ADVENTURES IN SPACE

Space Travel Space: A Brief Introduction 1 Drive vs Thrust: How Much Faster? 2

Absolute Distances: The Hard Way 4 Temporal Distances: Fudging It 4

Velocity: How Fast Am I? 5 Absolute Velocity 5 Temporal Velocity: Easier/Less Accurate 6 Temporal Velocity: Accurate/Trickier 6 Engine Strain 7

How Big is a Star System? 8 How Big is a Galaxy? 9

Interstellar Travel: Workarounds 10 Shortcuts 10 Jaunting 10 Winging It 10 Hoofing It 10

Drive Limits 11 Ready-to-Play Drive Limits 11 Fuel Capacity 11 Fuel Rarity 12 Imprecise 12 Interstellar Only 12 Minimum Size 12 Non-Orbital 12 Specialized 12 Traceable 12 Uncomfortable 13 Volatile 13 Variable Drive Technology 13

ADVENTURES IN SPACE Space Travel

Space: A Brief Introduction Throughout this first section, one does well to remember the sage advice of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.”

As you might expect, figuring out a reasonable way to cope with the immensity of a solar system, a sector, a galaxy or an entire universe is a serious undertaking that a GM building his own setting needs to confront early on.

There are a couple ways to do it, each with their own advantages and disadvantages, and each suited for a different kind of narrative. What these methods have in common is that they make use of two of a spacecraft's Systems: Thrust and Drive.

Thrust is used for local travel. It represents a Craft's "conventional" propulsion system, the kind it uses to maneuver through space in a precise, controlled fashion. This could be traditional solid or liquid fuel rockets, some kind of fusion drive or even nuclear bombs detonated against a pressure plate.

At best, Thrust can be used to navigate on an interplanetary scale, though doing so is, in most settings, glacially slow. More commonly, Thrust is useful for exiting a space station, navigating within a planetary orbit or outracing an enemy vessel in combat. Using Thrust to travel between stars is almost always prohibitive for time and resources, which is why spacefaring civilizations rely on more sophisticated technology.

Drive is used for long-distance travel. This can be anything from traveling from one planet to another in hours rather than months or crossing the gulf between whole galaxies, depending upon the needs of the story. Drive allows a Craft to cover distances many magnitudes greater than it could with Thrust, but typically at some kind of cost-- rare fuel, dangerous navigation, the need to carry bulky equipment or countless others.

Drive frequently represents Faster-Than-Light travel, but it can also be used simply as a faster, more powerful sub-light system, as in settings like Firefly and Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. This is especially useful when dealing with settings localized to a single solar system, rather than an entire galaxy. Space Travel (continued)

Drive vs Thrust: How Much Faster? Time Span Increments One basic question that a setting needs to address is "how Second/Round much faster is my Drive system than my Thrust system?" To Minute help work that out, we've provided this chart here showing the Hour various spans of time required by space travel. Day Month By default, the time it takes to travel between planets Year using Thrust is measured in Months, and between stars is Decade Millennia. This is based on somewhat optimistic projections of Century near technology, but it's as good a place to start as any. Millennium The rule then is as follows: Interstellar travel takes 4-time span increments longer than Interplanetary travel. This makes a go at simulating a universe bound by the steely barrier that is the speed of light. If you shorten that 4-increment gap, you're suggesting that the laws of physics in your universe aren't exactly the same as ours, which is of course fine if that's your goal.

Once you figure out how fast Thrust technology can go, you can do the same for Drive. In the interest of simplicity, it's usually best to keep these consistent even if your setting includes multiple space-faring cultures that use different Thrust and Drive equipment, so that everyone is on roughly equal footing when it comes to getting from A to B.

When you switch on your Drive, you're shifting your position on the Time Span Increments chart upwards, so that the time it takes to travel between Planets or Stars shrinks drastically. How far upwards it shifts depends on the power and sophistication of the technology itself. This is called the Drive Level. Drive Level 1 means the time spans for interplanetary and interstellar travel each move up one increment. Drive Level 3 means they move up three increments.

