in mind, like random encounters and loot. I've already got a quite detailed system for creating ships, fitting components to a hull and balancing power, mass, size, crew. It should be ripe for tinkering and upgrading, and will result in a smaller set of stats for use in combat.

[Joose]

Movement
- How can this be tracked with no board? Could a computer board be used?

From what you have described, personally, I would use a board. Assuming you are not looking at doing things in 3D (I wouldn't, it would add a shitload of headache) it would be dead simple. Its in space, so its not like you would need to worry *too* much about cover, beyond things like "there's a big asteroid here" or "this side over here is a nebula". This would mean that if you are playing around a tabletop, pretty much anything with squares on it will do. If you are doing it online, even the simplest of game table programs would manage, and if you don't even have that, then a googledocs spreadsheet would be perfectly usable. If you are going for something where the combat is quite tactical and, for want of a better word, "gamey" then a board is by far the easiest option.

The other option would be to go totally in the other direction, and abstract the fuck out of it. Absolute positioning in space isnt really important so much as things positions relative to each other. In other words, it doesn't matter exactly where you are, what matters is how far away from the enemy you are and whether you are in front, behind, to the side of them etc. Course, whilst this would be piss easy for one on one fights, it could become super-complex with multiple combatants. "Im 3km behind that guy, but I'm 4km in front of that other guy, but he is 2km to the right of this third guy..." Any game mechanic that would require trigonometry is probably best avoided.

Of course, if you wanted to go for realism, you could take the "hard sci-fi" approach. Any combat between ships that are capable of FTL is likely to be over almost before it starts. You wouldn't have to worry about movement, turns or any of that, because whoever gets the drop on the other one will be in, fired all their guns and out again before anyone knows what's going on! Simple, realistic (assuming FTL is possible), but probably not much fun to play.

Yeah, no, go with a board.

For the initiative thing: I like the idea of the Frozen Synapse style thing. If you were doing it on-line with a GM, it would be simple enough: have the GM decide what he is going to do first (but not actually do it), then have all the players submit their moves/actions to the GM without telling each other, and finally the GM tells everyone what has happened. You could replicate this at a tabletop game pretty easily too: just get people to write down what they are going to do in secret then reveal them and work out the consequences.

I've no fucking clue how you could do that solo though. You would need *really* solid rules and some damn stupid enemies to make that work in any way. I'm not convinced its possible with this kind of a game. I would love to be proved wrong though!

[Dog Pants]

I've been thinking about the dice mechanics a little more and I've come up with some ideals.

1. Since this is RPG-light and stats will be for crew as well as PCs, it's probably best to keep the numbers low. This means it's best to keep the ranges relatively low too - D6 based maybe.

2. The system will need to scale well. A combat could involve single man fighters and huge battleships, and both need to be viable to fight amongst themselves or against each other without numbers being so small as to be barely random, or so large as to be unwieldy.

3. The random element of the adventures means that sometimes a character will be badly outgunned, or badly outgun their opponent. Therefore it would be a waste not to have the facility to pull a heroic fight off and beat a much more powerful opponent, or lose to a puny one.

Lets try to address these points then.

1. Since skills and stats are low numbers dice pools are viable, in addition to the standard roll under/roll over types. I like the Eclipse Phase 'blackjack' style system, but that's better suited to larger numbers. Smaller numbers are going to be easier to scale up by adding than down by subtracting, so a positive system will make more sense. Rolling over with modifiers like SLA, or dice pools like Shadowrun I think are most appropriate for now.

