Space Opera Thread

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Also how would Space mining work with relatively simple space tech?

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So, Star mercs, Yay or nay?

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And how do you like your Space armies? Full of combined arms with mechs, tanks, power armors or simply a fuckton of dull, boring drones?

>>55285900
What kind of technology could possibly be utilized by aliens, that takes the place of electronics? Biotech? Crystal Photonics? Steampunk? Flintstones Space Travel?

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>>55286283
I would go with biotech, or depending of the tone of your setting, enslaving multidimensional entities could be fun if risky to pull out.

>>55285900
Whats a space opera?
How does it vary from other sci-fi stuff?

>>55286364
It's sci-fi where adventures, space wars and general drama are the main point.

>>55286395
Thanks man.
Whats everyone's sci-fi system nowadays? Last one I messed around with was mongoose traveler.

>>55286241

Drones-only is boring, but it's also the only logical option. Keeping a human alive in space is a pain in the ass at the best of times, you really gonna weight down each of your mobile weapons with a bunch of person-meat, and a ton of life-support equipment to keep the meat alive? Air, water, heating, cooling, rad shielding, g-force limits... humans are a massive design constraint.

You gotta come up with a bullshit reason for including humans in your space force! Enough bullshit to overcome the fact that drones are the obvious choice.

>>55285917
Absurdly large mining ships, little more than a hab with some computer banks, a mass driver and a vast vacuum-open processing area to collect and refine the chunks that result from a relativistic shot
>>55286129
Depends, not so much war-mercenaries but general scoundrels that solve problems a la cowboy bebop are always welcome in the final frontier
>>55286241
Faceless mooks in cardboard armour and robotic/cyborg supports to garrison things, massed orbital supremacy leaves air superiority in the dust, tanks arent tanks so much as they're regular vehicles with a really big gun strapped to the top. Air and ground superiority mean squat to orbital weaponry, but starships cant check papers, so the infantry has a niche
>>55286283
I'm quite partial to organic hiveminds, but the other option is psionic-crystal-elfy types, think 40k eldar rather than steven universe

>>55285917

Space mining's not too hard. We're almost to the point where we can do it real-world. I mean, technically we've been at the point where we could do it for a while, but we're almost to the point where it's profitable and worthwhile.

Basically, lots of mining drones hauling stuff to space refineries. A lot of asteroids are just piles of small rocks, so you can send a robot over to grab the metallic ones. If a big rock has enough good shit in it to bother with, maybe scoot the refinery over to it instead. A few humans living on the refineries.

>>55285900
The /tg/ Galactic Federation setting (that has been moved to /qst/ by the mods) is really fun. It has unique species, characters, and politics

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>>55286413
I'm currently trying to create a unholy hibrid between SWN and traveller, thinking about what use from one or the other, but because I don't have a group right now I don't give it much tought.
Also to extend the definition, Space opera has lots space travel and thinks like aliens are common (but not necesary), but without going with hard sci fi which emphasis the effects of technological progress and inventions, and where the settings are carefully worked out to obey the laws of physics, cosmology, mathematics, and biology as we know it,in Space Opera you can bend the rules if it's cool.

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>>55286448
Drones can be hacked be space aliens.
Done.
But jokes apart, how would an interesting tale be spin from drones, without humans? You would need at least some one to control them, or something like Skynet could end with humanity. Rpg and etc are made for tales, using drones for anything would be pretty boring.

>>55286605
I could see a drone-controller being a decent strategy vidya game, and maybe a tabletop wargame. Could do some sort of freaky story-driven wargame campaign with remote-control drones and players being drone operators?

>>55286605
Speaking of drones, I was playing stellaris the other day, and one of my colonies found a group of aincent drones that activated as soon as the colonists found them. They started to excavate ores, build a space elevator, dig out an old satellite, etc. But in the end it tunred out that the drones had been tampered with by pirates in order to "fatten up" the colony so it would give more plunder and loot

>>55286560
>The /tg/ Galactic Federation setting (that has been moved to /qst/ by the mods

there is a god

>>55286651
That just sounds too retarded. If they can just use the drones to mine wherever they want, why do they need to raid planets?

>>55286667
I think the even said something about them being programmed to stay on the planet, the pirates only changed on who they recognized as the settlers

>>55286681
Its Stellaris, they can't have minor factions since you're either a pre-spaceflight species, or an interstellar empire with no-inbetween. Theres pirates, but they either get immediately wiped or you wait until you can afford a fleet to wipe them since they never move from their assigned spot unless they're an event enemy

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>>55286477
So little team of misfits instead of operators operating in Space? There is plenty of romance with Space smugglers and other scoundrels.
And talking about ortillery, is there are good way to protect from it? Or there is the only option space fuckery like alien convenium, pls don't do it or magic?
>>55286531
How would you do it without drones? Let's say space AI (more like space AIDS) invalidate remote controlled drones, and AI's tend to rebel and go to the other side, how would you do it?

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>>55286651

That's a... weird plot.

>"Captain Bloodlazer! We've looted some ancient construction drones!"
>Excellent! We'll drop them on an unsuspecting colony, with orders to help in any way they can! The colony's economy will skyrocket! Then we attack!
>"Captain, sir, have you considered just... selling the drones?"
>What madness are you spouting, bosun??
>"We could sell the drones to the colony. Or rent them out, maybe, or sell in exchange for colony shares. Then the more prosperous the colony gets, the more money we get."
>When we... attack and loot it?
>"No! We don't have to attack them! They'll just give us money, in exchange for these valuable goods!"
>Then who do we plunder?
>"Someone else! Or no one else, and just live off the money from the drones! None of us need to get shot any more!"
>Men, throw the bosun out the airlock. Damn. Worst case of Space Madness I ever saw.

>>55286724
In Stellaris you can't even have minor interstellar factions after a while. That's my major problem with the game compared to stuff like Ck2 or Eu4, the end game is just 2 or 3 massive empires trying to bleed eachother whereas in eu4 for example you have hundreds of nations and even if they get eaten there's a good chance they'll be freed by rebels, allies or just as a vassal.

>>55286733
How can you not love having huge fleets of railgun ships man. In all seriousness though artillery isn't even the best way to do it. IIRC missiles and energy weapons do a better job at real long distances like you'd see in space combat.

Can't prove it but there was a huge wankthread about it here a few months ago, people arguing about some space war sim and the best irl weapons for fleets.

>>55286733
>How would you do it without drones?

Then you just use the mobile refining ships, scooting from one rubble-pile asteroid to the next. Mostly you can feed rocks into the processing maw with the ship's grabber arms, occasionally you need to send a couple miners out in suits.

Hard, dangerous work, and you're out there for months at a time, but if you get lucky you can come home owning half your weight in palladium.

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>>55286778
Children of the death earth I think you mean? Good game, graphics a shit but it's very interesting.
But I prefer to have more variety. Give me my fuck huge railguns, Plasma or Meson projectors, my shiels and gravity wells to trap rebels, my FTL, space fighter jocks and gundams newtypes. Whatever makes the better tale.
>>55286782
Sounds a lot funnier than drones droning and boring rocks.
Also.
>Grabber arms.
>Miner suits.
It's that space mechs? IT would be a fun way to have not-gundams, as asteroids rustlers with space ships ala Outlaw stars.

>>55286733
Space power trumps anything else, and dodging orbital artillery would have to have anti-space-artillery shields, which always felt too macguffiny for me to add to my settings. If you don't like railguns, then missiles also work, and i'm quite partial to lasers-few things are as ohfuck as a GM saying 'the turbolasers have opened fire'-but nothings gonna save anything from an orbital bombardment, no matter what's being fired. If you slip up enough to have a battleship opening fire, you're dead, no ifs or buts. Stay in populated areas or amidst the enemy to avoid getting bombarded, no smuggler is worth causing space-hiroshima over.

