For example I imagine air quality to be an effective device to make the players feel they're in a failing habitat. It gets humid and stuffy really quickly.

You smell the sweat of everybody around you and anything that rots smells ten times more intense than what we are used to. When oxygen runs out breathing becomes a very unsatisfying exercise and you feel like you are climbing Mount Everest when you just walk/float across the room.

Eventually CO builds up and settles in the lower regions if the habitat is spinning or not in freefall. Unlike oxygen depletion this is hardly noticeable. Eventually you suddenly feel very hung over. But by then your bloodstream is clogged with it and it is almost too late to do something.

Of course other than humidity, oxygen- and CO-levels many other things can go wrong with the air. It is generally not very nice to breathe processed atmosphere, and alarming smells can easily be mistaken for the usual stench.

Toilets suck - literally
If you want to implement guns you need something to counter the recoil or you'll be flying all over the place (uncontrolled)
One big problem is muscle and bone degeneration from the weightlessness - best way to work around that would be to have the sleeping quarters on a spinning axle to generate gravity...(don't know if thats already too far into the future for you)
Also take into account that weightless doesn't equal mass-less - moving something that is equilvalent to one ton would still be pretty difficult - and stopping it from moving would be equally as challenging.

>>14083538
Super true on the toilets. One of my instructors was working with NASA on the ISS, their nickname for the toilet was "Mr.Thirsty".

But not only your sense of smell is mislead.

Evolution has left us with a reliance on sound and visual cues to determine if anything is wrong. The limitation of these senses by bulkheads and sonar isolation in the void must be very unnerving after a while for those who still remember life on earth. Stress related symptoms could be as essential as SAN in CoC.

And when something actually does go very wrong chances are it will only be indicated by a tiny LED or a small shift in engine hum. Intuition can be very misleading in space.

Everything you'll probably ever want to know about hard scifi:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.php

>>14083538
>If you want to implement guns you need something to counter the recoil or you'll be flying all over the place (uncontrolled)

Not really, a .45ACP only imparts around .12m/s of Delta V, and in a firefight you'll be trying to get into cover, so that will give you a way to brace yourself and thus eliminate any "recoil thrust."

>>14083538
Your vernacular betrays your humble status in the empirical endeavor, /rocket scientist/. But you seem to be correct at least this once, even if your contortion will never work the way you are handling things.

>>14083691
God I hate that character. A large vocabulary is no excuse to act like a pillock.

Anyway, thoughts on combat (cuz eventually, somebody's gonna fight somebody else). For planetside civvies, firearms are probably still the law of the land. In space, not so much, for any number of reasons. Knives probably feature heavily in 0G, especially if the combatants plan to be in vacuum at any point. One little rip in the other prick's suit and you can let sweet sweet fluid pressure do the rest. Anybody who plans on fighting with something heavier than a knife in the black probably invests in a pair of magnetic boots, or a jet harness if they're feeling spiffy. Remember, even swinging an axe in freefall can send you flying off into space. Inside a ship, unarmed probably holds sway, with the objective being to get hold of the enemy's head and whack it against something relatively non-critical. But as one anon pointed out, handguns don't have much recoil, so on a sturdy ship or in the hands of total nutjobs they might not be ruled out.

As for the military, the game Shattered Horizon had some good ideas. Ballistic-resistant spacesuits, caseless ammo weapons smartlinked to the user's thruster pack, simulated sound to improve situational awareness, and all kinds of other semi-realistic but pleasingly sci-fi shit. It's a good base from which to go absolutely batshit.

>>14083396

Read this: http://www.nss.org/settlement/nasa/75SummerStudy/Table_of_Contents1.html

and then this: http://www.nss.org/settlement/nasa/Contest/Results/2006/Vademecum.pdf

Both of those docs will give you a good idea of what a big wheel station would be like. A Stanford Torus has a self-sustaining ecosystem (provided that your mirrors aren't destroyed somehow).

It'd actually be pleasant to live in a Stanford Torus or Vademecu, though the rotating frame of reference would play merry hell with all your standard ball games. Ditto for shooting, if you want to have fights in it.

