Are there any space RPGs that have intra-system space travel that doesn't require a physics degree to understand?
Are there any space RPGs that have intra-system space travel that doesn't require a physics degree to understand?
Are there any space RPGs that have intra-system space travel that doesn't require a physics degree to understand?
GURPS, although you need several advanced math degrees to play anything in GURPS.
Are there any that do? Sign me up, it's all rules lite these days, I haven't seen so much as a big boy table since battlelords of the 23rd century that
Traveller 2300 and The Expanse RPG come to mind
Dunno about 2300, but the expanse is literally just "big explosion on back ship make ship go."
Are you a fricking moron?
It goes on for seven pages about orbital mechanics in the space ships chapter
who cares about calculations, don't spacemen have space-chatgpt to figure out how to go to mars?
About an hour per astronomical unit (Au). The solar system is about 100 Au across. Also has FTL, which moves at 1 Light Year per day/hour/minute depending on era.
Oh hay, I saw you in one of the previous threads, are you done developing your game?
95%, just fixing text errors and inconsistencies, should be out this year.
You're looking for Traveller
That's always the answer.
>I'm looking for a space-
Traveller. You're looking for Traveller.
Get your greasy grippers on some little black books.
Not ALWAYS. Sometimes you're looking for WEG d6 Star Wars.
There's a Traveller SW conversion, You're set
I more mean that there's a choice between "I want pulp action and I don't care about fuel" and "I want less pulpy action and I like thinking about duct layouts."
What about battletech?
Battletech is fairly barebones when it comes to the space opera part of sci fi, but if you want combined arms outdoor combat, Battletech is great for that
Battletech is better for mech-focused combat, if you want combined arms combat you’re better off with a non-mecha setting.
I've heard some folks parrot this line, but it's actually pretty good for combined arms, there are several optional rules in TacOps that can help adjust non-mech combatants to be closer to mech standards, but even without those rules each has advantages
The problem is that the "advantages" of non-mechs is that they're cheap, not that they're actually good in any way. Battletech's idea of "combined arms" is that mechs are jacks of all trades, masters of all, and the only reason you'd use a conventional vehicle is you're too poor to afford a mech, which is reflected especially in the number of mechs vs vehicles used in the lore. The Battle of Tukkayid for example had like 4 mechs for every conventional vehicle on Comstar's side, and it was of course even more lopsided in favor of the mechs with the Clans.
Tanks are pretty good at absorbing fire and becoming navigational hazard bunkers, with proper positioning they can be very cheap fire support or deterrence
Artillery can be a tricky asset to remove while applying indirect or guided fires at either stationary or mobile elements
Vtols are harder to hit than Light Mechs, and can be about as armed as medium mechs
Wige are hard to hit but really only good as niche scouts, usually Vtols do their role better
Infantry turn random buildings into armor sinks and navigational hazards, can operate on or offboard artillery, and can be carted around quick by vtols
Battle Armor are expensive ablative armor that can wreck too-eager melee combatants and get infantry out of buildings
Superheavy Fixed-Wing V/STOLS are flying fortresses that move like slow helicopters but can carry multiple tanks of firepower or move an awful lot of battle armor, infantry, or vehicles with lift hoists
And that's still ignoring Aerotech, as no one touches aerotech anyway
Battletech does combined arms better than most other wargames, and far better than most RPGs (which is a frankly a staggeringly low bar)
>Tanks are pretty good at absorbing fire and becoming navigational hazard bunkers, with proper positioning they can be very cheap fire support or deterrence
Not anymore since a fricking Locust can take even a superheavy tank out with the new rules. Also, they were never as good at absorbing fire as mechs were, since they only had a single part, while mechs have like 6 parts, so tanks were really more like 1/6th as durable as a mech even with more armor.
Artillery can be a tricky asset to remove while applying indirect or guided fires at either stationary or mobile elements
Sure, but you can get even better results with an artillery mech instead, it’ll be more mobile and more difficult to destroy.
>Vtols are harder to hit than Light Mechs, and can be about as armed as medium mechs
>Wige are hard to hit but really only good as niche scouts, usually Vtols do their role better
They get hard countered by AA like a Rifleman mech and LAMs do their job better anyways.
>Infantry turn random buildings into armor sinks and navigational hazards, can operate on or offboard artillery, and can be carted around quick by vtols
Battle Armor are expensive ablative armor that can wreck too-eager melee combatants and get infantry out of buildings
>Superheavy Fixed-Wing V/STOLS are flying fortresses that move like slow helicopters but can carry multiple tanks of firepower or move an awful lot of battle armor, infantry, or vehicles with lift hoists
Probably the only stuff that’s not just downgraded versions of mechs, but still gets easily hard countered by Riflemen and Infernos.
