The Hum Calendar

With work on the next issue of the Frontier Explorer happening, it’s taking me a bit longer to get to these posts than I had hopped but progress is being made. And I haven’t yet fallen behind.

Today we build the calendar system for Hum, the humma homeworld in the Fochrik system, which we have been detailing in the previous posts (part 1, part 2) in this series.

The Data

In the first part of this series, we established the following facts about Hum:

From Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space
- Rotational period: 30 hours (we’re going to refine this a bit later on)
- Surface gravity: 0.9g (which we increased the precision on to 0.91g)
- 3 moons: Kran, Gluk, & Clud
From our calculations:
- Orbital Distance: 1.23 AU
- Orbital Period: 11323.3 hours
- Density: 5.43 gm/cm³
- Mass: 0.8139 Earth masses
- Radius: 5,991.93 km

Of those parameters, we won’t be using the surface gravity, radius, or orbital distance in this analysis but we will be using the rest.

The Moons

I ignored the moons in the early parts of this series but now they become important so we need to detail them out a little bit more. Just as the orbital period of the Earth’s moon defines the concept of a month for us, given that this is the humma homeworld, the orbital periods of Hum’s moons would probably play a roll in defining their calendar system as well. So lets figure out the data on Hum’s moons.

All we really have to start with is the fact that there are three moons and their order (assuming the first one listed is the closest). Beyond that, we can really do whatever we want. That said, we have a few considerations to keep in mind.

First, Hum is smaller than Earth (about the size of Venus) and so has a smaller gravitational pull. This just means that the larger the moon, the more it will cause the planet to “wobble” about their common center of gravity. So we may not want any moon to be too big. It also means that if the moons have to be too far away, they might have escaped the planet’s gravity well. This latter point shouldn’t be an issue but is something to keep in mind.

Second, the moons will all mutually interact gravitationally. Which means if we have strong orbital resonances (orbital periods in small integer ratios), or if they have very close passes (with “close” depending on their relative sizes) as they orbit, the moon system may be unstable and not have survived to the present day.

So while we can pick anything we want, we should keep those ideas in mind. Now ideally, after picking the parameters for the moons and their orbits, I would generate orbital data for them all and run them through several hundred thousand or several million years of orbits to confirm stability but I didn’t do that. So we’ll just hope what we come up with something that makes sense and works.

The other thing to consider is what role we want to attribute to the moons in regards to the calendar system. This will have an impact on the orbital periods we pick.

Kran

Kran is the innermost moon of the system. It will have the shortest orbital period of the three. As such, I decided that this moon would also be the smallest and associated with the “week” concept on Hum.

Since I want the “week” to be something on the order of 5 to 10 local days, and as I have no real reason to prefer one value of another, I’ll just roll 1d6+4 to get the value. I rolled a 5 so a Hum week is 9 local days long. Since the local day is 30 hours (from Zeb’s Guide), the week is 270 hours long. I want the orbital period of Kran to be something near this value so I just rolled four d10s to refine the number. The first one, I subtracted 5 from to get a number to add or subtract from 270, and the next 3 were just read as digits to represent the first 3 digits after the decimal place.

I rolled a 5 for the first die which meant no offset and then I got a 6, a 10(0), and a 4 so the orbital period of Kran is 270.604 hours. I realized later in the process that I should have probably given a bit more range the the +/- die but it’s fine as it is.

We’re also going to want to have a mass for the moon as that will have a small impact on its orbital distance. Since I wanted this moon to be small but still basically spherical, I just arbitrarily picked a size that was near to the size of the asteroid Ceres. I rolled some dice to pick exact values (although now I don’t remember exactly the rationale behind what I rolled) and came up with a value of 0.0125 times the mass of the Moon.

To get the size of the moon given its mass, we need its density. Referring back to the possible densities of the planets from the original article, I wanted to pick something in the 2-6 gm/cm³ range. So I rolled a d4+1 for the integer part and some d10s to get two decimal places and came up with
a density of 2.71 gm/cm³ for the moon.

Okay, now we’re all set to calculate the final values. Determining the radius is straightforward, we’re just back to this equation:

Only we’re solving for that r in there instead of M. That gives us a radius of 432.51 km. Next we want the orbital distance which takes us back to this equation:

where we are solving for a. M₁ is the mass of the planet, and M₂ is the mass of the moon. Again I used this handy website but since you can’t actually solve for a, I had to try various distances until I got the period to match. So it might have actually been faster to do the math on my calculator but oh well. We end up with a result of 198,336.5 km as the orbital distance for Kran.

For reference the diameter of Earth’s moon is 3474.2 km, almost exactly 8 times bigger, and it’s orbital distance is on average 384,400 km, so Kran is nearly twice as close.

Gluk & Clud

I’m not going to go over every detail of the other two moons but suffice it to say I followed the same procedure for each of those. The only constraints I had was that I wanted Gluk to be the largest of the three moons and have it’s orbital period correspond to between 1/8 to 1/14 of a year to represent the month concept. Clud was going to be way out there and orbit only about 4 times a year to correspond to the seasons.

After working through all the math we get the following results for each of the moons:

Name	Orbital Period (hrs)	Orbital Distance (km)	Mass (moon)	Density (gm/cm³)	Radius (km)
Kran	270.604	198,336.5	0.0125	2.71	432.5
Gluk	1,026.836	483,757.2	0.5237	3.14	1,430.2
Clud	2,826.842	948,883.7	0.2413	3.46	1,069.5

This image shows the sizes of the moons relative to each other and to Earth’s Moon. The image on the left shows their actual physical sizes if they were all side by side. The image on the right shows their apparent sizes as seen from the surface of Hum (assuming the Moon was dropped in at the proper distance).

The moons are all physically smaller than the Earth’s moon by quite a bit and appear smaller in the sky. Also, notice that because Kran is so much closer than the other moons, although it is physically the smallest, it appears almost as big as Gluk and larger than Clud.

Hum’s Rotation Period

One more thing we need to establish is the actual rotation period of Hum. The information in Zeb’s Guide said it was 30 hours. However, I want to add a few more decimal places but still have it round to 30. So employing my usual method, I rolled d10-6 (to get a value between -5 and +4) and then two d10s for decimal places. I then added that to 30 to get the actual rotation period in hours. I ended up with 30.09 hours.

The Calendar

Now that we have all the physical data we need, we can get on to the actual purpose of this post, determining the calendar of the planet Hum.

Length of Year

The first thing to determine is the length of the year in local days. We have the orbital period of the planet (11,323.3 hours – about 30% longer than an earth year and 41.5% longer than the Frontiers’ Galactic Standard Year) and the rotation period of the planet (30.09 hours) so we just divide and find that the Hum year is 376.3144 local days long.

In local day terms, the year is only a bit longer than an Earth year, just 11 days more. It also tells us we’re going to need leap years, about every third year. We’ll come back to that.

In the previous sections, with the exception of the moon Kran, I sort of glossed over the relationship between the orbital periods of the moons as they relate to the length of the Hum year. Now let’s look at that in detail.

A Week on Hum

The inner moon Kran has an orbital period of 270.604 hours. Dividing this by the length of a day (30.09) hours, we get that Kran orbits every 8.993 days. That’s almost exactly 9 days. In fact, amazingly close to to exactly 9 days. Which is why I said above, I should have allowed for a bit more variation.

You might be suspicious of how well these orbital periods line up. The exact values selected were not completely arbitrary. I picked approximate values based on what I wanted to see and then let the dice tweak them slightly. And then I also manually tuned them a bit more. For example, I actually rolled 30.06 hours as the rotational period of the planet but when working out the leap years, liked the values I got for 30.09 hours better and went with that. So it’s no coincidence that the numbers come out so close. Maybe too close.

But that’s fine, sometimes you get lucky. So we’ll define a week on Hum to be 9 days long. At some point the start of first day of the week corresponds to the full Kran on the meridian but since the cycles slowly drift, that only occurs every once in a while and the phases slowly move through the week.

Comparing Kran’s orbital period to the year, we see that it makes 41.84 orbits each year so a typical year is almost 42 weeks long.

A Hum Month

If we compare the orbital period of the moon Gluk to the length of day we see that it’s orbital period corresponds to 34.125 days. And comparing it to the planet’s orbital period, it makes 11.02737 orbits in a single year.

Since I’m going to tie the concept of a month to the orbit of Gluck, a nominal month is 34 days long and there are 11 months in the year. There might be some variation like on Earth but this works as a base line.

With eleven 34-day months, that accounts for 374 of the 376.31 days of the year, leaving 2 extra days in the calendar. I’m going to assign one of those days to one of the months making it 35 days long (in the spring) and the other will be a holiday celebrating the passing/new year and will occur at the end of summer which will be when the Hum calendar year ends.

A Seasonal Moon

That leaves us with Clud. It’s orbit is 93.95 days long and it orbits 4.006 times each year, completing one orbit every season. Since the timing of its orbit doesn’t quite line up with the planet’s orbital period, the timing of the full phase of this moon slowly shifts (by just over half a day a year) over the centuries but the humma have tracked this for millennia and know the pattern.

Leap Years

All that’s left is to deal with that pesky 0.3144 days left over after each year. Multiplying by 3 gives us 0.943 days, which is just enough to be considered another day. Thus every third year, the end of year holiday is a two day event instead of a single day adding an extra day on that particular year but not part of any month.

It’s not quite a full day though and so every 51 years, the deviations add up enough that the extra day is not added to the calendar, just like on Earth when we don’t add in the leap day on years divisible by 100.

Finally, there is one more minor correction and that occurs every 1530 years. On that year, which would normally be a year the extra day is skipped, the extra day is included (just like including the leap day here on Earth in years that are divisible by 400 as occurred in the year 2000). This has only occurred once since this calendar was established and the next one won’t occur for another 172 years.

The Final Calendar

So the final Hum calendar looks like this:

One week is 9 days long – in modern times it is a 6 day work week with a 3 day weekend
Each year has 11 months plus one holiday at the end of the year to celebrate the harvest and ring in the new year. This feast day/beginning of the new year corresponds to the end of the Hum summer (what we would call fall)
One month consists of 34 days, or nearly 4 weeks. The exception to this is the 5th month which is 35 days long. This occurs during the planting season giving one more day in that month.
Every three years there is a leap day, extending the harvest holiday into a 2 day event instead of a single day.
Except that every 51 years, the leap day is skipped and every 1530 years the day that would be skipped is included.

One more thing we need is to anchor this calendar with the Frontier standard calendar. To do that I’m going to say that the start of Hum year 2898 will coincide with FY60.124 and that year is a leap year so the end of year celebration (that starts on FY61.290) will last two days.

Last Thoughts

I realized as I was typing this up, that I didn’t account for the difference between sidereal and synodic periods for the moons. The orbital periods listed are really the synodic periods (as seen from the surface of Hum) but I treated them like the sidereal periods for computing orbital distances. Which means the distances are a bit off. The differences would be relatively small but that’s something I should revisit in the future. The rotation period for Hum is definitely the solar period (noon to noon) and not the sidereal period.

