Orbital velocity doesn't have to be gained directly upwards. Moving at 8km/s in any direction at all that isn't straight towards the planet will get you into low orbit. Add a little extra to account for air resistance, and it isn't actually that unachievable. The construction of a perfectly straight 200-300km maglev track should be within the means of any nation that's wealthy enough to have a maglev infrastructure at all. The maglev and acceleration and stuff would present the engineering difficulty (which is why we don't have space guns today.) The energy cost would be high (7 megajoules per kg or thereabouts) but if you can put that generator on earth then you don't have to lift it, and by 2076 we should really have power plants that can give us 7MJ quite cheaply.
Edit: Now, I'm aware that Shadowrun canon says that they do not have the infrastructure to get humans into space via space gun. Therefore, what I propose is to use the traditional Shadowrun escape clause: time marches on. That was then. Someone has built a space gun at a gentle incline and is now revolutionising the space industry by using it to lift people into orbit for a fraction of the cost of a rocket.
Shadowrun in Space
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Username17
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The power plants to give up 7MJ quite cheaply exist today. 7 megajoules is just 1.94 kilowatt hours, which costs a little less than 24 cents off the grid to households in the United States. The actual energy costs for running such a mass driver would be like a quarter per kilogram. The infrastructure is horrendously expensive, but the energy is a rounding error once you have all the ground based magnetic tracks set up.Laertes wrote:Orbital velocity doesn't have to be gained directly upwards. Moving at 8km/s in any direction at all that isn't straight towards the planet will get you into low orbit. Add a little extra to account for air resistance, and it isn't actually that unachievable. The construction of a perfectly straight 200-300km maglev track should be within the means of any nation that's wealthy enough to have a maglev infrastructure at all. The maglev and acceleration and stuff would present the engineering difficulty (which is why we don't have space guns today.) The energy cost would be high (7 megajoules per kg or thereabouts) but if you can put that generator on earth then you don't have to lift it, and by 2076 we should really have power plants that can give us 7MJ quite cheaply.
Edit: Now, I'm aware that Shadowrun canon says that they do not have the infrastructure to get humans into space via space gun. Therefore, what I propose is to use the traditional Shadowrun escape clause: time marches on. That was then. Someone has built a space gun at a gentle incline and is now revolutionising the space industry by using it to lift people into orbit for a fraction of the cost of a rocket.
-Username17
I'm an idiot. If you use a Force 10 air spirit then you only need to get up to 800 metres a second, better known as Mach 2.4, which is eminently doable. (I assume an air spirit also helps to overcome air resistance involved in travelling at that speed.) The question then becomes which is cheaper, hiring people who can summon Force 10 spirits or building a space gun capable of reaching low orbit. Both are mostly the domain of megacorps or nations, but I can see there being pirate setups which serve the Heinleinish asteroid miners.
So in other news, my design basis for space was going to be assuming that one's whole campaign wasn't based there. As other people have said, if you want to play hard science in space then you should be playing Eclipse Phase (which is a good ruleset made by good people even if I have reservations about it), so I'm going to be working on the basis that this isn't the setting for a campaign, just a place to go for one or two jobs. This has ramifications.
In particular, it means that all pie which relates to system matters has to be statted as equipment than you can buy with money, rather than cyberware, adept powers or skills which you need to invest BP or Karma into. This doesn't need to be true of NPCs, because NPCs spend all their time up there and so it's worthwhile for them to get specialist kit installed, but making it available to PCs would be to set up a trap option.
While Shadowrun is a symmetrical system, we need to think nonsymmetrically here. The PCs will not be the microgravity-accustomed people, but will rather be the clumsy groundsiders who slam into things a lot. However, the PCs are the ones which have to make all the rolls because that's how RPGs work. Therefore it makes sense that the PC side of things (the clumsy groundsider who's bought some gear) is the one with no bonuses or penalties, and the NPC side of things (the veteran spacers) are the ones whose numbers get adjusted. In other words, you won't suffer a shooting penalty in microgravity; you'll just be firing against people who have bigger Gymnastics dice pools than you. The mathematical effect is the same but it makes the gameplay a lot easier.
