/sg/space general

space general thread.

post; ships, stories, technical doubts, your own homebrew settings...

Suggested reading:

>General resources, well explained with simplified formulas and many recomendations for sci-fi works of all kind
>projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/
>Shorter but much more autistic, still very well explained with problems so you can practice
>braeunig.us/space/index.htm
>Also, very well explained general resources.
>daviddarling.info/encyclopedias.html

Further sci-fi reading.

>sfworldbuilding.blogspot.com.es/
>futurewarstories.blogspot.com.es/
>atomic-skies.blogspot.com.es/

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=w34fSnJNP-4&index=2&list=PLD9577E6CEBD077B4
youtube.com/watch?v=3m5ohobcKb8
youtube.com/watch?v=vO7RxsZpcKc
wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Cheat_sheet
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

Bumping with interest, hopefully this goes somewhere.

I'm curious though, I've read the first three Honor Harrington novels and I'm trying to find other sources of naval sci fi novels. I absolutely loved the ship to ship combat in the Harrington novels but it seems like the next book or two will be more character interaction.

>Moar ship novels


Ah, sadly I can't recomend right now, I'm with the hammer slammers books(start rough but soon get pretty dope)

Althought, not asked, I can recommend children of a dead Earth as a videogame centered around ship to ship combat in the most realistic fashion

Also, independence war, not so realistic but gives you quite an idea of how newtonian battles might feel(the difference with KSP and CHODE is that in independece war the ship is manually controled in first/third person).

Gonna start texturing some space right now.

It's a container ship (though without its containers there). Sometimes I just wanna chill and model something simple and satisfying and Orions come out.

Wow! What part of Syria is this? Who controls it? ALLAH SOURIYA BASHAR OU BAS!

Ah, sweet.

I was going to say, what exactly are the squares in the middle?

It's an extra radiation shield for sensitive cargo (shaped to cover the container stack that goes above it) and the command module.

Oh, and a fun thing that I didn't plan in the least: This is a warship in the same setting, though not proper military but rather corporately owned and built by civilian shipwrights. It would be completely appropriate for it to have some design commonalities with the freighter, and by complete accident (or convergent design), it does!

It's got the same basic configuration: Pulse drive, pulse unit magazines, middle section, cargo boom and docking/command module. On the freighter there's barely anything in the middle, just some structure and thrusters, whereas the warship has a voluminous and protected hull full of weapons, sensors and such. The module at the nose is smaller as it's just a docking compartment since the command module is deep inside the main hull. They both have the cargo boom, but the freighter's boom is a much more significant part of the whole ship, and the warship's boom is sort of atrophied and half occupied by the gun systems.

>corporately owned and built by civilian shipwrights

Ancap aproval, seems also a logistically sound idea(as long as we don't start talking about armor, but armor in sci-fi... you have reasons to have it and reasons to don't have it, it depends on the power of your weapons)

>Pulse drive, pulse unit magazines,

Did you consider making part of the bombs very narrow Casaba-howitzers.

It was in some old novel, giving the double function of weapon and propulsion to a the Orion drive with casabas, taking into account the ammount of power these weapons have it's kind of an awesome idea.

Well, the Eastzone is really an oppression machine granting a company ultimate power with very little oversight over their colonies in regions the empire is too lazy to police... (There's FTL, hence the scale, but it only gets you to the edges of a system.) The actual need for someone to guarantee security and stability is why they let them have warships.

The Eastzone's pulse units are antimatter-catalyzed (surprisingly feasible, you only need nanograms altogether) for greater efficiency. They wouldn't great as weapons since they have no way to ignite without the antimatter beam guns on the ship. They also have access to purpose-built casaba howitzers (among other payloads) with superior range which they can mount both on the missiles in those launch cells and on the shells for the guns.

That freighter does use plain old nuke-based pulse units. Very simple and efficient propulsion, if not the most economical over the long term. Great when you have lacking infrastructure though. If someone's going to be using repurposed or modified pulse units for weapons, it's gonna be the civilians when they decide to go rebel or pirate.

