Didnt they originate in another Galaxy? Granted Kasatha, just like Humans, could have appeared on multiple "homeworlds" across the universe...
Well, we know the ones in Starfinder come from the same planet as the ones that were brought to Golarion by the Destiny. Though it's never said how far away this planet is as far as I can remember, but a galaxy is huge, so even if they were from the same galaxy as Golarion, moving even at light speed can make such journey last a very long time unless they were from a very close star to Golarion's sun.
But the Destiny did use the Divinity Drive to get from Kasath to Golarion (and they made at least one other jump along the way, since the Dominion only noticed them after they had already visited Kasath), so it can't be too close to Golarion.
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How did the kasatha reach Golarion's system without Drift tech? Or did Triune also contact kasath because of Casandalee's memories of the kasatha once inhabiting Golarion?
I asked about this at the Starfinder panel. The Idara is the Kasatha's generation ship. They got to the Golarion system the long way pre-Drift. Apparently their sun was dying and they were told by another race that a new home could be found elsewhere. They arrived hoping to settle Akiton, only to find it already occupied.
James also hinted at some kind of vast 4-armed race conspiracy...
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If you stumble across a fancy location in the Drift, can you note where it is so you can return to it another time? Or are such places always chance encounters?
This Drift business seems pretty darn cool. Damn it, now I'm at least in for the PDF...
For a starship to engage its Drift engines to either enter or exit the Drift, it must remain stationary with its conventional thrusters turned off for 1 minute.
I read this as thrusters off... no change in speed or direction. (Because in space, "stationary relative to WHAT?!") So, you're being chased and want to make a jump through the drift... you shut down your thrusters, hurtling through space with no flight control as you power up and engage the Drift engine while your gunners are blasting away at the pursuers.
EXACTLY. Now THAT sounds awesome.
One thing Starfinder should have which Pathfinder doesn't is missiles that don't "instantaneously" travel to their targets. So I figure if you have a starship with missiles and you want to fire a missile at an enemy ship, you roll for target lock. Once target lock is achieved, the missile starts homing in on the enemy ship. The Enemy ship meanwhile sees the missile coming, they have time to do something about it, so one thing they can attempt to do is shoot it and destroy it before it gets to them, the second thing they can do is by maneuvering attempt to break the missile's target lock. Now in Pathfinder, this doesn't happen, if someone fires an arrow at you, it either hits or missiles, the target doesn't get a chance to react to the incoming arrow, he can react to the man pulling back on the bow string and getting ready to fire, but once the arrow is let loose, there is no time to react to it or evade it. With missiles in space, you can!
Pathfinder already has Deflect Arrows, which requires you to be not flat-footed. So you actually can react to an incoming arrow, but to avoid slowing gameplay, it isn't spelled out in actions.
A Toxophilite Ranger of at least 3rd level can even act as a point defense drone, although this ability doesn't get good until 11th level, and even then it's situational.
I have a question:
What happens if somebody steps through the ship's airlock and goes outside when in the Drift? Do you need a spacesuit to survive in the Drift? If the drift pulls in pieces of various planes, many of those planes have breathable atmospheres, does the Drift itself have a breathable atmosphere, thus making spacesuits unnecessary while in the Drift?
There is not enough information to give a meaningful answer.
Foremost is how realistic the natural laws of the Drift are. How does gravity behave with respect to ad hoc gravity wells, or gas temperature and pressure law with respect to equilibrium? What is standard temperature and pressure in the Drift? If a hundred mile diameter sphere of material from the Elemental Planes of Water or Air were to appear in the drift, would it expand through random atomic motion to fill the available volume, would it maintain its original T&P from its home plane, or would it collapse under its own gravity until nuclear forces balance out the gravitic collapse.
With more information on how things work inside the Drift we can figure out how a given mass of extraplanar material would behave. Assuming all conventional laws apply, the best case scenario is the flotsam is from the Elemental Plane of Air or Earth, with enough breathable air and no toxic gases to last at least round of breathing, and possibly some errant earth and stone to increase the gravity of the contiguous mass. Even so, you need a lot of air in one place for it to pull together under gravity into a ball dense enough for partial pressure of Oxygen sufficient for conventional humanoid life to respirate. But this will not last long because heat will radiate away if the Drift environment is colder.
But even if the mass collapses enough to maintain PP of O2, the air at the center may be too dense to breathe and may compress into liquid metallic air or even some 'hot ice'.
If extraplanar gases do not dissipate in vacuum (or there is no zero pressure environment to expand into) then the extraplanar air will retain its integrity. If gravity does not collapse large masses, then a mass of extraplanar air will retain its original shape although loss of heat may shrink it and force it to freeze out.
Bottom line, though, is the Rule of Cool should apply here. Maybe gravity, temperature, and pressure laws apply, but any Drift jump that causes a planar rip can easily bring through spheres of material hundreds of feet, to miles, to perhaps thousands of miles across, so that the Drift becomes littered with asteroids, comets, planet-sized balls of solid rock or asteroid fields. In extreme cases a Drift jump may create a rogue super-earth, a gas giant, ice giant, brown dwarf, or a red dwarf star (via plane of fire). Many of these will come pre-inhabited...
In a region constantly trafficked through by lots of extreme jumps, though, a lot of material will slowly build up in one place, which will also collapse and make bigger and hotter stars, eventually leading to deep gravity wells dominated by neutron stars or full fledged black holes...
There would be calls for policing Drift travel in these threatened areas. Too much heavy traffic and you'll be slamming into black holes populated by angry outsiders every time you jump into Drift space....
What I would like to see is Drift Gravity having a repulsive effect between large bodies at short distances. If many planetoids are formed in one place they will want to crash together under mutual gravity and make a big ball of homogenous and uninteresting ball of molten lava and debris. But if two or more planets or moon sized rocks appear in proximity they will enter a kind of mutual orbit without ever crashing together.
If you have seen lots of soft cience fiction and fantasy artwork you will know some of those worlds have background moons or other planets (usually in crescent or gibbous phase) at very close distances astronomically. Some are close enough that in real life those moons or other planets should not exist, being within the foreground planet's Hill sphere and subject to destructive tidal forces, or else impacting or sucking up the atmosphere of the foreground planet.
If in the Drift planets and moons can coexist in procimity, without getting smashed together by gravity, then all those astronomically unrealistic pictures may as well be exhibits of explorers, wildlife, or locations of worlds located somewhere in the Drift.
You don't need for gravity to turn repulsive at short distances to keep everything from smashing together, as long as the Drift doesn't inherently have friction. Otherwise, everything would coagulate in our space. And this eon's big uninteresting ball of lava could cool to become next eon's potentially inhabitable planet, if it manages to accumulate enough atmosphere of the right kind.
^Presumably the laws of physics have been tweaked on the Elemental Planes. Although it would be cool to have a different concept of the Elemental Plane of Air (and the other Elemental Planes) than in the Pathfinder Campaign Setting, in which they are actual planets that can be reached by gates (much more easily than by traveling through normal space), having the same laws of physics, but different chemical abundances and different environments to explain their different properties. In this case, the Elemental Plane of Air, instead of having no gravity, would have definite gravity, and would increase in density to crushing levels when going down, such that falling would be a disaster even if you had a parachute.