Starship Captain: What would you want to experience?

[intrinsical]

Hi guys, I've been a trekkie since forever and have been in this forum for a few years. I have also been working on a web-based game where you're the skipper of a small starship in the 30th century.

Currently, part of my work is to flesh out the universe and I figured this might be a good place to solicit some input. Since the player is captain of a starship with a loyal crew, the situation is largely similar to what occurs in Star Trek, Farscape, Firefly, Andromeda. And personally, I'ld love to know what you would love to see or experience in such a game.

The game's backstory is as follows:
It is the 30th century. Humanity has had spaceflight for the past few centuries but are limited to travel within the solar system due to the lack of a means for FTL travel.

All that has changed in the past decade with the invention of Trigates that allow turns a spaceship into a starship, allowing FTL jumps between star systems. Megacorps have been busy building new Trigates linking up more star systems, building extrasolar colonies and outposts. All fueled by an ever growing industry in the discovery and trading of exotic resources of all types.

In essence, the galaxy is virgin unexplored space and humanity only has a few newly established colonies outside the solar system. No sentient alien races have yet to be discovered.

As you take your ship out past the few extrasolar human colonies and into the unknown galaxy, what would you like to see?

 

[Quinton O'Connor]

Hm, good question. I just woke up a little bit ago, so I may have to get back to you for the most part. Haven't had my coffee yet. But here are a few things I'd love to experience:

Jumping into the very edge of an asteroid field, watching the 'ring' slowly moving in all its splendor;

Touching down on a world full of endless rivers and forests, trekking for kilometers in the quiet environs before standing in amazement at a herd of strange extraterrestrial beasts of burden;

Some occasional conflict with pirates and other such wanderers laying claim to resource-rich worlds, and the potential for combat and/or diplomacy this would open up;

Various anomalies current levels of technology haven't been able to define causing specific portions of space to be regarded as dangerous, and the trials that would follow should one decide to brave these regions;

The option to get involved in organizations such as mining colonies and reap the benefits;

Bar-like establishments littered across the more well-explored inner circle of traveled space, where a simple misunderstanding leads to a Kirk-style brawl;

A vast, inspiring but harsh frontier beyond the known rim full of lawlessness and many wonders.

 

[Itisnotlogical]

Definitely a ton of variety in the various cultures; different crimes may get you arrested for variable amounts of time, or may not even be a crime at all on certain planets. Also, a planet with non-stop warfare going on 24/7 would be pretty cool. No safe areas, no catching your breath, constant explosions and gunfire going off everywhere.

 

[sojourner]

So how do the tri-gates work? do you need one in both the origin system and one in the destination system? This would limit travel to undeveloped systems to sublight speeds slowing down expansion considerably. If ships can be equipped with a tri-gate and go ftl speeds, why are mega corps building what sounds like stationary tri-gates?

 

[intrinsical]

So how do the tri-gates work? do you need one in both the origin system and one in the destination system? This would limit travel to undeveloped systems to sublight speeds slowing down expansion considerably. If ships can be equipped with a tri-gate and go ftl speeds, why are mega corps building what sounds like stationary tri-gates?

​

You are correct. This FTL technology is just a decade old and requires large quantities of exotic and highly advanced materials. While there is on going research, no one has figured out how to scale down the tech to fit it on a ship.

A single Trigate would only allow ships to travel to the targeted star system with no way back other than to spend centuries travelling at sublight speed. So when a megacorp build a Trigate, they align it to point at a designated star system of their choice and send a fleet of engineering and cargo ships through on a one way trip to build a Trigate at the other end. All they can do is sit back and twiddle their thumbs for a few months to a year or two, hoping nothing went wrong on the other side. Whole engineering fleets have been lost and never heard from again in the building of these Trigates.

For game design reasons, there can be up to 4 trigates in each star system. Here's a mock of a star system in my game.

​

 

[intrinsical]

Hm, good question. I just woke up a little bit ago, so I may have to get back to you for the most part. Haven't had my coffee yet. But here are a few things I'd love to experience:

Wow, you have some good ideas here, some that took me a few months to think up.

Jumping into the very edge of an asteroid field, watching the 'ring' slowly moving in all its splendor;

Touching down on a world full of endless rivers and forests, trekking for kilometers in the quiet environs before standing in amazement at a herd of strange extraterrestrial beasts of burden;

Its web-based game and I'm not particularly good at computer graphics, so I'm afraid these visuals may be way outside what I can achieve. :P

Some occasional conflict with pirates and other such wanderers laying claim to resource-rich worlds, and the potential for combat and/or diplomacy this would open up;

The option to get involved in organizations such as mining colonies and reap the benefits;

This is probably going to happen throughout the game in various forms. One of the overarching theme that me and my working partner have for the game is to explore Humanity's insatiable need for constantly wanting more, more and More! Part of this is definitely the fight for resources between players and pirates, players and megacorps, especially players and players.

Various anomalies current levels of technology haven't been able to define causing specific portions of space to be regarded as dangerous, and the trials that would follow should one decide to brave these regions;

While writing the previous post on how Trigates work, it occurred to me that it would be a nice idea if players were sent on a one way trip to investigate what happened to one of these lost engineering fleets.

As for anomalies, I have a few vague ideas.. nothing I can reveal at the moment.

Bar-like establishments littered across the more well-explored inner circle of traveled space, where a simple misunderstanding leads to a Kirk-style brawl;

Great minds think alike

The alpha version of the game was hardcoded to display only star systems and planets. I have been reworking the code to allow for more flexibility, allowing player ships to visit space stations, asteroid fields and starship junkyards, fly past ancient ruins and megacities, etc.. Still, its a pretty daunting idea to implement and I don't know how far I can push the code since the game is fundamentally designed to be heavily ship-centric. So right now, I have no idea if its going to be possible to get you, the captain, off the ship :P

 

[Lookingglassman]

Do a "first contact" mission where war is not involved. I think it would be cool if us humans are the actual "aliens" and we meet a world that is equivalent to what we have now and are curious about "life out there".

I would love to do a mission where I get to decide how I want to initiate contact or if I just want to study them from a distance and listen to all their "ufo" reports when they do spot my ships buzzing their planet.

If I decided to make contact then the mission can branch out from there to helping them achieve space travel or solving a problem that plagues them. I would like to deal with those who would think I had an ulterior motive. I think being human and actually being the "alien" to another race would be cool.

 

[Canadave]

Jumping into the very edge of an asteroid field, watching the 'ring' slowly moving in all its splendor;

Touching down on a world full of endless rivers and forests, trekking for kilometers in the quiet environs before standing in amazement at a herd of strange extraterrestrial beasts of burden;

For these two points, if you're interested in playing a space exploration simulator, you might want to check out Noctis. It's pretty primitive-looking, but it does do an excellent job of letting you explore a vast galaxy.