Drive Level also tells you how many Limits are placed on your Drive usage. These are discussed in detail on page [XX] of this section, but essentially the greater your Level, the more restrictive and situational your Drive is to use.

All of this may seem a little complex, but the upside is that you only have to do it one time. Once you lock in how fast you can move through space in your setting, then you're able to judge distances and begin exploring the universe you've dreamt up.

Space Travel (continued)

To show how this method looks in action, take a look at the example below. It's using the default time spans for Thrust travel, and a Level 1 Drive. Thrust Time Span Increments Drive (Lv 1) Second/Round Minute Hour Day Interplanetary Interplanetary Month Year Decade Century Interstellar Interstellar Millennium

Note that whenever a propulsion System, whether Thrust or Drive, can make Interstellar journeys in Years or sooner, it's considered Faster-Than-Light (FTL).

In the above measurements, travel between planets using Drive is quite speedy, taking mere Days instead of Months, but going from one star to the next is still prohibitively long. A game in this setting would therefore likely be confined to a single solar system, like Firefly, Cowboy Bebop or Hannu Rajaneimi's Jean LeFlambeur novels.

Here's another example, one using more speculative, advanced technology. Thrust Time Span Increments Drive (Lv 4) Second/Round Minute Hour Interplanetary Interplanetary Day Interstellar Month Year Decade Interstellar Century Millennium

This is a configuration similar to . Note that on the Drive side, the Interplanetary and Interstellar time spans are only one increment apart, not four like it's supposed to be. This is fine, since with a Level 4 Drive, the Interplanetary time span would be in the realm of Seconds, which doesn't make for very compelling stories. Instead, the hypothetical GM chose to make his Drive technology less efficient for Interplanetary travel than the rules world normally dictate.

Space Travel (continued)

One final note about these Time Span Increments is the affect that it has on your setting. The shorter the time it takes to travel between objects in space, the smaller your setting feels. If you can freely travel from one planet to another in a matter of minutes, then the galaxy loses some of its grandeur, but in exchange it means you can visit new worlds and encounter new cultures on a much more frequent basis. In other words you're trading gravitas for action and adventure.

Now that you've figured out the speed limits of space, you can work out how to actually measure space between things. We've come up with two ways of doing that: Absolute Distance and Temporal Distance.

Absolute Distances: The Hard Way First off, we don’t mean “Hard” as in difficult, we mean “Hard” as in “Hard Sci-Fi”, the domain of the old authors like Arthur C. Clarke and Joe Haldeman. In a sense it’s the simplest approach, because it tells you how far apart things are in space using actual astronomical measurements.

Using Absolute Distances, the distance between objects in space is measured in two units—light-minutes (lm) which is used to describe the distance between relatively small objects, meaning anything the size of a planet or smaller; and light-years (ly) which describes the distance between stars, star-like objects like black holes, and massive objects such as nebulae.

Temporal Distances: Fudging It This is the approach you want if you’re less interested in the exact distances between two things in space than you are how long it takes to get there. For some people, this is both easier and makes more sense. When you run out to the store, you say “I’ll be back in 10 minutes” not “I only have to go 2 miles both ways”.

Temporal Distances give you a measure more freedom in how you build the universe versus Absolute Distances. You can say "This planet is 11 days away from you" and the players will know that that's a heck of a lot farther than a planet that's merely 2 days away. You just need to be consistent: how much time does it take to reach a nearby star? A distant star? The far end of known space? Work out these constants, and use them as the foundation for the rest of your world building.

Space Travel (continued) Velocity: How Fast am I? When talking about how fast a Craft or another object in space is moving, we use Velocity. Velocity is derived from a Craft's Thrust or Drive systems, depending on which they are using for their journey. It's express in three degrees.

