REDSHIFT Starships (lore)

STARSHIPS

What is an interstellar roleplaying game without some way of dealing with space travel right? So here you go. First some lore about how space travel works in REDSHIFT, then the rules for space flight. After that are the rules for creating your startships, and finally rules for using them to fight.

SPACE TRAVEL

Within the universe of REDSHIFT there four kinds of space flight. These are Redshifting, Wormhole Teleportation, Anti-Inertial Bubbles, and Realspace Flight. The first three are differing kinds of faster than light travel, and the last is sub-light travel.

Realspace travel is the mot straightforward form of space flight; it is using ion thrusters to propel the ship through space maxing out at speeds up to 50% the speed of light. This sort of flight is used exclusively within a system or when two ships meet in space.

REDSHIFT DRIVE

The discovery of the Dimensional Doppler Effect revolutionized faster than light travel allowing species who had yet to master lossless zero-point energy to travel faster than light.. By shifting a spaceship into a layer of reality where space-time is greatly distorted starships are able to move through space at faster-than-light speeds.

An interesting note about dimensional doppler flight, or redshifting, is that the speed you travel is not tied to how robust your redshift drive is. But instead how strong your shields are. The ion thrusters of a starship never push it faster than 150,000 m/s when redshifting. The further a ship redshifts, the faster it moves through realspace and the stronger the tidal forces of the DDE rip at the ship.

WORMHOLE TELEPORTATION

There are two forms of wormhole teleportation, the now obsolete wormhole network that was used before the discovery of the DDE, and the teleportation drives used by heavier class ships of species with lossless zero-point energy, such as the Decaro and Star Dragons.

Wormhole teleportion bores a hole in two spots in reality then folds realspace around those holes to connect them, creating an opening that the ship can fly through with ion engines. Before the discovery of the DDE, all faster than light travel used this technology. The younger species used an ancient network of teleportation stations, and the older species had them built into their ships. The discovery of redshifting made the teleportation stations obsolete. However, for ships it is a safer and faster mode of travel than redshifting.

ANTI-INERTIAL BUBBLES

A recent discovery (of a sort) is the technology of space travel used by the Automatrik, a species of enigmatic synth lifeforms from the other side of the galactic core. Instead of dealing with warping realspace or shifting into a subspace dimensional layer, it simply creates a bubble of space where inertia is turned off. This allows the Autmomatik city-ships to simply fly in realspace at speeds beyond that which special relativity should allow.