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Flight Skill: Pilot 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 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.” 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. 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 universe, 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 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. 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 speed of light, it’s worth mentioning that not all settings benefit from establishing hard rules on interstellar travel.
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