This is the last post in this series, and it mainly deals with publishing your gear. But I have a very busy weekend, with Halloween and my son's birthday, so we're gonna go through these real quick:
9: Does the Spacecraft in Question Have a Point?
"It looks cool" is not a good answer. Take a gander at the sub guidelines for most Star Trek blueprint websites. You will see some variation of the following, "No Uber Dreadnoughts, Please." This goes double for hard sf designs. It's an ancillary of rule seven; If there are no useless rooms in space, there probably won't be entire useless ships, either. Remember, even with more advanced technology, spacecraft will still be among the most expensive investments for governments and corporations. They will not make a 300-Meter-Kill-O-Zap-Super-Rocket if a ship like the Heinlein will get the job done.
10: Make Your Ships Unique.
By this I mean, "Do not make a dozen small orbiters when one or two will do." Think about it. If your ships are too similar, then PCs will lose interest. I had this problem back in the day when I was running Star Wars on a regular basis. After a while, it started to devolve into, "oh, another freighter." and a total lack of reaction. If your ships aren't exciting to your Players, what's the point?
This is even more important for making spacecraft deck plans for sale. If your designs are too similar, your customers have no reason to buy more than one. Even worse, if people only need one of a certain type rocket and you have several different versions of that type, you're essentially competing with yourself. Not to mention you have nothing to offer for you customers other needs... That's why every design I've produced so far is radically different from themselves. That and its more fun.
So, that wraps it up for this series, ladies and gentlemen. Hope you enjoyed and found it useful and stuff. Next week, I'll be starting a new series on space combat for the The Back Desert, and of course, role-playing games. See you all Monday!
Science Fiction Gaming, Art & Speculation
Friday, October 29, 2010
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Designing Plausible Spacecraft for Role-Playing Games Part V
(I read over this post when I felt better and noticed some glaring mistakes and incomplete thoughts. From me, this is really saying something. Here is the Beta version:)
Sorry about being so late with the blog today...I pulled an all-nighter with my sick kids. I did use part of the time to get the first draft of the Valkyrie's life system finished up. This is the first spacecraft I've designed that has no gravity from thrust or planet fall, and it was educational. It was also fun- not being constrained by normal surface area means that the walls can be the floor and the there is no reason not to have consoles mounted "upside-down" relative to other stations and fun things like that. I also, as per my personal policy, made a few all-new map elements for the interior and even re-did some of the old ones to make them cleaner and more detailed. Let's check it out:
It's kind of tiny, I know, but larger versions of the individual "decks" will be posted on Flikr later, for your enjoyment. I also did some reworking of the overall interior, to make room for the life system and to see if maybe I could get away with only one fusion reactor. Originally, I didn't want one at all, but fission power is just too dirty to have a atomic rocket in the nose, and the shielding would take up too much space. But going with fusion lets me add some political stuff to the rocket's back story, so it ain't all bad. BTW, the little hamburgers flanking the reactor are electric turbines.
When working on the interior of this little beauty, I had to use a bit of discipline. Like all of you, I'm used to gaming in ships like you see in Traveller and Star Wars; ships with a lot of space in them. Its fair enough; the ships we see in on the tube or the silver screen. That space is needed for production reasons movies and television, and is useful for exciting combat scenarios in gaming. Unfortunately, it is also completely bogus. The plethora of "storage rooms", "crew lounges", and other interior areas that exist just to fill out the empty spaces on a map may seem like a good idea...but in hard SF, they fun afoul of RocketDad's Rule number seven:
7. There Are No 10'x10' Rooms in Space.
Observe the case of the International Space Station. The ISS is the single most expensive construction project in human history. This includes things like the Manhattan Project, the Great Wall of China, and the estimated cost of the Great Pyramids at Giza. The total cost of the ISS is greater than the Gross Domestic Product of some industrialized nations.
I mention all this so that you will understand my point about extra space in space: The habitable volume of the ISS is roughly that of two 18 wheeler trailers. There simply is no spare room in spacecraft. All realistic spacecraft are designed for minimum weight and volume. Accept this and go on.
The important thing, I think, is not to see this as a limitation, but rather as an interesting challenge. As you can see in the above deck plans, I have managed to create an interesting environment without extraneous spaces in it. There are still blind corners, still places to hide, and, when you factor in the lack of gravity, plenty of room. Even better, that room can be used in new ways; I imagine a freebrawl fight between the mid deck and the bottom one, with the characters using the handles for leverage and darting up and down through the large open space in between the "decks". Eat your heart out, Neo!
