As you may have noticed, I haven’t been posting for a while. In fact, I didn’t post at all last year. I’m planning to change that this year. I’ve been quite busy over the past year with my position as a college professor. I’ve basically rewritten two classes over the past year. That, along with other, new hobbies, has kept me away from the Frontier. However, my teaching load has leveled out and is even a bit lighter this coming semester and I’m finally feeling the desire to get back into Star Frontiers.
Projects
Over the coming months, I have several projects that I’m going to work on:
The Detailed Frontier Timeline
I plan on getting back to this on a regular basis. I don’t know if I will continue to do daily posts on X any more but may only do the monthly summary posts here on the blog as well as detailed post on the battles. In fact, that will probably be the next post after this one. Namely a battle post between SF Nova and a Sathar Battle Group at one of the sathar starship production centers.
3D Modeling
I really want to finish the Privateer models. I hope to work some more of them over the coming months. I’ve actually started one of them and so my first priority will be to finish that and and then work on the others.
Additionally, I may have a lead on a 3D scanner capable of scanning the character, creature, and robot miniatures. I’m in the process of testing it out and figuring out how best to prepare the miniatures for scanning. The bare metal reflects the laser and gives bad readings. We’ve tried a clear matte spray that worked pretty well and next I’m going to put some flat gray primer on the same miniature and see if the scan is any better. If all goes well. I’ll be able to post the STL files for people to access. And then I’ll need to finish my collection. I have most of the blister packs but I think I’m missing a few.
Frontier Fiction
Depending on how long you’ve been following the blog, you may or may not know that I’ve been working on a novel set in the Frontier, specifically on Pale during the first sathar invasion. I’m going to be working on that regularly again starting this year. I’m not sure how that will interact with the blog. I might post snippets. I might start serializing it here. I’m still working on the first draft and it’s really rough and somewhat disjointed so I don’t know how well it would work as posts in its current iteration. But I plan on posting updates on progress. It’s currently at 77,000 words (I added 538 works on the 1st) and I think I’m about a quarter of the way through the story.
Blog Archives
The other thing I want to finish up this year is to get all my posts from the now defunct Arcane Game Lore blog moved over here. I didn’t control that domain and the other host, who did, stopped renewing it and some spam site bought it up. I started moving the posts over in 2022 and plan on finishing them this year.
Posting Frequency
I hope to get back to a weekly posting frequency but I’ll probably start out with just one or two posts a month in the beginning. That is something we’ll just be playing by ear to start.
Patreon
I still have the Patreon campaign for supporting this website. It billed here in January because I forgot to pause the January billing but I’ve already paused February’s. My plan is start letting the billing happen monthly again starting in March. For those that have stuck with my over the hiatus. Thank you. If you want to help support the site, consider joining.
Keep Exploring
That’s it for now. Look for Knight Hawks battle post to be the next post in a week or so. I’ve got the order of battle all set up and now just need to play through it. Let me know if there is anything in particular you’d like me to look at in the coming months.
I can’t believe August is over already. Time has just been flying by.
Looking Back
This month turned out to be pretty good for me as far as posting here on the blog goes. We started with our usual Detailed Frontier Timeline post.
Next up was a post with a sample star system. I had talked about starting a new project and this was the first pass at that. I got very little feedback on that post. I was hoping for a bit more but that’s okay. I actually haven’t had time to finalize the details of how I’m going to present those system but it’s something to work on this coming month.
We actually had two different battles in the Detailed Frontier Timeline this month, one in Fromeltar that resulted in a major setback for the UPF and then another in Gruna Garu that will also cause some problem. The sathar didn’t come out unscathed so the UPF isn’t as bad off as they think but they don’t know that.
Next up I wrote about a campaign idea I have, searching for the Yazirian homeworld. That campaign concept is playing out in the Detailed Frontier Timeline as the journey of the HSS HIstory’s Hope. That was another post I was surprised to not get a lot of commentary on. It looks like it would probably be better as a novel then a game, I guess. But maybe if I actually started soliciting players, people would respond.
