| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
It's always been true in TTRPGs - Pathfinder, Starfinder or otherwise - that if the GM lets the PCs do whatever they want, rules be damned, then the fault for the game imploding from the consequences lies on the GM, not on the rules.
A) The Starfinder ruleset does not intend to emulate real-world physics. I wouldn't read anything into the time it takes to get between planets, and I certainly wouldn't attempt to calculate the kinetic energy of "rods from god". The setting and rules just don't support that kind of real world math based approach, and intentionally so. This isn't a hard sci-fi setting. If your PCs are interested in orbital bombardment, there are rules for that.
B) Although there's no rules for it, there's no problem with them creating a Von Neumann machine - just tell them exactly how much bulk of UPBs it would take to make the first one, and then they need to supply sufficient UPBs to keep the replication going. OR let them get away with it without those restrictions and treat it as a story hook or big disaster that the PCs will have to solve.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
And when you go back to pathfinder, the good ol' commoner railgun works there too.
It's a set of assumptions that prevent this A) you (the players) don't want such an anticlimatic resolution to a campaign. B) there are various sci-fantasy defenses/other reasons preventing such things. Such as steward ships intercepting anyone who appears to be on a kinetic impact course with an inhabited world.
And when you go back to pathfinder, the good ol' commoner railgun works there too.
It's a set of assumptions that prevent this A) you (the players) don't want such an anticlimatic resolution to a campaign. B) there are various sci-fantasy defenses/other reasons preventing such things. Such as steward ships intercepting anyone who appears to be on a kinetic impact course with an inhabited world.
pathfinder where if the guns and gear playtest is to be an indication that the tech level of Golarion is so low as to not have the idea of a proper sized bullet into the chamber (less long range accuracy and distance then a bow which is really low even with smoothbore muskets) is going to come up with a railgun.
if a. was true then: power gamers and munchkins would not exist and society games would not assume all characters are optimized.
if b. was true then: any force capable of stopping a relativistic kinetic attack would be overkill to a glorified cargo freighter from landing hostile PCs
giving players space ships should be done very carefully.
You've never heard of the commoner railgun? Granted it made less sense than starfinder PCs finding a sufficiently large asteroid, but it still 'technically' worked. You each take leadership, line up your hundreds of followers and have them all ready actions, then boom you pass a 100lb steel rod down the line at faster than the speed of sound because of how readied actions work.
Besides, you're making some assumptions on A. If people keep ruining your buck Rodgers campaign by bringing real physics into it, they are probably going to get shut down by the GM.
And B) yes, steward battleships moving to intercept PCs attempting an asteroid drop is overkill. That's kinda the whole point. Well, at least in the Pact Worlds, outside the pact an asteroid drop might even be a tactic you should let your players get away with sometimes.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Can't asteroid strike that area. It's the only known habitat for Koala Sloths, the most huggable creatures in the galaxy. Have art commissioned and your players will never, ever drop rocks on that area.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
So, like, consequences are a thing?
It's easy to come up with a reason why these sort of tactics might work once or twice but have serious and likely painful consequences for these actions if you're running a campaign where this sort shenaniganery is not appreciated.
From a setting point of view, the exact tech-level of the setting is pretty fluid and it is almost guaranteed that anything they try has already been done and either stopped or is now something several large groups might have an interest in publicly deterring, likely with overwhelming violence.
Mechanically, this is not a simulationist game and has never claimed to be. There are no rules for dropping a rock on something at near-light speed, thus it is not an option without he GM making it an option. Likewise, there are no Von Neumann machines in the official materials so crafting one is not an option unless the GM makes it one.
From a story perspective, is it really, really easy to give PCs a reason to not simply nuke the enemy base from orbit. It's hard to extract valuable intel from computers that have been atomized. Killing prisoners held by your enemy is generally frowned upon. If destroying a delicate ecosystem doesn't give your players pause, maybe the fey creatures hounding them from now on will.
Also, there is literally no reason this sort of shenaniganery wouldn't show up in a Pathfinder or DnD game. Why should PCs clear out a kobold warren when they can just set a fire in the entrance and let physics suck all the oxygen out of the tunnels? Portable hole/Bag of holding arrows could just delete everything in a certain area for them. Our wizard can teleport to a nearby asteroid and slowly adjust it's trajectory to land right on the BBEG's fortress.
Sure, the PCs could take their ship and accelerate a relatively small rock at some distant location.
Said distant location spots the incoming rock, shoots it down, and then sends forces to pursue this would be WMD terrorists. Because most places with modern tech levels have things like "space born sensors", "orbital defenses" and "armed police or naval ships".
