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Interstellar hazards

Moogle

Moogle

Retired Member
Following a brief mention in the chat, I noticed SARP has a lack of codified SPACE HAZARDS

What do I mean by this?

Well, for instance: Nebulae. Currently, in sarp they're. . . kind of boring. Some of them mess with sensors and stuff, and there's like maybe TWO that are actually deathtraps, but for the most part they just aren't interesting as setpieces. Except, y'know, "ooh pretty".

And there are a million other things that could happen but I'm honestly too tired to think of interesting examples.

so yeah. spess danger. we needz it.
 
they could just be broadly navigation hazards, not in the sense of 'this is impossible to travel' but that 'it blocks sensors' and 'travel is slowed'. It's just more efficient to go through other areas.
 
I'm totally in agreement to depicting these hazards in our roleplays. I don't see the harm in mentioning them on the wiki to give people something to go on for them.

I just think that only the most major ones ought to be depicted on the Star Map. Because clutter existed, and it made the Star Map kind of unpleasant to look at, and after years of tolerating it and asking that to be toned down, it finally was. So, I'm in no hurry to see it happen again.

I'm not saying I don't understand why you'd see the appeal, but I've the perspective of someone whom has been around 11ish years so my take on it is like "Nice... but ugh, please no, not on the starmap again".
 
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I have need for something like this, but that is because the Val'ta is usually going into unknown territory and bound to encounter strange phenomena. In addition, the Val'ta is beta hardware.

An article like this would benefit me, but I am unsure if other plots will have use for it, unless an interlude is framed as being affected by something strange, like The Colour Out Of Space getting stuck to the hull.
 
Well yeah the most major ones should definitely be mapworthy. It's like having a mountain range on a map: Avalanches are a thing that happen on mountains, but do they mark those on the map? No.
 
the only things you mark on maps are permanent features. Volcanoes, mountain ranges, forests, landscape. Things that are not going to change within a generation assuming nothing utterly catastrophic happens.

You don't put down hurricane, tsunami, and tornado danger zones, even though those are mostly unchanging, because they're not frequent factors. You look them up when they are a potential danger.
 
We could also have things in the middle of space like "In sector 2508 there's a derelict ship that occasionally shoots some of its last operational turrets at passersby" or "in sector 1655 there's a group of hibernating space creatures that will attempt to stick the the hull of an ship that passes through there."

One issue is that I think we're unclear about what a nebula is and does in general. I mean, is it actually possible to "ignite" a nebula with an aether weapon? I'm not sure it should be.
 
No, flat out impossible. Nebula, even dark nebula, are 1 molecule or so every few miles. There's simply nothing to ignite.

Now GAS GIANTS, those you could probably ignite, especially jovian sized ones, give the potential energy output from aether devices.
 
Shadowclasper is 100% on this, there's just nothing to ignite. In order to get pressure high enough to make a cloud of gas dense you'd also need a lot of gravity... which means you're looking at a gas giant.


And of course, there is an XKCD for this!
Watch in amazement as they describe how a SARP-Powerful laser would kill you by hitting the earth and causing the moon to explode.
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But could you ignite a gas giant with the weapons we have available? No. Not really, but also maybe/kinda.

If you used some arbitrarily powerful super-laser against a gas giant the planet wouldn't catch on fire. It isn't like a spark would set off the planet or cause it to explode.

But if you used some arbitrarily more powerful super laser and kept pumping energy into the gas giant then eventually it would be so radioactive it'd be just like a star.

And if you used an Aether Shock Cannon on the planet? The damage would be stupidly-catastrophic. You're talking about heating up a planet-sized mass a near-infinite amount. The Planet wouldn't JUST explode. It would explode so hard that there would be a cloud of death traveling out from the planet at near C speed. As this cloud reached the moons around the planet it would also explode those moons, then eventually the other planets in the star-system and possibly even the star itself.
 
Stick an aether generator with no cap on it's power level and let it overload, then drop it into the gas giant. Not something made to release a focused aetheric energy wave, just something not built to build up to that much power and let it break down at random itself. The explosion will probably ignite the gas giant, but the thing is, that'll -still- basically cause it to turn into an expanding cloud rather than, say, a brown dwarf, simply because there's really very little middle ground between those two stages and they are entirely dependent on mass. You can't just pump enough energy into jupiter and get a new star, that's not how stars work. You have to get the core pressure high enough from simple gravity to start nuclear fusion going in a runaway process and that's a matter of mass, matter composition, gravity, and pressure, not just heat.

