Difference between revisions of "Exploration"

Latest revision as of 15:38, 16 December 2014

A part of Startroid adventures is exploration, which takes place between encounters. You may be given a great deal of information about where you're going and what might be there, but the rest is up to you to forge a path. Exploration includes making your way through unmapped corridors, uncharted (or lapse-charted) space, or a sprawling city and exploring the environment's dangers and wonders.

Exploration usually involves movement, so this section covers the rules for moving when you're not in an encounter. During exploration, you interact with your environment in various ways: pushing objects around, fiddling with control systems, searching rooms, forcing security measures, and breaking other people's things. The last part of this section includes rules for that.

Movement

Movement is what gets you from encounter to encounter and from one place to another within an encounter. This section provides rules for movement between encounters, whereas "Movement and Position" [pp] explains movement during a combat encounter.

Often a DM can summarize your movement, without figuring out exact distances or travel times: "You travel your charted course for three days at subspace speed and reach the orbital platform." Even in a station, particularly a large colony or cavern system, your DM can summarize movement between encounters: "After forcing entry to the rear hangar bay and normalizing pressure, you wander through miles of abandoned station hallway and catwalk before you arrive at a deep declivity, the remnants of severe hull damage to the platform, the site you were sent to investigate."

Your DM might evocatively describe the terrain you pass over, but the encounters along the way are the focus of your adventures. Sometimes it's important however, to know how long it takes to get from one encounter to another, whether the answer is days, hours, or minutes.

Surface Travel

The rules to figure out travel time depend on two factors: your speed and the terrain you're moving over. There is usually a means of insertion that will take you to your drop point at decent speed and without hassle, but sometimes there's just no getting around hoofing it. The Base Overland Speed table shows how much distance a character who has a given speed covers in 36000 seconds and in 60 seconds. A group of travelers moves at the slowest traveler's pace, so most groups use the table's first row to accommodate the slowest.

• 36000s: This is marching pace for roughly 10 hours of straight travel. Further marching may tire you out, reducing your additional pace. The added benefits of your powered armor are about counterbalanced by its mass. You can push yourself to roughly twice this speed, but suffer penalties and fatigue for doing so.
• 60s: Your speed per minute on the above table assumes a walking pace and is intended for travel that takes less than an hour. If you're in a hurry, you can move at twice this speed.

Terrain

The distances on the above table assume clear to moderately busy terrain. Other terrain does slow your progress. For great distances through dense terrain, your DM will assign a fractional amount for how much distance you can cover—for example 70% or 90% terrain—and refigure your speed accordingly.

Usually, flying characters can ignore these fractions and terrain.

Land Vehicles

When traveling long distances outdoors, you can use vehicles to increase your speed. These vary greatly in capacity, range, fuel, and cost. As a ballpark, you can expect to move at 40 times your own speed using a vehicle.

[vehicle speeds]

Common Planetary Travel

Many colonized planets and stations have their own systems of travel: high speed trains, mass transfer stations, atmospheric craft, with timetables and routes and security systems of their own. Once you are on a planet, it is usually not difficult to comply with local laws and customs for simple movement from place to place, for a cost usually comped by your commander.

As a baseline, common travel systems are able to move you a distance of 6000km in 1200 seconds, or roughly 5km/s of mid-travel time.

Delays usually account for an average of 3600s of flat additional transit time. Your DM may assign a percentage to this as well based on any number of factors.

Entering a colonized planet usually involves going through the port authority and bringing a local pilot aboard to perform final navigation to the surface.

Intra-sector Travel

The galaxy is subdivided into chunks of space that are easy to travel through called sectors. Within sectors, the technology to move ships at subspace speed has been miniaturized to the size of frigate class vessels: ships about the size of a small building. Consequently there are many ships that can take you between planets in a sector, and interplanetary travel is not difficult to find. Automated systems manage routes through the gradient of space using least-mass-lines called simply "lines" by navigators. Travel times are much faster with LCS than RCS.

LCS stands for local coordinate systems, and uses markers, cues, and readings charted by vessels going through the same place based on heavenly bodies within the galaxy, relatively nearby stuff.

RCS stands for remote coordinate systems, and uses other galaxies as reference points for charting a course. Because routes of this kind cannot account for the gradient you will travel through, it is infinitesimally unlikely you will hit a least-mass-line, and on average journeys charted this way take twice as long.

Regardless, the various planets you might visit each have known travel distances, and you will use these to travel within a sector.

Inter-sector Travel

The strata between sectors is akin to an ocean between land masses. Only specialized platforms are able to establish fields that can traverse the distance, and the technology for which requires massive structures called Wheels. Only the most wealthy and orderly planets possess Wheels, and each is a fantastic structure of legendary status. Consequently, one must travel first to a Wheel before spanning a sector, and even then the journey is lengthy and costly.