-Your first point is utter misinfo, tanks have 4 or 5 sides, and at minimum one will be at risk of hitting 3 or 4 of them, and this is specifically what those tacops rules are for
-Artillery is too heavy and in some cases too large to mount on mechs, depending on the device and platform, Arrow IV is fine, but instead of mounting it on a mech, one could mount it on a VTOL or V/STOL or tank, all much cheaper and with less niche footstepping
-VTOLs and WIGE are not hard countered by AA, interestingly enough, an AA trait plus flak or guided rounds is still not enough to outperform VTOLs truly insane to hit modifiers, even with those traits they're as hard to hit as light mechs, but while carrying the armament of a medium mech, and crossing the board to end up in rear arcs
-Yeah LAMs do their job better, but LAMs basically don't exists, they're the special snowflakes of special snowflakes and no one ever lets them get fielded except during curated campaign games. As a person whose favorite mech is the Phoenix Hawk LAM, I can tell you, no one lets them touch the board, either for canon reasons, or because they're just unreasonable elements
-Superheavy Fixed-Wing V/STOLs are not countered by AA either, mostly for the reason that they're flying fortresses, it's like using AA against superheavy mechs, yeah, you can hit them, but they just have way too much armor, unlike superheavy mechs, SHFWV/STOLs can move around the field like a jj light mech
I think the fact that you have to ponder how to counter each element of a combined armed force, and especially your recommendation in duplicate to field a rifleman, speaks volumes to how well Battletech performs Combined-Arms tactical gameplay
I also think that you're parroting other opinions you've heard on the internet, without playing enough yourself, these are real nogames battletech opinions, so get back out there and give it a go, it's truly a fun time
From the very top of my head:
Traveller
Rogue Trader
Spelljammer
My homemade one used a field generator that would shift the ship dimensionally to where space twisted around mass instead of just bending toward it. This reduced the space significantly between celestial bodies but still required travel time and did not allow travel close to planets while shifting.
Unless your homebrew system is on the market or you produce a PDF, your post is actually less than useless
Honestly just mixed up intra- with inter-. Regardless long distant space travel mechanics are completely interchangeable and rarely communicate with the rest of the ruleset beyond economy and pacing. I just gave an option for flavor since flavor is the only relevant part of such a mechanic that is going to be point A to point B with no encounters.
Why do you need to understand it? You don't understand the actual explanations so why should some made up bullshit matter?
Mutants in Space
>get in ship
>point ship where want go
>hit big red button
>go where want go
you don't want to point the ship where you want to go, you want to point the ship prograde or retrograde of your solar orbit, depending on whether where you want to go is closer to the sun than your current position or further away from the sun
minimum-energy transfer orbits are easy to figure out on your own, and will suit lower-level technology engines, like solid-core nuclear-thermal rockets made in the 70's
torch-ship math is hard, but there's a graph for that, all you need is a ruler, but you're going to need higher-performance, higher-tech engines, like practical fusion engines, gas-core nuclear thermal, saltwater fission, ramjets, etc
make your way to project rho/atomic rockets and it'll take you to zero to hero
I don't know of any RPGs that DO work that way. Space travel between planets in a system is almost always just a fiat process even in gritty RPGs because there's nothing for the PCs to do while it's happening. I'm not sure what you're even looking for.
EDRPG: Elite Dangerous RPG.
And Elite Encounters.
All of them.
Interstellar space travel that doesn't take years is impossible.
>Finds a cool space game
>The game has strange rules related to physics
>Get a physics decree
>Realize the game doesn't make any sense
>>Get a physics decree
the game doesn't make any sense
The final step is to create FTL in real life so you can prove that FTL in RPGs is unrealistic once and for all.
The greatest tragedy of all is that we never got a Revelation Space RPG.
As much as I love the idea, its space travels are far too realistic to be any fun in a game. Would be a nice landlubber-only cyberpunk game though.
Could go near-space with a Prefect campaign during the Belle Epoque
what's the point of a physics degree if you can't make your own space game that any DM can figure out
here, the math is done for you, just follow the instructions, place ruler on engine type and ship mass and you got your torchship time and acceleration and destination
Traveller exists, Gurps exists.
