Hyperspace confusion!
I’m a wee confused as to how hyperspace lanes and gates are laid out in Scum & Villainy. At first I thought it was like Fading Suns with a gate per system, but the hopping in and out of lanes in-system threw me off. Are there multiple in-system gates/lanes and foolhardy and skilled crews can “off road” onto a lane?I Googled about such things as they pertain to Cowboy Bebop, but it didn’t really help.
Yes, I know I need to watch that anime! 🙂
Cowboy beebop is a good touchstone here. And Fading suns isn’t a bad one either. Maybe the cheesy Andromeda show with slipstream lanes?
One of the issues with Fading Suns though is in-system travel. For us (using understood conventional sublight) to reach the outside of a system and not deal with relativistic nonsense would take months to a year (or more). And since you want exciting jobs where you have to make the run in a day or two … that’s not going to work.
So we cheat a little. If you imagine that travel through normal space is like hiking, but there are roads around, that’s roughly what you have. Just realize that the roads are laid out somewhat static, but the cities (aka planets/moons/etc) spin around way faster. So you don’t always take the freeway to the suburb. When the suburb is east you take a different road.
Good astrogators know how to do that, when to go over the fields to avoid people watching the on/off-ramps and when to take side roads (dark hyperspace lanes).
Does that help? Want me to expound more? Got more questions?
The only thing I’m still wondering is if there are a bunch of in-system gates or, like Fading Suns, one big gate to jump between systems. From my (limited) understanding, Cowboy Beebop has a gate per in-system lane.
Oh, as a tangent, great call on using “Ur”! It made it almost a requirement to add the Ur-Obun and Ur-Ukar (from Fading Suns). 🙂 We have the Obun as “higher citizens”, found mostly toward the Core and in key Hegemonic positions. The Ukar are less fortunate (much of such misfortune having to do with a failed insurrection), being more prevalent in the underworld, dark Way cults and edge systems.
Anyway, thanks and have a very Merry Christmas!
One big gate on the edge for system jumps.
Funny enough in our games, we do have smaller Starsmith-made gates at points of the lane that help you ‘translate’ in smoothly and efficiently (this is a bit more like Babylon 5 jumpgates) but I hope groups at home talk about this and decide how they like it and customize the fiction to their game. This isn’t cannon as it were ^_~ I know some crews like to have countdown clocks till you can jump into the hyperspace lane etc. Depends on what are your touchstones, and how you like to have heists be interesting.
I’m smiling really broadly at how you adopted the language. 😀 We were hoping to encourage this kind of taking the broad strokes we lay down and make them your own-so this is awesome.
We used Ur for two reasons. It gave us a short phrase we could use when we were tight on space (like for powers) and it’s German/Sumerian so it’s not trademarked or anything 😛 (you have ur-text etc).
I really like the idea of a bunch of mini-gates built and maintained by the Guilds (nothing anywhere near the Ur gates, but they facilitate in-system travel). I also totally dig the idea of a hotshot crew pulling the maneuver of “drafting” (breaching a lane mid-run by “latching” onto the ever-present residual energies of ships that have passed). This requires an adept sensor operator to detect the energy traces, a proficient engineer to attune the engines to the translation matrices and a steady pilot to breach the lane smoothly. If not done properly, a ship can sip into a hyperspace lane while still attuned to realspace and find itself ground to atoms by two dimensions. Drafting is illegal but enough find the practice worth it to evade gate tolls and (more often) pursuit. Hegemonic law enforcement vessels are often equipped with technologies which make the practice much safer.
Anyway, that got all rambley. 😉 Thanks a million, Stras!