2. Scaling isn't easy in any system. For the roll and add system I can either add more modifiers at greater scales, which reduces the random factor, or use larger dice, which reduces the effect skills have. Dice pools may be more interesting this way - if the number of faces on the dice changes with scale, but the number rolled stays constant with skill, then both are effective. Exactly how to implement that I'm not sure about. A D4 used in a pool scenario has a lot less variation of results than a D20, but the odds can be made the same. However, if the target roll varies by the scale of the target then suddenly those dice can become far more of a factor. A The success threshold for a roll would have to be 50%, as there are no uneven sided dice (25% would only work for D4, D8 and D18). Having them explode drops in the chance of outrageous luck. I'll try some examples with one on one at different scales;

Both ships are fighter scale, pilots have skills of 3 across the board. Fighter scale dice are D4s. Both pilots are rolling 3D4 with a target of 3+.
One ship is fighter scale, the other is a corvette. Corvette scale dice are D6. The fighter pilot is rolling 3D4 with a target of 4+, the corvette pilot is rolling 3D6 with a target of 3+.
Fighter Vs Cruiser. Cruisers use a D12. The fighter pilot has to somehow reach a target of 7+ on 3D4 (hence exploding dice), while the cruiser only needs 3+ on 3D12.

That works nicely for damage, but a fighter should be harder to hit than a cruiser. So we could invert the requirement to a roll under system for targetting;

With two fighters they're on evens. Roll under 3 to hit on 3D4.
Fighter vs Corvette. The fighter has to roll under 4 on 3D4 to hit, while the corvette is trying to roll under 3 on D6.
Fighter vs Cruiser. The fighter has to roll under 6 on D4 to hit, while the cruiser is looking at under 3 on D12s.

With exploding dice all options are still possible, and the higher the skill the more likely they are to be successful, regardless of whether the target is under or over. So how to explode them? A max success die will signify it exploding. This means it's a 1:4 chance for a D4 but a 1:20 chance for a battleship. That's fine, fighter pilots have more opportunity for flair and it makes smaller ships more of a 'critical-hitter'. If every exploding die adds the value of another roll then the increased likelihood is countered by the small possible increase in the roll; a critical on a D4 will still only add another 4 at the most. A rare critical on a D20 could add another 20. If those dice could explode too then in theory the sky's the limit, and it makes the smaller scale ships actually dangerous even to the larger ones if left racking up criticals long enough.

I'm quite happy about that as a base dice system. In case it's not obvious, I've been using this to think out loud. Feedback very welcome, and now I have to consider how the stats of the ships and weapons will affect it.

[Dog Pants]

From what you have described, personally, I would use a board. Assuming you are not looking at doing things in 3D (I wouldn't, it would add a shitload of headache) it would be dead simple. Its in space, so its not like you would need to worry *too* much about cover, beyond things like "there's a big asteroid here" or "this side over here is a nebula". This would mean that if you are playing around a tabletop, pretty much anything with squares on it will do. If you are doing it online, even the simplest of game table programs would manage, and if you don't even have that, then a googledocs spreadsheet would be perfectly usable. If you are going for something where the combat is quite tactical and, for want of a better word, "gamey" then a board is by far the easiest option.

I think 3D is right out, that's just too much of a mindfuck for too little benefit. A board isn't necessarily a bad thing though. I'm under no illusion that the only person who ever plays this may well be me. At best it might get played by a few of us. So using one of the available software options like Maptool isn't a problem. I considered using Excel, because it's the only thing I'm halfway decent at manipulating, but again that's just a huge pain. I think Maptools is the way forward.

The other option would be to go totally in the other direction, and abstract the fuck out of it. Absolute positioning in space isnt really important so much as things positions relative to each other. In other words, it doesn't matter exactly where you are, what matters is how far away from the enemy you are and whether you are in front, behind, to the side of them etc. Course, whilst this would be piss easy for one on one fights, it could become super-complex with multiple combatants. "Im 3km behind that guy, but I'm 4km in front of that other guy, but he is 2km to the right of this third guy..." Any game mechanic that would require trigonometry is probably best avoided.

While I rather like the abstract thing, because it feels so much more 3D, I think there's a sort of tactile benefit to seeing your ships relative position. Again, having the abstract thing would require a lot of though about how to treat the lines of fire as a mesh and might not even bring anything fun to it.

