Provisional Limits on Projectile Weapons

Provisionally, until I get more feedback on the subject, due to the outstanding question:

How fast should a projectile weapon be able to fire a slug?

I am implementing a hard-limit on how fast handheld or shoulder-mounted weapons can fire a projectile to 8,000 m/s (roughly Mach 23). This is a hard-limit for railguns and coilguns that use other means than those of conventional firearms (gunpowder or other explosives) which can be carried in the hand, shoulder-mounted, or otherwise used and carried by a single person. It was suggested by a player to have a railgun that can propel a round at just over 1% of the speed of light, which is clearly absurd. Since the escape velocity of Earth is a little over 11.1 km/s, I figure that if one fires their weapon and misses at STP (standard temperature and pressure), their bullet should not escape the confines of Earth’s gravity and go into orbit, or one should not be able to strike a vessel in orbit from the ground with a railgun one can carry.

Allowances are made for ship-mounted or ground facility weaponry that can have a higher power source, far more bulk, and potentially can propel a round faster.

Conventional Firearms

Conventional firearms of any design are limited by what is on hand, they are limited by a leeway of 25% increase from modern firearms for alternative explosive fuel sources and materials. Conventional firearms is defined here as being any firearm which propels a hunk of material using some force of explosive pressure or high pressure release. It is the opinion of the server admin that the human race has had a long time to perfect the production of handheld instruments of death using explosive charges to propel rounds, certain ballistic limitations of STP also exist that limit things.

At any rate, any conventional weapon is hard-limited to no faster than a 25% increase over the conventional weapon’s real-life firing speed. Such an increase also will have to be explained by some variation of describing why the fuel is different or shape of the round.

Round-Design

Rounds that approach the hard-limit will require explanation, what are they made of that they can withstand the force of air resistance at the velocity and should also have some note about their size and shape. One cannot just fire a blunt slug at those speeds, as it would become aerodynamically unstable very quickly, the round would also be subject to severe deformation due to heat from air resistance. Rounds traveling at speeds in excess of Mach 4.5 will also need to be aerodynamically designed in order to maintain flight stability. In terms of in-game explanations, it is not expected for players to have specific design specifications, but it is expected that a round is shaped with a small pointed nose and tapered back-end to allow for aerodynamic stability. Anything else would be aerodynamically unstable.

Grandfather Clause

While normally I extend a grandfather clause to new guidelines and rules, that is not the case here, and weapons currently in game which violate this rule will require special approval to keep.

Final Note

This is not a combat oriented game and it should be noted that the weapons used are used to further story – allow characters to have the opportunity for sufficiently “bad assed” moments but also sufficient risk during combat or other encounters. As such players should realize that while it is certainly canonical within a science fiction setting to have weapons that do massive amounts of damage, that actually makes play harder – the goal of play is to enjoy a situation which your character must fight to survive or overcome an obstacle, not insta-kill an enemy and celebrate a job well done.

This is the reason in canon Star Trek, during the Dominion War, they did not use the phasers to their full potential. Even though canon directly says that a single man with a hand phaser in the 23rd century (TOS) can annihilate thousands of infantry who are unprotected and during the course of TNG it is seen that phasers on a wide-beam setting can effectively incapacitate large numbers of people, it was because it worked well within the confines of those stories. The stories of the Dominion War would have lacked a level of personal risk among the characters to have things be that easy, rather than use that they told a different and far more relatable story of phasers used in the same line as conventional weapons with line-of sight restrictions. This was done to great emotional and dramatic impact, seeing the “horrors of war”, even though it is technically incorrect.

We strive to have challenges for characters to overcome that require effort and thought, situations that (without being horribly convoluted) force the characters to take risks, risks that make the end result more impactful to the players and audience of the gaming sessions.

