Finding out how to not be blown in to space dust on the way home is part of the planning stage I presume.

Exo-Squad!

I think space in Shadowrun is going to be the Shadowrun gloss over what is mostly a combination of Planetes and the up-well portions of Nueromancer. I've been interested in seeing some space material since the first time Orbital DK popped up with a comment on Jackpoint.

An Extreme Environments book could be cool, expand on the stuff in Arsenal for enironmental gear,, the stuff scattered through various books regarding orbitals and the lunar base.... maybe some new awakened beasties (Can you say sapient giant squid?) and some Zero Zones under water ( "Ha! I'ld like to see a shadowrun team infiltrate our research facility at the bottom of the Marianas Trench!" ) as well as rules for extra-atmosphere maneuvers would be damn cool.

Perhaps a crucial part would be a chapter for GMs to explain the particular problems and potentials of such a setting.. I've often looked at niche RPGs and though they were cool, but.. how do you run them?

for inside the solar system travel times on the order of days to weeks for within the moons orbit, months to mars and maybe a few years for jupiter would *not* be too hard to do. and as far as old stuff being ineffective I think pirates have been effective with 60's tech and insurgents in afgan have used 70's and 80's tech quite well.

In order to have in system speeds be reasonable you have to already be nearing the speed of light. 50% of the speed of light makes a trip to the sun a 15 minute flight. Cut that down to 0.25c (half hour to the sun) and a trip to the outer planets takes over 20 hours (hitting pluto would be a 26 hour, 40 minute flight, give or take 1 hour (which side of the sun its on from earth)).

That's one quarter the speed of light. Traveling the nearest star would still take years to decades.

Energy needed to achieve a velocity of 0.25c is huge.

I can't find the exact math, but a 1 kg weight moving at that speed has an impulse (momentum) of approx. 5,625,000,000 kg*m/s (newtons) and its kinetic energy is half that.

BTW, if you failed physics, it takes more energy to accelerate 1 unit the faster you're moving. This is why it takes infinite energy to achieve light speed (or zero mass).

are you saying the only reasonable times for insystem is minutes or hours to reach the destination?

oh and I think I passed physics well enough, I've got a bachelers in it.

Minutes to the sun (1 AU) and hours to reach the edge (40 AU from the sun*) at the same time. You can't have reasonable times to places and have reasonable speed limits.

*My 26 hour travel time is actually the Aphelion, which at 50 AU, is the farthest distance from the Earth to Pluto, not the distance from the sun. So travel time from Earth to Pluto will vary from 15:48 to 26:40, depending on the date. Its equivalent to driving from Philadelphia, PA to Dallas, TX with all of 6 pit stops (i.e. major cities with desert wastelands in between).

ok treky, I think we have differant ideas of reasonable times. I'm fine with it taking months or years to get to some further parts of the solar system (not counting the crap out beyond pluto).

I'm not a treky. I enjoy math and physics.

wanting relativistic speeds in system sounds trekyish.

Yeah... i would go the "Cowboy Bebop" approach. While in that series its some kind of slow subspace, i would just keep the accelerator-rings. Just position them all around the solar system and have HUGE reactors (or if you are near the sunsome kind of huge energy-gathering sails) power them like a railgun. And for a fee you can take your already fast ship through it and get a boost, which your own engine cannot provide at that speed.

I think a reasonable timeframe (for fiction as to not make it boring) would be around a week trip from Earth to mars or venus. A month or two to saturn. (if they are in line) Great downtime, but not so much that that the people get too old while traveling *g*. And if they choose not to use the accelerator lines (which cost a crapload of money to use) or come offcourse... well i hope they have a good supply of cheap canned food...

That system makes pirates cool too. They have to intercept the lanes and force the ships to decelerate or go off course. And if they did it, the ships can have REASONABLE space-combat at logical slow velocities.

As opposed to Isaac Azimov-y (who predates Star Trek) who did it first.

And a host of other science fiction authors--both before, during, and after--who relied on a host of varying reasons why you couldn't move at the speed of light or faster anywhere within ~100 AU of a(n inhabited) system.

Addendum: there was a book I read recently that used "space trains" of a sort to do interstellar travel, and the nearest you could put a station to a planet was roughly moon orbit (so it cost a penny or three to get up there and train tickets were expensive, but no more so than airflights these days) and a trip took a few hours bordering days to get to other stations.

No one could figure out how they worked and the race that built the thing were very secretive about it. The best anyone could tell was that the tracks actually went from place to play in normal space (as far down the tube as anyone had traveled just showed more track proceeding off into infinity) but that the train itself never moved more than ~150 mph relative to the tube (limited ability to bring scanning equipment on board meant you got few details about what was going on).

Main character ends up figuring it out in order to stop a plot to destroy the trains. The core of the tube, up where the trains actually run, is a superstring and the nearer to it you get the "faster" you go relative to outside space, without actually violating the speed of light due to the effects of spacial distortion of super dense objects.

and just think anyone could defend against pirates! if pirates come bother you just aim your exhaust at them. For anything that would produce those kinds of speeds it would be like using a flamethrower on wax. The pirates launch missiles? just aim your exhaust at the missiles! course pirates can do the same to you...

