Almost all adventures in the Starflight Universe involve going somewhere and doing something, whether its talking to (or shooting at) an alien species, visiting a nearby planet to conduct some mining, or searching for a trade center on a planet's surface. Even those adventures that take place only at one site on a planet's involve movement. Movement is an integral part of the game. Keeping track of that movement is equally important, if not more so. Any character will be hard-pressed to finish their adventure if they don't know where they are or where they've been. The same is true of vehicles and starships. Sure, they might be used for fighting, but all vehicles (including starships) are primarily a means of conveyance for one or more people, and those people also need to know where they are and where they are going.
Navigation is the process of planning, reading, and controlling movement from one place to another. In the original games, navigation was far and away the most important aspect; players had to go and do things (talk to aliens, pick up artifacts, blow up planets) at particular places. Without a competent navigator at the helm, a crew could find themselves lost easily, and could blunder into an encounter for which they were ill-prepared.
This chapter is devoted to navigation and the particulars of how to get from one place to another. The first section discusses fuel consumption for both vehicles and starships. The second section discusses planetary exploration, including how to incorporate random exploration with planned encounters on a planet's surface. The third section discusses interplanetary travel, including general slower-than-light movement in space around a given star system. The fourth section discusses interstellar travel, including travelling in hyperspace, fluxes, and jump pod usage. The final section discusses intertemporal travel and the conditions under which it can occur in the Starflight Universe.
A Quick Discussion of Kinematics and Units of Measurement¶
SFRPG uses
linear kinematics, or motion of objects in straight lines without consideration of the circumstances leading to the motion. In many of the situations used in the game, the mathematics involved in actual movement has been vastly simplified from the way it would be in real life. Those player groups that are more mathematically inclined can use their own methods for determining movement if they desire.
The most basic law of kinematics is the simple relationship
d=rt, or
Newtonian distance equals average velocity multiplied by time elapsed. Put even more simply,
distance equals speed times time. The players will need to be made aware (through the GM) of how far it is to a destination, how fast they can go, and how much time it will take to get there. Fortunately, with this simple relationship, it’s fairly easy to calculate. All that’s required is that two of the factors (distance, speed, or time) are already known or can be readily determined (
or even made up, in certain situations). To find distance, multiply speed by time. To find out how long it’ll take to get somewhere, divide the distance by speed. To find out how fast the characters will need to travel to get somewhere by such and such a time, divide distance by the time desired. It really is that simple.
Now for the complicated bit of d=rt. In order for the equation to work like it’s supposed to,
all of the involved units must be the same. If the GM uses a speed in kilometers per hour and time in seconds, the formula will yield a confusing final answer in a convoluted "kilometers-seconds per hour", rather than a tidy "kilometers". If the GM uses a distance in kilometers and speed in miles per hour, they’ll end up with a time elapsed in "kilometer-hours per mile", rather than "hours".
Traditionally, Starflight uses the metric system (SI units). Cargo volumes are measured in terms of
cubic meters (m
3). Time is usually measured in hours...24 hours per day, 28 days per month and 10 months per year on the Arth calendar. Player groups are welcome to use other terms of measurement as they see fit, though all materials within this basic set of core rules will use metric terms. If you ever need to convert terms from one unit type to another, an excellent site to visit online is
the MegaConverter site.
The standard unit of measuring distances in SFRPG is the meter. One meter is equal to 39.4 inches, or just a little over a yard. For larger distances, kilometers are used. Kilometers are equal to 1000 meters, or 3280.8 feet (roughly .62 miles). For extreme distances sometimes measured in relation to the tactical short-range movement of starships,
megameters (1000 kilometers, or 1,000,000 meters) and
gigameters (1,000,000 kilometers, a little over 3 light-seconds) are reasonable units with which to work, though neither will be mentioned again in this set of rules. Simply put,
starships really are that fast. Distances between planets will be listed in terms of astronomical units (AU), which are roughly 150,000,000 kilometers (93,000,000 miles) in length (the distance between Earth and the Sun). Distances between stars will be listed in Light Years (roughly 9.5 trillion kilometers). The largest measure of distance used in SFRPG is the parsec, equal to 3.26 Light Years (roughly 30.86 trillion kilometers). One parsec is roughly equal to a single hyperspace coordinate.
The standard unit of measuring time in SFRPG is the Arth second, defined as "the duration of 11,983,252,129 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom". This is 1.3 times the length of a standard Earth second, which is defined as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom". Both of these exact definitions are listed here for the sake of throwing in some worthless trivia into the game; neither are really pertinent for game play. The difference between an Arth second and an Earth second enables an Arth year to be as long as an Earth year while keeping the all the old Earth terms. Larger units of time can be derived from the Arth second; for the sake of simplicity, "Arth" is often not included in these measurement terms. A minute is equal to 60 seconds. An hour is equal to 60 minutes. A day is equal to 24 hours. A week is equal to 7 days. A month is equal to 28 days, or 4 weeks. A year is equal to 10 months, 40 weeks, or 280 days.
