ADVENTURES IN SPACE

Space Travel

Space and Distance

By way of introduction to this section, one does well to remember the sage advice of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the :

“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.”

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 , -like objects like black holes, and massive objects such as nebulae.

Time Span Increments Span: How Far Away Am I? Second/Round Minute Light-minutes and light-years determine the true distance Hour between objects, but what you really need to know is how long Day it takes to travel those distances. That time period is called Month Span. Year Decade For example, a setting may assume that travelling Century between planets can be done in a matter of days. In that case, Millennium we would say that its Span is Days. By default, light-years have spans four levels longer than light-minutes. So if a setting’s light-minute span is Days, then its light-year span is Centuries. This is based on a very rigid interpretation of interstellar distances—GMs are encouraged to bend this rule to better fit their narrative.

Spans naturally vary from one setting to another. Longer spans grant a sense of vastness to the galaxy as it takes tremendous lengths of time to travel great distances, while shorter spans lead to more fast paced, action packed storytelling. The GM and Players should put serious thought into how they want their game to flow when figuring out their spans. Velocity: How Fast am I?

When talking about how fast a Craft is moving, we use the term Velocity. Velocity is measured in light-minutes or light-years per span. If light-minutes are measured in Hours, then Velocity is lm per hour, and if light-years are measured in Months, then your Velocity is ly per month.

Example: The rapid response vehicle Moonage Daydream is stationed in the Adhafera System in orbit around the third planet, Leonix. A bounty comes down the wire for Zelma Rubia, the notorious thief who has shocked the galaxy by stealing the magnificently sculpted F-Ring of the planet Mohapatra. The Moonage immediately sets a course for Adhafera’s fourth planet, Orissa, to get in contact with their black market informant.

Orissa is 20 lm from Leonix, and in this , travel between planets is measured in hours. The Moonage Daydream has a total Thrust of 3d; if they were to travel to Orissa at their normal cruising speed, they would do so at a Velocity of 3 lm/hour, meaning it would take almost 7 hours to reach Orissa. Instead, their captain orders them to push their engines to reach Orissa faster, giving them a Velocity of 5 lm/hour. At that Velocity, they will reach Orissa in just 4 hours.

Thrust: Conventional Spaceflight

A Craft travels through space at a rate determined by its Thrust, which describes its conventional means of spaceflight. This may encompass simple rocket propulsion or more sophisticated systems like ion engines, Hawking drives or nuclear bombs detonated against a pressure plate.

Cruising Speed

Unless the Craft’s Thrust systems are damaged or destroyed, it can always travel at a Velocity equal to its Thrust. This represents Cruising Speed-- the pace at which the Craft can normally move without putting stress on its engines or flight crew. Cruising Speed doesn’t require any dice rolls or Flight Skills-- it’s the equivalent of casually walking down the street to borrow a cup of sugar from your neighbor.

Full Speed: Going Faster

If cruising speed isn’t cutting it, a Craft can open up the throttle and accelerate. This requires a dice roll using the Craft’s Thrust plus a relevant Flight Skill-- usually Pilot, Operation or Specialty [Thrust]. If the roll has a Set, add the Width to the Craft’s Thrust to generate its Velocity, called its Full Speed. A Craft can only travel at Full Speed for so long without straining its engines. This time limit is measured using the light-minute span of the distance you are travelling, and is equal to your Thrust. Therefore, a Craft with 3d in Thrust and measuring lm in days can travel at Full Speed for 3 days.

When the Craft exceeds that time limit, it needs to slow down to Cruising Speed to allow its engines to recover. This recovery period is the same as the amount of time the Craft is able to travel at Full Speed (so 3 hours at Full Speed requires 3 hours at Cruising Speed to cool off).

If that isn’t an option, like if the crew is pursuing their arch nemesis as he tries to escape through a wormhole, then they can keep their Full Speed at the cost of engine damage. If a Craft exceeds its Full Speed safety limit, then it will take damage each lm span that ticks by. Remember the Thrust + Flight Skill roll you did to accelerate to Full Speed? Well the Width from its Set becomes Shock Damage inflicted on every Hit Location housing a Thrust System.