Therefore, if you're in a centrifugal-gravity area, the mechanics are identical to being planetside. If you're in microgravity then the difficulties to do anything rise, and the dice pools of people who're accustomed to it rise equally quickly. This would make no sense if the game was about veteran spacers, but it isn't so we can screw them.
This combines nicely with Stahlseele's point to form a general rule of space: space is Shadowrun on hard mode. The difficulties are higher, the people who aren't you have all sorts of crazy buffs you don't get, there are horrendous consequences for failure, and there's far more treasure available to be stolen. If your game features cyborgs and magi bumbling about in hilarious comedies of errors, space is not the place for them. If your game features carefully-planned heists by teams of professional thieves, space is somewhere they'll thrive.
So in other news, my design basis for space was going to be assuming that one's whole campaign wasn't based there. As other people have said, if you want to play hard science in space then you should be playing Eclipse Phase (which is a good ruleset made by good people even if I have reservations about it), so I'm going to be working on the basis that this isn't the setting for a campaign, just a place to go for one or two jobs. This has ramifications.
In particular, it means that all pie which relates to system matters has to be statted as equipment than you can buy with money, rather than cyberware, adept powers or skills which you need to invest BP or Karma into. This doesn't need to be true of NPCs, because NPCs spend all their time up there and so it's worthwhile for them to get specialist kit installed, but making it available to PCs would be to set up a trap option.
While Shadowrun is a symmetrical system, we need to think nonsymmetrically here. The PCs will not be the microgravity-accustomed people, but will rather be the clumsy groundsiders who slam into things a lot. However, the PCs are the ones which have to make all the rolls because that's how RPGs work. Therefore it makes sense that the PC side of things (the clumsy groundsider who's bought some gear) is the one with no bonuses or penalties, and the NPC side of things (the veteran spacers) are the ones whose numbers get adjusted. In other words, you won't suffer a shooting penalty in microgravity; you'll just be firing against people who have bigger Gymnastics dice pools than you. The mathematical effect is the same but it makes the gameplay a lot easier.
Therefore, if you're in a centrifugal-gravity area, the mechanics are identical to being planetside. If you're in microgravity then the difficulties to do anything rise, and the dice pools of people who're accustomed to it rise equally quickly. This would make no sense if the game was about veteran spacers, but it isn't so we can screw them.
This combines nicely with Stahlseele's point to form a general rule of space: space is Shadowrun on hard mode. The difficulties are higher, the people who aren't you have all sorts of crazy buffs you don't get, there are horrendous consequences for failure, and there's far more treasure available to be stolen. If your game features cyborgs and magi bumbling about in hilarious comedies of errors, space is not the place for them. If your game features carefully-planned heists by teams of professional thieves, space is somewhere they'll thrive.
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Stahlseele
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There is some gear that i would think could be beneficial up there.
Cyberlimb Magnetic System, foot anchors, gecko hands . .
All these will help you actually stay where you want to be.
One could argue that getting an internal airtank might be able to help in some situations, but at the same time, it's a metal tank that is under pressure from the compressed air inside it and when you put that somewhere where the ambient pressure is lower, i imagine the stress on that might be something that you won't like the effects of.
Power-Armor if the sealing would maybe work as a make shift space suit, but every penetrating hit would more or less spell instant death outside i guess.
By the way, this isn't just a setup because somebody took incompetence:pilot spacecraft in character generation to get some points right? ^^
Cyberlimb Magnetic System, foot anchors, gecko hands . .
All these will help you actually stay where you want to be.
One could argue that getting an internal airtank might be able to help in some situations, but at the same time, it's a metal tank that is under pressure from the compressed air inside it and when you put that somewhere where the ambient pressure is lower, i imagine the stress on that might be something that you won't like the effects of.
