Future Tech Advice and Assistance Thread [O.O.C.]

[Vocenae]

I'm building a troopship in DOGA, mostly complete and have started defining, for personal reference, it's internal complement of troops and armor. So I was curious to see if anyone else has dedicated troopships and their complements, or if you go the Battlestar route and use warships as hybrid troop carriers.

[Kassaran]

Well, first things first. Name the needs for your starstate when it comes to dropships/troopships.

Per se, I use mostly cargo hauling frigates for everything, but that's because my armies stay planetside and travel through space using giant planet-side gates. The only military purpose-built shuttle is a small five hundred man vessel roughly as many meters long by three hundred meters wide. They're relatively flat, aerodynamic, and built to work within atmosphere no matter the thickness or thinness.

[Lubyak]

I'm building a troopship in DOGA, mostly complete and have started defining, for personal reference, it's internal complement of troops and armor. So I was curious to see if anyone else has dedicated troopships and their complements, or if you go the Battlestar route and use warships as hybrid troop carriers.

So I definitely have a few dedicated troop ships. The Kodiak class attack transport provides both troop transport and deployment capabilities, able to carry an entire Rifle, Grenadier, or Panzer division, while its complement of dropships is able to deliver its carried troops to the surface. When deployment is not necessary, L-12 Type Transports are commonly used as passenger carriers, and can be quickly refitted to serve as troop ships.

For more direct assault, the R.u.B Navy operates the Helepolis class assault ship, a modification of a standard escort carrier design. The Helepolis has much lighter troop carrying capacity compared to the Kodiak, only being capable of transporting a brigade sized unit of dragoons or marines. However, the Helepolis's role is much more direct. The Helepolis is equipped for drop-pod assaults, as well as carrying a small complement of strike craft to directly support landing operations. Once the Helepolis class ship has made planetfall, it serves as a forward command centre, fire base, supply depot, and air field for the landing.

[Tierra Prime]

I'm building a troopship in DOGA, mostly complete and have started defining, for personal reference, it's internal complement of troops and armor. So I was curious to see if anyone else has dedicated troopships and their complements, or if you go the Battlestar route and use warships as hybrid troop carriers.

I have both. I have dedicated transports that are unarmed but heavily armoured and capable of carrying tens of thousands of troops, plus their vehicles and supplies. They are quite large compared to my warships, but they are mostly empty space inside. The most common transport is nearly one and a half kilometres long. My warships also carry troops, but in much smaller numbers. While a two kilometre long transport may be able to carry 60,000 men, a cruiser of the same size may only be able to carry 12,000, as most of their available space is taken up by their reactors, engines, magazines, and weapons. It is for this reason that warships only carry marines, who are adept at fighting in small spaces, and deploy to the ground via drop pods and shuttles. Transports, by comparison, carry regular infantry and armoured units, who deploy either from the transports themselves, which are capable of landing on the ground, or from shuttles. If you want to know more and get exact numbers for how many troops each ship can carry, check the naval registry section in part I of the armed forces section of my factbook. Part I of the naval registry deals with warships, while part II deals with transports, and part IV with shuttles.

[Souzara]

I'm building a troopship in DOGA, mostly complete and have started defining, for personal reference, it's internal complement of troops and armor. So I was curious to see if anyone else has dedicated troopships and their complements, or if you go the Battlestar route and use warships as hybrid troop carriers.

I definitely go the hybrid route, perhaps to an even greater degree than Battlestar because not only can warships carry ground troop compliments, they always carry troop compliments as part of the Space Primacy doctrine, where the ground formations are permanently attached as auxiliaries to the fleet formations (although additional ground formations can be temporarily assigned to any fleet formation should they required for large operations, like full invasions). The use of teleportation technology by the military has more or less supplanted the large troop ship for landings, as large volumes of troops can be transported directly from the fleet formations they are attached to down to a surface deployment through that technology. Therefore, the only real special ship that does something akin to true troop transportation is the venerated Saihan attack ship (formal name pending), which is really more of a...well, attack ship, that is set up to preform boarding actions as well as contested landings (and is also the smallest vessel with teleportation functions). The attack ship therefore serves as the fleet's hand to deliver ground forces to the enemy, be it in the form of boarding actions or landings, although it only carries a small number of troops actual on board, using the teleportation function to move troops in from staging areas inside larger fleet ships.