Otherwise, this is a pretty good description of Hum and its moons and a reasonable calendar for the system. I didn’t touch on Forge or Larg, the two other inhabited worlds in the Fochrik system. I’m assuming this calendar predates the humma’s space age and so is the foundation of any other calendar system on the other worlds. How it was adapted might be another article in the future but for now is left as an exercise for the reader.

What do you think of the calendar system presented? What would you have done differently? What do you like? Let me know in the comments below.

Sathar Cave System

I believe this is the last major piece of the of the Death at Rosegard adventure that I haven’t yet published so let’s get to it.

An old, abandoned mine

Located some 30-40 km northeast of Rosegard is an abandoned Streele Mining corporation mine. It has been abandoned since before the Great Sathar War. Sometime after the war, an enclave of sathar survivors found the mine and have set up shop. They mainly are lying very low but send out scouts into the surrounding area and are the ones that were controlling the operative at the Streel mine near Rosegard. In addition, they were in contact with Trey Mulden to do the cybernuk breeding.

Let’s start with a map

This map was drawn by hand on my old Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2 tablet. I added the shading and the letters (but not the numbers) in Gimp for this post.

In addition to the labeled locations which are described below, there is a mostly destroyed and overgrown mining complex just outside the entrance. Bits and pieces of walls and foundations still exist but there really isn’t much there.

Area Descriptions

Aircar landing pad – while mainly filled with debris and rusted out vehicles from over 50 years ago when this mine was shut down, there is space for an aircar to land. The sathar have an old model aircar that may or may not currently be at the base. It was used by the sathar that was contacting the agent at Rosegard. If the PC’s captured or defeated that sathar, the aircar is not present.
Pool – This is a clear water pool that the sathar sometimes use for swimming but is primarily a source of drinking water.
Work area
1. Food Production (a) – This building contains a series of terrarium-like containers that have a variety of small bugs and other creatures growing in them. Additionally there are some hydroponic vats growing plants. None of these seem to be native to Pale. There is a single sathar working here. The sathar does not have a weapon but does have a communicator.
2. Tech lab (b) – This building contains what appears to be a technician or robotics lab although alien in nature. What appears to be a half assembled robot sits on one worktable and other tables contain various gadgets in various states of construction. One of the items looks like a nearly complete Cybernuk headset. There are 3 sathar technicians here. Two of them are armed (laser pistol with 2 power clips) while the other has a communicator.
3. Food Storage (c) – This is a climate controlled building with a freezer section. It contains a large numbers the creatures and plants from the food production building but preserved for storage. There is several months’ worth of food here.
4. Supply storage (d)- This area contains a wide variety of physical and technical materials ranging from various electronic parts to tubing, to wires, to chemicals. Most of the materials look to be frontier in origin but some are definitely alien in appearance.
5. Nuk pen (e)- This pen contains three cybernuks with no cybernetic attachments. It is locked with a level 1 lock simply to keep the nuks inside. When opened, the nuks will charge out an attack the PCs. An INT check will alert the PCs that something alive is inside. Wall and door have 100 structure points.
6. Nuk Pen (f) – This pen contains a single nuk with the cyber attachment. It is locked with a level 1 lock to keep the nuk inside. When opened, the nuk will charge out and attack the PCs. An INT check will alert the PCs that something alive is inside. If this cybernuk is released first, the other three will start bashing against the wall and door trying to get out to come to its aid (controlled by cyber implant).
Power plant and water processing – This is a geothermal power generator (type II). Cabling runs from here back to area 3 that has been partially hidden by debris and rubble on the floor. Additionally there is a large water processing facility here with fillers and processing system. Pipes run from here to areas 5, 6, 7, & 9 from here along the ceiling. There are two Sathar technician here. One of the sathar is armed (laser pistol with 2 power clips) while the other has a communicator.
Small Slime Pool – This pool houses four sathar. There are small bins by the pool that hold the personal effects of the sathar that call this pool home. Each has a backpack with a food jar, a small communicator, and two of them have laser pistols with two power packs each. There are currently two sathar in the pool.
1. backpack, communicator, food jar
2. empty
3. empty
4. backpack, food jar, laser pistol with 2 power clips
Large Slime Pool – Similar to area five, this larger pool houses eight sathar. There are currently four in the pool. The contents of the bins are:
1. Empty
2. Backpack, food jar, laser pistol with 2 power clips
3. Empty
4. Empty
5. Backpack, food jar, communicator
6. Backpack, food jar, laser pistol with 2 power clips
7. Empty
8. Backpack, food jar, laser pistol with 2 power clips
Large Slime Pool – Similar to area five, this larger pool houses eight sathar. There are currently four in the pool. The contents of the bins are:
1. Empty
2. Empty
3. Backpack, food jar, laser pistol with 2 power clips
4. Empty
5. Backpack, food jar, communicator
6. Empty
7. Backpack, food jar, communicator
8. Backpack, food jar, laser pistol with 2 power clips
Robot storage – This storage area holds a dozen completed combat robots. While the parts are Frontier sourced, the design is definitely alien. Characters have a –10% modifier to attempt any skills on these robots
Leader Slime Pool – This is the personal slime pool of the compound’s leader. This is a middle caste sathar. There is a bin here with the leader’s personal belongings which contains a backpack, a laser pistol with 4 power clips, an inertia screen with a power beltpack, two food jars, a communicator, and a small computer.

Initial status of the mine

The mine is not on alert for intrusion. It was fairly recently set up and does not have a lot of security features installed yet as the sathar began immediate production of the combat robots and food.

One of the residents is the controller for the agent at Rosegard and possibly was captured or killed by the PC’s. If it wasn’t, add in another sathar to area 5 (small slime pool). Another is out returning from the Trey Mulden’s compound. The second sathar will arrive back 5d10x10 minutes after the PCs enter the compound.

When the PCs first arrive, there are two sathar returning to area 7 from area 3 after being on duty that the PC will encounter in the passageway between those two areas when they first enter it. The next duty rotation is not scheduled to occur for another 1d5 hours at which point two of the sathar in area 6 will be headed to area 4.

None of the doors, except to the nuk pens, are locked.

Sathar Reaction to PCs Arrival

Before the sathar are alerted

When the PCs enter one of the buildings with sathar in it, immediately start combat. Those sathar that are armed will draw their weapon the first round but cannot fire until the second round. They will begin to attack the PCs as soon as they are able. Sathar with communicators will attempt to alert the rest of the compound. It takes them one turn to open their backpack, one turn to grab the communicator, and the third turn to send the message. The alert message will go out on the sathar’s action during the third turn. If the PCs eliminate that sathar before then, no alert goes out. Otherwise, consider the compound to be alerted going forward.

When the PCs enter one of the pool areas containing the lower caste sathar, there is only a 5% chance that one of the sathar is not in the water. Regardless, the sathar will notice the PCs immediately and react. The will start exiting the pool at the rate of 1d2 sathar per round (to represent different distances from the edge of the water) starting on round 2. Once they have left the pool, it will take them one round to reach the bins and grab their backpacks unless the PCs block their way. On the round after reaching the bins, those sathar that are armed may begin firing; those with communicators will simply grab their communication device and begin to activate it. They can send an alert out as their action on their next turn (3^rd after exiting the water).

Sathar with communicators will engage in melee combat (two attacks per round) with their bare tentacles once the alert has been sent or immediately if the alert has already gone out.

After the sathar are alerted

Once the alert has gone out, any sathar encountered will be ready and attack immediately upon seeing the PCs.

Any sathar in the slime pools will immediate move toward area 8 where they will begin activating the combat robots at the rate of one every other turn. They will remain there until all the robots are activated. At that point they will proceed up through the cavern complex looking for the invaders. The leader will hang back sending the robots and other sathar to engage the PCs. If the PCs arrive at area 8 before all the robots are activated, the robots that are active and those sathar that are armed will engage them while the others continue to activate the remaining robots. As the robots are activated, they will be sent to engage immediately.

The sathar in area 4 will take cover and immediately attack the PCs if they enter the generator and processing facility. They will get one free round of attacks on the PCs before the PCs can react.

The sathar in the food processing facility will head across the cavern to the tech lab when the alert is sounded (if they are not the one sounding the alarm) and will either engage the PCs from behind if they are in the tech lab or wait with the sathar in the tech lab until the PCs or the main body of sathar arrives.

The sathar in the tech lab will be waiting for the PCs if they arrive before the main body of sathar and robots. There is a 10% chance that they will have been able to reassemble the laser pistol being modified on the workbench. The sathar using it will have a 10% penalty to hit as is hasn’t been fully converted. If the PCs take a long time to get to the tech lab after the alert is sounded, raise the probability to 20%.

Sathar tactics

As the sathar are under-armed, they will try to attack from cover or ambush if at all possible. If they have robots with them, they will send the robots in the fore to take damage from the PCs’ weapons. If a sathar is in danger of being captured or thinks they will die, they will attempt to close with one or more of the PCs and trigger the self-destruct in their laser pistol (if they have one). When the self-destruct goes off, treat it as a fragmentation grenade doing a number of d10 worth of damage equal to the SEU remaining in the clip. If the clip is empty it will still do 1d10 points of damage. PCs get a RS check to take half damage and intertia screens and skiensuits halve the damage as well.

Stats

Sathar Leader

STR/STA: 50/50
DEX/RS: 60/50
INT/LOG: 55/55
PER/LDR: 55/70
PS: 3
IM: 5
RW: 30
MW: 30

Skills: Beam 4, Tech 3, Enviro 2, Unarmed 3, Robotics 2, Melee 1

Equipment: backpack, a laser pistol with 4 power clips, an inertia screen with a power beltpack, two food jars, a communicator, and a small computer

Regular Sathar

STR/STA: 40/40
DEX/RS: 45/45
INT/LOG: 45/45
PER/LDR: 45/55
PS: 2
IM: 5
RW: 23
MW: 23

Skills: Beam 2, Robotics or Technician or Environmental 2, Melee 1, Unarmed 1

Equipment: backpack, food jar, laser pistol with 2 power clips or communicator

Combat Robots

Type: Combat
Level: 2
STA: 100
Move: 120 m/turn
Attack: 50
Damage: 2d10 hands or 5d10 laser
Programs: Attack/Defense, Security Lock
Equipment: Laser pistol, power beltpack

Detailed Frontier Timeline – FY60.026 to FY60.053

Here is the next installment in the detailed Frontier timeline. This month’s entries include the posts that prompted the “How to build a star system” posts earlier in the month. The sathar are beginning to ramp up their forces while the Frontier is still debating what to do about the “Sathar Situation” on Volturnus.