Of course, if you wanted to go for realism, you could take the "hard sci-fi" approach. Any combat between ships that are capable of FTL is likely to be over almost before it starts. You wouldn't have to worry about movement, turns or any of that, because whoever gets the drop on the other one will be in, fired all their guns and out again before anyone knows what's going on! Simple, realistic (assuming FTL is possible), but probably not much fun to play.

Totally not doing. I'm going for gameplay over realism, and although I've not thought about plot, character or storyline, I'm thinking of edging it towards a Futurama style skiff on the original Star Trek, since the Roguelike progression will probably lend itself to more of a Paranoia style of presentation.

For the initiative thing: I like the idea of the Frozen Synapse style thing. If you were doing it on-line with a GM, it would be simple enough: have the GM decide what he is going to do first (but not actually do it), then have all the players submit their moves/actions to the GM without telling each other, and finally the GM tells everyone what has happened. You could replicate this at a tabletop game pretty easily too: just get people to write down what they are going to do in secret then reveal them and work out the consequences.

I've no fucking clue how you could do that solo though. You would need *really* solid rules and some damn stupid enemies to make that work in any way. I'm not convinced its possible with this kind of a game. I would love to be proved wrong though!

Bear in mind that this is intended as a co-op game, just as any other RPG. Even though it's more tactically focussed, I'd like it to benefit from roleplaying even if it isn't essential. Think Mechwarrior for the hybrid battle/roleplaying game. maybe some form of structured command sequence at the beginning of a turn will help players make a decision early then track it. A grid where each ship plugs in its end location, targets, and other actions, before they are all played out. Once the NPC ships are simply dropping directions of movement and targets into a box it simply becomes a matter of determining what those decisions are, which could be criteria based like "move towards and target largest enemy ship" or "attempt to stay at long range".

[Dog Pants]

The dice system is coming along quite nicely. I had a break and made a mockup of the 'board'.

[Dog Pants]

I have a basic combat system worked out. I'm quite pleased with how the dice pool thing works, but I'm not quite as happy with damage. I think I've missed out the exploding dice too, which I was thinking of just adding to the die when the highest number is rolled. As always, any feedback from you chaps would be lovely.

Combat Rules
Combat forms a large part of the game as many of the beings a captain encounters will have a conflicting agenda.

Tactical Map
Battles are represented on the tactical map, with movement and locations of ships recorded and altered. The map is divided into squares of 500m, with each ship occupying a space on it. Some extremely large ships may occupy more than one square, while small ships such as fighters can share their square with others.

Dice Checks
Most actions require a check of some description, be it against a crew skill or ship component. This is done by rolling an amount of dice equal to the active factor (skill, armour value etc), and counting how many rolls passed the success threshold. The type of dice used and the success threshold will vary both by the ship making the roll and its opponent. Ships are classed by scale, and each scale has a certain die to roll. Similarly, each scale has its own success threshold;

Ship Scale - Dice - Success Threshold
Battleship - D20 - 10
Cruiser - D12 - 6
Destroyer - D10 - 5
Frigate - D8 - 4
Corvette - D6 - 3
Fighter - D4 - 2

A ship will always roll the dice for its scale (or the scale of the component requiring the roll), but the success threshold will generally be that of the target. The success threshold is measured in passes, since the requirement to roll over it or up to it will vary by task. As a rule of thumb, tasks which will be made easier by virtue of the size of the target must be rolled up to (i.e. equal to or under) the success threshold, while tasks which will be made more difficult by the size of the target must roll over the success threshold.