Then I had a post looking at the Yachts and Privateers from the “Fast and Deadly” Dragon article. This was actually in preparation for the battle in the Gruna Garu system in the timeline since there were privateers in that battle. As someone pointed out, there was a follow-on dragon article “Yachts & Privateers Return” that basically did the same thing as me and revised the stats for the ships. I’ll need to look at that and see how they revised them differently than me. Considering that was written by Doug Niles, who wrote the Knight Hawks rules combat rules, it definitely deserves a look.
Behind the scenes, not much else happened. I didn’t work on my websites at all, other than to create a temporary fix for an issue on the Frontier Explorer site that was cause a process to runaway and use all the CPU on the server. I did get my 3D printer set up and running here in AZ as someone wanted me to print them some ship minis but I didn’t do any modeling.
Looking Forward
Coming up we’ll have the usual Detailed Frontier Timeline post. There might be another battle this month but I haven’t progressed the timeline far enough to see how things play out. I got a bit behind with the Battle of Hargut (Gruna Garu) and the prep for that so I’m only a couple of days ahead instead of a couple of weeks like I’d like to be. That typically happens when there’s a battle.
I plan on posting at least one new star system, and maybe more. We’ll see how that goes. I’m also starting to get itchy to do some 3D modeling so maybe there will be a new model. No promises though as I’m also traveling a lot this month. I plan to keep up the archiving work on the Arcane Game Lore posts as well. But beyond that, I really don’t know what the month will bring.
Final Thoughts
I’ve been debating back and forth on the value of these “State of the Frontier” posts. I’m thinking of maybe only doing them every two or three months instead of monthly. Especially if there isn’t a lot of “behind-the-scenes” work going on. Do you find them useful? Should I keep doing them monthly? Let me know what you think.
I mentioned in my State of the Frontier post that I was going to start working on transferring all my posts from the now dead Arcane Game Lore blog to this one and I’d post a summary occasionally listing the posts I’d moved over. This is the first of those summary posts.
For the most part, I just started at the beginning of the posts I made on that blog and started working forward. However, I question came up and I responded with a post I made here and realized that the post in question had links to my Arcane Game Lore blog posts. So I temporarily stopped working on the chronological progression and went through all my posts here on the Expanding Frontier to look for links to Arcane Game Lore posts and I ported them over first. That is why there are a few posts from 2015 even though the title says through December 2014.
For a couple of posts I wasn’t able to get the images, or didn’t add in the comments from the other blog. I’ve made a note of those and will go back and fix them up at some point. In once case, the image is something I need to rescan and the pictures are in Utah while I’m in Arizona. In any case, I’ll keep working on this over the coming months.
Here are links to all the archived posts I’ve uploaded to the site so far. Feel free to read some of my early writing if you’re interested. Not all of it is directly Star Frontiers related and some of it isn’t even directly sci-fi but it is all game related at some level.
This post is only a few days late. But there is a good reason. I’ve spent the last three weeks packing, moving, and settling in in Tucson, AZ. I’m down here for the rest of the year as my wife is on sabbatical at the University of Arizona as I mentioned in my previous State of the Frontier post. With that out of the way, on to the regular content.
That was it for posts on the site. After finishing the deck plans, my daughter came to visit from grad school and we shifted in the packing and moving mode. That said, there was some work that went on behind the scenes.
First, I continued to work and get ahead of the Detailed Frontier Timeline. I’m about two weeks ahead at this point and trying to keep posts scheduled so they come out on time. I’ll talk more about that in the Looking Forward section below.
Next, I started looking into a revamp of the Frontier Explorer website to make it more mobile friendly and simpler not that we are not actively publishing any more.
Finally, I started assembling the resources for a new project that I hope people will like that I’ll talk more about in the Looking Forward section as the first post in that project should be coming out in August. So let’s move on.
Looking Forward
First up as always will be the Detailed Frontier Timeline post. It should have been up yesterday but I wasn’t quite settled and able to work on it. Related to the timeline, I have events figured out through August 14th but there is going to be a major battle on the 15th that I need to play out before I can move beyond that. This will represent a change in tactics on the part of the sathar and it will be interesting to see how things play out. If you look closely at the timeline published so far (or are following on Twitter), you might be able guess where the battle will be.