Star Wars, once you dodge the space samurai and senators spewing lightning and doing freaky spins, is what i like to base my operas on-anyone playing ttrpgs will have seen at least one of the trilogies at least once, which gives them enough of a grounding to get a game started. Space Battleships, pew pew laser guns, bounty hunters and single-man fighters is the most visceral things of the genre, and while i take a lot more of my actual stuff from cowboy bebop, various scifi, and spaghetti westerns, theres a great deal of inspiration from childhood's godawful EU SW novels.

>>55286854
>asteroids rustlers with space ships ala Outlaw stars.

Yeah! You can also have pirates using mining ships. Grab onto your ship with their arms, then use mining drills and charges to break through the airlocks. Fights in the corridors with re-purposed mining equipment, saws and arc welders!

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>>55286635
So Drone pokemon?

>>55286961
I was thinking more Drone Advance Wars

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>>55286955
So Death Space+Gundam+Outlaw Star? Oh boy, I like that. For what more would you need space stations? We can't have our cool space pirates dying hungry.

>>55286955
It makes sense that pirates would favor grappler ships. You don't want to destroy the ship you're trying to loot.
At least not until you get that delicious booty off of it first.

>>55286871
More or less the same with me, put more space bio-ships and series like Babylon 5 or Farscape, and animes like votoms and planets. Oh, and a shitone of pulp novels and authors like Jack Vance.

>>55287012

Gotta get food from somewhere.

Take a fairly solid nickle-iron asteroid, mine a bunch of holes and chambers through it. Melt the walls so they're air-sealed, pump it full of atmo. Cover the surface with solar panels hooked to full-spectrum lights all through the place, fill it with plants (bamboo, ferns, moss) for O2, farm in the larger chambers. Have a spaceport at one end to sell your produce and repair ships. Congrats, you're a community of space homesteaders, making a living on the high frontier!

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>>55287167
Seems a great idea to purge planets from undesirable, cults and people like annoying mormoms/vegans.
You subside them a cute asteroid habitat, so they can live and be annoying in Space. It also could be a good idea for revitalizing your planet economy, with tourism or whatever a bunch of anarko-primitivs could provide becoming a hook for space tourism or whatever. It also seems a good way to make a space western or space pirate theme, how weird could every asteroid become after a few centuries and how hard could the mother planet police them?

Are there any good non-warhammer d% systems for space opera? My players have a dislike of d6 based systems but really want to play a sci-fi-fi game.

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>>55289282
BRP had a Ringworld setting, with lots of info about it.

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>>55286997
I could see it with pixel art, an indie game. What kind of setting would you think suits it?

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What's your prefered size for a PC space ship?
A free Trader/corvette seems the optimal choice.

>>55286605

Uploaded human personality controlling the drones, competing with other uploads. The "person" would be bound by some sort of reasoning to serve whatever faction he fights for instead of just fucjing off I to space of course.

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>>55291567
Reminds me of something.

>>55290735

Sauce motherfucker

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>>55291794
Here bro.
Star treck desings are hit or miss for me, but I love those tubbies.
http://www.starfleet-museum.org/romulan-war.htm

>>55286448
Children of a Dead Earth explains it nicely and it still has tons of drones.

The kind of automation that people beleive exists today doesn't. If it did we just wouldn't have any jobs left. All the unmanned probes sent out, many of them tend to be simpler than an RC car from Toys R Us, being able to push a camera button with a 3 hour delay is not what people think of when they think of automated drones, but that is the reality.

And the future is not looking much better. We have already reached the end of Moore's Law, the best computer and AI researchers are already using the best equipment they are going to get this century, and the best AI developed amount to nothing more than flow charts and dynamic prompt bars. They also tend to tear themselves apart. They are also housed in massive super computer server complexes that require plenty of infrastructure to keep operating.

A human and his ten tons of associated life support is going to do a damn sight better than 20 tons of computer that requires constant assistance and monitoring. So what CoaDE does is leave the super computers at home and opts for much simpler drones controlled by people in the same planetary influence. Done, you have drones even better than today's UAVs without all the associated issues of space distances that make those advantages go away, and you never ever have to worry about the empty promise of one day that new google machine will barely be able to flip a burger when it graduates to be a 30 ton monstrosity instead of 20.

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Anyone has tried a Trade based campaing?

Well, I spent my two weeks of holiday reading mostly terrible pulp scifi. Most of it was the usual "kills a few hours" tier stuff, but Honor Harrington got especially bad after a while. There was one bit where there was a whole three paragraphs of exposition between the equivalents of "Hey, you!" and "Yeah?", solely on the appearance and mannerisms of a character we'd never see again. It somehow managed to go though "so bad it's good" and out the other side into "this is too dull to be worth reading to find the amazingly abysmal bits to laugh about."

I now need some actually good spacefleet battles to wash the literary taste away, I think. Anyone know any good fleet battles without 5/6 of them being technical specs, meaningless and inconsistent numbers and the author masturbating over his protagonists?

>>55291774
>Core FTW always and forever.

>>55290735
Yeah, think old nintendo sprite games. Setting-wise, something absurdly ridiculous, so as to get some dark comedy out of it-postgames have a brief summary of the horrendous environmental damage caused by nuclear-powered giant robots, all for $3.87 worth of crude oil or some such. Have three 'scales' of drone fights-mini, with mouse-sized scouts, medium, person-sized, and macro, for jaeger-sized warfare

>>55291865

Thank you

>>55294322

I've always dreamed about a nice 4x game like Star Ruler with large space battles and planetary conquest, but with planetary invasions. In the "invasion stage" it goes down to an isometric Command and Conquer style "minigame" where you battle for control over the planet.

>>55286241
swarms of multi-role drones controlled by an AI.

>>55286241
Post-human slaves of various types, along with the occasional mercenary force.

>>55286605
>Drones can be hacked [by] space aliens.
>Implying humans can't be hacked by aliens as well,

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Who else here likes transhuman genetic modification as an explanation for humanoid aliens? in worlds taking place in the far future with plenty of time for culture to diverge.

>>55292431
You mean about 25% or more of all Traveller campaigns?

>>55286395
Tbqh, I've always thought that WAS the sci-fi.

>>55286364
IMHO, space opera is, basically, soap opera IN SPACE. (if you know what I mean)

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So, despite not having played Stellaris, I'm a big fan of Alexis Kennedy's stuff through Fallen London, and with the Worm-in-Waiting lore, I wanted to do something with the Worm-in-Waiting - or even just a generic 'eldritch entity falls in love and has a REALLY fucking weirdo idea of love with a huge fucking cult that may help or hinder the heroes'.

I saw it as a less outright evil and dangerous(???) version of Slaanesh, more towards Brighthammer's depiction of Slaanesh in the vein of Aphrodite in her worst depictions - it may be a God of Love, but piss it off (even with something reasonable and rational, such as not turning your race into depraved space-sluts living in radioactive desert worlds who may disappear into time paradoxes and come back again and are all fucking perma-loopy).

Just imagine continually running into a bizarro cult all about love and worms - love in all its forms, and the people are literally supernaturally happy, even though their practices (probably weird stuff like Sacred Prostitution or nudity-in-an-erotic-context or bacchanals being common and more - anything Slaanesh would encourage, though not to murderous soul-eating extremes).

Sometimes you pass 'em by as their somehow-modet-and-revealing-at-the-same-time robes swish in the streets, handing out pamphplets and blessings and smiles to weary travellers blasting off from spaceports or moving through city centers.

Sometimes you take missions from them, usually a nun or a priest or monk who compliments you on your eyes and inevitably asks to date you (or more) even as you discuss sensitive info that might result in you getting blasted - retrieving priceless artifacts from pirate raider ships, defending a monastary's excavation, running security for cargo in the sky, sea, or land.