Example:
A Terran fighter strafes the surface of a Bole cruiser, jinking through the flack as it goes. The fast and agile fighter will have very little issue in hitting the huge, slow cruiser. The Terran pilot will need to roll up to the success threshold of cruiser, using the scale dice for the fighter. The pilot will therefore roll his skill level in D4, each counting as a hit if it is equal to or less than the cruiser scale success threshold of 6.
As the volley of railgun shells hits the hull of the cruiser, the Terran pilot will make a damage check. Again, the pilot will be rolling fighter scale D4, this time an amount equal to the damage statistic of the railguns, and again the success threshold is the cruiser scale of 6. However, the roll must be over the success threshold. While there is a high chance of all of the railgun shells hitting, the chances of them causing any damage are slim.

Sequence
Combat follows a set sequence which is followed be each ship in turn before moving onto the next part of the sequence.

Scanning
The first action each ship performs is to scan the area. Scanning updates the ship’s tactical computers on the positions and statuses of other nearby vessels and may offer more useful information to skilled crews. In the scanning phase each ship targets another vessel (or multiple if more than one sensor package is fitted). The player rolls a number of dice equal to the crew’s Scanning skill plus the resolution statistic of the sensors, with a success threshold of over the scale of the target. Targets with ECM components will reduce the number of dice by their jamming statistic, with a result of 0 or less meaning the target cannot be scanned. The first success will identify which components a target ship has fitted, and each subsequent success will indicate the type and operational status of a component of the scanning ship’s choosing.

Orders
Once each ship has completed its scans, captains will issue their orders. Each ship has a command computer, and orders are locked in for the duration of the turn. There are two types of orders, and each captain may issue both; move orders and fire orders.

Example Move Orders:
Move to coordinate
Move towards nearest enemy
Move towards nearest friend
Move away from nearest enemy
Move to maximum weapon range from targeted enemy
Move within minimum weapon range of targeted enemy

Example Fire Orders:
Fire on nearest enemy in range
Fire on largest enemy in range
Fire on targeted enemy
Fire on specific component of targeted enemy

All ships will issue orders privately, however fighter scale ships are an exception. Since fighter scale ships are manned by only a single or pair of crew, the pilot (and gunner in a two-man ship) is acting on his own wits rather than the commands of the captain. Therefore fighter scale craft may move and fire at will in the appropriate phases, and no orders are issued. Once all orders are locked in the next phase can commence.

Movement
During the movement phase ships are moved on the tactical map in order of scale, greatest first. For ships of the same scale those with the lowest speed statistic will move first, and if this too is tied it will be the ship with the highest mass. Where ships are identical, such as squadrons of fighters, ties between players are resolved by random roll, while ties between friendly ships in a single player’s fleet can be moved in whichever order the player desires. During their movement, with the exception of fighters, all ships will move as per the orders in their command computers, however if the movement would cause a collision the captain may opt to adjust the course by one square in order to avoid it. Should a collision occur, either because the captain opted to ram the opposition or because there was insufficient space to avoid it, refer to the ramming rules.

Firing
During the firing phase attacks are calculated in order, from the smallest scales up to the largest. Attacking ships roll a number of dice equivalent to their gunnery skill, plus or minus any modifiers (such as fire control, range, accuracy, target manoeuvrability and pilot skill), with the scale of the dice as per that of the weapon, rolling up to the success threshold of the scale of the target. Regardless of modifiers, the minimum number of dice rolled for an attack is 1.

Only one success is required in order to hit the target, however captains may also choose to target specific components in order to reduce the capabilities of his opponent. In order to hit a component three successes are required. Should this criteria not be met, but a success is still scored, it counts as a normal hit.

When a hit is scored damage can then be calculated. The damage value of the weapon is used to determine how many dice are rolled, made over the success threshold of the target’s scale. The sum of the amount over the success threshold on all dice is then used as the damage caused to the target.

The damage caused by energy weapons will first be absorbed by any shields the ship has. Instead of hitting the ship, points of damage will contribute to the overload value of the shields. Once the shields reach their overload value they will shut down and be of no further use for the rest of the battle. Any remaining damage when a shield is overloaded will be passed on to the ship.

