WhiteWeasel's page

I haven't seen a machine/artifact that can create items out of thin air either, so unless you overmine a planet or several planets, you will never get a huge armada if you consider resources.

While starfinder doesn't quite go into this level of realism, i'd like to point out that space is far bigger and more vast than credit is given.

To quote Issac Arthur on starlifting:

In the starlifting episode, we saw that a civilization could pull 1000's of earths worth of metal out of their own sun, but even 1/1000 of an earths worth of building material would be enough to build an aircraft carrier mass spaceship 100 trillion times over.

You do not need planet mining to field large fleets by any stretch of the imagination. After all, star ships have a lot of empty space in them compared to how much materials they use. Not to mention, there's little need to planet mine unless you are going for truly colossal mega structures like dyson spheres. Excuse my vernacular, but asteroid mining is 'hella lucrative.

In 1997 it was speculated that a relatively small metallic asteroid with a diameter of 1.6 km (1 mi) contains more than US$20 trillion worth of industrial and precious metals. A comparatively small M-type asteroid with a mean diameter of 1 km (0.62 mi) could contain more than two billion metric tons of iron–nickel ore, or two to three times the world production of 2004. The asteroid 16 Psyche is believed to contain 1.7×10^19 kg of nickel–iron, which could supply the world production requirement for several million years. A small portion of the extracted material would also be precious metals.

To give you an idea of the scale here, a Nimiz-class aircraft carrier (one of the largest in the world and would classify as huge starship in starfinder terms) has a mass of a mere ~88,000 metric tones.

When it comes to asteroid mining, not only the raw materials are important, but the fact that unlike planets, they have tiny gravity wells and do not need a lot of work to get access to and process them. This makes obtaining resources in space FAR easier than planets as the ease of building space-based infrastructure goes up dramatically the easier the access to space is. And keep in mind, all of these speculations are being done with real-world technologies and limitations in mind like limited delta V and no access to FTL. In the starfinder setting where for all intents and purposes, starship travel is extremely easy, fast, common, and cheap by real world metrics... let's just say the pactworlds can produce more than enough supplies to fuel all of the infrastructure they will ever need in the near-future and then some.

And to really drive it home, all of this is before factoring fusion power and particle accelerators for transmutation, so if the demand was high enough, materials can be directly synthesized. After all, where do you think those antimatter mega-missiles come from?

Instead of a problem, it seems the game system simply doesn't fit your expectations.

So much this. After playing a lot of sci-fi games that had starship combat that ranged from using weaponized tractor beams and mining equipment for a starship melee class to watching the enemy ship disable it's own power supply to avoid being cooked to death because I shot off their heat radiators, I kinda toss expectations out the window.

While I admit that there's a lot to be desired for starfinder starship combat, I find the current upgrade system very interesting. Ship hulls behave more like computer cases where they are the pretty much frame for the actual hardware. The only reason to get a bigger frame is to fit more stuff or be compatible with certain modules. Which would make sense in the pactworlds setting given the wide disparity of technological advancement in equipment. This would handily explain hyper optimized PC ships, as they are essentially sleeper builds.

Less of a outright swear, and more of an exclamation. Protiumize. Verb. In the realms of theoretical physics, it is possible for an atom to be decomposed into it's constituent particles should a vastly powerful force be applied, rendering the object into a highly ionized cloud of hydrogen (lone protons, or protium) and neutron radiation. Or in other words, energized so dramatically the object in question undergoes spontaneous nuclear fission.

In scientific communities and highly intelligent races, to Protiumize something is slang often used to describe something destroyed with an excessive, obscene amount of force. This is almost always used in hyperbole, as the given energy magnitudes involved are far beyond any known technology, and to use it literally would imply rather dire circumstances.

Example 1:
"Are you insane?! The Vesk would protiumize us if we tried to play chicken with the Vindicas Tyrant!"

Example 2:
Science Officer: "Sir, you're not going to believe this, but I've just detected a brief energy discharge measuring in at 214 yottawatts from this empty region of space twenty degrees to port, several light years away."

