Quote from: jeff37923;1120460
'Vrusk are sometimes called "bugs".' 'They look like large insects'

'The internal structure of a Dralasite is very different from the other races. The Dralasite's central nerve bundle (brain), numerous small hearts and other internal organs float in a pudding-like mixture of protein and organic fluids. Dralasites breathe by absorbing oxygen directly through their skin, so they have no lungs. They are omnivores, but eat by surrounding their food and absorbing it, so they also have no digestive tract or intestines.'

Sounds like insects and single celled organisms to me.

Except... you know... not.

But keep failing miserably though.

Quote from: jhkim;1120472Omega is technically correct. Vrusk do have an internal skeleton, and Dralasites are definitely multi-cellular.

However, in general, Star Frontiers is definitely not hard sci-fi. It's mostly space opera, with FTL, artificial gravity, force-fields, tractor beams, ray guns, and outlandish creatures. Dralasites are not single-celled, but there's no explanation for how they can absorb enough oxygen for activity without lungs.

Star Frontiers doesnt have artificial gravity. Ships, other than some shuttles, are towers. They ported that over to Buck Rogers even.

Me too. "I always liked Heavy Gear. Reasonable mecha (small, lightly armored). FTL exists but is extremely rare and expensive as hell. And a deadly system."

Quote from: Pat;1120616Though this is a rather silly argument. It's clear they wanted a space bug and a space amoeba, which is fundamentally Science! out of a pulp serial. But it's also clear they tried to come up a more modern pseudo-plausible rationale for them both. So the implausibility isn't that they're insects or amoeba, because they're not; it's in how well those two forms are justified by scientific gobbledygook, and in the staggering coincidence that humans ran across multiple alien races that are roughly comparable to humans in size and physical capabilities, think enough like humans that they can smoothly integrate into human culture, and on top of all that they just happen to look like terrestrial bugs, amoeba, flying monkeys, and snakes.

Yup. That's pretty much my take on it. (And I agree about the splayed legs as well.) As I said, they have a ton of space opera tropes - from force fields to FTL to sonic stunners. So I think we're mostly in agreement that Star Frontiers is space opera -- but in the particular complaint that Vrusk are insect and Dralasites are single-celled, they are not technically true.

Quote from: Omega;1120621Star Frontiers doesnt have artificial gravity. Ships, other than some shuttles, are towers. They ported that over to Buck Rogers even.

As I recall, not all ships had artificial gravity, but it was an option in Knight Hawks. And it seemed to be an assumption in the original game. The crashed spaceship in the basic game had a flat layout with stairs. That's what I see in the Knight Hawks PDF download, cf.

http://www.starfrontiers.us/files/Knighthawks01.pdf

Quote from: Vidgrip;1120355Stars without Number has a default setting that would not qualify as hard sci-fi but is full of tables and tools for building any type of sci-fi setting.  I'd highly recommend it for that reason even if you never plan to use the default setting or mechanics.  All Crawford's games are like this.  I use them to build settings of my own.

SWN has a supplement called Engines of Babylon that covers harder-sci reaction engine powered spacecraft. Still no heatsinks though...

Quote from: Rhedyn;1120420Eclipse Phase requires their wormholes to exist because of that is how the TITANS left, if wormhole tech invented by post singularity AI is acceptable, then you are fine.

It's easy enough to chop out the non-hard bits of Eclipse Phase, including "egocasting". I guess aficionados would claim that guts the game of its USP but I don't care. I thought the Factor aliens were pretty good, genuinely alien. If, like Louis Armstrong, I had all the time in the world, I would love to reskin it for Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space setting.

Quote from: Omega;1120619But keep failing miserably though.

Like your claims of Star Frontiers as Hard Science Fiction?

Quote from: Pat;1120616That's not a disqualifier. Crocodiles have splayed legs, can move very quickly on land, and prehistoric examples with very similar body plans were the size of an elephant. Pretty much any giant land animal from prehistory that isn't a mammal or a dinosaur would also qualify, because the fully upright posture with legs directly under the body only appeared in those two lineages (I think... but even if there's another exception, it's still covers multiple animals that top out at couple tons). While the upright posture is a major advantage, after all it's one the features that made dinosaurs fast and allowed them to grow to unprecedented sizes, it's not a structural necessity at the human scale.

