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I really wish they had spent a little more effort in telling us how the Drift works. The snippets we have are awfully hard to weave together without a pattern, and a bunch of questions that are pretty important for telling a story are unable to be answered without just guessing:
We know that a ship must disable its thrusters for one minute prior to entering the drift. We also know that a round of space combat has no set duration, so... Can you enter the Drift in combat? If a foe does the same, are you near each other in the Drift? Or can entering the Drift be used as a form of escape?
Can the Drift itself be navigated? Is it possible to return to a derelict spacecraft that you discovered in the Drift before? Would you have to follow the exact same route to find it?
Do points in the Drift correspond with points in the normal space? If you activate your Drive in a certain spot in normal space, will you always appear in the same place in the Drift? And vice-versa?
Finally, this is the hardest one to wrap my head around: reconciling faster and slower Drift drives with the statements that ships use their thrusters to move through the Drift and that the Drift itself is one, single alternate plane.
What happens if two ships with different classes of Drift drive leave at the same moment to travel the exact same route (from each ship's viewpoint)? One ship's journey requires 10 days, the other ship needs only two days. How exactly do they interact in the Drift?
We also know that a round of space combat has no set duration, so... Can you enter the Drift in combat?
An excellent question! How many rounds of combat do you have to no move before you can activate your drift engines?
Can the Drift itself be navigated? Is it possible to return to a derelict spacecraft that you discovered in the Drift before? Would you have to follow the exact same route to find it?
This actually happens in a Starfinder Scenario so I think the answer is yes.
Do points in the Drift correspond with points in the normal space? If you activate your Drive in a certain spot in normal space, will you always appear in the same place in the Drift? And vice-versa?
Probably yes, considering the above. However, geometry is not necessarily sensible, since the distance between points in the drift depends on the presence of drift beacons in real space.
Finally, this is the hardest one to wrap my head around: reconciling faster and slower Drift drives with the statements that ships use their thrusters to move through the Drift and that the Drift itself is one, single alternate plane.
This one is weird since the rating of your drift engine is what determines your speed in drift space. Unless it simply makes your reception of drift beacons better? I may houserule that in home games.
I haven't been thinking too much about these questions. I have been considering the Drift plane as non-3 dimensional. Think of it as a wrinkle sheet vs. a flat one. Travelling in a straight line sometimes makes you "go faster" over the wrinkled areas; you cover more linear inches of sheet per linear inch of ship movement. And perhaps a better drift engine makes more wrinkles.
As far as 2 ships. The faster ship would almost immediately begin to move away from the slower. Although they would interact normally on a tactical scale. Think broad, sloping wrinkles vs sharp, short ones; ships in combat won't start skipping around. But from the slower ship's POV the faster will over hours long periods have periods of increased velocity.
The worst offender of all is th fact that Drift travel has a % of an encounter, but doesn't even tell you what these encounters might be. Compare that to the well thought out tables from Rogue Trader. Feels very unfinished.
And the Alien Archive has no encounter tables for the Drift, even though that would have been a logical place to put them.
My understanding is the drift is another plane, not unlike the shadow plane which allows you to move more quickly between real life locations via this planar travel compared to traveling through the material plane.
And the Alien Archive has no encounter tables for the Drift, even though that would have been a logical place to put them.
Exactly. I can understand waiting for that but still nothing? It's not a great move. Considering all the pre release talk about Encounters in the Drift and how unique and dangerous it was.
The creatures you will encounter in the Drift are largely outsiders. The Alien Archive dealt mainly with creatures native to the Material Plane. I imagine at some point we will get another book dedicated to outsiders and threats in the Drift.
Creative Director, Starfinder
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More information on the Drift will be forthcoming in Starfinder Adventure Path #4: The Ruined Clouds as well as in Pact Worlds.
Regarding encounter tables, since the Drift can pull in pieces of (and creatures from) other planes, almost any creature could be found there. We just don't enough monsters in Starfinder yet to justify building encounter tables that conceivably could include anything.
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More information on the Drift will be forthcoming in Starfinder Adventure Path #4: The Ruined Clouds as well as in Pact Worlds.
Regarding encounter tables, since the Drift can pull in pieces of (and creatures from) other planes, almost any creature could be found there. We just don't enough monsters in Starfinder yet to justify building encounter tables that conceivably could include anything.
thanks for the information I cannot wait to get the next 2 aps and the pact world book, i fear i am going to tire myself out with all th epacing and waiting for new stuff to buy :P
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More information on the Drift will be forthcoming in Starfinder Adventure Path #4: The Ruined Clouds as well as in Pact Worlds.
Regarding encounter tables, since the Drift can pull in pieces of (and creatures from) other planes, almost any creature could be found there. We just don't enough monsters in Starfinder yet to justify building encounter tables that conceivably could include anything.
I understand where you're coming from. But some guidance on frequency of encounters & severity would have been useful. A few pre made Drift hazards, challenges and the like could make Drift travel more of an adventure, as opposed to an afterthought.
