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Updated Starship Speed Documentation

Alex Hart

Alex Hart

FM of NDC
🎖️ Game Master
I delayed way too long on this due to life and a load of other factors, but the updated Starship Speed Standard I talked about making and that @Wes left in my hands is done and ready to be looked at.

The TL: DR is that there's the new Restricted speed tier which should only be used for Really Fast Stuff, and the Factional Traits. The long and short of those is that Yamataian ships have great strategic mobility, with the fastest FTL speeds in the Kikyo Sector, Nepleslian ships are really hard to put down with redundant systems and tons of armor, and Duskerian ships often forego good FTL systems on some starships in favor of mounting some of the most advanced stealth systems.

There's more detail to the quirks, talking about things like how different nations handle power armor and small craft and things like that, but that's the short version.
 
I of course am leaving this up to @Wes in terms of approval.

  • The new article is great, pretty much the same minus the new numbers and the explanations of a few of the major factions.
  • I like the faction traits, giving the factions more of a technological identity always adds richness to the setting.
  • I hope that everyone will pitch in, in terms of updating pages should this be approved.
  • I kind of wish we could find a way to make the article a little more player-friendly and simplistic. (Probably not possible but I know in the past the complexity of things like this and the weapons limitations have been hard for some newer players to grasp.)
 
Andrew said:
  • I hope that everyone will pitch in, in terms of updating pages should this be approved.
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I don't think this should really necessitate much change, thankfully. I aimed to basically keep the gist of the ways that different factions prioritize speed in their ships, and the older individual factional speed pages ought to still work well as specific guides if we want to keep them around.
 
Can we take the bit about Hill Spheres out? It doesn't make much sense. A star's gravitational dominance is more than a light year in radius, therefore it will take several years of STL travel to get in and out of a system. I think this comes from a significant misunderstanding of what a Hill Sphere is and how big it is.
 
I'd like to put in a good Quora answer about this:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-radius-of-the-Hill-sphere-of-the-sun
The Hill sphere is defined between pairs of bodies- it doesn't exist for a single mass in isolation. When we talk about the Hill spheres of planets, we usually mean "with respect to the sun they orbit"; and when we talk about the Hill spheres of moons, we usually mean "with respect to the planet they orbit". But there is no such established convention for stars. The Sun thus has many Hill spheres, depending on which other body's gravity you are worried about the interference of.
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Yuuki said:
Can we take the bit about Hill Spheres out? It doesn't make much sense. A star's Hill Sphere is more than a light year in radius, therefore it will take several years of STL travel to get in and out of a system. I think this comes from a significant misunderstanding of what a Hill Sphere is and how big it is.
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As far as I know, SARP Hill Spheres have always been much smaller then their real-world counterparts. I know this was discussed in the past, too, but I don’t remember where…
 
Well, stars don't even actually have them... nothing does. It's an artifact of the gravitation between multiple bodies. There's no such thing as "this is Mass X's Hill Sphere" because that's not what they are or how they work.
 
Let say "cannot use FTL inside the inner radius of a primary's Kuiper Belt."

Edit for posterity:

A Hill Sphere is a relative thing that takes two masses to compute. Something has to be orbiting something else. For example, Earth has a Hill Sphere because it is orbiting the sun. If you leave Earth’s Hill Sphere, you are now orbiting the Sun instead of Earth. The moon has a Hill Sphere because it orbits the Earth. If you get too far from the moon you start orbiting the Earth instead. What does a star orbit? The mutual center of mass of its cluster? The center of the galaxy?
 
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This is great, especially because it codifies factional identities that some people have tried to ignore in recent years. Thanks for the work, Alex.
 
Might it be possible to have an example of Standard, Advanced, and Very Advanced tech aptitude factions/corporations? Has always been something I have been curious about.
 
Is there any chance that "outdated tech" and "subpar tech" be added to the lists in addition to standard, advanced, and very advanced ones already listed??
 
Damaske said:
Is there any chance that "outdated tech" and "subpar tech" be added to the lists in addition to standard, advanced, and very advanced ones already listed??
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I would use the Slower speeds in Standard to represent that, but if it was something a lot of people wanted to see I could probably work additions for that tech level
 
Alex Hart said:
I would use the Slower speeds in Standard to represent that, but if it was something a lot of people wanted to see I could probably work additions for that tech level
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Well, I was thinking more so for other people who are making a pirate craft or use ships that are not up to standard tech AKA the Strays thread. It would also help encourage second-hand ships to be made.

Yuuki said:
poor ISS Sobek
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The ISS Sobek was not fully the reason behind me asking for this, BUUUT for its time it was very very advanced and would be on par for standard speeds.
 
This is one of the things you have to have, but has always bugged me. If you are from Yamatai or someone on par (and pretty much everyone is) you get the Very Advanced tech aptitude. Then you go say your ship is fast and that's kinda the end of it. We try to have a trade off with the armor, but I'm not really sure it's meaningful. It's a very long article for something that effectively goes "Ships don't go faster than x." The current addition pretty much makes it "Civilian ships don't go faster than x, Miliary ships don't go faster than y."
 
Soban said:
It's a very long article for something that effectively goes "Ships don't go faster than x." The current addition pretty much makes it "Civilian ships don't go faster than x, Miliary ships don't go faster than y."
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A lot of it is front-loaded technical jargon that's intended to explain what the numbers mean, though I think that we could probably chop off a lot of the top side of the article related to the math involved. As for the new addition, it's meant to be "Normal ships don't go faster than X, really fast Military ships don't go faster than Y." We should NOT be seeing anything but scouts and escort vessels using those new speed ratings.
 
Is this maybe a sign we should be leading with the stuff that needs to be referenced first and going into the details below, instead?
 
The article is pretty short as it stands (most space is taken up by tables) and isn’t particularly dense. The information there doesn’t detract from anything and only provides a logical basis for understanding the sci-fi rather than arbitrarily saying “this is max deal with it.”

Since Alex is NDC FM and Wes has approved it for Yamatai, the priority should be getting the final FM approval needed to have a functional article out of wip. It’s already taken months to get this version ready. Simplifying and reformatting (if such is actually needed) can come later, honestly.
 
I think it's good from Yamatai FM standpoint
 
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