Power-Armor if the sealing would maybe work as a make shift space suit, but every penetrating hit would more or less spell instant death outside i guess.
By the way, this isn't just a setup because somebody took incompetence:pilot spacecraft in character generation to get some points right? ^^
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Username17
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The reduced pressure of hard vacuum is completely meaningless for an internal air tank. It's rigid and is designed to handle large pressure differentials. The difference between sea level and hard vacuum is 16 PSI. The conventional limit for oxygen tanks is 3000 PSI. It's literally two orders of magnitude worth of not giving a shit.
The Elemental Movement power doesn't help you get into space very much. It doesn't give you additional momentum, it allows you to cover distance in less time. It's a sustained power, and when you pass into a mana void, the extra virtual speed is all lost. All it's really doing is saving you time and fuel getting to the edge of space. If it normally takes you a 2 minute burn to get out of the atmosphere, a Force 10 spirit will get you there in 38 seconds. That's a lot of fuel saved, but you're also not traveling very fast and you'll need to keep burning for quite a while (albeit with a fair savings in reduced gravity and air resistance) to get to your target speed.
But you know what's even more fuel saved? Telekinetically raising your payload to the edge of space and starting your burn from there.
-Username17
The Elemental Movement power doesn't help you get into space very much. It doesn't give you additional momentum, it allows you to cover distance in less time. It's a sustained power, and when you pass into a mana void, the extra virtual speed is all lost. All it's really doing is saving you time and fuel getting to the edge of space. If it normally takes you a 2 minute burn to get out of the atmosphere, a Force 10 spirit will get you there in 38 seconds. That's a lot of fuel saved, but you're also not traveling very fast and you'll need to keep burning for quite a while (albeit with a fair savings in reduced gravity and air resistance) to get to your target speed.
But you know what's even more fuel saved? Telekinetically raising your payload to the edge of space and starting your burn from there.
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Lago PARANOIA
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All this talk about integrating magic and aerospace engineering really makes me wonder which settings, aside from Shadowrun, are built from the ground up with this sort of thing.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
I dont know any settings that integrate magic and aerospace engineering. Not even Shadowrun does that. Its arguable if Shadpwrun integrate magic and technolgy even.. I dont see the mana powered aircrafts or the technological focis, etc..
Dictionary of Mu suggests demonic-powered spacefaring but thats another story.
Dictionary of Mu suggests demonic-powered spacefaring but thats another story.
Last edited by silva on Sat Aug 23, 2014 3:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
The traditional playstyle is, above all else, the style of playing all games the same way, supported by the ambiguity and lack of procedure in the traditional game text. - Eero Tuovinen
24 cents is actually a bad estimate. That's a retail price, and it both accounts for transmission and fails to account for the massive time-of-day variance (wholesale prices regularly go negative).FrankTrollman wrote:The power plants to give up 7MJ quite cheaply exist today. 7 megajoules is just 1.94 kilowatt hours, which costs a little less than 24 cents off the grid to households in the United States. The actual energy costs for running such a mass driver would be like a quarter per kilogram. The infrastructure is horrendously expensive, but the energy is a rounding error once you have all the ground based magnetic tracks set up.
-Username17
If you use primarily your own transmission system and schedule your launches for 2AM, you have a good chance of actually making money off your launches.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
Modern technology is, collectively, the culmination of several millennia of hard-core optimization for the actual rules of reality. If you think about it, aircraft are extraordinarily munchkiny: "Oh, I need to conserve momentum, and can't fly because I don't have reaction mass? That's okay, I'll just move enough air to throw me around."Lago PARANOIA wrote:All this talk about integrating magic and aerospace engineering really makes me wonder which settings, aside from Shadowrun, are built from the ground up with this sort of thing.
But within that, you might try Starshield. That universe assumes eight (iirc) sometimes-overlapping rulesets for reality (including ours). Anyone who travels between them uses vehicles built for more than one ruleset.
