Star Wars

More Star Wars/Traveller ship scale

Today’s contribution to I Made It So I Might As Well Share It. Might be interesting or useful to someone else as well.

A selection of some of the most iconic Star Wars ships at the same scale, with their respective volume in Traveller tons. (Traveller calls a volume of 14m³ a ton for interesting but annoying reasons. It’s the unit for designing space ship interior deck plans.)

As the eagle-eyed have already spotted, this image does not include Star Destroyers as they would reduce anything else to small smudges of grey pixels. But I did calculate their volume, and the classic Imperial class Star Destroyer would be 5,000,000 tons, and the much less ludicrously scaled Victory class 900,000 tons. On the end of the scale, both the YT-1300 Millennium Falcon and the Airbus A320 passenger plane are about 40 tons. (Much to small to have a hyperspace jump drive in Traveller.)

The rapid increase in volume compared to only slight differences in exterior size may seem off, but that’s a simple optical illusion by the brain just not being any good at comprehending the relationship of length to volume. Cones in particular look like they should be similar in volume to a cylinder with the same base and length, but is only a third of that. And the Strike is much more of a cylinder compared to the Dreadnought being almost rectangular with rounded corners. And the Saturn-V rocket has 85% of its volume in the thickest section that makes up two thirds of it’s length. That’s how you can easily fit three of them into the considerably shorter but more than double as wide GR-75 freighter.

Dynamic Stories in a Static World

This morning I was pondering a particularly stupid paradox of my views about good worldbuilding. I think most long running series of anything decay over time because the progression of the story increasingly chips away at the worldbuilding elements that made the setting interesting in the first place. Particularly when it comes to campaign settings for roleplaying games, moving the timeline forward a few years or decades always seems like a really bad development. I’ve long been thinking that my disinterest in any new Star Wars story for almost 20 years now is precisely because the Clone Wars era and the Feloniverse are set in a world that is very different from Classic Star Wars in the 80s and 90s. (Though that’s actually going back in time rather than moving ahead, but it’s still a case of being a very different setting.) When you have a story that is about dealing with a particular situation in the world, and you continue the story after that situation has been resolves, it’s not really set in the same world anymore. Which is why for example Mass Effect has nowhere to move forward after three games that establish a conflict in the first game and resolve it in the third game. The Mass Effect setting doesn’t actually have anything interesting going on in it other than the Reapers situation.

Yet how this becomes a stupid paradox is because my whole core concept about Iridium Moons as a setting to have many different stories take place in, is all about a struggle of regular people fighting back against a kleptocratic elite. It’s a setting based on a specific situation, made for stories about resolving that situation. Players are meant to contribute to a greater struggle to break the power of the oligarchy, but as I established above, I also don’t want the situation to change in any meaningful way.

“But tonight I say: We must move forward, not backward! Upward, not forward! And always twirling! Twirling! Twirling!”

But this conflict in priorities is not actually that bad, and the solution to it is really not that difficult. Instead of asking at the end of a particular story “And what happens next?”, the question should be “And what has happened somewhere else, at the same time?”

The issue with movies in particular is that the faces of the main actors are a huge part of the marketing and advertising campaign for any follow up movies. But also in videogames, stories are often written specifically to get the players attached to specific main characters. (Mostly happens in games that try to emulate blockbuster movies the most. Who would have thunk?) But it does not have to be that way. The Dragon Age games, even though they are all set one after the other with a kind of ongoing metaplot continuing through all of them, each mostly have a completely different cast of characters. As do the Fallout games or Elder Scrolls games. (Which also always advance the timeline. Why?!)

Many popular long running series are set up from the start to be about a small group of characters first, and the setting build around them to accommodate their story. Since the stories of specific characters are linear, and the characters are the main selling point of these stories, there are difficulties in adding more stories that aren’t added to the end of the latest installment. (Or in front of the earliest installment.) But when designing a world from the ground up to instead accommodate several stories of different characters happening in different places during roughly the same time period, this is a situation that is very easy to avoid. It’s a corner I really don’t have to paint myself into. I know I want to use this world in two or three campaigns over the coming years, and maybe manage to make a little Godot game or two also taking place in it. Each story can be about toppling one villainous oligarch on one of the three planet, making one big step towards the ultimate goal that I have no intention to ever see playing out.