Much like a corporate warship would generally trounce repurposed civilians ships, so would actual fleet warships trounce the Eastzone. It relies solely on its low delta-v missiles and its guns for offense, which essentially means it must either do high speed passes with a very short engagement window, or essentially pull up alongside the target and pummel it to dust. The latter is probably what it most commonly does. This is why the empire is comfortable with its existence. Actual warships carry Falcon 9-sized NSWR missiles and multi-light second range extreme UV lasers. The Eastzone is however designed to be able to mount those missiles on its cargo boom, so it can basically turn into a perfectly competent fleet corvette overnight if they managed to procure the weapons from somewhere.

>Total focus on missiles

I crossed on this idea before, and I always end up wondering, why bother with ships and not just employ planet based massed missile attacks?

EW can be dealt with lasers comms, and point defenses can be surpased with numbers, you also don't have to take care of the expensive parts of the ships(engine/propellant) and general logitics are in hours to your industries.

...

>after brewing hard-sci-fi settin for couple of years i realized that no one will play it because its near autistic and unplayable

why live

Cancerous question for this thread:

Is it safe to use the whole idea of "relative mass reduction for use of FTL travel" with ships outside of something based directly on Mass Effect or do I just need to live with being a biter?

my idea for my setting was for Mass Effect drives to basically function as the standard "traverse the galaxy" FTL with the odd Quantum displacement relay gates as the fancy 'insta-but-rare' form of travel.

I'd be interested if you have Universal Century tier politics and factions.

youtube.com/watch?v=w34fSnJNP-4&index=2&list=PLD9577E6CEBD077B4

Post comfy space things

Does this use antimatter catalyst fission-fusion pulse propulsion like your other pulse propulsion designs? I don't see any antimatter emitters on it.

People have been using vague warp drives and wormholes for FTL travel, so it ain't like ripping off an idea from someplace is anything new. Just make yours consciously different from Mass Effect in tone and content, and nobody would really pay any mind. ME FTL is just warp drives anyway.

post our greatest soundtracks for space games and space operas here.

ready? I'll start
youtube.com/watch?v=3m5ohobcKb8

I have a question.

Why are sci-fi RPGs always so rules-heavy? I mean goddamn. The fucking Star Wars RPGs have more rules than the actual rocket science simulator, Kerbal Space Program. What the fucking fuck you fucking fuckers? What is with this compulsion? I mean maybe I understand the motive behind the hard sci-fi guys who are really just trying to port their design for a spacecraft into a vaguely playable game, but Star Wars is on the other side of the spectrum (everything is a spectrum these days) from hard sci-fi. It's a Western in space. It's science is, at most, as hard as the Buck Rogers bullshit it was based on. And yet when I look at the most recent Star Wars RPG I see custom dice, three 500-page books, and fucking spreadsheets. How the fuck am I supposed to get my retarded players with their iphones and ADHD to play that game? It would be easier to teach them actual rocket science.

People think that hard sci-fi requires simulationist rules. They also want to show off how clever they are by building mechanics for transfer orbits and fuel cells and all that into the game.

There's also the desire to sell books. Can't sell supplements if your system is too simple and too straightforward. It's all about the sale.

Figure out what you want to /do/ with your game, not just what's in the game. Worldbuilding is masturbatory. Just write a book. Just build a setting that allows for many plots.

So has this thread superseded the traveller general thread?

Not always, eclipse phase is an example of a sci-fi that doesn't require constant head banging against numbers.

But have in mind, one difference with fantasy here is the mechanistic aproach to things, is not that you start dancing around a pentagram and screaming very loud nonsense and then things happen(although there are some fantasy games with an interesting ammount of autism too), here when you push the joystick of your ship forward, means that the maneouver thusters recieve the order to open small scluses that inmediatly liberate the high pressure gases inside the propellant tanks and produces momentum through the 3ยบ newtown law.

In the first one, you can only add details in the form of more complex, nonsensical rituals, in the second one you can start mathematically designing your own thrusters with as much ammount of detail you want and the best part is that it works and is more relatable(at least from my POV with my scifiphilia).

This also creates a mindset that if your game doesn't require at least one formula with a square root(or directly an exponential), slider rules or giant "easy to use" spreadsheets you are lacking something in there.

