Space Thread

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Baxter sure doesn't fuck around with his hard sci-fi.

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Does anyone have a picture of the galaxy that could be made into a map?

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Way ahead of you, chum.

This makes me think - what is the biggest man made structure you've seen in any work of fiction?

You mean man-made as in made by humans or as in stuff that was constructed? If the latter, pic related.

Dare you look inside the femtomachine printing box? It makes custom particals with custom properties, like Huey's antisemetic Boson, intoxicatingly gluons for huffing, arbitrarium, planc temperature napalm, and subatomic piranhas.

If the former, erm...

Probably the Phalanx from 40k. Pic related. It's supposed to be the size of a small moon, and has its own ecosystems aboard.

That feel when you realize Halo 3 is just shy of 10 years old.

Funny how that happens.

Tbh, I always wondered what living on the Ark would be like. Not, like fighting robots and aliens, and the Flood and so on, just living there.

Exploring the arms, getting as close to the crumbled planetoid in the centre as possible, sailing at night across one of the seas and watching the big misty spiral of the Milky Way above.

So with more Shkadov thrusters can you go faster or just move more mass? I'm asking for a friend and certainly don't have a von neumann swarm I don't know what to do with.

>tfw you realize the Ark would make a nice 'suburban home' in the oort cloud around the City.

I think something like pic related would make a nice way of getting around.

Y'know, more than once I've wondered about how to set a story or a setting on one of these creations. Can't think of what to do with it, though.

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The Downstreamers from the Manifold books had galaxy sized complexes, and made an infinite multiverse, so it's going to be pretty hard to beat "infinite universes" as a biggest man made structure.

I've been trying to come up with something as well, thinking it would be a hard scifi/clark-tech with no FTL but various sorts of super engineering on every scale, and lots of workarounds with sufficiently advanced tech.

It would be in the distant future of the milky way, populated by Posthumans and various aliens, mostly either uplifted by humanity or reconstituted from ancient exoplanetary fossils, because most intelligent life was planet bound and stayed biological in the milky way, for various reasons. There might be a smaller handful of nigh-incomprehensible fellow clark-tech species that went interstellar like humanity, but unlike our uplifts they aren't even slightly redesigned to humor us and understand our drives, and posthumanity leaves them to their projects and they do the same.

Orion's spur would be the extent of heavily engineered earther territory, and the projects of the distant, tech equivalent species would seem as opaquely pointless to the Posthumans as ours to them. The vast gulf in between engineered space would be quiet galactic wilderness, plied by free ships like these two , or their alien equivalents. In general Posthumans would be running amok akin to Doc Brown Starfleet, firing off von Neumann probes and gleefully sculpting tracts of spiral arm into a sprawling eternal city, and beyond that starcaptain Batman von Superman travels the wider galaxy sampling post-slug alien liquor and uplifted whores he can't even understand.

Hah, sounds a bit like a setting idea I had inspired by this pic, when I tried to imagine what sort of society would be capable of building these sorts of things.

The idea was that it's set in the far future of the Milky Way, post-singularity and all that, and the PCs are people from either our time or around about our time who are resurrected by their post-human descendants to perform all the tasks that they see as being beneath them.

Couldn't quite figure out what said tasks would actually *be*, however.

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Really I wouldn't bother making the Posthumans all that high-handed, they know they're frivolous beings that have artificial irrationality and libido just as much as artificial intelligence. They would want to be able to be greeted when they get home from the galactic center and to have new cultural ephemera to consume, and in return they'll provide a stylish megastructure with all the amenities of the modern age and a doting breadwinner.

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part of my thought is that the main feature of posthumans would simply be living long enough to travel in such a setting, in terms of multi-millennia acceleration times and journeys, but also Killy's millennia of stairs and hallways, though in my setting a posthuman might be walking through mountain ranges and valleys as easily as industrial space. Beyond the bar of being able to make journeys yourself instead sending your descendants, posthumans could and would be incredibly varied, essentially any conceivable way of transmitting a mind. There could be numerous network-minded product lines of commercial robots that compile all of their experiences into a distinct gestalt across all of human space, standard Bowie-esque shiny platinum starmen with personal ringworld-ramjet ships for them and all their booty, one thing I was thinking is viral minds that live in the bandwidth of some laser-sail highway, another was a library with "all the answers" from a particular perspective and through its written protocols executed by librarian it acts as an ageless mind.

