There's a surprising dearth of science-fiction that takes place during the initial colonization of the solar system...

You could take a look at some of Veeky Forums's Space Superstition threads, which seem to be mostly set in that period of solar system colonization:

suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?searchall=Space Superstition

I do agree in that I'd love a game that's set in that sweet spot where Mankind has advanced enough to make interplanetary travel and space colonies a reality, but not quite so much that it takes sci-fi spaceflight a trivial affair.

>What are the mental effects of spending your entire life on a world that is completely hostile to not only your existence, but everyone's?

I dunno. Our ancestors figured it out thousands of years ago. Pre-industrial Earth wasn't exactly a picnic.

Oh, I remember those threads. Good to see the song we did got passed on.

All the action (essentially) would be in sealed environments. It's strictly limiting what can be done by the players if the campaign map is about the size of a dungeon and if someone fails a mechanics check the entire station vents into space.

Not saying it can't be done (I've actually written a horror setting all about limited oxygen on a mining colony), it's just a different setting to Interstellar Hijinks.

Current sci-fi, yes. You'll want to look into authors from the 50's and 60's, they did a fair bit more early colonization stories. Heinlein did some novels that were much less political that Starship Troopers.

>tfw you start to recognize some of your posts
I had altogether forgotten about these, user. Thank you for reminding me.

Some manag... well they did it anyway.
Well, not really, but yeah they pretty much are.

This basically.
During the Age of Sail you find new lands, new places, new peoples, create new markets, fill out the blanks on map.

Exploring the Solar System you find dead balls of gas and rock and dirt unless you go way out of your way to make shit up.

>initial colonization of the solar system
Because we are now mostly aware of how dangerous it would be.
The Expanse (which revolves heavily around Solar system politics) is about this kind of, but they don't "discover" the Solar System because we already know what the fuck is there at this point.

The setting you describe would have little to no combat (because early space travel means war as we understand it becomes boring or impossibly difficult in space due to how hazardous it is), involve lots and travel and skill checks.
Most players wouldn't even bother, and you KNOW that already. It wouldn't even make a very good videogame because it would rely entirely on visuals that would get repetitive rather quickly.

I feel that way too but it's because I enjoy speculative science fiction. Most fans of space travel expect old fashioned Space Opera and get angry when they don't get it (see ). This means innovative science fiction writers who would otherwise write good hard science fiction involving space travel instead write to other audiences (transhumanists for example) who appreciate their work more.
That's just part of reality. By the time we send people to Alpha Centauri (likely costings trillions of future dollars), we'll probably have already sent a robotic probe. Of course, any serious scientific work will have to be done by intelligent beings due to light lag (either advanced AI or biological beings adapted to space travel).
That's part of it. You have to do math and understand basic Newtonian physics to do a realistic space travel campaign in the Solar System. Sadly, that's too much for a lot people.

I focus on the repercussions of space travel on colonies rather than the act of space travel itself, the important part isn't flying through space for a few weeks but rather the isolation of the colonies and the difficulty getting in or out.

I find that isolation is a powerful plot tool, one that is almost absent from modern settings unless you arbitrarily take their technology away. Even an antarctic research station can be reached fairly easily.

Lack of FTL travel makes the characters focus more on their immediate environment and makes enemies significantly more threatening, you can't just jump to the other side of the galaxy and pretend it never happened.

You might, sure.
Have any players that have verbally expressed interest in the same, user?

What if they get to do space martial arts?

And it jumps into aliens than solar system politics. Fuck the expanse.

Complex setting, not exactly hard.

Damn. And here I was, confident on the scientificity of the setting! How could I have guessed?

More seriously, there is nothing wrong with spicing up your sci-fi setting. Brutal and showy fights (with optional unnecessary German names) is as good as anything to change pace between space survival scenes.

Those names are about as German as Google Translate. Which didn't exist back then.

I know nothing about German, but somehow, I guessed that much.
Still cool anyway.

Yeah, everyone has pretty much pointed out the issues already. There are two genres I see that can still function in this environment, and they aren't genres we play often:

- Murder Mystery, like fuggen Murder on the Orient Express tier. You could have some pretty intense locked room mysteries.

- Slasher. Not as in horror, but like, legit everyone dies. You can't do this in a prolonged fashion.