Of course there are solutions, mainly forgetting about crunching numbers and just doing what you want(GURPS style), use online calculators or create your own(so all the work falls on the GM) or finding people that actually care about that(you fall into the risk of finding someone more autistic than you).

This.

Build some concepts here and there, and play with your world, the rest just comes along with it.

My prefered space battles are from the Lost Feet series.
Be warned, everything else is a lot more sketchy. Geary is a gary stu (not as grating as Honor tough) and everyone else outside his influence tend to be incompetent as fuck. But the battles are so graphic than tend to be fun, even if you can see the author recicling and making the same book, but with different details, all over.
Crimson Worlds also has the same problem, cool battles (both in infantry as naval), the factions are better presented adn there is more variety, but for some reason the characters seem too grating (it could also be than I'm not from the USA tough, I been raised with flawed heroes).

>forgetting about crunching numbers and just doing what you want(GURPS style)
GURPS has a boner for trying to base their rules on realism though.

Traveller is for traveller (it doesn't mean we don't talk about anything, but the same can be said for the BTG or other sci fi threads), it has never been about general sci fi.

>Remembering GURPS bio-tech
>Damn, that was good.

I would recomend to people reading GURPS manual even if they are not going to play GURPS just for the sake of how fucking well writen and informative they are.

noted, thanks.

I'm now kind of tempted to call them "break drives", since, they basically work by "breaking physics" in a lot of ways.

>Reduce relative mass of the ship and everything inside to zero
>Create an always-out-of-reach relative super-mass of gravity to yank the ship/slingshot it forward

Actually, this seems like a terrible idea. I'll stick with being vague.

Shit, it's weird to realize that even if Larry Nevin's tech seemed fantastic, he at least understood what seemed to be needed to make it work.

Also, why are freighters the best kind of starship?

youtube.com/watch?v=vO7RxsZpcKc

Nice catch. This one just uses nukes like good old Orion. They're usually used in systems which lack the infrastructure to build and maintain more sophisticated ships. They're dirt cheap and dead easy to build, and the pulse units are pretty primitive tech too. The downside is expending a nuke every second is relatively expensive, especially since they consume prodigious amounts of fissionables. (which antimatter-catalyzed drives don't since they don't need a critical mass)

Most of the older Veeky Forums people still do, when people can be bothered to make Veeky Forums related threads.

My biggest problem with that ship is the turrets. For offensive potential, they are too small. For defense, their blind-spot is the most vulnerable part of the ship.

Also I dunno about external pulse propulsion for a warship. You probably need something flexible that can drunk-walk and maneuver quickly. Not to mention the maintenance hogging and the cost-effectiveness.

That's a funny part about space turrets... you don't have to care about blindspots, distances are bound to be so big that your firing arc can cover huge distances and you can maneuver to fire without that many problems(unless your enemy hit your propellant tanks/maneuver engines).

That's why axial mounted weapons make sense in space; range and power are essential so having just one supergun makes a lot of sense.

>ship is powered by matter so heavy it produces energy by itself
>crew just "activates" more or less of that matter depending on how much power they need.
>all other ships in the setting use almost-stolen-then-replicated alien tech that permits FTL warping.
Anybody can try to explain that one rationally?
I guess it doesn't really matters as this ship's captain is the guy that once answered "No." to "Reality will end in 500 hours, please save us."

>ship is powered by matter so heavy it produces energy by itself

So... a black hole

>>crew just "activates" more or less of that matter depending on how much power they need.

So, adding matter or increasing the hawking radiation.

>>all other ships in the setting use almost-stolen-then-replicated alien tech that permits FTL warping

So, typical handwavium about FTL "it's aliens I ain't gonna explain shit"

I think these are not so complex...

>distances

Tiny turrets with tiny barrels are bound to have problems with this one.

>maneuver to fire

This will be a problem for the external pulse propulsion.

In the end of the day, if you want to use those turrets for defense, then you have short range and a ship as agile as a brick tied onto a firework rocket - not a great combo if you ask me.

...

the problem is, the stuff they use is actually just normal matter, they literally stock it in a chest.

>Tiny turrets with tiny barrels are bound to have problems with this one.