Date (FY)	Event
60.026	Envoy delegation from the Council of Worlds is dispatched from Gran Quivera (Prenglar) to go to Volturnus (Zebulon) to meet with the races of that world.
60.027	The KSS Trader’s Gambit arrives at Kawdl-Kit (K’tsa-Kar).
60.028	Maximillian Malligigg has a piece of fused metal he found on Starmist analyzed and learns it is the result of nuclear fusion. He begins securing funds to purchase a ship and return to Starmist in advance of an official expedition. (SF3)
60.029	Members of the Second Volturnus Expedition raid a small outpost discovered in the logs of Slave City One that was a hideout for the Star Devil. While the Star Devil was not there, valuable information about the Star Devil’s dealings in the Frontier are uncovered.
60.030	Worried about the events in the Zebulon system, the Rim Coalition increases spending for the Flight by 50%. Delegation dispatched to the Council of Worlds from Faire (Capella) to encourage that the Frontier take the Sathar threat seriously.
60.031	– The remnants of the sathar’s Zebulon fleet reaches sathar space arriving at the system containing sathar starship construction center #5 – Another destroyer is completed at the sathar starship construction center in the Liberty system.
60.032	Contestants, spectators, and reporters gather on Hum (Fochrik) for the annual Humma Jump Competition. Speculation is high that the current record in the standing long jump event of 38.272 meters will be surpassed this year.
60.033	Universal Households unveils its new fashion line at its annual show on Hakosoar (Scree Fron) which is transmitted via subspace radio to all systems in the Frontier. Products immediately go on sale across the Frontier as competitors race to match the new style.
60.034	After two days of competition, Zonuul Usu of Larg (Fochrik) wins the Humma Jump Competition with a jump of 38.275m, beating the previous species record by 3 millimeters. Two others beat the previous record in the final round of competition but lost to Zonuul.
60.035	SF Nova arrives in Fromeltar system; it will be in system for 4 days
60.036	Initial examinations reveal that the Eorna egg cache does in fact contain viable eggs. While overjoyed that they no longer face extinction as a species, concerns about the societal impact of introducing the new Eorna are raised. (SF2)
60.037	Synthetics Corporation announces a new brand of sports drink that provides the necessary electrolytes for all Frontier and Rim races. Included in the line is a “Hyper Humma” variation with 10x the flavor enhancers to appeal to their deadened sense of taste. It quickly becomes a point of bravado for members of the other race to attempt to consume the “Hyper Humma” variations.
60.038	Interplanetary Industries CEO Harlon Thow spotted wearing a never before seen style of toxy-rad gauge that is slimmer and more compact than previous styles. Rumors circulate that it is a new device soon to be released by the company.
60.039	In its first 60 days of operation, the Yazira Dome has had over 1 million visitors, mostly inhabitants of Hentz (Araks). Many across the Frontier denounce the Family of One for not allowing non-yazirian visitors to the planet and the Dome.
60.040	Sathar vessels are dispatched from the Liberty system toward a staging area somewhere near the Frontier.
60.041	Sathar Clan Z vessels, previously in route to sathar starship construction center #3 are diverted by clan leaders toward Kizk-Kar.
60.042	Sathar forces, operating in Saurian(DM103) space, launch simultaneous assaults against saurian forces in the Tischen (FE004) and Dayzer (FE004) systems.
60.043	Several Streel compounds on Laco (Dixon’s Star) are captured by Galactic Task Force teams and Streel employees are forced to evacuate and return to the Streel headquarter compound in Tyrell’s Landing.
60.044	SF Nova departs Fromeltar for Kizk-Kar
60.045	The Rim delegation arrives on Pale (Truane’s Star) for a short stopover to meet with the Pale government about the sathar situation.
60.046	Another destroyer is completed in the SCC in the Liberty system.
60.047	Pale militia delegation testifies before the Council of Worlds on Gran Quivera (Prenglar) as to the events of the Battles of Zebulon and Volturnus. Debate and deliberation on the need for increased military buildup continues.
60.048	Rim Coalition delegation departs Pale (Truane’s Star) to continue on to Gran Quivera (Prenglar) to meet with The Council of Worlds
60.049	Based on information obtained from the Star Devil lair on Volturnus (Zebulon), the Pale government raids and seizes assets from several business connected with the Star Devil pirate organization.
60.050	SF Nova arrives in Kizk-Kar. Will be in-system for 8 days
60.051	Several PGC vessels, just arriving in the Dixon’s Star system en route to Laco are destroyed by unknown vessels.
60.052	PGC representatives appear before the Council of Worlds requesting Spacefleet aid to protect their vessels in the Dixon’s Star system from suspected Streel aggression.
60.053	Proving the rumors correct, Interplanetary Industries announces a new line of wearable monitoring devices including a new toxy-rad gauge matching the one spotted on CEO Harlon Thow several days earlier. The new line boasts extended battery life and greater accuracy in a smaller package.

Here’s the full timeline download file:

DetailedFrontierTimeline Download

State of the Frontier – Feb 2019

For those of you that read these “state of the Frontier” posts, you probably realize that my plans got turned all upside down this month. The plan was to focus on Ghost Ship Osiris and the Death at Rosegard adventures with maybe some other items in the background. Well, the background jumped to foreground and then the month was over.

Looking Back

I had intended to work on the Ghost Ship Osiris adventure but for the most part that didn’t happen. I did get some initial sketches done of the Pursale ship. But I’m not completely happy with them and they definitely need some work.

Death at Rosegard didn’t even get touched. I honestly don’t think I even thought about it this month. I have now added it to my list of draft posts, however, and so it will be bugging me to get it finished now when I look at active projects.

What did come to the forefront was the beginning of the “Create a Star System” series. Triggered by a couple of posts I made on the timeline project, that series got stuck in my brain and seriously worked on. This month we got the details on creating the system data and actually drawing the map (including a video of the drawing process). The drawing of the map didn’t take as long as I expected but it took me a lot longer to actually do the write-up in the posts than I was anticipating.

I also posted a short bit on my new starship construction system covering hull types, armor, and sensors systems. Those are the last of the pieces of the system that differ significantly from the standard starship components in the core Star Frontiers Knight Hawks rules. I’ve been thinking about the system and realize I need a little bit more work on the engines so there is one more post on that before I can pull it all together.

Behind the scenes, the timeline project continues unabated. I also started working on pulling the next issue of the Frontier Explorer together, more on a management side, but things are progressing.

Looking Forward

So what’s in store for this month? We’ll start the month off with the now usual timeline post. I have entries for half the days this month (up through the 12th and a few random days after that) plus about half of April as well. So at some point in the next week or so I’ll be sitting down to flesh out the rest of the events happening over the next 30-60 days in the Frontier. We’re still a bit away from the massive Sathar fleets showing up in the Frontier but the activity is starting to heat up.

Now that I missed it last month, I plan on getting the sathar inhabited cave system finished and out this month. It really just needs some work cleaning up the map so I really don’t have an excuse.

After that, I intend to finish up the “Building a Star System” series with the Fochrik system’s calendar. That will wrap up that series for now.

I’m not sure what the 4th post of the month will be. Most likely it will be the last little bit about the engines in the new starship construction system. I’ll be working on the Pursale ship but I don’t know that I’ll have anything ready to go on that before the month is out unless I do a post just about the sketches and general design. Or it could be that something else grabs my interest and I run with that. We’ll see where it falls out.

The other thing I’ll be working on behind the scenes are the Frontier Explorer and another fanzine. There will be a big push on my part this month to get the next issue of the Frontier Explorer ready since we plan on releasing it in April. Keep your eyes on the magazine’s website for more details as they come out. We have all the articles we need, we just need to finish polishing our new layout. I’ve also been asked to head up another fanzine, this one more focused on general OSR topics and probably more fantasy focused. It’s in its infant stages but I have a big team and plan on leveraging my Frontier Explorer experience to put them to work and minimize what I need to do. More director than front-line worker bee. There will be more information on that in the coming months as well.

I think that’s it for now. I had a good month and am looking forward to a busy but exciting March. See you all around the Frontier.

How to Draw a System Map

Okay, in my last post on this topic, we generated all of the data needed to draw out a system map for the Fochrik star system. If you haven’t read the previous entry, you might want to but it’s not necessary. The next step is to take that data and turn it into the actual image. This post will cover that process. Let’s dive right in.

The Data

First a quick summary of the data for the system that we generated last time. While we won’t need all of this for the map, but it’s good to have it all summarized in one place. For generating the system map, we’re only going to need the orbital distance and the planet’s radius.

Name	Orbital Distance (AU)	Orbital Period (hrs)	Gravity (g)	Mass (Earth)	Radius (km)
T1	0.19	687.46	0.33	0.0349	2,064.55
T2	0.52	3,112.57	0.67	0.3373	4,468.50
Forge	1.13	9,316.45	0.81	0.6012	5,443.75
Hum	1.23	11,323.3	0.91	0.8139	5,991.92
Larg	1.61	16,957.2	1.12	1.4622	7,215.22
J1	4.66	83,501.4	3.30	525.82	79,714.14
J2	10.59	286,061	1.55	140.14	60,108.51
ID1	16.58	560,391	0.14	0.0189	2,297.74
IG1	18.53	662,106	0.97	19.902	28,62316
ID2	20.53	772,144	0.06	0.0018	1,054.47
IG1	26.01	1,101,096	1.02	18.472	26,919.75

When drawing the map, we want the distances to be all on the same scale. However, we cannot use a simple linear scale in most cases as that would put all the inner planets right on top of each other if we want to see the outer planets on the same image. You can see this in the following diagram that has a linear distance scale.

Fochrik system planetary distances on a linear scale. Click for larger image.

As you can see, those inner planets are bunched up pretty close together while the outer planets have huge gaps. We want to spread out the inner planets while compressing the outer ones but still have the relative scale be correct. To do that we need to shift from a linear scale to a logarithmic one.

To get on a log scale, we are just going to take the base 10 logarithm (the ‘log’ key on your calculator) of each of the orbital distances and use that value to draw the distances. First I’ll present the numbers and then another simple drawing.

Name	Orbital Distance (AU)	Orbital Distance (log(AU))	Scaled Distance
T1	0.19	-0.7212	14
T2	0.52	-0.2840	233
Forge	1.13	0.0531	401
Hum	1.23	0.0899	420
Larg	1.61	0.2087	479
J1	4.66	0.6684	709
J2	10.59	1.0249	887
ID1	16.58	1.2196	985
IG1	18.53	1.2679	1009
ID2	20.53	1.3124	1031
IG2	26.01	1.4151	1083

We can’t quite use the log(AU) values as the smaller numbers generate negative values (I’m not going to do a math lecture here. If you’re interested in why, you can check out this Wikipedia article). So we need to scale those numbers somehow. The scaled distance value in the table above was calculated by taking the log(AU) distances, adding 0.75 and then multiplying by 500. We’ll use these values to create the plot.

As you can see, the range of values is greatly compressed which allows things to be a bit more evenly spaced. The only issue with this scale is that zero (i.e. the position of the star) has a value of negative infinity so we’ll have to pick some arbitrary distance to separate them. However, since we’re just trying to show the relative position of the planets, that’s not too big of a problem. Here’s the simple plot we get:

Orbital distances on a log scale. Click for larger image.

This scale compresses the outer planets a bit but helps us spread out the inner planets which are the ones we’re more interested in anyway.

Drawing the Map

With the numbers above, we have all the information we need to create the map. The last thing to decide is if we are going do make a horizontal map (oriented like the diagrams above or the map in the Clarion Calendar post) or a vertical one (like in the Duergan’s Star post). For this map, I’m going to make a horizontal map simply because all of the “along the way” image will fit better into the post than a vertical one will. However, the process applies just as well to a vertical map, you just have to rotate everything 90 degrees.