For the record, I and my group love starfinder so this is not a critique of the whole game, just a request for more clarity on certain areas.
The weird thing about thrusters in Starfinder is that they only seem to affect your speed in combat but not in long term travel -- it still takes 1d6+2 days to use your thrusters to get from one planet to another regardless of the combat speed in hexes of your thrusters.
Perhaps drift travel is (almost) never straight line and you only pick up the beacon directly when nearby. Instead the Drift is filled with islands and clouds of material from other planes. These create reflections or even currents in the drift signal. better drives are able to lock on to more direct signals in cases where the signal is blocked pick up the faintest trace of one. Think of it as navigating a city based on cell phone signal strength.
That is pretty much what I came up with; As soon as you enter the Drift, you get a faint signal from the beacon you're using to calculate your trip, and then you need to use your thrusters to move within range of the beacon. A better Signal Booster allows you to 'lock on' to a beacon from a greater 'distance' in the Drift, and once you 'lock on' to a beacon, you can activate your drift drive to appear at the spot you calculated your course to. It matches nicely with the facts that neither your starting location nor your sidereal distance traveled has any effect whatsoever on how long your trip will take; Only the effectiveness of your Drift drive and the density of beacons at your destination factor into that.
Basically, every time you enter the Drift, the Drift-side map of all the beacons in the universe changes a bit (maybe it is the act of you entering the Drift that changes it...). This is why travel times are variable: The relationship between position in the Drift and position in the sidereal universe is constantly changing.
This accounts for pretty much all the facts we've been given, and also allows for navigation and rendezvous within the Drift. The Drift itself doesn't necessarily have to change frequently, just the relationship between the Drift and the sidereal universe. It is also provides a great rationale for the existence of Drift Beacons in the first place.
With that as a Given, two identical ships with the same course and travel time entering the Drift within moments of each other might never see each other in the Drift (making a Drift insertion during combat, if such a thing is possible, a great way to avoid battle.)
I'm a fan of that last idea: As is, if you are confronted with a ship that has a faster thruster speed than yours, your only options for ending the battle are destroying the enemy, disabling his thrusters, surrender, or RP hijinks. The ability to enter the Drift (even with a dangerously hastily calculated course) would be better than trying to duke it out with a superior foe.
More information on the Drift will be forthcoming in Starfinder Adventure Path #4: The Ruined Clouds as well as in Pact Worlds.
I hope that means the same information in both, rather than having crucial setting information only in the AP...
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i wrote many different reason for why this could or might work and end with man maybe all thrusters do powers your ship to same speed when going at max speed or "travel" speed but the hex based movement is just how well or how much power you can use during combat without losing control of your ship so... the thrusters hex speed is its "battle speed" not its full speed....maybe?
Is there air in the drift?
If a being was wrenched from its home plane and dumped in the drift, could it survive for long without some ability that eliminated the need to breathe?
The weird thing about thrusters in Starfinder is that they only seem to affect your speed in combat but not in long term travel -- it still takes 1d6+2 days to use your thrusters to get from one planet to another regardless of the combat speed in hexes of your thrusters.
I would rationalize this to say that thrusters have a normal "cruising speed" and the listed speeds are their "combat speeds" which they cannot maintain for too long (possibly for fuel reasons).
Of course, this also probably means that thrusters use non-newtonian mechanics as well.
I think of the thrusters as grabbing and dragging along space. It answers both why speed cannot be maintained (cutting power to thrusters reduces speed to 0)
Relative to what? There is no such thing as a physical object without any speed.
Whatever the drift is composed of may cause air ported from other planes to form a bubble....
I really like this idea. Barring any evidence to the contrary from official sources, I think I will use this.
Combat and travel speed:
For long distance travel there is probably a max speed ships can safely reach.
Clearly there is, since stepping on the gas in combat means you go the listed speed, and only faster if you have class abilities that allow it.
If there is a top speed this means that thrusters are not Newtonian in nature.
I do recall reading that the time in the Drift does assume that you have your thrusters on for the whole time. If you turn off your thrusters for a day, your trip through the Drift will take a day longer than what you rolled.
What other word/name you'd use to call the Drift if not that? Synonyms are ok, as long as it keeps the same concept.
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Hyperspace.
The Absolom Project was our last, best hope for peace. A self-contained world five miles long, located in neutral territory. A place of commerce and diplomacy for a quarter of a million humans and aliens. A shining beacon in space, all alone in the night. It was the dawn of the Post-Gap Age of Golarion… the year the Great War came upon us all. This is the story of the last (and maybe only) of the Absolom stations. The year is 317. The name of the place is Absolom Station.
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The Absolom Project was our last, best hope for peace. A self-contained world five miles long, located in neutral territory. A place of commerce and diplomacy for a quarter of a million humans and aliens. A shining beacon in space, all alone in the night. It was the dawn of the Post-Gap Age of Golarion… the year the Great War came upon us all. This is the story of the last (and maybe only) of the Absolom stations. The year is 317. The name of the place is Absolom Station.
As ever, I'm always in your service.
