Generic Sci FI Thread

So the only two spaceship combat games I've played are Star Fleet Battles and X-Wing. Star Fleet Battles is ridiculously involved and I'd prefer something that moved a decent bit faster than that. X-Wing is, for me, ruined by its movement system, which I find irritating as fuck (it doesn't help that I've got a bad back, and leaning over to fuck around with the movement fucks with it). Is there a good, fast-paced game where movement is quick and easy (like you'd get with hexes, where you can easily count spaces) and where you don't always have to worry about ships crashing into each other (which is thematically stupid, especially when its your own ships)? All other things being equal, I prefer capital ships to fighters, and original or obscure properties to shit like Star Wars and Star Trek.

Dropfleet commander looks a lot more focused, tough I don't like the space ships that much the setting seems cool as fuck, and the idea of orbital combat and to make a planetfall is very cool.
But I know next to nothing about the system.
Dunno what is that, some kind of soda?

Space ship games tend to the clunky(the harder the sci fi, it gets more complicated), Full thrust continum is kinda of a generic ruleset than you can find players (in some areas, with luck) playing it, and has its own bland setting.
I'm sure there are a lot more, but finding players? That will be the difficult part.

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>Full thrust continum is kinda of a generic ruleset than you can find players (in some areas, with luck) playing it, and has its own bland setting.
Thanks. I'll check it out.

Anybody got any good suggestions for early science fiction movies to watch? Like, pre-Star Wars stuff: early-mid 70s at the very latest. I've been trying to expand my historical awareness of the genre, but there's a fair bit of crap in there. I did quite enjoy Forbidden Planet. Are there any good RPGs that capture an old school sci-fi feel? Is that all going to be Flash Gordon / sword & planet stuff?

I'm loving the Maschinen Krieger image dump user.

Anybody ever play Blue Planet? It's relatively hard sci-fi about a water world. Just looking it over, I wasn't blown away by the crunch, and the book tended to read a bit too much like an encyclopedia at times, but it seemed like a pretty cool setting. I read 1st edition, but apparently a second edition was put out by Fantasy Flight using the Synergy Game System (whatever that is), so maybe it was more streamlined than the original.

As far as I know, this game is really obscure, so I wouldn't be surprised if nobody here has any experience with it.

On the subject of obscure RPGs, can anybody tell me if they liked Fading Suns?

What's everybody's favorite science fiction / science fantasy role-playing game?

Probably the Space Age module for Warbirds. It's a fun setting with a quick-rolling rules-lite system.

For that matter, what's your favorite sub-genre of science fiction?

As the pic implies, I've always been a fan of future apocalypse. You get cool sci-fi technology like laser rifles, but also swords and shit. And with society having largely collapsed, you also get a much smaller, less connected world where quests work well. And you get a magic substitute in mutations. So to me, it seems like it takes the best elements from fantasy and science fiction.

There's a space Warbirds? Well that's awesome.

Are you the same user who directed me to the game ~6 months or so ago when I was looking for a system that actually manages dogfights well?

I do remember doing that, yeah.

I'm the closest thing this board has to a Warbirds shill.

Also yeah, there's a space module. It's a bit limited in great detail but high quality, which is kind of the company's calling card. Warbirds and the Broken World expansions for Remnants are their only works that are very lore-heavy.

Remnants is also top-tier for mechs action, whether or not it's in their post-apocalypse-far-future setting.

I just wanna say thanks. I had a great time playing Warbirds late spring/early in the summer. Mechs you say? I should check this out.

My (current) favourite sci fi/sci fa is probably the mad monster I worked up from a half-dozen different things.
Favourite sub-genre is currently the fallen space-faring empire, but I love 'em all.

No problem. Glad to hear someone else is having the fun experience.

Yeah, they made a mecha game, but it takes place in a sort of Numenera-esque post-apocalypse setting, but the society that fell was SUPER advanced. Like, Clarke's Third Law advanced.

My favorite sub-genre honestly depends on my mood. I tend to go back to the Numenera/Remnants/Third Law science fantasy and the Star Wars/Firefly space western/exploration/adventure where small crews can get a freighter and make their way across a busy 'verse full of opportunity. The Space Age expansion for Warbirds is great for this; it's my go-to.

