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Thankfully the issue fixed itself!
"Don't Cry for me Argentina!"
- Thread starter Birdjaguar
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Post got long and rambling so moving it to Argentina
They didn't just try. They were more or less independent of the UN (which ITTL was stronger than our UN but not quite Stellaris) for twenty years before the UN levied a new round of sanctions that killed thousands of people on Europa before they gave in. Even then, they're kinda far away enough from Earth to get away with more than they should.
A lot of that came down to the distance though and had the setting progressed a bit faster so M-Drives were more common, it would've made a big difference. Traveller uses reactionless drives and a ship accelerating at 1G from Earth toward Europa would arrive in about a week, which is far enough away that you could throw a party while your parents are away, but not far enough away that you can burn down the house and have time to prepare a good excuse.
***
I've been working on a campaign the last few weeks that uses various reaction engines for different ships. For example, a freight ship with a fusion rocket engine is able to travel from Europa to Earth in about a 362 days, with only twelve days of that being acceleration/deceleration (as opposed to Traveller/reactionless drives, which typically would spend about half the travel time each way on accelerating of decelerating). At the same acceleration with a Traveller M-Drive, you're looking at 91 days because you're not worried about conserving reaction mass and the engine draws on the same amount for the power plant regardless, but you wouldn't travel at .005g in Traveller anyway.
As you can imagine, being able to get away with being an interplanetary pariah would be easier in a setting where earth is 352 days away versus 6.
For funsies, the players in my campaign are going to run a salvage ship around the Jovian colonies. These kind of ships use nuclear thermal rockets capable of .5g of acceleration each, so the ship is able to accelerate to 1g (versus the .005 of a single fusion rocket). However, the delta-v of the fuel isn't great so if the players tried to travel from Jupiter to Earth with this ship, it would take them about 15 years, of which about four minutes of those fifteen years involve acceleration and deceleration.
Alternatively, the freight ship could take the long route, reduce its fuel cost by 2/3rds, and use transfer orbits to get from Jupiter to Earth, but that'd take about 1176 days. It'd reduce the fuel cost of hydrogen from $2.7 million to about $900 thousand. The increase in supply cost for crew is negligible. As you can imagine, using transfer orbits in this setting is common because it makes some mid-range bulk goods suddenly affordable to ship, but that increases the material distance between Europa and the other Jovian moons and Earth. The cultural and political divide is less big given it only takes about 45 minutes for a message from Earth to reach Jupiter. The poor salvage ship, on the other hand, doesn't have the ability to pull this off going from Jupiter to Earth but could pull it off going to Saturn, in which case, the crew better have supplies for 10 years of travel.
Unfortunately, Jupiter isn't being gas mined since the only way I can figure out how to pull it off without using !!super!! science is using an Orion Drive, which doesn't sound economical at all. You can get the refining ship into the atmosphere easily enough assuming you have no intention of ever getting it out, but the ship needed to ferry the refined fuel out to a tanker would need an Orion Drive, which means it would need to be a big ship with a lot of armor or a smaller ship with a mag sail, but either way, its cheaper to just harvest Saturn.
They didn't just try. They were more or less independent of the UN (which ITTL was stronger than our UN but not quite Stellaris) for twenty years before the UN levied a new round of sanctions that killed thousands of people on Europa before they gave in. Even then, they're kinda far away enough from Earth to get away with more than they should.
A lot of that came down to the distance though and had the setting progressed a bit faster so M-Drives were more common, it would've made a big difference. Traveller uses reactionless drives and a ship accelerating at 1G from Earth toward Europa would arrive in about a week, which is far enough away that you could throw a party while your parents are away, but not far enough away that you can burn down the house and have time to prepare a good excuse.
***
I've been working on a campaign the last few weeks that uses various reaction engines for different ships. For example, a freight ship with a fusion rocket engine is able to travel from Europa to Earth in about a 362 days, with only twelve days of that being acceleration/deceleration (as opposed to Traveller/reactionless drives, which typically would spend about half the travel time each way on accelerating of decelerating). At the same acceleration with a Traveller M-Drive, you're looking at 91 days because you're not worried about conserving reaction mass and the engine draws on the same amount for the power plant regardless, but you wouldn't travel at .005g in Traveller anyway.