>run murder mystery game, but take each player aside before the game begins and tell them they're the one that committed the murder for X reason, as the game progresses it smoothly transfers from mystery to horror
>break out the insanity metrics halfway through

They're not just dictionary bad.
They're so bad, I assume someone used a dictionary who had never used a dictionary before.

>Einzug Rüstungen
seriously?

Actually most genres can work. It just requires a small amount of imagination. What won't work is a Standard Scifi Setting which is why people don't like realistic space travel (it's too much work when you can just copy/paste old stuff into a scifi kitchen sink setting).

>tfw you will never tame the final frontier with a nugget and some Space Slavs

>There's a surprising dearth of science-fiction that takes place during the initial colonization of the solar system. Most writers choose to skip right into the interstellar stage, which often cheapens the 'space' aspect of space travel. In many stories, space travel has been rendered mundane by plot devices like hyperdrives and warp-speed.
yeah, I feel you
It has to do with the fact that 50-75% of science fiction writers are actually philosophy writers who have a point to make (which half the time involves technology being bad after all, or at least not any better than ~the human spirit~). Most of the other 25-50% are actually anthropology writers, or they're into biology, or or geology, or chemistry-- some nerdy discipline (other than physics, because every dime-store sci-fi writer works wonky physics into their story) that the fiction is a tool for exploring. The amount of sci-fi that really says, "here is a new setting, here are some relatable characters, and here's how they act in that setting" is fairly thin on the ground. (Fantasy isn't much better in that regard.)

>There's a surprising dearth of science-fiction that takes place during the initial colonization of the solar system. [...] The idea of humanity beginning to inhabit our solar neighborhood fascinates me, but settings that play on the vast, empty hostility of space are kind of rare these days.

That's probably because almost no one in the modern world knows what it's like to truly experience vast distances, and basically no one at all knows what it's like to set up a community in a place where no one lives and where you can't really to a place where people live. Imagination is the only barrier to writing, but it's based in what you've experienced. If you've never been out of urban and suburban areas before, it's almost impossible to imagine going a long way *or* going somewhere with no people, let alone both together.

we are more than 9000
venezuela needs your help!!!!

I honestly think it's mostly laziness. Like said, why work to understand the laws of physics *GASP when you can make them up? Sadly, most people who follow that path aren't physicists (or at least don't consult with physicists before writing) so they fail to account for how their changes would result in a radically different universe from our own. Thus, their work basically becomes space fantasy.

Another problem is that people have a hard time getting past their prejudices on artificial intelligence and human modification. This basically means they can't relate to people who aren't like them (curse you human nature). That essentially rules out all characters who wouldn't be bothered by the limits of realistic space travel. They also have a hard time imagining a society that is better than their own (another point for human nature) thus we have capitalistic democracies as the highest form of government even thousands of years into the future. People like works of fiction that make them feel good so having species and societies that are objectively better than our own is never popular.

So yeah, most scifi writer (and readers) are lazy luddites who hate math and reject reality in favor of "feel good" fantasies.

This problem is one of the reasons I like Eclipse Phase. Pandora gates aside, it's all in the solar system. Hell, one of the biggest problems in most space operas is that the ftl isn't well-enough thought out, so why not just make a scifi setting without it?

Diaspora

Actually I wanted to say I still like the setting anyway, I don't really care about the German names, but I have the worst words apparently.

Pic related is for you! I partially disagree though, good robots is as usual as murderbot.skynet. Human modifications is more tricky I admit, while bionic aren't rare it's often without much thought beyond "cool mecha arm" and when it's a plot point it is indeed often seen as a bad. Genetic modifications are pretty much always seen as evil, I admit.
Except in video games, because Human modifications can be loots there, which are always good.

About societal form, I'm more annoyed by huge amount of space kings and princess that plague huge part of SF but I mostly agree. Though it may also have to do with the fact that people rarely want to delve into politic beyond individual relations between rulers.
I wouldn't say luddites either, but again I have the worst words.

Of course I would forgot my pic.

Perhaps because the scale has to be rather personal - things like The Martian or 2001.

A semi-realistic space story in the early days would have a lot of travel, slow events and possibly need to focus on politics and technical detail to an degree that doesn't make for easy writing or reading.