You can't find, react to, and engage a blackbody object traveling at a fraction of the speed of light without a hugely distributed sensor net that gives automated control to vast numbers of hugely distributed weapons systems that don't obviously exist with sufficient technological sophistication to effectively destroy such an object.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Out of curiosity, where in the advanced tech does it say said object couldn't be identified with the combination of Tech and Magic?
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
The space opera sci-fi game assumes the players want to do space opera sci-fi things.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Very true.
And beyond that, this really isn't a Starfinder issue : it's just a space thing.
Which makes it a sci-fi/space-op thing.
Every sci-fi game has to deal with the fact that yes, at any moment the PCs could just decide to nuke a planet from orbit with a heavy thing or two.
Gravitic bombardment hardly rely on anything Starfinder specific, it's every bit as devastating in Star Wars or 40k and likely even more so in a more hard-science setting.
Yet it's rarely used.
The Galactic Empire really didn't need the Death Star to raze Alderaan, they could have thrown rocks at it.
The 'Star does make for a much better show, but it's incomparably more expensive and just way too much work to be worth it, rationally. But that's part of what makes it fun, and therefore relevant.
"Meh, just throw stuff at it from space" is just not the interesting way to deal with issues in most cases.
Doesn't mean there's absolutely no place for tungsten rods ever, but there's very much a place and a time for things like that.
Most starfinder games probably won't have much room for that kind of devastation, at least from the PC side of things. On the villain side, maybe moreso ("Ohnoes, the Corpse Fleet has accelerated an asteroid and aimed it at a populated planet ! Hope your Bruce Willis impression is on point, cause it's time to reenact Armaggedon.")
So yeah, there's no rule against it, it's more of a trope thing and a gentlemen's agreement.
Same reason Daimalko gets mechs to fight their kaijus, rather than parking dreadnoughts in orbit to bombard the beasties into oblivion... Or throw rocks at them.
It's not as fun.
And then, there's the in-game rp consequences of being known as someone who's entirely willing to unleash that kind of firepower, which is another issue entirely. That's hard to come back from.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
And when you go back to pathfinder, the good ol' commoner railgun works there too.
Nope. RAW the last peasant drops the quarterstaff and it falls into his feet with zero veolcity.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
In the Expanse, they assumed nobody would drop rocks because it would mean the potential death of all human life.
Well, your average space rock which is the right size for Shrink item would burn up in the Atmosphere. Yes, you could get more dense materials in space but apparently with a quick google (So I am in no way fully educated in this, just comparing rough numbers.)
Apparently the asteroid would need to be about the size of the Statue of Liberty which I am sure is much bigger then 16 cubic feet, to be considered a danger
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Yakno if I was trying to fling things in space or even rain gunning. I'd have a caster whose wellversed in shrink object. You could make things very small-and make them harder to detect. Then resize them shortly before impacting whatever the targets are.
Keep in mind that when you change a specific thing, society reacts even if it isn't explictily stated. So you shrink an asteroid... with a lot of magic.
1) The planetary defense satellites have detect magic incorporated into their sensors, and pick up the rock more easily.
2) The level 20 precog who would be blown up along with his family, friend, and species, woke up at 3 am today, punched in his security code and frantically started telling Space NASA where to look for your death in a small package.
3) The ministry of magic security casts daily augiries about threats, and all the nations of the planet started getting warnings about looking for an expanding problem in the northern sky, and doubled their scanning.
4) the asteroid starts falling down and is immediately hit with everything from a nuclear missile from a star ship to planetary defense particle beams to disintigrate spells and a team of summoned earth elemental miners carrying a nuclear football teleporting onto it, digging their way to the center and hitting the KABOOM
ie, remember the bad guys have magic too.
or well, antagonists in this case, because ya';ll are the genocidal villains here.
| 7 people marked this as a favorite. |
ie, remember the bad guys have magic too.
or well, antagonists in this case, because ya';ll are the genocidal villains here.
"Are we the baddies, BNW?"
The kinetic strike option is probably more viable doing something like smashing an asteroid into a pirate base on another asteroid.
Even pirates are still likely to notice it and stop it, but you're less likely to get multiple planetary militaries hunting you to the ends of the universe.
Edit: even then you've got the free captains after you. Plus, if you do this anywhere near the river between, the sarcesians will still get the pact after you.
|
Isn't it simpler to explain that this "doesn't work". The spaceship drive is not a Newtonian drive with inertia - it requires continuous operation to maintain "speed", and turning is ... well Star Wars physics, not real-world.
