Faster than light travel or "jumping"

[Nareau]

I'd probably go for a combination of both hyperdrive and jump gates.

From a plot perspective, both have strengths. If you have to get to Farpoint really soon, and the only way to get there is to push your ships engines to the limits, that can provide for some great tension. Or, as Straczynski says about Starfury: "They travel at the speed of plot.”

But jump gates can allow for travel to wildly different locations.

I look at it this way: Trips between moons and planets should take 10 minutes. Planet-to-planet jumps should take about an hour. Star-to-star trips should take between 3 hours and 3 months, depending on the plot. Star-to-star gate-jumps should take about 10 minutes, but be limited to a relatively small network of highly-developed worlds.

I suggest these times because that's how long it seems to take in Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate SG-1, Babylon 5, etc. Whatever travel system I use would be largely reverse-engineered from those standards.

It might also be fun to set a campaign early on in the era of jump-gate construction. Have only 3 or 4 jump-gates in place, with others being added to the network as planets are able to build them.

Spider

 

[Ranger REG]

I'm old-school, so I like good old-fashioned Star Trek warp drive.

 

[Chaldfont]

This choice can have a big impact on the "feel" of your campaign setting. As was pointed out earlier, it depends on your player's ability to suspend disbelief or your desire to adhere to physics as we know it. Compare:

Star Wars/Star Trek: I go where I want, it just takes time. Cool things might happen along the way. FTL might be so slow that people go into suspended animation to save on consumables or to not age. It might be mindblowingly fast, like in Star Wars or Iain Banks' Culture stories, and you can traverse the galaxy in matter of days or hours.

Robotech/Dragonstar/Battletech/Traveller: Spacefold, whatever you call it, its just a teleport. The teleport may be instantaneous or may take a fixed or variable amount of time. Missjumps due to equipment failure or navigator error may occur. Jumps might be restricted to fixed points (natural or artificial) which become strategic locations.

Cowboy Bebop/2001 Space Odyssey: No or Slow FTL, campaign takes place in a single star system or characters are very long-lived. Maybe characters' minds are downloaded into a computer and transmitted at lightspeed to a receiver which creates a copy/robot body at the destination (read John C. Wright's Golden Age series for more ideas).

Some combination of the above: Star Frontiers had jump technology, but a ship had to reach 0.01c to make the jump. Most of the time was spent accelerating or decelerating. There was no anti-gravity so ships mostly accelerated at 1g for passenger's convenience. IIRC, David Brin's Uplift series and a bazillion forms of FTL travel--pretty much anything he thought up at the time. Different civilizations may have different forms of spacetravel and be at an advantage or disadvantage. How widespread is FTL tech in your setting? Does everyone have it or just a select few?

Another thing to think about is speed of communication. Is there a device that transmits information at FTL speeds? Can it transmit faster than a starship? If communication is limited to starship speeds (think pony express), central governments will be weaker and civilization less homogenous. Maybe communciation is done through telepathy and a certain group of talented telepaths have a monopoly on it.

 

[Emiricol]

I'm a fan of jumping. I'm also a fan of making the only safe jump routes be at a couple points at the fringe of the solar system, without a difficult nav job that computers are poorly equipped to handle. Rogue jump points are wicked.

 

[Laslo Tremaine]

A buddy and I are working on a hard-ish SF setting at the moment.

We have decided to use Jump technology that comes in two flavors.

1) Jump Gates: These exist at the fringe of a star system and connect in a direct line to another existing jump gate.

2) Jump Drive: Must be initiated outside of large gravity wells, and takes time to initiate so that you can calculate the jump trajectory and well as wait for the jump capacitors to charge.


Transport time is instantaneous, and jumps are impeded by large gravitational fields. So if there is a star near to a line that you want to jump along, you will need to jump to the nearer star first, and then jump to the further star from there. It also means that if you are jumping through a system, you will need to travel slower-than-light to the opposite side of the system before making the next jump. We are assuming relatively easy 1 g accelleration.

 

[D-rock]

A hundred will suffice.

Ok, I apologize (99 more to go)

 

[D-rock]

I think I will go with the "jump" idea. Suspension of real world physics isn't so much a problem. I just assume highly advanced cultures would have gained a better understanding of the laws of nature and be able to do things we think are impossible now. Just like we are doing stuff now that people in the past though would never be done. It just seems more low maintence to me. I don't really want to figure out travel times for every point that they may want to go to, and at whatever speed they choose to go. when I can just say you finally finish your jump and this is how much time it took.

I also like the Battletech idea of (and not just because its one of my favorite settings) only having some points in the system that are safe to jump into. You just know somebody is going to get crazy and try an unstable pirate point sooner or later, and I think it will be interseting to see it when it happens. Plus, that way you will more than likely have people waiting for them on the other side, or at least they will have time to prepare for your players arrival.

For those of you that said that you like the jumping method of traviling, is it instantanious or do you spend time in "hyperspace"? Is there anybody that publishes rules for having space battles in hyperspace?(or at faster than light traveling if I ever choose to go that route) I think it would be interesting to have some ship waiting in ambush in a hyperspace corridor, and have the players risk being droped out and being left stranded light years from any system. That will put a little fear in them.

 

[Staffan]

I liked the way it was done in Star*Drive, the old Alternity setting. Using the definitions from my old copy of GURPS Space, it would be considered hyperdrive, but it's closest game equivalent is Traveller's Jump drive (which would not be considered a Jump drive in GURPS - there, Jump is defined by only going between fixed points). Basically, you hop into hyperspace (called drivespace in the setting), and 121 hours later you exit at your destination.

If I was making a setting of my own, I'd probably use a mix of that kind of drive and jumpgates, with jumpgates being a lot faster but only going from point A to point B. This would make systems defensible (since you can protect your jumpgates, and you can also call in reinforcements relatively quickly if attacked), something which is an issue with many other methods of FTL travel.

 

[Captain Tagon]

I also like the Battletech idea of (and not just because its one of my favorite settings) only having some points in the system that are safe to jump into. You just know somebody is going to get crazy and try an unstable pirate point sooner or later, and I think it will be interseting to see it when it happens. Plus, that way you will more than likely have people waiting for them on the other side, or at least they will have time to prepare for your players arrival.

The one thing with that is did anyone in Battletech ever NOT use a pirate point?

 

[Psion]

My favorite is Starfire-style select "jump points"

Fixed that for you.