I’ll be building the map in Inkscape, my vector drawing program of choice and it will be a simple black and white drawing so it shouldn’t be too complicated.

Here’s a video I made of the map building process if you want to watch it in real time, It’s about 53 and a half minutes long and completely unedited so you can see all my mistakes and fumbling around. If you don’t want to watch the video, I’ve described all the steps below.

Laying the ground work

To start, we want to set up the basic image and some guides for us to work with. I’ve decided to make the image 1200×400 pixels in size so I create a blank document of that size to work with. I also turn on a rectangular grid to help with position items. This grid will get turned on and off as needed during the drawing process.

I’m going to use the logarithmic distance scale for my planet spacing so I then import that image into my document and position it accordingly.

Finally, I draw a guide line down the middle of the image so I know where the center line is. After this initial setup, the image looks like:

I’ve shifted the imported image just slightly so that it’s 10 pixels to the right of where it was in the original. I wanted a little more space between the star and the first planet. Since I’ll be measuring the scaled distances from the left edge of the image, this means I’ll have to add 30 pixels to the values in the table above for the final radii of the orbits.

All of the above was done on the initial default layer. I then create three more layers: one for the orbits, one for the objects (star and planets), and a third for the labels. I like to work in lots of layers as it makes it easy to turn bits and pieces on and off and add in effects if needed.

The star and the orbits

The next step is to draw in the star itself and then start adding arcs for the orbits. The symbol for Fochrik is created using the star and polygon tool in the star setting with corners set to 30 and spoke ratio set to 0.8. This is drawn on the object layer.

Next I hide the objects layer and move to the orbits layer. Here I use the circle tool to draw in the first orbit. Clicking on the point where the center guide meets the edge of the image I then drag out the circle holding down the shift and the control keys until it reaches out to the position of the guide line for the planet T1.

Holding the control key down makes the circle drawn have integer ratios between the x and y directions allowing you get a proportional circle. Holding down the shift key makes your initial click point the center of the circle instead of the upper left corner of the box enclosing the circle. Once I have the circle drawn to approximately the correct size, I use the spinner boxes for Rx and Ry (the x and y radii) to set the exact radii (44 px in this case). The fill of the circle is set to transparent, the stoke is set to black with a thickness of 2 pixels.

Inkscape allows you to draw off the edge of the image so we drew a whole circle for this first orbit. Since we will be copying and scaling this up, we don’t want our circles going way off to the left. We can turn the full circle into an arc by grabbing the small circular mark on the drawn circle (it’s at the 3 o’clock position) and moving it clockwise to break the circle. I move it down to just past the 6 o’clock position. Then I go back and grab the other small circle node at 3 o’clock and move it up to just before the 12 o’clock position. This gives us a half circle which is all we need.

Now it’s just a matter of duplicating that arc and setting the correct radii for each one. As we move out we’ll want to adjust the size of the arc so it’s not sticking up well above or below the edge of the image just to make things a little cleaner on our drawing canvas.

We can duplicate a selected object by pressing Control-D. Then we just go up and set the Rx and Ry values based on the scaled distance values in the table above (remembering to add 30 to each one). You have to remember to have the circle tool selected while you do this or you can’t set the radii.

Once that is done, we have an image that looks something like this:

Notice how the arcs are going high. They will be cut off when we export the final image. They were originally also going low as well but they have been adjusted (at a later step) and I didn’t export an image while I was drawing them.

You might also notice that the arc for the planet T2 is not lined up with it’s guide line. That is because as I was drawing it, I noticed a discrepancy between where the guide line was and where the arc was drawn based on the scaled distance values. I originally though there was an error in the scaled distance but it turns out I just drew my guide sketch wrong. It’s always good to double check your work.

Drawing the planets

We’ve got our orbits, now we need to draw the planets. This will be done on the planet layer so we switch to that layer now.

Like the orbits, we want the planets to all be on the same scale. This obviously can’t be the same scale as the orbits or we wouldn’t be able to see them since they’d just be dots on the page. To pick the initial scale, I just let the radius of the circle we’re going to draw be equal to the radius of of the planet (in km) listed in the table divided by 2000. I computed each of these values and wrote them down on a piece of scratch paper to have them handy.

Depending on how you have Inkscape set up, when you draw in the first circle, you’ll notice that you just get an arc instead of a full circle. That was my case as I have Inkscape set to remember the last setting for the tool and use that instead of resetting to the default. I find that more useful. But we need to reset the tool to draw circles. This is done by finding the Start and End boxes (up by the Rx and Ry boxes) and setting them to 0 and 360 respectively. Now we’re drawing circles again. Also you’ll want to set the fill to white instead of transparent.

I then just move to an arbitrary point on each planet’s orbit, draw a small circle and then set Rx and Ry to be the values determined for that planet. It doesn’t matter exactly where you draw them as we’ll go back and properly position them once they are all drawn.

When you start doing this, you’ll quickly notice that the scale we’ve picked is simply too small for the small terrestrial planets. In the case of a few of them, you can’t even see the disk as it is smaller than thickness of the line we drew for the orbit. To solve this we simply double the radii of these planets. However, that would make the giant and Jovian planets too big if we doubled them as well. So we’re just going to have to have different scales. The terrestrial and ice dwarf planets will be to scale with each other as will the giant and Jovian planets but the smaller planets will be twice as big as they would be if they were to scale with the larger planets.

The last step of drawing the planets is to place them at an appropriate position on their orbit circle. There are two requirements here. One is that the disk of the planet should be centered on the orbit line. The other is that for planets with close orbits, they are spread out across the image so that when we add labels there won’t be any overlap. To make this easier you should turn off the grid that we set up at the beginning so the software isn’t trying to snap your circles to positions you don’t want.

Once that is done, we have an image that looks something like this:

You’ll notice that even doubling the scale, some of those planets are pretty tiny. In fact, you might not even be able to see ice dwarf 2 unless you click on the image above to get the full sized one. But that’s okay.

Adding labels

The next step is to label everything. There are a few things we want to put in our labels. The most obvious is the name of the planet. I still haven’t come up with official names for the planets but that doesn’t matter for the purposes of demonstrating the mapping technique. The other thing we need to do is add the scale for the system map. Finally we’ll add a label for the system. I’ll be using the Copperplate Gothic Bold font for my lettering.

Let’s start with the scale. If you watched the video, you’ll know that I actually did this way back at the beginning of the process. Since it was already there in the imported image, all I had to do was trace it. Once it was drawn in and had the numbers, I put the “Distance (AU)” label on and then moved everything down as close to the bottom of the image as I wanted it.

The labels on the the scale are drawn with a height of 16px for the numbers and 20px for the label. What you choose is arbitrary and it should be picked to match the size of the drawing. You don’t want it too small but you don’t want it too large either.

However, at this point, I didn’t like the orbit lines crossing over the scale and I went back and adjusted them so that they stopped just before touching it. If you look closely in the previous image, you’ll see another guide line that sits just above the scale that all the orbit lines touch. I drew this line in and then, using the circle tool, adjusted the end of the arc of each orbit line to just touch that line, which is why they don’t extend below the image.

Turning off the layer with the guides and the scale image gives us the following at this point. I’ve also now only exported the actual drawing so everything is trimmed appropriately.

Next we label the planets. For each planet I’m going to put the name in using a 20px high font and then centered under the name, put its orbital distance in a 10px high font. Again still using Copperplate Gothic Bold. I had originally intended to just type both and then change the font size of the distance but found that I couldn’t adjust the vertical spacing like I wanted to. So instead I created two text objects, one for each line, used the alignment tools to get them lined up, and then grouped the label for each planet into a single object so I can move it around easier later.

It doesn’t really matter exactly where you put the labels to begin with as you’ll be moving them around once they are done and you have their exact sizes. Just go through and add them for each planet. Then, once they are in the drawing, move and position them so that you like the placement. This may also involve moving the position of the planet’s disk on the orbit line to get a spacing you want.

Typically for the smaller planets, I like to place label so the center of name is aligned with the center of the disk. For the large planets, I tend to set it to the lower left or right corner depending on the exact positioning. I just do this by eye. You want to avoid having the text run over the orbit lines as much as you can but in some cases it’s unavoidable. Just place the names where it looks good to you. On a vertical map, I’ll often try to center the name of the planet under the planet’s disk.

Now we have to deal with the text that is overlapping the orbit lines. This often makes the text hard to read so we need to mask out the orbit lines under the text. Your text layer should be positioned above the orbit layer. If it isn’t you’ll need to move it up in the layer stack. What we’ll do is draw some white rectangles to hide the orbit line below the text. I like to set their opacity to about 75-80% so the orbit lines slightly peek through but you can make them fully opaque if you prefer. Drawing the rectangles can either be done on a new mask layer that is placed directly under the labels layer or in the labels layer itself.

In this image I drew the rectangles directly into the labels layer. Using the rectangle tool I just drew in a small rectangle over the orbit lines in each location there was overlap between the text and the lines. You’ll want to make the rectangle extend just a bit below and above the text. Exactly how much depends on how much space you want between the lines and the text and is a matter of taste. As you draw the rectangles, they are placed above the text so you need to send them to the bottom of the z-order for the layer so they are behind the text instead.

If you draw on a new mask layer, then you don’t have to worry about moving the z-order of the boxes as they will all be between the orbit lines and the text. You also don’t have to worry about the opacity on the individual boxes but can adjust the opacity of the entire layer all at once. This is typically how I do the masks but for some reason didn’t on this particular drawing. Probably due to the fact that I was recording and it slipped my mind.

We are almost done. At this point our image looks like this:

Finishing touches

The only thing left to add is the label for the system, a border, and a white background.

We’ll put the label in the upper left. We want this to be large so we’ll use a 32px high font. We’ll also need to add a mask as it will be overlapping the orbit lines. I considered simply adjusting the orbit lines to end below the label but decided to leave them in and mask them off.

The border and background I did with a single object. You may not have noticed, but all of the images so far have had a transparent background with just the objects drawn on it. This can cause some issues depending on how the image is rendered so we want to add a solid white background.

To do this I make a new background layer that sits at the very bottom of the layer stack. On this layer I draw a single large rectangle that stretches corner to corner across the entire image. I set the fill to white and the stroke to black with a 6px thickness. Due to the way Inkscape draws the stroke, half of that will be off the final image giving a 3px border. If you want it thicker or thinner, simply adjust the stroke width.

And now we’re done. Here’s the final image:

The final system map. Click for larger version

If you’d like to look at or play with the original SVG file of this map, they you can grab it here:

FochrikSystemMap Download

Other touch-ups

Giving the planets some character

For this demo, I didn’t do anything special with the planets themselves. If you wanted to, you could add in cloud bands or rings on the giant planets to give them a little bit of character. Especially if they have features called out in their descriptions. I didn’t have any special descriptors so I left them as simple circles but that could be added in later.

The FTL Horizon

If I was doing this map for FrontierSpace, the other thing I would add in is a dashed arc at the position of the FTL Horizon, which in that game is the distance you need to be from the star in order to engage your Nova Drive to travel between the star systems. That would be an important bit of information for the map to include.

