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[Max White]

That's not mysticism. That's a race/species. It's not mysticism until they turn into bat-tigers every seventh Tuesday afternoon.

I don't know, I mean fish seducing people? It's got to be magic! 

[Retro]

A lot of weird things can happen in the universe, but 'remarkable scientific phenomenon' and 'can shoot fireballs or turn into a wolf' are in distinctly different categories.

So, what do you call small-ish plasma cannon, other than a wand of fireballs? Make it small enough and implant it in your finger and you don't even need the wand...

I would call it trying to force magic into a setting that's not about magic at all through the implementation of obscenely advanced technology. Guns and nanotechnology-that-you-implant-in-your-finger are a large jump apart. If you want to make a world with magic, it's a space-fantasy setting rather than a space opera. Yes, you can give me the whole spiel about how Trek-style beaming transport is the same as a teleport spell, but the transport hardware is substantial and requires both power and people to operate. If you remove that, it becomes magic-by-way-of-technology. Such things tend to just give people god-powers as well, heavily destablizing the balance of power players in the universe and generally serving as a good way of implementing boring, Mary Sue-like characters into your setting.

You guys don't even have a single planet or moon yet. I don't understand why you're all trying to heavily alter the genre setting to the point of turning it into another genre before you actually have a universe to even make these changes to.

[Max White]

You guys don't even have a single planet or moon yet. I don't understand why you're all trying to heavily alter the genre setting to the point of turning it into another genre before you actually have a universe to even make these changes to.

I want a star system! Let's start there.
I'm thinking your standard 'firefly' big style system, with many planets and moons, many colonisable to one degree or another.

[Rysith]

Yes, you can give me the whole spiel about how Trek-style beaming transport is the same as a teleport spell, but the transport hardware is substantial and requires both power and people to operate. If you remove that, it becomes magic-by-way-of-technology. Such things tend to just give people god-powers as well, heavily destablizing the balance of power players in the universe and generally serving as a good way of implementing boring, Mary Sue-like characters into your setting.

I'll admit to just debating somewhat for the fun of it, but isn't space opera all about playing around with highly advanced technology without needing to come up with anything more than hand-wavey explanations or fully think through all the implications? Where else do you get fusion torches, handheld energy weapons, and anything from Star Trek? Space Opera is magic and fantasy by way of technology, but it wears science-y sounding names[1] rather than Latin-y names. And that doesn't contribute any more to Mary Suing than anything else, in that you can write a perfectly non-Mary-Sue space opera[2] or include Mary Sues in non-fantasy works

[1] Dilithium crystals, antimatter drive, deflector shield, etc.

[2] See, for example, Schlock Mercenary

[Retro]

Yes, you can give me the whole spiel about how Trek-style beaming transport is the same as a teleport spell, but the transport hardware is substantial and requires both power and people to operate. If you remove that, it becomes magic-by-way-of-technology. Such things tend to just give people god-powers as well, heavily destablizing the balance of power players in the universe and generally serving as a good way of implementing boring, Mary Sue-like characters into your setting.

I'll admit to just debating somewhat for the fun of it, but isn't space opera all about playing around with highly advanced technology without needing to come up with anything more than hand-wavey explanations or fully think through all the implications? Where else do you get fusion torches, handheld energy weapons, and anything from Star Trek? Space Opera is magic and fantasy by way of technology, but it wears science-y sounding names[1] rather than Latin-y names. And that doesn't contribute any more to Mary Suing than anything else, in that you can write a perfectly non-Mary-Sue space opera[2] or include Mary Sues in non-fantasy works

[1] Dilithium crystals, antimatter drive, deflector shield, etc.

[2] See, for example, Schlock Mercenary

Yeah, I agree totally with that sort of stuff. It's when you get down to stuff like nanotechnology that shoots fire or lasers or whatnot without any real apparent technological source that I get uppity. And hell yes, <3 Schlock Mercenary.

I want a star system! Let's start there.
I'm thinking your standard 'firefly' big style system, with many planets and moons, many colonisable to one degree or another.

Good place to start. I'll throw in the concept of a few planet with their own 'belts' of moons all sharing the same orbits (the moons in relation to each planet, not the planets themselves) for anyone else to build off of. When I'm a bit less busy, and if this has really kicked off, I'll probably come back and properly start contributing. I love space opera.

[Taricus]

I'm interested, I have plans to make the empire
.
And Rysith, An antimatter drive could just be an engine.

[Singularity-SRX]

Well, I'll get started on making my star/solar system, I've always wanted to do something like this

I can also do a bit of pixel art, for ships and such
I could probably link my DA, but it has my photo and a bit of personal information on there, so I'll have to remove/change some of it.

