Jump to content


  • Content Count

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won


Thot last won the day on April 14 2018

Thot had the most liked content!

Community Reputation

71 Excellent

About Thot

  • Rank
    Senior Member


  • RPG Biography
    Been playing RPG's for 25 years, of all kinds and tastes. Even wrote and published my own (in German).
  • Current games
    Currently, I am running a Mythras campaign set in the Young Kingdoms of Stormbringer, using the magic system from Magic World. The players are in year 11 after the fall of Imryrr and try to escape the end of the world, which they found out about via visions, dreams and prophecies.
  • Location
    In the middle of the middle of Germany
  • Blurb
    Born 1976, self-employed IT networking consultant, served 4 years in my country's Navy as an officer candidate/officer back in the day, happily married.

Recent Profile Visitors

3,099 profile views
  1. I was forced by the players to use Elric, Dyvim Slorm, and Dharnizhaan (yes) as NPC's. It was a hairy thing, but I think I did them justice to some extend. Never used any pregenerated characters in any RPG, though. Players should be able to forge their own characters.
  2. ... and nobody here is talking about this? Elric: https://comicbook.com/tv-shows/2019/11/19/elric-saga-tv-series-michael-moorcock/ Hawkmoon: https://deadline.com/2019/02/bbcs-michael-moorcock-runestaff-1202556240/
  3. So... Having read it further, the idea does have merits, but somehow doesn't enthrall me to run a campaign in it. I'd maybe use it in some kind of world hopping campaign as a stop between adventures. But for a setting fully based on this one world, it seems... too peaceful? I mean, sure, there's the Cold War with a somehow only half-communist dictatorial Soviet Union, but that doesn't really inspire me. Maybe it's using a divergence point way, way in the ancient past of the early 20th century that fails to bewitch me... but then again, it's the only that makes sense when emulating the pulp sf, "inhabited solar system" genre. It's pulp in all its glory. Not quite my genre, but it's well done, I enjoyed the read.
  4. I totally forgot the existence of this until now; bought the PDF. Thanks for this thread! Their nuclear rockets have an exhaust velocity of about "25 times that of the best chemical rockets", which would translate into roughly 111,550 m/s. This results in these delta V numbers per tenth of ship mass as fuel: 1 11,753 2 24,892 3 39,787 4 56,983 5 77,321 6 102,212 7 134,303 8 179,533 9 256,853 9.9 513,707 9.99 770,560 9.999 1,027,413 I'll have to read the rest later on, but it does look promising from what I've seen already.
  5. Tangentially relevant: https://lifespanbook.com/
  6. There are many setting-specific variables. You have to decide how much mass a solar sail will have per square km. Something like 3 grams per square meter seems realistic; that would mean 3 tons per square km. So e.g. a 30 ton ship would have 1 module for 1 km² of solar sail, providing the ship with an acceleration of 0.0003 m/s² at 1 AU distance from the sun. There are, by the way, also concepts of solar sails that are not actual sails, but magnetic fields filled with thin hydrogen, for the same effect, but with potential of a much larger sail - if you have the energy.
  7. You just turn the sail 45° from the star so that it slows your orbit around it, and then the star's gravity does the rest. Likewise, you can turn the sail so that your orbital speed increases.
  8. For solar sails, the table here is also highly relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure#Pressures_of_absorption_and_reflection At Earth's distance from the sun, the radiation pressure is about 9 Newton per square kilometer of solar sail surface. In other words, if you had a 100 ton ship with a solar sail 100 by 100 km, you'd be able to accelerate at roughly 1 m/s², assuming 100% efficiency of reflection. So, you need an incredibly light material to make a solar sail worth doing, obviously.
  9. And for a fusion rocket, with an exhaust velocity of 100,000 m/s: 1 10,536 2 22,314 3 35,667 4 51,083 5 69,315 6 91,629 7 120,397 8 160,944 9 230,259 9.9 460,517 9.99 690,776 9.999 921,034 Note, however, that this would require a reactor in the terawatt range, for any meaningful acceleration numbers.
  10. Same numbers for an ion drive with an exhaust velocity of 30 km/s : 1 3,161 2 6,694 3 10,700 4 15,325 5 20,794 6 27,489 7 36,119 8 48,283 9 69,078 9.9 138,155 9.99 207,233 9.999 276,310 (Keep in mind, acceleration for this type of drive is way, way, way below 0.1 G, so no liftoff with this.)
  11. I have thought a bit about the original question. So, if the "modules" in M-Space refer to mass (not volume), which would make sense, you could easily define fuel tank systems that have a certain delta V, depending on the share of fuel tank modules compared to the whole ship. For a chemical rocket like SpaceX's new methane-oxygen drives, that would probably look a bit like this, assuming a 10-module ship (and easily scaleable from there) 1 381 2 807 3 1,289 4 1,847 5 2,506 6 3,312 7 4,352 8 5,818 9 8,324 9.9 16,648 9.99 24,972 9.999 33,295 The first number is the amount of modules reserved for fuel tanks in a 10-module vessel, the second, larger number is the delta v (the total amount of speed change the ship can carry out before refuelling) in m/s. For reference: In order to be in an Earth orbit, you need at least 7,800 m/s of actual speed.
  12. Nope. It was a fantasy, not a model by any standard. Actually, it was off by dimensions. "We have made progress in the past" is a false analogy here, guys. Sure we can engineer a lot of stuff. We will eventually turn this solar system into a Dyson swarm, I have no doubt, though it may take longer than many here think. But FTL? I am not saying FTL will not happen because I lack imagination. I am saying it because all we can OBSERVE in this universe points to the nonexistence of FTL or, in fact, interstellar travel.
  13. A society (or multi-society community) that can do FTL will use all available resources eventually. Given the age of the unvierse, "eventually" would have happened already. Our window of observation is the age of the universe. That's hardly short. We don't see giant interstellar civilizations consuming planets. We don't see Dyson spheres or swarms. We don't see space battles. We don't observe visitors, and our planet was full of natural resources when we started mining it. Exactly, and we are not observing this. So the only logical conclusion is: it is not possible. Because if it was possible, those civilizations who do it would outcompete those who don't. When resources are used up everywhere, you start recycling waste. This isn't happening, despite the age of the universe. You can never even get close to any speed worth mentioning as a fraction of c. Yet, mercury and the asteroids are still there. We do know that. Such a group would have stripmined our asteroids and other planets, too. That would be a waste (sorry for the pun). We already talked about this - not in quality, but in quantity. There is a lot of stuff on Earth, not to mention it is a free habitat. But see, either our gravity well is "considerable", because technology does not allow to fly to orbit and beyond cheaply; in this case, interstellar flight is impossible. Or it is not considerable, in which case interstellar flight may be possible, but then we'd see civilizations doing it. Right in our backyard. Because someone already did that a million years ago. Or a billion. 1. The other planets ae untouched and pristine, too. 2. When you make the journey, you take everything within reach, that's just efficiency. The whole inner system would be devoid of everything if interstellar flight was possible in this universe. (No, we'd have noticed that by now.) But why would they stop at Mercury? But given enough time, someone did. Wait another 20,000 years, and nothing will be left to use.
  14. And that's a reasonable thing to play and tell stories in. It is great fun, after all! But sometimes I want to make a proper prognosis, and the result is : We'll use chemical rockets for large-scale space faring, and that is likely the best solution, all things considered.
  15. Humans are creative users of natural laws, not changers of natural laws.
  • Create New...