Asteroid belts

I also didn’t add in an asteroid belt in this system. If I did then I would determine the distances for the inner and outer boundaries of the belt and draw orbit circles on the guide layer at those distances. Then on the object layer I’d go in by hand and draw in all the asteroids. I work on a 2-in-1 laptop that has a stylus so I can actually flip my laptop into tablet mode and draw the asteroids with my stylus right on the screen. I find this much easier and faster than trying to do it with the mouse but it can be done that way (and I’ve done it that way in the past). There’s a bit more to it than that so I might do a mini article on drawing in asteroid belts.

Final thoughts

And that’s everything. I think the map turned out pretty well. I was actually surprised it only took a little less than an hour to draw it out once I had all the data. All told I probably spent about 2-2.5 hours creating the data and making the drawing. It would have taken a bit longer if I had had an asteroid belt to include or added details to the planets but that gives you an idea of the effort involved. It actually took me longer to do these two blog posts (5-6 hours total) than it took to actually do the work.

I still have one more post on the calendar system to do and that will come in March. I’d like to hear your comments, questions, or any suggestions you have about the process. What wasn’t clear? What would you like more information on? Did you try this yourself? If you did, share your results. Let me know below.

A New Star Ship Construction System – part 4 – Hull Types, Armor, and Sensor Systems

This is a continuation of the excerpts from the starship construction system. I had originally planned to have the how to draw a star system map post ready for today but I didn’t quite finish it. So I’m posting this one in its place and will have that one up next week.

This article will be about the various type of hulls that you can make you ship out of and the effects they have on the hull points and mass of the ship. In the new system I expand on the basic hull from the original rules to four different types that have different characteristics and costs.

While not related, I’m also including the section on the radar and energy sensors as that is another deviation from the standard system

Hull Type

There are four different hull types. Each type has a mass and cost associated with it depending on the hull type selected. Different hulls provide different amount of hull points for a given ship size.

Hull Type	Cost multiplier	Mass Multiplier	Hull Point Multiplier
Light	35 cr * total volume	0.15 tons * total volume	0.6
Standard	50 cr * total volume	0.25 tons * total volume	1
Armored	100 cr * total volume	0.50 tons * total volume	1.4
Military	200 cr * total volume	0.40 tons * total volume	2

Light Hull – This is a light duty hull. It costs and weighs less than a standard hull but only provides sixty percent of the hull points of a standard hull.

Standard Hull – This is the standard type of ship hull and provides the standard number of hull points. This is the typical hull used on most civilian vessels

Armored Hull – This is the highest grade hull available to civilians. It is twice as massive and twice as expensive as a standard hull and provides a forty percent increase in hull points over a standard hull.

Military Hull – Combining specialized materials and designs, the military grade hull is not available for civilian ships. It is more expensive than even the armored hull although it doesn’t contain as much mass and provides double the number of hull points of a standard hull.

Example: Obar Enterprises is designing a new mid-sized freighter that has 100 cargo units of space. After selecting all the ship’s, the total volume of the ship is 18,453.2 cubic meters. Selecting a standard hull gives a cost of 18,453.2 x 50 = 922,660 credits and a mass of 18,453.2 x 0.25 = 4613.3 tons. This hull would have the standard number of hull points.

If the cost or mass were a concern, they could go with a light hull, which would have a cost of only 18,453.2 x 35 = 645,862 cr (saving nearly 300,000 cr) and have a mass of only 18,453.2 x 0.15 = 2767.98 tons saving nearly 2000 tons. However, this hull would have a hull point multiplier of 0.6 or only 60% of the standard hull points.

Additional Armor

Sometimes even the strongest hull just isn’t enough and you want to add more armor to the ship. Once you have your base hull, you can add additional layers of protection to the ship as desired. This will greatly increase the cost and mass of your ship but won’t affect the volume.

You can add armor on to the ship to increase its hull points by up to 25% in 1% increments. The cost of additional armor is 8 cr. per cubic meter of volume per percentage increase. Thus to get a 5% HP increase it would cost you 40 cr. per cubic meter of the ship, nearly doubling the cost of a standard hull. The armor adds an additional 0.016 tons of mass per cubic meter of volume per percentage increase. Thus that 5% increase above would also add 0.08 tons per cubic meter of the volume of the ship.

The armor modifier for calculating the ships final hull points is just 1+(armor bonus/100). So if my armor bonus is 20% the modifier is 1+(20/100) = 1.2. This will be multiplied by the ship’s base hull points to determine the actual number of hull points the ship has.

Long Range Detectors

Radar

Radar systems are combination active/passive systems. In active mode they send out pulses of radio waves and detect the reflected pulses. In passive mode, they scan space for emissions from other ships. The range of the radar system depends on its rating. The higher the rating the more distant an object it can detect due to stronger emitters and more sensitive receivers. It takes a lot of power and large transmitters to get returns from objects in the larger areas covered by the higher rated systems. The listed range is the range for the active system. In passive mode, the ranges are at least 10 times larger but can only detect targets that are radiating at radio frequencies.

Rating	Range (km)	Multiplier
1	300,000	1
2	600,000	8
3	900,000	27
4	1,200,000	64
5	1,500,000	125

Cost: 10,000 cr x Multiplier, mass: 15 tons x Multiplier, volume: 5 cu m x multiplier (7 cu m if aerodynamically streamlined)

Energy Sensors

These are broad spectrum radiation detectors that look at multiple wavelengths to detect radiation from ship systems. They scan radio, optical, infrared, x-ray, and microwave wavelengths and have gamma-ray detectors to look for signatures from ships’ engines and power plants. These are completely passive systems and like radar come in different ratings that have increased sensitivity. The ranges listed are for detecting shielded, ship-sized energy sources against the cosmic background. If an object is putting out energy emissions that are stronger than typical radiation leaked from ship systems, the detection range could be much larger. For example, even a type 1 energy sensor suite will still be able to detect the system’s star at ranges of billions of kilometers. Exact details are left up to the referee.

Rating	Range (km)	Multiplier
1	500,000	1
2	1,000,000	8
3	1,500,000	27
4	2,000,000	64
5	2,500,000	125

Cost: 200,000 cr x Multiplier, mass: 50 tons x Multiplier, volume: 20 cu m x multiplier

Thoughts

That’s it for the hull types, armor, and long range detectors. It’s a fairly simple change but allows for a wide range of ships with various characteristics and costs. Obviously the heavier hulls, armor, and larger sensors are going to require bigger, more expensive engines or suffer a performance penalty but sometimes you just need more hull points or a larger sensor range.

Share your thoughts, suggestions, and questions in the comment section below.

Building a Star System – Fochrik

In a couple of my timeline posts at the end of last week, I mentioned an annual competition on Hum in the Fochrik system, the homeworld of the Humma race in Star Frontiers. The tweets were as follows:

FY60.032 – Contestants, spectators, and reporters gather on Hum (Fochrik) for the annual Humma Jump Competition. Speculation is high that the current record in the standing long jump event of 38.272 meters will be surpassed this year. #SFTimeline
— Star Frontiers RPG (@StarFrontiers) February 7, 2019

FY60.034 – After two days of competition, Zonuul Usu of Larg (Fochrik) wins the Humma Jump Competition jumping 38.275m, beating the previous species record by 3 millimeters. Two others beat the previous record in the final round of competition but lost to Zonuul. #SFTimeline
— Star Frontiers RPG (@StarFrontiers) February 9, 2019

This immediately got me thinking about how the Hum calendar interacts with the Galactic Standard calendar of the Frontier and if the Rim had a different standard calendar.

Since in my Clarion calendar system post, I mentioned that I would probably do more calendar systems for other planets and in my last State of the Frontier post I said I would write about creating a system map, I thought I’d roll all of these thoughts and ideas into a series of “how to” posts as I flesh out the Fochrik system.

I’m planning on dividing this into three parts. In this first article, I’ll be talking about generating the astrophysical description of the system. We’ll go over what we know from published material, adding a bit to that, refining the details, and trying to generate a stable star system.

In the next post, I’ll actually walk you through the process of creating a system map for Fochrik like I did for the Duergan’s Star system.

In the third post, I’ll generate a calendar for the Fochrick system. I don’t know yet if all three planets will have a unique calendar or if Larg and Forge will base their calendar off of Hum’s. We’ll see when we get there. I’m not planning to address a standard Rim calendar at this time as I need to look over the other Rim systems first. That may be a future post.

Anyway, let’s get started.

What We Know

Let’s start with what we know from published materials, both original with TSR and material from the fan magazines. There isn’t much, but let’s assemble what we have.

The Rim was introduced in TSR’s Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space, vol 1 as the area of space that the three new races introduced came from. It was specifically left vague in the supplement. Whether they intended to flesh it out more in later volumes that never were published we’ll never know. On page 50, in the “Planets of the Frontier” table we have the following entry for Fochrik:

For this series of posts, we’re interested in the stellar spectral type (F9), the number of known planets (three in this case) and their rotational period (the Day column which is given in hours). Also, the number of moons might be used in making the system map and we should probably consider them in making the calendars as well. The other information is not needed for this endeavor.

Beyond that, there is little said about the system in Zeb’s Guide. The worlds of the Frontier have little blurbs with interesting facts about each of them but there is nothing on any of the Rim worlds. We’re basically left with a blank slate.

In a Star Frontiersman article (issue 15), entitled Humma Hop Back, TheWebtroll talked about the race but gave no information on the star system. Tom Verrault did a little bit of work on the Humma in issue 13 of the Frontier Explorer were he fleshed out their racial description some more but again nothing was really mentioned about their star system. However in another article in that same issue, where he adds detail to the boon’sheh, a fan created race from the early Star Frontiersman issues, he places them with the humma in the Fochrik system with the humma forcibly relocating the boon’sheh to Larg from their mutual homeworld of Hum. But that’s all we have.

In the end, we just have the table entry for the system to work with. Which tells us we have three habitable planets, some moons, and their approximate rotation periods. We get to create everything else so let’s dive in.

Fochrik

We start with the star. It is given a spectral type of F9. That makes it a little more massive and brighter than the sun but not by much. I like to use the table on this page for my starting point of stellar masses and radii as it has broken the data down in to details for each spectral classification. Plus the author has gone through, and based on the spectral energy distribution, given you the RGB colors for the star. I’m a little leery of the radius data on that page but we won’t be using that in this analysis.

From that page we get a mass of the F9 star for 1.1 solar masses. Looking at the adjacent spectral types, F9 and G0, they have listed masses of 1.2 and 1.1 respectively so that gives us a range to work with and tells us that the F9 star is probably a bit heavier than 1.1 solar masses but within rounding errors. Plus there is scatter based on other factors as well so we have some room to wiggle about. Let’s do some quick calculations.

The mass of the sun is 1.989 × 10³⁰ kg. so we have a range of 1.1 to 1.2 times that to work with or from 2.1879 × 10³⁰ to 2.3868 × 10³⁰ kg. Like I did for White Light, I want a few more decimal places so I’m going to roll some dice for the digits. I’ll keep the 2 before the decimal place, roll a d4 for the first digit, and then d10s for everything else. That will possibly let me go slightly outside the range but that’s fine. Here’s what we get:

I ended up rolling a d8 and dividing by 2 just so it was easier to see in the picture. I just rolled the dice and then went left to right as they fell on my desk to pick the order.

