Welcome! These forums will be deactivated by the end of this year. The conversation continues in a new morph over on Discord! Please join us there for a more active conversation and the occasional opportunity to ask developers questions directly! Go to the PS+ Discord Server.

interstellar expansion

15 posts / 0 new

Last post

Tue, 2009-12-29 14:29

ChristianCalvert116 ChristianCalvert116's picture

The concept of Eclipse Phase is a fantastic one. However I feel like its a concept that would be better served if humanity had begun its expansion onto the interstellar stage in a more rapid pace by its own hands and not just with the aid of alien technology. The ideas are solid, but I feel that the stage is too small. If I read over the draft of the fluff before it was published I would have suggested that after humanity found Pandora's gate scientists and AIs managed to backwards engineer the technology enough to make jump and\or hyperdrives that were not as efficient as the gates, either having a shorter range or longer travel time, but still enough that humanity has begun to colonize other star systems and build settlements on terran worlds. With the destruction of Earth. Expanding the human sphere of influence has become all the greater priority. Spreading out so that extinction becomes less likely. Perhaps aliens such as the factors are trying to discourage this, saying that we are not ready, while others are aggressively trying to bottle us up by destroying our colonies and raiding our ships. Perhaps a supplement that brings things into 40A.F. Where interstellar starships are becoming the new thing would be on the list of upcoming source material.

Thu, 2010-01-14 19:46

Scion

Re: interstellar expansion

I'd rather avoid all the interstellar travel. One of the things that attracted me to the system in the first place was that technology had advanced in a very plausible way ie. we have handheld supercomputers but can't rip space/time to small chunks. For me this helps emphasise transhumanitys fragile nature. We now live in tin cans and on lifeless rocks because there is nowhere else to live. Every Habitat is a village, we've lost the global community simply because it takes hours at the least to send a message. And if a habitat is in trouble it is days to weeks or even months before any help other than an egocast comes. I also like that there is a FTL option out there in the form of the pandora gates. It gives the GM the option of a stargate campaign but adds the horror of knowing that there are still things we may never know. Between all the immortality and body morphs there are still 'things that man was not meant to know.' Yes, we can use the gates, but we will never master them. Besides, I have a bet with a friend that if they do manage to open the engine of a pandora gate they'll usher in a warp storm, ala 40k, which changes over the setting :P

Fri, 2010-01-15 00:14

ChristianCalvert116 ChristianCalvert116's picture

Re: interstellar expansion

I can understand that concept. And it is a good one. At the same time I likes my starships and warpdrives. Part of what it means to reach to surpass our human limitations is breaching those barriers that we thought solid, our confinement to the solar system being one of them. I was sort of thinking on the level of Trinity FTL in White-wolf's sci-fi game. We have starships, but they are brand new, so new that our colonies are really just research stations. And as I recall it only took SG-1 six years to build an interstellar starship. Perhaps the technology was figured out by the Prometheans. They are Seed-AIs of near infinite intelligence, surely they could figure out how the Pandora's gates work.

Mon, 2010-01-18 10:09

Re: interstellar expansion

Just steal a Factor's ship.

Sat, 2010-01-30 13:39

The Doctor The Doctor's picture

Re: interstellar expansion

Iv wrote:
Just steal a Factor's ship.

And then figure out how to pilot it.

—

[img]http://drwho.virtadpt.net/graphics/info_userbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://drwho.virtadpt.net/graphics/argo_userbar.jpg[/img] [url=https://drwho.virtadpt.net/graphics/blankbadge.png][img]http://drwho.vir...

Sun, 2010-01-31 18:56

jackgraham jackgraham's picture

Re: interstellar expansion

If you want FTL, go for it! We've chosen not to include it in the game (at least not at this time), but there's nothing to stop you having someone figure out how to harness Pandora gate technology to move an entire ship. Of course, in keeping with the spirit of the game, getting a bit Event Horizon with the effects of using a Pandora Gate to move a ship is suggested for atmosphere. :)

—

J A C K G R A H A M :: Hooray for Earth! http://eclipsephase.com :: twitter @jackgraham @faketsr :: Google+Jack Graham

Sun, 2010-01-31 19:25

Re: interstellar expansion

The Doctor wrote:
Iv wrote:
Just steal a Factor's ship.
And then figure out how to pilot it.

Steal a Factor's ego copy ! Of steal a Factor right away I smell a campaign material...

Wed, 2010-02-03 11:57

standard_gravity standard_gravity's picture

Re: interstellar expansion

Iv wrote:
The Doctor wrote:
Iv wrote:
Just steal a Factor's ship.
And then figure out how to pilot it.
Steal a Factor's ego copy ! Of steal a Factor right away I smell a campaign material...