Captain: "What does that mean?"

Science Officer: "Either a wormhole opened up in the wrong place, or we just saw someone get protiumized with wrath on the order of a small star directed at them.

Yeah most definitely, and they would had succeeded, at the cost of a couple of Resolve, but they did the opposite of focusing, they went on grabbing more enemies and that's generally a bad idea in every possible game from tabletop to MMOs, you simply don't start running forward in a dungeon.

You should get your party a copy of XCOM 2. They'll quickly learn to never aggro multiple pods of enemies at once if they want to live. ;)

Don't megaton measure explosive power, and not weight or mass?

Mega is a standard SI prefix.

exa E 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10^18)

peta P 1,000,000,000,000,000 (10^15)
tera T 1,000,000,000,000 (10^12)
giga G 1,000,000,000 (10^9)
mega M 1,000,000 (10^6)
kilo k 1,000 (10^3)
hecto h 100 (10^2)
deca da 10 (10^1)
(none) (none) 1 (10^0)
deci d 0.1 (10^−1)
centi c 0.01 (10^−2)
milli m 0.001 (10^−3)
micro μ 0.000,001 (10^−6)
nano n 0.000,000,001 (10^−9)
pico p 0.000,000,000,001 (10^−12)
femto f 0.000,000,000,000,001 (10^−15)
atto a 0.000,000,000,000,000,001 (10^−18)

One megaton is equivalent to a million tons. Therefore a 1 megaton bomb is equivalent to that mass of TNT in destructive power. Which is about 4,184,000 gigajoules.

Read the full descriptions of feats, they may be better/worse than you think from their summaries.

For me in particular, I wished I figured out sooner you can pair antagonaize with the envoy's not in the face.

As a standard action, you can antagonize a foe that can see and hear you by attempting a Diplomacy or Intimidate check (DC = 10 + your opponent’s total Sense Motive skill bonus, or 15 + 1-1/2 × the opponent’s CR, whichever is higher). If you succeed, the foe is off-target and takes a –2 penalty to all skill checks for 1 round plus 1 additional round for every 5 by which your result exceeds the DC, or until it makes an attack against you, forces you to attempt a saving throw, or damages you (whichever comes first). Once you have attempted to antagonize a foe, that foe is immune to this ability for 24 hours. This is a language-dependent ability.

As a move action, you can choose one enemy within 60 feet. That enemy must succeed at a Will save or take a –4 penalty to all attacks it makes against you until the end of your next turn. At 6th level, you can spend 1 Resolve Point to make the enemy take the penalty with no saving throw allowed.

I find it way too funny that you can smack talk an enemy and then immediately backpedal to give the baddie a -2 to hit everyone else, or a -4 to hit me. It's just like that scene from super android 13 abridged.

Kid Gohan: Hey, why don't you pick on someone your own size!
*Giant hulked-out blue android turns around and growls angerly*
Kid Gohan: Euuhhh, well, clearly not me...

Seems like starfinder really needs the golden rule of magic for class features.

The first golden rule of "Magic The Gathering" states that whenever a card contradicts the basic rules, the card takes precedence.

All things considered...

{quote=Dougalas Adams]Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

The overwhelming majority of space is a vast swath of nothing. Were it not for game contrivance, pulling matter into the drift would be incredibly rare, and it would be just hot plasma from stars 99.99% of the time. I can see why people in-universe see it as a negligible downside.

To help myself keep track of whose who, and where they are in combat at my table, I have made colorized versions of the official paizo character sheet, along with initiative trackers that you can fold in half and place on top of your GM screen.

Color Coded Character Sheets And Initiative Trackers

Example Image

The character sheets come in 8 colors (Not counting the blue vanilla character sheet and greyscale), making for 10 total colors.

I figured I would post them here if anyone else finds them useful.

It is tricky, but as long as you have a schtick, and all aspects of your build support that schtick, then you'll do okay.

-snip-

Basically, look for classes that have overlapping, yet still stacking, abilities, and be prepared to give up the highest level abilities in each class, in order to maximize that one area.