Example Zelma Rubia boasted on the Net that in 6 hours she will steal the ruby encrusted ninth moon of Bastilet, the gas giant on the very edge of the Adhafera System. At 25 lm away, the Moonage Daydream races to Bastilet at Full Speed to catch her before she can cement her already legendary reputation.

The Moonage’s navigator rolls Pilot + Thrust and gets a set of 2x5, so he adds 2 to the Craft’s 3d in Thrust, setting their Full Speed Velocity at 5 lm/hour. At that rate, they’ll reach Bastilet in 5 hours, but after 3 hours of flight their engines are exhausted. Knowing that they’ll never reach Bastilet in time if they slow down, the captain orders them to keep their current Velocity. For the last two hours of the flight, the Moonage Daydream takes 2 Shock each hour to the Hit Locations housing her Thrust systems, arriving at Bastilet with 4 Shock to each and an hour to stop the heist.

Max Speed: Pushing the Envelope

The absolute fastest Velocity that a Craft can travel at is its Max Speed. Max Speed is a dangerous, unstable mode of travel that pushes a Craft’s engines well beyond their designed parameters.

Max Speed requires the same roll of Thrust + Flight Skill, but the resulting Set needs a minimum Height of 5. A successful roll for Max Speed gives the Craft a Velocity of Width plus double its Thrust.

This Velocity comes at a severe cost: every span that passes incurs Shock damage to all Thrust locations equal to the Width of the Max Speed roll. Unlike Full Speed, there’s no time span in which Max Speed is safe to use-- even a brief burst of Max Speed will hurt a Craft’s propulsion systems. 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 , showing how far various planets are from the . 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.

Body Miles (millions) Light-minutes (lm) Sun - - Mercury 36 3 Venus 67 6 Earth 93 8 Mars 141 12 Asteroid Belt 186 16 Jupiter 483 41 Saturn 886 76 Uranus 1,784 153 Neptune 2,794 240

Pluto 3,674 316 Oort Cloud 186,000 16,000

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 9 lm, 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, a solar system can be 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. Then there’s the Oort Cloud, the massive expanse of ice, dust and rocks that surrounds the solar system. At 1 lm per hour, it would take about 21 months reach the inner fringe of the Oort Cloud, and you wouldn’t reach the other side for almost 90 years.

The conclusion to all of this is that mere Thrust won’t cut it for any setting where interstellar travel is a factor. For adventures on that scale, the light-year scale, players need some way to break the speed limit that light imposes. Interstellar Travel: Workarounds

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of moving at speeds approaching or exceeding the , it’s worth mentioning that not all settings benefit from establishing hard rules on interstellar travel. There are plenty of ways that you can avoid the issue altogether.

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, mindboggling 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 hyperspace 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, Bussard ramjets or nuclear explosions. 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 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

If your setting takes a Hoofing It approach to interstellar travel, then you need to refer back again to the Span rules at the top of his section. For basic, conventional spaceflight technology, light-years are four spans down from light-minutes. If the lm-span is Hours, then ly-span is Decades. If the lm-span is Days, then the ly-span is Centuries.

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: Advanced Spaceflight

A Craft uses its Drive system when it wants to move magnitudes faster than it can by using its conventional propulsion systems. This usually manifests itself in some kind of faster- than-light (FTL) technology, though not always. The Firefly universe, for instance, has no FTL technology, but Serenity, the principal spacecraft in the series, is shown to fly both by means of traditional thrusters and a “pulse drive” capable of accelerating an object to far greater but still subluminal velocities, making interstellar travel feasible, though still a major undertaking.

How a Drive system works is unique to the setting of the story featuring it. In most science-fiction, FTL technology comes in two flavors: the ability to bypass certain laws of physics to exceed the speed of light, as in Star Trek’s warp drive; or the ability to enter some kind of alternate space or dimension where the speed of light doesn’t apply, as in Star Wars’ hyperspace. These are just two common examples, and are by no means the only way to describe the function of a Drive system.

Using a Craft’s Drive system is similar to using its Thrust system. A Craft can always travel a number of lm or ly equal to its Drive (Cruising Speed), or it can risk damage to its Drive systems to gain extra Velocity (Full and Max Speed).

