Lore: How do I interstellar traveled?

(For a previous discussion of this and other topics, refer to this thread)

I'm co-writing the story for the ZK campaign with Saktoth, and we need to settle on the fluff/lore for how the commanders get around the galaxy. I'm welcoming ideas from the community in this matter.

The key design goals are:

• Suspension of disbelief
• Consistency with ZK/PlanetWars gameplay
• Ability to tell an interesting story (without necessarily being bound by common sci-fi tropes)

Some parameters/questions that you should consider answering:

• Unrestricted travel between any two arbitrary points in the galaxy is probably not desirable (makes distances/territory/astrography meaningless). If it exists, it should be difficult to get.
• Ships are cool (and in PW), so I'd like them if possible. On the other hand, why don't the ships just wipe the ground forces with a few well-placed kinetic strikes?
• For that matter, if the planet has a suitable moon, why don't I land on it and fling rocks at the primary?
• FTL is a near-universal space opera trope for a reason (unless you like your human characters taking really long naps), so I suspect you'll just have to put up with it. That said, we're open to ideas that don't involve FTL, even if we're extremely unlikely to use them.

Here's a sample idea that I came up with:
The commanders use (technobabble) to teleport between points in space. The travel range is energy-limited. Because of (technobabble), the energy requirement increases the further the destination is from a gravity well, so commanders land on planets rather than in deep space (also, they need to gather fuel for the next trip anyway).

So, anyone have any ideas you'd like to share?

quote: boundries set by their human controllers ... there are only a fixed number of dropships, each attached to a commander (who are themselves old tech, possibly).

That doesn't fit with Free Machines being a full-fledge Old-Tech Planetwars faction, because said faction lacks, resents, and seeks to eradicate the notion of "human controller" as such.

quote: This is not an orbital bombardment ship but a dropship.

Which, together with Old Tech idea, fits with PW universe perfectly - orbital bombardments and even planetkillers are there on the table, but dropships are for different purpose and do neither.

quote: jammers? low fidelity or scanners

Or just adventure. You simply don't know you're ending up in a fight before you actually end up in it, so you don't get to planetbust the opponent.

IF enemy presence is significant enough and known beforehand so you can nuke them, obviously, they will have anti's (ingame tech), fighter garrison (pw tech) or similar to prevent you doing just this.

As for PW compatibility.. I think its clear.. wormholes, artificial wormholes. Its no easy task to traverse them though, content has be as small as possible, sending information or nanobts, viruses is possible, anything bigger is impossible. Stabilizing wormhole costs insane ammounts of energy even for atom sized objects. Distorting time-space is not an easy deal.

Humans still need to travel in ships, robots can travel in the form of information/nanobots.

To create a new wormhole you either need to send a huge and slow ship with complex machinery, or send a small commander that builds up industry on the planet and construct wormhole stabilizer using local resources.

It would still take ages (a lot of them) for information to travel through the galaxy.

quote: deemed impossible

Not to the Ascended, i'd reckon. Once you enter the possibility of mind-upload, all bets are off.

If you add crazy-level biotech like Dynasty seems aimed for, you can do the following:
1) upload a mind from existing human
2) send uploaded mind and some machinery to other side
3) construct (clone) body using nano/biotech machinery.
4) graft mind into body.
5) assign title to the newly assembled noble commander, and get conquering the new domain! :P

If wormholes require the other end to support them, they are useless for rebellion suppression or as means to wage war. All your enemy has to do is turn off the receiver, and they are now immune to attack except by RKV or whatever sublight ship you assemble.

I'm going to assume then, that this low-matter hi-information package transit mechanism must be able to select arbitrary (maybe limited by range or other considerations) points where to target its projection of gray goo / whatever else.

4X-style, this means a huge bonus to factions who can replicate their representatives across worlds like this.

This leads to paradox: why don't free machines/ ascended /anybody else who can teleport themselves this way just go exponential, consuming whole planets at superluminal speeds?

A ready solution appears: war! Similar nano-teleported entities of opposing factions always seek to find and kill your new 'colonies' and your assembled-or-not commanders.

This leads to a game of deadly hide-and seek, where almost nobody gets to build up well enough to actually consume planets (except maybe their well-protected core worlds). Even factions that cannot project themselves at wormhole speed, must try to inhibit the other factions - and this is how you get Disorder.

quote: On the other hand, sending classical information, ordinary AIs of robots, is as simple as pressing download button.

This leaves out two cases:
- Free Machines. Nuff said.
- "Seeder ship" concept. You don't teleport a ready mind, fine. You still can construct a new representative of your faction on other side. Constructing a colony from such "seed" is bound to be much faster and cheaper than relativizing a sublighter to other side.

Mostly this would seem a natural expansion route to FM in first place, and then to anybody who doesn't mind mass cloning as their way into the future.

quote: As for free machines, perhaps they are using quantum computing too for their most advanced minds?

As long as you don't need one to make one (which is implicitly true since somebody had to build the first one without having one), it still leaves FM a seeder-capable faction.

Being able to transmit robots but not people leaves FM as the only faction actually capable of governing an interstellar empire, actually colonizing worlds, and conducting war in any way but remotely...?

MAybe a material explanation is better than 'Oh it is their programming explanation', but I think the idea of ancient lost technologies and gargantuan city-sized derelict spaceships is cool. FM is not a problem here because they still can only violate so much of their core programming (Remember how they lost PW to the empire: The Artifacts are capable of excercising total control over all AI's, which implies that the commanders are ancient tech even in the era of planetwars).

How do we tell a story with no FTL? Literally millions of years will pass between one meeting/battle and another. We could have each storyline take place within a single star system. But it makes jumping between plotlines impossible, you have to complete one before moving on to the next. Is it epic enough to make it worthwhile writing around and possibly constraining around? I like the idea of eons floating in space (though we already do it in the prequel) but it might just make writing harder.

Either way, the ship you describe with a small payload can exist with FTL as easily as without it. It may be best to explain the whole structure of self-replicating commanders as just the most effecient payload that a ship can send (since it can MAKE starlights, nukes, etc at it's destination). I like that explaination either way.


Truth is though we don't really want to explain the fluff in detail during the storyline. Maybe it could be somewhere, and it's nice to have it consistent, but reams of technical description does not make a good story. We can be pretty vague, saying little more than 'The Commander, capable of building entire armies within minutes of landing, is the most effecient payload any intergalactic warship could carry' without ever explaining whether we use hydrogen ram scoops, relativistic drives, foldspace or wormholes...


And I think it's important the hero be a Commander pilot, rather than a civilian on a liner. Otherwise it doesn't make much sense for her to wake up and be piloting a commander (Which she will be, because making her some disembodied talking head rather than a physical unit in the game, when we already HAVE a single hero commander unit as a part of the games design, is a total waste). Her commander frame puts her in stasis to preserve her during the set-up to the campaign. This makes her an engaged participant in a galactic war, too.

Saktoth why millions of years? If its all in bubble of tens of ly it can all take place within tens of years of time on individual planet and within few years of time of traveler between stars..

I dont see an issue here..
Also civilizaiton at this scale necessarily thinks in big numbers, big distances, big time units..

Sending a ship to far away system is huge task .. once established, wormhole integrates the new world into empire, but you wont got visiting your relatives :)