Expanded Iridium Moons map doodle

Because scope creep is a fact of life, I’ve been tinkering with several ideas to give some additional detail for the rest of known space outside of the Foross Sector, which has become heavily inspired by the Tales of the Jedi and Knights of the Old Republic comics.

Since I am always bad with names and leave that up until the very last moment (or never), I’ve been using the names of Star Wars planets that are similar to what I have in mind for the various worlds of Iridium Moons. Might always give Star Wars nerds like me some reference for what you might be looking at.

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As Space Opera settings go, Known Space of Iridium Moons is rather small. It covers only a short segment of a single spiral arm. The low density of stars and lack of abundance of heavy elements outside the spiral arm has channeled exploration and colonisation away from the galactic center and into the more dense regions towards the galactic edge from the core systems. There are at least dozens and perhaps even hundreds of small colonized planets with populations numbers in the thousands, which are not shown on this map at this stage. The exception are the planets of the Foross Sector, which are the main focus region that almost all of my specific detail work goes into. Which are in the center top of the map.

Unlike Star Wars, Iridium Moons does not have one big Galactic Empire, or even an Old Republic and a Sith Empire facing off in an epic struggle for control of the entire galaxy.

The Directorate of United Systems (blue) is a federation of four homeworlds and five major colonies over 100 million inhabitants, that each have complete autonomy over their local internal governance and planetary defense, plus a large number of minor worlds with varying forms of dependency on the major worlds. Each of the nine worlds elects a delegate to the Directorate that is in charge of all diplomacy, economic policy, and the Directorate Navy.

The Confederated Worlds (red) is a more loosely organized block of largely self-governing worlds. While in theory a community of equals, the economic, industrial, and military dominance of the enkai homeworld gives its government the power to largely dictate policy to the other member worlds. The worlds of the confederation maintain their own fleets and ground troops, but all are integrated into a single command structure under the High Command.

The Star League (green) is purely a defensive alliance of fully sovereign states. It is centered around the chosa homeworld, which has long resisted any efforts to be pulled into the Confederated Worlds, with a number of other neighboring worlds making considerable concessions to the chosa to gain an insurance against falling under confederate control.

The three great blocks see each others as rivals and competitors, but are all engaged in large scale trade with each other. None of them want to deal with the enormous costs and unpredictable risks of a full scale war between them, and instead are always looking for every possible opportunity to gain a more advantageous position over the others that will give them greater leverage in trade negotiations and relationships with minor worlds. None of the three great powers have ever attempted to land ground forces and occupy member worlds of the other powers, but the stopping and confiscating of ships, raids against orbital infrastructure, and blockades of planets happen somewhere along the borders every few years or so for some reason or another, which all sides understand to be mostly saber rattling to force concessions in some dispute or another.

Traveller is Retro-Futuristic

Traveller is an endlessly fascinating game to explore in the 2020s. Its first release was only three years after Dungeons & Dragons, but unlike D&D, which really is just a name and a couple of archetypes attached to a number of very different games, the revised 2nd edition Traveller from Mongoose has changed very little from Classic Traveller. Even though there have been about as many different edition over the last 48 years. And like D&D is sticking to some mechanical elements because they are traditional, even though their original purpose hasn’t existed for over 30 years, Mongoose Traveller is sticking to some terminology even when it’s completely outdated by now. While Traveller is presented specifically as a generic sci-fi game about characters who own and operate a small private cargo ship, and the rulebooks of the various editions come with no description of an assumed default setting, fans have long recognized that, just like the earliest edition of D&D, there is actually a lot of worldbuilding being done in the tables and character options. If you don’t alter the tables and mechanics to make the rules fit the world you have in mind for your own campaign, they do reveal quite a lot about the default assumptions that probably seemed obvious and not requiring any explicit mention at the time of writing almost 50 years ago.