Here is a list of various dips that I've been looking at that I think may be worth the cost for some builds in some games. There are all the usual caveats about skill bonuses not stacking, and worrying about getting Weapon Spec at 3, and effects on caster level and BAB. I think, unfortunately, most of these don't work most of the time because of all that. But I think they can work, especially if you start at higher level where you don't necessarily have to feel the pain, and especially if you take dips that either shore up a class's weakness or compliment their strengths (though, because of insight bonuses not stacking, and so much being tied to class level, this is hard).

-Snip-

Thank you so much for the help. That was the kind of stuff I was hoping to see. While I asked this in a general sense, the specific reason was that I was thinking about doing a one-shot with some pregen characters and was wondering how well the game supports "flavor first" character design so my players can have wacky character concepts to play as instead of soldier mcbadass #14.

Or you just move it because it's magic.

Or just make it colder.

Magic isn't physics. You don't play physics games like changing albedo, you just summon eternal winter.

Thinking about magic in physics terms is a fool's game. Some spells are easy and should use huge amounts of energy, others are much harder, but might require much less. Others of course it doesn't even make sense to talk about "amount of power" in any conventional sense.

Why not? Magic is just bending the laws of universe to your whim. It's not a stretch to think the more dramatic the change in the "law" is, the more powerful the spell needs to be in some metric to achieve the desired effect.

Would slowing a planet's orbit actually require more power than locking the planet in eternal winter without changing its orbit? Just magically imposing snow and cold everywhere.

Nooooooooooo.

From what I could look up, the total kinetic energy of the earth for example is 2.69x10^33 joules or 2,690,000,000 yottajoules. Earth's gravitational binding energy (AKA the amount of energy you need to dump into it to shatter it) is 2x10^32 joules or 200,000,000 yottajoules.

Anything that has the power to alter a planet's kinetic energy in a meaningful way would require an amount of power that would be classified as a doomsday weapon in any other context. Being able to enforce an eternal winter via magic should be child's play. Just raise the planet's albedo to make it better at reflecting the energy it gets from the sun and it's temperature should drop.

Wait, you're supposed to read the rule book cover to cover? Every GM I talked to was like "No don't do that."

I still want a race of giant caterpillar/millipede like aliens so I can show off my superior hugging ability to all the other poorly "armed" races.

Eh, I'm pretty lenient with names. My only concession is that if someone uses a third party name, they might as well go big and play up the part. So I expect a "Brock Samson" to be a operative melee machine. =P

One might wonder, with all of the inhabited planets in the pactworlds system, one might think it's unrealistic. Short answer: Yes, but not nearly as bad as you might think. So far, I've only done the rudimentary math, namely just figuring out their semi major axis to see where they would be spaced out in the system. All values are assuming the sun is equivalent to the earth's sun, and that the days and years are in reference to earth.

All of my equations were taken from Artifexians worldbuilding videos.
Classical Planetary Systems
Orbits For Earth-like Planets

Sun
Class: G
Mass: 1
Habitable Zone (I): 0.95 AU
Habitable Zone (O): 1.37 AU
Inner limit: 0.01 AU (planets will break apart if any closer)
Outer limit: 40 AU (anything outside this boundry would be considered a trans neptunian object, which are typically asteroids and dwarf planets)
Frost line: 4.85 AU (Distance where volatile compounds such as H20, NH3, CO2, & CH4 become solid ice. Gas giants are typically formed out +1 AU from this line)

I have not calculated them yet, so all of these numbers are assuming 0 eccentricity and inclination. Which isn't that bad since only one or two planets even bother to mention those. And, artificial structures such as Absalom station and the Idari are omitted as well as the diaspora since they are not planets. I've extrapolated their worlds distances from the sun based on their orbital periods.