I'ts not great, but I always wanted to give it a try. It's built on a a Weiss & Hickman trilogy, which wasn't even finished.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
I'm inclined to say that all maneuvering rolls in microgravity use Climbing, because in microgravity, every direction is down. That will mean that all the existing equipment that contributes to Climbing will be useful, and I don't need to invent new equipment or add bonuses to old equipment. It also lets the person who bought the Athletics skill group show off, which is nice.Stahseele wrote:There is some gear that i would think could be beneficial up there.
Cyberlimb Magnetic System, foot anchors, gecko hands . .
All these will help you actually stay where you want to be.
One could argue that getting an internal airtank might be able to help in some situations, but at the same time, it's a metal tank that is under pressure from the compressed air inside it and when you put that somewhere where the ambient pressure is lower, i imagine the stress on that might be something that you won't like the effects of.
Power-Armor if the sealing would maybe work as a make shift space suit, but every penetrating hit would more or less spell instant death outside i guess.
A hard vaccuum isn't actually as deadly as you'd think as long as the human body isn't exposed directly to it. If your suit is pierced with a bullet-sized hole, it will slowly depressurise but the pressure inside will stay even enough that you won't explosively depressurise (this is especially true if it's a rigid suit rather than one inflated like a balloon.) Mountain climbers can handle pressures down to about 0.5 atmospheres, which means that you can lose half of your air before you slap some duct tape over the hole and then reinflate it from your tanks.
<.<Stahlseele wrote:By the way, this isn't just a setup because somebody took incompetence:pilot spacecraft in character generation to get some points right? ^^
>.>
....no.... why would you say such a thing?
*hides character sheets*
This hurts my brain. The concept that you can travel 8 kilometres in a second without having a speed of 8km/s is as close to Lovecraftian madness as I have ever come. Any moment now the world is going to start looking like non-Euclidean geometry. Mask, no mask.FrankTrollman wrote:The Elemental Movement power doesn't help you get into space very much. It doesn't give you additional momentum, it allows you to cover distance in less time. It's a sustained power, and when you pass into a mana void, the extra virtual speed is all lost. All it's really doing is saving you time and fuel getting to the edge of space. If it normally takes you a 2 minute burn to get out of the atmosphere, a Force 10 spirit will get you there in 38 seconds. That's a lot of fuel saved, but you're also not traveling very fast and you'll need to keep burning for quite a while (albeit with a fair savings in reduced gravity and air resistance) to get to your target speed.
However. Working within the madness, this basically means that magical assisted transport is meaningless since it won't help you achieve your actual orbital velocity. We need genuine velocity from somewhere, and if magic can't assist then we can fall back on mankind's dearest friends, Fire and Electricity. They can assist us.
To physics for a moment: Orbital velocity calculations measure from the centre of the earth. The radius of the earth is 6400 km. Another 6km from a mountain, or even 70km from the edge of the atmosphere, is not going to change things appreciably. You'll still need to reach 7 - 8 km/s no matter where you start.FrankTrollman wrote:But you know what's even more fuel saved? Telekinetically raising your payload to the edge of space and starting your burn from there.
-Username17
You know what's even more fuel saved, though? Not having to start a burn at all because you don't carry fuel. If you use a space gun and not a rocket, you escape the tyranny of the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation since you don't have to carry your own fuel. Bingo, you've saved between ten and a hundred times the mass of the payload.
As such, it's less important to launch from orbit than it is to launch from a place which has the infrastructure for a space gun. Since you can't build one of those at 70km, lifting yourself up there isn't going to help.
Frank can answer this better than I can, but I am not a hundred percent sure that Shadowrun was built to handle this sort of thing at all. The fact that it allows me to increase my velocity without increasing my velocity is evidence thereof.All this talk about integrating magic and aerospace engineering really makes me wonder which settings, aside from Shadowrun, are built from the ground up with this sort of thing.
