Fix Bluespace Lore

[Guest Menown]

Right now bluespace travel makes very little sense for the setting. The slowest possible drives take 50 years to travel just 500 light years with the fastest taking 182 days. This means that in the time frame of how fast shit is going in our lore, there's no way most of these places in the far reaches of the frontier would be discovered or anybody would be getting anywhere/creating bluespace gates.

This doesn't even account for pre-warp which is where most of the discoveries and such occurred which is even SLOWER than bluespace drives, so right now these numbers are all fucked.

[BoryaTheSlayer]

Idea. Remove numbers?

[Guest Menown]

Then you're faced with people questioning how fast it is. @BoryaTheSlayer

[Scheveningen]

I agree. It should be a lot speedier than it supposedly is, nothing really makes a lot of sense with how everything is framed. The slowest drives should only take a couple weeks to travel, up to a month for larger convoys such as for trade fleets or large military detachments with slower logistical vessels, provided they're travelling from one end of the known civilized galaxy to another. Shuttling out in a speedy craft from one system to another adjacent one should take 24 hours at most.

Edited January 16, 2020 by Scheveningen

[mwhit030]

IMO the fastest drives should take like a month to get from adhomai to tau ceti, with the slower drives taking like 6.

[Guest Menown]

Then there's the question of bluespace gates. Kyres gave the suggestion of twice as fast as the fasted bluespace drives, being just 91 days to travel 500 light years, which is more sound until you realise it still takes half a year to get to the furthest reaches.

[SatinsPristOTD]

Menown had this discussion at 9:30 last night, and I was too busy battling a sick baby to really put much effort in the conversation. (until now)

but he is absolutely right.

Some of the key points we discussed:

-------------The "devil may care" attitude a lot of players have regarding the "news" that involves our lore stems partially from the sheer distance it takes to even get home. It's very hard to care about Solarian news if it takes me half a year to get there, experience it, and half a year to get back just to even discuss what's going on with my coworkers. You could change Solarian to Dominians. Unathi. Anyone from the Frontier reaches. To put it bluntly: Our scale is too big and our warp speed is too slow for anyone to actually immerse themselves in the vast lore we've created. There isn't a lot wrong with the base of our lore. It has a lot of good bones to build on, but in the grand scheme of things, nothing actually effects us enough for us to care about.

So we're stuck with either making everything revolve around Aurora and Biesel (which is just implausible and a bit silly to even think this is a good idea), or we can do things in the "homeworlds" but suffer from the fact that they're too far away for us to muster up any sort of RP outside of "aww man. My mom lives there. I hope she's okay." We lose the hard impact of our lore events because we have literally kneecapped ourselves.

---------------The other concern we talked about was just how-- difficult it is to believe our lore setting came about from such slow warp drives. Menown brings up the fact that a lot of our settlement comes before we even discover the "faster" gates. We somehow settled Biesel, transplanted the Earth flora and Fauna and developed mega cities all within the speed of some very slow warp drives? I can't actually be bothered to delve into this aspect of the lore because it just-- doesn't make sense.

I don't even wish to start on the mixed bag of nuts Dominia brings to this equation. Go look up the timeline for Dominia. Apply it to the current bluespace math. It doesn't fit.

-------------Menown brought up the fact that we are trying to build a sci-fi setting in hard-sci ratios. That probably sums up the problem with bluespace lore.

Even if you wish to brush off my first point as "well it's meant to make you feel small in a giant setting", you absolutely can't brush off the second. It doesn't feel like something we can continue to ignore. We're constantly trying to explain how things work. Add realism to our setting. Leaving the Bluespace Lore like this does the opposite of what path we've been going on since I arrived on Aurora.

-------------We're faced with a few options.

--Remove vague, half explained numbers from the Bluespace Lore. Mark hardline "this is how long it takes to move to x planet". Don't make them ridiculously small, but don't make it where it takes six months to get to a specific homeworld. Find a happy medium that will help blossom the "current events" and all future events that may be in the plans. We don't need to explain everything. Hard-Sci on something like a Bluespace Drive really can't be done, given we don't have a clue what Science will give us in the year 2462. All we have is our imagination. Utilize that. No one in this game expects 2020 physics class to properly sum up how our shuttles move.

--Alter the size of our setting. Make it smaller. Bring it in closer. This feels like an extreme option to me. I like the size of what we have. (I'm certain others do as well.).

--If for some reason you still can't wrap your head around fast gates in the year 2462, but you enjoy the size of our setting and like what lore has done with Biesel/Dominia/Adhomai... then may I suggest changing our year? If the argument is "we wouldn't have that in this time frame" then change the time frame. This is the easiest of the changes. You don't have to fill in the "unexplained years" with filler that won't change much. Bump our important lore events up, leave the "early" years just open for interpretation. Players (and characters) will only focus on what's relevant to their character. My bartender doesn't need to know the history of the 2100s.

