Well not really but I would be grateful for your help.
I've been working on a setting and I need you guys to do what you do best.
The basic premise is that FTL drives are incredibly finicky things. If you operate an electronic device (say a smart phone) near one it will screw the telemetry and fire you into a planet. So if you're aboard or near a spaceship the best you can do is 1960s technology.
How do these ships function? What's it like? What quirks can you think of?
>alternatively spaceship quirks thread >yes this idea is partially based off the space borrowers if anyone remembers them.
>How do these ships function? I'd imaging like any hard sci-fi before they try to jump and they just have to powerdown for a while before going to or coming out of FTL.
>What's it like? You'd have to jump some distance away from your destination because the elecromagnetic interference could fuck you up and you'd always have to slow approach (making ambushes impossible for combat and always give a defender tech advantage or way to screen traffic)
>What quirks can you think of? Some areas of space are so "loud in electromagnetic disturbance you have to circum-navigate them in very specific routes or potentially kill yourself. Also local phenomena like solar flares or gamma rays could block travel to places for months at a time.
Zachary Richardson
Thanks user.
I would like to ask some more questions.
>how might space combat work? You're having to aim by mark one eyeball, use radar maybe. Gunnery is I think going to have to be good old fashioned battleship cannons or missiles that are fired before "waking up."
>life aboard ship I'm thinking the FTL drive is going to involve a lot of complex mirrors and periscopes to monitor the thing.
Everything is going to be pretty labour intensive too. I'm not sure if biological computing is a thing here. I'm messing with the idea of idiot savants being cloned for calculations.
Dominic Jenkins
Well, I would imagine that all of the critical locations would be locked inside a Faraday Cage, in order to arrest any electromagnetic radiation that could interfere with the drive. I would say that you would likely have to do the same thing with the whole ship. Laser transmissions would likely be an important way to pass data, as there is a more directed way to transmit data, which would enable communications without having all of it blocked out by shielding. Smaller, commercial or even personal craft likely could not afford this outside of the largest vessels. Something that could take form would be having larger, Guild Heighliner-like vessels that have large, shielded cargo bays that can transport ships possibly for ludicrous sums, or crawling across star systems at sublight.
Carter Roberts
Would everyone be using slide rules?
Aaron Scott
If the drives require intricate analog shit, they will take up a ton of space and will likely need to be deep in the hull of a radiation shielded ship.
This means literally hundreds of meters of material given have delicate they are.
Any smaller craft will never have the ability to jump without docking with a Jump ship or module.
Carson Hill
OP again.
Some more setting info >aliens are subverting humans to their cause. Think invasion of the body snatchers. No, no one knows yet. I'm going for space delta green. > if you're on a planet then yes computers are a thing but most of the action is going to happen aboard ship.
Jace Ortiz
No, they calculate the jumps before they powerdown to jump and just feed the information into an analog computer.
Nicholas Ross
OP again. Sorry if I'm moving the goalposts but the drive is an always on thing. So even if you're not in ftl, it still have the same no fucking about with tech requirement.
It occurs to me that this means a system monitor or anything else that doesn't have to FTL is going to be like HMS dreadnought fighting the Mary Rose.
Austin Long
>You're having to aim by mark one eyeball, use radar maybe. Gunnery is I think going to have to be good old fashioned battleship cannons or missiles that are fired before "waking up."
No, you will be a sitting duck before your systems come online because of how massive the distances are in space and you don't have access to proper missile targeting or particle beams (unlike your opponents) and projectiles take tens of minutes to hit hit their targets after firing.
Juan Stewart
>Sorry if I'm moving the goalposts but the drive is an always on thing. So even if you're not in ftl, it still have the same no fucking about with tech requirement.
Then the defense systems, that don't carry FTL will blow you out of the water without you posing any sort of threat. Or after you exit a jump you have smaller technical craft detach and fight for you.
Leo Carter
>So if you're aboard or near a spaceship the best you can do is 1960s technology.