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Stahlseele
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@Laertes:
Now i am thinking Grapple-Hand, magnetic hand, gecko tips and climbing claws might just be the best thing to have as an astronaut on a space walk O.o
And why i would ask . . because it's totally something i'd do ^^
@Headache:
Welcome to Magic.
It does not care for your puny laws of physics.
@Magitech
No, shadowrun does not do well with magitech.
Tech and magic don't want to play together.
Aside from when they totally do because of whoever wrote that abortion come to life called WAR! . .
Now i am thinking Grapple-Hand, magnetic hand, gecko tips and climbing claws might just be the best thing to have as an astronaut on a space walk O.o
And why i would ask . . because it's totally something i'd do ^^
@Headache:
Welcome to Magic.
It does not care for your puny laws of physics.
@Magitech
No, shadowrun does not do well with magitech.
Tech and magic don't want to play together.
Aside from when they totally do because of whoever wrote that abortion come to life called WAR! . .
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Username17
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Movement operates through space folding rather than velocity increasing. This was done because the original authors were very concerned about people using spirit movement to hyper accelerate bullets to make them do more damage. It also bypasses questions of whether movement based acceleration or deceleration should turn people inside trucks into raspberry jam.
It is really really powerful, and cuts times and fuel use to travel distances immensely. But it doesn't actually help that much as far as far as acquiring momentum, because it specifically doesn't give you any extra momentum. In terms of flying straight up, even Force 10 movement really just cuts about 90 kilometers off your journey. It happens to be the 90 kilometers with the worst gravity and air resistance of the whole trip, but compared to stellar distances its pretty disappointing.
And as mentioned earlier, with telekinesis, you can bypass the whole 100 kilometers of manasphere and take to the skies with a space craft that isn't even aerodynamic. That's kind of cool, but again not quite the super killer app you might have been looking for.
-Username17
It is really really powerful, and cuts times and fuel use to travel distances immensely. But it doesn't actually help that much as far as far as acquiring momentum, because it specifically doesn't give you any extra momentum. In terms of flying straight up, even Force 10 movement really just cuts about 90 kilometers off your journey. It happens to be the 90 kilometers with the worst gravity and air resistance of the whole trip, but compared to stellar distances its pretty disappointing.
And as mentioned earlier, with telekinesis, you can bypass the whole 100 kilometers of manasphere and take to the skies with a space craft that isn't even aerodynamic. That's kind of cool, but again not quite the super killer app you might have been looking for.
-Username17
But ignoring drag is actually pretty nice, and changes your design constraints.Laertes wrote:To physics for a moment: Orbital velocity calculations measure from the centre of the earth. The radius of the earth is 6400 km. Another 6km from a mountain, or even 70km from the edge of the atmosphere, is not going to change things appreciably. You'll still need to reach 7 - 8 km/s no matter where you start.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
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Stahlseele
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@silva:
dies/goes insane.
dies/goes insane.
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
How easily the setting could be adapted to accomodate transhuman type genegeneering ? Would it be wildly nonsensic if the Azzies or Monobe released a microgravity adapted parahuman ?
The traditional playstyle is, above all else, the style of playing all games the same way, supported by the ambiguity and lack of procedure in the traditional game text. - Eero Tuovinen
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Stahlseele
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SR3 actually had a space adapted phenotype gen therapy if i remember correctly.
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
Genetic modification is totally a big thing in Shadowrun. It would not be odd at all for a space gene mod set to exist.
DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.
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Stahlseele
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err, no, genetech is actually the redheaded stepchild of shadowrun augmentations . . hell, even nanotech, despite being introduced later than genetech, has more stuff you can have and actually use . .
well, at last untill they went full on retarded again in SR4 and basically made it untrostworthy and dangerous . .
well, at last untill they went full on retarded again in SR4 and basically made it untrostworthy and dangerous . .
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Lago PARANOIA
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Sorry, I meant settings for TTRPG systems. Not settings in general. Or even settings for other traditional games. 
