Space Travel?

[Celebrim]

You're absolutely right. Another problem is having these skills very often means the character is less skilled in areas that are likely more meaningful to them. In Fantasy Flight's Star Wars, being a hot shot pilot meant my skill tree was devoted to piloting but we spent the majority of the game on the ground.

This is a problem in my experience with every single Sci Fi RPG in one way or the other.

The solution in my opinion actually draws inspiration from Delany's "Babel 17" of all places where he has each ship crew position actually have an off-ship skills that correlates to ship skill at a one-to-one level. For example, all great ship pilots are also by default great professional wrestlers. Now, I wouldn't necessarily copy the setting (shudder) but the core idea there of having generic skills that equate directly to "If I'm good at this, then I'm also good at some job aboard a starship (or visa versa)" is I think a very strong one that I'd employ if I had to design my own Sci Fi game.

 

[Thomas Shey]

There's also simply having a modest amount of skills and either having progressive costs (so a little goes a long way at first and then gets into diminishing returns). Its not super painful having the necessary skill for a pilot and a bunch of ground related skills in Eclipse Phase, and I suspect similar things apply to a lot of other BRP derivatives.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

This is a problem in my experience with every single Sci Fi RPG in one way or the other.

The solution in my opinion actually draws inspiration from Delany's "Babel 17" of all places where he has each ship crew position actually have an off-ship skills that correlates to ship skill at a one-to-one level. For example, all great ship pilots are also by default great professional wrestlers. Now, I wouldn't necessarily copy the setting (shudder) but the core idea there of having generic skills that equate directly to "If I'm good at this, then I'm also good at some job aboard a starship (or visa versa)" is I think a very strong one that I'd employ if I had to design my own Sci Fi game.

I seem to recall Starfinder has separate ship and non-ship skills so PCs don’t have to choose between them.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

This does create weirdness though.

Typical Star Wars space travel involves a ship leaving the planet's surface and getting a few thousand miles away from the planet to reduce the mass shadow of the planet while calculating a jump to hyperspace. Normally this takes 3-30 minutes depending on the speed of the ship and how much preparatory time it had to anticipate the jump. For large ships like bulk freighters this time is effectively reduced because they generally load and unload from a position a few hundred to a few thousand miles above the planet using smaller ships called barges to ferry loads back and forth from the planet, and then generally leaving on fixed schedules so they can precalculate the jump (often spending up to a day optimizing the jump while being loaded or unloaded).

What this means is effectively that space travel is quite rare and generally only occurs near planets in routinely travelled areas. So it's actually quite easy for a law enforcement agency to hang around in any place it needs to be, since the space it needs to patrol is a tiny tiny area compared to the vastness of space and if needed Star Wars ships can hustle around sublight space at say up to 4% of lightspeed.

So the problem you have is how do battles actually take place? In particular how does something that is a big part of the canon like piracy actually work? Smuggling is pretty easy to explain but piracy is hard because typically a ship with valuable cargo is never far from aid by legal authorities except on the most backward worlds which couldn't afford a local police force - and those worlds have scant traffic that itself doesn't carry valuable cargo. For most of the Star Wars universe, a would be pirate would have to hang around a hyperspace transfer point exactly where the authorities would be hanging out and would simply not be able to attack a ship, rob it, and get away in time to avoid being attacked themselves.

So a lot of the answer for me turns on "hyperspace jumps are very difficult" which is nothing that comes up in the canon. But my estimate is about 1 in 500 hyperspace jumps go bad and result in some form of problem where the ship then has to spend some amount of time travelling at sublight or else is stranded for some time needing to replot a new jump (often requiring hours) or rescue. And since galaxy wide there are millions to hundreds of millions of jumps daily, that's a lot of ships that in some level of distress every single day. And instead of a rescuer, you get a pirate who jumps in before the authorities can arrive and robs the stranded "motorists". This is one of the places my complex hyperspace failure rules come into things, as the PCs are themselves familiar with missing jumps and having to handle the problems that result, then if around them NPCs having problems with failed jumps that doesn't feel contrived.

The other thing you can do as a Star Wars pirate is rob systems where there is significant in system real space travel between mining facilities in the outer solar system and highly populated colony/refinery worlds in the inner solar system. That traverse can take several hours to half a day and an in system hyperspace jump can be too risky to make it worthwhile, which means a pirate can ambush ships in the middle of the transit away from places authorities are most likely to be loitering. Hypermatter and strange matter and other exotic types of matter is the "gold dubloons" of the Star Wars universe, with cargos that can be really valuable relative to the size of the cargo.

Star Wars is very unrealistic in terms of the scale of space (and planets). “Thousands of miles” wouldn’t get you out of the atmosphere. Judging by the apparent size of planets ships are actually hundreds of thousands of miles from planets when they enter hyperspace. That’s a billion cubic miles of volume.

But if you watch the Mandalorian for example, pirates are able to operate because many planets have little or no “the authorities” to stop them.

But even without hyperspace short cuts interplanetary distances are so vast that it’s extremely difficult for anyone to intercept anything. Outside of planetary orbit (and even then interception is hard) space piracy is the stuff of fantasy. If you want any degree of realism, boredom leading to crew friction is the biggest danger in manned space travel.

 

[Anfelas]

An earth like world has an atmosphere only a hundred or so km, thousands of km put you well outside the atmosphere.

Back to spacecraft skills, by the far future, or a long time ago in a galaxy far away, piloting a ship will be no harder than learning to play a spaceflight pew pew game today.

