Over on The Big Purple, a while back Bailywolf talked about a novel where a cheap hyperdrive was invented, and proposed a campaign setting for it, calling it "FTL, Y'all".

I was thinking of this sort of thing as a basis for a campaign setting, leading to game world something like Firefly - quite rough tech, a real "frontier" feel.

So let's imagine a warp drive can be built with the following properties,

• It costs a few thousand dollars to build, and the components can be had from any electronics supply shop and hardware store.
• The power requirements are relatively minimal - you could send off something the size of the X-15 with a few car-battery-sized power things. But the power required increases drastically with larger craft, and with the FTL speed.
• When you set it off, it turns the surrounding air into plasma of several thousand degrees, so it's only safe to set it off at something like 1/1,000 atmospheric pressure (about 50km or 30 miles up). So you still need to be able to get quite high, and know how to fly.
• The warp drive distorts space-time so that your normal thrust gives you a relative velocity of many times light-speed.
• This distortion makes you blind to the surrounding universe, so you have to stop every now and then to take a look around and check navigation.

My thinking is that once it takes hold, FTL travel will come within the reach of the same sorts of people who buy powered yachts these days - you'll be able to get in space for half a million bucks.

What are your thoughts on this? Again, my aim is to get a relatively low-tech, and "frontier" feel to it.

Quote from: JimBobOzI was thinking of this sort of thing as a basis for a campaign setting, leading to game world something like Firefly - quite rough tech, a real "frontier" feel.

What are your thoughts on this? Again, my aim is to get a relatively low-tech, and "frontier" feel to it.

I'd use elements from here:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082869/

Regards,
David R

A cheap trick would be to have a corporation (An evil one, of course. All corporations are evil, in the real world and in game worlds.) sells frontiersmen nice cheap warp drives, BUT they are either fuel guzzlers or they need lots of maintence, effectively enslaving the frontiersmen to the evil corporation for fuel and or parts.

Campaign ideas revolve around getting the frontiersmen better engines, a cheaper source of fuel or parts and thereby break the corporate dominion over them. The corporate pigs naturally send out forces to prevent this, and conflict ensues.

Hmm, the landing proceedure implies you might be able to 'hyperspace' between points on a planetary surface.
If so the military is going to be all over this like flies on poo - ejector seats that could eject you directly into the nearest hospital, missiles that could hyperspace themselves inside the building they were aimed at etc etc
Not to mention criminals who could fit their car with a hyperspace unit and warp out of trouble when the cops show. Or even fit a mini unit to themselves.

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Some thoughts:
1. A plasma creating warp dirve that cheap would be weaponized and turned into unstoppable hyper-bombs.

2. You may have cheap drives but initially will have no where to go. You could have alien civilizations but having a drive and nowhere to go...well, I do not kno wthere would be a rush for space.

2.5 You can't just slap a warp drive on a old pontiac car frame and fly the stars. Life support, to say the least, would be necessary for any voyage of reasonable length. Food, waste processing, air scrubbers, heaters are all part of it. So the drive might be easy, but joe sixpack is unlikely to strap one to his Ford Explorer and blast for the stars...well, and make it back to tell about it.

3. Colonies cost money. Big money. And lots of resources. What is the benefit. Why would we be doing it. Look at the moon. Relatively close and no more hostile than many of the planets in this system and we have not gone there with a permanent colony. So you need a why.

4. Navigation...If you are not traveling in some sort of space bubble you could run into the Moon at launch or some other astral body in travel. If you are, you still need astrogation skills to find the point you are trying to get to and find your way back. Yes, computers are nice but you need to know how to use that software also.

All the above said, I like the idea. It would be neat to explore the effects. I imagine you would have a lot of deaths from people without enough caution but an oversupply of technical knowledge and drive to explore.

Bill

I see a "quadrant" of space being opened for settlement, not unlike Oklahoma in 1889.  Everyone lines up (except those who dishonestly jumped the gun), gets ready, and at the appointed time, a new frontier is opened!!! It'd be a blast to play out those first few years, as a cluster full of newfound, habitable planets is settled by new pioneers.

Alrighty, since I drove away half my game group by publicly talking about them and thus nixing the "underground" campaign, it's time to revive this idea! New group, new campaign, I say.

The handwave to avoid having this as a weapon, I've two thoughts.

The first is that if the field creates a plasma which will destroy the ship if sufficiently dense, then dropping one is equivalent to a car bomb. Nasty, but nothing world-destroying, and a pretty expensive IED. I'm sure someone will come along and calculate the TNT-equivalent of a ten tonne ship vapourising, but you can bugger off, I'm happy with the handwave, and that's good enough for me - I don't have any physicists in my game circle who'll argue with me

The second is that if the field is so easily produced, it'll also be easily stopped. So I imagine it as something like a radio transmitter - it can be jammed. Big-arsed jamming units will be quickly set up around cities, and that's that.