Game-wise it's easier, as lots of things can just be glossed over that you wouldn't get away with in a book - and Transhuman Space does a really good job of setting up an interesting playspace. It's a mostly-hard-ish high-biotech setting, with a lot going on in the solar system as it becomes increasingly inhabited.

Even during the age of sails getting lost meant that you were very likely to get sick and die and/or become shipwrecked.

Maybe you can get around it by making the setting about first generation warp explorers. Make it so that warps are naturally occurring and not fully understood, so the only way to know what's on the other side is to send a scout ship through one and hope for the best.

Sure, you're still changing reality, but this will at least let you skip the most tedious parts of space travel while still keeping the mystery.

I like to run space colonization games similar to age of piracy games, the focus is on what happens between travel times, most of the action is at the spacedock or near the spacedock (around the planet/moon).

Long travel times encourage more direct involvement with long-term threats, if you want to keep a habitat safe you'll need to deal with it right away rather than pursue a few other missions first. It helps create a sense of place and belonging which I feel is sorely lacking in campaigns which are too nomadic, establishing your home turf if a rewarding part of most campaigns.

Going to another planet is similar to beginning a new chapter, if something is significant enough to motivate players to move a long distance across the solar system I'll come up with a long-term plot hook to justify it.

Funnily enough, I feel like adding a few difficult but important locations increases the weight of where the party locates its headquarters, in a campaign with FTL you may be able to reach any location within minutes or hours, on the other hand even a very powerful engine using conventional propulsion (such as a nuclear fission or fusion engine), would take days to weeks to reach even Mars.

This seems like as good a place to ask as any.

I am working with my players to design a relatively low bullshit space setting (aliens are rare and nigh-incomprehensible, FTL communication isn't a thing, FTL is so much of a pain in the ass and dangerous that most planets only see one or two out of system ships a year because travel is super infrequent, etc) and one of the players is really attached to the idea of 'heat kills' in space. Basically, using weapons that don't actually do a lot of damage to enemy ships, but cause them to overheat faster than they can radiate the heat away into space and slowly cooking the crew/causing widespread system failure as the ship overheats itself into malfunction.

Is that sort of attack even really practical in a space setting? I understand the basic idea behind it, but I'm not convinced it really works as a thing. What sort of weapons can you even use for causing it aside from slowly pinging them with lasers? Anything else I can think of that would cause a lot of heat makes the heat kill concept sort of irrelevant. Yes, plasma throws a lot of heat, but if you get hit with some kind of plasma bomb your problem isn't your ship being to hot, your problem is your ship being exploded.

I don't get why you think colonies would feel isolating. They're going to be full of people. Do you feel isolated on earth?

Feelings of isolation come in space ships, not on planets.

Compared to Mars, it pretty much is.

go play KSP

Take it to Veeky Forums or Veeky Forums

This has nothing to do with Veeky Forums

I tried to hash out a 'realistic' science fiction setting that was humans only and no FTL. It ended up a little Cowboy Bebopish but I kept coming up with more and more "why is this like this" and "How do you deal with that" questions. My lack of scientific knowledge coupled with attempts to 'logic it out' didn't combine well.

I think I ended up with mass driven space trains, floating Venusian cities, and radiation bathing as a primary means of space warfare. Then I started getting into mecha and quietly put the setting away before it went full retard.

>>>/plebbit/

Radiation bathing wouldn't really be that effective given that any kind of interplanetary transportation has to have radiation shielding out the ass as cosmic rays will penetrate surfaces further than almost anything humans can create.

You are the only ones. Months/Years of planning and executing seperate hi from any rescue, any help. When things start going wrong, you are alone 'together'

Yes it does, it is taking about games and settings whole using contextually important examples of other media

>put the setting away before it went full retard.
Or you could go full retard!
(now I'm rereading the full serie, thanks Veeky Forums!)

obligatory staring woman

>protip

Its the CO2 that is the big danger in space

I know where I'm going to post this one.

>/k/ the .jpg

It's easier just to use kinetic weapons to explode people.

Lasers, since you can't dodge them. However, at large distances away lasers basically turn into heat rays anyways.

