2300AD next year

[Colin]

My personal preference is to keep 2300AD a possible future, rather than an alternate future. This means keeping the timing and events of Twilight somewhat vague. "...early part of the 21st century" sort of thing.

 

[Sturn]

My personal preference is to keep 2300AD a possible future, rather than an alternate future. This means keeping the timing and events of Twilight somewhat vague. "...early part of the 21st century" sort of thing.

Thank you!

Vague is good when it comes to the Twilight War (or just Twilight as you put it). That way a person could use the old Twilight 2000 history, the newer Twilight 2013 history, something they make up themselves, etc. AND, you won't have to rewrite some of the history in 10 years.

 

[rust]

That way a person could use the old Twilight 2000 history, the newer Twilight 2013 history, something they make up themselves, etc. AND, you won't have to rewrite some of the history in 10 years.

Plus, it would relieve me of the burden to explain how Bavaria managed
to become a major power, something quite impossible without a chain of
ridiculously implausible events ... :lol:

 

[Colin]

Or a whole bunch of support from France as a buffer state, and as a focus-of-irritation for the rest of Germany.

 

[rust]

Or a whole bunch of support from France as a buffer state, and as a focus-of-irritation for the rest of Germany.

Sorry, no way.

Even if someone would send the Bavarians an army and the status of a
major power in a parcel, they would return it to the sender. The idea col-
lides so badly with their entire history, culture and mentality that there
simply is no way to make it truly plausible.

One could just as well write a background where Switzerland introduces
human sacrifice and the entire population of Denmark converts to Hindu-
ism.

The best thing you can do with that part of the original 2300AD history is
to hide it in a fog and jump to the result of an unexplained history, with
Germany reunified and some colonies inhabited by isolationist Bavarian
colonists.

 

[TrippyHippy]

Can 2300AD operate as a cyberpunk setting too?

The original 2300AD did. At this point, I'm not sure what direction the Human Core Worlds will take. There will be high-tech, fashion on overdrive, augmentations, hacking, memetic engineering, Social Cults, augmented reality, pervasive surveillance, jack-booted thugs, and Lord Chain. :twisted:

Perfect.

 

[silburnl]

Keeping 'the twilight' vague is my preference too - you also have a plausible mechanism for the vagueness by invoking some SF-ish tropes to say that poorly thought out digitisation strategies in the run up to the Twilight combined with aggressive cyberwar/psyops/propaganda battles during the Twilight led to historical archives being particularly badly hit by the events of the time. It's not so much that there aren't records from the period, but that they are of questionable provenance and reliability.

In any case, for the people of 2320 the events of our era are as historical as the South Sea Bubble, the advent of Prussia under Frederick the Great or the building of St Petersburg in a Finnish swamp. People today generally don't refer to how the Marattha States undermined the Mughals when they talk about the relative performance of the BRIC economies and I doubt our analogues in the C24th will be invoking an outbreak of (allegedly weaponised) Ebola in Caracas in 2024 when they discuss the establishment of new trade routes into the Chinese arm.

Regards
Luke

 

[Colin]

Which is pretty much what I did for 2320AD. I'll have to pick a place for recorded history to restart, probably around 2030 - 2040 or so.

What's important is that there was a Twilight, which included a war of some kind and general devastation, though that could've been economic as much as nuclear. France survived it, less devastated that anyone else. Long period of recovery followed by intense expansion into space.

 

[GJD]

Zombies. Twilight was a zombie apocalypse. It's the only reasonable explanation. :wink:

 

[kristof65]

Which is pretty much what I did for 2320AD. I'll have to pick a place for recorded history to restart, probably around 2030 - 2040 or so.

I'd actually keep it even more vague than that. For anything prior to 2100, I'd reference it as "in the first/last half of the 21st century".

Twilight: 2000 was so cool, and seemed so far away at the time GDW released it, and I was in my late teens. But the time difference between now and 2030 is less than half the amount of time I've been here - it doesn't seem so far away now.

If you can keep the Twilight references vague, and avoid pinning any dates prior to 2100, then this version should have a good 20-30 year life span.

 

[Jame Rowe]

I would suggest that the vehicles included get better gas mileage. The ones in the original GDW version were a bit too low for me.

 

[Gee4orce]

It'll probably never happen, but I'd like to see a few of the sillier things about the setting 'fixed':

I never liked the idea of Kafer's dual intelligence - intelligence is too expensive for it to be something that's only switched on under stress.

I never liked Stutterwarp much - really, it would have to cycle millions of times a second to get superlight speeds, and space combat has a weird feeling for a 'hard SF' setting. ie. how can weaponry have any effect when the target only exists in a location for a femtosecond ?

Ah...I can feel all the decades old arguments brewing up already....

I wonder, will we have 'ectomorph' and 'mesomorph' character body options ?

 

[GJD]

I never liked Stutterwarp much - really, it would have to cycle millions of times a second to get superlight speeds, and space combat has a weird feeling for a 'hard SF' setting. ie. how can weaponry have any effect when the target only exists in a location for a femtosecond ?

Each cycle of the drive moves the ship "a few hundered meters". The speed of light in a vacuum is c300,000,000 m/s, so if we assume that a ship moves 300 meters per cycle (a conveniently round number) it'll take a drive running at 1Mhz to attain a pseudo velocity equivalent to C. Increase the displacment distance or the drive cycle rate to get better performance...

The combat was about predicting where a ship would be and peppering the area with radiation. The difficulty in hitting a target is reflected in that ALL the starship weapons in the original game were directed energy - even the missiles and submunitions were just a delivery system for a remote detonation bomb-pumped laser warhead that fired "shotgun" style over the predicted path of the target ship.

