Old Problem; Extra D space and starships


General Discussion


I am curious as to how StarFinder and you all would deal with an old problem we had (and has cropped up ever since) when we first squished together AD&D and Traveller back in the 80's.

Magic allows for extra dimensional space. Space is generally the limiting factor in starship construction, as the ships foot print has to contain all of the necessary equipment and infrastructure needed. But if you have Extra D Space added it allows for builds that generally break the system. ie, Millennium Falcon with Star destroyer drive in it, Death Star with twice the generators than it would have if it did not have Extra D Space.

In the past we have dealt whit it in a number of ways;
1) Its ok, no problem Extra D Space away to you hearts content.
2) Simply Ban it as rules breaking
3) Rationalize the ban, ie FTL drives in some way destabilize large Extra D Space's but all for bag's of holding and portable hole's to exist.

So what is your opine?
MDC

Grand Lodge

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Mark Carlson 255 wrote:


3) Rationalize the ban, ie FTL drives in some way destabilize large Extra D Space's but all for bag's of holding and portable hole's to exist.

Interested to know how it pans out in canon, but my hunch is that the same quality that allows extradimensional space plays into faster than light travel. And we all know what happens when you put a portable hole into a bag of holding.


Most extradimensional spaces in D&D, in my experiences, have "shut offs" either one side is in stasis or what occurs on one side does not transition through portals to the other. It hasnt exactly been explored before but maybe you dont want to be running high power cables through a permanent trans-dimensional rift for too long... The closest i can imagine would be quintessence which isnt exactly extra dimensional but still a really bad idea to use for only part of a thing. More relevant perhaps is the old portable hole/bag of holding problem and trying to send an active extra dimensional space through the drift might be even more catastrophic.


Mark Carlson 255 wrote:

I am curious as to how StarFinder and you all would deal with an old problem we had (and has cropped up ever since) when we first squished together AD&D and Traveller back in the 80's.

Magic allows for extra dimensional space. Space is generally the limiting factor in starship construction, as the ships foot print has to contain all of the necessary equipment and infrastructure needed. But if you have Extra D Space added it allows for builds that generally break the system. ie, Millennium Falcon with Star destroyer drive in it, Death Star with twice the generators than it would have if it did not have Extra D Space.

In the past we have dealt whit it in a number of ways;
1) Its ok, no problem Extra D Space away to you hearts content.
2) Simply Ban it as rules breaking
3) Rationalize the ban, ie FTL drives in some way destabilize large Extra D Space's but all for bag's of holding and portable hole's to exist.

So what is your opine?
MDC

We finally have a way of explaining all four decks, the accomodation of the Chariot and Space Pod, as well as the tripod landing gear of the Jupiter 2!


Wait, wait, hold on, do you mean that, wait, so, wait

So the Tardis is a Space Ship!


Didn't the precursors in Halo do this, only for everything to collapse once the portal generators went down?


Maybe dimensional spaces don't come with you when you go faster than light. So your bag of holding doesn't work outside the system in which it was created. :P


On thinking of how to design a ship that used this, keeping in mind that if you lose access to any extradimensional sections, they're gone until you deal with whatever or whoever disabled the portals, I thought of the similarities to Star Trek TNG. While much of the ship's volume is in the saucer section, including the relaxation area and civilian quarters, everything needed for combat is in the other half.


My personal ruling is that only rooms containing non-essential mechanisms and possessing a single door through which to pass may contain an extradimensional space. Essentially, the door functions as a portal. It is possible to have an entire ship of nothing but extradimensional rooms, but it's essentially an artifact level item.


you could also make up some mumbo jumbo about ED space acting as Drift Anchors, randomly latching onto vortexes between spaces and yanking your ship back into real space in massively off course regions... with lots of damage from being ripped back too. So for safety reasons, no one Drifts with any sizable ED spaces attached to their ships. That also opens up the door to effects using ED nets to purposefully snare ships out of the Drift.

... However the book addresses it, i now want indterdictors and Drift Snares for pirate ambushes, black sites and weird alien artifacts.