Alright, weapon bollocks set aside. Man, every time someone imagines a scifi technology, geeks start talking about making it go BOOM!!

Okay, HinterWelt's point 3. Why make a colony? Well, I can think of a few reasons. Simple curiosity and the exploring nature will prompt a lot - if people are willing to pay twenty million bucks just to feel spacesick for a couple of days, they'll sure as shit pay half a million to fly off and see (say) the moons of Jupiter. The desire to be the first on some alien world will do a lot, too - hell, people spend years of their lives and tens of thousands of dollars just to be the first to take some particular route up a mountain, let alone be the first up it.

If transport is (relatively) cheap, then transporting goods will be cheap, too. The first things transported are going to be scientific curiosities. Think of how much bits of Mars meteorite sell for, if sold - millions. Now imagine someone brings back a methane crystal from Titan, or a European sea slug.

After a while, someone's going to discover an Earth-like planet. Free land!

We'll also see ethnic, religious and political groups running off to form colonies. Remember the USA's Puritans? The Mormons in Illionois running off to Utah?

Whether colonies will make profits is irrelevant - historically, many colonies didn't, but people still established them out of prestige, ego, a desperate hope that this one would make a profit, etc...

As to navigation, yes, lots will get lost and destroyed. Just as many ships were lost before the accurate clock with longitude calculations... but they still travelled!

When would be a good time to set the campaign? If it were me playing, I'd like to be the first out there - but hey, I'm the kind of guy who'd enjoy an rpg based on that BBC show Space Odyssey, about a grand tour of the solar system. Most gamers wouldn't - adventure comes from interacting with other people. So it'd have to be a few years in, with a few small colonies established, maybe some great power rivalry over claims on this or that planet...

What do you guys reckon?

I am not trying to rain on your parade here. I just think that you need to look at the factors and then extrapolate from there. That sounded more defensive than it is meant. Simply, I like the idea and am trying to extend the circumstances.

So, I like the idea that the drive can be jammed much better than the expense angle. To be honest, if it was a teleporting plasma bomb that only needed a few hundred dollars of common electronics...ish, it would be bad. Terrorists, radicals, and governments would be all over it. If it was only heated plasma, radiation damage would be at a minimum. However, jamming takes care of that nicely.

I want to stress about the colonies, it is not like the settlers of old. Just to take one angle, plenty of attempts at colonization failed for lack of picking the proper site. Soils not fertile enough, local food too different from what the settlers were used to, or climate to different for the crops they brought with them. When colonizing a planet, it is worse. Take something relatively peaceful like the moon. It is not just dog a hole and go. Life support, food, fertilizer, and heat are all major efforts there. Something a group of ragtag settlers would not have. Now, a cool extrapolation would be corporation that specialize in colonies. They will set you up where ever...for a price.

So, I think it would be a neat idea to have the IDEAL of "Strap a warp drive to a chevy and explore the universe" but in reality it is a major effort. For instance, once there are places to go, you might cobble a ship together and head there but you would not explore empty space in such a vehicle...not on purpose anyway. However, now you have the basis for a primitive "Space" coast guard (I would call the SAR) who go out and attempt to rescue lost space travelers.

As for making a colony, there are reasons. I do not think "the spirit of exploration" would cut it. Call me a pessimist but I think you need motive. Ores, gems, resources, land or the like could be good. However, I think you touch on the real point. An earth-like planet would make for some great motivation. Going to live in a mine on Titan sounds more like a punishment. Going to live on a potentially dangerous new world...a lot better. Frontier spirit, there, would matter more than technical knowledge. You do not need to know how to pilot a ship as much as survive in wilderness. Tech resources would be limited for a long time. Shipping would be cheap and would actually impede creating an industrial base beyond those needed for exporting goods.

Another motivation I have been thinking on is ecological distress. Not necessarily disaster but take the  global warming theme and make earth a storm ravaged flooding mess. Still able to produce but a new world sure might look better. People would be motivated to try their hand at making "tin can star ships" and making it to the new colony(ies).

Finally, no aliens? I think an earth like planet would have alien life (obviously unless we are talking terraforming) and  it could be simple animals or native "intelligent" life.

Just rambling thoughts...
Bill

Great idea. I'm imagining it would work like a slow stutter-warp. Take a reading, jump... whew, we made it! Take another reading, repeat as necessary.

How far in the future are you imagining this? Years, decades, more? It might affect your thinking.