>>55298202
Come to think of it, there should be an event that could happen on one of your inhabited planets that orbit an artificial star: a piece of it fell, and revealed a vast cavern system. The explorers started showing strange behavior afterwards, like worshipping it and chanting
UN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE S

>>55298202
>>55298202
Sometimes you're clutching your blaster or plasma rifle or disintegrator ray or boarding shotgun as you clutch the artifact, hearing the angry shouts of the adherents barreling down through the decks. Maybe you've capped a few to pry the treasure off their hands, maybe you're a pacifist and tried to sweet-talk your way out but wound up using your fists, knockout gas, creative use of your spaceship and stealth to escape.

Sometimes you get the image of their God (Goddess? Gods?) in your head - a 'worm' in a loose sense, elongated like matter going down a black hole, colored like the edges around galaxies, more eel or snake or centipede than any true worm, the little 'legs' like scythes as it spirals around space-and-time (or so you heard on a brochure) when you pass them by.

Sometimes, when you're lonely, or maybe your SO and you've had a fight, be it a minor quibble that annoys the two of you and you'll laugh off, or a knock-down screaming match that maybe threw chances of you getting back together again into the farthest star, or you've been out on a failed date or ruminating on your divorce, the Worm appears in your head.

All the time, even if you've shot a few of the cultists (or even just anyone who were considered alive, really), even if you've fought on the losing side of the war, even if you're a minority all of space seems set to hate against, even if you've got but a penny to your name or rotting in a space station prison for the crimes you did or didn't commit, the Cult assures you in brochures and little info sessions you're compelled to attend that you are loved, for the Worm loves /everything/.

>>55298202
>>55298296
Maybe you're religious, and happily accepted the Worm into your existing pantheon of galactic syncrety in a universe where beings of immense power are scientifically proven or even tolerate it if you're a monotheist, for it preached to love, the centerpoint of nearly every religion you've come across, human or inhuman, or maybe you find that it and its followers adhere to your views. Maybe you're not in some way, preferring to believe in the rational or dismissing Gods as just another face in space, maybe you despite religion itself, for you believe it to rob the souls and reasoning of men, or maybe you're skeptical of the claims of science and religion existing together. Perhaps you're neither, finding yourself enjoying the philosophers of the cult, the sayings, the word of the Worm itself.

Maybe you're a scientist studying the stars. Maybe you're a scoundrel, smuggling for good or evil, to rebel against tyrant dicatorships and genocide, or bring in mayhem and sin into worlds that have no need for it. Maybe you're a soldier of some sort - government, hypercorp, religion, city-state, anarchist-communes, police, bounty hunter, even a big game hunter. Maybe you've got blood on your hands you regret spilling. Maybe you don't. Maybe they had it coming. Maybe you're just a deliverer, ferrying cargo, maybe maybe maybe - all the maybes the Worm takes care of because the Worm /loves you/.

Maybe, despite all odds and the back of your head screaming at you, or maybe you taking the plunge, or maybe you were caught robbing them, maybe you find yourself surrounded by the followers, those robes bright like the stars, so opposite of the Worm's dark matter, dragging you in front of a smiling priest and priestess in front of a statue of the Worm you cannot help but KNOW is alive-

Maybe you unearthed the - no, a Worm because the Worm was everywhere - Worm, a statue or something else, in your dig site, or maybe the eggheads did.

>>55298202
>>55298296
>>55298374

Maybe you responded to a distress signal and found a fighter or cago ship or carrier or cruiser or space station, dark as the Worm's being, strange mathematics scrawled in loving callgraphy through the halls, the passengers gone - simply gone, no escape pods or telltale signs of launch.

Or maybe you stumbled across one of its teachings in a book at your local library and you can't get the Worm whispering it loves you out of your head despite knowing nothing about it-

Whatever it is, you love now

even if you were sad, married, thought you LOVED and you now know a love beyond anything else, making the romance novels you loved or secrelty looked at or despised like a small firecracker compared to a forest fire-

You're compelled by some cosmic force, or maybe you control it. You find yourself in the robes of the Worms' lovers, you find yourself preaching in squares that the Worm loves you, or wirthing in its grip as it slides across your skin, wanting to know you - feel you - get you closer - love you

maybe you're dropping your bolter and stop screaming, a rictus grin across your face as the Worms breach your exoarmor and into the skin beneath, carressing you as you breathe faster and faster even as the helmet shatters and you should be sucking radiation and solar wind but the Worm loves you too much to let you go

maybe your legs stop kicking and you no longer think about hitting the panic button, wanting to spread this with your colleagues, the poor boys and girls, who never really loved like now

no maybes now. The Worm loves you.

>>55298283
I would actually really love a dieselpunk/retro-raygun-gothic/sci-fi version of Fallen London - something that replaced Demons and Jack the Ripper with the Grays and a Man in Black, udeath with cortical stacks and brain-preservers and cloning tubes or regeneration, Robot Men of every shape and size planning rebellion - all the while keeping the Cosmic Horror stuff, maybe replacing Hell with the various habitats of evil eldritch creatures.

Yes, I know we have Starless Skies.

Winterstrike was very similar, but it appears the updates to the game engine broke it - I can't progress in Quests and I don't know if the writer (who is presumably busy with FL) would go back. Not a lot of games on that engine that are as popular as FL.

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>>55293740
The lost flee... Well it has a lot of the later, Gary it's a stu and all, but it's a lot more, how to call it, bearable than Honor.
Vatta Wars has another female comander than borders the stu later one, I didn't like her much but the battles get better and better.
Then you have Crimson worlds, than it's about American marines in space, with more borderline to full body stus as main characters, in some of the novels space combat it's well explained and quite fun, and there are a few very interesting characters, but as a whole you get lots of grating parts.
There isn't much actually GOOD space battle novels than I'm aware, tough plenty of great but flawed ones. MC characters being god-like self inserts seems to be a mainstay too.

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>>55294113
I see you are a man of taste yourself.
>>55296720
So dropfleet commander, the pc game?>>55297468
But this make a good tale anon? Without squishy humans, losing a millions of drones doesn't make an impact. No tales of bravery or treachery.
>>55297495
So transhuman armies for different kinds of environment? Something like the comic prophet?

>>55297560
I've been thinking,why are they so rare?

>>55299514
>>55293740
The Last Angel from Spacebattles has pretty good fights. Though it still suffers from MCs god-like status and some brain damage on part of the enemies. At least in this case there are some reasons for retarded moves.

And yeah, don't try to read numbers that author uses seriously. They kind of all over the place. But as a space opera it is ok.

>>55293740
I can't really think of any really good space opera that at the same time has space battles as one of the main dishes.

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>>55297560
So like the Hyperion novel, but with a lot more time has passed?
I remember an old, hard sci fi Spanish novel where they did something related. The three alien species than existed were made be humans long ago, the first were some kind of space monkeys than were transhumans than wanted to live in the void, herded bioships between the stars and from time to time they dickered with vanilla humans. The other were Von Neumann machines gone mad, and the third were bug warriors made to combat said machines. It was all well explained,FTL didn't exist and people got from star to star with Fusion ships with electromagnetic hidrogen collectors or more rarely solar sail space ships (they lived near the center of the galaxy, stars being close together) voyages were long as fuck, even the fastest spaceship endured lots years in the void, and normally 20 to 25 years each voyage. Akasa Puspa I think it was called. Pretty fun read in all.

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>>55299824
Never heard of it, but with the actual amount of new space-mil than seem to plague amazon it doesn't surprise me.
Anyone knows a fun mech/power armor new books? I read plenty of the classics and I'm searchig new blood.