I mentioned before that I have a new project I’m starting up. In comments about the Extended Frontier Map, people have commented that they’d like to see astrographic data about the star systems. So I’ve been assembling a suite of software tools to generate star systems and world maps. I’m going to start generating star system data for each of the star systems on that map and generating a catalog. I haven’t decided on the format or where it will be housed (here or the Star Frontiers Network wiki) so there might be some fits and starts as I get it going and work out the details but a first trial system should be posted this month. If I can streamline the production process, you might start seeing a new system every week but that will probably take some months.
Another thing that happened last month is that my old Arcane Game Lore blog went off-line. The blog has been fairly dead for a while and apparently my co-blogger, who was hosting the site, allowed the domain name to expire and it is now owned by someone else and seem to be some advertising site. Unluckily, I never did a backup of the posts and I can’t get a hold of the site owner to see if he has them or access to the data still. Luckily, they are preserved on the Internet Archive so I’m going to start rebuilding the posts here. There are posts from 2013-2018 from me there to pull over and at one point I was posting weekly. I basically stopped posting there when I started this blog. The posts will be back-dated to their original post date so they may not show up in the RSS feed for this site, but as I get them posted I’ll make a summary post for those interested in going back to read what I wrote back then.
That’s probably enough to keep me busy, but if I find some more time, I might start working on 3D modeling again and finish up the Privateer miniatures. I’ll also be working on website updates.
Final Thoughts
I don’t really have anything else to add. Other than to thank my Patreon supporters and encourage anyone that likes what they find here to support me on Patreon as well.
I was just looking at my last State of the Frontier post from April 2021 and saw that it started with “I’m back!”. Which is how I was going to start this one but decided that might be bad form and I already talked a bit about that in my Back to Blogging post in May. Although this time I hope to be back for more than a single post.
Looking Back
I didn’t get as many posts up this month as I had planned but it’s a start.
My first project was to get the Detailed Frontier Timeline posts going with updates here on the blog and the daily posts going again on Twitter. That was a success. I started the month off with a Detailed Frontier Timeline post that covered the events I had posted to Twitter in May as I got the posts going again. Behind the scenes on this project, I did a bit of organization of my notes and got a bit ahead of my posting so I have a bit of buffer in the events I’ve figured out. I missed a few days posting to Twitter this month but got those caught up so everything is on track. I was looking at the full timeline document it is up to nearly 44,000 words. That’s almost the length of my novella Discovery. And there is still a ways to go.
Behind the scenes I’ve started working on finishing up the deck plans for the HSS History’s Hope but I only finished one more deck and didn’t feel that that deserved a post by itself.
The other thing I’ve done is start looking at the websites that I host, most specifically the one for the Frontier Explorer. I’ll probably be focusing on getting a new version of that site up in the next little while.
Looking Forward
The next post will be on Saturday (July 2) and will be a battle summary from the Detailed Frontier Timeline. I post those battle summaries on the days the tweet goes out about the battle. It’s a small fight, and there probably won’t be another one for a couple of months but there are some battles, including a big one, that are building so if you follow the daily updates you might see them coming. Shortly after that post, I’ll get the summary timeline post up for all the events that happened in June.
I’m hoping to finish the deck plans for the HSS History’s Hope this month and get the rest of them posted. I decided to not make videos of the map making process in the interest of time so it will just be the maps, but I think the the videos I already posted on the process are sufficient to demonstrate how I do things. Related to this, once I get the plans for the ship done, I’m considering running a campaign based on the travels of that ship in the timeline, basically having the PCs be the crew on the mission the HSS History’s Hope is undertaking in the Detailed Frontier Timeline. If that’s something you’d be interested in playing in, state tuned.
I’d like to get back to 3D modelling but I think that is going to have to wait at least until August as I’m temporarily relocating to another state at the end of July until Christmas time (my wife is going on sabbatical and I’m going with her along with our two youngest kids) so a lot of my free time next month is going to taken up by cleaning the house and packing.
The other major thing I am going to focus on is the revamp of the Frontier Explorer website. I hope to make significant progress on that next month.