G.

 

[Colin]

It was definitely hard in that the nature of ship-to-ship combat was wholly in response to the consquences of the drive. Also witness that against non-stutterwarping vessels, the weapons used hit far easier, and did more damage.

At least, I'm sure there was a rule about double damage vs. non-stutterwarping vessels, and non-stutterwarping vessels were considered to be moving at speed 0, making them eadier to hit.

If there wasn't, there will be. Hitting a ship in stutterwarp is hard.

 

[Gee4orce]

It'll take a drive running at 1Mhz to attain a pseudo velocity equivalent to C.

Which is a million times a second.

I just find it breaks my suspension of belief to think that the machinery responsible for a jump is cycling at that rate.

My argument about hitting with weapons fire still stands. A laser photon is going to travel ~100m in the time between cycles, and bear in mind that the firing ship is probably also warping. How do you even know where the enemy ship is if you're limited to light speed detection methods. And even if the beam hits, at most it's going to linger for a microsecond.

Nah.

I like some aspects of the setting, but honestly, other parts are incredibly anachronistic.

 

[GJD]

It'll take a drive running at 1Mhz to attain a pseudo velocity equivalent to C.

Which is a million times a second.

I just find it breaks my suspension of belief to think that the machinery responsible for a jump is cycling at that rate.

My argument about hitting with weapons fire still stands. A laser photon is going to travel ~100m in the time between cycles, and bear in mind that the firing ship is probably also warping. How do you even know where the enemy ship is if you're limited to light speed detection methods. And even if the beam hits, at most it's going to linger for a microsecond.

Nah.

I like some aspects of the setting, but honestly, other parts are incredibly anachronistic.

Hmm. I dunno, depends on what "cycling" means. If there is actually a mechanical bit that spins, then no, obviously not. If it's a purely electronic process then you will be limited to how quickly your drive can react to the cycles before the limited timeframe means that actually you can't get instructions from your controller to your drive in a fast enough timeframe to meet the "drive slice" window. Keeping the links between the drive, power and control systems short will be the order of the day.

That also assumes nanosecond transit and wait time combined, which seems to me to be far too short - but it's not, as I recall, defined anywhere.

I'd suggest that maybe the description of the Stutterwarp should be ammended to say that each cycle moves the ship up to a few kilometers instead.

G

 

[GJD]

My argument about hitting with weapons fire still stands. A laser photon is going to travel ~100m in the time between cycles, and bear in mind that the firing ship is probably also warping. How do you even know where the enemy ship is if you're limited to light speed detection methods. And even if the beam hits, at most it's going to linger for a microsecond.

I realise I didn't actually address this bit.

That is partly the reason for the multi-beam approach. You splay fire all along possible vectors, so that you get more than one strike on a ship along it's path. Damage may well be from both energy from the strike and damage from a disrupted "warp" - although that is purely conjecture on my part.

You don't know where they are exactly - you have to estimate and predict where they are likely to be in any given volume of space.

I also seem to recall somewhere that most combats occur in the "shallows" - the areas inside the limit where stutterwarp efficency falls below C. I dimly remember a mod for Star Cruiser that adjusted the ships movement based on how deep inside the gravity well a ship was?

G.

 

[silburnl]

It'll take a drive running at 1Mhz to attain a pseudo velocity equivalent to C.

Which is a million times a second.

I just find it breaks my suspension of belief to think that the machinery responsible for a jump is cycling at that rate.

The computer I'm writing this on has a CPU that cycles three thousand times in that millionth of a second. Does that break your belief suspenders too?

My argument about hitting with weapons fire still stands. A laser photon is going to travel ~100m in the time between cycles,

Per GJD's example it'll be ~300m, but still.

and bear in mind that the firing ship is probably also warping. How do you even know where the enemy ship is if you're limited to light speed detection methods. And even if the beam hits, at most it's going to linger for a microsecond.

Like GJD said, you get burnt by light photons for a millisecond at *this* point in space, then you warp and... oops there's a bunch of light photons streaming into you at *that* point in space too. Targetting space weapons is all about predicting the volume of space that the target could be in and then saturating as much of the resulting volume of space with your laser fire as you can. If you ask me that holds whether the ship is stutterwarping or moving through realspace under 'conventional' engines (whether chemical rockets, gravitic thruster plates or whatever).

Now your sensors are limited to lightspeed, which means that a targetting solution becomes much, much harder if your target is stutterwarping at a superluminal pseudo-velocity. Indeed I always played it that combat just wasn't feasible in the superluminal zone, but I don't recall if that was just my houserule or whether there is anything in the rules that actually says that - from what I recall there's stuff in the non-core material (Lone Wolf, Three Blind Mice etc) that strongly implies that superluminal combat is infeasible.

Regards
Luke

 

[Colin]

Stutterwarp cycling is in the high khz (up to 100 or more) range, with transit lengths of several hundred meters to several kilometers, depending on how stressed local space-time is.

Target engagement is a matter of knowing the "probability cone" of where a ship with certain characteristics (stutterwarp speed, turn ability, power) will be over the next unit of time, and trying to saturate that cone with horrifically powerful detonation laser fire. These weapons generate X-ray and even gamma-ray beams of extremely short duration, packing the equivalent of a few tons of TNT into every microsecond burst.

Ship-based lasers and particle beams are decidedly less efficient at damaging a stutterwarping ship.

 

[gloomhound]

I'm very happy about this. Just thought you guys would like to know that. :wink: