Art Thread: Space Opera Edition!

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So how about a race that's grown up without ever seeing the sun? Either the surface of their planet is incredibly hostile and life originated in vast subterranian caves, or there's some sort of permanent cloud cover.

How would that affect their views on space?

Also, I kinda like the concept that "The first hostile world they conquered was their own planets surface."

FTL travel is almost a given in space opera, but how about FTL communications?

Imagine a world where yes, science has come up with a good and reliable way to make ships and other phyiscal objects travel faster than light, but there's yet no way of sending wireless singnals faster than light. All inter-system communication would have to be done with messenger ships.

There would even be significant communication delay between planets in-system. Hours even, between the inner and outer planets.

Speaking of, anyone got any preferences on the capabilities and limitations of FTL-travel?

I like a harder way of handling it, Limited direct ftl transmissions, but the majority of stuff travels on ships as hundreds of harddrives filled with mail.

First story that I;m actually kinda happy with, though unfinished, is a climatic space battle told through the perspective of a damage control team.

For example, I like the idea that FTL travel can't be used too close to huge chunks of mass, such as planets and stars, forcing ships to travel significant distances in- and out of star systems in sub-lightspeed.

This means plenty of space for space-pirat ambush, and makes it a bit harder for fleets to instantly flee loosing battles.

It's kinda cool how old concepts like mail transports becomes relevant again in such situations.

How would you handle lagrange points? Have those hotly contested/controlled and taxed while freelancers tend to go with just heading to the outskirts?

By the way, space mining is cool. Just throwing that out there.

Didn't know what Lagrangian points were until you just made me look it up. Cool stuff! Not sure how they would be handled, what would be the main advantages of controlling one?

Offense is now the only defense. Without FTL comms you cant have FTL sensors, so ships can, and will appear within the arbitrary 'too close to targets' cutoff before you know they left. You know, unless the enemy willingly let you park a significantly faster ship overlooking their staging ground.

That might not seem so bad, but at the very least it means that while the defender has to cover every target within range, the attacker can deathblob any of them with superior forces at their leisure. And thats only if there is an FTL cutoff before weapons range of whatever goes as a strategic asset.

If you can just drop a fleet in orbit then wars would essentially have to be fought at first contact as a race to find and cripple the enemy before they do that to you, or if fought later, both sides will deathblob each others capitals at first sign of open hostilities.

Space mining is really cool.

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The problems (if you think of them as such, some might consider it a feature) of hyper-agressive FTL suprise attacks can be mitigated by limiting FTL travel, like making it a gate-only sort of thing or make it impossible close to huge bodies of mass like detailed in

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Well, you were suggesting that you wouldn't be able to use ftl in a gravity well, but the points are where the gravity of different objects cancel out, so either they could be used as an in-system jump point, or completely ineffective depending on how you wanted to pitch the setting.

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Oooh, that's a really neat idea! I am very much in favor of Lagrangian points as quick-access but closely guarded jumping points. Smuggler will have to take the long way around to the edges of the system.

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So how about them metal men? Can they actually think? Does androids dream of electric sheep in your space opera setting, Veeky Forums?

Gates and jump points would work, but if its only springboarding off systems then you can just drop in at the far edge off your enemies' maginot-line.system and then jump on to the next (classic tactic in Stellaris and other X4s).

Or you could make FTL slow compared to the size of the setting and end up with an age of sail kind of scale so you still might end up with an uncomfortably large fleet dropping in at your doorstep but you may have time enough that your ships saw their movements leading up to this and could at least get back in time to tell you the enemies are massing somewhere around X or Y.

Use the EVE system. Gates port you from gate to gate, in a linked fashion.

I personally like the way it's handled by Star Wars and Wall-E; 'bots start out unthinking automatons but after prolonged activation they'll start to slowly accumulate personal quirks, a process that gets speed up by experiencing unexpected situations the robot isn't pre-programmed to handle.

That said, I don't like robots to just be metal humans. They may have wants, needs and some sort of emotions, but they should be fundametaly different from their evolutions-driven organic counterparts.

Nightfall but in reverse?

Y'know, I find that detailing technological capabilities for soft-sci-fi is kind of like designing magic systems and metaphysics for fantasy games.

Oh, but look at the time, I must be off now. Have a good day, Veeky Forums!

>No suicide jumping
>use next bridge
>Aquila in the distance

Yup, that's 40k alright

Spacebump

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Space opera?

I'm looking for pretty specific shit. A combination of space opera and southern belle.

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I really like the simple but unique look of these. Already brainstorming ideas on how to incorporate npcs that look like this into my ongoing Star Wars campaign.

They're a good example of designs that really look like they belong in the star wars universe without being pale copies of something from the movies.

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