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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="s/LaSH" data-source="post: 444886" data-attributes="member: 6929">Commercial interest is the likeliest way to increase space awareness, or at least activity. It's not glamorous, but civilian projects are definitely getting there; there are prizes on the line for the first person to take tourists into orbit and stuff like that. Having studied aviation, I know that similar prizes were the incentive for things like flying across the English Channel.In fact, John Carmack, the lead programmer at ID (who did Doom, Quake and, um, other games with Doom and Quake in the titles), recently said that, for less money than he'd spent on Ferrarris in the 1990s, he could be running a space program.But besides the gee-whiz factor, cold hard cash is actually pretty attractive. I believe that a mile-long asteroid towed into Earth orbit would provide a boost to the planetary economy on an order of trillions of US dollars, no matter whether it was metallic or 'slushy'.However, while the US still leads the world in governmental space flight, other nations and alliances are catching up. Europe, Japan, and China are all putting rockets into space, and Russia is quite a contender (in fact, look at their successful tourist policy). This competition will probably see rivalry pushing off a new space race sometime in the next fifty years. (I hear NASA wants a man on Mars by 2030...)Looking further ahead, in 50 years the planetary population will be approaching 20 thousand million (12 billion by 2030). One of my favourite scenarios is the creation of terraformed exodus planets connected to Earth by quantum wormhole gateways... but that's a little more advanced. Anyway, in fifty years humans will be clamouring for a new place to live. Will we see war, or expansion? All very useful things to consider.Plus it creates an interesting paradigm for near-future campaign settings. We will have laser guns in 2050 (heck, look at the contemporary American humvee-mounted Zeus laser system and British tank-mounted energy armour systems), but I suspect most people will still be using tech out of d20 Modern...</blockquote>

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