Onward - To New Frontiers! (Torchship Playtest Quest)

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CHARACTER SHEETS
RULES
LORE BIBLE (WIP)

Seriously y'all, this is an open_sketch/DragonCobolt quest. It's gonna get spicy.
We'll put all the NSFW stuff behind spoilers but like, for real.
Also also: There will be drug use in this quest, it's the space 60s. Many, but not all drugs will be fictional.​
 
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I feel like my reaction to "Improbable vehicle skills" is "...define 'vehicle'", which probably means I shouldn't vote for it because I'd continually be trying to find a way to define literally every move we make as being a vehicle. Never trip because your meat-sack is a vehicle for your mind! Never get trapped in an elevator because those count! etc etc etc
 
DragonCobolt said:
Tachyon stuff
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My summary: Star Patrol can have little a relativity violation, as a treat?

Also,


[X] Generalized Vehicle Training: If it moves, you can fly it. You waive any difficulty penalty for being unfamiliar with the operation of a vehicle, be it an alien ship or a 1960s car.

for improbable small craft shenanigans
 
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Vebyast said:
eek.

...Hmm. On the one hand, "lukewarm", so it's certainly not holding on to all of the energy that was bound up in the ship. On the other hand, it's probably still hella radiation. How weaponized is this? Like, is this how you build a planetcracker, or is crashing out of FTL into someone the space equivalent of a bug on a windshield?
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It's how this answers the question of FTL ramming. For the purposes of drama, the answer is "don't do it", because what ends up happening is that the field catastrophically implodes (rather than just collapses like if you ran out of power) and instead of a few kilometers of vacuum with your ship in the middle having been shifted to the location, you instead have all the things your ship was made of spread exactly evenly across the area the bubble occupied before it collapsed.

There would be radiation, but nothing ships of this 'verse aren't already equipped for.

The thing is, you need sufficient mass to achieve this, though. If you just try to throw a small missile ahead of a ship at FTL, it'll just gently slide along the outside of the field and the ship will seem to pass 'through' it from your perspective. This is related to the size and mass of the thing vs the size and shape of the bubble, with rumours abound that some advanced civilizations have FTL fields that let them pass unnoticed through planets.
 
open_sketch said:
There would be radiation, but nothing ships of this 'verse aren't already equipped for.
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That's what I figured, yeah. Presumably, ramming something at FTL would be substantially less effective than FTLing near something and then accelerating as much as you can before ramming it at sublight velocity.
open_sketch said:
The thing is, you need sufficient mass to achieve this, though. If you just try to throw a small missile ahead of a ship at FTL, it'll just gently slide along the outside of the field and the ship will seem to pass 'through' it from your perspective. This is related to the size and mass of the thing vs the size and shape of the bubble, with rumours abound that some advanced civilizations have FTL fields that let them pass unnoticed through planets.
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And also presumably the major cost of an FTL starship is in the FTL drive itself, so ships won't cruise around surrounded by "missiles" that are just asteroids with FTL drives bolted to their surfaces.
 
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Vebyast said:
That's what I figured, yeah. Presumably, ramming something at FTL would be substantially less effective than FTLing near something and then accelerating as much as you can before ramming it at sublight velocity.

And also presumably the major cost of an FTL starship is in the FTL drive itself, so ships won't cruise around surrounded by "missiles" that are just asteroids with FTL drives bolted to their surfaces.
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FTL drives get pretty cheap, but moving something big requires a (dis)proportionately large amount of power. A little tiny missile can sprint a few FTL ratings higher than most ships using (admittedly really good) batteries. Big ships need antimatter reactors to move them. The more mass you're hauling, the more power you need.

(Technically you aren't hauling mass at all, but there's a minimal proportion of field size to object mass you need to make it work. Faster ships have bigger fields too: a missile's bubble radiates out maybe a few meters, a war rocket's radiates out so many kilometres that you can (and people do) fly into the bubble and have a whole space battle in there.)

There's kind of a 'dead zone' where ships are too small to fit antimatter reactors but too big to be moved at high speeds for long periods by smaller power sources. There's itty bitty fusion reactors in the setting, and you see them on long-endurance probes at low FTL ratings and fast, short-range droids, fighters, and shuttles at high ratings for very brief periods.
 
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open_sketch said:
there's a minimal proportion of field size to object mass you need to make it work
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So there's a hard lower bound of field volume based on mass, but is there a hard upper bound, or just the soft upper bound of power requirements versus the square-cube law for increasing field volumes? Because I'm picturing, like, massive fleet-tugs, salvage vessels, and pseudo-jumpships with enormously oversized powerplants and FTL rings to generate a large enough field in both volume and mass capacity to drag fleets of short-range fighters and corvettes, single wrecked hulls of much larger ships, or enormous flotillas of sublight cargo barges along the better-patrolled beacon routes.
 