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
There was a Starshield game.
http://danielbayn.com/starshield/downloads.html
http://danielbayn.com/starshield/downloads.html
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
So this has been a really, really fucking busy and stressful week, but I've still managed to get a little bit of writing done during lunchtimes. Please tell me what you think; please feel free to criticise my writing style, my knowledge of Shadowrun, my knowledge of physics and my personal hygeine.
I haven't included shadowtalk, much as I enjoy it; if I ever finish this I'll come back and add it.
Microgravity
Unless you're in a station large enough to have centrifugal rings, you'd better get comfortable maneuvering around in microgravity. If you get it wrong, then the best thing that can happen is a humiliating or painful pratfall. In worse situations you can break a limb, or just end up stranded and drifting. My advice to you is to find yourself a nice safe place with plenty of handholds and spend a few days getting used to moving.
There are three things you need to remember about microgravity. They were discovered by an alchemist back in the fifth world, and we name them after him: "Newton's Laws."
1. Unless you apply a force, things remain the same.
If you're stationary, you'll remain stationary. You can waggle your limbs all you like, but unless you either push off against something or throw something, you won't move. Likewise, once you're moving, you'll stay moving unless you either slam into something or throw some stuff. Flailing wildly at the void won't help.
Spacers like to say "every direction is down", and this is why. Once you push off against something, you're going to carry on moving away from it forever, which is not unlike falling. That's right: in space you can fall in any direction. A lot of people develop agoraphobia or vertigo from this. To be honest they're not wrong to fear it either: drifting endlessly until you die of thirst has to be every spacer's worst fear.
The worst sort of "at rest" isn't moving or being stranded drifting though: it's spinning. Once you start rotating you'll stay rotating, and that can be too disorienting to allow you to get your bearings and fix your situation. It's pretty nauseating too - for the love of god, do not throw up inside a void helmet. Even if you don't choke, you will never get the smell out of the filters.
Speaking of nausea, the most annoying consequence of this law is that your inner ear is going to keep spinning even if the rest of you doesn't. Flashy moves and quick flips in microgravity are going to lead to you wrecking your sense of balance at best and throwing up everywhere at worst. Leave this sort of thing to the veterans.
2. Force equals mass times acceleration.
Look at that equation. Notice that there's no "weight" in it - even if you're weightless you still have mass, which means you still have inertia. I swear, I see more dumbasses get hurt by ignoring this one than any other rule. They think that just because they can skip daintily across the void it means they'll land just as easily, and then when they do land they end up breaking bones. Worse, they think that microgravity means you don't have to learn how to land properly. You still have the same mass as you did on earth, which means it's no easier to stop yourself than it is on earth.
Another consequence of this law is that you have to be careful about pushing off against things. It's too easy to use all your strength and enjoy flying, but that "all your strength" can often end up propelling you at unsafe speeds. For those of you who have wired reflexes, you can probably do gymnastics in the void while shooting along faster than any sprinter, but the rest of us can find that pretty taxing. If things are moving too quickly, you make mistakes and then you break bones or die or soar off into the void and never get seen again.
3. All forces point both ways.
If you push against a wall, both you and the wall move. The wall is part of a spacecraft and a spacecraft is lot bigger than you are so it's going to move much slower, but you're still applying a force and so it's still going to be pushed out of rest, even if only by a small amount. Normally this cancels out perfectly because you're eventually going to rebound off the opposite wall, which pushes the spacecraft the other way and balances it out. However, in some cases it doesn't - for example, if you push off into the void, or fire a bullet, or dump trash. In these cases you're going to knock the spacecraft very slightly off its previous course; probably not enough to matter, but in the case of orbital craft or stations with very precise orbits, it could be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
This also applies to you when you're floating around. Every bullet you fire and every breath you exhale pushes you a little. This isn't recoil like you're used to it, where it jerks you for a moment and then stops. This is force, which means it accelerates you. Unless you're applying a counterforce from somewhere, it's going to make you drift. More worryingly, unless the force is perfectly aligned to your centre of mass it's going to make you spin. If you're used to firing a pistol with a Weaver stance or a longarm pressed against your cheek, it's not going to be aligned at all - you're going to find your head going backwards and your feet going forwards, until you're tumbling literally head over heels. Even if it isn't strong enough to throw you off your perch, it's going to be enough to ruin your aim.