Of course, I have the luxury of not being beholden to corporate suits who’s main priority is to monetize the face of some world famous movie stars. But then again, Fallout has been a huge success even with the continuity between stories being just fan service and not being relevant to each story. If you want to have a world that can be reused for many stories and does not change with each story, and your vision does not revolve around finishing that ultimate battle where evil is destroyed for good, then there really isn’t anything that would force you into that situation in the first place.

Star Wars ships are massive! But Traveller ships aren’t small either.

A few years ago I made a size comparison of the various classic Star Wars ship types in GIMP. But I only compared the ships against each other.

Yesterday, I was trying to get a sense of scale for ships in Traveller, as they are not usually measured in length but by volume. The CR90 corvette from Star Wars is fairly easy to measure for a volume estimate, having the volume of 4,500 tons of liquid hydrogen. (Relevant xkcd joke here.) With the Patrol Corvette from Traveller being 400 tons, and the tables for ship design in Cepheus Engine only going up to 5000 tons, that had me wonder how small ships in Traveller are. And how big even the smaller ships in Star Wars actually are. So I made this scale comparison for the CR90 corvette, the smallest big ship in Star Wars.

Those are big.

The A380 might not have been a good size comparison, as these planes are gigantic. It makes a Saturn V rocket look somewhat unimpressive. So today, I made this size comparison too.

The Iowa class is one of the biggest warships ever build. Even slightly longer than the Yamato, though not nearly as thick in the hips. Even the flimsy looking Nebulon-B frigate that disappears in the background in battles between the big hitters in Star Wars is bigger than that.

The A320 is by far the most common plane for passenger flights inside Europe. It’s the only plane I’ve ever been on, and when you look out the window at an airport terminal, almost everything is either an A320 or equivalent size. It’s volume can be approximated as a cylinder 37 meters long and 4 meters wide, plus let’s say +20% for the wings. Which comes out as 40 tons of liquid hydrogen. That’s only 40% the minimum size for a ship to install even the smallest possible Jump Drive. The classic Free Trader is a 200 ton ship. Five times as a big as an A320.

I also calculated that the Millennium Falcon would be 160 tons. That’s 4 times the volume of an A320. Can that be right?

It indeed does check out. It’s a bit sad that we never got any wide shots of it with people crawling under and over it (probably because that would be much more expensive to film), but it is a pretty big ship.

Have I had enough Star Wars?

As far as I recall, I saw Star Wars for the first time at about this time of the year, 30 years ago in 1995. Star Wars has been my favorite thing in fiction ever since.

But the last Star Wars work that I was invested in was the Knights of the Old Republic comic series that ran from 2006 to 2010. Which ended 15 years ago. Before that, the last two Star Wars works that engaged me were KotOR and Jedi Academy in 2003. That’s 22 years ago.

I have been a fan of old Star Wars stories almost three times longer than I was a fan of current Star Wars stories.

And I still am a huge fan of the three movies and many of the great works from the 90s and the early 2000s. But I also feel that the old setting might have been played out, and its potential for additional stories sufficiently explored and exhausted. As a gamemaster, I always felt like the classic Star Wars setting is a great world for endless adventures. You can always have more stories with new heroes, and new villains, and new planets. But in practice, it feels to me like mostly just more of the same. Things get renamed and reshuffled, but it’s mostly the same old pieces with the same old plots. And they are great and exciting pieces and plots. But they have already been done.

There is of course always the option to come up with new kinds of heroes and new kinds of villains who are dealing with different issues and conflicts. But in that case, why set those stories in Star Wars? For movie, TV, and videogame productions, the answer is simple. Brand recognition. Millions of people will throw a lot of money at almost everything because it is branded as Star Wars. But as a hobbyist who has no means to commercialize something with the Star Wars brand, that point is moot.

Star Wars does still endlessly inspire me to do and make new things. New ideas for new cultures, new factions, and new conflicts that can produce new stories. But in this creative space, tying everything to the framework of Star Wars does not support and enhance the new ideas, but rather restricts and limits them. With Iridium Moons, I do have the full freedom to just do my own things, and execute all my own new ideas as a coherent world that does not have to struggle against its foundations.

The Star Wars d6 RPG is such a great and exciting game, and even the d20 Saga Edition is very evocative in its own way. But I feel to me, as a GM, the setting has been played out. I still love the idea of running Star Wars campaigns, but when I sit down to sketch out a draft for adventures, I do find this world quite lacking in hooks for new stories to tell in it.