Final Thoughts
There are some things going on in the wider community but I’ve purposely decided to not comment on them here on the blog. I might mention some things in my State of the Frontier post next month, especially to provide links to useful resources. But for now, I’m not ready to do that. Again, stay tuned.
That’s it for this month. It wasn’t as packed as I had wanted it to be but it’s a start and I am getting back into the flow of things once again. Look for more in the future. Stay safe and have fun.
There has been a discussion going on on the Star Frontiers Discord server (invite link) in the #KnightHawks channel about firing one of the Knight Hawk (KH) rocket weapons (torpedoes – TT, assault rockets – AR, or rocket batteries – RB) from a ship downed on a planet surface at a target in orbit around the planet.
Given the nature of the weapons, my gut reaction is that they have more than enough power to get from ground to space, but I want to check that assumption. There are other things to consider such as aiming, steering, etc. Let’s look at these in turn.
Power to get to orbit
The first question we have to answer is if the weapons have enough power to get from the ground to orbit. They are designed for firing in a zero gravity environment and getting to a target in orbit means that they have to climb out of the gravity well. Can they?
We start by looking at how much thrust the weapons have. And to do that, we have to make an assumption about how their engines work. We know that they can cover either 40,000km (TT & AR) or 30,000km (RB) in one KH turn or 10 minutes. The question is do they constantly accelerate over that time or is there a short burst of acceleration and then they basically coast? Personally, I’ve always felt that torpedoes do the former while AR and RB do the latter. But let’s look at the accelerations involved. Warning, math ahead!
The equation that governs the distance traveled for an object that is accelerating under thrust for a time and then (possibly) coasting is given by
d(t) = \frac{1}{2}at_{1}^2 + v_{max}(t-t_1)
where
d(t) is the distance traveled at time t >= t1
t is the total time of the calculation
t1 is the time when the acceleration stops
a is the acceleration of the object while under thrust (assumed to be constant here)
vmax is the velocity of the object after acceleration is over and is simply the acceleration times t1. Substituting this in gives us
d(t) = \frac{1}{2}at_{1}^2 + at_1(t-t_1)
Simplifying this slightly gives us
d(t) = att_1 - \frac{1}{2}at_{1}^2
This equation can be used in both cases where the object accelerates and coasts (t>t1) and when it accelerates the entire time (t = t1).
For the KH weapons, we know the total distance d (30,000 or 40,000 km) and the total time t (10 minutes or 600 seconds). What we don’t know is a or t1. But we can pick one and calculate the other. The rocket with the highest acceleration on Earth is the Sprint anti-ballistic missile which had an acceleration of 100g (982 m/s2) for 5 seconds. So as long as we stay below that figure, we are probably safe.
For the accelerate constantly option, which is what I assume torpedoes do, to cover 40,000km in 10 minutes, the acceleration would need to be 222.22 m/s2. If a rocket battery had the same acceleration pattern, the acceleration would only be 166.67 m/s2 as it has to cover less distance in the same amount of time.
A reader on Facebook asked about the decrease in range and when looking into that, and adding the section at the end, I realized I had miscalculated the acceleration in the burn and coast mode. The actual numbers (now corrected) were lower than I first posted and much more reasonable.
Now for the accelerate and drift option (which I assume for AR & RB), let’s start by trying a 30 second acceleration and then coast to the target. To achieve that, the AR would need an acceleration of 2279.20 m/s2 and the RB would need an acceleration of 1709.4 m/s2. Which is starting to be a bit excessive and well over the 100g of the Sprint rocket. If we go with a 60 second acceleration period, those drop to 1169.59 m/s2 and 877.19 m/s2 respectively. Those are more reasonable and given advanced materials, and the fact that these are fired in a vacuum, maybe that is reasonable.
So now we need to see if these accelerations (and durations) are enough to get these missiles off of a planet.
When we launch from the surface of the planet there are three forces we need to deal with. The first is the thrust from the rocket which is just mass of the rocket times the acceleration we just calculated. This pushes the rocket up. The second is force of gravity pulling the rocket back, and finally we have drag on the rocket as it pushes through the are. This also resists the rocket getting off the planet.