Coriolis forces would also make newbies to the station more vulnerable to motion sickness, and this is on top of space adaptation syndrome if they haven't been in space long.

>>14083637
Conventional guns work fine. Sure, there's recoil. But you wouldn't want to fire without bracing yourself on earth. Why would you in space?
Okay, I can picture a rare situation when two opponents in close draw and start firing unexpectedly, which could result in some macabre corpse tumbling. But I think it's maybe as likely as a rifleman hitting his brow with the recoiling scope. It happens, but not all that often.

A few larger conglomerates might develop specialized weaponry. Tazers, mazers, lazers, recoilless rifles, smart grenades, and even battlebots. But that stuff is expensive, rare, reliant on extensive infrastructure, impossible to repair, and a dead giveaway of who you work for.

The vast majority of weapons will be literally what is here today. There's tons of guns that work well enough and making new ones is expensive. Settlers can't afford more than an old AK and proven principles refined over centuries by master gun makers are still the go to option for modern militaries, aside from what they let their special commando operations field test.

Fouling might be a bigger issue when firing outside of an atmosphere. And the building materials for ammunition in space might be inferior, the production methods imprecise.

There will certainly be a wide spectrum of weapon technlogies.

>>14083799
Honestly what you want is a gun that fires a large frangible round, eg, metal flechettes or shards of glass/plastic. Shotguns and heavy pistols will be the weapons of the hour.

>>14083799
Smart materials are a big thing in my campaign. A ripped suit will seal itself in moments. And skinsuits are less reliant on vapor pressure than those dive bells they use for EVA today.

The maneuvering thruster backpack is a neat idea, but that as well is expensive high tech.

I have been working on one city/station and it has one iron rule concerning weapons: Nothing heavier than a .45. The outer hull will stop most rifle calibers, but pressure lines and vital systems can render entire levels uninabitable within seconds if shot unfortunately.

>>14084024
If your guns are used within pressurized, tightly enclosed space stations they'd best be suppressed unless you want everybody without serious hearing protection to go deaf.

A big problem with conventional guns is heat dissipation causing jams in vacuum, heatsinks will be barely effective through radiation of heat, a way to deal with this might be to use larger, thicker casings that can absorb more heat or some kind of liquid cooling.

Gas systems would work normally, but might need to be adjusted to cope with 0atm instead of +1atm.

>>14084109
Nerf Aliens Pulse-Rifle, and Starship Troopers Long-arm.


I Came.

>>14083861
>Settlers can't afford more than an old AK

Any settlers worth their salt would have access to machining tools for repairing their equipment and building new stuff. It would probably take them about a week to start low-rate production of AK clones in pistol, rifle, submachine gun or semi-auto shotgun configurations. (And since shotguns are basically "tube with a breach at the end," break actions could be produced even easier)

Take a look at this for example, Blowback AK pistol with minimal tools and parts:
http://www.weaponeer.net/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=6683

>>14083799

Nah, guns are still the king of weapons, even in space. If you're messing around on the OUTSIDE of a wheel station you're already going to be performing the trapeze act of your life to not get flung off while you're working.

Remember that there's not all that much energy in a club, sword, or axe. You'll get pushed around a little bit if you're hit by one, sure, but mostly why people fall over when they're hit is because it really hurts! They're not pushed over by the energy from the swing, they're surprised and shocked by the pain. Melee weapons of all kinds should be about as controllable for individual fighters as guns, in terms of recoil and rebound from the weapon strikes. They'd still see a little use, especially melee weapons with legitimate non-combat purposes (prybars, sledgehammers, that sort of thing) but if you're going to be fighting you might as well get a gun with frangible rounds (or smart rounds designed to turn frangible after they've traveled far enough).

Unarmed zero-g combat would focus on whole body maneuvers and pins. Judo variants would be very useful; why waste time trying to beat the snot out of a guy when you can knock him off his perch and then manhandle his limbs however you want? It'd be easy to put his entire mass into making his elbow bend the wrong way, for instance.

>>14084109
My thinking exactly.

Which is why I am not a friend of caseless in space.