[Nadaka]

I did find it kind of odd that one of the first responses to this thread was basically "great! can I take all your ideas and sell them for profit?"

As for the generator, I find it helps to open my imagination when I have somewhere to start. The way I look at it is that I as an author/designer am exploring these worlds, and when I find an interesting one, I stop and build something there and I don't have to worry about my foundation being too shaky.

When you go to create a fictional solar system you have 4 options.
1: model everything almost exactly on our solar system, this gives you realistic orbital parameters and planet qualities because they are real. But you don't get any variety.
2: Make stuff up and don't give a damn, this leads to problems where you get the wrong length of year, temperature, travel times, etc for a all your planets.
3: Do the hard math yourself. Calculate the orbital parameters and physical qualities of planets to the best extend that your knowledge of physics, chemistry and astronomy will allow for several planets and dozens of moons.
4: Use a tool that does the most of the heavy lifting for you.

[Rysith]

I'm interested, I have plans to make the empire
.
And Rysith, An antimatter drive could just be an engine.

Oh, yes. An antimatter drive is just an engine. The trick, though, is storing and containing your antimatter, making your rocket nozzle out of something that doesn't melt, and still getting a reasonable thrust (and thrust/mass ratio) out of it. 'Realistic' rocket engines tend to be either inefficient but have high thrust (LOX/peroxide/etc.) or efficient but have extremely low thrust (ion, some of the theoretical deep-space ones). High-thrust/high-efficiency (more than .5G of thrust, less than 25% of spaceship mass as fuel[1]) reaction drives tend to need to operate with internal temperatures at or above intrasolar temperatures, and thus need advanced enough materials science that they might as well be magic[2]. The consequences of having materials that can comfortably operate at those temperatures also aren't normally explored (lasers tend to still be effective weapons, for example, and spaceships still normally detour around stars).

I have a few star systems lying around from a space RPG thing I ran, I'll throw a few pieces of it up when I have a chance.

[2] Numbers pulled out of the air, but they are a good approximation. The ones straddling the edge tend to be nuclear-powered and use clever ways of not dealing with the heat - Orion-types by using ablative pusher plates, nuclear lightbulbs and their derivatives by using the reaction mass as coolant (and dumping it before it gets hot enough to melt quartz).

[2] Reactionless or gravity-manipulation drives get around this, but also might as well be magic.

[Max White]

Antimatter would make for an energy source, as your using it to convert matter to energy, and it would make for missles, as it tends to make a lot of energy quickly, but as a means of propulsion? I don't get it... I mean it could power an ion drive, or even some 'magik' warp drive, but that dosn't make it a drive.

[tNok85]

Update - setting up a MediaWiki install.

Will need to decide how updates are added. Have some ideas, will throw them out soon.


Edit: Also, for 'licensing' concerns -
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Thoughts? Also, every author's name could be put on each page they contributed to (as suggested earlier) for sort of a 'double' protection. I'm not sure if everybody cares that much, but I'm sure some will care enough to not want their ideas exploited.

[Max White]

Oh cripes. I just answered a question about world-building forgetting where I was. Sorry about that.

Yeah. World-building. It's not like we all have a piece of software that can do that for us, and let us set our parameters how we want, one hemisphere at a time.

Hey, some people on this forum just stay here for the community.

I mean not me, I have replaced 'sleep' with 'play df' on my daily schedual, but reguardless. I thought we were moving away for computer genned worlds in, I don' know, some sort of writing project...

[tNok85]

As for all the debate on what should and shouldn't be allowed, I think we should set up a group of people (those most interested and willing to dedicate some time) to vote on these issues. That being pretty much everybody here who's interested.

Limits of physics in the world (just because we might not follow our knowledge of physics doesn't mean we should have none I think), establishing some consistency, magic vs. biology vs. technology, etc. etc.

[Singularity-SRX]

So what sections are we going to have to include for the wiki?

[tNok85]

So what sections are we going to have to include for the wiki?

Pretty much anything that comes up, I think.

Off the top of my head? An overall galaxy page, of course. Then solar systems, individual planets, moons/uninhabited planets of any note, major cities, ship types, specific ships, individuals who are important (politicians, political parties, military leaders, captains, smugglers, scientists, crime lords, etc), technologies, wars/battles/insurgencies, religions, races, species, natural phenomena etc.

Anything that might be important enough to deserve its own page would be a page. And obviously, index pages for all the categories listed above and any more that come up.

I'll have the bones up and running tomorrow.