1.0 = 1 AU

Aballon: 0.044 AU - Outside sun's Roche limit. Good. World is appropriately mercury-like and features artificial habitability or robotic lifeforms. Totally works.
Castrovel: 0.645 AU - Too far inside sun's habitable zone. Oceans would have boiled away and become Venus-like or barren.
Akiton: 1.59 AU - Planet is just outside the HZ, but unlike castrovel, it's not by as much, and we got some room for bullcrapping here. It's dark appearance and lack of oceans gives it a low albedo and industrialization means it could have a fair amount of greenhouse gasses in it's atmosphere, making it a good enough heat absorber to just barely be habitable.
Verces: 2.09 AU - Well outside of the sun's HZ, and too far for conventional tidal locking. One could argue because it's tidally locked, it sun facing side should be heated up enough for habitability, but thanks to the inverse square law, Verces gets only ~23% of the light as earth (Absalom station) does. The backside could be cold enough that gases would freeze out of the atmosphere, and reduce the rest of the planet to a barren ice cube. Best case scenario is that is that convection currents keep the heat distributed just enough for dry ice snow and liquid methane rain like titan. (That kinda sounds like a way cooler planet TBH.)
Eox: 2.96 AU - Cold and (un)dead. Makes sense.
Triaxus: Screw Triaxus. It's eccentricity means it would spend the majority of it's time far outside the HZ. Life not possible, and probably screws over all of the other systems planetary orbits if it's not in resonance. That fact it's orbit is unnaturally slow just throws equations out the window.
Liavara: 5.25 AU - Gas giants outside the frost line. Good job. Have not done the research on moon probability. Only mess up here is that it's not the system's largest gas giant, but that's passable.
Bretheda: 9.7 AU - See above, bar last sentence.
Apostate: 39 AU - Barren, and it's wild inclination is justified since it's a captured dwarf planet.
Aucturn: 63 AU - "Planet" is supernatural in nature. No point in judging anything here.

Over all, the only major conflicts are Castrovel, Verces, and the affront on science; Triaxus. And the planets are far enough apart from another they would be in reasonably stable orbits. Except for Triaxus.

Pact Worlds: 7/10, would swarm again.

Someone made Role cards for starship combat.

I concur. This site has been one of the worst forums I've been on in terms of performance and reliability. It's down often, and the site runs slow like it's being Doxxe'd or something most times I'm on.

The glossary of Dead Suns 4 has a LOT to say on the Drift, and answers numerous questions such as:

[list]

Can a ship arrive at a known, precise location every time? No.

Will a group of ships leaving from the same place at the same time, such as an invasion force, arrive in the same formation at the same time? No.

Is there a way to allow ships to arrive together, in formation? Yes.

These are really good things to know. I always felt the inability/difficulty of "fleet warp" for drift based ships would be an interesting military/tactical problem to explore since we are so used to fleets showing up wherever they please at the time they want ala star trek or star wars.

Also, it could be chalked up to thematic differences. Magic users don't get the spotlight, because the game puts more emphasis on being science fiction with fantasy elements rather than being fantasy *cough* Pathfinder *cough* in space.

For my Ysoki icon, I found a compromise by wearing skin-color second skin. Sure, I might look like a featureless barbie doll, but hey, I'm sure my fellow party members are glad about that.

Yeah, dropping scattered cover to enable enfilade movement and cover runs will definitely help the mobility of a game.

As will destroyable terrain elements.

Or sections that provide complete line of sight blocking and possible flanking positions.

This talk about cover actually being important for tactical options and to not get massacred makes me think of XCOM 2, and that's great in my opinion. Wish I had more opportunities to get in more combat experience since our group has... scheduling issues.

While this subject has mostly blown over, there seemed to be a disconnect on what the game's intended audience is.

I'm someone who approached starfinder as a standalone Sci-fi game without any baggage so to speak, and my main reason for buying into it was that I didn't want to play pathfinder. And I really love the narrative function of the gap and how meta it is because that universe might as well not exist from a (my) perspective of someone that has not played it.

Bumping this thread, as I wish the site will get official dark mode, as white backgrounds are just obnoxious.

I cannot for the life of me find what these mean!

APHELION, AZIMUTH, CORONA, PARALLAX, PERIHELION, ZENITH

While you can look up the more technical definitions, I'll give you the shorthand's. But as states above, they are just in-game prefixes to differentiate item level.