Sounds like combat looks kind of like Crest/Banner of the Stars then, in terms of a lot of it being about matching FTL bubbles so that you can actually enter the pocket of space the other ship is in and shoot them, or shooting the points where FTL bubbles are synchronizing in order to kill something trying to enter.
 
thepsyborg said:
So there's a hard lower bound of field volume based on mass, but is there a hard upper bound, or just the soft upper bound of power requirements versus the square-cube law for increasing field volumes? Because I'm picturing, like, massive fleet-tugs, salvage vessels, and pseudo-jumpships with enormously oversized powerplants and FTL rings to generate a large enough field in both volume and mass capacity to drag fleets of short-range fighters and corvettes, single wrecked hulls of much larger ships, or enormous flotillas of sublight cargo barges along the better-patrolled beacon routes.
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Absolutely yessss.

The Sandman said:
Sounds like combat looks kind of like Crest/Banner of the Stars then, in terms of a lot of it being about matching FTL bubbles so that you can actually enter the pocket of space the other ship is in and shoot them, or shooting the points where FTL bubbles are synchronizing in order to kill something trying to enter.
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There's a bit of that, but that's like... incredibly lethal for both parties, so much more common is trying to use special FTL missiles to destabilize the bubbles of others to drop them to sublight speeds, then attacking them yourself (either in FTL drivebys or dropping out yourself).
 
open_sketch said:
There's a bit of that, but that's like... incredibly lethal for both parties, so much more common is trying to use special FTL missiles to destabilize the bubbles of others to drop them to sublight speeds, then attacking them yourself (either in FTL drivebys or dropping out yourself).
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And the pilots must be cyborgs, right? Or genetically engineered. There's no way human reflexes could keep up with light-speed combat.
For that matter, how common are cyborgs/augmentions/whatever this setting calls them? When we got the option to have them in our character, I thought they were something rare. Also, how common are the Psionic people?
 
[X] Approximated Vector Calculations: Hold one per episode. Spend that hold to instantly escape trouble: by going to warp, disappearing around a corner, losing your pursuer in a cloud, etc.
 
ProfessorB said:
And the pilots must be cyborgs, right? Or genetically engineered. There's no way human reflexes could keep up with light-speed combat.
For that matter, how common are cyborgs/augmentions/whatever this setting calls them? When we got the option to have them in our character, I thought they were something rare. Also, how common are the Psionic people?
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FTL ships are unbelievably fast, but don't turn or change speeds very quickly. So it tends to be plotting out ahead of time. A computer controls the actual shooting and you have leeway through tracking in the missile itself, but despite the straight line speed actual changes in circumstance as still slow enough for humans to keep up.

Ironically, sublight fighing is *much* faster in terms of pace, with a lot more happening. FTL combat is shooting a missile at somebody's plotted course, initiating a very slow turn, and waiting fifteen minutes to see if you hit before making your next move. It's practically turn based.

In order of commonness, psychics, cyborgs, augments. Any person can be a psychic through various training, though there's degrees of natural aptitude involved.
 
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[X] Approximated Vector Calculations: Hold one per episode. Spend that hold to instantly escape trouble: by going to warp, disappearing around a corner, losing your pursuer in a cloud, etc.

So, FTL combat is sort of like submarine combat? You try to find out where the enemy is, while hiding where you are. You plan ahead and have to intimately know the capabilities of the ships, the vagaries of the space, the phenomena that occur at FTL speeds and can fool sensors - yours or theirs if used correctly. It's slow paced and terrifying and you can be dead before you know what hit you. Lone wolves can skip around and take out unarmed convoy ships, hiding in the deep black between attacks, necessitating convoy travel. While hunter-killers patrol and try to track down and end the threat.
 
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ProfessorB said:
What's the difference between cyborgs and augments? Sorry, should have specified - I thought they were synonymous.
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Augments are the catch-all term for anyone who is human-derived but in some way basically modified. Most commonly this is extensive genetic engineering (as opposed to smaller and more routine procedures) but it could also encompass posthumans of various sorts, like our dear Sandra and her artificial human bod.

A cyborg is a human with mechanical technology incorporated into their bodies in some way. Nhi is a cyborg.

In star trek terms, you'd play Dr. Bashir as an Augment, Geordi La Forge as a Cyborg, and Data as a Cyborg Augment probably.
 
[X] Approximated Vector Calculations: Hold one per episode. Spend that hold to instantly escape trouble: by going to warp, disappearing around a corner, losing your pursuer in a cloud, etc.

Ideal for tactical retreats from the enemies of the galactic proletariat... or drama that our future flirting might cause.
 