I picture the maintenance and accessories of firearms will have to adjust, different lubricants to deal with the broader spectrum of conditions, case catchers to avoid filling the air with tumbling hot copper cases...

Maybe an adjustable valve on gas operated systems to enable the gun to function reliably when going from 0atm to .6-.8, even handle some overpressure. Though I imagine the adjustment is small as it is scaled against the massive pressure in the barrel when a charge expands.

>>14084184
Don't forget the bayonets. He can't grapple you easily if you've just impaled him on your gun.

>>14084140
Morita and M41a made me blink for a moment.
I know most of them. But what is that at the bottom right?

>>14084109

Suppressors are easy to build, and if you design them to use water as a liquid coolant in the can itself then you'll want a design that wicks water up into can through surface tension. The wipes inside will have to be arranged so that they look like little wings.

Like:

\|\|\|\|\|
/|/|/|/|/|

Instead of the traditional design of:

]]]]]]]]
]]]]]]]]

>>14084184
Zero-g combat on the outside of a station. If you just do something like the opposite of a jiu jitsu hip thow and catapult him 'up' away from the station, you win.
Loser gets to drift off into the void.

>>14084281
Water only cools when it evaporates. And that could be expensive quickly. Or you have a closed system and then the water is just a medium for the heat, providing a sink to dissipate its heat later over time. But that's heavy.

I don't know anything about suppressors. Please explain the design idea in more detail and don't assume I know the basics.

>>14084379
A bunch of little chambers. That's all it is.
As the hypersonic gas cloud passes by each chamber, it slows down a bit. By the time it reaches the end of the suppressor, it is fairly quiet. These are very simple and low tech. The same guy who invented automobile mufflers designed these.
But you need to use subsonic ammo for it to really matter. Or else you get the CRACK noise of the hypersonic bullet leaving the gun.

Though, in a vacuum, guns would overheat very quickly since they could only cool down by radiation. Unless they vented refrigerants or something. I guess they could have a circulating water system connected to the operator's suit. Eh, there are ways around overheating, but just using a regular gun in space wouldn't be such a great idea. The lubricants would also outgas. You would quickly end up with a dry gun.

>>14084297

If you're on the outside of a spinning station the forces will make it seem very much like you're hanging from a set of monkey bars. You don't go out there unless you have a damn fine tether and an emergency MMU with enough delta-V to push you into a rescue orbit if your tether somehow breaks (i.e. enough reaction mass to push about 120 kilos of man and gear up to a total change in velocity of about 10 m/s^2). That's pretty reasonable for an emergency MMU given that the old MMU designs NASA used in the 80s were capable of 24.4 m/s^2 for a mass of 148 kilos+astronaut (another 80 kilos or so).

Something like this?

Too bad nobody plays it anymore.

>>14084449

There are lubricants that do not evaporate on their own. You would want either radiator fins or an open-loop coolant system on a gun meant to be fired in a 0-barr environment. Radiators would only give you a few more shots before the gun got too hot to handle, so most sensible weapon designs would use open loop cooling. Every shot would result in a spray of water being ejected from a jacket around the barrel, to quickly radiate heat away.

If you need a silencer you're in a pressurized environment, and thus you do not need the water jacket for your barrel since it will cool normally through atmospheric convection. You WILL need the silencer to help cut down on hearing loss, and if you're in a pressurized environment that doesn't have artificial gravity you'll need specialized silencer designs if you intend on using liquid filled silencers. If you skip filling the silencer with liquid you can use a normal design.

The advantages to filling a silencer with water or something else is that it is even quieter and until the water is exhausted each shot will have a greatly reduced heat signature. Disadvantages are that it's a bit messy, and (if you're not used to how your silencer and gun handles when full of water) less accurate.

You could probably use high-temp alloys or ceramics for most of the gun, allowing it to take enormous heat without the barrel warping.

The problem then becomes the rounds cooking off as they're chambered. A more inert propellant with a higher ignition temperature could help, perhaps with direct electrical ignition instead of a chemical primer.