Drive’s advantage is that when used, it shifts the span used to measure Velocity higher up the scale, significantly decreasing the amount of time it takes to travel between planets and stars.

As an example, consider a Thrust span of lm in days and ly in years. A Craft with 5d in Thrust can travel between planets at a cruising speed of 5 lm per day, and between stars at a cruising speed of 5 ly per year. This Craft also has 3d in Drive. When it uses its Drive, its time scale gets moved up by one level, so now its cruising speed is 3 lm per hour and 3 ly per month, a significant boost.

Drive Levels and Limits

The above example is one where shifting to Drive moves the scale up by one level, but that’s just the base example. A Drive’s Level describes how many steps up the time scale the Drive goes. A Level 1 Drive moves the scale up one span (Years to Months, for example), while a Level 2 Drive goes up two spans (Years to Days), and a Level 4 Drive buys you four spans (Years to Minutes). There’s a trade-off, however.

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 stellar 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 (five of them, in fact, in this case).

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.

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 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.

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.

How Big is a Galaxy?

Previously, this supplement briefly demonstrated, using our own solar system as an example, how far apart things are on an interplanetary scale. Since this section is now discussing distance on an interstellar scale, let’s do the same for the .

Body Relationship to Earth Light-Years (ly) Sun Home star - Proxima Centauri, Nearest star outside our solar system 4 Brightest visible star 8 Tau Ceti e Nearest potentially habitable planet 12 Hyades Nearest 150 Betelgeuse Nearest giant star 640 Helix Nearest nebula 680 Orion Nebula Nearest stellar nursery 1,344 UY Scuti Largest known star 9,500 -- Distance from Earth to 26,000 Overdensity Nearest 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.

Things to do in Space Using Flight Skills

This section covers special rules that apply to using a character’s Flight Skills. Flight Skills, as laid out in the character creation section, describe that character’s ability to use the various systems on a spacecraft, either as a sole operator or as part of a crew. Each Flight Skill combines natural with certain systems, but the following descriptions are not the only uses for each Flight Skill. Players are encouraged to be creative in how they combine Skills and Systems. Flight Skill: Pilot

Space Travel (Pilot + Thrust and Pilot + Drive) Pilot + Thrust and Pilot + Drive are used to travel between interplanetary and interstellar distances.

Combat Maneuvers (Pilot + Thrust and Pilot + Maneuver) Variously, Pilot + Thrust and Pilot + Maneuver are used during Combat to avoid incoming attacks and affect a Craft’s position and combat Velocity in order to achieve an advantage over hostile forces. The rules for these are covered in detail in the Space Combat chapter.

Precision Flight (Pilot + Maneuver) Outside of combat, Pilot + Maneuver can be used for careful or acrobatic flight, such as weaving through an asteroid field or flying through into the heart of a vast battle station through a narrow fuel intake passage.

Stealth Flight (Pilot + Stealth) A Craft’s Stealth system is used to mask its emissions and signals from sensor detection. Combining Pilot + Stealth allows a Craft to move through hostile territory without its actions being noticed.

Flight Skill: Defense

Offensive Actions (Defense + Weapons) During Combat, Defense + Weapons is used to fire one of a Craft’s Weapon systems. The outcome of this action depends on the capabilities of a given Weapon, and is covered in greater detail in the Space Combat chapter.

Defensive Actions (Defense + Shields and Defense + Countermeasures) Defense is also used more literally to protect a Craft from an incoming attack. Defense + Shields allows a crewmember to maintain and modulate Shield strength in the face of an attack. Defense + Countermeasures is used to deploy weapons or hardware designed specifically for foiling attacks, such as launching decoys to trick missiles or spreading fields of chaff to deflect laser fire. The specific rules surrounding Shields and Countermeasures are covered in the Systems section of his Chapter, and the techniques for using them are detailed in Space Combat.