Damage not stopped by shields will be reduced by armour. The hardness of the ship’s armour is subtracted from the damage, and the remainder penetrates to damage the ship and its components.

Tracking
The tracking phase is an optional part of the turn used to calculate the changes in various states of the ships. The GM can choose to use all, some, or none of them to add complexity or speed the game up. They are done separately in order to not break the flow of the combat phases, but may affect the performance of the ship next turn. Since these rolls are not opposed the dice used is not important unless specified.

Crew – Crew incapacitated by damage are reduced from the ship’s crew value. In this phase crew can also be re-allocated to components where they may be better utilised, or to fight fires.

Shields – Shields can effectively recharge by dissipating their load, earthing it off into the resistive hull. This reduces the shield’s overload value by its discharge statistic, but if heat rules are being used will add a point of heat.

Power – The captain may opt to enable or disable components, and components may become disabled through damage. Disabled components have their load added to the net power of the ship, while enabled ones reduce the net power by their load. Should the net power of the ship be reduced to a negative figure the reactor will shut down and render the ship adrift and unable to use any components until it is no longer in negative figures.

Ammunition – Physical weapons carry limited ammunition supplies, and through the course of the battle can become depleted. A ship which has fired a physical weapon must make an ammo roll for that weapon, with the number of dice as per the magazine statistic of the weapon. The dice used are that of the ship’s scale, and the roll must be up to the success threshold of the scale of the weapon. If the roll is failed that weapon cannot be used until resupplied (usually after the battle).

Heat – Certain components generate heat which must be dissipated or risk causing fire, as do fires themselves. Every point of heat generated by a component or fire (using the fire’s intensity) is added to the overall heat value of the hull. Every turn, for every ten points of heat, a die must be rolled, and a success means a fire has started on the ship. Heat may be dissipated by adding heat sinks or cooling to the ship, which will reduce the heat value by its cooling statistic.

Fire – Ships which have fires on board must combat them by allocating crew to fight it. For every turn the fire burns its intensity increases by one point, causing its equivalent in hull damage (armour has no effect). Crew fighting the fire may roll one die plus an additional die per crew member. Every success reduces the fire’s intensity by one, and fires taken to zero intensity are extinguished.

[Joose]

I like the sound of that so far. My one worry is that you will need to keep a close eye on how modifiers and ship sizes are effecting your dice rolls. In your example, if there are no modifiers, the fighters will *always* hit and *never* damage. Trouble is, if the modifiers are hard numbers (like just +1 to hit or something), then the dice themselves can quite quickly become totally irrelevant: You would only need a small number of modifiers to make fighters always hit and always damage Cruisers. Its even worse against closer matched ships: with fighter vs corvette would only need -1 to hit and +2 to damage to always hit and damage, regardless of the actual dice rolled.

It wouldnt be impossible to keep that under control though, just make sure that the modifiers are either linked (ie, +/- to hit *and* damage) or make them class specific in some way (+/- to hit against Corvettes, or against larger targets or something).

Its a good system in theory though, and as long as you can keep that under control it is a really nice way to model the difference between big and small ships.

[Dog Pants]

Ahh, I'm leaving that too ambiguous. The modifiers add and subtract to the amount of dice, not the result. The only thing that will add to the number rolled is a critical, which is what that always hitting fighter is relying on. I read something you linked to on Dumpshock about changing number of dice or target number, but not both, and it struck a chord. The only way around the fact that it's easy to succeed is by increasing the success thresholds, but since there are different dice each scale would need a different threshold. They do anyway, but at the moment they're a nice, neat 50%. Also, by increasing that you make it easier to roll under it, which throws the balance out.

I'll chuck some stats together and play out an example later.

[Dog Pants]

This morning I had a brainwave (in the shower) about the board for this thing. I doubt anyone will be surprised to hear it's a more elaborate version of Endless Space's range system, but even I wasn't expecting it to accidentally become a pride flag.