>>14084531
A gun that results in a permenant loss of water with every shot? Eh, is that a good idea when you live in space station?
If you hooked it up to the operator's suit it could cycle water into the suit and the suit's refrigeration system could keep it cool.
But them I'm not sure if a space suit's ability to radiate heat from its refrigeration system can realistically take the extra load. I suppose security specialists would have to have special suits with extra of radiating panels on the back and a robust refrigeration system.

>>14084572
Or how about electromagnetic guns?
Just a coil of wires and ferromagnetic rounds and you can shoot without massive heat buildups.
If room temperature semiconductors exists, the coils (or rails, if you are using an actual rail gun) would not heat up at all.
But then you would need a power source that is very powerful and rather small. And you would also probably need a capacitor bank to rapid release large electric currents.
The technological feasibility of such a gun depends on the setting, I suppose.

The sunlight used to be my friend.

It woke me up and promised exciting adventures when I was a child. It scattered on the icicles on grandma's roof, concentrating beams of warmth and spreading out tiny rainbows when the ice started to melt.

It held the promise of vacation beaches and skiing slopes. It's heat permeates my skin and lets me produce essential vitamins.

That sunlight was the soft afterglow of the sun filtered through Earth's magnetosphere, ozone layer and miles of atmosphere. And it used to be my friend.

Up here things are different. It is gloomy most of the time. Light strips full of vibrating crystal paint everything in overdrawn blues and yellows. And even set to full they hardly exorcise the gloom, even if they supposedly provide all the body needs acoording to HAB-3-BIO specifications.

When we rotate into full solar exposure the sun rises in seconds. And it is not the big yellow ball with a smile on the upper margin of my childhood crayon pictures. It is a small white hot needle casting sharp edged shadows from inconceivably far away. Its medusic gaze would decay me beyond repair within minutes without shielding sometimes. We use prolonged unshielded exposure to sterilize our lab equipment on special trays attached to the main shield body at the back of our habitat.

Sometimes I wake up drenched in sweat.Then I have to verify thruster operation and call up the solar weather forecast before I can get back to sleep. The idea of being stuck in an exposed rotation with the thrusters out of service and a particle wave on the way has replaced the monster under my bed.

And I'd take the monster back in exchange any day.

>>14084628
Wouldn't a magnetic field of sufficient strength around the ship keep him safe from the sun's high energy particles?
I read a proposal for just such a thing if we ever do a manned mission to Mars.

>>14084656
Sure. But so does a massive plate around the exposed side of the station. And although that is more expensive to put into orbit, a space constructed habitat would be much cheaper in the long run with plate armor instead of a polarized filed generator.

>>14084581

It's a great idea if you want to be able to actually fight. You just have to budget extra water in your station's tankerage toward your guns. Since you'll only be using your water-jacketed guns to fight someone stupid/brave enough to try to cause trouble on the outside of the station, you won't be firing many shots (comparatively), so you won't even need to budget that much water. Most of your fighting will happen in the pressurized compartments of the station, since that is where most of the people and infrastructure are.

Look at it this way: would you want to add a lot of extra mass to your suit and put a big extra burden on your suit's life support, and have a relatively fragile system that attaches your gun to your life support system, or would you rather have to buy a few extra gallons of water per gun from your supplier every couple of years and not have those concerns in a fight? I know which I would pick.

>>14084606

If there are no superconductors the heat problem will be worse with a coilgun or rail gun, not better.

>>14084572

Outrageously expensive, but I could see elite forces and gun fanboys investing in them anyway. Thermally isolating the magazine shouldn't be too hard, and if you didn't chamber a round until just after the trigger is pulled a cook off wouldn't matter at all.

Artificial gravity (through spin) would have to be omnipresent, at least in habitats. Otherwise bone decay and muscle loss will kil most people within a few months.

>>14084280
bottom right is...
Magpul PDR
except for one, the whole list goes from top left to bottom right:

FN F2000
HK XM8
FN P90
Morita
HK G11
????
HK OICW
M41A
TDI Vector
Magpul PDR

>>14085440

Styer ACR

>>14084690
Even with VASIMR rockets mass cost a titanic amount to move around. For anything mobile a magnetic shield would be cheaper over the mission. For a station intended to sit at L2 and be awesome, you could build your shield from whatever is cheap.. nickle-iron from an asteroid, water ice for extra consumables, lab monkeys after your experiments are done, ect.