Tactical Scanning (Defense + Macro- and Microsensors) The Defense Flight Skill can also be used along with a Craft’s Macrosensors and Microsensors to gain an advantage in combat. Defense + Macrosensors can tell the user broad information such as what kind of weapons a Craft has or what its Shield strength is. Defense + Microsensors can give even more detailed and vital info, depending on the nature of the Sensor system. Microsensors [Lifeforms] can be used to identify how many passengers are onboard the ship as well as their distribution. Microsensors [Technology] can be used to identify weaknesses in a Craft’s design, granting bonuses to attacks. These functions are detailed further in the Space Combat section.

Internal Defense (Defense + Security) Defense doesn’t just refer to threats coming from outside a Craft. It also involves using Systems to combat threats that have boarded a vessel. Defense + Security can be used to track intruders and secure passageways, cutting the invaders off from vital areas of the Craft by force fields or heavy bulkheads.

Flight Skill: Engineering

Reroute Power [Engineering + Any System] Engineering can be used to redirect power, in the form of dice, from one System to another. To do this, simply roll Engineering + the System with the smaller dice pool. The Width from your Set is the maximum number of dice you can reroute, and it also tells you how many times you can use the now boosted System before the power returns to its original System. Each time Reroute Power is used, the hit locations housing the affected Systems take 1 shock.

Minor Repair [Engineering + Any System] One of the primary roles of the Engineering Skill is repairing damage that a Craft takes to its Hit Locations. To do so, roll Engineering + the highest System the hit location. If you are making this repair “on the road”, i.e. while travelling through open space, then you can remove Width in Shock from that location over the course of 5-Width hours. If you are at a friendly repair facility, such as a space dock, you can repair all Shock over the same time period.

Major Repair [Engineering + Any System] When a Craft suffers Killing damage, it requires Major Repair to fix. Major Repair works similar to Minor Repair—the user takes his Engineering Skill and adds it to the highest System in the hit location he’s repairing. He can then convert Width in Killing to taken to that location to Shock over the course of 5-Width hours for Small Craft and Medium Craft, 5-Width Days for Big Craft.

Emergency Repair [Engineering + Any System] In combat, an Engineer doesn’t have the luxury of making a thorough attempt at repairing damage that his Craft suffers. Emergency Repair, which uses the same Engineering + highest System mechanic as the previous repair types, allows an Engineer to remove Width in Shock or Width in Killing (if Height is at least 5) from a hit location for Width rounds of combat. So if a Craft’s Thrust systems is housed in a Hit Location that fills up with Shock, an Engineer can make an Emergency Repair roll to temporarily fix the engines, perhaps long enough to allow the Craft to escape their situation.

Flight Skill: Operations

Operations is a special kind of Flight Skill, because it allows basic usage of any system. This includes flying the Craft using Operations + Thrust and avoiding attacks with Operations + Maneuver, and launching attacks with Operations + Weapons. It represents basic competence and a broad understanding of how a spacecraft works. However, the Operations Skill has its drawbacks.

Drawbacks As stated in the Character Creation rules for Flight Skills, a character cannot have more than 3d in Operations, nor can he have Hard or Wiggle Dice. Each die in Operations also has a higher cost than its others—6 points rather than 4 points.

If a player wants to use a special move with Operations, such as using Inspiration to get a +1d bonus, the Willpower costs are doubled.

Furthermore, most of the actions that the Engineering Flight Skill handles are beyond the capabilities of Operations. It can make Minor Repairs, but not Major or Emergency Repairs, and it can’t Reroute Power.

Flight Skill: Specialty

Specialty is the opposite of Operations. Operations is broad, Specialty is focused. Operations can handle everything, but not to the highest level. Specialty works only with a single system, but within that parameter it can do just about anything.

A character can have as many Specialties as he or she wants, and can buy them at a reduced cost of only 3 points per die. Specialties are free to go up to 5d and can have Hard or Wiggle Dice. But of course, each Specialty can only apply to a specific system. A character with Specialty [Thrust] can’t use that skill with a Craft’s Maneuver system, even though the two seem to go hand in hand. Specialty represents dedicated focus and total mastery of a narrow band of proficiencies.

Specialty can even supply Engineering functions, including Rerouting Power, Major and Emergency Repairs, as long as it’s related to his chosen system. A character with Specialty [Drive] can conduct repairs on a hit location where the Drive is the main system (i.e. has the most dice), and can Reroute Power to or from the Drive system.