The drag force is given by:
F_d = \frac{1}{2}C_d\rho Av^2
where
Cd is the drag coefficient
rho (ρ) is the fluid density of air
A is the cross sectional area of the missile
v is the velocity of the missile
The drag coefficient depends on the shape of the object and how the fluid flows around it. I’m just going to use the drag coefficient for a long cylinder (0.82) as an approximation for any of these missiles. That value comes from the Wikipedia page for drag coefficients.
The other bit we need is the fluid density of air. That can be approximated by
\rho(h) = \rho_0e^{-h/h_0}
where
ρ0 is the fluid density of air at sea level (we’ll use 1.222 kg/m3)
h0 is the scale height of the atmosphere (10.4 km).
To figure out the acceleration as a function of time, we add up all those forces and divide by the mass of the rocket. That acceleration can then be used to find how high the rocket goes. The problem is that the acceleration has terms that depend on the velocity and position which in turn depend on the previous acceleration and velocity. This type of problem is known as a partial differential equation. And it can be solved but is definitely beyond the scope of this blog. Luckily, it easy to approximate this one with a simple numerical iteration that you can do with a program or even a spreadsheet. So that’s what I did.
The only thing we don’t have is the mass of the rockets. It cancels out for the rocket thrust and gravity but we still need it for the drag term. The problem is that all the rules give us is the volume for each weapon. Since a larger mass will reduce the effect of the drag force, we’ll approximate on the light side and say that the missiles weigh only 1000 kg/m3, the same density as water. That’s might be light but I also assume that the volumes given in the rules are for the entire storage space for the missile, not just the missile, so it probably evens out. And that just means that if it is more massive, the drag effect will be smaller and easier for the missile to get to orbit. That gives us a mass of 10000 kg for the RB and AR and 20000 kg for the torpedo. Although for the rocket battery, I’m going to use a mass of only 1000 kg because it’s a salvo of smaller rockets.
Let’s start with the with the continuous acceleration engine. We’ll look at the RB, AR, and TT and see how long it takes to get to space (if it can at all). For the purpose of this calculation, I’m defining reaching space to mean it got to an altitude of 600 km. That’s a bit higher than the orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope. I’m also going to round the acceleration of gravity up to 10 m/s2 and ignore the fact that gravity drops off with altitude. Finally we’ll use a cross section of one square meter in the drag equation (that’s probably high for the RB but that just means that any values we get for the RB are conservative). Here’s what we get using 0.25 second time steps on the integration:
Weapon
Thrust (m/s2)
Mass (kg)
Time to space (seconds)
Rocket Battery
166.67
1000
112.75
Assault Rocket
222.22
10000
78.75
Torpedo
222.22
20000
77.00
The small mass of the individual rocket battery rockets definitely has an effect on the time. Even with the same acceleration as the other weapons, it would take 94.75 seconds to get to space. Still though, it takes less than 2 minutes to reach space and in truth the drag of the atmosphere is negligible for the RB after 57 seconds and 28.5 seconds for the AR. And remember, these are slightly longer times than the actual values because we’re ignoring the dropping off of gravity with height.
Now let’s look to the burst acceleration case. We’ll use the 60 second burn case. This gives us the following values:
Weapon
Thrust (m/s2)
Mass (kg)
Time to space (seconds)
Rocket Battery
877.19
1000
48
Assault Rocket
1169.59
10000
33.50
Torpedo
1169.59
20000
33.00
Now there would be variations due to atmospheric density and gravity but even increasing the gravity to 1.5 g only added 0.75 seconds to the AR in the continuous acceleration case. Doubling the air density and keeping the gravity at 1.5g pushed the AR’s time-to-space up to 82.5 seconds. The thrust of these weapons is just so large that gravity and drag are only small effects.
In all cases, the missile reaches space before the engine cuts off. The drag force gets really high on these later cases because they are accelerating quickly but it’s not enough to keep them from reaching orbit. So it’s pretty safe to say that any of the weapons have the thrust to reach a ship in low (or even high) orbit if fired from the planet’s surface. But having the thrust to do so isn’t everything.
