The Expanse: Theory on the Ancient Builders

I haven’t seen all episodes of Season 2 yet, so I may be off topic completely here. But I just came up with one, actually two, ideas about the motives of the ancient race that is responsible for creating the protomolecule and the wormhole network spanning space (that I read about internet spoilers already). I […]

Spinning Habitat Rings on Spaceships

Without the help of magical constructions that create artificial gravity aboard spaceships, there are actually only three options to have some sort of gravity in spaceflight: Accelerate by thrusting Make your ship spin (or a section of it) Place a large mass under your ship Option 1 works perfectly as long as you can accelerate […]

Space Trucking

The Mercury Planetary Book of Jovian Chronicles has some details about running freighters between the planets. On page 0072 and following it states the following information: The formula is based on the number of Equivalent Burn Points a captain or pilot wishes to spend to make the trip. Half the EBPs are spent accelerating the […]

Hull Mass

So, I always wanted to create a system of rules or mechanics to design spaceships for roleplaying games. Interesting and yet somewhat realistic spaceships. Not as realistic as a Space Shuttle but also not as wild as a Star Destroyer from Star Wars. So I had to sit down and think about what I expect […]

Interior design

Ships in movies and tv series come in all kind of styles. Especially when you get inside you will find all levels of comfortability, from industrial dark to the shiny white hotel style. What would spaceships really look like on the inside? First of all spaceship interior design has to be functional. Nobody cares if […]

Detection – I can see you…

With the lack of windows and an endless void between you and any other ship, the usage of sensors is crucial for survival and navigation alike. On a naval destroyer you can always use your eyes and binoculars if all systems fail (not very helpful in smoke or at night). On a starship you are […]

The second question: costs

The second question when desiging spaceships will be “how much”? The cost of building a specific design is crucial to it’s success. You can build a state of the art or futuristic ship, like the Zumwalt, and then find your project cancelled after the first prototype left the wharft due to exploding costs. Successfull designs […]

The first question: purpose

While playing around with different ship building rules and methods from various roleplaying games I found, that all of them start with the question: “How big?”. The first thing you had to decide was how large you wanted your spacecraft to be. I think this comes from the fact that the very same rules had […]

Pen & Paper Rollenspiele

[su_row] [su_column size=”1/2″] Das Pen-&-Paper-Rollenspiel (engl. pen „Stift“ und paper „Papier“) ist ein Spiel, bei dem die Mitwirkenden fiktive Rollen einnehmen und gemeinsam durch Erzählen ein Abenteuer erleben. Als Hauptspielmittel werden fast immer die namensgebenden Stifte und Papier eingesetzt, um die dargestellten Rollen auf Charakterbögen zu beschreiben und Notizen zum Spielverlauf zu machen. Nicht zuletzt […]

Thoughts on spaceship designs

Many popular fictional spaceship designs look sleek and powerful but that is not because they are well designed, their looks trigger memories of well known naval ship designs merged with jetfighter shapes and aspects. We have seen huge naval ships and fast and agile jetfighters for decades and learned to associate different impressions and adjectives with […]