Of course, if you have some bad ass power supply like a real fusion generator you could probably kick mass out of the well cheaply enough to use nice thin lead as shielding.

>>14085472
ah fuu
thought I've seen that somewhere - shame on me

>>14085097
You could see stations featuring large rotating rings to generate faux gravity for living spaces, along with "slow and low" colony and freighter ships made for only microgravity levels of acceleration. Other ships might just carry enough reaction mass and power to maintain a steady 9.8 meters per second per second acceleration, set up engines down like a skyscraper with rockets in the basement and accept microgravity for the period of time they spent parked.

Hohmann transfer orbit traffic jams....

>>14085586
...or, you know, crashes.

>>14085521
>bad ass power supply
The sun?

>>14086238

I'd expect crashes to be most common in docking attempts.

>>14084508
I still play that from time to time, great game.

Anyways, I'm glad this thread popped up. I've been planning something similar, but it seems /tg/ has put more thought into this than I originally did.

>>14088366
I heard there was just 1 map, and it was boring. Like the art though.

As long as you can deal with annoying characters and anime bulshit you should watch Planetes.

It has a really good visualisation of life on large space stations. Main characters are responsible for cleanup of space debris. They usually strap small small rockets to them, to steer them into Earth's atmosphere and incinerate them.

>>14092146
Just a word of warning, if you do watch Planetes, you will never be able to watch a Gundam series ever again, simply because their zero-g scenes will look ridiculous in comparison.

>>14092146

It's small things, like astronauts wearing diapers, or your employee running low on funds and giving you one-size-fits-all space pants, while only anatomically adjusting sleeves and gloves.

Or learning to use forearm thrusters to move around in zero-g.

Yup. Planetes is one of the big reasons why I am making this. And I can take the KAWAI-UGU, I've seen far worse (Although the Lunar Ninjas ep is stretching it).

Toyi Boxu FTW!

Pic is the Antares from the TV series Defying Gravity (aka Gray's in Space).

This info will help in my next Eclipse Phase session (I'm the GM)...

>>14097221
EC is great for hardish scifi.

But I think I will use Cortex in the Galactica incarnation. It's gritty enough for me and I heard they fixed the firearm resolution nicely.

>>14084508

My only real complaint was how few maps there were.

Anyways,

>>14097890
>>14097221

Can any of you stalwar/t g/entlemen tell me how the fuck grappling works in eclipse phase? The rules are on page 204, but I don't quite understand. Does the winner of a grapple have to keep grappling their opponent each turn, only dealing damage with a critical success? I'd be kind of OK with this since the other character is still at a -30 disadvantage to the opposed test to grapple.

If not, what are the restrictions on subdual?

>>14097890
EC=EP of course.

>Millions work on extraterran jobs or eke out a living as settlers and in small scale operations, mining moons and asteroids for the basic materials of life and industry.
Beside valuables like He-3 on the Moon for fusion power (which I think is needed to really kick start the colonization of space by civilians / corporations in massive numbers), metal rich asteroids are the major source of income. I'd intuitively say that the delta-v costs to move often and fast between Earth orbit and the asteroid belt or even between asteroids is too prohibitive; after all, propellant is the most expensie thing in space. This, I think, means that miners need to live permanently in large, self sustainable space stations near big asteroids (after all, only one big one is needed for decades of raw materials). Fast trasportation to and from these distant space stations would be a rare and expensive luxury, and slowly accelerating ion engines in Hohmann orbits or low-energy Interplanetary Superhighways would be used for supply transportation. CEO's would have the money to travel to Earth on special occasions; the average worker would need to save money for years to leave the station.

>The new frontier is far from peaceful as corporate interests clash with each other and the settlers, and smugglers and pirates do their part.
They don't smuggle drugs or guns, but expensive luxuries like chocolate, and organic meat that's of a higher quality than Labmeat grown on petri dishes. Naturally, most of those things are banned by local corporations who try to control the market.