So we end up with a stellar mass of 2.21766549 × 10³⁰ kg which probably has more decimal places than we need but that’s fine.

Size of the Habitable Zone

The next thing we need to know is the range of the habitable zone for an F9 star. We’ve got to squeeze three planets into that area. We don’t need to be exact, but we want some reference. For this Wikipedia has a good article on the habitable zone that you can read to determine the various factors that go into determining it. There is also a really great picture (reproduced here) that almost gives us what we need.

The only real problem with this image is that the x-axis is in relative flux on the planet rather than distance. But I can work with that to get values for Fochrik.

We start by getting the percentages for the edges of the habitable zones. This is done by drawing a line across at the temperature of Fochrik (6140 K) and then drawing lines down from those to the x axis like this (the blue lines)

This gives us a range of 178% to 34% for the optimistic habitable zone and a range of 115% to 36% for the conservative one. Now we just need to turn those into distances.

The amount of starlight on the planet is dependent on three things. The first is the temperature of the star (which we’re taking to be 6140K. We could figure it out exactly based on the mass but that is a close enough approximation). The second is the radius of the star. These two give us the total luminosity of the star, L, which is proportional to R²T⁴. The final bit, which we are trying to solve for, is the distance from the star. The amount of starlight received at a planet, F (flux), is proportional to the luminosity of the star divided by the distance squared, i.e. F~L/D².

Combining those gives us that the amount of starlight at a planet, F, is proportional to R²T⁴ / D². or D ~ sqrt(R²T⁴ / F). If we work in ratios to the solar temperature, solar radius, measure distances in AU (the distance from the earth to the sun), and enter fluxes as multiples of the flux at the earth (i.e. flux at earth =1, 200% = 2, 50% = 0.5, etc), everything works out.

For this exercise, we’re going to assume the radius of the star is the same as the sun. In reality, it’s probably a little bit larger but we’re not going to worry about that. So we can drop the R² term. The ratio of the temperatures is just 6140/5780 = 1.062283737. That raised to the 4th power is 1.273392. Plugging in those number gives the following distances for the four flux percentages:

178% = 0.8458 AU (inner edge of optimistic habitable zone)
115% = 1.0523 AU (inner edge of conservative habitable zone)
36% = 1.8807 AU (outer edge of conservative habitable zone)
34% = 1.9353 AU (outer edge of optimistic habitable zone)

Those numbers seem about right. The star is brighter and hotter than the Sun so it makes sense that the habitable zone is a little further out than in the solar system.

Placing the Planets

Now that we know where the habitable zone is, we need to place the planets and add other details to the system. We start with the three known planets, Forge, Hum, and Larg.

The Habitable Worlds

Each of these planets is habitable, with fairly large populations. As such, they need to be at least somewhere within the habitable zone. Also, since they are relatively low gravity worlds, around 1g, they should probably be close to or in the conservative habitable zone as the optimistic one is more for “super earths” which these are not.

Forge is the innermost world of the three and the name itself implies that it’s a hot world. I’m going to place it just inside the conservative zone. It’s livable, but its a bit on the warm side. We’ll place it at 1.08 AU from Fochrik.

Hum is the humma homeworld. As such we’d expect it to have a relatively nice, comfortable climate. If we go back to the flux calculation from above and find the distance for 100% we get a distance of 1.13 AU. That’s a little too close to the 1.08 AU I picked for Forge so I’m going to move it out just a bit further than that and place it at 1.23 AU. It will be a bit cooler than Earth receiving only 84% the amount of starlight.

Finally, we have Larg. This has the smallest population, medium instead of heavy, so I’m taking that to mean that it probably has a less hospitable climate (in addition to the higher gravity). Plus, if we’re using the fan material from the Frontier Explorer, it’s where the humma deported the boon’sheh to. We’ll place this one out towards the outer edge of the conservative habitable zone at 1.61 AU.

Now that our habitable planets have been placed we need to fill the rest of the system. There are a number of ways you could do this. I have a really old program called StarGen that makes solar systems around F, G, & K type stars based on habitability ideas presented in a paper by the Rand corporation. It works pretty well but doesn’t take into account modern information as that paper is from the 60’s or 70’s if I remember correctly.

You could also use the star system creation system presented in the FrontierSpace Referee’s handbook. It’s a good system as well. However, for this system I’m just going to be arbitrary. I’ll roll some dice for distances but beyond that, I’m just going to pick what I want in the system.

The Inner Worlds

Let’s start close. What is inside the habitable planets? I’m going to place two small worlds in there. They are small, hot, and airless. They probably have mineable mineral resources but they are not very hospitable. We’ll place these worlds at .19 AU and 0.52 AU from Fochrick. To get those distances I simply rolled 4d10 and 9d10 respectively and divided the number by 100 to get the AU.

The Outer Worlds

Next let’s move out from the inner system and see what’s out in the outer reaches. We’re going to add in 6 more worlds outside the habitable zone. For now, I’m not planning on having an asteroid belt but that may change when we do some sanity checks below. We’re going to add the following planets to the system:

Jovian – 4.66 AU
Jovian – 10.59 AU
Ice dwarf – 16.58 AU
Ice giant – 18.13 AU
Ice dwarf – 20.53 AU
Ice giant – 26.01 AU

In each of these cases, to get the distance I created a number between 1 and 6.99 by rolling a d6 and two d10s. The d6 was the integer bit and the two d10s were the decimal bit. I then added that number on to the orbital distance of the previous planet. Like I said, this was going to be pretty arbitrary. Let’s keep going.

Orbital Periods

Now that the planets are all placed, we want to compute their orbital periods to know how long the length of their orbit is. While we don’t need this to create the map of the system. We want to do some sanity checks since the planetary placements were fairly arbitrary.

Orbital periods are given by Newton’s form of Kepler’s Third Law of Planetary motion, namely:

which I described in the Clarion Calendar post but P is the orbital period, a is the distance from the star, G is the gravitational constant, and M₁ and M₂ are the mass of the star and planet respectively. Since M₁ >> M₂, we’ll ignore M₂ in our calculations.

You could do this by hand, or use a spreadsheet, or use an on-line calculator. I’m going to use this handy website that allows you to enter the values in a number of different units and does the math for you. I’m just going to leave the mass of the planet at 1 earth mass in the calculation. If I was going for full detail, I’d figure out the mass of each of the planets but this is really just an approximate sanity check. For example, if I set the mass of the first Jovian planet to 100 earth masses, it would lengthen the orbital period by only 10 hours, so it’s not something I’m going to worry about here.

Plugging in the values for the planetary orbital distance and the mass of the star we get the following data:

Planet	Orbital Distance (AU)	Orbital Period (hours)
T1	0.19	687.46
T2	0.52	3112.57
Forge	1.13	9316.45
Hum	1.23	11323.3
Larg	1.61	16957.2
J1	4.66	83501.4
J2	10.59	286061
ID1	16.58	560391
IG1	18.53	662106
ID2	20.53	772144
IG1	26.01	1101096

Mainly here I’m just looking to see that we don’t have any resonant periods with the two Jovian planets. With orbital periods in ratios such as 2:1, 3:2, & 3:1 we would have potential stability issues. My only concern is with the second jovian and the first ice dwarf. They are in a nearly 2:1 orbital resonance but that might actually be okay and why that planet is where it is. So I’m going to leave it alone. If I really wanted to check system stability, I’d generate the masses, starting positions and velocities, and then enter all of that into a simple n-body computer simulation and run it for a million years or so of simulated time to make sure nothing went crazy but I think this will be fine.

Planetary Sizes

Okay, while this isn’t strictly necessary to draw the system map, we might as well figure out how big each of the planets are (and their surface gravity. When I do the system map, I like to have both the distances to scale and the sizes of the planets to scale so if I want to do that, I need the sizes.

The equation we’ll be using for this is

where g is the acceleration due to gravity (m/s²), M is the mass of the planet (kg), r is the radius of the planet (m), and G is just the gravitational constant (6.67408 × 10^-11 m³ kg^-1 s^-2). Additionally we’ll want an equation relating the mass of the planet to its density which is just the volume of the sphere times the density or

where ρ is the density (kg/m³). While we could do this just with the mass, I like to make sure the physics work out for the type of planet so I like the densities to make sense and prefer to include it in the calculations. Combining those two equations gives us an equation that relates the gravity, the radius, and the density:

This is what we’ll be using to get the data we need.

Densities

As part of this we’ll need densities for the planets. We’ll just be picking those from reasonable ranges which are the following (in g/cm³):

Terrestrial (rocky) Planets – 3.5 – 5.7
Ice Dwarfs – 1.8 – 2.5
Ice Giants – 1.2 – 1.8
Jovians – 0.6 – 1.4+

To get it into the units we need (kg/m³ ) we just multiply by 1000. The Jovian planets may not have an upper density limit because once you get to be the size of Jupiter, adding more mass doesn’t change the radius much, it just increases the densities. Brown Dwarfs, which are 10-80 times Jupiter’s mass are still all about the same size.

We’ll use these density ranges to pick densities for the individual planets in the sections below.

The Habitable Planets

First up are the three habitable planets that we know the gravity on. In this case we need to rearrange the last equation to solve for r giving us:

All that’s left is to pick a density or each of the planets and start computing. Well, almost. I also want one more decimal place for the actual gravity of the planet. To get that I’ll roll d8-4 x 0.01 and add that to listed gravity to give me some variation that would round to the listed value.

The table below is what we ended up with. Interestingly, all the gravity adjustments I rolled were positive. I also selected the planets with the higher gravity to be a little more dense but modulated that somewhat due to the fact that planets that form closer to the star would have higher density as well. Thus the densities of these three planets are pretty close together.

Name	Gravity (g)	Density (gm/cm³)	Mass (Earth)	Radius (km)
Forge	0.81	5.32	0.6012	5,443.75
Hum	0.91	5.43	0.8139	5,991.93
Larg	1.12	5.55	1.4622	7,215.22

Hum turns out to be almost exactly the same size and mass as Venus, just a little further out in the system so it’s not as hot. Forge is smaller still by about 10% in radius and 75% in mass while Larg is about 13% larger in radius than the earth and almost 50% more massive.

Other Planets

Now lets due the rest of the planets in the system. In this case we have to pick two of the three values: radius, density (or mass), and surface gravity. I’m going to select the radius and density for each of these planets and then compute the mass and surface gravity. Surface gravity doesn’t exactly make sense for the giant planets (jovians and ice giants) but it is the gravity present if you were stopped at that radius at it’s upper atmosphere. Here’s the table:

Name	Gravity (g)	Density (gm/cm³)	Mass (Earth)	Radius (km)
T1	0.33	5.65	0.0349	2,064.55
T2	0.67	5.39	0.3373	4,468.50
J1	3.30	1.48	525.82	79,714.14
J2	1.55	0.92	140.14	60,108.51
ID1	0.14	2.22	0.0189	2,297.74
IG1	0.97	1.21	19.902	28,623.16
ID2	0.06	2.19	0.0018	1054.47
IG2	1.02	1.35	18.472	26,919.75

J1 is almost two times the mass of Jupiter while IG2 is a little smaller than Pluto. If you want to compare them exactly this Planetary Fact Sheet page gives the data for all the planets in the solar system.