If you're interested in scale and biodynamics, McGowan wrote a couple of good, popular books on the subject. They're not recent books, but it's not one those subfields that goes out of date particularly quickly.

Though this is a rather silly argument. It's clear they wanted a space bug and a space amoeba, which is fundamentally Science! out of a pulp serial. But it's also clear they tried to come up a more modern pseudo-plausible rationale for them both. So the implausibility isn't that they're insects or amoeba, because they're not; it's in how well those two forms are justified by scientific gobbledygook, and in the staggering coincidence that humans ran across multiple alien races that are roughly comparable to humans in size and physical capabilities, think enough like humans that they can smoothly integrate into human culture, and on top of all that they just happen to look like terrestrial bugs, amoeba, flying monkeys, and snakes.

Bolding is mine.

Problem is that crocodiles do not have a carapace while Vrusk do, and that is a significant increase in weight on the human scale of things.

Quote from: jhkim;1120638That's what I see in the Knight Hawks PDF download, cf.

http://www.starfrontiers.us/files/Knighthawks01.pdf

I don't know where you found this PDF, but it isn't Knight Hawks for Star Frontiers. It looks like some Science Fiction Homemade Heartbreaker based on the game because the artwork on pages 54 and 81 are from Traveller: TNE; the artwork on pages 61 (taken from T20), 73, and 98 are all done by deceased Traveller artist Bryan Gibson; and the art on page 112 looks like it was from Jeff Dee.

Quote from: jeff37923;1120655Problem is that crocodiles do not have a carapace while Vrusk do, and that is a significant increase in weight on the human scale of things.

Depends on its composition. Vrusk look like bugs, but they're not bugs, so they're analogous rather than identical structures. And plenty of large animals with a splayed posture have armor of some kind, like a crocodile's osteoderms.

Quote from: Pat;1120659Depends on its composition. Vrusk look like bugs, but they're not bugs, so they're analogous rather than identical structures. And plenty of large animals with a splayed posture have armor of some kind, like a crocodile's osteoderms.

"A Vrusk's body is covered by a carapace (hard shell). This shell is jointed at the Vrusk's elbows, hips, knees, etc. The carapace protects the Vrusk from bruises, cuts, scratches and other minor injuries."

So in order for the carapace to be a hard shell and protect the Vrusk from "bruises, cuts, scratches and other minor injuries" it would have to have some hardness to it and thus weight. I'm not saying that it is steel or some kind of metal alloy, but even bone has weight to it. Even saying that the Vrusk exoskeleton is no more massive than the Vrusk endoskeleton, you are still increasing the weight of the body significantly. For added problems, there is the matter of the Vrusk upright torso - which requires more carapace and additional musculature and tendons to be able to exist and remain upright.

Two things:

A) if you find your grail game, let me know, because I've been looking for it too. I especially hate the way a lot of hard sci-fi rpgs feel the need to plug in an horror aspect just to be able to redo Alien. Ugh.
B) FTL travel with no time travel paradox could theoretically be possible through an Alcubierre drive. Our current knowledge makes building one "extremely unlikely" whereas before it was "straight out impossible". So, depending on your preferences, it could be acceptable.

Quote from: jeff37923;1120656I don't know where you found this PDF, but it isn't Knight Hawks for Star Frontiers. It looks like some Science Fiction Homemade Heartbreaker based on the game because the artwork on pages 54 and 81 are from Traveller: TNE; the artwork on pages 61 (taken from T20), 73, and 98 are all done by deceased Traveller artist Bryan Gibson; and the art on page 112 looks like it was from Jeff Dee.

Whoops! Sorry about that. I have seen a PDF of the complete original Knight Hawks online -- there was a project to make it available for free since for decades Star Frontiers wasn't reprinted or offered from anyone. However, there is now a legal PDF which is what I should link to.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/227734/Star-Frontiers-Knight-Hawks

I did find the original, though, and you're right that artificial gravity isn't in Knight Hawks. This isn't quite consistent with the deck plans in the original game, but that isn't explicit. Still, Knight Hawks has FTL, force fields, and other space opera features -- like being 2D and ships acting like aircraft - facing the direction of movement.