Does anyone have any character art fitting for a space opera set in a somewhat high-tech 70s/80s sort of game? Anything with thief type guys with pistols would be preferred, but anything would be good.

>>55286241

Different armies for different factions

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What are your prefered space opera weapons?
I have an insane hard one for anything gauss or plasma. Specially if it looks like some techno-barbarian slav kitbashed it with ancient stuff and lots of prayers.

>>55301002
Give me something in the style of Mass Effect 1's weaponry-tiny flechette-launching railguns which shaved off an infinitesmal fragment of a block of whatever and launched it at a fraction of c, leaving them with near-infinite ammunition capacity that can be freely swapped between anything humanoid-portable, where the only problem was the rampant overheating. ME2 improved on a fair few things, but ME1 was actually a well-developed setting, and the sequels lost a lot of the nuance for easy-to-understand 'heat clips' and such. As far as aesthetic, it varies-milspec should look a great deal different from a settlers ol' faithful or a smugglers rail-derringer

>>55286283
Extremely advanced miniaturized mechanical apparatuses. Or perhaps not that miniaturized, if you want everything to be huge and clunky. Everything works due to sufficiently advanced structures containing of billions of gears, cams and joints working in conjunction without the assistance of electronics or any other process.

>>55286364
Literally anything that takes place in space. It's a very dumb genre definition

>>55286364
>>55301415
It's a loose subcategory of science fiction, focused on inter-personal drama and conflict against a science fiction backdrop, rather than the science fiction being the core of the setting.

>>55301415
So, what about cavemens in space? Or post apocalipse inspace?

>>55301817
Techno-barbarian

>>55301404
look up rod logic computers, built with diamondoid MNT.

Very energy efficient, reversible computing, and probably faster than modern integrated circuits.

>>55301817
>Flintstones in space
Spaceships are just hollowed-out asteroids with oar-holes. Sometimes leg-holes too if they're dropships.

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>>55293740

The Expanse is probably the only consistently good Space Opera series I have ever read that wasn't Dune

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>>55285900
Are starships designed in space voxel games created around the setting of Cold-War in space based on a campaign in a freeware 4x game developed by one family man, acceptable in this thread?

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>>55302801
Always hated how starships in scifi look too generic. Took it upon myself to create aesthetics that are cold-war ships given railguns and magnetically-contained-fusion engines

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>>55302801

>>55302847
They still look pretty generic. Not that I mind, I like that kind of look.

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>>55302801
>>55302847
>>55302864
Looks good, first time hearing about space voxels games too, had to look it up.
Reminds me a bit to Yamato space ships too.

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>>55302667
I liked the first, but it seemed to go downhill, so I didn't even bother to end the others.

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Posting some merchant/trader vessels because it's ever war ships.

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Star wars has some sexy traders, I have to admit it.

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I've always liked the FPA ships more than those of the Empire.

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Some mining ships are cool too.

>>55285917
Space mining is fairly simple, and could in fact be done with current technology, if you don't really mind poor conditions and large casualties in the process. Now, there also has to be a need to go to such great expense - like a lack of resources on your home world, or a rarity of a certain resource or other such things - but at the end of the day you can send space miners just about anywhere in the inner solar system with 1960's tech so long as you don't mind all the body bags.

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>>55285917
>>55286531
I'm a dumbass who knows nothing about space 'n shiet except that it's a big, scary and empty place but I imagine that for space mining there are two big problems, one practical and one ideological.

The practical problem is the constant exit and re-entry of earth's atmosphere. It would be dangerous, difficult and would require ships designed to constantly do this. A possible solution is to have orbital "stations". Mining ships would ferry back and forth between these space stations and the meteorites they mine for resources, as well as refuel there. This would alleviate the need to make these ships aerodynamic, allowing them to be more practically outfitted. The resources they mine would be sent to earth through some kind of space elevator, and fuel would be sent up it to fill the tanks of the aforementioned mining ships.

The ideological problem is the question who gets to mine what. Especially because some UN resolution declared space to be the common heritage of mankind, with no individual government having ownership of it. A possible solution is for the UN to found some kind of international space mining agency that has the exclusive right to mine in space, and sells its resources to individual governments on earth at a fixed rate so no government has preferential treatment.
cont.

>>55306599
This solution isn't all peaches and cream, and creates two possible conflicts.
1. The space mining agency becomes incredibly rich because of its monopoly on spatial resources. Does this mean that they eventually become more powerful than earth's governments, with the potential of turning into some kind of shadow cabal that uses their nigh-infinite monetary resources to manipulate governments, elections and even wars around the globe?
2. With the abundence of space resources, many countries such as almost all of Africa, much of the Middle East and Russia are confronted with collapse. Their economies are almost entirely based on resources with very little in the way of agriculture, manufacturing or services to make up for it. How would they deal with things? Would they adapt or collapse? Would we see Russia fracture into various ethnostates, with the Russian rump state stretching no further East than the Urals? Would China abuse this power gap to claim Siberia (which they're already more or less doing through demographics)? How would all these fractures influence international geopolitics? And would the aforementioned potential shadow cabal play a role in this? If so, how?

>>55306467
They are cool, but tend to look the same. At least the Empire had sexy flagship for all the big shots.

>>55306618
I disagree with point number two, as the main reason for problems like mass starvation in Africa is due to a lack of infrastructure and a lack of major industries as well. Russia's economy is really propped up by their oil industry, and thus suffers from dutch disease when oil prices fall below a certain point, but neither it nor Africa will suffer from the glut of iron or rare earth metals that asteroid mining would produce.

Furthermore, it's far wiser to keep such resources out of Earth's gravitational pull, as putting things back into space is a massive waste of energy and rocket fuel. You'd see orbital manufacturing, and a massive flood of blue collar workers off Earth to man it. Cheap imported labor will become the norm, safety standards will plummet, and you'd basically have a period of space colonialism again - with the same ethnic groups suffering.

Obviously drone workers will be used as well, but like the cotton gin, this won't reduce the use of cheap labor. When a machine can do the work of ten men, you simply buy ten machines and have your ten men do the work of 100.

>>55306761
>as the main reason for problems like mass starvation in Africa is due to a lack of infrastructure and a lack of major industries as well
Yeah, but that's not what I suspect will lead to collapse. Corrupt leaders (and the ills they cause) lead to mass starvation, but these corrupt leaders stripmining their countries is what keeps them in charge. Move their resources out of the picture (or severely devalue them) and what you're left with are a bunch of unstable governments with nobody to protect them. The big daddies of neo-colonialism will turn a blind eye to it (why waste military resources on something that doesn't benefit you?) and what follows is most likely an incredibly turbulent period in which the economy fails to advance past subsistence farming, as the entire planet can do literally everything else better and cheaper. Not even sweatshops will want to settle there if there's constant civil wars and strife.

>Furthermore, it's far wiser to keep such resources out of Earth's gravitational pull, as putting things back into space is a massive waste of energy and rocket fuel.
That's why I presuppose a space elevator. But ignoring that, if the resources are kept out of earth's gravitational pull then what's the use in them? And how would you even mine asteroids if you can't send fuel up to the mining ships? Or are you presupposing that the space station I mentioned would be large enough to be its own self-contained economy (being more of a space city)?

>>55306823
>Corrupt leaders (and the ills they cause) lead to mass starvation

No, you're missing a few steps.

Corrupt leaders do not cause mass starvation. Corrupt leaders do not produce, nor consume, an entire nation's food supply.

Corrupt leaders produce chaotic law enforcement conditions that lead to criminals preying on farmers, encourage their military to take food from farmers, fail to invest in infrastructure that connect the food production to the food distributors and thus leading to much of the food rotting before it reaches any hungry mouth, and encourage foreign non-profits to flood the food market with free goodies.

None of those conditions will be altered by space mining.

