Travel and Sci Fi

[Warbringer]

OK

So I'm looking to build rules for interstellar travel. I want something beyond FTL, worm holes, folding space. Something that can have a completely magical response, but I need a decent treaty as to why.

An idea I've been playing with is the devil drive. The devil drive opens a small dimensional rift to the abyss, or hell, allowing a space craft to travel through that dimension and reappear in the prime dimension. The scale for travel in the abyss is much smaller than in the sci-fi prime. No time dilation issues.

Others?

 

[kenobi65]

Dragonstar (which was a 3E d20 setting that really was "D&D in space") fundamentally used teleportation as its FTL mechanism. Wizards would create a device (I wanna say it was called a starcaster) that was charged with 50 teleports; a ship with FTL capability would have a starcaster. When the ship was out into orbit, the pilot would enter the co-ordinates for his destination, activate the starcaster, and *poof* you're there.

Starcasters weren't cheap to make or to recharge; in a later expansion book, they introducted a material called liquid mithril, which could be used to reduce the cost of recharging a starcaster.

 

[Hand of Evil]

The Planes boss, the Planes! Open a gateway to a plane of your creation and travel via it.

 

[Einan]

What about some sort of psionic travel? Every ship and planet has a dedicated telepath who is hooked into some sort of booster device. A ship's telepath contacts a final destination's telepath psychically. The ship's telepath creates a conception of the ship in his mind. He then transfers that conception to the mind of the final destination telepath. The final destination telepath uses that conception to mentally form a sort of archetypical form of the ship, which is more real than the actual ship. Since two forms of the same creature cannot exist simultaneously, the more real archetypical form becomes the ship and the ship at the starting point ceases to exist.

Since this is very taxing on the psychics, this form of travel is used only for extremely long distances and only a certain number of times during a period. Overtaxation of the psychics can result in imperfect transfers (crazy crew, odd malfunctions onboard ship, bizarre outer god-like things coming into our world, thoughtforms coming into existence, etc) or loss of ships entirely. Which might lead to the question of where they go and what happens when you're lost.

This is a basic idea. Feel free to tweak as needed.

 

[Warbringer]

Einan

One of the ideas I really liked in Chronicles of Riddick was the way "psyche" powers worked for communication devices.

Your idea is nice and reminds me of navigators folding space in Dune.

Keep em coming....

 

[Finster]

My setting uses a psychoportive drive.
Telepaths are slaves, and used as human batteries to power the FTL drives. The side effects of the drive are sometimes lethal to the Telepaths.
You could do away with the deadly aspects of the drive and use willing participants, without changing the mechanics.
I'm not sure if this is magical enough though.

 

[Chaldfont]

How about the travel-by-copy concept? I've read some sci-fi where they have FTL communication (or just light-speed) communication but no FTL drives. So they make an exact copy of the traveller's mind and transmit this data to the destination. There, they "download" the copy into a body (could be a clone, robot, etc). When the copy returns, it is recombined with the original.

You could do this with instantaneous telepathy. If you are worried about multiple copies of PCs, you could say that the original is put into suspended animation while the copy is active.

This leads to all kinds of interesting ideas. What legal rights does the copy have? What if it does not want to recombine? What if the original dies while the copy is gone?

 

[Pyrex]

@Warbringer
Seen 'Event Horizon' lately?

@Chaldfont
There was a series of books by Piers Anthony that I think you're thinking about. The gist of it being that psychically powerful people could beam their "soul" across the galaxy and temporarily inhabit the body of another leading to wacky hijinx.

 

[Warbringer]

I'm not sure if this is magical enough though.

Actually, it's perfect. I am looking for soemthing that can be magical nature, but doesn't have to be. Just trying to avoid pseudo-science as much as possible

 

[frankthedm]

@Warbringer
Seen 'Event Horizon' lately?

I think he has

This leads to all kinds of interesting ideas. What legal rights does the copy have? What if it does not want to recombine? What if the original dies while the copy is gone?

There was an interesting Showtime's The Outer Limits episode on this.