Then again, the attack ship also serves as a light warship, like a heavy corvette or a frigate depending on your sense of scale, so its not really dedicated to troop transport duties, more its a warship that also does troop delivery.

PS: The attack ship is basically the Synchronized World's jack of all trades military ship. It is so versatile, it is even used by the customs authority and Synchrony police, since its heavily armed enough to deal with most small scale threats, but also carries troops and can preform boarding actions in the field, making it well suited to preform customs stops and inspections as well as field arrests.

[SquareDisc City]

I've not given any thought to specific design, but the UPT uses dedicated troop carriers. Keeping big ground units on combat starships is just asking to get those soldiers blown up with the ship.

[Rostavykhan]

I'm building a troopship in DOGA, mostly complete and have started defining, for personal reference, it's internal complement of troops and armor. So I was curious to see if anyone else has dedicated troopships and their complements, or if you go the Battlestar route and use warships as hybrid troop carriers.

My bootleg Trek state would maybe have shuttles or small craft used by the Marines for transportation, but no purpose-built starships capable of warp travel AND atmospheric flight, except for the not-Warp-Delta of the fleet, and that's more of a gunboat or escort than a transport.

There ARE a few ships in my factbook though, that are much older than contemporary designs and are used by every branch, so the Marines or Star Command (basically the Coast Guard) could use them as transports and carriers - mostly refitted colony ships and freighters.

[Neornith]

Generally for most of my nations I use a dedicated troop carrier to move soldiers from planet to planet, from there there's a separate vehicle to get them from the carrier to the ground, some of them use drop pods and others use landers to ferry them down. Often times with landers there's an escort of multirole fighters to engage enemy flyers or ground defenses trying to shoot the landers.

Troop carriers aren't generally armed beyond point defense systems and maybe some light armament to hit smaller ships but I would say they have a higher power to weight ratio then most my other stuff since often times they have to unload on the fly and the get the hell out before they're destroyed

[Axis Nova]

I've been out of the game for quite some time. Are there still older FT nations that practice the obnoxious habit of newbie crushing?

[Kyrusia]

I've been out of the game for quite some time. Are there still older FT nations that practice the obnoxious habit of newbie crushing?

There will always be some players prone to dog-piling, unfortunately. Hopefully, however, most players recognize they don't have to play with folks just "in it for the OOC sake of winning it," so to speak. We were all newbies at one point, after all. x]

Also: welcome back! Woo!

[Auman]

I've been out of the game for quite some time. Are there still older FT nations that practice the obnoxious habit of newbie crushing?

I haven't seen it. Things seem to have calmed down around these parts. Welcome back.

[Kyrusia]

I've been out of the game for quite some time. Are there still older FT nations that practice the obnoxious habit of newbie crushing?

I haven't seen it. Things seem to have calmed down around these parts. Welcome back.

It's a thankful rarity, it seems, for the most part. Not saying the occasional thread doesn't sometimes... go off the rails, mind you; that's just what happens sometimes. Thread ownership - tis a powerful thing for a dedicated OP.

[Allanea]

I haven't seen it. Things seem to have calmed down around these parts. Welcome back.

It's a thankful rarity, it seems, for the most part. Not saying the occasional thread doesn't sometimes... go off the rails, mind you; that's just what happens sometimes. Thread ownership - tis a powerful thing for a dedicated OP.

When I was younger, there seemed to be a concept wherein, if your nation was being attacked, it was up to you as the attacked party to determine what tech level the thread would be and what allies you could summon.