What you should be doing is statting out real world cars, ships and aircrafts for GURPS in an autistic but enthusiastic manner.
>Are there any space RPGs that have intra-system space travel that doesn't require a physics degree to understand?
Star Wars honestly. Weather it's Fantasy Flight, GURPS, hell use 5e for all I care. At this point Star Wars FTL is so inconsistent that you can break any established rule at any point and people will just go with it.
No hyper drives, just a network of portals connecting billions of worlds built by the ancient precursor race eons ago. Problem solved, what do I win?
I've toyed with the idea of using the High Frontier board for traveling around a developed solar system. That game does a good job of doing all the math for you, so you could use our real solar system as your setting.
reality is much simpler tho
I've wondered about this quite a lot recently.
The, "problem," with both of these maps is that they assume we live in our reality, where the big limit of space travel is how much delta-V a ship has. This means limited burns and drifting to a destination, using fly-bys for gravity assists.
What I'm wondering is what the travel time numbers would look like assuming a ship was using a, "torch drive," and able to maintain a constant acceleration.
I do remember the Traveller corebook had a very small chart for this, giving travel times from the surface of Earth to orbit, to the moon, to Jupiter, to Pluto, to the system limit, assuming a ship is travelling at a constant acceleration, in either 1g-6g. (g being our Earth gravity constant)
But I do want to know more! What if we're using ships like the Honorverse, where inertial dampners mean ships travel could travel at speeds of like, 350g? How many multiples of g would a ship have to be travelling at to cross from the distant edge of our solar system to the opposite side in one hour?
Could someone point me to a math formula, website or tool that calculates this?
Also, I think for narrative purposes a setting should limit FTL travel within or near a planet's atmosphere. Depending on the story direction, ships might need to travel, minutes, hours or days of in-system travel before accessing FTL.
The limits you are talking about are not imposed on you by "reality," but by NASA's budget. dV budgets for torchships are feasible using real technology that could be built if, say, the Pentagon and NASA budgets were switched. There is no getting around a dV budget, however; money isn't real, but math is. it's just an issue of the exhaust velocity part of the rocket equation, which isn't very complicated in the first place. Just go big into nuclear.
I know what a g is, omfg wtf.
And no you don't want to do 6g. Humans have been tested under 2g constant acceleration long-term and can live like that indefinitely, but a torchship doesn't need all that. 0.1g is more than fine for keeping your soup in your bowl, your toilets working, and the floor staying floor. Most large moons (in this system) only have @ 0.15g anyway. There are big questions about how less-than-1g-but-more-than-0g will affect the human body, but it's... probably fine! Lunar astronauts problem was death sand getting everywhere, not 0.16g.
Google project rho and/or atomic rockets, same website, look up torchships, I already posted the idiot's guide here
For that matter I already mentioned project rho. Read motherfricker read.
The "stats" (mass and exhaust velocity and acceleration and mission length given a destination) for a long list of ship typs are oN tHe pAgE READ MOTHERFRICKER READ.
>The limits you are talking about
>I know what a g is
>I already posted the idiot's guide here
>I already mentioned project rho. Read motherfricker read.
So, there's this interesting concept to Ganker, you might have heard of it. It's called anonymous posting.
I have no idea what you personally have posted, I was responding to three different posts. I was writing for any lurkers just reading who don't know what certain symbols mean. I find it very good policy to always explain what an acronym means at the start of a post or message, it frustrates me when I don't know what people are referring to and context gives no hints to the meaning.
>And no you don't want to do 6g
Yeah, that's why I mentioned a setting that hand-waves this with, "inertial dampners," thus changing the math.
Ah, found it after some googling.
Assuming speeds stay under 0.14c, (c=speed of light) then these "simple" formulas work:
T = 2 * sqrt[D/A]
Where T is travel time in seconds, D is distance in meters, A is acceleration in meters/seconds-squared.
Aaaand, one forumula if travel time is nown and acceleration needed is wanted:
A = (4*D)/(T^2)
If we put Neptune as the, "edge," of our solar system, our systems diameter is 9.09 billion km. So if I wanted to cross it in one hour...
That would require 2808.5g of acceleration! Wew! That's too much for the story I'm planning, even in special circumstances, I'll think of something.
Travelling to Neptune with a starting point of our sun, with Neptune's orbit radius of 4.545 billion km would take 1.56 days or 37.45 hours with 1g of acceleration. With 6g, travel time is 15.29 hours. 100g gives 3.7 hours. 1000g "only" cuts that to 1.18 hours.