Anyway, by limiting range to one dimension it removes all manner of headaches about speed and relative distance, looks pretty, and allows for tactical positioning. You put your ships in their bands and work out how many are between them and the target. The labels are mostly for reference rather than actual measurement. Also, the retreat bands at the ends of the board are handy both for escaping and for leaving enemy ships behind. Taking inspiration from the old GW Mad Max-esque Dark Future, the board can shuffle backwards and forwards as the battle moves. So only when one ship has a lot of distance put between it and the one at the other end will it escape or be left behind. I can even have volleys of missiles as counters to give them flight time without it becoming too complex. It needs some work, but I feel good about what I've thought about so far.

[FatherJack]

I hadn't spotted this before, but the both-decide-then-act-together system in the vein of Frozen Synapse is a good model for space combat, as it provides a built-in simple simulation of how things can take a long time to happen in space - you can't just turn around and go the other way, you have to decelerate, first.

Of course you wouldn't want to simulate Newtonian physics, but the simlpe fact that you set a motion in action based on decision on what you can see about positions at the start of a turn, then cannot make a correction to that until the next turn during which the enemy also moves, is a hint to that happening.

[Dog Pants]

I've had a funny contrast all through development over realism. I want to keep things fairly rules light, as much board game as rpg, but I want the ships to be designed with detailed figures behind it all to support a useful looting and progression system. When it came to calculating speed relative to mass and thrust though things started to get newtonian. This banding system made all that a moot point, handily.

[Dog Pants]

I want to crowd source a bit of what I'm doing with this at the moment. Since I'm happy with the basics of the system mechanics I wanted to put a few ships together to try things out, and as a break from all the maths and guesswork of putting them together from components I've been thinking about the actual pseudo-technology of the components so that they're nice and colourful rather than just numbers. It's interesting researching theories for interstellar travel and future weapons, but there are bigger sci-fi geeks than me here, so what better excuse to have a bit of a nerdgasm than to suggest different technologies for my bits.

By way of an insight into how this bit works, every ship is the sum of its components. The hull has a maximum volume and you can fill it with whatever will fit, all contributing to its final mass. Sublight (pilot) engines, superlight (cruising) engines, weapons, power plants, armour, shields and so on. The ship is pretty much what your character would be in a normal RPG, and just as complex. The character sheet will do the maths though. Actual characters, on the other hand, are pretty simple. So the components are the star of the show, like equipment in D&D etc. Different races use different power systems and hull materials, so things which can be used to convert alien equipment for your ship will be pretty valuable. Alien hulls, on the other hand, will probably be uncomfortable. I'm aiming for the roguelike thrill of finding out what you can loot when you win a fight.

So anyway, I digress. I've been looking at faster-than-light travel recently and split it into three categories: conventional, zero-point, and abstract. Conventional is physics based, such as Ram Scoop Drives and Diametric Drives, which propel the craft at very high speeds. Zero-point drives deal in zeros and infinites, distorting space-time to create effects which are normally outside the laws of physics, like Warp Drives and Wormhole Generators. Abstract drives are the real sci-fi stuff - interplanar travel (Culture series), navigators folding space (Dune), Jump Drives and Hyperdrives.

Anyone know of other types of crazy faster-than-light travel?

[FatherJack]

The Revelation Space series explores some near-light travel, but deems light speed impossible due to the infinite energy requirements to accelerate that last little bit. There may be some spoilers if you haven't read them all and plan to.

They have Tokamak drives which, like Stellarators are magnetic fields used to contain plasma, presumably ejecting it out the back like a rocket, but the faster ships - lighthuggers - use Conjoiner (a human faction) Drives which along with some weapons use a tiny wormhole linked back in time to the Big Bang to suck out the vast amount of energy required to keep accelerating. They use Cryo-arithmetic engines, which are quantum computers and which (perversely) get colder the more the calculations they do, as heatsinks.