Wrapping up for now

And that’s it for this entry. We have the number of planets in the system, mass data on the star, and orbital and size data on the planets. I’m fairly confident that we don’t have to worry about system stability issues (of course since I didn’t do a rigorous check, this will be the one time it doesn’t work 🙂 ).

In the next post, we’ll create a system map for Fochrik and walk through the process of doing so. If you have any questions or comments, let me know below.

Detailed Frontier Timeline – FY59.395 to FY60.025

Here’s the next installment of the timeline. This section include the events that will be considered the first battles of the Second Sathar War, namely the Battles of Volkos and Zebulon between ground and spaces forces of the UPF and the sathar at Volturnus in the Zebulon system.

After posting the last installment, I was asked if it would be possible to provide references to the sources I’m using to create the entries. I realized that would be a good idea so I’ve started adding reference notes to all the entries that come from other sources other than me just making them up for the timeline. I also wrote a short introduction to the timeline that explains the references that I’ve reproduced below.

I’ve gone back an annotated all the previous entries in the downloadable timeline document and where a reference occurs in the blog post, I’ve included the key for those references at the end of the post.

Introduction

The following timeline represents the events of the Second Sathar War as I designed them to act as a backdrop to various campaigns I am running. I have a different timeline that runs the PCs though all the game modules in an appropriate order to progress their skill level but that is not this one. This is somewhat of a more fiction-oriented timeline rather than on specifically designed to run PCs through.

One major aspect of this time line is that I’m using the Knight Hawks rules for interstellar travel, namely that it effectively takes 9 day to make an interstellar jump between systems (ignoring astrogation calculation times). I also make the assumption that if you’re not stopping in a system, you only have to spend as much time in that system as the astrogation calculations take as you stay near jump speed during your transit. If you assume 1 day per light year per the original Alpha Dawn rules, it would change the timing of many of these events, possibly significantly.

If you’re familiar with the timeline in the Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space, you’ll quickly notice that I don’t follow that much at all. I pull some of the names and ideas but the timing and actual events follow my own muse. Additionally, regardless of the source of the events, the exact dates are all of my creation.

In the events that follow, I’ve tried to annotate the source for names, dates, and events if they come from any of the material originally published by TSR. Although I’m not going to annotate the system, planet, and common megacorp names as I assume those are common knowledge. I will also try to annotate any material coming from the Star Frontiersman and Frontier Explorer Fanzines. If you notice that I missed anything, let me know so I can fix it.

Annotations that appear at the end of an entry refer to the entire entry. If it appears in the middle, it applies just to the name that the annotation follows. Each time an annotation first appears, there will be a footnote describing it. I’ve also added an Appendix listing all the annotation codes. If no particular annotation is associated with an entry you may assume I made the entry up out of whole cloth or extrapolated it from other events specifically for this timeline.

Timeline

As always, the data presented in this blog post cover only the new dates but the downloadable document at the end is cumulative over all the timeline posts up to this point.

Date (FY)	Event
59.395	Subspace signal received at Laco from unknown location in Sathar space. Images appear in the great pyramid showing a similar complex on a warm, swampy world with a large number of sathar and a bipedal insect race (Zuraqqor) working around the complex.
59.396	Despite efforts to keep the images contained, news and clips of the images race across the Frontier on the subspace network. Scientists, politicians, and the general populous speculate as to the cause and meaning.
59.397	A new group, calling themselves the Anti-Satharian League (ZG), stage demonstrations on the major population centers of the Frontier and at the Council of Worlds, broadcasting excerpts from the Laco pyramid images and demanding increased military buildup for Spacefleet.
59.398	Completing its time in the Cassidine system, SF Nova departs Triad for the Dramune system to spend some time cooling rising tensions between Inner and Outer Reach.
59.399	A CDC scout ship, the Twilight Moon, returns from charting a jump route to the Rhianna system. Due to preliminary geological findings, CDC decides to keep the route a secret and establish a mining outpost on the planet Alcazzar. (SF4)
59.400	Most businesses across the Frontier close a day early in anticipation of the big Founding Day celebrations tomorrow, allowing citizens and organizations some extra time to prepare.
60.001	– UPF Founding Day celebrations occur on most planets across the Frontier to celebrate 6 decades of peace. However, there is a subtle undercurrent of concern due to the recent events on Laco. – The first new sathar ship that will be committed to the coming conflict, a destroyer, emerges from Sathar Starship Construction Center (SSCC) #2, located in the as of yet unexplored (and unnamed) Liberty system.
60.002	– In wake of the Founding Day celebrations, the Frontier Peace Organization hold a rally outside the Council of Worlds headquarters demanding a reduction in Spacefleet and Landfleet operations. Some small altercations occur with members of the Anti-Satharian League. – Observance Day on Clarion (White Light) commemorates all who have fallen defending the system through history. This year it also continues the UPF Founding Day celebration on the planet for an extra day.
60.003	UPF PG Virgo, together with the Pale militia (a frigate and 3 assault scouts), depart for the Zebulon system. Streel additionally sends a frigate, 4 corvettes, and 3 assault scouts to assist.
60.004	Council of Worlds reconvenes for its 60th session. Initial topics of debate include events on Laco and Zebulon and their implications for the future of the Frontier.
60.005	Fighting breaks out between Frontier Peace Organization and Anti-Satharian League supporters outside the Council of Worlds headquarters. Local police have to resort to doze and tangler grenades and stun weapons to break up the fighting. Over 4 dozen beings detained.
60.006	Sathar SSCC#4, near Fromeltar and Klaeok, completes construction of a light cruiser and 4 fighters.
60.007	SF Nova arrives in the Dramune System. It will remain in system for 15 days as a show of force to help quell rising tensions between Inner and Outer Reach
60.008	Laco artifacts taken from the PGC chartered freighter, KSS Dawn’s Glow, anonymously arrive at the Triad Institute of Technology (TriTech) and are delivered to their originally intended recipients. (NCW)
60.009	The Sathar cleansing fleet arrives in the Zebulon system and begins decelerating towards Volturnus. (SF2)
60.010	The UPF fleet arrives in the Zebulon system and begins decelerating toward Volturnus and the sathar fleet. (SF2)
60.011	A small freighter, the KKSS Trader’s Gambit, misjumps travelling from K’aken-Kar to K’tsa-Kar and ends up in the Sundown system. Damaged engines force the crew to look for a planet to land on to effect repairs. (SF3)
60.012	– Battle of Volkos – Sathar ground troops advance on the ruins of the Eorna city of Volkos. A rag-tag army, composed of members of Volturnus’s native races and lead by members of the TSES Second Volturnus Expedition, manage to hold off the invaders. (SF2) – Battle of Zebulon – UPF forces engage the Sathar fleet around Volturnus. Although the UPF forces are mostly smaller vessels, the sathar are driven off with only a frigate, 2 destroyers, and a heavy cruiser surviving. UPF losses were 1 UPF LC and AS, 1 Streel Corvette, and 1 militia AS (SF2)
60.013	News of defeat at Zebulon reaches sathar space. Clan infighting begins around debate of invasion and who should lead assault. This will continue for several months. At the same time all the clans begin building up their military.
60.014	– News of victory over sathar forces in the Zebulon system announced across the Frontier to mixed reaction. Performance of the Assault Scout in its first major engagement with sathar forces is deemed a success. – Pale militia and Spacefleet given priority at the Pale and Gran Quivera starship construction centers to replace vessels lost in the battle at Zebulon.
60.015	– The KKSS Trader’s Gambit sets down on the planet Starmist in the Sundown system. (SF3) – Having effected repairs from the battle with the sathar, the Pale militia and Streel ships depart Volturnus (Zebulon) to return to Pale (Truane’s Star) while the UPF forces remain on patrol.
60.016	– The Anti-Satharian League stages demonstrations on Pale, Gran Quivera, Triad, and Clarion demanding increased militarization and growth of Spacefleet – The navigator and second master of the KKSS Trader’s Gambit, Maximillian Malligigg, makes contact with an intelligent race, the Heliopes, on the planet Starmist (Sundown). (SF3)
60.017	Leotia (SFKH0) Valentine Leotus, crown princess of Clarion (White Light), celebrates her 32nd birthday (18.5 earth years)
60.018	A listening station in the Kazak system in the Rim detect faint signals of sathar ships in the outer system. Flight vessels are dispatched to investigate.
60.019	Repairs completed, the KKSS Trader’s Gambit leaves Starmist to attempt to return to charted Frontier space. (SF3)
60.020	The Flight vessels in Kazak arrive at the location of the sathar signals but find nothing more than a faint indication that ships had passed through the area days before. Two ships are left on station while the rest return to base.
60.021	Winter begins in earnest on Alcazzar, delaying the start of CDC operations on the planet. The corporation hopes that this delay will throw off any competitor’s interest in the mineral rich system. (SF4)
60.022	SF Nova departs the Dramune system for the Fromeltar system
60.023	– The KKSS Trader’s Gambit successfully jumps back to the K’tsa-Kar system. – The Pale militia arrives back home from the Zebulon system.
60.024	Scouting through the Zebulon system, a UPF frigate and assault scout find an ancient vessel in a distant solar orbit. Investigation reveals it to contain a cache of cryogenically stored Eorna eggs. If still viable, the eggs will secure the survival of that species. (SF3)
60.025	Delegates from the Pale militia are dispatched to testify at the Council of Worlds regarding events on Volturnus.

DetailedFrontierTimeline Download

References

NCW – A New Can of Worms on-line game events
SF2 – Starspawn of Volturnus module
SF3 – Sundown on Starmist module
SF4 – Mission to Alcazzar module
SFKH0 – Warriors of White Light module
ZG – Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space, Vol 1

State of the Frontier – Jan 2019

I seem to have gotten into a pretty good rhythm of posting this month by getting a post out on every Tuesday. I’m going to try to keep to that schedule going forward. I’m not sure I will be able to add to that schedule (see the big announcement below) but hope to not fall below that.

Looking Back

I actually managed to meet all of my expected targets this month. The big one was getting the next section of the Ghost Ship Osiris adventure – Osiris Under Siege – finished. The full text went out to my Patreon supporters on the 18th with the post going up here on the 22nd.

Along the way we got the Laco Sand Dragon, which I mentioned in last month’s “state of the Frontier” post and finally got to use in my on-line game last Friday, the post on the Clarion calendar system, and one post on the starship construction system.

That calendar system post came completely out of the blue as I was working on the timeline project. The starship construction system post was originally going to go out the day the calendar system post dropped but I wanted to post the calendar system immediately. That will probably be a recurring theme for those construction system posts. I’m using them primarily as filler when I have a slow week. Although if I get a lot of requests, they might get a higher priority. Similarly for the calendar post. I had a lot of fun doing that one and think I might work out the calendars (and in some cases system details) for all of the systems in the Frontier. Let me know what you think.