(I'm assuming an, "average," travel time from Earth to Neptune. Earth and Neptune could be on opposite sides of the Sun. The midpoint of Earth's orbital distance would be just inside the Sun for this math. And of course Orbits are not totally circular, to varying degrees.)
Well this was actually a really interesting learning bit for me. I'm working on a setting where FTL travel is only possible through, "lanes," of travel linking stars, ala Stellaris. Lanes are entered/exited at extreme distances from a star, like the Oort Cloud, or from specific, "jump points," near the orbits of certain planets, like a LaGrange point around Jupiter.
I was playing around with the idea of an invading fleet quickly cutting off any ships trying to leave through a jump point, so invaders would launch interceptors to reach it as fast as possible.
Mind you, I just realized that these equations assume a ship is stopping at the end point! If a ship only wanted to zip by and do a drive-by shooting, the equation would just be halved and much less acceleration needed...
>4.545 billion km would take 1.56 days or 37.45 hours with 1g of acceleration
That does not seem right. I think you might be off by an order of magnitude.
Yeah, I totally fricked up. In my defense, it was late at night. I wasn't using the right units. The equation calls for meters, not kilometers. Acceleration is not in whole integer multiples of 1g, but 9.81m/s^2.
4.545 billion km, with constant 1g of acceleration, starting at zero velocity and stopping at zero would actually take 15.75 days or 378.15 hours.
Whoops.
>t = 2 * sqrt(D/A)
> a = 4d/t^2
Actually it's
t = sqrt(2*D/A)
Because:
d = 1/2 * a * t^2
Then you isolate t:
t^2 = 2d/a
And to finish you elevate everything to 1/2, so:
t = sqrt(2d/a)
So the actual acceleration formula is:
a = 2d/t^2
In fact the acceleration is half the number you wrote
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/space-travel
simple. Just know the distance and what acceleration the ship is capable of. A ship going from Earth to Mars accelerating at 1g will take just under 50 hours to reach it. Travel times are very important in settings so you should consider if that's an appropriate speed for your purposes
I really can't think of any rpg that works that way. FTL in fiction usually complete fantasy.
intra-system means not going outside the solar system and thus FTL isn't required
do you consider mastering Kerbal Space Program "getting a physics degree"
Homeworld maybe? I haven't delved into the rules for that yet so I don't know for sure.
Any sci-fi system where computers exist?
Anyone aware of good mech modules for MgT2E? I've tried to homebrew my own with some of the vehicle combat supplements but nothing ever feels quite right.
There's Walker Vehicles, Volume 1 & 2, but they're just small collections of vehicle designs, if you're looking for a vehicle oriented adventure module, I think MgT2e is lacking there
Just make your intra-system space travel easily managed by you without requiring a physics degree. There are plenty of ways to do this. Here are a few.
Make a 3d map. Each star system occupies a combination of 3 dimensional points. X, Y, Z. Use the pythagorean theorum to calculate distances between. Make each click a quarter of a light year (1/4ly), so that Alpha Centauri is like four or five squares from Sol. Traveling between points involves spooling up the hyperdrive, then jumping into hyperspace before jumping out of hyperspace at your destination after traveling through hyperspace.
What more do you want? What kind of troubles are you dealing with?
>Make a 3d map
I hope you are aware it's not as easy as it sonunds
>What more do you want?
a program that does this for me
>here bro just make a 3d map of a fricking solar system ezpz
I may as well just get a physics degree.
>intra-system space travel
Okay, just to make it clear because it's so easy to mess it up, there's a difference between intra-system travel and inter-system travel.
Inter-system is like international or interstellar, it's between different systems.
Intra-system refers to travel limited to inside that specific system.
So that's the thing the OP is asking about, it's not something a lot of sci-fi RPGs or games really focus on. Normally it's about where a ship can engage FTL engines, typically a certain distance away from a planet.
Intra-system involves some different considerations and math. Some FTL systems won't work for Intra-system travel and "regular" thrust engines will be needed.
Have some maps, note this does assume Alpha Centuri is unihabited, which frequently scifi settings due not for plot convience. I also vaguely recall people speculating if Tau Ceti V had habital planets but this decided no.
These are measured in parsecs not light years as well
Got these from https://www.projectrho.com/
What game are you playing that does require at least an undergraduate degree in physics to handle intrasystem travel? Most games -- all games if I'm being frank here -- correctly simulate the vast majority of things like understanding basic maneuvering in four dimensions. Because a simulation is more than adequate to recreation.