Successful Writing Prompts

So far my foray into writing prompts has been successful, so we’re going to keep doing it. As such, I’ve created a new category on the site blog, Motus Impulsores, which is Latin for “Sources of Inspiration” (at least according to Google Translate). Most everyone here has had substantial improvement in their writing and I’m so happy to see that taking place. Moving forward, this category is going to be used for when we’ve got news or other such information relating to writing and role playing as a method of collaboration.

I’m enjoying seeing what everyone comes up with and I look forward to seeing where the community goes moving forward.

Thank you all.

Twitter Lockout

So, when changing the information for the site’s twitter account, I put the birth date of the server in as the account birth date. This locked the account, so I have it petitioned to re-open the account hoping that they will realize it is an entity / site not a person.

Our FB page has changed. to reflect our site name properly @moltenaether.

Contest – Sexiest Ship

So we’re doing a contest to decide on the sexiest ship. The winner of the contest, the person who submitted the ship that is voted to be sexiest, will get the opportunity to write a plot line where a character of their choice gets to obtain that ship. Of course, standard caveats apply to maintain balance of power in the game. If, for whatever reason, the ship is in the game already or impossible to add the award will be discussed with the player and a suitable replacement will be agreed upon.

Submissions will end Monday the 4th by 5pm Eastern US Time. Right now we have 6 submissions pinned in the media channel on Discord. Once 5pm hits on the 4th, we will open a poll for users to vote on what they believe the sexist of the presented ships are.

Ships must be starships of at least 100 meters in length or a crew of at least 100 people.

May’s Top Contributors

Here are the top contributors for May 2018.

Forum

  • Titan Shadow (64 Replies)
  • Buckethead (38 Replies)
  • Red_the_heretic (32 Replies)

Wiki

Contribution Score combines new pages with revisions.

  • Cyclope (Contribution Score 93)
  • Darktrooper501 (Contribution Score 29)
  • Neo Akazuli (Contribution Score 15)

Awards

  • Titan Shadow#1701 gets 2000 Guild Points
  • Buck Approves#3038 gets 750 Guild Points
  • darktrooper501#8924 gets 750 Guild Points
  • Red the 15th#2304 gets 500 Guild Points
  • JumpingScript#4310 gets 500 Guild Points

New Top Guild Scores

New scores directly from Tatsumaki:

User Score
darktrooper 224033
Titan Shadow 220951
Red the 15th 165881
t0l 151836
ks 146883
The Chubby Gamer, Sloth Boi 138390
Dr. Winterdawn 96528
(Thatotakugalaxy) Jade 83808
JumpingScript 80865
Buck Approves 71531

Thank you for all the help everyone!

Awarding for Wiki and Forum Contributions

So I’ve been trying for a while to figure out how to reward people for adding content to the wiki or using the forum. So what I have come up with is that each month I’ll award, via the Tatsumaki bot on Discord, guild points for the top 3 contributors for the last month. The Wiki site is the easiest, as I just installed a handy extension that does exactly this. Discourse also has a nice feature, which will use the number of replies, since this is a role-play community, replies are everything! I may consider adding a bonus or something for the number of topics started or some such.

Here is the breakdown for the points awarded. The forum and wiki are treated separately in this case.

1st Place gets 1000 points.
2nd Place gets 750 points.
3rd Place gets 500 points.

Point totals may get adjusted in the future as needed.

No More Pinging – WordPress for Site News

I was originally not going to use the WordPress for site news, although I had the category for it. I’ve rethought that, given that it ties in so tightly with Discourse. Thus, two things have been changed. Additionally, the site will no longer ping roles for posts to the forum, I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while but while the system will continue to toss posts onto the Discord from the forum, it won’t send out pings. People will, I hope, more freely listen to pings when it isn’t being so over-used as I think it was getting to be.

There is also now a category here on the WordPress for Solas Tempus Internal COMs, which represents internal memos sent by Solas Tempus. This will allow me to notify everyone of internal orders going back and forth within Solas Tempus and provide more clarity when dealing with things that happen off screen. It won’t be every single thing that goes on, but a good way for me to publish things when I don’t know how to be clear or a lot of people have similar questions.