Looking Forward

The next step for the Ghost Ship Osiris adventure is to design the alien craft that is embedded in the center of the Osiris asteroid. That may take a while as it’s a fairly big ship. I hope to have that design done, probably as the last post of the month.

I need to get back to finishing up the Murder at Rosegard adventure as well. You’ll probably see a post on the sathar inhabited cave system for that adventure which really is the last location map (I think) I need. Otherwise, there is a lot of writing to put together all the bits and pieces I’ve posted into a coherent package.

You’ll probably get another starship construction post at some point in the month together with the update on the Frontier Timeline. I have a few other ideas for posts included a requested post on how I make system maps, a discussion on starship construction in the Frontier, and some thoughts on Spacefleet crews. Those last three are just ideas with nothing really concrete written as of yet but if you’re interested in me fleshing them out, let me know and I’ll bump them up on the priority list.

But Wait …

I mentioned at the top of the post that I had a big announcement. Starting in February I am officially relaunching the Frontier Explorer fan magazine.

The first new issue will probably come out in April, exactly one year after it would have come out if WotC had not asked me to put it on hold. I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past year and given all that has happened and the information I’ve received from WotC, it’s time to get the magazine back up and running.

I might get started on this and have to stop, but as of now, I’ve told WotC of my intention to restart it and they haven’t told me that I can’t. So keep an eye out here and on the Frontier Explorer website for more details as I work out the plans going forward. I’m hoping to get some more community involvement in the production of the magazine and broaden its scope but we’ll have to see how that pans out.

And that’s it for now. Things are moving along nicely and I hope you are still enjoying the content being produced. Feel free to share suggestions, questions, or ideas in the comment section

A New Starship Construction System – part 3 – Life Support

My previous posts about my new starship construction system generated a bunch of interest and several people expressed a desire to see more. So I thought I’d post up bits and pieces of this over a series of posts. I’ll start by posting the things that are new relative to the starship construction system in the Star Frontiers Knight Hawks Campaign Book.

I already posted the introduction the the “A New Starship Construction System” post back in early November. Although it wasn’t labeled as such, the “Starship Engines” post that came shortly after the first one was part 2 as that was taken from the new system as well.

The timing of these posts will be probably be fairly sporadic as I’m using them as filler between posts on other topics and when I’m working on things that I’m not ready to post about.

I’ve already posted about the engines. The next major change is the life support system which is the topic of this post. With each of these posts going forward, I’ll try to include some of the rationale and thinking behind the choices I made and the way I designed it. So let’s get going.

Design Considerations

One of the things that I found problematic with the life support system as described in the standard rules was that it always felt way too small. For example say you had a ship that could support 9 people. According the the standard rules, all of the life support equipment for the entire ship, including all the food, oxygen, and water for 200 days of operation would weigh only 9 kg (20 lbs)!

That 9 kg is split half and half between the equipment and the consumables so there is 4.5 kg (10 pounds) of equipment to get all that food, water, and air throughout the ship and then 4.5 kg of the food and water itself. Now I don’t know about you, but there is no way I can feed my family of 9 for a week, let alone 200 days on 10 lbs of food. Maybe if it was all just a nutrient pill that you took once a day that had all your calories, vitamins, and minerals. But I think even that is stretching it and definitely not very satisfying.

One could argue for transmutation/replicator technology ala Star Trek but that just doesn’t jive with the feel of Star Frontiers for me and I don’t want that in my game. Beside the rules state that the life support systems “include food storage and preparation, and water, atmosphere and wast processing and disposal.” (KHCB p 14) That sounds like it should include a bunch of machinery and storage space.

So looking at the life support systems I saw two things that needed to address. One was food storage and preparation, and the other was water, air, and waste circulation and processing. All of that was going to take up space. I needed to make sure the system had enough mass and volume associated with it to include all the various bits of machinery and storage and pipes and duct work needed to get the various bits around the ship as needed.

Another aspect was that I wanted it to be completely configurable by the ship designer. The default rules were for a 200 day supply in the system. Since I knew this new system was going to be bulkier, I wanted to give the option to go for a smaller system if you knew that was all your needed. For example, a shuttle, that just goes up and down from the ground to orbit probably doesn’t need a life support system that can go 200 days without recharging. It probably only needs a few days at most and so can have a much lighter system.

Related to that I wanted to have different types of system for shuttles, system ships, standard interstellar ships, and first class accommodations. Each of those have different requirements and therefore should have different costs, volumes, and masses.

Taking all of that into account results in the following system. The excerpt of the rules that follows assumes that you’ve determined the crew size and number of the various passenger cabins you will have on the ship before to select the life support system.

Life Support Equipment

Now that you know the number of crew and passengers, you can select the amount of life support equipment the ship needs. It is recommended that you have at least one backup life support system in case there are problems with (or damage to) the primary system. The life support system includes a variety of systems such as air filtering and circulation, food preparation, sanitation facilities, and waste management. Life support on starships are mostly a closed system, almost everything gets recycled. However there are some consumables that do need to be replaced (mainly foodstuffs) every so often.

Your life support system needs to be at least large enough to support the crew and passengers. Typically, ships are designed with a little extra capacity as a safety margin or for emergencies. There are four basic levels of life support available for ships, depending on the ship’s needs:

Rudimentary – This is an air supply system only. It doesn’t handle food or waste materials and just provides an air supply and air circulation system with filtering. This is the life support system you find on launches, workpods, fighter craft, and other ships that are not designed to be occupied for a long time.

Basic – This level of life support adds basic food storage and preparation, sanitation facilities, and waste management to the air supply system of the rudimentary life support level. Supplies are stored and consumed and waste material has to be removed regularly. There is little to no recycling of materials except for air and water. This level of life support is typical of shuttles and some short distance system ships that typically operate for only short periods of time between calling on bases where their life support can be resupplied and waste material removed. It may also be found on some lifeboats. While you could equip a starship with this type of life support system, making it large enough to support long missions uses up valuable space in the ship and tends to be more expensive in the long run.

Standard – This is the typical system for any starship. It consists of complete air and water recycling, as well as recycling of waste material. It typically includes some sort of hydroponics system for both growing fresh food and recycling carbon dioxide back into oxygen. There are full food preparation facilities as well as complete sanitation facilities. This level of life support is required for Journey class passenger accommodations.

Deluxe – This is a more advanced version of the Standard system. It provides better recycling, larger food preparation facilities, more variety in the fresh foodstuffs, and better (nicer) sanitation and waste management facilities. This level of life support is required for any First Class passenger accommodations.

A ship can have different life support levels for different parts of the ship. This is quite common on passenger liners. For example, if a passenger liner has 20 First Class cabins and 100 Journey class cabins. It is not very likely that the owners will invest in Deluxe life support for the entire ship (although if they did, it would figure prominently in their advertising). Rather they would invest in a Deluxe life support system to cover the First Class cabins and a standard system to cover the Journey Class cabins and the crew.

The volume listed for the life support system includes both the machinery and hardware for processing the air, water, food, and waste material as well as storage space for raw materials and duct work to move material around the ship.

Every life support system has two ratings. The first is the maximum number of beings the system can support. This determines the amount of mass and volume allocated for the life support machinery (pumps, filters, ducts, pipes, etc.). The second is the maximum number of days that the system can support those beings without being refilled/recharged. This determines the amount of volume committed to storage of life support supplies.

Base hardware costs and volumes per being supported

All values except base system volume are multiplied by the maximum number of beings the system can support at one time.

Type	Cost	Mass	Base system volume	Volume
Rudimentary	500 cr	0.2 tons	1 cu m	0.1 cu m *
Basic	1500 cr	2 tons	6 cu m	5 cu m
Standard	3000 cr	4 tons	15 cu. m	8 cu m
Deluxe	5,000 cr	6 tons	30 cu. m	10 cu m.

* This volume assumes you are equipping a small one or two room craft with this system like a fighter or launch. If you try to put this into a larger ship the volume goes up by a factor of 10 for the ducting and pipes needed.

For example, our passenger liner has 20 First Class cabins and 100 Journey class cabins for crew and passengers. It would need two life support systems. The Deluxe system would support 20 beings. It would cost 20 x 5000 = 100,000 cr, have a mass of 20 x 6 = 120 tons, and take up 30 (base volume) + 20 x 10 (volume per being) = 230 cubic meters. The Standard system for the Journey class cabins would cost 100 x 3000 = 300,000 cr, have a mass of 100 x 4 = 400 tons and take up 15 + 100 x 8 = 815 cubic meters. Thus the Standard system while being just a little more than 3x the size of the Deluxe system, supports 5x as many beings.

Supply cost per being per day

In addition to the base machinery costs, there is the cost of the food, air, and water needed for the beings on board. Multiply each value times the maximum number of beings the system can support and then by the number of days you want to be able to support those beings without a reload/refill of the system.

Type	Cost	Mass	Volume
Rudimentary	10 cr	0.05 tons	.1 cu m
Basic	15 cr	0.15 tons	.4 cu m
Standard	25 cr	0.1 tons	.15 cu m
Deluxe	40 cr	0.15 tons	.25 cu m

So if our passenger liner wanted to support its full complement of crew and passengers for 200 days without a resupply, the cost of the supplies and storage areas would be as follows: For the Deluxe system the cost is 40cr x 20 beings x 200 days = 160,000 cr, the mass would be 0.15 tons x 20 x 200 = 600 tons, and the volume would be 0.25 cu m x 20 x 200 = 1000 cubic meters. The standard system supplies would cost 25 cr x 100 beings x 200 days = 500,000 cr, the mass would be 0.1 tons x 100 x 200 = 2000 tons, and the volume would be 0.15 cu m x 100 x200 = 3000 cubic meters.

Thoughts and Comments

That’s the life support system rules in the the new system. Let me know what questions or thoughts you have in the comments below.

The Data

The Moons

Kran

Gluk & Clud

Hum’s Rotation Period

The Calendar

Length of Year

A Week on Hum

A Hum Month

A Seasonal Moon

Leap Years

The Final Calendar

Last Thoughts

An old, abandoned mine

Let’s start with a map

Area Descriptions

Initial status of the mine

Sathar Reaction to PCs Arrival

Before the sathar are alerted

After the sathar are alerted

Sathar tactics

Stats

Sathar Leader

Regular Sathar

Combat Robots

Looking Back

Looking Forward

The Data

Drawing the Map

Laying the ground work

The star and the orbits

Drawing the planets

Adding labels

Finishing touches

Other touch-ups

Giving the planets some character

The FTL Horizon

Asteroid belts

Final thoughts

Hull Type

Additional Armor

Long Range Detectors

Radar

Energy Sensors

Thoughts

What We Know

Fochrik

Size of the Habitable Zone

Placing the Planets

The Habitable Worlds

The Inner Worlds

The Outer Worlds

Orbital Periods

Planetary Names

Planetary Sizes

Densities

The Habitable Planets

A Note on Gravity

Other Planets

Wrapping up for now

Introduction

Timeline

References

Looking Back

Looking Forward

But Wait …

Design Considerations

Life Support Equipment

Base hardware costs and volumes per being supported

Supply cost per being per day

Thoughts and Comments