I'm sure you noticed that the there is a large amount of cargo in the tube connecting the airlock with the rest of the habitat, but this is not an oversight. I have observed this to be the case on the ISS, in the Zvezda module, where up to half the corridor space is filled with supplies and the astronauts float above them. This is simple practicality and the reality of trying to cram enough supplies for a crew of six for a month. I like adding little real-world details like that, it gives the location flavor (and treasure!). The exercise equipment attached to the walls is another new detail that you would see in any spacecraft that sees a lot of use in freefall. I fudged a little in the Heinlein plans and only showed where the equipment would be when unstowed, so in this one I decided to show the the stuff out and ready to work. Of, course, in the actual battle map version, that stuff will be out of the way; no one's gonna bring treadmill to space fight.
Anyway, I think little things like that are important enough to give there own rule:
8. Keep the Design Grounded in Reality.
Science fiction is, by its very nature, fantastic. It takes a good bit of willing suspension of disbelief to put over the stuff that is actually true about space travel. The stuff we hope to do later on, like interplanetary travel in weeks instead of months and terraforming Mars, is simply beyond the pale. This is one of the reasons that flat-out untrue things like sound in space, handwavium gravity generation and the other familiar tropes of frontiersmen and romance are easier to put over than the reality of that most strange of environments, deep space. It also doesn't help that most TV and Movie budgets are too small to make a realistic-zero-gee-floating-all-the-time-and-stuff film or series. This makes the problem worse by simply reinforcing the common misconceptions of space.
But just because a realistic setting is outre doesn't mean that the the tech has to be fake. I get around this necessity by adding things to my twenty-third century spacecraft that exist in the twenty-first and would most likely be replaced with something strange. It's a compromise; by keeping certain elements low-tech and real, the high-tech and imaginary is easier to believe. It may be just as unrealistic, in a way, but if I had to choose (and I did) I'd rather use elements from the the real world to ground my rockets in reality.
(enjoy the newer version, folks. My final post on the subject will be out later on today.)
Sorry about being so late with the blog today...I pulled an all-nighter with my sick kids. I did use part of the time to get the first draft of the Valkyrie's life system finished up. This is the first spacecraft I've designed that has no gravity from thrust or planet fall, and it was educational. It was also fun- not being constrained by normal surface area means that the walls can be the floor and the there is no reason not to have consoles mounted "upside-down" relative to other stations and fun things like that. I also, as per my personal policy, made a few all-new map elements for the interior and even re-did some of the old ones to make them cleaner and more detailed. Let's check it out:
It's kind of tiny, I know, but larger versions of the individual "decks" will be posted on Flikr later, for your enjoyment. I also did some reworking of the overall interior, to make room for the life system and to see if maybe I could get away with only one fusion reactor. Originally, I didn't want one at all, but fission power is just too dirty to have a atomic rocket in the nose, and the shielding would take up too much space. But going with fusion lets me add some political stuff to the rocket's back story, so it ain't all bad. BTW, the little hamburgers flanking the reactor are electric turbines.
When working on the interior of this little beauty, I had to use a bit of discipline. Like all of you, I'm used to gaming in ships like you see in Traveller and Star Wars; ships with a lot of space in them. Its fair enough; the ships we see in on the tube or the silver screen. That space is needed for production reasons movies and television, and is useful for exciting combat scenarios in gaming. Unfortunately, it is also completely bogus. The plethora of "storage rooms", "crew lounges", and other interior areas that exist just to fill out the empty spaces on a map may seem like a good idea...but in hard SF, they fun afoul of RocketDad's Rule number seven:
7. There Are No 10'x10' Rooms in Space.
Observe the case of the International Space Station. The ISS is the single most expensive construction project in human history. This includes things like the Manhattan Project, the Great Wall of China, and the estimated cost of the Great Pyramids at Giza. The total cost of the ISS is greater than the Gross Domestic Product of some industrialized nations.
I mention all this so that you will understand my point about extra space in space: The habitable volume of the ISS is roughly that of two 18 wheeler trailers. There simply is no spare room in spacecraft. All realistic spacecraft are designed for minimum weight and volume. Accept this and go on.
The important thing, I think, is not to see this as a limitation, but rather as an interesting challenge. As you can see in the above deck plans, I have managed to create an interesting environment without extraneous spaces in it. There are still blind corners, still places to hide, and, when you factor in the lack of gravity, plenty of room. Even better, that room can be used in new ways; I imagine a freebrawl fight between the mid deck and the bottom one, with the characters using the handles for leverage and darting up and down through the large open space in between the "decks". Eat your heart out, Neo!
I'm sure you noticed that the there is a large amount of cargo in the tube connecting the airlock with the rest of the habitat, but this is not an oversight. I have observed this to be the case on the ISS, in the Zvezda module, where up to half the corridor space is filled with supplies and the astronauts float above them. This is simple practicality and the reality of trying to cram enough supplies for a crew of six for a month. I like adding little real-world details like that, it gives the location flavor (and treasure!). The exercise equipment attached to the walls is another new detail that you would see in any spacecraft that sees a lot of use in freefall. I fudged a little in the Heinlein plans and only showed where the equipment would be when unstowed, so in this one I decided to show the the stuff out and ready to work. Of, course, in the actual battle map version, that stuff will be out of the way; no one's gonna bring treadmill to space fight.