Actually, you can create the laser axially within the ship and just use mirrors to redirect the energy, is not so far fetched as it seems

But for railguns/gauss guns/light gas guns and all of that... I would say that the real thing to take into account is the power that you manage to deliver to the gun itself, the cannon affects this of course but if you make it too long you start creating stress and making the barrel vibrate, reducing reliability, useful life and precision

>This will be a problem for the external pulse propulsion.

Well, you can gimbal a bit the external pulse(might be complicated and expensive... but possible) or rely on maneuver thrusters an Orion drive is torchship like so you can go a bit wild with mass with these things.

The actual required thrust of these maneuver thrusters is not that important for an axial mounted gun, since you are trying to out range your enemy so you should have enough time to aim before the enemy gets in range.

For point defense you can put specialliced ships near it or simply rely on your huge reach advantage.

The problem here is that no wet navy ship ever had something similar to this and used it, only planes use axial mounted guns but more through a limitation of space and engine power than actual destructive advantage.

>laser

If that turret is a laser and it has barrels then it is even more stupid as I thought.

>an Orion drive is torchship

And it is pretty darn heavy for that. Pushing it around with conventional maneuvering thrusters will be a bigger challenge than with any other engine setup. It also doesn't lend itself too well to continuous maneuvering (firing bombs while turning is a good way to have the blast catch your ship and not the plate).

You have external pulse propulsion to go really-really fast for really-really long. If you ever want to do anything else then you should look for alternatives. If you are ballsy enough to ride an EPP then you should consider the NSWR - it is only slightly more crazy, but much more practical.

Here's the thing though: If it's HARD scifi, you only need to sell ONE book: AP Physics. Or, since you don't need ALL of Principia, just the rocket science part, here's the Kerbal Space Program cheat sheet:

wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Cheat_sheet

If it's NOT hard scifi, and Star Wars is about as hard as boiled spaghetti, then you DON'T even need this shit.

So I ask again: What is with this fucking compulsion? Are these fanboys just wanna-bes? Are they nerds who think they're smart but are really stupid?

>Here's the thing though: If it's HARD scifi, you only need to sell ONE book: AP Physics. Or, since you don't need ALL of Principia, just the rocket science part, here's the Kerbal Space Program cheat sheet:
Well that's just nonsense. I read probably close to 60 books specifically to prepare for the hard sci-fi game I ran, and that's stuff outside of my degree. It's not quite so simple.

And turning it into game mechanics is trickier. You could write 10 pages of rules that are so dense, tedious, and useless that nobody would ever use them.

>If it's NOT hard scifi, and Star Wars is about as hard as boiled spaghetti, then you DON'T even need this shit.
Of course not! But people do it anyway. People like to write stories rather than write tools to tell stories.

The game, for reference.

That's absurd. Game design is about creating sets of playable and fun (whatever your value of fun might be) mechanics. Some games are based purely on this (Go) and are completely abstract. Most are instead abstractions of some other thing, be it aspects of the real world or a fictional setting. A hard scifi game would include mechanics based on and accounting for physics, but it would not be a physics textbook. The categorization also doesn't define how abstracted it might be. It can be rules heavy, rules light or anything in between.

>AP Physics. Or, since you don't need ALL of Principia, just the rocket science part

Oh boy, I'm afraid not, if you are going down this line of thinking you are doing it wrong.

it's not hard-rocket-science it's har-science, to do it like you said you need around 1.000 hours in sci-hub and google scholar researching just one specific thing, it's a soul crushing activity that barely a few people manage to go through.

So, don't forget that while doing hard science you don't have aliens; you have carbon-based, water disolved life forms formed by fats, proteins and ribonucleic acids that form anthropomorphic lifeforms through universal natural selection of the best phenotype for civilizations, so you instantly went to physics to chemistry and biology in a second, and if we start talking about planets you go into geology.

Hard science, is not so much about creating a technical manual with character as to create a beliable environment that fits with our current understanding of the universe, so in your example Star wars is soft but still can require you to use a shitload of spreadsheets and formulas just for adding complexity.