 

[Joerg Baumgartner]

Back to spacecraft skills, by the far future, or a long time ago in a galaxy far away, piloting a ship will be no harder than learning to play a spaceflight pew pew game today.

Piloting may be little more than inputting the target location into the navigation system.

Maintenance of the ship systems might be a far less glorious but harder task.

When it comes to space combat, you need to decide on space combat lethality. Fasa's ancient Inteceptor/Leviathan/Prefect system relied on failure cascades along system maps and the chance that these cascades ran out before reaching terminal kill conditions. The Starfire space combat system simply lines up systems and exposes them to incoming damage, possibly ignored or erased by the damage type without reducing the damage.

Literature makes damage control about team effort with occasional spotlight on individual effort. Casting that spotlight on the core team members can be hard. One of the best load distribution might be in Star Trek Lower Decks, with character quests using the general mayhem sometimes as focus, sometimes just as the backdrop.

Generally, this will result in hand-waved technobabbel about re-routing signal paths or possibly plasma conduits (why though?). The GM needs to create some challenge for the character(s) to overcome, ideally with a bunch of sufficiently plausible options to attempt. The challenge needn't be technical, it could be triage decisions.

It helps if the game system allows some measure of competence and/or improvisation to tackle the tasks the GM creates.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

An earth like world has an atmosphere only a hundred or so km, thousands of km put you well outside the atmosphere.

There is still atmosphere, known at the exosphere, at ten thousand. And traces as far as the Moon (384,000 km). That’s why satellite orbits gradually decay.

To get an idea of scale, the Earth viewed from the distance of the Moon is about four times (3.7) as big across as the Moon viewed from the Earth.

 

[Koloth]

One way to simplify the tedium of many die rolls to 'just get there' would be for the GM to make one roll. Success, the ship is there. Fail, something interesting happens. If fail, then the various crew make skill rolls to see what is so interesting. Pirates. Jump malfunction. Passengers attempt hijacking. Etc. Not much different then the Random Encounter roll for many fantasy RPG games. Most fantasy players would get really bored with a roll to hitch up the critters to the wagon, properly grease the axles, feeding the critters, properly cooking the breakfast meal to avoid food poisoning, did a wagon wheel break on the road?, etc. The single GM die roll has the bonus of avoiding the totally unplanned oops for which the GM isn't prepared.

I think most of us have played in sessions where random stuff kept happening so that the session wrap up was some variation of "Well maybe next time we can get to the planet/dungeon/town and start on the real adventure."

 

[Anfelas]

There is still atmosphere, known at the exosphere, at ten thousand. And traces as far as the Moon (384,000 km). That’s why satellite orbits gradually decay.

To get an idea of scale, the Earth viewed from the distance of the Moon is about four times (3.7) as big across as the Moon viewed from the Earth.

I'll stick with this:

Kármán line - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Celebrim]

Star Wars is very unrealistic in terms of the scale of space (and planets). “Thousands of miles” wouldn’t get you out of the atmosphere.

The general rule in the game is that ships normally jump one planetary diameter away from the planet in order to minimize the turbulence that hyperspace experiences in the presence of real space gravity. Systems with complex moon or ring systems often have correspondingly more hyperspace turbulence. You can jump from closer, but you are very likely to have an accident.

Judging by the apparent size of planets ships are actually hundreds of thousands of miles from planets when they enter hyperspace. That’s a billion cubic miles of volume.

This strongly varies across the movies. We see everything from the Imperial Fleet arriving at Hoth on the edge of the solar system (say 30 or more AU) to jumps like Luke over Dagobah or the improvised rebel fleet over Scarif in what effectively low obit only a few 100 kilometers up. The rebel fleet arrives at Endor at what appears to be four or five planetary radiuses from the planet's surface. I don't think you can use the existing evidence to strongly make a claim about the normal height ships jump into as I think the shots are chosen for artistic reasons or reasons of storytelling and not out of some rigor introduced to the artists about how things should be done. I've settled on 1 planetary radius, which for an earth sized planet is about 12000 kilometers out.

In the TPM it looks like they jump to Coruscant roughly one planetary radius out. In my own game, for such a high population world, this jump point would be reserved for priority government traffic only. Coruscant has so much traffic and so many orbiting bodies that for safety reasons most ships would jump in 60 or more planetary radiuses out just to minimize chances of collisions.

But if you watch the Mandalorian for example, pirates are able to operate because many planets have little or no “the authorities” to stop them.

I don't consider the Mandalorian well enough made to inform canon in much of any way, but I addressed this point already. While pirates certainly could predate on outer rim worlds too poor to maintain any sort of planetary security, and in fact I've already had an adventure that one of the major plot points was a bounty on a pirate that was doing just that, the truth is that it's hard to make a living pirating a few tons of frozen fish or other low value commodity that fringe worlds use as cash crops or trade goods.

Even if we cite the terribly made later seasons of the Mandalorian as realistic, they are realistic about how not to successfully get away with piracy or maybe more to the point how not to set yourself up as a minor warlord in the fringe. The pirates here preyed on impoverished worlds, wore out their welcome in an area where a wiser captain would be spending profits not acquiring them, and eventually so angered the other underclass and criminal elements in the area that they organized against them. Sure, you can make money for example intercepting smugglers transporting spice, but robbing from other thieves is one of the more dangerous ways a thief can make a living.