Setting Travel

A primary concern of many civilizations is the movement of people and goods, those within Wandering Star included. This movement of people and goods is typically achieved through the use of interconnected logistics infrastructure consisting of a mixture of roads, rail, waterways, airways, orbital, inter-planetary, and interstellar networks.

Transit is accomplished in almost all instances by making us of one or a combination of the various

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In the setting a large part of the day to day considerations of the people who live within it will be dedicated to the movement of people, and goods. In an effort to make things feel alive an interconnected, I will be working to eschew the 'FTL Minivan' variety of transportation that is present in some sci-fi settings and instead will encourage GMs and players to utilize pre-existing and interdependent logistics to travel from place to place.

For example: If one were to want to travel to another city, instead of hopping in a personal shuttle craft and flying there, one might have to use personal ground vehicles such as a motorcycle or car, and drive to their destination. Alternatively, mass transport such as buses, or trains might be used, and if expediency is required a quick trip to the airport (or maglev station) might be in order at a slightly higher expense.

Even if this traveling section is glossed over in favor of the action of the scene even mentioning it in a couple of sentences would give a better sense that the players have actually had to travel somewhere, negotiating the relatively mundane tasks that most people face.

To this end, I would encourage that shuttle craft be used primarily for spaceport to space ship, or vice-versa use and that travel ground-side be handled by bus, rental car, boat, train, plane, foot, bike, etc. Giving a meaning to including planetary infrastructure in the setting.

Beyond this, I would propose that we as a setting make the existence of personal, civilian FTL capable starships a noteworthy occurrence. Basically, if a personal civilian ship drops out of FTL in your system of its own power, it should be noticed by locals, and not just one of the myriad. Instead, I would propose that systems like FTL ferries (large ships dedicated to transporting smaller ships), and stationary FTL structures like wormhole gates (limiting fast transport to certain points in space) be used instead of personal FTL to once again make travel more meaningful in the setting by demonstrating that even our heroes usually have to commute, and perhaps even place value on the relative anonymity of mass transit to get to places since showing up in a crowd of others is less eye-catching than a lone ship.

That's all that comes to mind for now. Maybe more later.

Below will go text giving ideas as to how people get about with allusions to cultures and specific vehicle articles to be filled out as time permits.

• Foot
• Person-Powered
• Animal
• Motor Vehicle
• Train
• Others? (hovercraft? GEV?)

• Swimming
• Person Powered
• Animal?
• Boat (Sail and powered?)
• Others?

• Person Powered
• Animal
• Glider
• Aircraft (Plane/Airship)

• Surface to surface - Rare. High speed transit between to global points, very expensive, unlikely to be used by most cultures outside of emergencies or high priority transit.
• Surface to orbit transit
• Planet to moon/Moon to moon - Takes several hours, most of the travel time being the acceleration and deceleration phases due to the inability to change speed rapidly without harming organic passengers.
• Interplanetary - Trips take from four to seven days¹⁾ almost universally. This is again due to most of the time spent either speeding up or slowing down with the majority of the distance covered relatively rapidly once up to speed. Military grade vessels can make the trip in a fraction of the time due to more powerful g-force compensation hardware.

FTL is handled through a variety of means the fastest being established wormhole gates. For ships traveling between stars at FTL speeds to unexplored or unconnected locales the setting has a soft cap of 2500c for travel speed for the fastest purpose built cutting edge tech ships in the setting. Most ships will instead travel around 2000c, and civilian grade and more average vessels will travel slower than this.

• Short range interstellar (less than 10ly)
• Long range interstellar (greater than 10ly)
• Fixed position (wormhole gates, perhaps teleporters, magical gates?)