Aphelion is the location of an orbit where an object is furthest from it's parent body, and perihelion is the nearest.

Azimuth is the horizontal axis of a spherical coordinate system, (like star navigation) while zenith is the vertical.

Parrallax is the is the apparent difference in location or motion of distant objects based on where the observer is. Like how the ground rushes past you in a car, but mountains in the distance hardly seem to move.

Corona is the outermost layer of plasma that surrounds the sun.

Considering one of my favorite parts of Starfinder is page 25 of the CRB where it essentially says that nixing alignment from the game entirely has no impact on how the game plays, I'm hoping neither Pact Worlds nor any other book so much as uses that word, to be honest.

Yeah, I kinda hate the impact of alignment systems. Not alignment itself, but the that it often causes the issue of alignment dictating a character's actions instead of the other way around, as well as removing the moral ambiguity from some situations/characters. And the most interesting thing about morality is interpreting and debating it. I flat out tell my players to play the characters they want to play and to forget about it, and that if needed for any reason, just pick the one that fits best/have me assign one for them. I would lose no sleep if alignment stayed where it was metaphorically tossed.

Also I think you might find this video by taking 20 interesting to watch.

thejeff wrote:

Icehawk wrote:

For those talking about access, just remember that the Vesk put nuclear missile launchers on their fighter craft. Getting nuclear weaponry is not particularly difficult if it's fighter mountable on a low end spacecraft.

Except those clearly aren't what we think of as nukes. They're not city destroying.

Out of curiosity, what brings us to that conclusion? They don't have any description, like other starship weapons, so that's probably up to the GM, really.

While starfinder doesn't exactly go into this level of realism, a interesting thing to note is that at least as far as space combat goes, nukes (especially tactical ones) actually wouldn't be all that impressive, as without being surrounded by many thousands of tons of atmosphere to create a shock wave, it would just be a bright flash of light. So a starship based nuke's primary means of damage would be from thermals (whether over saturating the ships cooling systems or ablating the hull outright) and radiation, with ranges measured in the hundreds of meters to a few kilometers. So tactical nukes being not being that much stronger than conventional starship missiles would not be too much of a stretch.

Though that tidbit doesn't really help the OP's argument of: "What's stopping people from nuking them from orbit?" As, if anything, makes the argument more difficult as one could argue nukes would be more destructive against a planetary base. But, yeah, I think the three biggest things that against just nuking them is the ramifications of the collateral damage, the big bad having a competently defended base, and no loot or XP from baddies killed with indiscriminate weapons.

Given that the Azlanti armor is specifically mentioned to be highly stylized and sleek, it would be not be far off that their ships would follow the same design philosophy. The question would be would they be:

Rounded Sleek to look streamlined and efficient like their armor.
or
Angular sleek to look more menacing with aggressive lines.
or
Perhaps an amalgamation of the two?

So as an upcoming GM, I'm learning how to put together an one-shot "playtest" scenario to try things out. And well, I was wondering how do you structure a mission or adventure path? Not write, as I'm pretty good at coming up with ideas and writing them down, but the creation of the skeleton of an adventure that anyone can just pick up the note papers and run. I'd love to look at the incident at Absalom station booklet and model after that, but the GM said no because they don't want me to accidentally spoil myself of anything.

Now I know you need dialogue, skill checks, room maps, baddies to kill. etc... for an adventure. But my question is how do you assemble all those pieces together in an organized and coherent matter. Are there any free/open source adventures I can look at to see how they organize their stuff?

I’d prefer no 1st-party full casters.

We finally have a fantasy setting where magic isn’t always the best way to solve a problem. Let’s keep it that way.

I second this notion.

The first one I see in a campaign i'm going to hug it, consequences be damned.

Many of the new playable races in Alien Archive are Small or Large.

For the most part, this poses little to no problems, especially since Starfinder did away with many of the modifiers and bonuses that made being a different size spectacular.

Some, like the sarcesian, however, are really, REALLY, REALLY ridiculously tall though!

To help you and others out, I found this decent character size chart calculator thing.