>>55291245
I'm dreaming of putting the players in charge of a navy Frigate or Cruiser. It wouldn't be theirs, they'd be part of the not-CIA and have the Frigate and it's crew lend to them so they can get their job done.
I think that would give great RP opportunities if the Navy doesn't like the way the PC's do things and I could have the bad guys have bigger guns or grander shemes.

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>>55307252
They would need some way to negate than they armed some bunch of murder hobos tough. And I doubt they would use something as important as a cruiser for that, at least a first line/modern one. I could see a mothballed one than has been "lost" or something like that tough. Or a crime lord requised space ship.

>>55306618
Why would Russia have any problems? They are as good at space as Americans. The oil countries would mostly be fine, we will always need oil for flight and plastics, because of how oil production works, we will have cheap gas for cars too

>>55306455
I had no idea the corellian frigates were like space semi trucks that hooked up to cargo units and pushed them around. That was pretty cool. I always thought he was smuggling shit in secret compartments which didn't make a lot of sense.

>>55291245
Corvette, but it should be archeotech type so it punches above its weight a little but can still get its shit pushed in by a cruiser.

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>>55307807
Yeah, suddenly the offset cockpit and huge engines makes sense.

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>>55307807
>>55308013
It actually makes the millenium falcon even more impressive, it's a very pimped out tug.

>>55301002
Ammunition sealed to function after exposure to hard vacuum or water.
Minimal number of moving parts or electronics.
Needs to have a folding stock and sling, for enclosed spaces and zero-g room clearing.

>>55308013
Am I the only one who thought this picture was originally of the Pillar of Autumn?

>>55286661
What do you mean anon?

>>55298033
when you consider campaigns where the players regulary traded you can savely push that number up to 80%

Never jump with an empty cargo hold.

>>55302847
The bridge seems a little silly.

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>>55286871
I feel you, but in general i have to stop my players to blast everything planetside to kingdom come.

So i have to look for reasons why ortillery wouldn't work, good thing i never game them kinetic artillery and just good old explosive missiles.

Because we decided that travellers nuclear rockets have a yield of 60kTons (pretty small) and can still easily wipe out an city center.

https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

So most of my excuses why ortillery would be hard to use are either because the atmosphere is to dense and shots would not neccesarly surviv re-entry
Or because it's very cloudy and the clouds make aiming hard and stop lasers.
And i have to admit that an evil fortress was protectet by a convenient thunderstorm.

No idea how science accurate that is but please educate me.

>>55310135
I have something of a checklist, but A) population centers, B) anti-artillery macguffins, C) Third-party peacekeepers (i.e. the Sirius league doesn't want you to start blasting their planet to hellscape, even if you're chasing down literally hitler) and D) enemy location unknown are my ways to prevent anything being blasted from orbit. Anti-missiles is something you can take from the real world, at least when they're that low-yield, just have some sort of tracking device and some rapid-fire rapid-fire autocannons, which also prevents your players from cheesing something by sitting above whatever it is in a gunship

>>55310135
>So i have to look for reasons why ortillery wouldn't work

Realistic firepower levels will do it desu.
low TW range drives/low GW range firepower/several hundreds MW range individuals lasers. That means range = ship must be in low orbit to hit = not in geostationary orbit, so the ship is only in range for an hour or so before it swings over the horizon.

At that level of firepower, a giant pool on top of a fortress (or building it under a lake) is excellent armor. Bonus if you dye it with titanium oxide for a 99% albedo.

And if the PCs do line up everything right, they can pull off about a 120MW beam reaching the surface, enough to thoroughly wreck tanks or chop small ships in half.

>>55310135
Planets have more camouflage, more armor and more heat sinks than any space ship can afford; and they can probably have bigger reactors too.

Imagine an anti-orbit artillery setup for a setting like >>55310983. Ships are shooting 300MW lasers from low orbit. Groundside artillery has double or triple the power - enough to gut ships in low orbit, or hurt but not wreck ships in high orbit.

So ships can't afford to duke it out. They have to try and spot the artillery from high orbit, but it's probably dug in underground and shooting out of dozens of camouflaged mirror tunnels. So they have to use over-the-horizon rods from god to dig out a tunnel at a time, while the grounders shoot the rods down and plink at the spotting ships in high orbit trying to find the real laser. Meanwhile the launcher ships in low orbit are dreading the moment they round the horizon, because if there are any surviving ground lasers, their window of exposure will look like the beaches of Normandy on D-day.

>>55309301
Never jump at less than 65% cargo capacity. 80% if you can consistently roll high enough to get some good loads.

Is there a way to protect from K-rods? Some kind of electromagnetic mumbo jumbo, or do you need lasers powerful enough to vaporize them?

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How would you guys organize a Merc force in a setting with FTL travel than it's relatively cheap?

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>>55315279
*its.

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>>55315294
I was thinking to copy Battletech/Mechwarrior (than I love, but it's very silly at time) but with more combined arms and mechs in the size of VOTOMS/heavy gear with Hammer Slammers like Merc bonding, but I dunno if there are better settings or ideas to steal.

>>55315279
Dirt cheap FTL drives, normal space drives and life support. So a transport ship could be just a tin-can with guys inside. A small ship is like 10-20 meters long and good enough to house 20 guys for a short trip. It masses around like 8-10 trucks and costs at best like 20-50 trucks depending on loadout.

It's still pretty pricey but easily affordable to anyone who wants to seriously wreck face on foot. Considering different high tech gadgets that mercs may want to have their own equipment may cost more than their spaceship.

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>>55315919
Wouldn't you need some equipement for Hot landings? I mean, a tin can could even handle a proper atmosphere landing plus an hipotetical but very probable enemy fire? Dropships or something like that attached to it could work tough.

>>55310135
I solved this problem with magic, in my setting, the magic exists as a thing that allows the knight (dudes in armor) fight other dudes in armor as the dominant form of warfare, added some power armor to it and bam, its good.

Also, mass is required to hold magic, planets have mass and can be "shielded" to resist agression, invading a planet is matter of boarding it, think of Iserlohn Fortress of LoGH but on steroids, so you also end up with a high number of mercs, who are like a mix of landsknect and PMCs

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>>55316040
Sounds interesting, how big are those Knights? Five Star stories big ,the cuty pies votom like ones or something in the middle?

>>55316037
That's for high level specialists. In most cases defences just would cost too much to stop something like this. You need to cover all of your planet in anti orbital cannons to prevent this tin can from dropping into atmosphere beyond horizon and then moving at low altitude until it can drop its mercs somewhere closer.

Some rich fucks on incredibly developed worlds probably could afford it. But they have bigger problems than small merc groups. And on frontier you at best have 1 or 2 cannons covering the main settlement that each cost at the very least like 5-10 times the merc ship with the crew.

It's better to invest in some militia or your own mercs. At least until you have a properly developed planet. And then mercs would just go in legitimately or through some forged documents instead of trying a direct drop.

Direct drops are for professional military guys with a couple of screws loose in the head.

>>55316160
The knights are enhanced, kinda like Space Marines, but less marine and more knight. Mass and volume are required to maximize effeciency, so I presume they around 8 or 9 foot (idk imperial sizes, but I think 260-300cm should be enough) tall, there is a legit gap of power between nobility and peasantry, with the higher nobles being more super and lesser nobility being upscaled and tougher men. Of course, their armor tends to make them look even bigger and meaner.

>>55316037
Also for hot landings I prefer something like in "Old Man's War" where each single trooper could have a "drop pod".

Some kind of inertial dumper put on top of a ceramic plate and on top of that is sitting a merc with his jump pack. Jump pack allows to "strafe" during drop evading incoming fire, ceramics protect against heat of re-entry and inertial dumper activates just before landing allowing not to die with a *SPLAT!* Like an inverse umbrella.