The main unifying theme for me is the postential for exploration and a small group of tenacious indiviuals carving out their own portion of the galaxy to influence.

I see you are a man of culture as well.

I'm digging a lot SWN, there are a few things than I dislike (the AC for the armor, instead of using it to deduce some damage, its class and level based) but nothing than I couldn't mod.
What is great about SWN is the tables. You can generate sectors quickly, and every planet will have a couple of interesting shit, good and bad npc, plot seeds etc. And every expansion is gold, even if you don't use the system.
Never played it, loved the setting the same. The idea is great desu, Noble armada had cool star ships but they discontinued the line.

>sperg about the impracticality of space warfare

I've used "treaty agreements" as catch excuse for that.

Star fighters only exist because that the prohibition and restrictions on offensive weapons on starships neglected to include the shuttlecraft. Not to mention it tends to be safer for everyone involved, with the notable exception of the pilots.

I was tempted to include mechs as way around restrictions on tanks and attack choppers but that seems to be *really* pushing it.

Personally I like to use star fighters in the same way aero-space is used in battletech, for orbital/planet defense/atack and escorts for planetfalls, plus asteroid defense and in other places outside "deep space", why they use them instead of drones? Countermesure make the use of drones very unrealiable, I go for quantum ecm technobable, and in the future lives are very cheap.
About mechs, because I don't like the big metal monsters anyway, they are used as big power armors/landmates, the biggest barely over a votoms style mech, think VS and infinity tags. Vs a Tank, in plain terrain or equivalents, it will lose because it can't carry the heavier ordinance or armor, or be as fast, but in complicated terrain or in ambush they have they niche, basically they are used as IFV and to augment infantry power, speed (lots of mechas have handles so less equiped infantry can catch a ride, plus jump)and fire power. Some people used them in asteroids, moons etc as "ambush" and counter insurgence, but like with tanks, tend to lose in straight fights vs space fighters because they aren't as fast, armored or up gunned, but can go to a lot more places.

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>I'm digging a lot SWN, there are a few things than I dislike (the AC for the armor, instead of using it to deduce some damage, its class and level based) but nothing than I couldn't mod.
I don't know how close SWN sticks to the source material in terms of damage and AC, but in that, at least, 2 points of AC converts very nicely to 1 point of DR (which is handy, because armor moves in 2 point steps of AC). If damage is significantly increased beyond the rather limited range of old school D&D, this conversion becomes less accurate (though just because the balance is a bit different doesn't necessarily make it wrong). Anyway, I know you said it was nothing you couldn't mod, but I actually fucked around with the numbers for this, so I thought I'd share.

Actually I was going to do something like that, and probably over complicating it using special reduction stuff like vs Heat etc. That reduced a lot of eyeballing and try to make sense of it, and it's quite elegant and simple.

Any military SF nerds in here? I'm considering running a Red Cross themed campaign. In my setting many of the large empires are rearing for a fight and will in the foreseeable future duke it out.

Players will be from a NGO dedicated to minimizing the damage to civilians and the human cost in general.

Now in somewhat hardd SF warfare that resembles our modern world a lot when would civilians get caught in the crossfire? Mist large armies seem somewhat predictable and often military targets are a good distance away from military facilities out of security concerns. So just how likely are civilians to get attacked intentionally or not?

So, are we like tech 3 or tech 3.5 or something?
Anything special those armored guys future guns can do?

More like early 3 tech desu, I'm defining for my games and based on the SWN tech levels, as tech 3 as intra-stellar (so from modern times, passing cyber-punk to trans-humans), Tech 2 industrial/world trade (so from ww2 to early the late renaissence) , Tech 1 anything pre-industrial(so simple gunpowder weapons to Bronze daggers) and localized trade between a continent or two and Tech 0 primitives with sparse comunication even with the tribe over the other hill. It's more about how well conected as world is basically, Tech 4 would be extra-stellar, with low level or Basic jump-1 system of travel to very advanced extra-stellar able to make wormholes, dyson-swarms etc, tech 5 we start into techno-magic and Progenitors/ancient/precursor stuff.

FSA (and DW) got picked up by Wayland Games.