System
When you're in microgravity, all skill rolls which involve a physical characteristic (Body, Strength, Agility and Reactions; or if you're playing in my game then Body, Agility and Reactions) drop one hit from each roll. If you rolled two hits, count it as one. If you rolled one hit and two glitches, then count it as no hits, which in that example makes it a critical glitch.
This does not apply to other rolls which use physical characteristics, for example initiative. This also does not apply if you're in a centrifugal space station, because while you are technically still in microgravity, to all intents and purposes you're not.
Experienced spacers will have ways to overcome this, either using skills, augmentations or adept powers. All of these methods of overcoming the microgravity penalty have the same result: they give the spacers three additional dice on all skill checks where they would take the microgravity penalty. I recommend that you do not stat these because otherwise players will want to take them, spending their perfectly good nuyen, Karma or Essence on stuff which is going to be worthless for the rest of the campaign.
If you really want to allow players to overcome the microgravity difficulty spike, I recommend that you invent a method of doing so which is a piece of obnoxiously bulky, immediately noticeable normal gear. It should not be an activesoft or form of 'ware because these will unfairly penalise magicians who can't use them. Space is hard enough on the magicians, they don't need to be penalised further by being the only person on the team who has to suffer through microgravity.
I haven't included shadowtalk, much as I enjoy it; if I ever finish this I'll come back and add it.
Microgravity
Unless you're in a station large enough to have centrifugal rings, you'd better get comfortable maneuvering around in microgravity. If you get it wrong, then the best thing that can happen is a humiliating or painful pratfall. In worse situations you can break a limb, or just end up stranded and drifting. My advice to you is to find yourself a nice safe place with plenty of handholds and spend a few days getting used to moving.
There are three things you need to remember about microgravity. They were discovered by an alchemist back in the fifth world, and we name them after him: "Newton's Laws."
1. Unless you apply a force, things remain the same.
If you're stationary, you'll remain stationary. You can waggle your limbs all you like, but unless you either push off against something or throw something, you won't move. Likewise, once you're moving, you'll stay moving unless you either slam into something or throw some stuff. Flailing wildly at the void won't help.
Spacers like to say "every direction is down", and this is why. Once you push off against something, you're going to carry on moving away from it forever, which is not unlike falling. That's right: in space you can fall in any direction. A lot of people develop agoraphobia or vertigo from this. To be honest they're not wrong to fear it either: drifting endlessly until you die of thirst has to be every spacer's worst fear.
The worst sort of "at rest" isn't moving or being stranded drifting though: it's spinning. Once you start rotating you'll stay rotating, and that can be too disorienting to allow you to get your bearings and fix your situation. It's pretty nauseating too - for the love of god, do not throw up inside a void helmet. Even if you don't choke, you will never get the smell out of the filters.
Speaking of nausea, the most annoying consequence of this law is that your inner ear is going to keep spinning even if the rest of you doesn't. Flashy moves and quick flips in microgravity are going to lead to you wrecking your sense of balance at best and throwing up everywhere at worst. Leave this sort of thing to the veterans.
2. Force equals mass times acceleration.
Look at that equation. Notice that there's no "weight" in it - even if you're weightless you still have mass, which means you still have inertia. I swear, I see more dumbasses get hurt by ignoring this one than any other rule. They think that just because they can skip daintily across the void it means they'll land just as easily, and then when they do land they end up breaking bones. Worse, they think that microgravity means you don't have to learn how to land properly. You still have the same mass as you did on earth, which means it's no easier to stop yourself than it is on earth.