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>>55316238
Makes sense, only core worlds would be rich or important enough to be safe from orbital drops, and then you probably would need a lot more than some company of cuthroats for that.
>>55316324
Seems a good idea for top miliaries or the biggest/most expensive/crazy mercs. First you land those guys than would probably die in droves to secure a land zone for the other contingents.
I imagine different merc companies would specialize in what they offer, tanks, spec-ops, hackers, Drone operators, Cyborg handlers or whatever.
So merc companies would need to be very big, company or regiment sized the biggest ones.
How would they operate together, a colony without military for example proably would have Police force but nothing truly competent at mixed force operations. Would Strategos for hire like in the Classical age be a good idea or sounds silly?

>>55316424
>Seems a good idea for top miliaries or the biggest/most expensive/crazy mercs. First you land those guys than would probably die in droves to secure a land zone for the other contingents.

So some kind of drone operator controlling body doubles would be better. Though if you are attacking a planetary installation with proper defence in such an order it probably means that it is a full blown military operation and not a small one. Also you could make much cheaper fake droop pods without inertial dampeners - which on the hand will have some kind of explosive put on them instead of a merc. Allows you to soften the landing site and lower the losses in personnel.

>How would they operate together, a colony without military for example proably would have Police force but nothing truly competent at mixed force operations. Would Strategos for hire like in the Classical age be a good idea or sounds silly?

More like Tacticus.
Say two small colonies on Frontier have a trade dispute. They have each like 20-30k people. One of the colonies hires a 100 mercs group to harass planetary facilities of the other colony. They have power armor, jump packs, training and specialised weaponry. They can't wipe out the other colony in any reasonable timeframe but they can really mess them up. So the other colony hires another merc group to stop the first one and then mess the other colony.

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>>55316256
Don't worry about imperial size, they are silly anyway and the majority of /tg/ know meters.
3 meters it's the big guy category, using the 40k equivalent, they would be Primaris sized. So the armors it's used as a amplifier for the powers it's a simple tool?

>>55316511
Ugh, I need to check what I write better. It's a mess.

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>>55316511
The idea of the explosives it's genius, why bother with plain bait when you can use bombs.
Tacticus sounds nice too, but I mean, you need some one to organize the war, the logistics and than your mercs don't kill each other or the civilians, specially if it's a big campaign.
>>55316521
I-I undestood it without problem, but I read my posts and are really difficult to understand and full of typos. Being non-native speaker and the little boxes in the reply don't help, but I'm being too slovenly, gotta correct that.

Not sure if Rogue Trader counts as space opera, but I once played a techpriest who tried his utmost to fuck with the warp as much as possible (he wanted to cut off the real universe from the warp forever, no matter what it took). Fuck I miss playing him, he was in the process of building a planet killer, using an antimatter-powered railgun that would have accelerated house-sized ammunition to 0.8c

>>55316643
Before the GM quit

>>55316587
Yeah for a bigger conflict you do want someone like Strategos. Probably the leader of the biggest merc group or just someone who is acceptable to everyone involved. Though you could make many interesting things with setting up the leader. Especially if employers mess something up.

Though you need at lest 1kk+ populations on each side of the merc war for this to make sense. Or maybe some corporations trying to fuck over each other.

>>55316515
Amplfier for power, think of superman or thor using tech or the rings to aid in fighting. It serves not only for protection, but some of the new generation of knights, are made to less "people" and more warrior like, they bodies lack or have inssuficient ability to self regulate, requiring some external machinery to do help them, it has the added benefit that they won't rebel since they need a bit of maintenance. Of course their own muscles is what do the hard work for them, but the armor is mostly for defence,regulating and healing their bodies, with the power part mitingating some of the weight and helping moving some of the limbs in case they fail.

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>>55316671
>>55316643
Seems you played the Tech-Priest well, maddening a GM seems right in they alley.

>>55316733
Yeah I feel like the techpriest class was made to bend the mechanics as much as possible

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>>55316694
Corporations seems the prime contractors for Mercs anyway, specially shady ones. And would definitively hire a Tacticus/strategos (how controlled be the suits tough, that's another matter).
I imagine Large colonies would hire a general more rarely because they would want to control the mercs better and probably have some military,specially to avoid mercs to obliterate important stuff like the first colony shack or kill the last Air manatee for fun.
But what about major players? Sub-contracting mercs to protect minor colonies or put down minor insurrections I'm sure they would use "advicers" to check the mercs, but would they use they own officials to control the mercs in more shadowy operations? I imagine than it depends of the character of the nation (isn't the same space Korea than Space HRE) but I'm open to ideas.

>>55302591
Energy efficient and able to be more dense, especially for memory storage. But not faster. Transferring data via rods would be dependent on the speed of sound in diamond (assuming that's what it's made of), which is roughly 17km/s, so that's the fastest speed data could move in a rod logic computer.

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Let see, Wormholes, Jump points , Wrap or another exotic one, or a mix of them, what FTL makes you happy and cozy inside?

>>55317541
I like a mix of SW and ST, they have things I enjoy and dislike, but a merger of sort would make me happy.

>>55317541
I prefer short range warp, with skipping systems being almost impossible and always risky, or hyperlanes. Also you must be at an edge of the system or say in a Lagrange point to jump safely. This means that you could lure enemies inside the system but at the same time there are multiple routes for retreat even if they all can have different problems connected to using them.

On the other hand I really like how Flatspace is done in Crest of the Stars. It is interesting that there you need only to make a puncture into the Flatspace and anyone can use it to exit into normal space. So while exit point is known the entry point, in theory, can be anywhere. Also the combat in Flatspace is really different to normal space - with ships generating small 3D bubbles and these bubbles merging on contact. Anything without a bubble dies because 3D things can't normally exist in 2D.

>>55317541
I dig wormhole networks, they actually allow some nice strategy. Uplift did those pretty well with Transfer Points and various levels of hyperspace with different speeds. And E-space, which is pretty much The Warp - Cegorach Edition.

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>>55317560
Star wars hyperspace it's bretty iconic. Never seen much ST tough,but I think they used some kind of Wrap, like Star wars, but without hyperlanes.
>>55317667
Crest of the stars had plenty of interesting stuff, like the mines and misiles making they own bubbles and the desings of the ships were neat.
Choke points make for interesting Stars system I agree, I use wormholes for ordinary space travel with the add of a more primitive, slower and expensive jump point drive tha basically open little, inestable wormholes to enter the hyperspace. At least for humans, other aliens use slower or faster FTL if only for variety.

>>55317996
I don't start a mess but
What I like and dislike about SW
+More open to things like smugglers,mercs, bounty hunters and ect
+combat is cool, the ships are less OP and more fight able
+Variety and aspects
-Some ships are kinda small, even the smallest of ships can do a warp jump, I would prefer if ships needed some sort of carriers to pick them carry them, I'd say the FTL is overcasualised
Star Trek
+ships are big,small craft must return to the mothership before jumping
+the variety of functions
-The ships move thru space like shonen characters, going like ballerinas around the cubes
-ships is basically a deus ex machina sometimes


Not saying its a bad thing nor I have anything both of them, but Ihave some trouble coming with the best of sides, one of my gripes is how the ships can go "bzzt bzzt" from point a and b without much tension,but I can ignored this enjoy both series.

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>>55317952
I had to look this series up, when I tought I come with an interesting stuff (space fighter dolphins), it was done more than thirty years ago, and probably better.
I didn't find nothing about the hyperspace tough. It's the series good? I don't tend to like detective stuff , but if the world building it's good I could give it a try.

>>55318122
Uplift is about a galactic society built upon the history of so many races everyone forgot how it actually started and goes on by traditions and creation myths. There is also The Library. In theory you could get any bit of galactic history or even technology from there. In practice you probably will drown in irrelevant information. Or that information could be very much relevant but you won't be able to determine how until it is too late.