Liberty's Edge

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Didn't the player's guide to Skull & Shackles deal with extra-dimensional spaces and nautical ships? Something like, "since the ships move across the surface of a planet, the don't carry the E-D Spaces with them"?


Terquem wrote:

Wait, wait, hold on, do you mean that, wait, so, wait

So the Tardis is a Space Ship!

The initials do end in Space.


Forgottenprince wrote:
Didn't the player's guide to Skull & Shackles deal with extra-dimensional spaces and nautical ships? Something like, "since the ships move across the surface of a planet, the don't carry the E-D Spaces with them"?

tl;dr: Yep. The entrances to extradimensional spaces (Edit: created by spells; doesn't mention items) don't move with the ship. Also, magical teleportation to a ship requires line-of-sight and the target point of scrying is stationary, making it tough to pull off at nautical speeds. Space-scale speeds should therefore be impossible, but I expect there'll be at least some way around it.

Page 22:
Skull & Shackles Player's Guide wrote:

Dimension Door, Greater Teleport, Teleport, Teleportation Circle: Because ships are constantly in motion, the caster of spells of the teleportation subschool must have line of sight to teleport onto a ship. Otherwise, a caster must scry upon a particular ship first, then immediately teleport to the scryed destination. Any delay in casting means the ship has moved from its scryed location and the spell fails.

Mage’s Magnificent Mansion, Rope Trick: The entrances to the extradimensional spaces created by these spells do not move with a ship.


Personally, I'd rule that the angry outsiders pulled into the Drift during hyperspace travel have a chance of apparating inside the extradimensional space. Nothing quite like popping open that bag of holding and saying hello to the most upset pit demon in all possible realities.


Pathfinder Maps, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Maps, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

If extradimensional spaces don't work right in hyperspace, wouldn't that make it necessary to empty out your Handy Haversacks and Bags of Holding immediately after you board an FTL capable ship?


David knott 242 wrote:

If extradimensional spaces don't work right in hyperspace, wouldn't that make it necessary to empty out your Handy Haversacks and Bags of Holding immediately after you board an FTL capable ship?

I've had to do worse than that for airplanes in reality, so why not?

Besides, it could simply be a very small risk. Just a tiny risk. It'll never realistically happen. Trust me, I'm the GM, and I honestly report every roll I make behind the screen.


I did not know about the Skulls and Shackles rulings. In the past we have allowed teleportation to unique patterns or to items to which the caster has some type of link (ie another spell teleport link or a minor magic item that is created for such cases).

Thanks,
MDC

Sovereign Court RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32

Another route would be to state that this stuff is already as miniaturized as it can get - maybe the guts on an FTL drive take up a skyscraper sized room, and they are already stuffed in an extradimensional space to make them fit at all.


Pathfinder Maps, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Maps, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

I like that idea. It lets you tell players that they haven't come up with anything new since extra-dimensional storage is assumed on Starfinder era spaceships. As a side effect, Starfinder PCs might be mostly unimpressed if they ever find themselves on a vehicle like the TARDIS (since they can see it as simply a variant of technology that they are already using -- to them it would just be a normal spaceship with a dangerously small exit -- at least until they find out about the time travel bit).


ryric wrote:
Another route would be to state that this stuff is already as miniaturized as it can get - maybe the guts on an FTL drive take up a skyscraper sized room, and they are already stuffed in an extradimensional space to make them fit at all.

I like that idea.

At first I tried to keep the idea to how the spells are written in PF but then thought about all of the problems you would have if a section was damaged and then required to be repaired.
So then I thought that why not just alter it so that small pieces could have extra-D space inside and that way you can still benefit from the "replaceable parts" idea of technology. If it is this way now when your ftl engine takes a hit and is damaged you can just pop in your new ED-FTL Engine part and not worry about trying to recreate the entire space that the engine was in if you stuck to the RAW for Extra-D Space spells.