How does this work with the thread ownership concept?

[Kyrusia]

It's a thankful rarity, it seems, for the most part. Not saying the occasional thread doesn't sometimes... go off the rails, mind you; that's just what happens sometimes. Thread ownership - tis a powerful thing for a dedicated OP.

When I was younger, there seemed to be a concept wherein, if your nation was being attacked, it was up to you as the attacked party to determine what tech level the thread would be and what allies you could summon.

How does this work with the thread ownership concept?

Not really differently, to be honest. That (the attacked party deciding tech restrictions) is a player convention, not something Mods police. It'd be up to the players involved (the attacking party, the attacked party, any potential allies, etc.) to decide how to deal with that, to adhere to that idea or not, etc. In an ideal world, this would always resolve amicably for all parties involved: everybody gets what they want, the thread they want, etc. Unfortunately, not an ideal world.

If, for example, Exampleland started a thread declaring war on Examplestania and Examplestania wanted to bring in his extraterrestrial allies; if Exampleland, as the OP, didn't want that... Well, it's his thread. But this runs squarely into "you get to roleplay with who you want and how you want (within the rules), and cannot be forced to do otherwise". Ideal world, they both reach a compromise, everyone is happy, thread goes on. (Frankly, in my experience as a player, this is usually how it goes.)

But not always...

If Examplestania just doesn't want to RP without his alien allies, and Exampleland just doesn't want to RP with them, there's obviously going to be a breaking point. Thread OPs get to rule their threads, but freedom of interaction also exists on NS. At the end of the day, no matter who instigated, if Examplestania says he no longer wants to participate, that's the end of it; can't really RP the invasion of someone who doesn't want to play-out the invasion, either mechanically or in terms of the actual In-Character action. Usually, that's the end of it for everyone involved. Most players inherently recognize that. Every so often you get a situation where, say, Exampleland refuses to accept that, and goes on godmodding the invasion of Examplestania, using Examplestania's intellectual property without their consent, constantly demanding Examplestania participate, etc. That pushes into things like harassment; luckily, that's a rarity.

I think, as a Mod, I've ran across that situation, actually requiring Mod intervention, perhaps... once?

[Random Characters]

If I have a nation that has developed colonies all around the entire galaxy and some territory in nearby galaxies, how should I determine my population?

[Valefore]

If I have a nation that has developed colonies all around the entire galaxy and some territory in nearby galaxies, how should I determine my population?

Well, if you're looking to keep it vague, one way would be to treat your home quadrant like others would treat their nations home planet... Being the most populated and developed. Other quadrants of that galaxy would then be the equivalent of somewhat developed worlds that have been around for a while [probably having a quarter to a third the population of the home quadrant], but are still being developed and growing steadily. The extra galactic territories would then be your "frontier" territories; sparsely populated [each satellite galaxy having a population of say 1/100th or 1/1,000th the population of your least populous quadrant in your home galaxy] but appealing to your people as places where they could make or break a quick fortune.

As a note on this, I'd recommend avoiding exact numbers... Especially as at such a large scale you'd be needing a number of zero's that people couldn't really visualize anyway... Just my opinion here, but I get the feeling that others would agree; assuming they don't just try and get you to not go so big as in FT smaller, especially in the beginning, is considered to be better when it comes to scale; both for storytelling and nation development.

[Kyrusia]

If I have a nation that has developed colonies all around the entire galaxy and some territory in nearby galaxies, how should I determine my population?

Many people, simply put, don't. It's not a requirement, per se. That being said, if you're like me, and just like fluff for the sake of it, there is a very broad figure you can work backwards from, assuming like-conditions. Lemme see if I can find it... I can't find my original source just this moment, but a LiveScience article will do nicely. It gives an upper-limit for an Earth-sized planet, with Earth-like resource availability, being just beneath 10 billion. I recall Constantinos Doxiadis (inventor of the term "ecumenopolis") stating he figured this closer to 15 billion, but I can't for the life of me actually find where I found that. Either way, if you just like numbers, you can start fiddling with available resources, planet size (and thus population density), etc. and work backwards from those admittedly rough figures.