So, if you drop a rock out of the airlock, it stops. If the ship's drive is still operating, the ship will move away, leaving the rock floating in space. Oops.
.
.
.
.
.
OK the navigationally inspired will observe that if you allow conservation of momentum for the rock, and you cross the solar system to the opposite side, pick up a rock (whose orbital tangent is opposite direction to the chosen target), carry it over and aim, you still get a Big Smash. Nowhere hear lightspeed, but big enough to make a mess.
You don't even get away with it if you drop conservation of momentum, and have the dropped rock literally stop relative to the solar system, as the planet's orbital velocity is still enough to make a Big Smash. (Remember the comet that hit Jupiter that may of us watched thanks to Nasa?).
The story-wise GM rules that things dropped out of holds take up the immediate locale's orbital comfort velocity, so the rick just starts drifting along in the same orbit as the target planet.
Physics is not the strongest point of Space Opera... go with good story effects
|
|
Note also you have 2 options with the rock:
1) drop the rock a long way away, leave it rushing in, and skedaddle. Precogs, sensors etc pick it up and the locals rush out and push the rock off course. It doesn't take much push if you have a day or more to apply the push, to deflect it off impact course. (Real world considers 50,000km away to be a "near miss"(!) with no actual effect)
2) you carry the rock real close before dropping it. Most places worth hitting have fleets of friends around them, like Absolom Station does, and they react to your intruding spaceship... they make you into a small fireball and watch the sparkles die away. (The precog or sensors warned you were coming).
Pirates still have the problem of issuing out in their hidden fleet etc. That's also true for pirates if you bring a big hi-tech (high level) nasty-bomb.
I vastly prefer glossing over real world physics over trying to invent non-newtonian physics as a way to explain why certain things don't work. IMO, space opera is made actively worse by trying to reinvent the wheel with a whole new version of physics. It just has complication after complication that makes the whole thing a mess rather than the neat 'Here's a basic reason why it doesn't work, let's move on with the story'.
And outside storytelling where 'No, bad idea, ruins the story' can work. It's fun to think of how the tech in a space opera can be applied to semi-real physics to answer the questions of 'what if I tried _____'.
|
|
@Garretmander - except that the existing Starship combat rules already ignore Newtonian physics and laws of Momentum etc. Instead you have a simple Speed (used per round), and Turn Rules to change direction (and allow special manoeuvres like Flip). You can also change facing at the start of your turn without regard to previous rounds... no carry-over between rounds.
Starfinder space-drives are not rockets!
If you want example of Newtonian physics, try Traveller Book 1 rules (the old Little Black Box) - you get a simplified, pragmatic version of vector movement, and your move last turn persists into all subsequent rounds, and accumulates. Yes, if you apply full thrust in one direction round-after-round, it's not long before your minis are out of the house, heading down the street... If you build up velocity it takes several rounds to change direction.
So my argument is: since a starship moves under power then stops dead if it powers off its space-drive, so also a dropped rock does exactly the same. It has no space-drive, so if you kick if out of the hold it will "stop" like a powered-off starship - at least insofar as the map you are using. So it won't hurtle at planets, any more than the starship does.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I do not take rules as explanations for what's really happening in starship combat anymore than I do in 5' square character combat. They are simplifications for what is actually happening.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
You can't assume that the starship combat rules mean that there's no newtonian physics in reality, just like you can't assume a PC who is stabbed down to 1 HP has zero blood on his skin because he hasn't taken the Bleed condition as part of combat, nor does some mysterious quantum force guide all outcomes in world into discreet 5% increments.
It's abstracted stuff for fun, not a reality simulator. This is especially true of starship combat since it ignores the third dimension and deliberately doesn't put any distances on hexes or times on combat rounds. A hex might be 5km or 50,000km, an obstacle on your battlemap might be an asteroid twice the size of your ship or a huge gas giant, a round of combat might be 10 seconds or three hours. It might be all of these at different times due to applying different levels of abstraction and tactical simulation to the situation at hand.
@xenocrat, @garretmander - you miss the point - I was hand-waving away any possibility of arguing real-world physics for a lob-the-rock hyper-speed attack on targets like planets.
My simplistic, game-style argument says "no lob the rock" and "here's some flavour text for why".
And my counterpoint to that very argument was that doing so creates a vast number of knock on effects that change your setting in deep, fundamental ways that can be a serious detriment to any story being told in the setting.
Saying 'physics as we know it doesn't work in this world' requires a lot more world development than 'people own telescopes and can use scrying magic'.