They also have Inertia Suppression to suppress the g horses of high acceleration by negating the inertial mass of the ships. They can get it close to zero mass, but like light speed if they go beyond (in an attempt to go faster than light) they get a kind of divide by zero error and very bad things happen, thus no species in that Universe do so. They can communicate faster than light by using a sort of far-future telephone exchange, which archives all the messages and will only replay them to the correct recipient in the same timezone as the sender.

[Joose]

Theres that crazy one that involves you and all your alternate selves in all the other alternate universes shuffling sideways. I don't know if it has a proper title. The basic concept is this: You cant travel faster than light, but you can travel to parallel dimensions (assuming the Many Worlds theory). Therefore you can approximate FTL by travelling from this dimension to another dimension that is extremely similar to this one, except with everything displaced the correct amount. This does mean that you technically disappear from your home dimension and appear in a neighbouring one, but that doesn't matter because the dimensions are so similar there is inevitably an almost identical you arriving at your intended destination in your home universe too, and the equally almost identical you from the universe you have just arrived in will have disappeared off to another universe.

Its quite hard to describe without diagrams, but the end result is that you disappear from your starting point and someone who is so close to you that its impossible to tell the difference arrives at your intended location.

The other, more simple concept I can think of (again I forget where I heard about it) is something that simply dicks about with the fundamental rules of physics in a local area, effectively turning the speed of light up. This means that sufficiently bigassed engines (or I suppose regular engines left on long enough) will accelerate you faster than 3*10^8m/s because the speed of light is now 3*10^99999 or something. Of course, there are inevitably weird side affects.

[Dog Pants]

Good stuff guys, keep it coming. At the moment the conventional drives can't travel faster than light due to their being restrained by the laws of physics, although they can come close. I might make Joose's device which speeds up the speed of light locally and FJ's inertial suppression as modules which can boost conventional drives to faster than light speeds. As it stands they're pretty much limited to the less advanced races. The Ram Scoop drives sound similar to Stellarators, scooping up hydrogen and compressing it into a fusion reaction which is then directed out the back of the ship, like a jet engine. A couple of variations speed them up further by using magnetic fields to push them out faster, or using lasers in the containment chamber to heat it to plasma.

The cojoiner drives are a new one on me. I did see a similar thing which created a tiny black hole in front of the ship and the gravity of it pulled the ship to close to light speed. Like a dachshund chasing a sausage on a stick. Which in turn isn't dissimilar to how the Diametric drive works.

The dimensional swappy thing is a good one I'd forgotten about. Nice abstract drive, I'll nick that wholesale.

[FatherJack]

The only FTL trips that really work for me are ones where you don't actually travel faster than light, but take a massive shortcut, such that you beat light to the destination if it was to go the long way round.

Wormholes are the most likely of these, but are more likely to function by finding certain bits of space that already happen to be bent close to each other like poking a hole through a folded-up piece of paper and would be more like stargates in practice. Something that can bend all of space at will just to make a shortcut where it wants one seems a bit less practical, energy-requirements-wise.

The Many Worlds theory one could work, but it would actually have to be the near-Infinite Worlds theory to make sure there was a near-you close to the exit point. Make that an actually-Infinite Worlds theory though, and there would be a guaranteed identical-you at every single point in the Universe.

Another method would be to somehow remove yourself temporarily from spacetime and either wait until the Universe had moved to where you wanted, or somehow manoeuvre independently of it, rematerialising in the desired location.

So, I think FTL travel would be more like getting a train somewhere than flying - you'd have to travel to the nearest FTL endpoint then use the preexisting network to get as close as possible to your destination, then travel the rest of the way at sublight.


More off-the-wall ideas would be Magic, the Improbabality Drive (which simply by calculating exactly how likely you are to be somewhere else, actually makes it happen) , or something which would see you exist in more than one place at once (perhaps even in all possible places at once) and you'd subsequently destroy all the other copies of yourself until only the one at the intended destination was left.