Cruising Speed is the Velocity at which a Craft can move without stressing its propulsion equipment by pushing it beyond its normal operating parameters. At Cruising Speed, Velocity is equal to the number of dice in the Craft's Thrust or Drive System. Therefore a Craft with 5d in Thrust and 3d in Drive has a Thrust Cruising Speed of 5 and a Drive Cruising Speed of 3.

Full Speed is what you get when you squeeze more power out of your engines than is safe for long-term operation. Going to Full Speed requires a Flight + Thrust or Flight + Drive roll. You add the Width of your resulting Set to your Thrust or Drive dice to get your Velocity. If you roll Flight + Thrust and get a Width of 3, and your Thrust System normally bas 5d, your Full Speed is 8.

Max Speed is an unsafe, unstable Velocity where you've pushed your Craft's beyond their intended limits in order to go as fast as possible. It's calculated the same way as Full Speed, but you double your Width before adding it to your Thrust or Drive dice; so in the above example, it would be 11 instead of 8.

What you've probably noticed here is that Velocity is just a number; it doesn't really tell you how much ground you can cover. That's because Velocity works a little differently depending on whether you're using Absolute or Temporal Distances.

Absolute Velocity Velocity using Absolute Distance is expressed as light-minutes or light-years per time span, depending on whether you're travelling between planets or stars.

Example: The rapid response vehicle Moonage Daydream is stationed in the Adhafera System, in orbit around the third planet, Leonix. Its crew need to reach the fifth planet, Orissa, which is 20lm away. Their Thrust is 5d and their Drive is 4d. In this universe, Thrust travel between planets takes Days, and Drive travel takes Hours. Using Thrust, they can travel at a Cruising Speed of 5 lm/day, so it would take 4 days to reach Orissa without using their Drive. If they did use their Drive, at a Cruising Speed of 4 lm/hour, they'd be at Orissa in just 5 hours.

Space Travel (continued)

Temporal Velocity: The Easy but less Accurate Way If your GM has stretched out the Universe with Temporal Velocities, where the distance between worlds and stars is measured purely by how many hours, days, months or years it takes to go between them, then Velocity can work in one of two ways.

If you want to do it the easy way, just subtract your Velocity from the Temporal Distance you need to cover. This works nicely in settings where distances aren't particularly extended, usually 10 or less.

Example: The Vorga is carrying a shipment of luxury goods from the Mohaim system to Wolf 359. This is an interstellar distance of 10 days. The Vorga has a Drive of 2d, so at Cruising Speed they can reach Wolf 359 in 8 days. The captain decides this isn’t fast enough so he orders Full Speed. The Vorga’s helmsman makes a Pilot + Drive roll and gets a Width of 2, which gives him a Full Speed Velocity of 4. The Vorga will now reach their destination in only 6 days.

This method breaks down a little bit if distances between planets or stars are extremely large. A journey of 55 days won’t be significantly shorter if your Drive is 1d or 5d, for example. To that end, there’s another way to approach things, but it brings into the formula the roleplayer’s bane: division.

Temporal Velocity: The Accurate but Trickier Way The other way you can handle Velocity with Temporal Distances is just to divide the distance by your Velocity, and be done with it. If Distance is 10 hours, and your Velocity is 2, then you’ll get there in 5 hours.

Remember that per the ORE’s cardinal rules, you round any remainders down. The exception here is your result is less than 1 (like your distance is 4 days but your Velocity is 5). In that situation the result is always 1.

This method works equally well for short distances and long ones, which is nice. The downside is that at least one person will probably need a calculator at some point, especially if you can crank your Velocity up to really high speeds, which can turn a simple navigation roll into a pop-quiz, and that’s not much fun for everyone. Nobody wants to figure out 71 divided by 13 in their head (it’s 5.4, so rounds down to 5). Just use a calculator. We promise it’s the only time we’ll ever ask you to do this.

Space Travel (continued) Engine Strain Travelling at Full or Max Speed taxes your propulsion hardware, which overtime will cause them to weaken and eventually fail. Here’s how it works.

