Pirates or Commander or Swiss Family? Might be fun to do Chinese super junks vs Spanish Galleons c.1500?
Mike Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T -----Original Message----- From: Roger Burton West <[email protected]> Sender: [email protected] Date: Mon, 28 May 2012 09:34:32 To: <[email protected]> Reply-To: The GURPSnet mailing list <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [gurps] Space Freighter Memes On Sun, May 27, 2012 at 06:10:54PM +0200, Onno Meyer wrote: >I've been thinking about the stereotypes for small space >freighters, the right size for party of adventurers. The >TL of various fictional settings can be hard to compare, >but look and feel may be easier to categorize. I fear that much of it is "which bit of human history are they trying to copy" - particularly the interaction of speed and communications, determining the degree of isolation. Usually this seems to be in the Age of Sail model - maybe you can talk to home, but even if you can it doesn't seem to happen very often (see Star Trek), and certainly by the time home sends another ship to help you the problem will all be over. (Good for drama, because the ship has to live or die by its own resources.) The more communication and travel speeds increase, the more modern the setting feels... but I don't think anyone's used say contemporary airliners as the model for spaceship operations, because they're simply not romantic enough. Still, Bertram Chandler's books were largely based on his personal experience aboard ship around the middle of the twentieth century, and they have a distinctive flavour that's not quite the usual one. Artificial gravity, sadly, is a necessity for television and film. Firefly was claimed to be in a single star system, but there's nothing in the actual series to confirm that - it could have been the more fictionally-conventional approach of multiple systems, without any script changes. >A picture >says more than a thousand words, so I think of movies >and TV: It seems to me that you're proposing a sliding scale of "shininess", but capabilities don't necessarily vary a great deal - nor does reliability, considering how many Star Trek episodes are predicated on some part of the ship going wrong, whereas I think the Space 1999 Eagles pretty much always worked until someone blew them up. Perhaps one might approach this in a dramatic sense, though - to what extent is the story _about_ the ship and its problems, as opposed to the ship's being a plot device for getting the characters to the planet where the adventure happens? This obviously varies from episode to episode, but for example Space: Above and Beyond seemed primarily to be about delivering the PCs to a planet, and Starship Troopers certainly was; Star Trek mostly is, but has quite a few episodes of stuff happening aboard ship, and Next Gen/DS9 certainly rely heavily on the ship (or the ship-like base). Babylon 5 is even more about the ship/base, with only occasional episodes set elsewhere. >* Very early look-and-feel. Reaction drives with limited > delta-V, no gravity, but with FTL. Space 1999, perhaps, > but they dodge the question of FTL and zero-G. The old > 3E Space had experimental stardrives at TL9, but > Vehicles only has them at TL10. 4E, I think sensibly, lists stardrives as TL^ - so they can be plugged in wherever seems appopriate. R _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
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