Gee, and after reading Target: Wastelands, I thought space was over-developed for the era in SR. I mean, given the rate space development has advanced in RL, I'm surprised there's more than a dozen or two researchers in space.

Instead, in SR, you have tourist platforms with thousands of people, corporate-funded mining and research facilities on the moon, corporate missions to Mars, corporate space stations everywhere, even a space-based shadow economy. Difficult or nearly impossible technologies like scramjets are in widespread use, while economically unfeasible projects like solar power satellites (10000+ tons, compared to the ISS's 500 tons) were built not just in the future, but were operational in (IIRC) 2005.

That's not underdeveloped, IMO.

Silence! There can be no arguing with people in space! SPACE IS KING!
*eyes twitch as fingers grasp for bludgeoning object*

Er. Seriously, you're totally correct on that score. But really, why argue? Space is *cool*! And it takes a hell of a lot of cool to overcome my 'that's irrational and therefore dumb!' rule.

Oh, definitely. Don't get me wrong, I'm a space junkie, too. I think T:WL gave not only an interesting space background for SR, but a playable one.

Oh, absolutely...but since this was my first thread on a SR forum, I wanted to take it a little slow...

So as I understand it, the answer is the lack of stable powerful governments, lack of interest, and relative wealth of resources on good ol' Terra? Sounds good to me...

It also sounds like they took care of that whole "economy of space" thing in space!

SR seems to be taking a "fairly hard science" approach to space travel, so going beyond the solar system is unlikely as far as canon SR goes.

It's also trivial to include, and one of SR's ancestors, Bladerunner, certainly points the way toward "off world colonies." Hmm...

You just say something like, government/megacorp X developed an FTL gate or (my preference) jumpships, and that the places the ships operate from is relatively convenient. Gates might be functional in Earth orbit, while (borrowing from Battletech) jumpships can operate from Earth's Lagrange points. Target Wastelands has put some space facilities at Lagrange points, IIRC.

If FTL is that easily accessible and does not require lengthy travel in normal space, then FTL is quite within the range of SR rocket science.

If you want a setting with cybernetics, bioware, spaceships, etc., you might look into GURPS' "Transhuman Space," which has some excellent hard science. I'm not a fan of the GURPS game system, but the several Transhuman Space books are an outstanding near-future space travel setting. They also lack FTL, but GURPS explicitly encourages modifications of settings to suit a GM and gaming group. Tacking on FTL travel is easy.

No moon colonies before the 2050s? Don't be so sure about that, chummer. I personally think technology is moving FAR faster than we can practically deal with.

Classical problem of capabilities vs. will


We(humanity) have IRL:

i ) Two tested heavy-lift launchers with 100+ metric tons to Lower Earth Orbit (LEO) the Saturn Ib and the Energia that can deliver bigger modules than the rather cramped shuttle (Imagine Skylab with it's 10m diameter vs. the 5m of a shuttle)

ii) At least one promising Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) project that generated a tech demonstrator (MBB/Boing Delta X) and some additional ones in planning stages

iii) Quite a bit of experience with space stations (Saljut/Mir/Skylab)

iv) A highly developed mining technologie

v) A nuclear engine (KIWI/Nerva/Sowjet followup)

vi) Too many MBA's (Okay, one is one too many)

vii) Not enough dreamers

What we lack is the will to go out there. We lack drive and vision, the ability to say "screw the return of investment" and "kick the earth first greenies" and use the stuff we have. The technologie long exists to put a permanent base on the moon. It has existed for some 20 years. And for at least 10 years a mars mission (manned) would have been possible with a nuclear drive. So some greenies die of a heart attack - I'm soooo sorry.

Michael

--
Civil Technologie can solve 10 percent of the worlds problems - for the rest you need weapons technologie!

Virus? When did this happen?

Correct. I doubt we'll see a manned landing on the moon again before 2020, especially at the past 2 decades' sluggish-to-dead pace of manned space exploration. Until 1998, no new, large rocket engine had been developed in the US in 25 years. Even the Buck Rogers-esque "DC-X" used a rocket engine developed in 1961 (the RL-10, which flew on the Apollo missions). The X-33 represented a great idea (cheap, reusable spacecraft) with an implementation that was a travesty (the X-33/VentureStar configuration was deliberately selected because it was the technically challenging...even though no one had made an SSTO work yet, let alone reusably.) The ISS is a $95 billion dollar version of an $8 billion space station that was meant to replace the mostly-completed Skylab 2 (shelved because of budget cuts, later diced up for components for the shuttle).

The US space program hasn't gone anywhere fast since the early 1970s (and the slowdown was seen in the late 1960s, when the last Apollo missions were cut from Apollo 25, to 19, to 17...) and plodding Soviet program was screwed in 1991. The high-profile X-Prize vehicles are hardly proof-of-concept cheap spacecraft; yes, they get into space, but even the fastest of them are a loooonnng way from orbital velocities.

For the moon in particular, there's just no good reason for a lunar colony. The place is deficient in many materials useful to a colony (volatiles, hydrogen, water, etc.). Heck, it also lacks many materials useful to space travel (again, hydrogen, water, etc.), making it fairly useless as a "way station" or "stepping stone" for further interplanetary exploration.

All that is why Target:Wastelands is so fun for SR. It uses reasonably realistic science to portray a fun, alternate, future space setting, something that's an escape from the dreariness of the real world's manned space programs.

The Crash of 2029. It's mentioned in the main book. It gutted a lot of technological progress because it feasted on encrypted files in particular.

The Saturn Ib had an 18.6-ton capacity. You might be thinking of the Saturn V.

Skylab had a 6.58m diameter, not 10m, but later Saturn V stations did approach 10m in diameter.

Also, you forgot a third 100-ton launcher: the shuttle stack. The shuttle puts 80+ tons into orbit every flight (the empty shuttle along is about 75 tons), and up to 100 tons when the shuttle is pretty heavily laden. There have been a lot of proposals to get rid of all that useless orbiter mass and turn the shuttle stack into a proper heavy lifter, and it would be cheaper than reviving the Saturn V.

Kicking up NASA's funding $5 billion a year to about $18-$19 billion annually would be nice, and it would just about match what the DoD spends annually fighting corrosoin.

As well as too many polititions, and not enough hammers.

We're not going to be leaving the solar system (especially manned!) anytime within the next century or two at least, and that's being very generous. Probes, sure... we've already managed to get at least one out there (Voyager 1, and that took how long.. 25 years just to get almost 8 billion miles away, which is just enough to get it past Pluto?). But there's no way we're going to be leaving the solar system, especially when we have eight other planets to explore first-hand in this one.

Shadowrun is doing an excellent job at keeping up the believability of space exploration... and is significantly more advanced in it than we'll likely be by 2063. Once again, Shadowrun has a space station manned by what's basically pirates on Echo Station. Pirates in space. That's not going to happen for a looooong time unless, as Synner said, some remarkable breakthrough happens in the next fifty years.

Or India. They have a pretty solid space program and plans to send a probe to the moon in the next couple years.