MDC


I think in the end i would prefer if the creation of the Drift blocked off or otherwise severely restricted the capabilities of ED. Conjuration and Teleportation tend to be some of the more havov inducing aspects of magic and both can hamper the space travel/exploration themes i am hoping for in Starfinder. Also it would create a bit of resentment from the ascension of the AI god/creation of the drift. Oooh, antagonistic cult that wants to kill the AI and Drift to empower magic again!


I would probably leave the setting if magic and technology were that opposed to one another.


The Sideromancer wrote:
I would probably leave the setting if magic and technology were that opposed to one another.

I dont want magic and technology to be outright opposed, more of the Drift creating a whole new barrier between the Prime Material and any other plane, meaning previously existing pocket planes were severed and new attempts to create ED space tend to result in giant sucking holes into the Drift. Just a way to curtail some of the more abuseable forms of magic and put a little more emphasis on using the gimmicks new to Starfinder. Sort of like, why create a starship when you could just create an x/day scry and inter-planetary teleport slotless wondrous item without needing several thousand years of scientific and industrial breakthroughs?


Torbyne wrote:
The Sideromancer wrote:
I would probably leave the setting if magic and technology were that opposed to one another.
I dont want magic and technology to be outright opposed, more of the Drift creating a whole new barrier between the Prime Material and any other plane, meaning previously existing pocket planes were severed and new attempts to create ED space tend to result in giant sucking holes into the Drift. Just a way to curtail some of the more abuseable forms of magic and put a little more emphasis on using the gimmicks new to Starfinder. Sort of like, why create a starship when you could just create an x/day scry and inter-planetary teleport slotless wondrous item without needing several thousand years of scientific and industrial breakthroughs?

Off the top of my head:

Scrying:
  • range limits,
  • inability to use more than audiovisual information,
  • unreliability when going to new places.

ITP:
  • Size limits, and the lack of military support thereof
  • cannot be used to colonize uninhabitable but terraformable worlds
  • 9th level spells ore too rare for this to be in common use


True but those are basically "developed" fields of study and manufacture in Pathfinder, how much more work would it have been to develop the massive scale needed for research and creation of spaceships over just improving known spells?

And looking at it another way, i am not suggesting that technology and magic are opposed but actually that they work with the same forces but that the creation of a new plane of existence also created a huge new barrier to something that was devised when the Drift didnt exist.

At the end of the day what i am hoping for is an in setting means of preventing cheesey abuses like putting rocks in a bag of holding and then dumping them all out when being pursued by space cops to create an entire asteroid field behind you. (RAIB, a redundant array of inexpensive bags of holding) Used more offensively your shuttle size craft could throw out a lot of high speed boulders at a planet as a poor man's orbital bombardment.


Torbyne wrote:

True but those are basically "developed" fields of study and manufacture in Pathfinder, how much more work would it have been to develop the massive scale needed for research and creation of spaceships over just improving known spells?

And looking at it another way, i am not suggesting that technology and magic are opposed but actually that they work with the same forces but that the creation of a new plane of existence also created a huge new barrier to something that was devised when the Drift didnt exist.

At the end of the day what i am hoping for is an in setting means of preventing cheesey abuses like putting rocks in a bag of holding and then dumping them all out when being pursued by space cops to create an entire asteroid field behind you. (RAIB, a redundant array of inexpensive bags of holding) Used more offensively your shuttle size craft could throw out a lot of high speed boulders at a planet as a poor man's orbital bombardment.

I think you have pointed out well some of the abuses that can occur and be thought up by GM's, player's and adventure authors if some thing is not ruled on before hand.

IIRC, in our last such game in the 90's we ruled that you could open bags but not portable holes (they ripped and all the stuff was lost) and larger spaces collapsed when you use the FTL drive.

Guessing by the ruling's made in PF listed above about a sailing ship and extra D space I wonder if there is or will be a ruling that says just how big an object has to be before the extra-D space will work. ie most if not all planets are moving through space at some speed some quickly and some slow, so I do not know if you can use the speed argument on a large body.

MDC

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