People seem to be unterestimating just how far away out solar system is from anything potentially important. Hell, the oort clout alone is thought to be many times the size of our solar system itself, and that's not even taking into account the massive gulf between us any anything interesting. This means that we can be traveling FAST, and I mean FAST, like from earth to mars in a matter of days, and still be not even close to capable of interstellar flight. hell, if you need to be faster, think up some macguffin that prohibits leaving the system.

The benefits one gets from limiting oneself to the Sol system are huge. Everyone already knows the big important locations. and there are so many little places that pulling something out of ones ass is easy as pie. No longer do you have to go on and on about glarxibon IV and its neighboring systems. Juest say venus and everyone gets whats up. I would personalty run it like a WWII setting. Conflict just about everywhere, everyone has some part to play, and crazy untold shit can happen in the far reaches.

I'd run mine like a Cold War spy fiction. Nobody can attack each other outright because it will either be MAD or wildly ineffective so espionage, terrorism, and even sabotage are everywhere.

The idea, I think, is that heat weapons would be used either to cripple enemy ships you want to take in more or less one piece (by forcing them to shut down their own engines/weapons/other heat generating equipment or cook themselves) or against enemies that you have difficulty using kinetic weapons against. Lasers can easily hit enemies that railguns and missiles would miss, because speed of light. And if you are just dumping heat at the enemy, armor is basically irrelevant because you don't need to break it to heat it up.

I'm really just not sure if it is even scientifically sound. I get that heat has no air to convection away in space, so all it can do is radiate, but sunlight already heats things up pretty good and that doesn't seem like it is a serious problem for modern astronauts. Like, I am sure it is a concern under certain conditions, but I don't know if you can build a whole offensive strategy around it.

What your expriencing is what was, at a time, a very deliberate device to make stories seem really fantastical within sci-fi: You make the mundane amazing by making the amazing mundane.

e.g. Star Trek's food machine (can't remember the name) is so rarely talked about or fangirled over despite the fact it is basically impossible

>I don't get why you think colonies would feel isolating. They're going to be full of people. Do you feel isolated on earth?
>Feelings of isolation come in space ships, not on planets.

At the early stage, a colony is just a slightly larger ship, that you're stuck on forever.

"full of people" is only relative to the ship you came in on; there are only a few hundred, and you can't really get away from them, because outside the habitat is still unliveable. They're not your friends and family from before, so you can be socially isolated extremely easily, and the dating pool is about zero.

Don't know anyone? No friends? No dating prospects? Can't go outside?

Sounds just like business as usual! Ha ha ha... ha....

You're describing a living situation that wouldn't really wouldn't be any different from what most fa/tg/uys have now, so your point is kind of lost.

It can be done but it needs a lot of tact.

Hopefully the next big stage for humanity will be this and fusion. so yeah.

Read Leviathan wakes.

yeah, the idea being that computer guided weapons would make naval combat into broadsides and nothing else, so I thought of small fighter ships that would complicate targeting and spread fire around instead of focusing it from one source. Then I assumed that small fighters would be unlikely to be adequately shielded against radiation and that a large swarm of targets would be most effectively combated with huge swaths of radiation. But yeah, I kept 'and then...'ing until I decided to put the setting away before I really embarrassed myself.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXeUkrlxQ98&list=LL16gUBk8XCl6Zz6evVOv2zg

>Game-wise it's easier, as lots of things can just be glossed over that you wouldn't get away with in a book - and Transhuman Space does a really good job of setting up an interesting playspace. It's a mostly-hard-ish high-biotech setting, with a lot going on in the solar system as it becomes increasingly inhabited.

Came here to say exactly this. GURPS Transhuman Space is exactly what OP wants: a period of interplanetary colonization. The Moon is industrialized, Mars is growing but still wild west, the asteroid belt and trojan asteroids are a mishmash of wildcat colonies, and Titan and Mercury are company towns. Oh, and Triton, where there's some really interes@)#($*#@)$(*@#()$*)#@(*)@#$)(*#)$(

Most continents generally have edible food, useful materials, and the same atmosphere as the rest of the planet. You can saw down a tree and make a new raft with some work while living off the land after a while and try and sail away.

On Mars you're completely dependent on technology to try and survive. You need air recycling, a pressure suit, temperate controls, radiation shielding... and there's not much you can easily glean from the natural environment. There's no food on Mars nor any potable water, wood to burn, and materials to build basic tools from. No building a new rocket from rocks and rocketing off back to civilization.