 

[KingOfThePing]

I am very glad someone brings this up, finally. What satin says, I can only echo it. A character of mine, Sei, comes from Xanu Prime, a system so far away from Tau Ceti I cant even imagine it properly. Yet I sometimes let her visit her sister, back home. (Its one of my ic explanations why I didn't play her lately again)

 Thankfully no one ever questions the fact that she is not actually like, months gone, which she should be for the two way trip alone. 

Tldr, travel times should be much faster, otherwise everything falls apart. It's like in Pen and Paper. Travel times are something small but give actual....dimension and scale to any map and world. It's small but important to wrap your head around this and figure out what works best. 

[Zundy]

I'd honestly like to see the setting shrink in the sense of the distances reduced. I think they're a bit large. Make it tighter, add some specific travel times for the key planets. Badda bing badda boom. Simple fix imho.

[canon35]

Zundy, Mwhit, and others have the best idea to handle this. Simply reduce travel times. Personally I'd include some more infomation on where bluespace gates are and how systems can gain them (Maybe make it a megacorp thing so systems have to rely on them building one, thus opening a system to exploitation.).

Then, have Bluespace gates be instant. You wait some time for your turn, send it through the gate, and wind up in the system you wished to enter. Of course there would be fees and wait times, but for commercial cargo transports and civilian transports who can afford it, it'd help connect the galaxy and make it so travel times are less of a headache for characters who can afford it. 

[Resilynn]

Hi. I am just going to go ahead and add this to my to do list. My background is astrophysics so you will be in secure hands in terms of scale and realism. 

 

Kyres and mofo will ultimately review what I write and have the say on what gets published but I will post updates as I go so you are all able to continue providing feedback. 

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

Gates should be instant again. 

[Aphelion]

14 hours ago, Marlon Phoenix said:

Gates should be instant again. 

Instant, or a little faster.

My main gripe with making it possible for an ftl drive to clear the distance from Tau Ceti to Adhomai in a month is that it then offers very little reason for the majority of the galaxy being unexplored.

Edited January 18, 2020 by Aphelion

[Carver]

On 16/01/2020 at 08:36, SatinsPristOTD said:

--If for some reason you still can't wrap your head around fast gates in the year 2462, but you enjoy the size of our setting and like what lore has done with Biesel/Dominia/Adhomai... then may I suggest changing our year? If the argument is "we wouldn't have that in this time frame" then change the time frame. This is the easiest of the changes. You don't have to fill in the "unexplained years" with filler that won't change much. Bump our important lore events up, leave the "early" years just open for interpretation. Players (and characters) will only focus on what's relevant to their character. My bartender doesn't need to know the history of the 2100s.

Please- never do this. This would be the biggest pain in the ass redoing records, rewriting numerous pages + in-game references to the year, and so on.

Delete the numbers, makes shit instant, do anything but change the Goddamned year.

[SatinsPristOTD]

16 hours ago, Aphelion said:

Instant, or a little faster.

My main gripe with making it possible for an ftl drive to clear the distance from Tau Ceti to Adhomai in a month is that it then offers very little reason for the majority of the galaxy being unexplored.

actually, this isn't difficult to explain.

Gates have to have an "exit point" to connect to. You can't just warp to a place that hasn't been unexplored yet.

[BurgerBB]

This is the lore I have for my other server and I suggest that you guys implement it too as it fits with how bluespace works in code.

 

Bluespace is an alternative dimension as endless as the universe. For every atom in the universe, there is room to fit it inside the bluespace dimension.

In order to access bluespace, you must have a bluespace crystal and send a very precise electrical charge to retrieve a coordinate inside the bluespace world, with the amplitude being the y coordinate and the wavelength being the x coordinate . From there, you can dose the crystal in radiation to open a bluespace pocket to open a portal relative to the strength of the radiation. You can also do this inside the bluespace dimension to go back to the real world.

Bluespace bags are a portal that is constantly open. A box that expands is placed inside the bluespace dimension and stretched out to fit the portal's radius. It effectively acts as a near bottomless bag that allows you to fit all sorts of things inside it. Bluespace beakers do the same thing.

Bluespace travel is done by sending an electrical charge to open the portal, forcing the object inside the portal, and then opening another portal inside the bluespace dimension to access the real world again. Unfortunately this process slows down based on the size of the object, which is the reason why people can teleport instantly while shuttles take 2 minutes to travel a few lightyears.

As for why the galaxy or in fact universe can't be explored with bluespace, the destination needs to be safe, or else you'll get telescience mishaps and create large explosions when a large object teleports inside another large object.

Edited January 19, 2020 by BurgerBB