The first thing where I noticed it is with the types of armor. One of the basic types of body armor is “flak jacket”, which comes at the standard Tech Level 7 version and the improves TL8 version. Flack jackets were an early type of modern body armor common in the Vietnam War and introduced in the early 50s. So a TL5 technology. The flak jacket can be seen as an ancestor of modern (TL7) ballistic armor. But calling those flak jackets is like calling a modern car a motor carriage. In the mid-70s, this was an appropriate term to use. I don’t know if sticking with it was a deliberate choice or ignorance on the side of the most recent writer, but I do find it quite endearing. Maybe the world of Traveller is so retro-futuristic now that they actually do have flak jackets in space?

Another thing that had been puzzling me for a while is with some of the Trade Codes. They have names like “Industrial”, “Poor”, “Ice-capped”, or “Non-Agricultural”, that seem like they would be entirely self-explanatory. But creating some planets and checking which Trade Codes apply to them, I found it weird to see some codes applying to worlds where I think they don’t fit, or planets not qualifying to a code that I think they really should have. “Industrial” is the one that stands out the most. Somehow none of the homeworlds of the big shipbulding species and their major factory worlds did qualify for being “Industrial”. Either their population was too small, or their atmosphere wasn’t one of the correct types. So let’s flip the question around: What conditions are required to have an Industrial World.

As it turns out, the planet must have a population of at least 1 billion people. So just having a planet whose economy is dominated by heavy industry is not enough. It has to be industry on a massive scale. And second, the atmosphere has to be either non-existent, tainted, exotic, corrosive, or insidious. Or, in all cases, non-breathable to humans.

“Why would anyone pick a planet where they can’t breath to settle a billion people?” I was asking. But that’s looking at it from the wrong side. Nobody would do that. Instead, the planet started with a population of billions of people, and then the air became unbreathable. That’s the intended meaning of an “Industrial World”.

I was born in the mid-80s. I didn’t become aware of what was going on in the world until the early 90s. I remember acid rain. I remember Forest Death. I remember lakes being covered in dead fish as far as the eye can see. I remember “wild mushrooms are radioactive”, and the latest reports of radioactive contamination in milk. Americans might remember the river being on fire 14 times in Cleveland alone. Yes, climate chance can cause a lot of damage on a global scale. But toxic pollution and it’s local and regional environmental effects before the 90s were on a level that is hard to comprehend now. The idea that a planet with a focus on heavy industry on a massive scale would be a toxic wasteland probably seemed very logical and obvious back in the mid 70s.

That’s why the industry has to be on such a massive scale of billions of people. If the population is smaller, they don’t have the capacity to poison the global atmosphere. And if air is still breathable, then it is not “industrial”, no matter how big its manufacturing sector and its output of goods is. Almost all the goods that can be found on Industrial worlds (excepts polymers and robots) can also be found on High Tech worlds. So non-apocalyptic advanced manufacturing is possible in the world of Traveller. Though High Tech means Tech Level 12 or higher. Which is very high.

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.

Psychic Powers in Iridium Moons

Magic is probably the biggest challenge with worldbuilding I’ve always had. I do like supernatural and mystic stuff, but I just really don’t care for magic spells. I always knew that I wanted to have a mystical element in Iridium Moons, but always kept that off for later. Early on in the development of the setting, when I wanted to stick to realistic physics, demographics, and economy unless necessary for a Space Opera, I had the idea that people could be trained to have a greatly heightened sense of intuition by subconsciously processing information in parallel to logical reasoning. That seems physically and biologically possible. That idea was very much inspired by the mentats from Dune.

I’ve been diving into Traveller for the last three weeks, and that game does come with a default optional system for psionic powers. It’s very generic (like everything in Traveller) and basic, and from what I’ve been reading across the internet, most people never use it in their campaigns. Even though they does exist in the official setting, psionics are super illegal in the main empire as it is very strongly associated with their main rivals as their signature power. So illegal and hidden underground, that it could just as well not exist in most campaigns, and just way more trouble than it’s worth by painting a big target on your back. I can understand that. It’s not really interesting or inspiring as written, and the most popular setting makes it even more unattractive to characters.