Full Speed Strain When you roll to accelerate to Full Speed, the Width of your roll translates into Shock damage. This damage can be distributed across each location housing a Thrust or Drive system, or it can be concentrated all in one location.

If the duration of your journey exceeds your total Thrust or Drive dice, you take one point of Shock to every location when you reach your destination.

Example: The Moonage Daydream activates its Drive system to make the trip from the Horsehead Nebula to the Tannhauser system, a distance of 15 ly. They have 4d in Drive, and decide to throttle up to Full Speed to knock some time off their journey. The helmsman’s Pilot + Drive roll gets a Width of 3, so they boost their speed to 7 ly/day. At that speed, they’ll reach Tannhauser in just 2 days. Their Drive systems incur a total of 2 Shock on this trip.

Were they to make a longer interstellar journey, they could only travel at Full Speed for a maximum of 4 days before incurring further strain; not only is their Drive not built for sustained travel at that Velocity for longer than that, but the rest of the Moonage Dayddream would feel the pressure as well, taking 1 Shock to every location.

Max Speed Strain Max Speed works the same as Full Speed, but the damage you take when accelerating is Killing instead of Shock, and the damage incurred after surpassing your Craft’s distance threshold is Shock AND Killing. It’s therefore not recommended that you use Max Speed for long trips except in emergencies.

Space Travel (continued)

How Big is a Star System? To give an idea of how Planetary Units relate to the distance between Planets, the following chart details our Solar System, showing how far various planets are from the Sun. This can be used as a helpful reference to give you some sense of big a Solar System can be, and how far apart planets inside the system can be. We’ve measured the distances in millions of miles (functionally useless for most games), light-minutes (useful for Absolute Distances) and months, using theoretical near-future technology (useful for Temporal Distances).

Body Miles (millions) Light-minutes (lm) Theoretical Months Sun - - Mercury 36 3 3 Venus 67 6 7 Earth 93 8 9 Mars 141 12 14 Asteroid Belt 186 16 19 Jupiter 483 41 50 Saturn 886 76 92 Uranus 1,784 153 185 Neptune 2,794 240 291 Pluto 3,674 316 382 Oort Cloud 186,000 16,000 19,375

This chart demonstrates a few important facts about the distance between planets.

First, the sweet spot for speculatively habitable worlds is generally between 6 and 12 lm. Closer to 6 gives you swelteringly hot worlds like Venus, and towards 12 you get cold, mostly airless planets like Mars. If the universe the characters are occupying adheres more closely to a realistic, hard science premise, then even these aren’t serious options, and life is limited to a narrow band of 7 to 9lm, with 8 lm being ideal.

Second, the further you get from the Sun, the more spread out planets become. The space between the Sun and Saturn is slightly less than the distance between Saturn and Uranus, the next planet out.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, a solar system is really, really big. If a voyager could cover 1 lm per hour, it would take almost two weeks to travel to Pluto from the Sun. So our advice is not to feel shackled by reality. Reality, as far as spaceflight is concerned, is a harsh mistress and frequently un-fun, so don’t feel bad if your science-fiction roleplaying game doesn’t cling closely to real-world astrophysics. Space Travel (continued) How Big is a Galaxy? As with the solar system, it can be helpful to see how big our galaxy is, since most sci-fi settings aren’t limited to the planets of a single sun. To that end, here’s a quick list of stuff in our own galaxy and how far away from us it is. Since interstellar travel is the most speculative of speculative sciences, there’s no sense in offering potential Temporal Distances for these objects; just do whatever feels right for you.