Most of the technology on NASA craft is 1960s, innit? I read somewhere that they tend to use "obsolete" tech because it stands up well to space radiation, vibrations, etc.
Lucas Davis
>anything else that doesn't have to FTL is going to be like HMS dreadnought fighting the Mary Rose.
You wish they had that kind of margin, you'd be fucked. They have autonomous defense systems, powerful particle weapons or rail guns, self-correcting missiles with cluster warheads they all have their own internal targeting systems and (depending how liberal you want to be with the science) energy/particle sheilding.
You have a guy with a parascope and a ruler with a howitzer trying to hit a target with a los projectile that has to lead it's target by literally half an hour distance to be anywhere close to hitting it.
Aaron Ward
That makes combat ludicrous.
Nicholas Wilson
>I've been working on a setting and I need you guys to do what you do best. Autism mode engaged.
>The basic premise is that FTL drives are incredibly finicky things. If you operate an electronic device (say a smart phone) near one it will screw the telemetry and fire you into a planet. So if you're aboard or near a spaceship the best you can do is 1960s technology. Define "near", because one can always make ships based on the Helios atomic moon rocket. Or detach the FTL drive once it arrives. And what exactly in an eletronic device interferes with the drive?
>How do these ships function? They use optical computers, no electrons required.
>What's it like? No big differences.
Xavier Butler
I'm confused as fuck, does the drive mess up the tech? I thought the tech made the drive impossible to aim.
If it's tech screwing with the drive, it doesn't matter if the drive is always on, because you only need it WHEN you're jumping. Having the telemetry of your warp drive be off when you're farting around shooting other ships means fuck all.
Cameron Russell
Computers are the least of your problems. An electric motor will generate vastly more noise than a smartphone, so probably everything will need to be pneumatic.
Landon Thomas
user, is this just an excuse to have submarines in space?
Elijah Anderson
Ships are just as complex as you can imagine but they have two main systems, one electronic and one old fashioned pneumatic or whatever just for life support. When the electronic systems are on you can fly around and do all you would, but can't engage the FTL. Then you switch over, have the FTL do its thing after all electronics have powered off, land, and switch back to normal advanced microcircuits.
Logan Butler
Not OP, but I have a related question. My FTL drive screws with electronics, specifically electronic data storage: 25% of all data is corrupted, while 25-65% is flat out wiped from the drive every time the drive activates. My workaround is data storage is done using colored microdots on cards, with the instructions on reading them being hardwired into the computers, which then does the computer thing and acts upon the data. Five colors - Red, Green, Blue, Black, and White. What would the computer systems look like?
Ryder Anderson
If it's just data then the hard drives can just become solid crystal so they aren't fucked by electronic bullshit.
you can't never bring a device near or it has to be turned off and sealed in a faraday cage during the FTL?
Luis Morgan
It might be simpler to say the systems can compensate for low frequency interference but not high frequency, so you can still have electricity on the ship but apart from the drive itself the computers are all limited to below one kilohertz.
Hudson Parker
Actually most of the reason why technology on most spacecraft dates back to the 60s is because that was the last time when they had a research budget. The fact that analog controls are reliable in a high radiation environment is only a contributing factor.
Luis Collins
If the drive is always on, surround it with big blocks of retractable radiation shielding. It has to be opened in order to jump. There you go.
Easton Ward
Okay so my favourite quirk for used spaceships is this: >There are small rodent like aliens on the ship. If the players start exterminating them, ship sytems start to act up and will even start having random failures if the population becomes almost extinct.
Lincoln Hall
Of course the rodents act like rodents and also should bother the players in minor ways. One player hears the skittering during his sleep and and doen't feel fresh when he wakes up. If a player want to get his rations, anything from protein bars to importet whine, there is a chance he finds bitemarks on it and some food is missing. Passangers get restless because they think they saw something in the dark corridors of the ship.
You know, annoying but never actually harmfull.
Colton Scott
What's even better is when they start multiplying
Jackson Evans
What if the players just start capturing them and releasing them at spaceports?