Heat of Passage
These missiles are going to be screaming through the lower atmosphere for the first 30-60 seconds and that drag force is going to generate a lot of frictional heat on the surface of the missile. The Swift anti-ballistic missile dealt with this by having an ablative heat shield to protect it through the lower atmosphere. It’s safe to assume that our missiles don’t have that as they were never designed for atmospheric launch but rather were expected to be working in a vacuum. One might argue that they might not even have a shell or skin, just structural supports to hold all the pieces as no aerodynamic shape is needed, but we’ll assume that just for the sake of handling they do have a solid surface.
This means that while there might be enough thrust, it might be too much for the missile to handle. The rocket battery, with the slower thrust, goes a bit slower so the effect isn’t as great but it spends more time hot. This is probably enough to make this a no go but it’s up to you to decide if this is a factor for your game.
Aiming/Guidance
The next consideration is how to aim and/or guide the missiles at their targets. And this comes down to how you feel the weapon is fired in space. This will impact if a ship sitting on the surface of the planet can fire and guide the weapon to its target. It really comes down to two ideas, direct flight or guided flight. Direct flight is where the missile is launched and it just flies in a straight line at the target based on its launched direction. Guided flight is where the missile has maneuvering capabilities and can steer itself after the target. Here’s my take on each of the three weapons we’re considering.
Assault rockets are moving player only and forward firing. These are mounted in a launch tube aligned with the main axis of the ship and the ship needs to be lined up with the target before firing as the assault rockets are direct fire. Once launched, they fly in a straight line at the target and detonate. If they have any steering capability, it is minimal for final approach.
Like assault rockets, rocket batteries are direct flight. The difference is that the launcher itself can swivel to aim the rockets and control the direction of launch. Again, any guidance of the missiles themselves if very, very minimal, probably confined to final approach.
Torpedoes, on the other hand, I treat as a guided flight weapon, probably by an internal system rather than controlled by the firing ship, but they do have the ability to steer to chase their targets. You fire them out of the side of the ship and they steer around and guide in as they approach.
This has an impact on how these weapons navigate through the atmosphere. Since they are designed for spaceflight, and not to work in an atmosphere, it’s very unlikely that any of these missiles have fins, which would help to stabilize their flight though the air. They are not needed in space so the missiles wouldn’t have them. Which means, that for the direct flight weapons, strong winds, turbulence, and uneven air flow are going to push them off their intended path, possibly significantly and maybe catastrophically as they don’t really have any guidance system to keep them on track. This won’t be so bad for a guided weapon as it has the capability to somewhat steer itself and remain on course.
Another question is rifling of the launch system. This is where the launch system either by physical design or the way the rocket is made, imparts a spin to the missile as it is launched. While not needed, it may very well be a design feature of the AR and RB launchers as it imparts stability to the flight and could help keep the missile from going off course due to minor unevenness of engine thrust over the long flight, basically a form of gyroscopic stabilization. If you do include some sort of spin stabilization in your launch system, that could help the missile stay on course while buffeted by the atmosphere.
Given those aspects of the missiles, you’d only be able to launch an assault rocket from the surface of the planet if the ship had landed tail down and the target passed nearly directly overhead. Since it takes the whole ship to aim the weapon, a grounded ship can only shoot and AR at a target that passes directly in front of it. The rocket battery or torpedo launcher could conceivably fire at any target. Additionally, there is a good chance that the AR or RB will get knocked off course due to the turbulence of passage through the atmosphere whereas the torpedo, with its steering capability, might fare much better.
Environmental impact
Here I’m not talking about whether the missile launch is good for the environment or not (it’s probably not) but rather what direct impact it has on the firing site. The ship itself would probably be fine as it was designed to handle the launch of the weapon. But they were designed for space and now you have all this heat being generated by the rocket launch rushing out into the surroundings. The air will get hot, things might catch on fire, etc.
Additionally, even the “slow-moving” rocket battery breaks the sound barrier in 2.5 seconds while it is only half a kilometer away from the ship. What impact does that sonic boom have on the ship and surroundings? What impact does it have on the missile?