With the exception of Antarctica, humans with enough training have a decent chance of surviving in most places on Earth if they know what they're doing. Surviving on Mars, which is perhaps the least extreme environment to Earth life of the telluric planets in the solar system (besides Earth) would be harder than try to survive in Antarctica.

I would guess that its because it would not transfer well to a role-playing experience; technically challenging, but uninteresting to a player because it largely consists of lots of skill rolls and very little interaction.

There's better systems that handle it better than just skill rolls. Skill rolls are the least interesting way to handle it, and are generally a means of handling skills in a game with another central focus: namely combat.

A system built around using skills would be much better, and working with available materials, tools, and within certain operational envelopes would be neat, though they generally touch upon more narrativist elements because it would be difficult to actually put it into simulationist practice would extensive rules and catalogues for the operation of various skills. And that puts people off entirely because they're turned off by the idea of engaging with these problems in a narrative way instead of a mechanical one.

Other system try hashing out new systems, but they're many times integrated poorly and feel more tacked on and at odds with the system itself. It could be done correctly but I haven't seen a hugely successful example outside metacurrency.

So it's quite possible for it to transfer to roleplaying, just not cut-and-paste D&D roleplaying, where the system is geared towards and around combat rather than skill challenges and creativity with those skills.

(mah fucking nigga, UW1)

Currently running a homebrewed game based on The Expanse (using mostly the setting and the technology, dropping every hint of anything aliens because that was stupid) and a mix of a comic series i really liked, Universal War One.

Basically a three way cold war between the numerically and militarily superior earth (and moon and other stations), the technologically superior Mars (which basically evolved as a university state) and the economically superior CIC (Colonization Industrial Companies), which essentially were granted a 100 year exclusivity contract on any exploitation of the outer system (anything beyond mars, really) back when it wasn't worth the money yet. Its now 95 years into the contract and its so profitable they're the biggest money makers in the system and they're not going to just abandon it to earth (who wants its "rights" back) and mars (who are still pissed they were initially left out of the contract)

Hard sci-fi is garbage in a literary or gaming media. It can be good in visual media though.

Children can be disciplined perfectly well.

>(you)

technology is basically a "fuck you it works" fusion reactor, that's kept stable using an antigravity generator (that allows to easily shape the fusion reactor's inner plasma).
no artificial gravity on ships, mostly because its a gigantic waste of power better used on radars, lidars and lasers. also the antigrav generators are still wildly unstable. they tend to collapse into miniature, unstable black holes which close a few microseconds after birth.
after eating the whole ship.

they learned this when a very large antigrav (the first built) generator collapsed on earth, taking away with it half of the middle east in about 2064.

basically the fusion reactor allows the epstein drives (see the expanse) so unlimited thrusting, more or less. Plot-limited thrusting, as I like it. travel still takes a bit, 3 days to a week between earth and mars but still upwards of a month to go anything outer system

the three factions are stuck in a cold war because, while nobody openly has them, everyone knows using antigrav interplanetary missiles would RIP everyone's ass in five directions.

its MAD all over again, on an interplanetary scale. only the thing is (and huge fucking spoilers on universal war one and to my players) the CIC have perfected the creation and use of antigravity "lasers", AKA making a gigantic chunk of shit dissapear nearly instantaneously

my players are part of a black ops team for earth researching what's happening and trying to prevent a war
they're still looking for clues and have absolutely ignored my pressing them for time, saying they're on a schedule. next week they plan to explore a mining facility that's about a week of travel away. the CIC is planning their first attack in 9 days. earth with literally be cut in half in 10

>What sort of weapons can you even use for causing it aside from slowly pinging them with lasers? Anything else I can think of that would cause a lot of heat makes the heat kill concept sort of irrelevant.
I think the heat efficiency of lasers means that you would be copping as much or more heat than your opponent anyway. Better to just blow their radiators up with your lasers if you're actually worrying about heat in space.

You'd probably have to invent something magical/new, like the thermal inducer the Kzinti use on human ships in the Known Space books.