As to who might go, think of the dangerous, forbidding places people already go to or have gone to. I like the analogy of climbers. How many rich, bored people would pay to go skiing down Olympus Mons? Or skating on Europa? Or just to see with their own eyes the rings of Saturn? You already have people paying millions to go to Earth orbit for a few days of weightlessness, or to summit Everest. Nathaniel Branson? Steve Fosset? Virgin Really  Galactic?

A movie that comes to mind is "The Perfect Storm". Here are a bunch of working class slobs with a half million dollar vessel, lots of high tech gadgets, setting off into a big blue nothing, just to try to make a few bucks. As I watched it, I thought, that's what it might feel like to be in space; the relative isolation, the reliance on technology, the unforgiving environment.
Men spend weeks and months on oil rigs, or in Antarctic research stations. Given a similar cost, why not a station on Pluto, or Eris, or prospecting the asteriod belt? The solar system would be as accessible as the oceans of the world are now.

A response I posted on another forum fleshes this out a bit.

The sensor-blindness during warp is the side-effect of the c+ speeds, outrunning EM radiation. You can't use light to see with (outside the field) if you're going faster than it.

You also get a "blue streak" when one of these zaps off. In real physics, there's a thing called "Chernekov radiation." Light travels at different speeds in different mediums, the highest in vac, if you send a very energetic particle faster than that, it emits that radiation - a blue or ultraviolet streak, somewhat like a sonic boom. Well, since FTL does not exist we can't argue about the physics of it too much, so for interests' sake I'd say a ship travelling in warp emits Chernekov radiation. Of course, the light from its "wake" arrives after the ship itself does, but this is equivalent to the sound of a bullet arriving after the bullet does - no use to anyone it hit, but useful to everyone else.

Anyway, having a long colourful streak of light after a warping ship is just cool  

But yeah, if you're going faster than light, you can't use light to observe things. This would also mean that there'd be a lot of stops if travelling in the plane of the solar system. What happens if you run into a space rock at 5c? Can't be any nicer than what happens at 5km/sec! Any volunteers to find out? So okay, let's just stop and check, okay?

And of course if your navigation isn't good, you just end up taking longer to get there.

So that's a very good point, that effective speed would be limited by quality of sensors and computers. "I stick an old cement mixer bowl on top of a stolen ICBM, put a PC in there, and..." :eek:

Logically, the field energy cost would be proportional either to the volume of the field, or the mass of the craft, or both. The volume of the field's a good one, sicne it's a cube equation, and will increase nice and fast as size goes up, keeping ships small. One idea I've been playing with is the warp equivalent of the difference between static and dynamic friction - in real physics, it's often harder to start moving something than keep it going. When you first push, you feel a large frictional force resisting it, once it's going there's much less. It'd be interesting to do that with the warp field.

So it'd take a burst of energy to start up - saying, nice big capacitors required - but then not so much energy to maintain. As suggested, a regular drive might be needed, with so much "real" speed being translated to so much "FTL" speed. So 1km/sec could be 1c, 2km/sec could be 2c, and so on. That would make interstellar journeys still take months or years, though, since with just rockets we're not likely to get manned capsules going at more than 10-20km/sec, perhaps up to 40-50km/sec with some fancy gravity slingshot action around Jupiter, etc.

Since I don't want to have more than one super-tech at once, there's no artificial gravity. So what might be interesting is to have it that your post-c speed is proportional to your ship's acceleration. So if you have an acceleration of 4g, you're going at 4,000c; if at 0.001g, at 1c. We just say that real-space acceleration becomes warp-space speed. Then we start building spaceships with the decks perpendicular to direction of travel, rather than parallel like aircraft. Just like the rockets in scifi stories from the 1930s-1960s!

I can see I'm going to have to have another look at the previous edition of GURPS Space, which had all the different types of rockets in it...

What about a jump gate type arrangement. Where smaller tramp traders might not even need warp engines just efficient sub-light drives.  Low population systems might only have one gate or share a gate with nearby systems, while large central systems might have half a dozen or more gates. I use this type of arrangement for my Traveller universe, only large corporations and governments can afford to fleet large ships with warp/hyper drives.

Quote from: JimBobOzBut yeah, if you're going faster than light, you can't use light to observe things. This would also mean that there'd be a lot of stops if travelling in the plane of the solar system. What happens if you run into a space rock at 5c? Can't be any nicer than what happens at 5km/sec! Any volunteers to find out? So okay, let's just stop and check, okay?

Probably a lot of travel through the SS would involve going up off of the plane and away from all of the debris, pause while you get a good sighting on your destination, and then zip down there.  

I like the idea.  I do agree that it needs some earth-like planets to make the trip interesting to colonists - although near-earth-like might be acceptable to groups who just want to get themselves out from under the government's view.  The'd be more interesting to settlers if there was some unusual/useful resource that you could get from the planet.