[Dog Pants]

I'm not too concerned about keeping things hard sci-fi as long as they sound about right. The premise of the game will be to go out space-spelunking for alien treasure, so while I want rich and interesting descriptions for everything I'm not aiming for scientific accuracy at the expense of gameplay. Since exploration is a key theme I think fixed games would detract from that. Sub-light techniques are still useful though: the less advanced alien races can use them, since they're more like static encounters so it doesn't matter if it takes them thirty years to travel between stars. There are also pilot engines (named after nautical pilots because they're used for navigating close to planets and other ships) which would by necessity be more conventional - ion engines, chemical rockets, fusion and plasma engines. Solar sails are in there, but they're limited mainly to probes which need efficiency over speed.

[FatherJack]

It guess it depends how plausible you want encounters to be. I think it'd theorectically take about a year to accelerate to 99% of LS at 1G, so if FTL ships can pop up anywhere inside a solar system, it's highly unlikely they'd find anything waiting for them, or even able to get anywhere near them anytime soon at sublight.

If FTL jumpers always appear within a designated endpoint (of which there could be one or more per-planet) then the chances of something intercepting you is a lot higher.


I guess though, if the aim is exploring, the goal is to find something interesting - so other ships would be more likely to already be at the interesting things, exploring them themselves.

[Dog Pants]

Fair point. If ships can traverse sub-lightspeed quick enough to close to weapons range even within orbit they're probably fast enough to fuck off and avoid any encounter. Whereas with gates you get Eve-style camping scenarios. Exploring pre-established gates could work, but in order to be worth exploring they would have to have been put there by some long dead alien race, and I really want to avoid that cliche. I could just dodge the question though. Ultimately all these various FTL engines will just act as a factor to how long it takes to get between star systems. All the techno-babble behind it is purely to give players a crutch to visualise their own customised, personal ship. That's not to be underestimated though, I'm aiming for light sci-fi geek porn, building the reasonably authentic sounding ship of your dreams.

Incidentally, on that last point, huge fleet battles are not going to be a good idea. It would take fucking ages. Originally I wanted each player to crew a different part of the same ship, with the option of maybe expanding to a handful if they can salvage a few. It's designed more for the Millenium Falcon or the Defiant, rather than Battlestar Galactica (although it does scale for big capital ships).

[Joose]

Something you may or may not have taken into account with your FTL tech ponderings is limits set by navigation. Its all well and good being able to travel at superluminal speeds but unless you have equally far fetched sensor technology it would be somewhat like driving a sports car through a busy city street whilst blindfolded.

Some techniques from various fictions that come immediately to mind:

1) The Star Trek approach: ignore the problem and hope no one notices. As far as I know they never really explain how they see where they are going. I could be wrong though.
2) The Culture approach: im working entirely off memory here, but if I remember right there is a concept in the Culture novels of there being this thing called the skein, which sits figuratively under space time and doesn't obey the same rules. Things in regular space leave a wake in the skein which propagate faster than the speed of light, so you can tell what is in front of you by looking at the ripples in the skein. Its a bit like FTL radar really.
3) The Dune/WH40k approach: mild psychic powers. If you can predict the future you can see what course corrections you need to make to be in the timeline that doesn't end up with you crashing into an unexpected moon/eaten by extraspacial gribblies.

Stuff where you are technically not going faster than light (wormholes etc) still face navigational problems: Unless you have something like one of the things above there is no way of knowing that the space you are essentially teleporting into isn't already occupied with something. The other option with this is using something to do with gravity: If the curvature of spacetime at your destination is reasonably flat then there is nothing there to squish into, so a drive that can only open an exit in relatively flat spacetime means you don't need to navigate around solid options. Possible downside of that: There are two situations where there is almost no gravity: the depths of space (safe!) and the exact centre of a planet or sun (less safe!)