Beyond this, Vale has ninja'd me. x] I, too, would personally recommend keeping things vague, and relying instead on descriptive language (Yay! Storytelling!). And... As I was editing this in, Sunset ninja'd me from the future. ;___;

[Sunset]

That depends on a number of key factors; Who you RP with, and how you RP. If you roleplay with a specific group where numbers are important then the first step is to ask them. There may be rules or suggestions or guidelines in place. If this is not the case then my advice is 'You don't'. Numbers are a bit of a trap. They are useful in circumstances and groups where numbers are used to determine things but if your roleplay is largely a creative rather than statistical endeavor then you would be better served by not determining the population but rather a description of the population. One of my favorite factbooks adopted something of the following convention and I think it works very well;

Density - Growth - Stability

In order; How dense is the population of the colony/world/station? Sparse? Ultra-Crowded? A single word can give the casual reader - and you - much more of a feeling for a visit to that world than '800 Million People'. The same is true for Growth; Expanding, Contracting, or Stable. Stability is a measure of restless or restfulness. Is that population Content and Happy? Or are they Restless and Revolting? Combine the three and you have the basis for an easy-to-grasp yet descriptive summary of a population beyond '800 Million'.

Past that, you can also apply that description to the nation in general. Sunset would be 'Teeming - Moderate - Content'. Lots of people but spread out over a decent area with moderate growth from immigration and births and an established, stable political and economic environment. Does it matter how many people are in the Republic? Well, not to my RP partners. More important is the description of what they will encounter when they visit or have an interaction with a particular location.

[Jackania yugo]

/bump

[Kyrusia]

/bump

While I don't dislike the thread being bumped, necessarily, is there something more you wanted to comment on besides that?

Density - Growth - Stability

Entirely personal anecdote is entirely personal, but... I have a particular fondness for posts in certain "clunk-predominant" states in the manner of "density." Posts which go into descriptive detail regarding the congestion, claustrophobia, and grime of proverbial megalopolises ("Megalopoli?" Spell check says that's incorrect.); it's one of the things I sometimes miss, given my general "science-fantasy" bent with my main, and it often tempts me back, trying to inspire me to make a civilization that has its own particular fondness with cramming as many people as possible into as small a volume as possible, and just letting the chips fall where they may.

I think I got this fondness out of the Eisenhorn novels, come to think of it, and their description of "hive cities."

I'm sure, somewhere, an urban planner is screaming.

[Spacers General]

I'm making myself a trinary star system for my new little star state side project. I was wondering how ... possible is it to have all three stars of a three star system orbiting a single barycenter, such that the stars stay more or less in a semi-stable triangle and don't go all loopy and insane on each other. I am tempted to have the stars be freely orbiting each other in what I feel like is a more realistic trinary system, but I also feel like that would make any attempt to map or otherwise worldbuild the astronomy of the system utterly impossible without a level of technical expertise and dedication I do not posses.

The way I have my system set up, there are the stars in their triangular shape caught in each other's gravity but only in such a way that they all spin around a single central point of the orbit rather than being drawn into orbits all over each other. That way, there can be stable sorts of mini solar systems around each individual star that are more or less like versions of the inner planets of the Sol system, because I figure the really big gas giants would be caught by the gravity of another star and get pulled off into a crazy orbit. I do have a single gas giant, but its a small one so I figure that's gravy. I'd off course also have the insane loops of planets and asteroids caught in the gravity of all three stars that end up swinging wildly around the system in unpredictable ways that you would need some serious higher math to properly model and map out. Then of course theres the super oort cloud, that treats the three stars as a single combined gravity well that they orbit around as if it were one giant star, because the stars are so much closer to each other (relatively) than to these distant outer bodies.

