Long range exploration
Long range exploration posted in Homemade Settings, World Building & Galaxy Construction forum comment posted by uncle_jimbo With
Rim Expeditions,
Deepnight Revelation and a couple of things the Zhodani have done,
Traveller GMs (not only from Mongoose publications) now have a picture coming together how ships can travel and (necessarily, eventually) place forward bases at extended distances from a polity's usually accepted territory.
These are slightly bigger and definitely older nations than in
Star*Drive. They have a few difficult factors in ship technology and astrography compared to our setting. The figure of 200 parsecs (about 650 light-years) seems to come up for the Solomani, for no particular reason I can see - maybe a mapping influence. Building a supporting settlement there, the civilisation can extend operations further. If there's a physical reason for that distance, it might be different in a galactic rimward than coreward direction or between galactic arms (which, instead, might be objectives).
For a setting with a shorter history and more restrictive technology again,
2300AD has the
Bayern expedition just setting out to the Pleiades, which are within stellar nations' territory for
Star*Drive.
We know mass reactor capabilities that we have can be extended in a couple of ways, but with standard technology (built into standard Super-Heavy ships, which are not cheap or quick to build from scratch for a requirement), it's convenient, no more, to travel out for up to three months and return in the same time. 90 days can fit a little more than 10 starfalls, so I might expect a slight threshold at 500 light-years. In the map that we have, distances from (current) borders to (the near edge of names of) frontier regions are about 300 light-years, which we can corroborate for the Verge as 250 light-years. It's possible the stellar nations haven't unified and directed their efforts (and have had no reason) to launch really distant expeditions, which now can be contemplated.
Post replies at
AlternityRPG.net forum#alternity #rpg #alternity-rpg