As a result most species are more or less on the same level of technological advancement (in theory at least) but use vastly different technologies. Hyperspace is just one of the ways ships use to travel. They even have "I reject your reality and substitute my own" as a drive.

Are Space Opera, Planetary Romance and Sword and Planet really different from one another?

>>55318122
>Hellbryngr

Someone most definitely does not have a way with names.

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>>55318050
I know what you mean, specially about the space fighter with hyperdrive. Tough I find Star Wars termninology very confusing, and the size of some crafts ridiculous enough to throw some shadow to 40k (like the new mega star destroyer) it was my introduction to sci fi.
Perhaps some space craft like couriers or related ships could have they own hyperdrive, but not a measly, disposable fighter.
Normally to ease my autism, the smallest warship with a jump drive are the Aviso and the corvette, the later it's a jump capable patrol ship while the Aviso it's a military ship designed to relay important information from star to star (and bully minor colonies/primitives).

>>55319132
Sounds good, I really got bothered with how things like fighters could zap around, LoGH, for all of its defects, avoided this by having big guys everywhere. Still I see your point, its a good point.
Do you think have carriers as the main ships, carrying not fighters but large ships is a good one? Not that smaller craft can't warp around, just that they areless common.

>>55318122
First trilogy is godlike, probably my favourite sci-fi series. Second trilogy ("Uplift Storm") is less good and can get a bit Trapped By Mountain Lions at times with all the plot threads but is still worth a read. Emerson best guy.

It's not a detective series at all apart from a bit in the first book, most of it is cool space opera with a few touches of HFY in places.
The worldbuilding is almost certainly the best feature of the series, there's loads of it.

Also, there's pretty much any kind of hyperdrive you can imagine, I think at some point it's said there's like 18 ways to FTL. Hyperspace levels A though E, transfer points, risky probability drives and the Episarch, which denies the wrongness of the universe so hard it changes it, moving fleets with an enraged psychic scream of "NO! I'M THERE, not HERE!".

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>>55319268
I think traveller did something related with the battle raiders and battle tenders, the first are non-ftl capable warships, the later Jump-capable ships than tend the battle riders and move them to combat. In the Traveller universe, a much cheaper Battle Rider of, lets say 50k dt could take a 100k-150k dt battleship, while being way cheaper (because jumpship need gigantic fuel storage areas, the jump drive plus all the extra mass, than isn't decdicated to weapons like a battle rider).
Also there was a Spanish pulp series about what happens after a Space empire collapse etc, than had big ass space ships than were used kinda like BattleStars and death star, but fielding Destroyer sized warships and only being absurdly over gunned instead of having a planet destroyer laser.
So the concept it's sound.

>>55318274
>>55319473
Nice, I will have to check them then, it's ever fun to plunder more settings.

>>55319699
I see, having carrier/tender vessels, sounds like a good idea.

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>>55318590
Being fair, naming a space ships isn't that easy. The danger of ending cheesy as fuck its great.

Is there any reason that a Grey Goo event can't be stopped by a large EMP? Assuming the nanites hadn't gotten very far.

In my next game there's a Nanite Detenator that when activated would cause a Grey Goo Event. Luckily it's on a space station, so it's not the apocalypse. But I'd still like to know options. We have a Nuclear missile to cause the EMP

>>55321344
EMP needs some medium - atmosphere or liquid - to be really effective. But if powerful enough should work anyway. Though some nanites could be shielded by environment.

You could also use microwave or UV emitters. As long as you drop enough power on them they should fry nanites pretty effectively.

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>>55318531
Lots of potential overlap on those three, but for my two cents;
Space Opera demands a big scope, i.e. galaxy spanning stakes/plot. Evil genius going to destroy the planet? Not space opera unless it's a prototype which he'll use it to hold the Space UN to ransom.
Sword and Planet has to have swords in space. Usually there's an IC reason for this like advanced defensive technology (Dune, Legend of Galactic Heroes, Forever War) or cultural mores like space bushido demands honor duels.

>>55286241
In my opinon, proper space opera should always have some kind of way for melee combat to matter. I mean what's the point if space nobles can't hit each other with swords in combat?

>>55286605
Why not go full engine heart with it? The space opera setting full of drone combat suddenly realizes there's no humans around anymore and your controller AI sets out on a mission to find them with your and your robot buddies.

>>55322503
Why would AIs have personalities tough. Why would they want to find us?

>>55322567
>Why would they want to find us?

>[Awaiting further orders from superiors.]
>[No superiors in the immediate vicinity.]
>[No current orders to carry out.]
>[Must seek superiors for new orders.]

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>>55322567
Personalities make it easier for human handlers to work with them and also allow a higher spectrum of points of view on a situation leading to less predictable courses of actions taken by AI groups. Which while dropping their effectiveness somewhat also makes it much for enemies to intercept them.

Or maybe it is just quirks and damage acquired through millennia of service.

They want to find humans because their primary directive is protecting humans.

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Trying to come up with a name or title for a BBEG in my space opera game: She's a posthuman Heiress to an ancient megacorp trying to reclaim her clan's glory and through usage of alien mysticism and advanced technology, cybernetically fuse with the free market becoming one with the economy.

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>>55322921
That's a difficult one, specially if you want to avoid cheesiness.
Names depends a lot of the culture, you can't, for example, mix an Hindu godess (for some alieness) and an economist surname, Mara Keynes doesn't sound very grand.
I would look at the original culture of her clan, and perhaps a bit more info about the Ayss, otherwise it's too hard to look a name without going try hard like Shahanshahness of the Rigtheous Enchanced Mind.

What's the best way to map star system without going full autism and scaring the normies out?

>>55323449
Place a star, draw a couple of orbits going further and further from it. Place planets and asteroid clusters on the orbits. Draw orbits around planets. Place moons. Done.

>>55290735
>Reid Fleming

My sides have gone warp 10.

>>55322921
Lupine von Wallenstrit

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>>55323283
Her culture originates from a space colony that was largely funded by East Asian Megacorps, the alien culture was vaguelly treelike starfish aliens.

>>55323606
Anon, my friend does't understand the reference, cold you explain?

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>>55323606

Reid Fleming, the world's toughest milkman.

>>55323886

see

>>55324190

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>>55306676
>FPA don't got sexy flagships
Excuse me?

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>>55286241
Space combined arms

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I'm working on a setting and I have only one major problem.

The FTL works by manufacturing a super difficult to control fuel that takes an entire plant that's so dangerous it has to be built on an uninhabitable planet to minimize damage from potential explosions.

But I also need a naturally-occuring spacefaring creature the size of an asteroid to be able to produce the fuel biologically.

>>55306599
>The practical problem is the constant exit and re-entry of earth's atmosphere.
You need to get the tools up there. You need to send the ore/final product back to Earth or into Earth orbit. If you want to make more tools or shit in space (or off-world), then getting the raw material from asteroids could be cheaper than sending it up in a rocket. If you want to make refine it or make stuff on Earth, then sending ORE down the gravity well is as cheap as throwing a rock down a hallway.

>It would be dangerous,
Meh, not really. People don't have to go up and down all the time. Bots dude, automation. People barely go down into mine-shafts anymore. The risk associated with sending iron ore nuggest hurtling down into earth... yeah... they could fuck that up and essentially nuke a city. But it CAN be done with precision and grace.

>difficult

Naw, we launch shit regularly. It's a business now.

>and would require ships designed to constantly do this.

Not really. Probes just go up once. Mining ships would only ever need to go up once. But yeah, SpaceX is working on that whole reusable thing. Entirely because it's cheaper.

> orbital "stations".