Body Relationship to Earth Light-Years (ly) Sun Home star - Proxima Centauri, Nearest star outside our solar system 4 Sirius Brightest visible star 8 Tau Ceti e Nearest potentially habitable planet 12 Hyades Nearest star cluster 150 Betelgeuse Nearest super giant star 640 Helix Nebula Nearest nebula 680 Orion Nebula Nearest stellar nursery 1,344 UY Scuti Largest known star 9,500 -- Distance from Earth to galactic center 26,000 Canis Major Overdensity Nearest dwarf galaxy 28,000 -- Diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy 100,000

Naturally, these exact distances are not especially important if the game is not centered on Earth. However, it does give a good idea about the sheer vastness of the Milky Way. One might expect that nearby stars should have around 4 ly of space between them. Inhabited systems might be 12 ly apart. Star clusters, where one might expect to see large spacefaring empires to center themselves, might be a hundred or so ly away from each other, and nebulae, several hundred to several thousand ly. Truly unique objects like UY Scuti up there are few and far between.

This chart also illustrates that even at ludicrous speeds, where light-years zip by in plaid-tinted minutes, it would take months to get from one side of the galaxy to the other. This is why having short-cuts like wormholes are useful storytelling and gameplay devices. Speaking of which…

Space Travel (continued) Interstellar Travel: Workarounds There are alternatives to powering up your hyperdrive and shooting across space. A GM should decide what place, if any he wants these to have in his universe. They might be commonplace, exceedingly rare or non-existent. But they can be useful methods for opening up parts of the galaxy that would be otherwise too far to reach by normal means.

Shortcuts Instead of Crafts being able to propel themselves through space at superluminal velocities, they can make use of fixed shortcuts that let them travel from one section to space to another in minutes, if not seconds. Countless narratives employ wormholes or other spatial anomalies to this end. In the Mass Effect universe, devices called Mass Relays can fling a ship from one end of the galaxy to another almost instantaneously. This way, you don’t have to worry about the staggering, mind-melting vastness of the galaxy, and can cut right to the chase.

Jaunting Another way of sidestepping the problem of scale is simply give spacecraft the ability to effectively teleport across a galactic distance instead of actually moving through it. The original concept comes from Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, from which its name is derived. Battlestar Galactica’s jump drive, Dune’s space-folding Holtzman effect, and even the Infinite Improbability Drive from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are examples of Jaunting. With Jaunting, travel occurs instantly to any desired point, so the limiting factor is usually how long it takes to chart out one’s destination and/or recharge the engines.

Winging It An even looser alternative to Shortcuts or Jaunting is just making it up as you go along. Less scientifically rigid settings have no problem with ignoring the issue of how long it takes to jet through to reach another planet. Star Wars is a prime example, especially in the prequel films. A ship travelling from one end of the galaxy to another, covering a hundred-thousand light-years at least, seems to take a couple days at most. This doesn’t communicate a particularly grand scale to the universe, but it does keep the action moving.

Hoofing It An infinitely slower but more grounded option is to simply eschew faster-than-light travel altogether. Plenty of science-fiction has made do without wormholes and hyperdrive systems, relying on good old fashioned liquid fuel engines and Bussard ramjets. In these narratives, travelling from one star to another is an epic journey requiring cryogenic storage of a ship’s Crew and passengers, and travelers can count themselves lucky if the Space Travel (continued)

civilizations they expect to encounter upon arrival haven’t collapsed into a dark age or transcended the crude bonds of matter to become beings of pure thought. It’s a risky venture for sure, but possible, and doesn’t get its hands dirty with more out-there technological concepts.

GMs and Players are encouraged to embrace these rules if it fits the style of play and the structure of their narrative better, or even to include them into a more hard-SF setting where appropriate. Shortcuts are especially useful for this; if a GM is making a go at representing the immensity of the galaxy, a wormhole here or there will give them the option to extend the reach of their campaign without putting it on a centuries-long time scale.

Drive Limits As stated previously in this section, a Craft’s advanced spaceflight system, its Drive, is given a Level which indicates how much faster it can move compared to its Thrust system. Each level that a Drive has should be accompanied by a Limit. A Limit is a rule placed upon the use of the Drive technology, such as that it uses an exotic fuel or that it can only be used over fixed distances.