And that's the point here, do not confuse hard science with complexity, hard science can be very simple if you only stablish the rules based around things that are relatable to scientific knowledge and still forget about all the required formulas and number crunching, you can even make a hard-science story by skimming over the technical parts and just going through the characters.

the important thing is that the equipment needs to make sense, for example: If you tell me that you only use one radiator for the engine and the crew you are making a mistake since the energy gradient will be stronger on the engine so you can't "move" heat from the tripulation compartment.

but it might LOOK complex, just because is not using everyday language, alineating the reader but a clever writer can overcome this with some effort.

Re: guns
They are poor for offense. In an actual war between proper militaries, they would be irrelevant as offensive weapons. You could make a giant spinal mount gun that has superior muzzle velocity, and it would still be irrelevant due to the speeds and distances involved in the setting. The missiles also lack effective range due to low delta-v and thus also make poor offensive weapons. However, this is the best the company that owns the ship can get. The empire simply won't let them procure weapons that could actually challenge their warships. At any rate, fighting other warships is not a typical use case. Something that would be typical is matching trajectories with a suspect ship in what may end up being anything from an exchange of communications to a boarding/inspection action to a battle. In this sort of situation, its weapons will handily outpower civilian ships (including ones converted for combat use), which is their real point. Another capability they want is bombarding colonies or planetary targets, which the guns with nuclear payloads would do well. It's not something they'd actually want to do (and they'd certainly catch a lot of shit for it), but being the one with the ability to do so tends to give an understanding of who is in charge. The final guarantee of their political authority is the capability for assured destruction without the "mutual" part.

Like I mentioned though it is designed to externally mount actual anti-ship missiles, which would turn it into a competent military craft. Its guns and existing missiles would then shift to a defensive role. In that case, you wouldn't think of the guns as direct fire weapons. Rather, they're a method to deploy a field of guided mines between yourself and incoming missiles, well in advance. I call them mines because in this context their velocity is irrelevant relative to the speeds of ships and missiles and it's best to think of the projectiles as more or less stationary. Some velocity, such as that handily provided by a gun, is still required to give the mines a push so that intercept will happen at a safe distance from the ship. The missiles could do much the same, but they would also have some reach to cover nearby friendly ships.

Re: propulsion
There is no reason to think a pulse drive ship would not be maneuverable. True, they are generally limited to thrusting while not turning, but you still have high forwards thrust and depending on your thrusters you may turn quickly. There are also possible solutions to alleviate the problem: You could aim the pulse unit gun to take into account current rotational speed, so that it would arrive at the right spot at the right time, or you might mount thrusters on the pulse unit so that it would be self-positioning. That would cut into your effective isp while turning due to the extra mass on the pulse units. Either solution would require very good control systems, but so do a great many other things. There are ballistic missile interceptors today that position themselves accurately enough for physical contact with an incoming missile at speeds much greater than that of a pulse unit relative to the ship.

This particular ship however is unlikely to be designed for either capability, so it simply is somewhat restricted in when it can burn the main drive while under intense maneuvers, a flaw which matters little for its usual work but which would hurt its evasive capabilities against lightsecond range anti-ship lasers. Another point the empire would like.

Orion is not particularly heavy - thinking in terms of thrust-to-weight ratio, it's lighter for a given thrust than practically any other feasible high isp system. This isn't exactly Orion, of course, it's a fictionalized, much higher performance antimatter-catalyzed version, and I do have similarly fictionalized (but likewise at least physically possible) continuous drives in the setting which are in quite wide use for both civilian and military ships. Pulse drives have advantages in simplicity and thus maintenance, while continuous drives have advantages in economics (it's cheaper to burn hydrogen than manufactured pulse units) and, somewhat arbitrarily, in isp. Pulse drives do have the additional boon that the explosion will be happening some significant distance behind the ship, and the inverse square law really is your friend there for alleviating heating and radiation concerns. Additionally, it will be happening behind the slab of solid propellant on the pulse unit, which shields you from a a bunch of radiation. The pusher will also be shielded from thermal radiation by the propellant plasma itself, which is so hot that it radiations in wavelengths the plasma is opque to, an amusing fact discovered by the Orion designers.

Are you smoking something? The ffg swrpg is simpler to play and run than every fantasy rpg I've played bar dnd4e. 4e and lazers and feelings are probably the only rp games I've played simpler.