Effect on range
I had originally ignored this because I was assuming we were looking at shooting at something in orbit around the planet which is well within the range of all these weapons. A commenter in the STar Frontiers Facebook group asked about it so I thought I’d post the max ranges for each of the weapons in each scenario.
If you assume an unguided missile (i.e. AR or RB in my case), I’d definitely reduce the chance to hit something not in orbit just because of the aiming issue, the atmospheric passage would reduce the accuracy of the weapon. But here are the max ranges for the weapons (these are for vertical launches):
Weapon
Normal Range In Space
Continuous Burn From Planet
Burn and Coast From Planet
Rocket Battery
30000 km
25678 km
22189 km
Assault Rocket
40000 km
37716 km
37061 km
Torpedo
40000 km
37953 km
37607 km
So for the larger weapons, the atmosphere only reduces the range by less than 3,000 km or less than 10%. The RB fares a little worse due to the increased drag. In continuous burn mode, it loses ~4,300 km or 14.4%. The biggest effect is when you assume the RB is a burn and coast engine. Then the effect is nearly 8,000 km off it’s normal range, a 26% reduction.
Obviously firing at an angle through more atmosphere would reduce this even more, firing the continuous burn RB at a 30 degree angle drops the range to ~22,000 km and the AR to ~32,600 km as examples. Also, these are actually slight underestimates of the range because I didn’t taper off the gravitational effect with distance from the planet. But that is such a small effect relative to the thrust that the variations are minor.
Final thoughts
This was a fun problem to think about. I think in my game, I’d allow these weapons to be fired at targets in space but give them a failure chance to go off course (possibly catastrophically) during their flight through the atmosphere, probably 20% for torpedoes, 40% for assault rockets, and 60% for rocket batteries. If the PCs were doing this, I’d reduce those failure changes for various things that they do to mitigate some of the problems mentioned above.
Such mitigations could include reprogramming the rockets for slower initial launch speeds (assuming you declare to rockets to not have a solid fuel core that cannot be regulated), somehow inducing spin stabilization at launch, adding fins that deploy after launch to stabilize flight, etc. Of course those things would probably take hours of work to set up and modify the missile so it wouldn’t be something they could do quickly.
One thing I didn’t talk about was the extra time it would take to get out of the atmosphere if not launching straight up. The launch angle (theta), measured in degrees from vertical, is in my spreadsheet that does the calculations but I only presented the numbers for straight up. Also, that angle only affects the height calculation and isn’t accounted for in the slow down caused by gravity but it’s a relatively minor effect unless theta is large. As a first approximation, just divide the times listed above by cos(theta) to get the time to space for a different angle. It’s actually a little bit longer than that due to more time spent with the drag force affecting the missile but not by much (at least for small theta). I’d probably also increase the failure chance by the same factor.
Speaking of the spreadsheet, you can find it here if you want to play with it:
I haven’t had as much time as I thought I would to create content directly on the blog but I thought that I’d let you know of some things that have been going on.
First, I have been working on the Detailed Frontier Timeline. Posts have been going out (almost) daily on the @Star Frontiers account on Twitter and you can expect a summary post here at the beginning of May.
Second, the Moonbright Stinger (aka Gullwind) 3D model is finally up on DriveThruRPG where you can download it if you want. It’s taken me nearly a year to get it up there but I finally got around to it. I know at least one of the readers will be happy. They keep asking about it.
I’ve also started looking at website updates. I’ll probably be updating the Frontier Explorer site first as there is some issue with the current site that causes it to send a random process off in to some weird infinite loop that is using up all the spare CPU cycles on my server. It’s really strange and I haven’t tracked down what is causing it. Since I was planning on an upgrade anyway, That will hopefully solve the problem.
That’s it for now. Hopefully there will be more soon.
It’s been a long time but I’m back to blogging and you can expect content to appear on this blog fairly regularly again. With the exception of the post about the Moonbright Stinger miniature, it’s been over a year. I’ve just had too much going on and, honestly, been very distracted by other activities, to do much in the way of posting. That is changing.