Star Wars has stopped expanding on its original form a long, long time ago. And all the new forms people have come up with to extend the profits that can be extracted from the brand have been doing nothing for me. And I don’t have any ideas for how to do more with that classic world either. So perhaps it has become time to reframe my relationship with Star Wars as a deep love for three movies and a few books and comics that I can take from the shelf every year to enjoy them for what they are, rather than as this endless playground that should be expanded into perpetuity. And I think I can keep that love going for another 50 years.

TK-421, do you copy?

Has been quite a while since I’ve done anything RPG related.

For the last year, I’ve been learning about videogame design and using Godot and Blender. Something that is still ongoing and I expect for a long while, but no, there is nothing I have to show yet.

Last week I started playing in Geoffrey’s Old School Star Wars campaign on Grenzland, because I was only going to be a player and it’s a rules light system, so nothing was required of me other than show up for a few hours. Which is a very different kind of activity than preparing and running a campaign in a game like modern D&D. It was an immediate blast. Even though my only die roll was a single shot at a stormtrooper. (Which missed.)

And of course it had me right away thinking that running a rules-light system in an open-ended swashbuckling campaign wouldn’t actually be much more work and a time commitment. For the last months, I’ve been more or less settling on working on a small videogame set in a new incarnation of my Iridium Moons space opera setting, and happened to be browsing the Scum and Villainy rulebook for ideas and inspirations. Right now, a Scum and Villainy campaign in the new Iridium Moons in the not so distant future might be a real possibility, as it wouldn’t really conflict with my videogame hobby.

While cleaning out the spam comments that had build up over the last year (most were tracksbacks that didn’t get caught by Antispam-Bee), I also saw that there’s been 19 actual comments here on older posts since the last time I wrote something. Really cool.

I also noticed that I never actually updated the link to my Mastodon profile. I’ve not been using the old for a year now. It’s fixed now.

Campaigns I’d like to run one day

Old-School Essentials Sword & Sorcery West Marches campaign set in Kaendor, exploring the ancient ruins of the northern forests which have only recently begun to being settled by groups of people fleeing the reach of the sorcerer kings in the south.
Iridium Moons: Coriolis homebrew Space Opera campaign about two merchant cartels fighting over who is going to have a monopoly on trade after the last large mining company pulls out of the sector, and their attempts to make the many small independent mines completely economically dependent on them.
Shadows of the Sith Empire: A Star Wars d6 campaign set after the Dark Side ending of Knights of the Old Republic, in which a new Sith Empress controls a quarter of the Old Republic’s systems and is sending her agents out to search for lost ancient Sith texts that hold the secret of how Marka Ragnos and his predecessors managed to hold their empire together and how she might prevent her own apprentices from inevitably turning against her.
The Outer Rim: A Star Wars d6 campaign set right after the destruction of the Death Star at the height of the Empire’s power. The party consists of former senatorial aides and guards and imperial officers who have fled to hide in the Outer Rim among the smugglers, scoundrels, and gamblers to escape the purges in the core worlds. Meanwhile the new Moff of Enarc has decided to establish order in the space between Sullust and Tatooine by putting an end to the fighting over spice smuggling between the Hutts and Black Sun. Imperial crackdowns and increased fighting between the two syndicates to be the one that gets to keep the region for itself only increases the chaos and raises sympathy for a rebellion against the empire.
The Heart of Darkness: Dungeons & Dragons Planescape campaign that focuses on the rarely visited planes Beastlands, Ysgard, Pandemonium, Carceri, and Gehenna and revolving around an arcanaloth, a rogue asura with an army of Fated, the Revolutionary League, and the Doomguard trying to gain control over a terrible artifact of entropy.
Murky Waters: A Mutant: Year Zero campaign set in the islands that are left of Denmark, Northern Germany, Northern Poland, and Southern Sweden after an 80m sea level rise. The mainland is completely uninhabitable by clouds of deadly fungus spores, but the salt of sea water keeps the fungus from taking hold on small islands in the stormy sea.
Sankt Pauli bei Nacht: Vampire campaign set in Hamburg, with a brewing conflict between old Ventrue shipping magnates and Bruja activists over which neighborhoods are their rightful territory as gentrification changes the social environment. With Malkavians claiming the rowdy entertainment district in the harbor, and a gang of Nosferatu the subway systems. And going all the way back to the concepts of the first edition, it’s actually going to be personal horror.