Missiles are highly inefficient in interstellar warfare. In the time it would take them to travel from their point of origin to the target would border on days.

(There's a book about this, let me retrieve the title)

Edit: The Lost Fleet: Dauntless (by Jack Campbell)

yea but treky gets under peoples skin better about that subject. Why would I want to do that? This is SR there is barely any space travel as it is in the setting. A bunch of satellites, a few moon bases and one outpost on mars. Not a big precurser to the foundation series. Also most of those are utopian ideals right? SR is still dystopian I think which should mean things kinda suck and are gritty, dirty, wear people out, chew them up and spit them out.

conventional missiles yea, I can think of at least one warhead that might have some promise.

Space lanes? Pirates? Singularities?

Has anyone else here played Freelancer? Sure, I was thinking of stuff pretty much still within a planets gravity well 9and getting out of it) when I brought up Alpha Centauri but when I think dystopian space and gaming, Freelancer certainly comes to mind. Certainly helped that I found the game deep but easy to play at the same time with its mouse controls - joystick lovers hated that.

I think the official corp space traffic is the stuff that gets around the solar system quicker from my experience with that, unless you happen to hack the space lanes. Shut em down to stop traffic where you want it and pirate it. Want to fly below the radar for your dirty deeds? Don't use the space lanes and the travel time goes way up and don't point your pin point of light in anyone's direction that you don't want to see or maybe even use as a way to give a false trail of light and sigint, now I am getting into Firefly/Serenity territory with those thoughts.

I disagree w/ your travel times draco... the true problem is accelerating/decelerating. Those trips aren't like a car... red light brake, green light hit the gas... set the cruise to 65. If you're in an accelometric frame, you A. produce your own pseudo-gravity. B. you have some kind of efficient engine producing constant thrust the entire flight. Overall, the jump gates in bebop were one of the things I didn't care for.


While .25c has rediculously short travel times... now okay you've gone from X to mars say... now how do you stop? You're moving too fast for a capture orbit. And hitting the thing results in a relativistic impact scenerio... hope your life insurance is paid up for your beneficiaries.



If you do the math... you'll find that a constant acceleration model provides quite workable travel times for our solar system. Simply accelerate til halfway, then turn around and decelerate back down. Just remember instantaneous speed is the integral of acceleration. distance traveled is the integral of velocity. EG: time*acceleration==velocity. 1/2 acceleration * time^2 == distance. 1G is roughly 10m/s^2 to keep the number nice and round. EG: after 1 day of acclerating from stop.... you're looking at 864 km/s velocity... or roughly 0.003c however have covered 124.4 light seconds of distance (2 light-minutes!). Quite significant! Get a few more days... and that's w/ 1G acceleration.. if we only allow a fraction of that (say .5G or .25G... we can quickly scale times down a bit if say a 1 week transit time to mars is the goal).

That's ignoring relativistic effects of course... which provided your velocities are small fractions of c you can do.. if you let the speed get too high (like .25c)... now you also have to consider time dilation.

When dealing w/ space distances and such I found it much easier to think in terms of light-seconds or similar increments for distance rather than AU or similar arbitrary figures... (light-year is a measure of distance). Though things like transfer orbits and the like get funky... IE: if you leave the earth at the right time, all you need do is acclerate to the same orbital speed as mars and the acceleration curve in the gravity well will transfer you with minimum energy between the orbits...



Though really... most of what we're talking about is for manned flight systems... it's also possible to use unmanned systems, especially for things like bulk cargo... EG: a monstrous railgun on the dark side of the moon.... what's it do... accelerates non-living items through 100's of G's and throws them on orbital trajectories... then at the other end... you just have 'catchers' in cargo shuttles snag them and bring them in.

Tons and tons of room for very good HARD sci-fi here... w/o needing to get all mystical. (save the mystical for the magic :)).

Accelerating and decelerating (at non-infinite levels) requires time, which increases the problem.

I've had SR teams go do jobs on the orbitals....

are you suggesting the problem is noninstantanious travel times? why are such tiny travel times needed?

There are two issues at work here:

1) If a remote colony wishes to remain up to date with information and are farther away than Pluto you need FTL travel.
1a) If you want them to be able to receive supplies/people/help within a reasonable timeframe and they are farther away than the moon you need space travel faster than it is at current (and the farther away you go, the faster you need to be--a rough estimate might be for every planet beyond the moon, triple the modern travel speed)
1b) If you want to go somewhere and come back you have to plan your trip well ("will I still have a job when I come back to Earth? Will I still have my house? Is this job going to pay well enough to cover my expenses for the next X months/years/decades?")

2) Realism. Accelerating to the speed of light is impossible. Accelerating to 1/4c might be doable without too much advancement on currently available technology (see previously mentioned 180 nuke detonations). You can handwave the impossibilities of surviving the G forces needed to accelerate to that speed in anything less than months, its getting there in the first place.

With regards to instantaneous travel I don't think any body would actually fall for it. You're talking infinite speed using infinite energy and infinite acceleration and somehow not FLRM'ing whatever it is that's traveling. Or using whatever powersource this travel method uses and simply blowing up your enemies, the BBEG, the planet the universe.