Anyway, I think little things like that are important enough to give there own rule:
8. Keep the Design Grounded in Reality.
Science fiction is, by its very nature, fantastic. It takes a good bit of willing suspension of disbelief to put over the stuff that is actually true about space travel. The stuff we hope to do later on, like interplanetary travel in weeks instead of months and terraforming Mars, is simply beyond the pale. This is one of the reasons that flat-out untrue things like sound in space, handwavium gravity generation and the other familiar tropes of frontiersmen and romance are easier to put over than the reality of that most strange of environments, deep space. It also doesn't help that most TV and Movie budgets are too small to make a realistic-zero-gee-floating-all-the-time-and-stuff film or series. This makes the problem worse by simply reinforcing the common misconceptions of space.
But just because a realistic setting is outre doesn't mean that the the tech has to be fake. I get around this necessity by adding things to my twenty-third century spacecraft that exist in the twenty-first and would most likely be replaced with something strange. It's a compromise; by keeping certain elements low-tech and real, the high-tech and imaginary is easier to believe. It may be just as unrealistic, in a way, but if I had to choose (and I did) I'd rather use elements from the the real world to ground my rockets in reality.
(enjoy the newer version, folks. My final post on the subject will be out later on today.)
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Designing Plausible Spacecraft for Role-Playing Games Part IV
Aaaaaaaand, we're back!
STEP 2: THE DESIGN PHASE
This is where we get down to the nuts-and-bolts of making all the cool ideas from the pre-viz come together into a coherent whole. This is mostly a matter of personal taste and style, so there are not a lot of specifics I can offer on designing the general look of your craft. Its up to you, your influences, your audience, and your personal skills. But I can add to my unofficial List-O-Design-Rules:
6. Fictional Spacecraft are Either Anthropomorphic or Iconographic.
This is part and parcel with the human condition. Even real spacecraft, whose designs are influenced far more by money, politics and the inescapable physical limitations of chemical, disposable rockets, fall into one of these two categories. The Soyuz/Progress capsule is an excellent real-world example of this. Its a ball, bell and cylinder-simple, efficient shapes- yet they combine to define the entire eastern bloc space design ethic in a way that is instantly recognizable. In fiction, probably the most iconographic spacecraft is the Enterprise. Say what you will about it being a totally non-plausible design, you know what that design is. The point is illustrated by the many different versions that have been made over the years; original, A-E, reboot- they are all recognizable as "The Big E" in design. I think that, despite Doug Drexler's awesome designs, the titular ship from the television series Enterprise, the NX-01, sort of doomed the show because of its lack of the iconographic design.
Anthropomorphic is a bit of misnomer. What I mean is "ships that look like animals and stuff" Does anybody know the word for that? The mental process involved is called matrixing and referes to the human trait of finding patterns in random images and things like seeing faces in the light socket and stuff. The point is, a ship that invokes a certain object through similar design invokes the emotional impact of that object. I'll offer two examples for this, on animal and one inanimate. The K-03 midbulk transport Firefly-class from the show of the same name is an excellent example of a spacecraft that invokes an animal. Or, more to the point, two animals. It has a bulbous, glowing abdomen that gives the Firefly its name, and the long, graceful swan neck that make it remind one of a bird in flight. The ship is also iconographic in the sense that it is instantly recognizable and unmistakable for anything else, so its a double whammy of WIN.
The Imperial Star Destroyers from the Star Wars franchise are also iconographic to the point that they have inspired the off shot prequel designs, but they are also anthropomorphic- if that's the right word- in that they all bear the general shape of a spear or arrow head. This primitive, lethal imagery is part of what makes the Star Destroyer so ominous and dangerous looking.
That, and they're freaking huge...
So any way, how does this apply to our project Valkyrie, do you ask? In order to make the spacecraft memorable and therefore lucrative, I want to make it either iconographic, anthropomorphic, or both. Iconography is kinda something that a design has to earn, in a way, but anthropomorphic can be accomplished easily. Now, I realize not everybody reads manga- I hardly ever do myself- so lets take a look at the inspiration for the project, the DS-12:
See, isn't she cute? Looks kinda insect like, which is good, because - like an ant - the Toy Box 2 scurries along busy orbits and cleans up debris. The Valkyrie is designed to clean up debris as well - its function in the game world is to clear the orbital space between asteroid colonies that have been cut off since the Geat War. The part of the DS-12's design that stuck with me the most is the round protrusion in the bow and the "bumper guard" that covers most of the dorsal surface.