>Extreme missile surfing
>As opposed to the much tamer regular missile surfing

That's a lot of pressure to put on players user. The group is going to call bullshit on you when Earth goes all DBZ

Fan translations are fun.

yeah but it's really nowhere near the actual plot

so far this is, imho, all the background noise

first its meant to be a very short campaign, like 3-4 month tops.
second the actual campaing will be the discovery they, and only they, make (they have one of the brightest antigrav physicist in their team, who did not get affiliated with the CIC). once they see and initially destroy two of the CIC's grav lasers, they will essentially discover the means to artificially enduce local, stable wormholes. first to travel through space but eventually through time (IF said player, with whom i will be having discussions about those repercussions, SHARES this knowledge. hitler, etc. this is dangerous theories)
eventually they'll have to start and lead a rebellion, 30 years in the future, to overthrow the new, economically totalitarian regime of the CIC
this is the actual campaing i'm heading for

(also this is ran in WH40k Rogue Trader, with many many many adaptations to fit in a non grimderp setting)

also rereading myself i know this is even more pressure i'm straight down dumping on them but that's how they like to play and how I like to make my games

i don't do minor heroics of rescuing grandma stuck in a tree because she encountered a DC 1/4 house cat
i do world ending disasters a group of heroes / anti heroes have to size up to and prevent/manage/fix

Kerbal space program has the pre interstellar allure sans politics. And plot. And character development. Or characters, really. But it has explosions!

>needing combat for your players to have fun

> Suddenly, space Buddhism.

Lasers could be used as an energy channel to send more destructive energy beams down it by grounding them on the enemy ship.

Although that concept works in atmosphere with lasers creating a charged channel through with raw electricity can be sent down in a straight line rather than a ragged beam, grounding at the other side of the beam. There's not much medium for in space save for the laser itself.

Could be a phaser, where charged particles are fired down the laser's beam to the target, making the laser more of a propellant and medium than actual damaging component.

But in hard scifi you might as well use missiles or bullets because you only need so much destroy your enemy, and you might as well not over complicate it when you have perfectly good weapons already. Unless there's some advancements in weapons design or we discover a bunch of things we can do that gravity or atmosphere are a barrier to weapon-wise, might as well stick with the reliable basics. Or if there's some advancement in armor/shielding that renders contemporary weapons obsolete.

I'd probably just ripoff Gundam in this scenario to be honest

How much hydrogen could a ramscoop really bring in?

Enough to power one of MgT's fusion plants?

>It wouldn't even make a very good videogame because it would rely entirely on visuals that would get repetitive rather quickly.

Oh look, there goes No Man's Sky.

Right? I enjoyed DotV and First Light.

>the technologically superior Mars (which basically evolved as a university state)

>societies that are objectively better

So why don't you tell us what is 'objectively' better if you know?

Why do these threads always attract smug people who feel the need to insult anybody who does not share their tastes anyway?

t.Eclipse Phase dev

>smug
>person who isn't so arrogant as to believe even in the far future his model of society will be at the pinnacle of social organization
Seems like you're the arrogant one user.

As for species yeah, if a new species is more intelligent, stronger, tougher, and dextrous than humanity they are objectively better. Add in a lifespan that is much longer than ours and humanity is pretty much outclassed in all respects unless you believe in the "human spirit" or some bullshit like that.

As for your tastes user, I quite frankly don't give a shit user because our discussion has nothing to do with your tastes. You clearly don't like hard scifi. What are you doing here in this thread? Are you just here to antagonize people? Do you get triggered when people are discussing things you don't like? If so, I'm sorry you feel insulted by the existence of this very discussion.

TL;DR: Humanity Fuck No.

>FTL communication (paradoxes lol)
>Plasma guns (fucking disgusting)
>No discussions of the actual mechanics of wormholes (jupiter sized masses on a planetary body oh my)
>Sidesteps the Continuity vs Discontinuity question completely for video game style revives (should be a big fucking question for most people)
>No discussion on the theoretical limits of nanotechnology (it's basically magic) because lol the Titans did it
An admirable effort but it ultimately falls flat on its face and drifts down into soft scifi territory. It also doesn't help that the developers have for some unknown reason decided to inject their own political beliefs into the books in a disgustingly obvious way. I guess it's a stylistic choice, but it's just not one I agree with.

Shouldn't you be busy working on your favorite strawman, the Jovians, and not shitposting on Veeky Forums?