>From elaborate sky cities in lower Earth orbit to rusty habitats drifting at the edge of nothing, from enormous biodomes across Valles Marineris to dive caves in the ice of Europa
Don't forget small floating science facilities on Venus's atmosphere, or minor mining outposts in Mercury's craters, where water is aplenty.

>Of course other than humidity, oxygen- and CO-levels many other things can go wrong with the air. It is generally not very nice to breathe processed atmosphere, and alarming smells can easily be mistaken for the usual stench.
For this reason, every non-suicidal space crew has at least one parrot with them.

>>14098807
Love the canary, err parrot.

>>14098829
Because sometimes, you just feel *really* lonely 150 million miles from home...

REALLY LONELY REALLY LONELY - CRAAHH

I'd take a lyrebird. At least he can serve as acoustic decoy should the need arise.

How would we deal with crewmembers who have absolutely lost it and couldn't handle space? Do we have some sort of procedure?

>>14098841
150m miles is close to home. Earth's orbit around the sun has more than twice that diameter.

>>14098906
Happy pills. Lots of them. Orange ones and green ones and yellow ones, kinda like Skittles.

Halfway through this game the mi-go should show up.

>>14099027
I have something planned. No, it's neither Xenomorphs nor Cthulhu. And yes, it's kinda like Xenomorphs or Cthulhu. But that is irrelevant atm.

>>14092326
Reading the manga is a much better experience.

>>14098906
Airlock procedure.

>>14098906

The way NASA handles that is to restrain and sedate the ill crew member, and then scrub the mission. If it happens on the ISS, they either wait for the next Soyuz pod if it's close to time for it to come anyway, or they use the escape pod. Not fun, but they don't have enough space to have a brig and there's too much potential for a berserking crew member to fuck over the entire vessel since there's so much sensitive gear in such a small space in a space vessel (shuttle or ISS or Soyuz).

I imagine the inside of an asteroid will look much like any underground facility. They dig entire villages out of ant/arctic ice already. Maybe a little on the rough side since dry wall would be heavy to haul up.

The Nazis built cruise missiles in a mine. Just like that, only without gravity.

>cultural peculiarities brought on by these new ways of life

Saying something "sucks" would become less common as it get associated with sitting on the vacuum toilet.
On smaller installations the car culture would be tweaked to the highest degree, not only is transport necessary for convenient living, access to transport off the ship/station would be something all would have to be able to do or risk riots or depression.
Claustrophobia and Agoraphobia would both have to be managed carefully, maybe large (100s of m3) inflatable rooms, built for people just to float around in.

rolled 45 = 45

>>14107813

I could see a scooter culture rising, but even a larger habitat isn't big enough to need more than a couple hundred cars. Most people would get around by tram or bus, because centralizing transportation infrastructure makes the most sense in terms of economy and maintenance.

>>14107813
'Suck' is more generally associated with vacuum. I think it would take on a more menacing note and be reserved for expressing immediate and pressing discomfort.

Omnipresent orbital dynamics may make it into idiomatic metaphors. 'Off the rails' is replaced by 'spinning freely', 'hounding my heels' by ' intersecting my trajectory' or 'intersecting' for short, 'massive' could express general attraction, 'untethered' takes on a whole new significance. 'Burning daylight > 'burning oxygen', 'bleeding money' >'leaking atmo', I'll stop or it'll get silly.

>>14108503
Generally I think settler language will evolve to less polite more precise mimetic grains, short and crude, with much of the details communicated through tone and visual cues.

Corporate employees on the other hand will quickly develop their own shorthand that preserves the nuances of polite society and company hierarchy but also abbreviates common expressions and provides sufficient ambiguity to deflect responsibility. Just imagine you were working in an office building that you could never leave except when you quit and then it takes a year to get anywhere.

I like this train of thought, imagining how cultures may change over time in different environments.\

I really do think possibly hostilities between colonies may occur as the genetic stock changes to cause certain characteristics to each colony.

>>14113730
But I think this will only become relevant when we settle outside of Sol system. In this setting people might live a few years from earth. But it is still close enough to not isolate genetic strains completely. It takes generations for a mutation to occur and enter reproductive propagation to a relevant degree.