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Technicaly a cargo ship.

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Ugliest ship in RPGs coming through

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>tfw infinite space will never get a sequel

Feels bad man.
Also those Enemonzo ships look stylish as fuck.
Although my heart will forever be taken by Regeinland ships.

why are 90% spaceships is sci-fi so aerodynamic, even if they never land? is it just influence of aircraft/shuttle design, or there are any real strengths to such design?

ain't seen it in sourcebook myself, but I saw mentions that Numenera has dyson sphere around Antares, I think.

Depends what you mean exactly, post an example.

Many artists think 100% realistic starships look 'boring' but they have very little knowledge about space and physics which makes it difficult for them to actually design something original so they just heavily draw off of either boats or aircraft instead which would lead to many designs which appear more at home in atmosphere then space.

Some practical designs can also happen to be somewhat aerodynamic, long tapering cylinders can work well as a spaceship hull for example.

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As ridiculous as it might sound.

Titan A.E created an entire planet.

Apart from that, any dyson sphere or Matrioshka brain(it has to be bigger than a dyson sphere) would do.

They work on translating boats and planes into space.

But mostly is because aerodynamic forms just happens to be more pleasant to the eye than the blocky and crude aesthetic a real space might have, And if you want to make it look realistic you make it in white, black and grey with little details and recognizable technology.

The first warning sign in every spaceship design is if such spaceship have a radiator or not.

Magrathean planet assembly floor

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Discworld wizards made a snowglobe containing the entire universe

anyone got rusty/used/old/worn out spaceship pictures maybe?

Doubling this request
I need some stuff for a hand-me-down future game I'd like to run

So i got this idea for my hard sci fi setting where they use antimatter to create a wormhole to wherever the ships need to go but the drive is so big and needs so much computing power that it has to be installed on big ships that act like megacarriers

so, basically Dune with quantum technobabble instead of psionics?

Similar, but what i was going for is the early modular tau fleets where the ftl capable ships carry the smaller support ships

>atomic bomb propelled airplane
>seriously atomic propulsion is so cool
>we should use it for everything
>its only those naysayers that fear progress that think flying around your own fucking atmosphere by nuking everything behind you isn't a sound idea.
>well we'll show them

Not actually an airplane, the fins are radiators and the background is some planet

I thought to put space trains in my scifi setting.

They go through ancient railways built between solar systems, all across the galaxy. No one really knows how those work anymore, let alone how to build more of them, but they go along with it so long as it's fast and convenient.

SPAAAAAAACE

Unless your universe doesn't follow basic law of motion, it shouldn't even work due to being torn up

Yeah but the railways are in the warp.

And anyway that's one of the reasons no one's even quite sure how they work.

By that time there's been a lot of ancient long-lost civilizations, each with their own secrets and bizarre tech.

Wouldn't it just be the warp then?
If nobody knew how they worked anymore, how can they still access it, let alone navigate it? I mean, there would be intersections in it, due to how widely spread it is, wouldn't it?
>And anyway that's one of the reasons no one's even quite sure how they work.
Sounds like shit writing to me. Write it up yourself how should it work and then just hide it behind "the knowledge was lost". That way, it will be consistent ancient knowledge that was lost, not some shit you make up as you go.

>Sounds like shit writing to me. Write it up yourself how should it work and then just hide it behind "the knowledge was lost". That way, it will be consistent ancient knowledge that was lost, not some shit you make up as you go.
That's fair enough, but I've also been told to not worry too much about extraneous detail and stuff the story isn't meant to focus on, and this would certainly be one of those things.

Maybe I'll write some more about it anyway, just in case it draws interest. Right now it's just one of those weird setting details.

I mean just have some basic set of rules, then, such as
>distance cant be greater than X
>can't go through solid objects such as planets, stars or black holes
>trip always takes Y time units
>probably a size limitation
>entry points are stations - ancient derelict ships that still work

etc.
Although the last one would be just way gate traveling.

ringworlds