Zed Flashbang's page

(I have no guess at all about the Androffans!)

Hm.
I was going to say "Probably less than 40-some billion light-years" (our universe is 13.8 billion years old, but inflation kinda did some odd things). But I didn't know that each was visible by telescope.

The only two hefty galaxies in the Local Group are our Milky Way and Andromeda (larger than us but maybe less massive), with the remaining fifty-plus galaxies being much smaller (Magellanic Clouds, etc). So it'd be two and a half million light years if it's in Andromeda?

Gamerskum wrote:

Pretty sure the size of the Galaxy doesn't matter for anything about Drift Drive.

This seems like potentially interesting nonsequitor. Can you expand to make it relevant to the thread topic?

Two ways size impacts:

And the number of stars becomes important because travel through the Drift remains in the same galaxy, but there are hundreds of billions of stars.

Look at all the races and more-or-less habitable worlds in the Pact Worlds solar system... Now, let's guess that there are a hundred billion stars in the Pact World's galaxy and that 2% of the stars are F-, G-, or K-type main sequence stars that could have Starfinder-grade habitable planets (i.e., single stars, binaries far enough out like our local α Centauri AB duo with tiny Proxima Centauri barely tethered to them, etc).

That's still a couple billion solar systems that can all see the Starstone beckoning to them, and many of them have spacefaring races who might have known what Triune's message meant when they received it three centuries ago...

And I am sure that Starfinder has many races smart enough to use the metals, organics, and water in asteroids and comets who don't even NEED a solar system (anymore). ;)

That's a LOT of civilizations!

I think the only thing that keeps absalom from being flooded by the trade traffic of the entirety of the vast, or invaded by expansionist empires is that when starships in the drift see the starstone beacon, they tend to think 'danger, probably a supermassive black hole, or crotchety deity' not 'ooh - an interstellar trade hub'.

9/10ths of the Pact Worlds' home galaxy probably DO think that the Starstone is the lure for a planet-sized anglerfish...

I don't think that actually works. The Pact Worlds system is indeed 1d6 days away from any place in the Galaxy, but stopping by that system on your way to somewhere else simply adds 1d6 days to your trip. The only considerations for how long a trip to a given place takes are the number of Drift beacons in your destination system and the quality of your Drift Drive.

True, it only helps if you and someone else are looking for a place to rumble that won't inflict collateral damage on each others' inhabited systems.

How big IS the Pact World's galaxy?

Our Milky Way has a couple hundred billion stars in a disc a hundred thousand light years across and a thousand thick. There are a hundred and fifty stars within twenty light years of Sol, the Earth's Sun.

Is the Pact World's galaxy similar?

Throw in how Drift travel makes everything days to weeks away and you have a mess! ^_^

Thankfully planar languages are consistent across the galaxy, and creation itself favors bilaterally symmetrical oxygen breathers (though not to exclusion of other oddities), so things are highly weird but usually comprehensible.

Me, I imagine there are races from 70,000 light years away that shortcut through the Pact World's system daily to take advantage of the Starstone's beacon, much to the consternation of the Verces-originated Pact Worlds Stewards and the Triaxian-originated Skyfire Mandate!

Story-seed:
You've been hired to keep part of the Absalom Station Armada safe after two unknown interstellar powers with strange technologies decide to use the Starstone as a beacon for a place to go fight...

Opinion.
I like the Gap for some of the reasons mentioned above, and because it makes it easier for players old and new to pick up history.

1. For comparison - reality.
First, consider real life: we have a universe that is roughly 13.8 billion years old, some two trillion galaxies whose distribution is smooth at distances of more than 300 million light-years (the "End of Greatness"), a giant galaxy cluster of some 100,000 galaxies in which our own Local Group lies embedded ("Laniakea"), and our Local Group of some 52 smaller galaxies and dwarf galaxies orbiting our Milky Way and our nearby, larger neighbor, Andromeda (with which we'll merge about the time our Sun turns to a red giant, 4 to 5 billion years from now).

Our own Milky Way has 200 to 400 billion stars in a disc a thousand light years through and a hundred thousand light years across. Our solar system and homeworld orbit about two-thirds out from the galactic center of Sagittarius A*, taking 225 to 250 million years for a "galactic year." Our solar system is 4.5 billion years old but our planet didn't even have free oxygen until it was half that age and the Great Oxygen Catastrophe happened. We didn't even see things like trilobites or the predecessors of vertebrates until 540 million years ago or so in the Cambrian evolutionary explosion of life... right about the same time something paved most of Venus flat into rolling plains and plateaus of basalt (the continent-like highlands of Ishtar Terra and Aphrodite Terra only make up 8% of its surface, unlike our continents at 24% of the surface, and the surface atmosphere exists at 90 times our sea level pressure and at temperatures that melt lead).

That's great stuff if you're playing in the universe of The Expanse, but in my mind it's waaaay overwhelming for Starfinder (and the Golarion system is in a far away but similar galaxy to our own).

2. How I hand-wave it.
We know that the Pathfinder Society and others did some pretty risky things with time travel and cross-time stuff between the time of Azlant and Thassilon and its "present day" in the Age of Lost Omens about a century after Aroden went missing and presumed dead. And we know that self-compiled Triune put out information on the Drift right after the Gap ended. Moreover, any faster-than-light travel in our own world would mess time up badly.

So I assume that reality in that galaxy "unraveled."

In a sense, time didn't even really exist as time and had to be stitched back together (when I run things). And if you look at light or radio waves more than three hundred light years away, you can see them -- but near the edge of the Gap they are jumbled and overlapped "multiple realities," fuzzing out into an indistinguishable mess a few years in. You SHOULD be able to scan a world four hundred light years away and image its air and seas, listening to its radio and TV... but when I run things, it's all a mess.

Because whoever sewed reality back together NEEDED that vagueness.

Anyhow, that's how I do it.
Your mileage may vary!

Makes sense to me --
There are likely people looking for interference patterns in the nonsense or contradictory results they get.

(Which is NOT to say that we ourselves haven't been "putting way, way too much power into their transmitting station" for a half-century and more!)

Hee!
Back in 1978 we were estimating that you could see the Earth up to 250 light years away (though the wavefront is not yet so far, of course!). We have gotten both louder and more perceptive since then...

Eavesdropping: The Radio Signature of the Earth
W. T. Sullivan III, S. Brown, C. Wetherill
Science 27 Jan 1978:
Vol. 199, Issue 4327, pp. 377-388
DOI: 10.1126/science.199.4327.377
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/199/4327/377

The Gap:
Do we have an official answer on what kind of jumble we see and hear (via light and radio and other stuff) if we look at a world from 400 or more light years away (and thus back into the Gap)?

Obviously things have to be as jumbled as the unreadable history books in a library for the Gap to work, or else it would be easy to map how long it lasted and what was happening (at least visually, via radio and TV, etc). But how do people run it?

Pet theory:
I am 99% sure that the Gap is a cosmic quantum-level repair for a causality breach caused by Drandle Dreng messing around with pre-Earthfall civilizations. Fight me.