But last week, James Maliszewski wrote about the big impact that spiritism and Theosophy had on Pulp Fantasy. Which reminded me of the very similar story of how psychic powers became a default element of sci-fi in the 50s to 70s. Some very prominent writers and a very influential magazine editor had really high hopes in the big breakthrough in parapsychology research being just around the corner and gave it a big presence in many of the popular stories of the time. I made the deliberate choice to step away from realism and tilt fully over to straight up space fantasy and to go for a very retro-futuristic aesthetic. I think classic psychic powers are pretty much a must for that.

My still early idea for Iridium Moons is that the psionic field is a regular element of the physics of the universe and always has been, but it is usually only interacting very weakly with the electromagnetic field that controls electricity, magnetism, radiation, and atomic bonds. So weakly that it’s an almost invisible phenomenon in everyday life, and that almost no creatures have ever naturally evolved to gain any traces of psionic powers.

However, a rare mineral called midorin, that only forms naturally on planets inhospitable to life, does significantly amplify interactions between the electromagnetic and psionic fields. Midorin is a soft and brittle, pale green mineral similar to soapstone or asbestos. Many reports of mines on remote planets being haunted and miners having uncannily accurate dreams and hallucinations were traced back to traces of midorin in the rock. Near high concentrations of midorin, the mere presence of people can cause anomalous physical changes in the environment as their brain activity disturbs the psionic field, which amplified by the midorin affects electromagnetic phenomenons.

Miners working in midorin-rich rock were the first people to display signs of real telepathic abilities, that only had been considered as archaic superstition and fraud for centuries. These abilities were connected to particles of midorin dust they had breathed in and made their way into their brain. This led to the development of the synthetic drug midorinol that can be injected into a person’s brain and then be subjected to radiation that causes it to form networks of microscopic midorin crystals inside the the brain’s neural pathways. These midorin filaments then serve as an amplifying antenna between the brain’s neurons and the psionic field. Disturbances in the psionic field can stimulate reactions in neurons, making it possible to sense psionic phenomenons and activity. And in reverse, electrical activity in the brain can produce psionic waves.

Over time it became clear that only a limited number of people possess specific brain structures that make it possible to learn to use this psionic sense to manifest useful powers. And of course, with a procedure as this, there is always a considerable risk of causing significant brain damage to the subject. While midorinol is quite expensive, psionic researchers are always looking for volunteers (or other subjects) who are physiologically suited to attempt the procedure, to study the process of developing psionic powers. They will often cover the entire costs, and in some cases even pay people for agreeing to undergoing the procedure, as long as the subject agrees to be studied while undergoing training, typically for a four year period.

Psionic powers in Iridium Moons cover the aspects of telepathy, clairvoyance, and awareness (which is actually body control). Teleportation is definitely out, and I am currently leaning strongly towards excluding telekinesis as well. That still leaves quite a broad range of potential powers that characters can learn. Psionic characters are quite rare in society, but many organization manage to recruit small numbers of them into their ranks. Compared to many other magic systems, telepathic powers in Traveller are quite limited in what they can do, and psions can only use them for a few short moments before they become too exhausted to continue. Midorin compounds mixed into building materials make them opaque to psionic powers like a Faraday Cage interrupts electromagnetic signals. This makes it fairly easy to shield small spaces from psionic intrusion. Shielding individual people is also possible, but carrying psionic disrupting objects on the body for prolonged periods is disorienting and uncomfortable, as it scrambles the natural very subtle influence the psionic field has on all brains at all times. Alternatively, midorin-based drugs can suppress any psionic abilities in a person for several hours, and it is widely accepted that certain high security areas can only be entered by known psions if they take an injection. This is also commonly done for the apprehending and arresting of psions, but keeping them drugged long term without holding them in a shielded area instead is widely seen as abusive treatment of prisoners.

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.

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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.

Click to embiggen.

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.