Sputt's page

I've been setting up a few Starfinder APs in Foundry VTT, and I'm not sure what to do about the map quality.

I understand that FFoD had issues, with the promise that it would be better after FFoD was done - but it hasn't been made better.

Liberation of Locus-1 has really poor quality for the maps. They're tiny, and honestly just look really bad when extracted from the PDF. The worst of the bunch. After the map has been aligned with the smallest grid possible, the map looks like a cheap proof of concept from an inexperienced artist.

Horizon of the Vast#1 has a separate map file, but I can't get any map except the hexploration map from that. Can get them from the campaign PDF, at a lower quality. Not as bad as LoL1, but still pretty bad. At least they're usable.

Junker's Delight doesn't come with a separate map file, and not all maps can be copied from the PDF. The ones I can extract look strange - some kind of artifacts around the outer edge. The hand-drawn art style that, admittedly, looks pretty good in the PDF itself, looks like a child's crayon drawing once the quality drops from getting it from the PDF.

I have to admit that I'm increasingly disappointed with every single new PDF release.

Is this the new bar for the maps? Is this what can be expected?

Actually sending a message and sending images is exactly the same. Its just data. Only the volume differs.

And that sending messages intra system works in 1d6-1 hours and breaks the laws of physics is stated in the core book exactly that way (using the drift, so no issue with something blocking the path).
Laser I brought up because its a technology which is already implemented in the real world so no "science fiction handwaving".
And with 200+ years of intra system cooperation why would bandwidth be limited and expensive instead of there being dozens of laser relay satellites from corporations and governments in both the orbits of the individual planets and Lagrange points?
And if you have such sensitive data to be worried about interception then you just teleport the storage device instead of putting it on a ship.

We went from Morse code, to phone calls, to more advanced data transfers over a long time for a reason. A 20-word message of a few handfuls of bytes, or, at a minimum, terabytes of data. I'm not saying images aren't just data. I'm saying that the volume is so different that the solution will be entirely different - so different that it's not even remotely worth comparing. Which is what I meant with my RL example; it's entirely possibly to take 3d MRI scans of your brain, but it's prohibitively impractical due to data volume. And that's just one image. Compare that to two hours of how many images you have per second, where 60 is on the very, very low end.

Setting up relay satellites for intrasystem communications would take a lot. Bandwidth is not unlimited. There's a finite bandwidth available, per physical laws, which is why it would be prohibitively expensive to commercially send a lot of data.

I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm saying that I don't think it's the cheaper, safer alternative.

You said that it was unbelievable that physical copies of media would be sent. I'm saying that it's quite believable. You can choose to handwave away any physical limitations you want, and that's fine, but if that's your approach then the rest of your post where you complain about the system inconsistencies is just a personal hypocritical rant for the sake of the rant.

Sputt wrote:

There's a new movie out, and it's in a 3d format. You want to transmit it to the next planet over. Distance and transmission speed isn't something you can change without handwavey "space magic!".

You already have space magic as according to the core book messages take 1d6-1 hours intra-system, specifically breaking the laws of physics. So the only question is bandwidth.

And if you do not want to use space magic, there are always technological means to ensure large scale communication between planets like laser communication between relay satellites in orbit of the individual planets.

If you cherry pick the handwavey "space magic!" that fits your point, but choose to ignore what doesn't - then yeah, it's easy to make an argument for absolutely anything and everything in the system.

Sending a message isn't comparable with sending images, especially when we're talking billions of images.

Magical telepathic messages are quite limited in the setting, too. About 10 words per six seconds (or 20, if you include the reply as being made in the same time frame), if you can see the target.

Over large distances there's going to be more issues. Laser communication in space is going to have tons of issues, not least among them piracy and the risk of something just plain blocking. Over long distance the redundancies and security needed would increase transfer time exponentially with distance. Relay satellites could alleviate some of that, but traffic on them would likely be prohibitively expensive for large data transfers (just like buying bandwidth irl is absurdly expensive).

Still looking pretty decent to hire a crew to take a storage device from planet to planet. For low data messages? Nah. For media? Certainly.

Anything short of magically teleporting the storage device from one spot to another, seems unlikely to be as fast as hauling the thing there physically.

media being shipped physically around the pact worlds instead of transmitted with encryption is also rather unbelievable.

That one I completely buy into. There are going to be three important factors; transfer rate, distance, and size.

There's a new movie out, and it's in a 3d format. You want to transmit it to the next planet over. Distance and transmission speed isn't something you can change without handwavey "space magic!".

You can change the rate by increasing bandwidth, but if everyone does that there's going to be an insane amount of interference - meaning you'll have to spend a larger portion of your bandwidth on redundancies to assure quality.

Looking at file size and it's going to get scary large. If you want to keep image and audio quality up, you're not going to want too much compression.

In my day job I've spent quite a bit of time making system integrations for hospital equipment. Currently there's a huge problem with how various scans take a ridiculous amount of space, since they basically need to be kept in a raw format - a few pixels wrong and it could be the difference between an experienced radiologist seeing that dark spot on your MRI and not diagnosing your tumor. Now they're talking about 3D scans. So every single scan that used to be one image, will now be thousands of images. We can take 3D scans already, we just can't realistically store them anywhere. Now imagine how that new 3d movie you want to send in high quality from Castrovel to Absalom, and over its 2h runtime you will, on the low end, have millions of images per second. Some compression will be fine, but I bet it's not enough to make up the increased quality and features.

I'm okay with harddrive storage space having increased a lot in Starfinder since that's easier to develop. Transfer rates, however, have very real limitations. It's already faster (and possibly both cheaper and better for the environment) to send a shipload full of DVDs from the US to Australia than it is to send the same data through the internet (though this particular example falls apart once you compare sending a ship of DVDs with transmitting the same movie once, copying it, sending the copied data).

I fully believe it would be faster to load a single harddrive on a ship with the movie and have Space UPS deliver it, than to transmit it between planets. You can get rid of the limitations with space magic, but if your argument is that it's not reasonable to manually ship media between planets, I think you're more in science fantasy than science fiction.