>That reduced a lot of eyeballing and try to make sense of it, and it's quite elegant and simple.
Thanks. In case you're interested, here are a couple of tables comparing damage taken per round under the new system with that taken under the old system. A value of 104% would indicated that you'd take 4% more damage per round under the new system. The overall averages are remarkably close, and the cases in which the individual stats deviate the most tend to be niche cases (for instance, a person with a 9 THAC0 is very rarely going to be attacking unarmored targets who have no dexterity or enchantment bonus to AC with an ordinary dagger and no strength bonus to damage).

I quite like the Star Frontiers races.

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Nice star ships, remind me to Requium comic for some reason.

Same artist. It cover for something.

Old school stronk.

Likeliness increases as war goes on.

Civilian infrastructure has a lot of neat hideaways and systems built into them that make them good fallbacks for weakened militaries. Add in insurgents, xenophobia/ philia, and you're going to get a few apartment complexes bombed for the sake of the people that live there.

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i want to play an RPG of this

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I think it'd be interesting if full warfare in a sci-fi setting was almost entirely outside the realm of classical engagement between human combatants. It's all computer hacking, autonomous drones, and shit like that. Troops with guns can just be disassembled by nanites, zapped by security guns, or blown up by drones that move and react far too quickly for humans to keep up with. Even engagement between people could come down to personal forcefields, and AI-controlled lasers mounted on a belt buckle or something like that.

That relegates more familiar human conflict to petty skirmishes, the equivalent of people throwing bottles and rocks today. Of course, that equivalent may be well-coordinated special forces-type attacks with assault weapons, but it would be nothing compared to the craziness you'd get if you ever unleashed your automated military shit. So it's sort of like conventional war vs. chemical or nuclear war. You don't use such things lightly because that raises things to a whole new level.

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I think SWN would fit nicely, heck it even has the warrior, ranger/specialist, mage/psi guy classes.

SWN?

Stars without numbers, a kind of OSR mixed with traveller.

I hate the overwhelming majority of Sci-fi designs and I don't know why.

examples?

There are tons of different sci-fi designs. You have the classic 60-70 rocketman with a raygun look, the rugged pipes and tubes to make the thing work look, and the unnecessary intricacy and lines but it looks cool look (think doom).

Not him but I've definitely come to hate most sci-fi weapon and armor designs simply because so much of them look overdesigned and nothing like what someone would actually wear or use.

Halo's kind of the best example I can think of. Why does everything have so many bumps and ridges and lines in it?

Yeh I totally know what you mean. For me, some of them look cool and other dont, but I have a hard time describing why.

Here's the things in this thread that manage to juice my unjuiceable noodle.

Looks like it could be a real spaceship. Absolutely beautiful piece that has a sense of wonder and mystery to it.

Bunch of fun dopey aliens in an old school aesthetic.

And maybe because it makes you question what all the weird shit hanging around is and gives a sense of vast verticality. The big hoverpad looks fun to ride around on, like something that could potentially be made and has a sort of construction zone aesthetic that implies that these things are just common tools.

I don't care how many fucking numbers plates and LED lights your plastic ship has I want to see the vastness and strangeness of space.

>Is there a good, fast-paced game where movement is quick and easy (like you'd get with hexes, where you can easily count spaces) and where you don't always have to worry about ships crashing into each other (which is thematically stupid, especially when its your own ships)? All other things being equal, I prefer capital ships to fighters, and original or obscure properties to shit like Star Wars and Star Trek.

Dropfleet might be interesting for you; the game isn't hex-based, so it requires measuring, but it plays very quickly once you've got two or three games under your belt. Movement comes down to turning 0-45 degrees at the beginning of your movement, and then moving some number of inches, with the exception of a special order that allows you to turn twice at any points during movement.
All the ships in game are abstracted away as point-entities on their bases, meaning it's physically impossible for them to collide (although the models might bump into each other)
Game is almost purely capital ships (cruisers and up), with only frigates and corvettes being sub-capital (but are still pretty big). There are fighters and bombers, but they're weapon systems rather than actual entities.

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At least for Halo's aesthetic, I think it would all look a bit too futuristic if there wasn't lines breaking up the shape.

The Starlost, its on Youtube

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We need more biopunk stuff.

Fuck the metalfuckers, we want the way of the flesh!

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what is that from?