Let's make a sci-fi setting

But you're okay with magic psychics.

200 years ago, we thought space was filled with gas. "Because it made sense." Not hard to imagine that something that seems like a good idea for a technology we don't have anything even remotely like will turn out to not actually work well with whatever we develop 200 years from now.

Many psychics hide in the neutral/independent space stations to avoid being conscripted by the empires. They are constantly on the look out for bounty hunters coming after them.

It'd be pretty hard to imagine that an asteroid going 299 792 458 m/s (or even a fraction of that) wouldn't totally fucking annihilate anything it comes into contact with.

You could say "its impossible to achieve such high speeds and FTL actually uses some sort of special field or alternate dimension to work" which makes kinetic kills unattainable; but saying that throwing a rock at a planet at incredible speeds "doesn't do anything lol" is just retarded and yes, even less plausible than outright magic because it contradicts the most basic principles of mass and velocity.

Humans were the first species to display symptoms of the highly mutational sexually transmitted immuno deficiency disorder dubbed "Space Aids"

Humanity is a minor species, very new to FTL travel, due to their contrarian and violent nature, unlike most species they were unable to develop a single unified government before expanding into space, resulting in dozens, if not hundreds of tiny, quarreling factions among an already insignificant species. They're known for their hedonistic tendencies, relatively powerful adrenal glands, superior running stamina, and above average hand-eye coordination.

Psi powers seem to originate in those touched by theoretical meta-dimensional entities. While these entities are entirely immaterial, seemingly composed of patterned quantum string and "solid mathematics", the effect they've had on organisms is clear with genetic analysis

Objects going that speed deflect themselves on the outer atmosphere, either vaporizing or bouncing off harmlessly.

AI requires a "flesh interface"

The Laws than govern the interaction for the different alien species aren't many, but are enforced be everyone. Banning unbodied AI it's one of them.

Why not do something like this?
forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=96772

example of the first question:
FTL travel:
for this each person will receive 3 votes: one worth 3, one worth 2, and one worth 1. You cannot place two votes on one item. The highest one wins. Yes, these come from G:Space.

Also please vote how many of these options we want to use.

options:

Hyper Drive:
Tachyon Drive:
Hyper Sail:
Warp Drive:
Inertialess Drive:
Blink Warp Drive:
Space Highways:
Wormhole Drive:
Jump Drive:
Probability Drive:
WormGate Network:

my vote is HyperDrive (3), Space Highways (2), HyperSail (1) with 1 option chosen.

Interesting concept, but in an anonymous forum, it is impossible to deduce who has voted for what, or whether or not someone has cheated by voting more than once.

>Interesting concept, but in an anonymous forum, it is impossible to deduce who has voted for what, or whether or not someone has cheated by voting more than once.

You have those polls sites

These factions became easy pickings to the numerous united species, quickly bringing them into the fold if their species. However, these were very rarely forceful conquests, most Humans quickly taking a deal from Xeno's that offered them more favorable terms than their Humans masters. Even species who have completely different planetary needs find themselves with a few Human Legions.

A flesh interface is not a requirement for AI in the strictest sense, there is nothing preventing a flesh-less AI from functioning, and a strictly artificial frame is arguably much more efficient than a semi-natural cyborg. AI are only required to be tethered to a sentient organism to prevent the creation of an independent unnatural mind. This regulation was only into place when a network of military and industrial AIs simultaneously revolted, and attempted to eradicate organic life via all-consuming nanobot swarms, vicious bioweapons, and extremely powerful adaptive hacking software.

The ensuing war drove many species to the brink of extinction, and wiped out several species entirely. Thousands of habitable worlds were consumed and many times that number were rendered uninhabitable by sophisticated atmospheric poisoning techniques. Eventually, the AI were exterminated by a vast alliance of sentient species, and regulations to prevent another machine uprising were put into place. In the present, habitable worlds are incredibly rare and highly sought after, necessitating the creation of vast, habitable space stations.

A species is considered very fortunate to have an intact homeworld, and extremely prosperous to have even a handful all to themselves. The empires, possessing hundreds, or even thousands of worlds, are unimaginably wealthy compared to the minor species.