DragonCobolt said:
The speed of light was constant to something, to tachyons, but as very little in the natural world interacted with tachyons there was no information being transferred and relativity was consistent. But if you built a sensor which could detect tachyons passing through it and a computer which could read the information, you could get data about whatever you wanted anywhere in the universe, through any amount of matter, instantly and in absolute real time.
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Hmm. So how does this actually work out? Solar systems are like ten light-hours across. There's no such thing as stealth when it comes to sublight sensors; you can't hide your reactors even if you're not running your engine, your habitation module will stand out against the CMB. So you can't, like, go quiet and wait for your opponent to give up, or cruise in on a ballistic trajectory. But you can definitely hide from FTL detection, if only through simple distance, and there are probably all sorts of fun things you can do to change how you're emitting tachyons and what kinds of tachyons the things around you are emitting. I wouldn't even be surprised if active FTL sensors are a thing, send out a burst of tachyons and see how they interact with whatever you're pointing them at?

This is going to have a ridiculously complex ELINT environment, holy crap. Sublight gives you guaranteed detections but they're slow and you have to be in place to observe the light shell, so you keep logs of every tachyon you observe and then use any sublight detections you get to give you known positives that you can use to go through your tachyon intercepts to figure out what your opponent actually looks like. Then if you get any interesting tachyons you have to decide if you're going to try to drop out of FTL to corroborate it with sublight detections, but since there are only so many places you can do that - constrained by the position of the light shell - it gives your opponent a chance to predict where you're going to be and have a missile waiting for you.

Then there's an entirely different game going with dropping sublight observatories in random spots throughout the battlespace and then occasionally popping out of FTL to recover their information. Or CAPTOR mine equivalents that are a sublight observatory sitting next to a missile, and when the sublight observatory detects something nearby the missile lights off...

Fascinating.
 
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[X] Generalized Vehicle Training: If it moves, you can fly it. You waive any difficulty penalty for being unfamiliar with the operation of a vehicle, be it an alien ship or a 1960s car.
 
open_sketch said:
There's a bit of that, but that's like... incredibly lethal for both parties, so much more common is trying to use special FTL missiles to destabilize the bubbles of others to drop them to sublight speeds, then attacking them yourself (either in FTL drivebys or dropping out yourself).
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So correct me if I'm wrong here, but it sounds like matching warp bubbles puts ships at most twenty klicks, and that's if it's two really big war rockets. Most ships would wind up even closer. But at that range, the ships are inside each other's shields, inside each other's PD envelope, and probably at Danger Close for any sort of interesting munition. In other words, a very and expensive way to commit suicide.

Which means that a high-risk, high-payoff zoom-and-boom equivalent would be to match bubbles, fire off a bunch of countermeasures and an alpha strike, and then try to de-sync the warp bubbles as fast as possible. Of course, pulling that off requires a ship that is slower and less maneuverable than yours as the target, and that doesn't have enough boom to turn your ship into a very interesting cloud of exotic particles during the seconds when the bubbles intersect.

This implies, in general, that anything a ship could splat will be able to avoid it, while anything a ship can forcibly match bubbles with outguns it. Although a purpose-built rocket specializing in that mission profile, could work. But it would be incredibly specialized and due to cutting something to make room for the better FTL, would lose to a fortress-style war rocket of equivalent mass.

I suppose one could also use something that stops being a "missile" or "torpedo" and starts resembling a fire ship, because it's big, it's full of boom, and the people launching it don't expect it come back.
Vebyast said:
So how does this actually work out?
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It makes things look like badly composited models from 60's SF. :V
 
I mean if you knock a ship out of FTL while compromising its shields to any substantial degree you probably kill most or all of the crew when the gamma ray cloud it was dragging behind itself slams into it.
 
samdamandias said:
So correct me if I'm wrong here, but it sounds like matching warp bubbles puts ships at most twenty klicks, and that's if it's two really big war rockets. Most ships would wind up even closer. But at that range, the ships are inside each other's shields, inside each other's PD envelope, and probably at Danger Close for any sort of interesting munition. In other words, a very and expensive way to commit suicide.
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There was some discussion about warp bubbles being bigger on the inside, since they're manipulating space anyway and all that.
 
I'm torn between [] Generalized Vehicle Training, since that means we've been playing someone who's never traveled away from home before yet learned a bunch of piloting skills, and [] Approximated Vector Calculations because it fits the character's build better to have a "get out of combat" skill.
 
[X] Approximated Vector Calculations: Hold one per episode. Spend that hold to instantly escape trouble: by going to warp, disappearing around a corner, losing your pursuer in a cloud, etc.

We find ourselves wondering just how powerful and focused the beam of gama rays chasing an FTL craft ends up being, and how this scales with things like craft size, FTL speed and flight duration. Because the next best thing to an enormous gamma ray laser is probably endlessly useful in space combat, either against imobile targets or as a sort of long-range sucker-punch or as a way of creating regions in space-time where an enemy would prefer not to be. Clever application of FTL missiles or probes might even let you use it for things like point defense.
 
[X] Slingshot Orbits: When you return to a dangerous situation after having escaped, gain +3 Energy.
 
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