After doing some research on real-world debris removal scenarios, I came upon the "laser broom" proposal. It resonated with an idea I had about using a species of fusion torch to vaporize debris. So I''ve decided that the Valkyrie will have an armored spine, a thrust nozzle on the bow, and several pairs of robotic arms for grabbing the big salvage.
After playing around with the elements I had collected and the design principles we've outlined, I come up with the basic design for our space scow:
The design, to me, is invokative of a mole and a angry, angry beetle. This is what I want for reasons that will be revealed later.
Now, the exterior is not designed in a vacuum (no pun intended). I also played with the interior, remembering that living space in a purely free fall spacecraft is only about half the size of what's needed in gravity, I'm just adding in a simple cylinder and connecting tube for the life system. I also have to account for the fusion generators, propellant tanks, support trusses and hard science-y stuff. Fortunately, I have Photoshop! So, here is the skeleton of the Valkyrie superimposed:
So you see, eveything fits. We now have a plausible design that looks cool, does what it it's supposed to do, and invokes the imagery I want it to.
That's it for today, folks. Tomorrow, we'll start designing the interior in detail.
Enjoy!
STEP 2: THE DESIGN PHASE
This is where we get down to the nuts-and-bolts of making all the cool ideas from the pre-viz come together into a coherent whole. This is mostly a matter of personal taste and style, so there are not a lot of specifics I can offer on designing the general look of your craft. Its up to you, your influences, your audience, and your personal skills. But I can add to my unofficial List-O-Design-Rules:
6. Fictional Spacecraft are Either Anthropomorphic or Iconographic.
This is part and parcel with the human condition. Even real spacecraft, whose designs are influenced far more by money, politics and the inescapable physical limitations of chemical, disposable rockets, fall into one of these two categories. The Soyuz/Progress capsule is an excellent real-world example of this. Its a ball, bell and cylinder-simple, efficient shapes- yet they combine to define the entire eastern bloc space design ethic in a way that is instantly recognizable. In fiction, probably the most iconographic spacecraft is the Enterprise. Say what you will about it being a totally non-plausible design, you know what that design is. The point is illustrated by the many different versions that have been made over the years; original, A-E, reboot- they are all recognizable as "The Big E" in design. I think that, despite Doug Drexler's awesome designs, the titular ship from the television series Enterprise, the NX-01, sort of doomed the show because of its lack of the iconographic design.
Anthropomorphic is a bit of misnomer. What I mean is "ships that look like animals and stuff" Does anybody know the word for that? The mental process involved is called matrixing and referes to the human trait of finding patterns in random images and things like seeing faces in the light socket and stuff. The point is, a ship that invokes a certain object through similar design invokes the emotional impact of that object. I'll offer two examples for this, on animal and one inanimate. The K-03 midbulk transport Firefly-class from the show of the same name is an excellent example of a spacecraft that invokes an animal. Or, more to the point, two animals. It has a bulbous, glowing abdomen that gives the Firefly its name, and the long, graceful swan neck that make it remind one of a bird in flight. The ship is also iconographic in the sense that it is instantly recognizable and unmistakable for anything else, so its a double whammy of WIN.
The Imperial Star Destroyers from the Star Wars franchise are also iconographic to the point that they have inspired the off shot prequel designs, but they are also anthropomorphic- if that's the right word- in that they all bear the general shape of a spear or arrow head. This primitive, lethal imagery is part of what makes the Star Destroyer so ominous and dangerous looking.
That, and they're freaking huge...
So any way, how does this apply to our project Valkyrie, do you ask? In order to make the spacecraft memorable and therefore lucrative, I want to make it either iconographic, anthropomorphic, or both. Iconography is kinda something that a design has to earn, in a way, but anthropomorphic can be accomplished easily. Now, I realize not everybody reads manga- I hardly ever do myself- so lets take a look at the inspiration for the project, the DS-12:
After doing some research on real-world debris removal scenarios, I came upon the "laser broom" proposal. It resonated with an idea I had about using a species of fusion torch to vaporize debris. So I''ve decided that the Valkyrie will have an armored spine, a thrust nozzle on the bow, and several pairs of robotic arms for grabbing the big salvage.
After playing around with the elements I had collected and the design principles we've outlined, I come up with the basic design for our space scow:
Now, the exterior is not designed in a vacuum (no pun intended). I also played with the interior, remembering that living space in a purely free fall spacecraft is only about half the size of what's needed in gravity, I'm just adding in a simple cylinder and connecting tube for the life system. I also have to account for the fusion generators, propellant tanks, support trusses and hard science-y stuff. Fortunately, I have Photoshop! So, here is the skeleton of the Valkyrie superimposed:
That's it for today, folks. Tomorrow, we'll start designing the interior in detail.
Enjoy!
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