Thus, the more powerful and sophisticated a Drive is, the more constraints are placed on its use. Being able to cross interstellar distances in minutes when normal propulsion would take decades would be a tremendous feat, which is why the means to do so should be bound by a number of restrictions.

Ready to Play Drive Limits Any of the following Limits can be applied to a Drive system in a setting to increase its Level. These are, of course, cumulative, so by adding together Limits you can design more sophisticated and powerful Drives.

Fuel Capacity Your Drive consumes a relative large amount of its fuel when used, either because it is inefficient or because you can’t carry much of it.Your fuel supply is equal to your Drive x5. You consume one portion of fuel each time you use your Drive for lm travel over a distance equal to your Drive, and you exhaust all of your fuel when doing the same for ly travel.

If this Limit is combined with Fuel Rarity (below), then they count as 3 Limits instead of 2.

Space Travel (continued)

Fuel Rarity Your Drive requires some kind of exotic material to function. You aren’t necessarily in danger of running out, but if you do run out or if it is compromised, you can’t just replenish it at the nearest spaceport.

If this Limit is combined with Fuel Capacity (above), then they count as 3 Limits instead of 2.

Imprecise Precision navigation using your Drive is difficult, and your Craft will arrive 5 lm away from your target destination, minus the Height of your Flight Skill + Drive roll. This means that you need a height of 5 or higher to exactly reach your destination

Interstellar Only Your Drive can’t be used to travel between planetary bodies, only stars.

Minimum Size Your Drive technology, due to size, power requirements or some other limiting factor, can’t be outfitted on smaller Crafts. This is worth 1 Limit if it restricts Drive to Medium and Big Craft, and 2 Limits if Big Craft are the only ones that can carry Drives.

Non-Orbital Your Drive can’t be used when in orbit around a planet or star. You must be at least 1 lm or other planetary distant measurement away from any planet or 3 lm from any star before you can use your Drive. Exiting your Drive can only be done outside of that same bumper.

Specialized Using your Drive requires a Crew member with Specialty [Drive] as a Flight Skill. Operation or Pilot simply won’t cut it.

Traceable A Craft using its Drive leaves behind some kind of signal or residue that can be detected by another Craft’s Hidden or Tech Sensors, allowing its route to be traced.

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Uncomfortable The process of using your Drive causes discomfort for all Crew and passengers with less than 4d in Endurance. Any travelers below this Threshold must make an Endurance check and take 1 Shock to their Heads and 3 Shock to their Torso upon failure when the Drive is activated.

Volatile Your Drive is an unfortunate combination of sensitive to damage and loaded with hazardous material. If a Hit Location housing a Drive system is filled with Shock, it begins a countdown starting at Drive +1 (i.e. 3d in Drive would start the countdown at 4). The crew then has that many Rounds to use their Flight Skills (i.e. Engineering + Drive) to accrue total Width equal to Drive. If they succeed before the countdown ends, then the Drive is stabilized and nothing happens. If they fail, the Craft is destroyed.

A Craft with a Volatile Drive will also be destroyed if the Hit Location housing the Drive is filled with Killing.

Variable Drive Technology When figuring out how Drive works in your setting, one thing to consider is whether it should be Variable. This means that different groups, races, civilizations, corporations or whatever might develop different kinds of drive systems.

The way this works is that all Variable Drive systems have the same Level in the setting, but exactly what Limits go along with that Level are up to the GM and/or the players to determine.

So if the Drive Level is 4, the Procyon Hegemony might use a Drive system with Fuel Rarity, Minimum Size [Big] and Traceable, while the Horsehead Kingdom has Imprecise, Minimum Size [Medium], Specialized and Traceable. Both Drives use the same span to measure their travel speed, but they have unique rules they need to follow. The Procyon can only use Drive on their biggest ships and it requires rare components, while the Horseheaders have a more compact, efficient drive that requires specialized skills to use and is less accurate. Both technologies leave behind some kind of traceable signal or residue.