I think this sort of distribution should also work well with my political backstory, where there are spacer peoples established out in the outer bodies and sparsely populated regions of the system, divided from the highly populated earth-like planets and other major colonies of those stable mini systems around each star, to whom the borders of their system more or less end at the physical boundary of the trinary orbital system, even though there are like a dozen AU worth of asteroids, planetoids and full fledged outer planets flying around way beyond that but still orbiting the same three stars.

So yeah. What do you guys think of the possible implementation of a three star system? Any tips on that front?

I did make a map, but its waaay not to scale or accurate in an astronomical sense in any way. More just to remind myself what orbits what.

[Multiversal Venn-Copard]

The problem is that a system with three stars in that sort of triangular shape is incredibly unstable, and even the tiniest of orbital perturbations caused by planetary motion will throw it completely out of balance within a fairly short timeframe. (If one star is, say, 0.01% more massive than the others, even if they all start in perfect 120-degree positions relative to each other, the system will also collapse.) What we see in actual trinary systems is two stars orbiting each other at a healthy distance (say, something on the order of at least ten or twenty AUs if you want to have lots of room for planets around each) and the barycenter of those two in a shared orbit with a third star. It's really not that complicated to look at, and almost nobody on NS really bothers with the exact orbital dynamics anyway, so if you're aiming for realism, consider that option.

If you're alright ignoring the physics problems, then it's certainly very possible to write about, and could indeed make for an interesting setting like you've described. Proper timing and gravity-assist planning for interplanetary travel would be critical (unless you've got the tech for torchships or FTL), and if the whole system is heavily colonized, you'd end up with something like a space subway system with huge amounts of traffic moving in uneven bursts whenever planets lined up properly. Might make things difficult for trade, say, if a convoy of supply ships get delayed or flung away into deep space due to a slight miscalculation.

[Spacers General]

The problem is that a system with three stars in that sort of triangular shape is incredibly unstable, and even the tiniest of orbital perturbations caused by planetary motion will throw it completely out of balance within a fairly short timeframe. (If one star is, say, 0.01% more massive than the others, even if they all start in perfect 120-degree positions relative to each other, the system will also collapse.) What we see in actual trinary systems is two stars orbiting each other at a healthy distance (say, something on the order of at least ten or twenty AUs if you want to have lots of room for planets around each) and the barycenter of those two in a shared orbit with a third star. It's really not that complicated to look at, and almost nobody on NS really bothers with the exact orbital dynamics anyway, so if you're aiming for realism, consider that option.

If you're alright ignoring the physics problems, then it's certainly very possible to write about, and could indeed make for an interesting setting like you've described. Proper timing and gravity-assist planning for interplanetary travel would be critical (unless you've got the tech for torchships or FTL), and if the whole system is heavily colonized, you'd end up with something like a space subway system with huge amounts of traffic moving in uneven bursts whenever planets lined up properly. Might make things difficult for trade, say, if a convoy of supply ships get delayed or flung away into deep space due to a slight miscalculation.

That is very useful, thank you. I will probably keep the triangular orbit, just for quality of life purposes, although I very much look forward to worldbuilding on the loose rocks rocketing around the system in loopy orbits. Astronomy class in the Platinum Triangle is probably pretty fun. I do have FTL, so some of the transit concearns are null, although I will definitely be doing something with an in-system transit scheme, especially since the highly populated worlds are all pretty close together near the stars in semi-stable systems, and also because those inner system economies need imports from the outer system in order to keep running, making regular traffic a real concern and thus worthy of worldbuilding.

I am also curious, wouldn't the equivalent of the Oort cloud in a trinary system be much bigger because the combined gravity of all three stars would be pulling on any distant debris in the outer system, making it possible for small rocks to get caught in the system's gravity much further afield?