Quote from: JimBobOzI was thinking of this sort of thing as a basis for a campaign setting, leading to game world something like Firefly - quite rough tech, a real "frontier" feel.

Remember, you asked for this...

OK, maybe I still have BJ and the Bear, Smokey and the Bandit, Convoy, and other cheesy trucker stuff from the 70s on my mind but...

First, Firefly theoretically took place in a single solar system (though not ours).  In ours, there is Outland, Saturn 3, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Event Horizon, Total Recall, some Gerry Anderson shows, and a host of other sources including Space Truckers and Starhunter 2300.  

So suggestion #1 is to skip the FTL angle and just make it a very fast sub-light or light speed drive and keep it in the solar system.  As an added bonus, you get to avoid all sorts of physics issues related to FTL travel.

What all of those these other sources have in common is that they aren't about green world colonies but space stations and enclosed colonies.  Everything off of Earth is a space station, moon station, or enclosed colony on a planet.  The closest Starhunter 2300 gets is a semi-terraformed Mars.

So suggestion #2 is to skip the frontier and green worlds.  Instead, go for a trucker, truck stop, cargo terminal, mine, and factory feel.  You are still dealing with blue collar space travel but now it's 20th/21st Century blue collar instead of the Space Western feeling of Firefly.  Hard hats.  Forklifts.  Filter masks.  Tools.  Grease.  Metal.  The Alien series of movies is a good source for this, too.

So, where I'm going with this is that big corporations go out into the solar system and set up bases for science, industry, and as playgrounds and homes for the rich and famous.  Perhaps the Earth is getting nasty because of a disaster du jour (global warming, supervolcano, asteroid hit, a new ice age, plagues, pollution, whatever works for you) and the rich, famous, and brilliant are getting off the sinking ship and maybe they're starting to terraform Mars (Starhunter 2300 has this sort of thing).  

Then some of the "little guys" stuck back on Earth figure out how to get truck-sized spaceships off the ground and into space.  They make a living ferrying people and goods quickly between the corp stations and bases along routes too unprofitable for the corporations with their big old-style cargo space ships that the new space drive can't work with (maybe it creates a field that's too small or something).  Maybe they also ferry up exotic goods from Earth that the corps are no longer welcome on or not interested enough in to bring their bigger (and maybe slower) cargo ships in to Earth to get.

Don't worry about the space drive not working on the ground.  Maybe it does.  Maybe that's the whole trick.  Turn on the special field and it hides the mass of whatever it surrounds.  Fire off a thruster and it moves things as if they weighed next to nothing.  So they seal up a truck (or maybe a sealed cab surrounded by a bunch of sealed boxes in a cluster) or truck-like spaceship, turn on the mass-hiding field, fire off an ion drive (or something more exotic and black-box sounding) for thrust, and go out into space with that.  (ADDED: Since the truck is inside of the mass-hiding bubble, the people inside might be exempt from feeling any acceleration -- maybe they are zero-G at all times.)  Key to the feel here is that the spaceship is like a truck cab (with sleeper area), and not a spacious house in space like Serenity.  If you have 6 people in the cab, three might be sitting in seats up front and the other three peeking out of the sleeper or something.  This is where i think Space Truckers has some cool ideas, though maybe not as campy.  It's got some really cool visuals for a high-tech truck in space, even if you don't make your version quite as literally a truck.  

These "Space Truckers" work on contracts and when they dock or land at a station or base, they go to the corporate cafeteria with with blue collar grunts that keep the place going.  The only time they'll mix with the rich and famous or scientists is if they are doing some work for them (e.g., ferrying them around, delivering a package to a secret lab or station, etc.).  And I'd suggest leaving the Earth a disaster that the PCs might visit but wouldn't want to stay too long at.

If you can find them and stomach them (they aren't high art but I liked them both), I really suggest watching the Starhunter 2300 series (really low-budget but better than the first season/series of Starhunter -- you don't need to have seen the first one) and Space Truckers for the feel that I'm talking about, as well with Outland and Total Recall and even bits of Silent Running and the new Battlestar Galactica.

If you write this up as a setting an publish, I want a credit and a free copy of the book.

If you don't like that suggestion, give me a better idea of what you want (and what you don't like about this suggestion).  Just a rough idea for a cheap FTL drive and a frontier feel is a bit vague.

I'd like to keep the thing as plausible and "day after tomorrow" as possible. I think that obscure physics issues about causality can be safely handwaved for most players, but less obscure things, like whether Venus has jungles or not, or Titan has true methane lakes or just muddy water, not so much. So I'd take the action out of the solar system, to new systems where I can happily give new planets whatever properties I like.

I've seen most of the movies you mentioned, but not Space Truckers or Starhunter 2300.