By the look of them, Factors sure seem smelly ;)

—

[img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/ext_userbar.jpg[/img] "People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes." - John Dee

Mon, 2010-02-08 20:36

Sepherim

Re: interstellar expansion

Maybe the Factors don't have FTLs, they just use an unknown Gate... or have been here all along...

—

The mind is information... hack it! [IMG]http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j166/Sepherim/Otros/F_Rep.jpg[/IMG] +4 http://tribulaciones.es/

Mon, 2010-02-08 20:40

#10

Sepherim

Re: interstellar expansion

Sorry, double post. Please delete this one. :)

—

The mind is information... hack it! [IMG]http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j166/Sepherim/Otros/F_Rep.jpg[/IMG] +4 http://tribulaciones.es/

Tue, 2010-02-23 13:45

#11

nick012000 nick012000's picture

Re: interstellar expansion

Iv wrote:
The Doctor wrote:
Iv wrote:
Just steal a Factor's ship.
And then figure out how to pilot it.
Steal a Factor's ego copy ! Of steal a Factor right away I smell a campaign material...

I don't think the Factors make ego copies the way transhumanity tends to. They're all about melding together and whatnot; they don't even have a word for "I".

—

+1 r-Rep , +1 @-rep

Sat, 2010-03-06 08:51

#12

Wapa

Re: interstellar expansion

I came up with a group called "Project Thistledown" in my campaign. They're basically a group who are raising funds to set up outsystem colonies using transhuman technologies - no paying a bunch of inscrutable aliens, no stepping through Cthulhu's getaway hatch, just the technologies people understand. It's not impossible, either, given the setting - just pack a cornucopia machine, some cortical stacks and a heap of Qbits (mostly for setting up quantum farcasters) into an extremely light solar sailer craft and push it out of the system with a sufficiently powerful laser. Once it reaches the star system you're aiming at, the cornucopia machine builds some mining/construction bots with those resources you could bring along, then they build a nice habitat with bodies and everything. Set up your farcasters and ego bridges, and wait for the would-be colonists to arrive. Sure, it'd take a long time, but transhumans are more or less immortal. I put the Thistledown people in the inner system and gave them links to the Reclaimers, but they could go pretty much anywhere really.

Mon, 2010-03-08 07:32

#13

nick012000 nick012000's picture

Re: interstellar expansion

Wapa wrote:
I came up with a group called "Project Thistledown" in my campaign. They're basically a group who are raising funds to set up outsystem colonies using transhuman technologies - no paying a bunch of inscrutable aliens, no stepping through Cthulhu's getaway hatch, just the technologies people understand. It's not impossible, either, given the setting - just pack a cornucopia machine, some cortical stacks and a heap of Qbits (mostly for setting up quantum farcasters) into an extremely light solar sailer craft and push it out of the system with a sufficiently powerful laser. Once it reaches the star system you're aiming at, the cornucopia machine builds some mining/construction bots with those resources you could bring along, then they build a nice habitat with bodies and everything. Set up your farcasters and ego bridges, and wait for the would-be colonists to arrive. Sure, it'd take a long time, but transhumans are more or less immortal. I put the Thistledown people in the inner system and gave them links to the Reclaimers, but they could go pretty much anywhere really.

Given that QE comms aren't used for that sort of thing normally, I think it'd probably be easier to just send the egos with the ship to begin with rather than wasting irreplacable QE q-bits sending them over.

—

+1 r-Rep , +1 @-rep

Mon, 2010-03-08 09:07

#14

Wapa

Re: interstellar expansion

Actually I was meaning the qbits used to encrypt high-bandwidth slower-than-light farcaster transmissions. IIRC you can get away with using the same bunch of qbits for all your farcaster messages, but the more qbits you take the more you have for the odd message that has to get there yesterday.

Mon, 2010-03-08 15:14

#15

Decivre

Re: interstellar expansion

Wapa wrote:
Actually I was meaning the qbits used to encrypt high-bandwidth slower-than-light farcaster transmissions. IIRC you can get away with using the same bunch of qbits for all your farcaster messages, but the more qbits you take the more you have for the odd message that has to get there yesterday.

Quantum farcasters do not expend qbits at all, but rather use entanglement to transfer data at the speed of light to the receiver at the other end. So no, there is no need to bring qubits if that's the sort of data transmission you plan to do. Just note that time to transmission is going to be long as hell. Even assuming you found a habitat at the nearest neighboring star system (Proxima Centauri), the transmission lag is going to be around 4.218 years!

—

Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]