[Multiversal Venn-Copard]

The problem is that a system with three stars in that sort of triangular shape is incredibly unstable, and even the tiniest of orbital perturbations caused by planetary motion will throw it completely out of balance within a fairly short timeframe. (If one star is, say, 0.01% more massive than the others, even if they all start in perfect 120-degree positions relative to each other, the system will also collapse.) What we see in actual trinary systems is two stars orbiting each other at a healthy distance (say, something on the order of at least ten or twenty AUs if you want to have lots of room for planets around each) and the barycenter of those two in a shared orbit with a third star. It's really not that complicated to look at, and almost nobody on NS really bothers with the exact orbital dynamics anyway, so if you're aiming for realism, consider that option.

If you're alright ignoring the physics problems, then it's certainly very possible to write about, and could indeed make for an interesting setting like you've described. Proper timing and gravity-assist planning for interplanetary travel would be critical (unless you've got the tech for torchships or FTL), and if the whole system is heavily colonized, you'd end up with something like a space subway system with huge amounts of traffic moving in uneven bursts whenever planets lined up properly. Might make things difficult for trade, say, if a convoy of supply ships get delayed or flung away into deep space due to a slight miscalculation.

That is very useful, thank you. I will probably keep the triangular orbit, just for quality of life purposes, although I very much look forward to worldbuilding on the loose rocks rocketing around the system in loopy orbits. Astronomy class in the Platinum Triangle is probably pretty fun. I do have FTL, so some of the transit concearns are null, although I will definitely be doing something with an in-system transit scheme, especially since the highly populated worlds are all pretty close together near the stars in semi-stable systems, and also because those inner system economies need imports from the outer system in order to keep running, making regular traffic a real concern and thus worthy of worldbuilding.

I am also curious, wouldn't the equivalent of the Oort cloud in a trinary system be much bigger because the combined gravity of all three stars would be pulling on any distant debris in the outer system, making it possible for small rocks to get caught in the system's gravity much further afield?

Zoom out far enough (hundreds of AUs, thousands of AUs, fractions of a parsec...) and a triple star system has pretty much the same gravitational force as one star with the combined masses of all three. So while it might be somewhat bigger, if you're talking about typical main sequence stars (G-class or whatever), they'll only have the same relative gravitational pull at an interstellar scale as, say, a moderately large A-class star. Might make something of a difference, though since the gravitational force increases linearly with mass but drops off proportional to distance squared, you'd get an Oort-cloud-like structure about √3 times as large as it would be from one star, though that's ignoring other star systems that happen to pass by and would likely disrupt the outer layers of it.

[Spacers General]

That is very useful, thank you. I will probably keep the triangular orbit, just for quality of life purposes, although I very much look forward to worldbuilding on the loose rocks rocketing around the system in loopy orbits. Astronomy class in the Platinum Triangle is probably pretty fun. I do have FTL, so some of the transit concearns are null, although I will definitely be doing something with an in-system transit scheme, especially since the highly populated worlds are all pretty close together near the stars in semi-stable systems, and also because those inner system economies need imports from the outer system in order to keep running, making regular traffic a real concern and thus worthy of worldbuilding.

I am also curious, wouldn't the equivalent of the Oort cloud in a trinary system be much bigger because the combined gravity of all three stars would be pulling on any distant debris in the outer system, making it possible for small rocks to get caught in the system's gravity much further afield?

Zoom out far enough (hundreds of AUs, thousands of AUs, fractions of a parsec...) and a triple star system has pretty much the same gravitational force as one star with the combined masses of all three. So while it might be somewhat bigger, if you're talking about typical main sequence stars (G-class or whatever), they'll only have the same relative gravitational pull at an interstellar scale as, say, a moderately large A-class star. Might make something of a difference, though since the gravitational force increases linearly with mass but drops off proportional to distance squared, you'd get an Oort-cloud-like structure about √3 times as large as it would be from one star, though that's ignoring other star systems that happen to pass by and would likely disrupt the outer layers of it.

Fair enough. I guess the Platinum Triangle, since its comprised of three red dwarves, would have more of normal sized Oort cloud.