As you can imagine, being able to get away with being an interplanetary pariah would be easier in a setting where earth is 352 days away versus 6.
For funsies, the players in my campaign are going to run a salvage ship around the Jovian colonies. These kind of ships use nuclear thermal rockets capable of .5g of acceleration each, so the ship is able to accelerate to 1g (versus the .005 of a single fusion rocket). However, the delta-v of the fuel isn't great so if the players tried to travel from Jupiter to Earth with this ship, it would take them about 15 years, of which about four minutes of those fifteen years involve acceleration and deceleration.
Alternatively, the freight ship could take the long route, reduce its fuel cost by 2/3rds, and use transfer orbits to get from Jupiter to Earth, but that'd take about 1176 days. It'd reduce the fuel cost of hydrogen from $2.7 million to about $900 thousand. The increase in supply cost for crew is negligible. As you can imagine, using transfer orbits in this setting is common because it makes some mid-range bulk goods suddenly affordable to ship, but that increases the material distance between Europa and the other Jovian moons and Earth. The cultural and political divide is less big given it only takes about 45 minutes for a message from Earth to reach Jupiter. The poor salvage ship, on the other hand, doesn't have the ability to pull this off going from Jupiter to Earth but could pull it off going to Saturn, in which case, the crew better have supplies for 10 years of travel.
Unfortunately, Jupiter isn't being gas mined since the only way I can figure out how to pull it off without using !!super!! science is using an Orion Drive, which doesn't sound economical at all. You can get the refining ship into the atmosphere easily enough assuming you have no intention of ever getting it out, but the ship needed to ferry the refined fuel out to a tanker would need an Orion Drive, which means it would need to be a big ship with a lot of armor or a smaller ship with a mag sail, but either way, its cheaper to just harvest Saturn.
Lord of Elves
Suede-Denim Secret Police
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Any of y'all gonna play classic World of Warcraft when it comes out? Wanna start a guild? On Alliance-side because Ironforge is the best city in MMORPG history.
Lord of Elves
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Lord of Elves
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I'm very serious about this, Alex. I'm very intentional. I have my intention. It's my intention to play classic World of Warcraft as a holy paladin and wreck things. I want to mine all the ore nodes and make thorium bars and chestplates and legplates and bracers and sell them on the auction house in Ironforge, pull up on your girl with my holy crusader horse and say, "henlo smol bean."
Can you dig it?
In classic WoW are the Horde explicitly evil or is it more of that namby-pamby wishy-washy "well sometimes devouring the flesh of your enemies is good" nonsense? Like oh gee who are the good guys, is it the reanimated dead and their green and purple monsterpeople friends or is it the forest people and the guys who just want to live in thatched-roof cottages? I mean what is the deal with the Horde? They're so obviously bad guys. Their entire ethos as a civilization is "killing is good and fun." Oh I guess they can see into the future and summon lightning. Well it's not hard to see into the future when you can summon lightning. "I predict that city of innocent night elves is going to burn to the ground." Zap! Well that prediction came true. Boy it sure is fun being of ambiguous ethosity. No the Burning Legion is the bad guys, the orcs are just the poor victims who chose to drink demon blood and kill for fun. Come join our murder club, it's called The Horde and it's totally not evil. You know the Allied Powers? Yeah, THOSE are actually the bad guys. I mean their symbols are so wicked. Trees, crescent moons, shields and lions. Well our symbol is a shield decorated with bones and skulls and a dabble of blood. Can't you just feel the love? Oh we're also good guys because we are focused on our communities. Like the Ku Klux Klan, also very community-minded people to whom we've extended an invitation to join said evil Horde. And did I introduce you to our Blood Elves? We have Blood Elves. I'm told that's good. I mean, anyone would trust elves who were banished from paradise for doing something called blood magic. And you know, again, to really drive home the fact that they're good guys, they call themselves goddamn blood elves. Look at their eyes!