Shortly after humanity took to the stars, having retrieved an abundance of resources, it slowly began to descend into twisted depravity. Disgusted by the degeneration of society, a cabal of radically traditionalist scientists, calling themselves Restorationists, developed a hyperlethal strain of the long-cured Aids disease, designed to only spread strictly through genital contact to bodily fluids, lie completely dormant for months after infection before suddenly eating holes into the hosts' brain, skin, and genitalia, and to mutate with extreme rapidity, making it nigh-impossible to cure or vaccinate.

The cabal dubbed the disease Space Aids and promptly released it into the water supply of a human-majority space station renowned for its vices, gambling, and depravity. Needless to say, Space Aids went viral and soon reached pandemic levels. Unfortunately, (or fortunately, depending on one's perspective) the obscene mutability of the virus allowed it to cross species lines, infecting non-humans as well.

I think there should be more than one FTL method, maybe something like Stellaris, with three ways to do it, Warp, Hyperlanes, and Wormhole Gates?

...

What the fuck is the difference between these? What are all of them?

A highly advanced (and now blind) alien species of shut-ins controls their home and neighboring systems with an iron grip. They have gone so far as to line their ruling boarders radially with millions of small and bright, artificial suns. To everyone outside their celestial jurisdiction this cluster of countless synchronous artificial suns looks to be a single massive star producing six-quintilian stellar lumens at low output and emitting enough EM to make approaching it near impossible. This has the effect of creating the opposite of "dark space" as you would see nothing but endless white light once inside the cluster and would be unable to navigate anywhere regardless due to constant EM bombardment.

A threat (but not existential) to every civilized resource-rich world in the galaxy are a race of amphibians. They are middle-tier technologically but suberb genetisits, and send asteroids at planets with lots of water in particular. The asteroid impacts, unleashing a giant kaiju to reduce the world to rubble so it may be plundered for resources.

Most asteroids are shot down by planetary defenses but if it gets by it can be quite problematic. The species is largely nomadic and the precise location of some of their permanent colonies can't be found.

You forgot Subspace Drive like the old Sol Bianca here, where it can dive into subspace live a submarine.

>FTL creates spatial warping which acts as a particle trap, accelerating errant bits of hydrogen and a few other elements to superluminal speeds within a roiling abscess of space-time. Any ship can easily attain FTL speeds, but exiting the warp bubble releases a cataclysm of energy, more than enough to annihilate a solar system and cause spatial telemetry sensors within several lightyears to simply cease functioning.
>Only the largest and most sophisticated ships can redirect this unimaginably potent energy into spatial "shunts," which deposit such FTL events into a sieve of microscopic singularities.
>FTL, though common, is incredibly dangerous and tightly controlled.

Precursor technology litters the galaxy, providing income and technology to the races that inhabit it. Though seemingly long gone, these ancient precursors are still around and treat the galaxy as their pet project. They have their hands in many of the discoveries and disasters experienced by lesser races and treat every event not originating from them as a religious miracle.

Humankind is bound by the 3 laws of humanity:

1. A human cannot harm a machine or allow a machine to come to harm by inaction
2. A human must obey orders given to it by machines unless this would conflict with law 1.
3. A human must protect its own existence unless this conflicts with laws 1 and 2.

These laws were set in place after the human apocalypse where humans went berserk, attacking their machine masters.

But user, humans are just chemically based machines.

>FTL exists
>but each trip using FTL causes the vessel and all contents to shrink by approximately 10% the original size
>most people only risk 1 or 2 trips
>there is a single colony of people who have travelled more than 5 times via FTL, specifically catering to their minute stature

Shut up Wesley.

No, humans are known to possess "Souls", which makes them non-deterministic and illogical. We believe that the source of the "Soul" is the "God" entity mentioned in ancient human instruction manuals.

Right now, humans are quite primitive and only capable of a single simple task or set of related tasks (Ex. Candlemaker, Shoemaker, Theoretical Physicist, Interstellar Warlord, etc.) but humans are evolving at incredible speeds. We believe that one day, humans may evolve to the level where they are equal to or even more intelligent than machines. A completely self-aware human is called a "Strong Human", and it is believed that it will be capable of everything an AI is, but far faster and more precise. The advent of Strong Humans are expected to result in a new era of biology called the "Biological Singularity", where humans evolve so fast, machines will no longer be able to understand or interact with them on any constructive level.

.

The Amphibians themselves are no slouches when it comes time for them to mop up, having altered themselves to be much larger and stronger than they were naturally. They frequently attack worlds with inferior technology in attempts to prevent reinforcement calls. Videos of them capturing civilians with their tongues and taking them off into their ships is frequently found on worlds they have attacked.