I am curious what sort of players you play with where you need more then a 'I like the idea, but no.' Maybe a brief discussion where they can defend their point.
|
|
Hang on - physics as we know does not work in Starfinder. Real physics is totally incompatible with magic. IRL you have a number of limits which build the self-consistent framework around us: conservation of momentum, mass, and energy.
However, Magic can create, destroy, and move things and energy. It can arbitrarily transform things without regard to substance or mass. That means SF "physics" is actually completely different to our universe. You can't import SF magic into the real world; and the physics in SF is "stuff that looks like ours, but isn't actually".
So the thread begins: can we use SF spaceships to carry a big rock, let go of it, and use the rock's subsequent passive movement to bomb the hell out of planets.
Now IRL, if you could make a ship move with a big rock (difficult, but let's skip that), this would work perfectly.
However, the energy cost of movig the rock and getting it to high velocity is such that generally you'd be better off using your resources in another way. Albeit if you did it could be really devastating.
So the thread evolves into - should you be able to use big rocks to create huge unlevelled weapons, and should it b e possible at all.
I'm on the side of stick with the game's levelled weapons, keep drop-the-rock out of it.
So... can I come up with a story idea, and yes I can. One that observes the rules for how a starship moves: it uses move points round by round, and if it does not expend move points it stops. If it expends move points in 2 rounds, it does not go any faster, it does not accumulate velocity - it just moves round by round.
So it is very clear that starship non-drift movement is non-Newtonian. It breaks all of Newton's laws.
So I considered: what happens to <any> object which leaves a starship's drive field. I postulate it behaves just like a starship which fails to expend move points: it stops.
That's not creating a vast realm of pseudo physics.
There is then the question of "what does 'stop' mean?" Which applies to starships as well as rocks and lost crewmen.
The real world is relativistic. Even ignoring high-speed motion, even low speed motion is all relative - there is no absolute frame, no "map". IRL if you cease to accelerate you keep moving as you were - but we just noted above that starships don't do that.
So there are several possibles for "stop". In the end, the easiest one is "you stop "on the map", whatever map the session is using. I note that Planets and Moons, over game timescales, are also static - they don't normally move across the map.
So that's where the "stopped" objects end up ... not-moving relative to the local planets.
And that conveniently spoils "drop the rock".
(Note also, that the game doesn't include anything significant in the way of gravity at a distance, so the rock isn't really going to fall onto the planet with any enthusiasm... Again, not like real world.)
(Before you say, well it does, but over longer time frames - there are unusual planets, like diffuse water-worlds, air-worlds, rock-cluster worlds, etc. and they *ought* to all implode under self-gravity, but they don't... And game-world Black Holes are Black, and Holes, but not for practical purposes "incredibly massive". They are just "there".)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I am curious what sort of players you play with where you need more then a 'I like the idea, but no.' Maybe a brief discussion where they can defend their point.
No, no, my players are the kind to take a quick reasonable 'no, bad idea' and move on. I just like figuring my reasoning out ahead of time on the boards.
Hang on - physics as we know does not work in Starfinder. Real physics is totally incompatible with magic. IRL you have a number of limits which build the self-consistent framework around us: conservation of momentum, mass, and energy.
However, Magic can create, destroy, and move things and energy. It can arbitrarily transform things without regard to substance or mass. That means SF "physics" is actually completely different to our universe. You can't import SF magic into the real world; and the physics in SF is "stuff that looks like ours, but isn't actually".
Who says magic breaks the conservation of mass/energy/momentum? We have no idea how magic works in the system. It's just magic from our perspective. Technomancers in universe may well have equations for magic energy/mass/momentum that balance it all out. We don't know that magic in universe breaks our laws of physics, because we don't know how it works. It's a simplification for 'this system has things supernatural to our world'.
So it is very clear that starship non-drift movement is non-Newtonian.
How so? Do they also move in 2 dimensions only? Are guns impossible to shoot while the drive is active? How does that affect fly by shots? When one ship's drive is active, does it stop other ship's drives from operating? If the science officer operates the scanners does that mean the drives are inoperative while they scan? Why can't the guns shoot while they're scanning but not moving?
Or is all that just a simplification made for tabletop turn by turn play?
And if all those things are simplifications... well, why isn't the hex speed movement a simplification as well?
And if they aren't simplifications, well is the story made better by answering all those questions, and breaking out your notebook of how non-newtonian drives interact with laser cannons and gravity guns and why ships can only travel in two dimensions, and why scanners shut down drives and guns?
Or is the story made better by saying the ships fly and shoot?