Another consequence of this law is that you have to be careful about pushing off against things. It's too easy to use all your strength and enjoy flying, but that "all your strength" can often end up propelling you at unsafe speeds. For those of you who have wired reflexes, you can probably do gymnastics in the void while shooting along faster than any sprinter, but the rest of us can find that pretty taxing. If things are moving too quickly, you make mistakes and then you break bones or die or soar off into the void and never get seen again.
3. All forces point both ways.
If you push against a wall, both you and the wall move. The wall is part of a spacecraft and a spacecraft is lot bigger than you are so it's going to move much slower, but you're still applying a force and so it's still going to be pushed out of rest, even if only by a small amount. Normally this cancels out perfectly because you're eventually going to rebound off the opposite wall, which pushes the spacecraft the other way and balances it out. However, in some cases it doesn't - for example, if you push off into the void, or fire a bullet, or dump trash. In these cases you're going to knock the spacecraft very slightly off its previous course; probably not enough to matter, but in the case of orbital craft or stations with very precise orbits, it could be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
This also applies to you when you're floating around. Every bullet you fire and every breath you exhale pushes you a little. This isn't recoil like you're used to it, where it jerks you for a moment and then stops. This is force, which means it accelerates you. Unless you're applying a counterforce from somewhere, it's going to make you drift. More worryingly, unless the force is perfectly aligned to your centre of mass it's going to make you spin. If you're used to firing a pistol with a Weaver stance or a longarm pressed against your cheek, it's not going to be aligned at all - you're going to find your head going backwards and your feet going forwards, until you're tumbling literally head over heels. Even if it isn't strong enough to throw you off your perch, it's going to be enough to ruin your aim.
System
When you're in microgravity, all skill rolls which involve a physical characteristic (Body, Strength, Agility and Reactions; or if you're playing in my game then Body, Agility and Reactions) drop one hit from each roll. If you rolled two hits, count it as one. If you rolled one hit and two glitches, then count it as no hits, which in that example makes it a critical glitch.
This does not apply to other rolls which use physical characteristics, for example initiative. This also does not apply if you're in a centrifugal space station, because while you are technically still in microgravity, to all intents and purposes you're not.
Experienced spacers will have ways to overcome this, either using skills, augmentations or adept powers. All of these methods of overcoming the microgravity penalty have the same result: they give the spacers three additional dice on all skill checks where they would take the microgravity penalty. I recommend that you do not stat these because otherwise players will want to take them, spending their perfectly good nuyen, Karma or Essence on stuff which is going to be worthless for the rest of the campaign.
If you really want to allow players to overcome the microgravity difficulty spike, I recommend that you invent a method of doing so which is a piece of obnoxiously bulky, immediately noticeable normal gear. It should not be an activesoft or form of 'ware because these will unfairly penalise magicians who can't use them. Space is hard enough on the magicians, they don't need to be penalised further by being the only person on the team who has to suffer through microgravity.
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Stahlseele
- King
- Posts: 5977
- Joined: Wed Apr 14, 2010 4:51 pm
- Location: Hamburg, Germany
Gear like the full gyro system usually used to hold heavy weapons?
Heavy, bulky, impossible to not notice, but because of how it works it will stabilize you, while you are still moving?
Technically, if connected to the user via DNI(Trode-Net/Skin-Link), then the user could use it to spin himself in every way he so desires and stop spinning immediately too right?
Heavy, bulky, impossible to not notice, but because of how it works it will stabilize you, while you are still moving?
Technically, if connected to the user via DNI(Trode-Net/Skin-Link), then the user could use it to spin himself in every way he so desires and stop spinning immediately too right?
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
Well, angular momentum is conserved, so a gyro system can't reduce your total quantity of spinning. It might be able to spin something you're holding so you stop spinning.
The gear you probably want is a suit with a fancy thruster rig that will trigger an appropriately aligned counterthrust when you shoot or whatever.
The gear you probably want is a suit with a fancy thruster rig that will trigger an appropriately aligned counterthrust when you shoot or whatever.
DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.