Igniting a gas giant would, basically, just be setting off a bomb to kill practically everything in that particular solar system depending on how dense the cloud remained when any other planets swung through that area, assuming the sudden change in gravity didn't utterly fuck the orbits of everything involved.

Would this kill the -star-?

No. It wouldn't even explode the planets provided they weren't directly next door. It'd not be something full nova strength, it'd be ranging up to that point, but not that high. Even a star going nova won't actually DUST a planet if the planet isn't close enough or the star isn't dense enough. Blast the atmosphere and a good layer of the crust off, yes, but there'll be a planet still there.

Stars would be destabilized, centuries shaved off their total life span, stellar activity enormously increased, more flares, acting a lot more like a very young star.
 
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OK. this is interesting.

My first thought is that this wouldn't work. Once the Aether-generator overloads it'll destroy itself. It'd be like just dropping a big bomb on the planet.

BUT! What if you somehow got the bomb right in the center of the planet and set it to some arbitrarily high amount of boom? You could blow the planet apart just enough that its gravity would pull it back together quickly. The rapid compression could actually end up igniting the planet briefly.

Of course if you want to make an artificial star the easiest way is to park a ship by the planet in question, dial your Aether Shock Cannon down to the right setting, and then just bathe the planet in energy until it has enough heat to glow like a star.
 
Why even need it to get to the center? You just need to get it enough into an atmosphere comprised of sufficiently high reactive content (if the atmosphere is mostly comprised of hydrogen for example), you just want to cause a run away reaction, which we're almost positive has HAPPENED on earth before for brief periods such as immediately after the great dying right before we got enough oxygen breathing biomass to actually get the atmosphere back in balance, but after the whole 'fungus figured out how to eat dead trees and all that locked up carbon got dumped into the atmosphere at once to suffocate 90% of animal life on the planet" was one period. Another potential period (though we don't know if there were enough plants at this time to cause this) would have been when you got algea for the first time producing oxygen as a poison to kill -all the competition- around them, creating the first stage of this process.

You can get run away atmospheric 'everything burns' reactions. You just need enough reactive mass in the atmosphere to do it. Your explosion just has to ignite enough of it to start that, and it has to be hot enough to get over the natural dampening effects of the other stuff in the atmosphere (such as nitrogen for us).
 
If you put it at the center of the planet, then you leverage the planet's own gravity to compress everything. The center of the planet would slam back together with enough pressure that you would actually end up igniting the core for a short amount of time like a combustion engine.

If you put the bomb somewhere else you could still pull off the same trick, but the center of the planet would be optimal.

If you put the bomb on the surface, you may get a little bit of atmosphere-burning from the blast wave but I think it would mostly just scatter things. You need a certain amount of hydrogen, a certain amount of pressure, and a certain amount of oxygen for burning to occur. If the planet is already full of an explosive mixture then it would explode during the next lightning strike or static discharge.

It also isn't a matter of just making a bomb that gets hot enough. Making a bomb that gets up to a few million degrees would make a large blast, but it wouldn't ignite the atmosphere. This was a concern during the original atomic bomb tests but "The hotter something is the faster it loses heat and cools. Hence it is a reasonably straight forward calculation to show that the atmosphere would cool much faster than any fusion reaction could produce heat, and that this particular scenario is impossible." - /u/Veefy from reddit.


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You could keep pumping energy into a planet with a weapon like an ASC to make the planet glow and burn the whole thing, but you can't really chain-react the atmosphere of a planet with a bomb.
 
Wont get into teh discussion about igniting gas giants cause I don't know nothing about that. But we shouldn't be afraid to play a little fast and loose with space dangers as long as we don't do something totally crazy like like fire a single torpedo into a nebula the size of a couple star systems and blow the whole thing up and make it vanish.

The point I wanted to get at though is we should probably make a page where it list some common types of space danger and what effects they'd have. I have a sneaking suspicions that most GMs aren't familiar with astrophysics and simply just don't know what they can do. So maybe a "GM's guide to space dangers" or something.
 
I really enjoyed the interstellar hazards in the Homeworld games. Particularly the Karos Graveyard; this enigmatic, legendary maze of wrecks ranging from planet-sized super-structures to long-dead combat fleets from ancient battles. All of which is haunted by strange, artificially intelligent space-craft like the 'Junkyard Dog'; which steals ships and takes them deep into the graveyard to be lost forever.

There was also the mysterious ghost ship outside the Garden of Kadesh, which could override control systems on nearby ships and turn them into automated defense vessels enslaved to its unkonwable will (and presumably with a lot of confused, panicking crew trapped on board).

Not to mention the Garden of Kadesh itself, but that goes without saying, heh.
 
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