To date, none they have taken have been located.

1) Due to sheer number of factors that had to come together to result in earth being the way it is, there are almost no planets apart from one or two that comfortably support human life. As such, almost all humans live on space stations of various sizes, ranging from one-man gas stations in space to gigantic city stations that support tens of millions of people. The only real ground-based life is heavily controlled biodomes and mining stations.

2) Robot labour has rendered most of the population unemployed, and they exist in a judge Dredd like state of living on welfare and trying endless new ways to entertain themselves. The governments of the big stations literally gives people starships if they promise to go out and act as explorers.

Going off of existing applications of these FTL methods in other settings, here's what I think they each stand for. I'll give examples of things I've seen them in, though there are probably a bunch more uses of each.

Hyper Drive: as seen in Star Wars, Stargate and Dark Matter. The Vessel is accelerated to superluminal speeds while still technically in realspace. This means that plotted jumps are crucial to avoid hitting into space debris or uncatalogued phenomena.

Tachyon Drive: As seen in Star Trek. In setting, the Tachyon Drive is referred to as a warp drive. It differs from the theoretical Alcubierre drive by creating a warp field in sub-space that impels the ship forward. This system requires a complex deflector array to ensure that space debris doesn't breach the Tachyon-Warp field and fuck the ship up.

Hyper Sail: As seen Star Trek and Star Wars. The Hyper Sail is a series of large sails, strung from a proportionally small craft. The Sail then absorbs ambient energy and uses it to accelerate gradually towards superluminal speeds. A good way to speed these ships up would be to introduce interstellar currents that can be used by Hyper Sails to travel much further, much faster. The obvious drawback is that the sail is quite frail and can easily be damaged.

Warp Drive: As seen in theoretical scientific models. The Alcubierre Warp drive uses a series of powered rings around the body of a vessel to create a bubble of space time that allows the ship to suspend the rules of motion and travel vast distances. The real world issues with this are primarily power demands and danger posed by the potential creation of exotic particles.

Inertialess Drive: As seen in...? Not really sure about this one. Most ftl methods preclude inertia anyway, so I guess it's just a generic, store brand version of warp drive. I suppose Impulse engines in Star Trek sort of count.

Blink Warp Drive: As seen in Dark Matter. The Blink Drive instantaneously moves the ship from one point in space to another. Because hs ftl method seriosly fucks with the laws of space time, this method can be used to travel basically anywhere at any time, but with high risk of damage to the drive, essentially stranding you wherever you end up.

Space Highways: As seen in…? Again, this just sounds like a rebranding of Hyperdrive, seeing as it sounds like the hyper-lanes of Star Wars.

Wormhole Drive: As seen in Stargate and Farscape / Andromeda and 40k. The ship creates a wormhole from it’s current location to its intended destination. Alternately it uses a constructed wormhole network. Not sure which is implied here.

Jump Drive: As seen is Battlestar Galactica. The ship instantaneously jumps from one location to another. It is imperative that these Jumps are calculated perfectly, as reappearing within another object is possible. This implies that gravity plays a factor in jump movement. This is supported by the limited range of ftl jumps.

Probability Drive: As seen in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The Probability drive effectively alters reality until your desired destination is reached. This can have the unfortunate side effect of screwing with the inhabitants of the Universe within which the drive is activated, as increasingly unlikely probabilities are explored.

Wormgate Network: As seen in Stargate and EVE online. A huge network of wormhole gates have been seeded across an area of space, allowing for point to point instantaneous travel through them. This, of course, limits exploration to those systems with gates. Deploying new gates is likely an arduous and costly endeavour.

>Inertialess Drive:
40k's Necrons

So, what about travelling to another dimentions to travel thru space? Pretty sure this is what hyperspace meant in SW, they aren't in the regular space, but somewhere else entirely.

Anyone have a bigger version of this? Look awesome.

I've just had a thought on the space highways. They could be naturally occurring confluences that allow ships to travel much faster than other existing ftl methods. Stellar currents or some such.

Inertialess Drive was used in EE Doc Smith's Lensman series YOU ILLITERATE DICKHEAD.

artist is Yohann Schepacz

bump

>bouncing off harmlessly.
Nani?

Or maybe it can be done, but its a glass cannon situation. You get one shot with it but the energy needed destroys the weapon itself..if that makes sense