Speed (
and by extension, velocity; there is a mathematical difference between the two) is a derived measurement based on the difference in an object's position (i.e. distance traveled over a given period of time. As different units of measurement can be used for both distance and time, there are many different possible measurements for speed. While the standard derived SI measurement for speed and velocity is the meter per second, SFRPG utilizes
kilometers per hour, or
kph, as its standard speed measurement. One kilometer per hour equals 0.27778 meters per second, and is also equal to 0.62137 miles per hour. In those extremely rare cases where a faster unit of speed is needed (usually dealing with space vehicles), SFRPG may use
kilometers per second (kps) for slower-than-light flight, or
parsecs per hour for faster-than-light travel. One kps equals 3600 kph. One parsec per hour roughly equals 30.86 trillion kph.
Because the calculation of speed, distance and time can be a bit tricky, a GM should take the time to calculate the distances that need to be traversed in any adventure they publish. For those GMs that want or need to use a quick, rough solution to determining the distance and travel times between two points on a planet's surface, the following table of benchmarks may be used. For distances and speeds that fall in between those listed here, a GM may either extrapolate a time based on what's listed in the chart, or use the distance-speed-time formula to get an exact solution. The chart follows a few conventions. First, all times listed are in Arth time; if an Earth time is desired, it'll have to be calculated. All times listed are rounded to the nearest whole unit, and only three standard time units are listed for each entry for some of the larger time periods (
it's possible to have a time listed in years, months, weeks, days, hours and so on, but such a long period of time will be cut off after weeks). Finally, the chart uses the following shorthand notation:
y equals years,
m equals months,
w weeks,
d days,
h hours,
min minutes, and
s seconds.
Planetary Kinematic BenchmarksSpeed
(kph) | 1 km | 10 km | 100 km | 1000 km | NY-LA
(~4000 km) | NY-Tokyo
(~11,000 km) | circumglobular
(~20,000 km) | Earth-moon
(~385,000 km) | Earth-Sun
(~149,598,073 km) |
|---|
| 1 | 1h | 10h | 4d 4h | 1m 1w 6d | 5m 3w 5d | 1y 6m 1w | 2y 9m 3w | 57y 2m 3w | >100y |
|---|
| 5 | 12min | 2h | 20h | 1w 1d 8h | 1m 5d 8h | 3m 1w 16h | 5m 3w 5d | 11y 4m 2w | >100y |
|---|
| 10 | 6min | 1h | 10h | 4d 4h | 2w 2d 16h | 1m 2w 3d | 2m 3w 6d | 5y 7m 1w | >100y |
|---|
| 20 | 3min | 30min | 5h | 2d 2h | 1w 1d 8h | 3w 1d 22h | 1m 1w 6d | 2y 8m 2w | >100y |
|---|
| 50 | 1min 12s | 12min | 2h | 20h | 3d 8h | 1w 2d 4h | 2w 2d 16h | 1y 1m 1w | >100y |
|---|
| 100 | 36s | 6min | 1h | 10h | 1d 16h | 4d 14h | 1w 1d 8h | 5m 2w 6d | >100y |
|---|
| 200 | 18s | 3min | 30min | 5h | 20h | 2d 7h | 4d4h | 2m 3w 3d | >100y |
|---|
| 500 | 7s | 1min 12s | 12min | 2h | 8h | 22h | 1d 16h | 1m 4d 2h | 44y 5m 6d |
|---|
| 1,000 | 3s | 36s | 6min | 1h | 4h | 11h | 20h | 2w 2d 1h | 22y 2m 2w |
|---|
| 1,500 | 2s | 24s | 4min | 40min | 2h 40min | 7h 20min | 13h 20min | 1w 3d 16hr | 14y 8m 1w |
|---|
| 2,000 | 1s | 18s | 3min | 30min | 2h | 5h 30min | 10h | 1w 1d 30min | 11y 1m 1w |
|---|
| 2,500 | 1s | 14s | 2min 24s | 24min | 1h 36min | 4h 24min | 8h | 6d 10h | 8y 9m 1d |
|---|
| 5,000 | <1s | 7s | 1min 12s | 12min | 48min | 2h 12min | 4h | 3d 5h | 4y 4m 2w |
|---|
| 10,000 | < |
|---|
1s3s | 36s | 6min | 24min | 1h 6min | 2h | 1d 14h 30min | 2y 2m 1w |
NEXT: 8.1 Vehicles, Starships and Fuel ConsumptionPREVIOUS: 7.4 Non-Canonical Starship CatalogTOP