Quote from: Marchand;1120653It's easy enough to chop out the non-hard bits of Eclipse Phase, including "egocasting". I guess aficionados would claim that guts the game of its USP but I don't care. I thought the Factor aliens were pretty good, genuinely alien. If, like Louis Armstrong, I had all the time in the world, I would love to reskin it for Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space setting.

I don't get why "egocasting" is not considered hard sci-fi by some people.

My gut is guessing that the reason is bullshit and has little to do with science.

Quote from: jeff37923;1120665So in order for the carapace to be a hard shell and protect the Vrusk from "bruises, cuts, scratches and other minor injuries" it would have to have some hardness to it and thus weight. I'm not saying that it is steel or some kind of metal alloy, but even bone has weight to it. Even saying that the Vrusk exoskeleton is no more massive than the Vrusk endoskeleton, you are still increasing the weight of the body significantly. For added problems, there is the matter of the Vrusk upright torso - which requires more carapace and additional musculature and tendons to be able to exist and remain upright.

Some weight, certainly. We're not really near the physiological limits, though.

But your mention of their upright torso and tendons/musculature reminds me: For a long time, people assumed that dinosaurs dragged their tails on the ground, and the art reflected that. But the trackway evidence is indisputable: Dinosaur tails almost never touched the ground. They held their tails high, in a roughly horizontal position. If you think about it, that's a terrific feat of bioengineering. Stegosaurs and ankylosaurs even had heavy spikes or balls at the end of the their tails, and swung them for defense. And it was an even more impressive feat among sauropods, because they reached well over 100 feet in length, and most of that was neck and tail. Many paleontologists even believe they could raise their heads high in the air, to feed. This was aided by features that made the neck and tail lighter than expected (more neck and tail vertebrae, extensive pneumaticization/air sacs, etc.), and some theropods developed skeletal modifications that stiffened their tails and made them rigid, dinosaur necks and tails were primarily held in place through soft tissue.

One solution we know in living animals is the nuchal ligament, which is found in mammals and supports the weight of the head, making the horizontal or near horizontal pose the zero energy natural rest position. Sauropods have a trough in their bones that likely supported a similar ligament, and ossified stacks of tendons, like those in extant birds, also contributed. Something similar could explain the upright position of the vrusk torso.

Quote from: jhkim;1120674I did find the original, though, and you're right that artificial gravity isn't in Knight Hawks. This isn't quite consistent with the deck plans in the original game, but that isn't explicit. Still, Knight Hawks has FTL, force fields, and other space opera features -- like being 2D and ships acting like aircraft - facing the direction of movement.

Very inconsistent. The first part of SF0 Crash on Volturnus involves an escape from a spaceship that was about to crash, and it clearly has artificial gravity. And that's not some obscure module, it's everyone's first experience with the game because it came with the box set.

Quote from: Pat;1120697Some weight, certainly. We're not really near the physiological limits, though.

But your mention of their upright torso and tendons/musculature reminds me: For a long time, people assumed that dinosaurs dragged their tails on the ground, and the art reflected that. But the trackway evidence is indisputable: Dinosaur tails almost never touched the ground. They held their tails high, in a roughly horizontal position. If you think about it, that's a terrific feat of bioengineering. Stegosaurs and ankylosaurs even had heavy spikes or balls at the end of the their tails, and swung them for defense. And it was an even more impressive feat among sauropods, because they reached well over 100 feet in length, and most of that was neck and tail. Many paleontologists even believe they could raise their heads high in the air, to feed. This was aided by features that made the neck and tail lighter than expected (more neck and tail vertebrae, extensive pneumaticization/air sacs, etc.), and some theropods developed skeletal modifications that stiffened their tails and made them rigid, dinosaur necks and tails were primarily held in place through soft tissue.

One solution we know in living animals is the nuchal ligament, which is found in mammals and supports the weight of the head, making the horizontal or near horizontal pose the zero energy natural rest position. Sauropods have a trough in their bones that likely supported a similar ligament, and ossified stacks of tendons, like those in extant birds, also contributed. Something similar could explain the upright position of the vrusk torso.

I concede to your point after reading your links. I just can't get over their BEMness, I guess.