Lady Liadrin can get it, tho
Lady Liadrin can get it, tho
idk if that'll work since she already does all that so maybe you should git gud before you talk smack
Lord of Elves
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Warcraft is a really lame setting. It's - classic - still a great MMO, though. The Horde in classic is like a weird third worldist fantasy, sort of in the way you imply; they have ostensibly noble goals but in the process of trying to achieve them they do and become some grimy things, but it's just good guyism with bad guy characteristics
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I support the degenerated workers' state of the Horde against Stormwind's Imperialism.
Tani Coyote
Son of Huehuecoyotl
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So I drop in occasionally to see how things are going.
Only 2 active games, by the same GM, in the span of several weeks, even though it's Summer. Remember the good ole days where the term "Summergeddon" was thrown around a lot, to reference how many games were started in that period?
I understand why things are this way, with how many years have passed, but I still feel a sort of sad nostalgia. Like that one comic book shop you and your friends would hang around for years as kids, only for it to close down after you're all out of school.
Only 2 active games, by the same GM, in the span of several weeks, even though it's Summer. Remember the good ole days where the term "Summergeddon" was thrown around a lot, to reference how many games were started in that period?
I understand why things are this way, with how many years have passed, but I still feel a sort of sad nostalgia. Like that one comic book shop you and your friends would hang around for years as kids, only for it to close down after you're all out of school.
gay_Aleks
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We're all posting on the premium diamond-club subforum now. You can join us, but you'll need to paypal me $10,000. My paypal account email is scamminUSA@spacex.com.
Lord of Elves
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I just said that Warcraft is a lame setting but I think it'd be better to say that Warcraft is an incoherent setting; there are parts of the story and the worldbuilding that deserve praise, but they get walked back in service of more cookie-cutter gameplay, because they demand a kind of complexity that's difficult to square with attracting and keeping the interest of customers when the gaming industry is so corrupt and directionless it gets a shout-out from Bernie
Take the Defias for example. If you pay even cursory attention to the plotline associated with the Deadmines dungeon, which basically all the human starter zone quests build up, it's kind of a prescient critique of capitalism shoehorned into what's nominally a feudal setting, since the Defias emerged as a revolutionary movement out of the people who rebuilt Stormwind being cheated by the aristocracy. As I'm typing this it occurs to me that them screwing off to build their base of power in Westfall has some neat parallels to the Zapatistas, or any other guerrilla movement that has operated as a de facto state entity.@Ailedhoo has to know what I'm talking about in referring to Thrall as a Jesus/general messianic figure. There was some cool moral grayness in the setting back before World of Warcraft when it was just the Warhammer-derived RTS games. In between the events of Warcraft 2 and Warcraft 3, some of the human kingdoms - I think Lordaeron and Alterac, but it's been a minute - take orc captives as slaves and raise them in work camps, and Thrall leads a revolt that creates the modern Horde, I think prior to the events of Warcraft 3 or early on. I've never had a good handle on Warcraft lore because when I first got into it in middle school I ended up reading the Lord of the Rings and deciding that anyone who knew anything didn't care about Warcraft as a setting anyway, because I've always had a fraught relationship with criticism and pretense
... but then all that work was made for naught after Cataclysm when Thrall resigned as warchief and somehow we ended up with uh ... some really weird dude whose name I forget who was low key into bad magic and brought the old Horde from the first Warcraft game back to Azeroth through a gateway to another part of the multiverse, or ... there's a reason why they finally conceded to pull an Everquest and let you play the original game. It's 'cause they broke it, and the setting.
Tani Coyote
Son of Huehuecoyotl
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The PoliSci guy in me wants to take a stab at what happened.
If I had to hazard a guess, and boy is it a hazard given my numerous hiatuses... it seems most games increased in complexity, which both wore out GMs and also intimidated newer players? And as the old guard aged and departed for other places...
Though I recall NES saw a similar phenomenon of a huge activity decline? I guess it's just a melancholic moment where lots of people have gotten older, taken on new responsibilities, and it slowly but surely eroded the community base.
(Also it sounds like chatroom culture caused us all to be in close contact too frequently, where we could get on each other's nerves, and caused its fair share of rifts, without getting into specifics of course?)
It just feels odd because I have a million ideas for games to GM in my head, but I know I lack the time to commit to them, and I can see a lot of the community is in a similar situation.
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