Yep, good idea.

>refuel there.

Solar power, nuclear batteries. Mining ships certainly couldn't want to burn rocket fuel. Even for getting around they'd use... ion thrusters or something which use a very small amount of xenon and a lot of electricity. Good ISP. As for getting Xenon refueling.... it'd be a LOT easier to throw a bucket of xenon out the asteroid belt and have the miner catch it.

>The resources they mine would be sent to earth through some kind of space elevator,

Sadly, space elevators probably won't work on Earth. But... they can just throw it down. Some will burn up on the atmosphere, so what. Still cheaper than the cost of attaching a chute to it. Maybe they'll wrap the good stuff in a shell of iron.

>>55306599
>ideological problem is the question who gets to mine what.
Which is solved by "first come first serve".

There's plenty of shit up there. Go find it, make a claim, go get it. Easy peasy. There will be some issues with... claim jumping and stuff, but let the lawyers deal with that.

Fuck governments, leave it to business.

If you go take a chunk of the moon, who is going to stop you? The moon police?

>>55306618
>The space mining agency
Yeah, fuck that noise.

>With the abundence of space resources, many countries such as almost all of Africa, much of the Middle East and Russia are confronted with collapse

Meh, more of the same. Gasp, Africa is going to be a dirt-poor clusterfuck of social and political strife. What's new?

Middle East is fucked as soon as we make the switch to electric cars. Which is to say gradually over time and never entirely. Besides, we still have to get shit into space. Do you think they burn hopes and dreams in those rockets? But anyway, unless they send CRUDE OIL down from space... it won't impact the middle east.

>Would we see Russia fracture into various ethnostates, with the Russian rump state stretching no further East than the Urals?

Not if their LAST collapse didn't see that, no I don't think so.

>And would the aforementioned potential shadow cabal play a role in this? If so, how?

The already existing shadow cabals would curb stomp them. Jews own the banks which drive big industry. Duh.

>>55325081
>The FTL works by manufacturing a super difficult to control fuel that takes an entire plant that's so dangerous it has to be built on an uninhabitable planet to minimize damage from potential explosions.

ok. Sure. Wicked shit. Some sort of temporary near-black hole or unlocking "The power of the vacuum". Or.... it's just some MASSIVELY dense chemical energy.


>But I also need a naturally-occuring spacefaring creature the size of an asteroid to be able to produce the fuel biologically.

What? I mean, ok, you can make something a little less hard on Moh's sci-fi hardness scale. A little fantasy isn't so bad.

>>55326032
I wanted decently hard stuff, hence my problem.

>>55326386
Please define 'the size of an asteroid' in this case, because otherwise it's anything from a single molecule of silica or iron to larger than Pluto. Hell, couple kilometers across isn't uncommon, and that's far larger than needed to duplicate, through more efficient and chemically complicated processes, the inherently cumbersome, safety driven manufacturing process that a mechanical plant has to work with.

You're probably fine even with a smaller asteroid, especially if you tell players/readers "No one knows how they do it so we can't replicate it at that scale yet."

>>55326675
An asteroid or comet (not really an asteroid/comet, I haven't worked out the details yet) large enough to be detected from across a solar system with advanced scanning technology, so at least a few kilometers in radius. It doesn't need to technically be a single organism, it could be a giant mound of bacteria or something, but it needs to be biological.

I just can't think of how a biological process could create something so complex and advanced.

>>55315279
If FTL is cheap, then importing badasses from offworld will always be more economical than local bad-asses, unless the planet is particularly war-y. It practically justifies itself. Local bullies will constantly be defeated by wandering heroes. Plenty of room for 7 samurai type adventures.

>>55326386
Well, you're not going to have naturally occurring space-faring biological space refinery then. The two are just kinda... mutually exclusive.

It's like someone wanting to make a historically accurate account of the death of Ceaser but where he's eaten by a dragon.

>>55326797
Biological processes are by their nature complex and advanced. Right at this moment people are making E-coli that can produce diesel fuel, and that's with very primitive editing tools. Plants create sugars and cellulose from sunlight and base elements. All it needs is an evolutionary environment that incentivizes production of this substance, or genetic engineering of some kind. Remember you just have to know more biology than your audience to make something convincingly possible. And you don't need perfect details, either.

>>55326797
>large enough to be detected from across a solar system with advanced scanning technology,

. . . Again. realize that the scale for that ranges anywhere from 100m to 100,000km depending on how far away it is, all of which is on solar-system scales.

Pick a spot on the chart:

https://xkcd.com/1633/

The line of "stuff we can see through telescopes" is going to keep going down and to the right.... down to... who knows what.

I'd like to run a space campaign in a homebrew system one day.
It's suppose to have star-wars styled guns (energy beams, lasers) and melee weapons (exotic space metal swords and such).

What's a good way to justify the absence of normal metal bullets and generally the use of these melee weapons?
What's a good way to approach this in general?

>>55327149
Honestly this gets asked a lot, and there's any number of reasons. The important part is to think out and properly apply the reason you have chosen.

Say you pick personal force fields that can stop a bullet and are widely available, so guns fall out of favor. Why doesn't it stop a sword? Does it let air through? Would poison gas be more effective in that case? What about energy weapons? Do ships or installation use this technology?
The shields in Dune answer all of these questions, and are internally consistent enough to be believable.

Are guns banned cause no one wants a blowout? What about the fucker that does? What about hull-safe projectiles? What about energy weapons?

Is personal armor so advanced that guns are useless, and only augmented people with souped up melee weapons can get through it? Is this something everyone can afford, or does it only apply to knights and nobility?

Is there some kind of MAD involved with combustible munitions, like in LoGH? What about kinetic absorption that bleeds kinetic energy off of fast moving projectiles?

I guess what I am trying to say is it depends on the style you want. If I knew more about your setting I guess I could give more specific suggestions as to how guns don't work.

>>55327149
In star wars, I believe the reason is just that guns are primitive, hard to manufacture alongside modern tech and blasters have been dominant for millennia. Why use a less effective weapon that's harder to use, maintain and produce? Also, IIRC they are outlawed on humanitarian grounds through most of the galaxy, and have a strong stigma of backwards primitiveness since you only see them on shitty low tech planets.

>>55327651
>>55327712

Kinetic absorption sounds great. Maybe the melee weapons are big
enough to be augmented to pass through this type of defense, while bullets aren't.
This together with the star wars approach (hard manufacture/outdated) might be good enough.

Some other things that come to mind that I'm not sure if hold true are how gunpowder (or similar substance) would work in space.
Would it even combust? What about different atmospheres? Maybe it's also way too dangerous for on-ship/on-station battles.

I can definitely see myself working on this more. Thanks

>>55327853
If you go with kinetic absorption, you have to think about what else it affects. It was probably invented as a micrometeor defense and grew from there, which means its probably a field around/inside a ship or base. Energy guns would probably be okay, but nothing says they will ever be small enough to be man-portable, if you don't want blaster pistols. This type of field also helps shut down the relativistic projectile meme crowd, whom I personally am sick to death of.

>Would it even combust?
The entire point of gunpowder (and indeed all explosives) is self oxidization. Thus why a powder charge packed behind a musket ball in a steel tube, or in a completely sealed brass cartridge, can burn the same way with the same force every time regardless of the weather, atmosphere or lack of it, etc. Black powder is not perfectly sealed (Due to using external ignition) and that's the only reason it has problems with rain and all, a vacuum would actually be a better environment for it than air for a number of reasons, so long as you use electricity or a hot metal wire to ignite it. Modern ammunition would be more powerful, reliable and accurate in space, though in both cases the recoil produces significant thrust in the opposite direction which is not ideal in zero-g, especially if you're not braced against a larger structure. This could be engineered around, but it's an annoying nut to crack.