project Orion might be able to get a huge ship moving, (1000-10,000tons) it would be cost prohibative for anything but an unmanned or colony vessel to another star. or as a way to move around the solar system by wealthy nations and do whatever (move comets or asteroids around or science etc) but even AAA corps couldnt individually afford such a method of travel without a serious probability of going bankrupt.

If ya stick to only within the solar system and forget other stars things get alot easier. I dont think commuter or weekend vacation type travel times are needed. its only within the last century that going from here to europe didnt take at least a week and most of the time months. Things worked fine then. Sure its more dangerous and anything that gets set up with no help closer than a few months away would need to be able to fend for itself. Whats wrong with that though? or are you worried about players realising they just have to deal with the facility on mars and they can get away scott free if they nuke the place after they get done looting it because help for the facility is 3-10 months away.

Getting back a problem for runners? well if it is then maybe they should stick to dirtside. My problem with having stupidfast spacetravel is it would change the game from SR where the runners can take a run in space and maybe even a far out run to something on mars or maybe a little further; to a complete space opera. that is a HUGE change. Not saying anything is wrong with that kinda stuff, I greatly enjoyed a dragonstar game once upon a time, its just a huge change maybe even big enough to not really be SR anymore. Perhaps Battlerun, which sounds awsome, or close to battlerun, but not SR.

If I were to do anything in Space it'd be days to Moon/Lagrange points, and really, there is virtually no reason for anyone to go any farther. That's where the action is in the setting. It's not like there's ancient Martian cities to excavate....OR ARE THERE?

there must be something important out there, Ares does have a base....

Does it? BBB says EVO. Didn't know about Ares.

For the person asking for a book of extreme places in Shadowrun, you're looking for Target: Wastelands. It features space, toxic zones (think SOX is talked about here), undersea, and arctic regions.

I ain't touching this space talk for anything - other than to say that I Support Ancient History Writing Shadowrun in Spaaaaaaaace.

Quite frankly... I don't see anything SR going anywhere beyond the solar system. Though the point here is that designers would need to settle on a arbitrary travel time. Quite frankly, I have nothing against those times being like the old sailing ships crossing oceans.

It's just when you're talking about distances measured in light-minutes (as opposed to light years), you don't need to reach anywhere close to .25c. Even to reach mars in a reasonable timeframe... the far outside solar system maybe.. but that's a completely different animal than the inner solar system.


Just for arguments sake, Mars orbit is roughly 13 light minutes... the earth 8 light minutes. So difference of 5 light minutes... triple that to 15 light minutes to include the extra distance spent along a short flight trajectory. (really you're looking at 5 light minutes up to 33 light minutes)

The goal is to go 7.5 light minutes distance in say 1 weeks. (2 weeks to mars and back while they're close).
Plugging in the numbers...
Distance: 7.5*60*3E8~=1.35E11 m.
Time== 7day * 24hour * 60min * 60s ~= 604800 s
Time^2== 3.66E11

Equation: distance == 1/2 * accel * time^2 we have two knowns.. get the unknown...
Accel ~= .738 m/s^2 or just under a tenth of earth G (9.8m/s^2)
max speed ~= 446000 m/s ~= .0015c (nowhere close to your .25c!!).


The problem is with current technologies... a constant accel of that much is too much to ask of a ion drive. And chemical systems have a very high G burn but short in duration. Also the amount of reaction mass you'd need to accelerate that profile. (we can handwave some of that away, w/ really efficient drives which 'shoot' ions at relativistic velocities for propulsion provided we have a decent power source to accelerate them (like say a fusion core).

Like I said, it's a balance problem. For Raw ShadowRun having normal / modern speeds should be sufficient. Its up nearing space opera that things cease making sense.

You have know to what you want.

Essentially, I want Planetes with Dwarves and magic. Is that too much to ask for?

another intersting location could be near earth objects such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/433_Eros.

Especially seeing this...

I just want Bebop with elves and SURGE and YK and the Seatbelts providing the soundtrack, of course.