Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Tantavalist" data-source="post: 8272831" data-attributes="member: 7030056">The only time I've ever seen a truly realistic depiction of real-world physics for space travel complete with gravity wells and orbits anywhere is in the Kerbal Space Program computer game. Playing it really gives you a feel for just how complicated a subject this is and why Astrogation would be a dedicated skill.It also makes it clear just how much work translating this into a pen-and-paper RPG would be. KSP has a large chunk of the work done by the computer running the game. Working it all out would be... Let's just say there's a reason that it's never been done for RPGs before.There are some that gave it a try, of course, but they always end up abstracting some part of it. GURPS Transhuman Space was probably close to The Expanse, but while the thrust and fuel was there the position of the planets was somewhat abstracted.To really get what you're after the only way to make it work would be to have a dedicated app that does the calculations for you and then translate that into numbers and dice rolls. All you'd need is someone with an astronomy degree and someone who can write decent software to work together. Barring that, we're out of luck.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Tantavalist, post: 8272831, member: 7030056"] The only time I've ever seen a truly realistic depiction of real-world physics for space travel complete with gravity wells and orbits anywhere is in the Kerbal Space Program computer game. Playing it really gives you a feel for just how complicated a subject this is and why Astrogation would be a dedicated skill. It also makes it clear just how much work translating this into a pen-and-paper RPG would be. KSP has a large chunk of the work done by the computer running the game. Working it all out would be... Let's just say there's a reason that it's never been done for RPGs before. There are some that gave it a try, of course, but they always end up abstracting some part of it. GURPS Transhuman Space was probably close to The Expanse, but while the thrust and fuel was there the position of the planets was somewhat abstracted. To really get what you're after the only way to make it work would be to have a dedicated app that does the calculations for you and then translate that into numbers and dice rolls. All you'd need is someone with an astronomy degree and someone who can write decent software to work together. Barring that, we're out of luck. [/QUOTE]

Verification