First, if you haven’t seen it yet, I just released issue 36 of the Frontier Explorer. You can grab a copy at DriveThruRPG or on the Frontier Explorer website. This was the last issue of the magazine. I was seriously burnt out on producing the fanzine and had to force myself to put out every issue for the last year. I threw in the towel with this one. Thirty-six issues and ten years of production was a good run. It’s time for new activities. If you want more details, check out my Endings and Beginnings article at the end of issue 36. A lot of what I plan on working on will appear here on the blog, either as entries or reports on “behind the scenes” activities.
That said, it won’t be the last fanzine issue. Tom V., who I co-created the Frontier Explorer with, is going to revive the Star Frontiersman fanzine. So you can expect to see more content there as well. I’ll probably write for the magazine, but I won’t be producing it any more.
What to Expect
With that out of the way, let’s look at what you can expect here at the Expanding Frontier going forward. I currently have no idea what my publishing schedule is going to look like. I hope to get back to a post a week, and maybe even more, but we’ll see what happens. Here are some of the projects I’m going to be working on and posting about.
Detailed Frontier Timeline
First, I’m resuming the Detailed Frontier Timeline project where I am posting a day-to-day series of events going on in the Frontier, these posts go out daily on Twitter and monthly here on the blog. Currently, the timeline is in the thick of the opening events of the Second Sathar War. I tweeted nearly a month’s worth of events back in February 2021 that never got posted here on the blog. That summary post will be the next one after this post. (In fact, it’s already written. I just decided to get this post up before I posted that one).
If you want to get the daily updates, follow the @StarFrontiers account on Twitter or the #SFTimeline hashtag. I post these in the Star Frontier account instead of my personal account (@dagorym) and every post has the #SFTimeline hashtag. They will start back up on day FY61.382. Otherwise, my plan is to publish the summary blog post here during the first week of each month that collects all the Twitter posts from the previous month. So you’ll be getting the summary from February 2021 in a day or two, Twitter posts starting back up, and the next summary post in the beginning of June.
3D models
I want to get back to modeling. I still have 5 miniatures from the Privateer boxed set to recreate and then it will be off to to the races creating ship models of my own design. Probably several space stations to start. I don’t know exactly when I’ll get started on this, but I hope to start working on models by the end of May. We’ll see what kind of progress I make and how often I post these.
HSS History’s Hope
Back in December 2020, I posted a set of videos showing how I was creating the deck plans for the HSS History’s Hope, a ship that features in the Detailed Frontier Timeline. The idea was to both show the deck plans and talk about how I create them. I need to finish the deck plans for that ship. The question is, would you be interested in seeing videos of how I draw the remaining five decks or do you just want to see the final plans. If you want me to record the design/drawing process for the maps, let me know in the comments. I’m happy to do so, but that might delay getting this project restarted.
Regardless of whether I record videos of the deck plans being drawn or not, I have two projects in mind related to this ship, maybe three. The first is to do a Technical Manual for the HSS History’s Hope like I’ve done for the UPF Assault Scout and Sathar Destroyer. It will include details of each deck, a bit of history on the ship, and its stats, all in a nice little manual.
The other project I want to do is a write-up of an exploration campaign to use the ship to search for the Yazirian homeworld, exactly what is happening in the Detailed Frontier Timeline. This is an ambitious project so I don’t know if I’ll be able to pull it off or finish it (I’m really bad at that), but I’m going to give it a go.
The third possible item related to this is doing a write-up of the History’s Hope’s travels as chronicled in the Detailed Frontier Timeline but in a more narrative form with additional details added.
Writing
Which brings me to my next topic, fiction writing. I have a short sci-fi novella, Discovery, that I wrote over a decade ago. While it’s not exactly Star Frontiers, it’s also not explicitly not Star Frontiers either. I wrote that novella to describe how I envision Void Jumping to work. I have a sequel planned and I might start working on that. And it’s possible to tie this into the Star Frontiers universe if I wanted to as the story is about humans discovering FTL travel and they could discover the other SF races in a later novel.
However, more likely, I am going to keep working on my explicitly Star Frontiers novel, A Pale Survivor. That one is already half again longer than Discovery and about a quarter of the way through the story. This is a story of events on Pale during the invasion of that planet during what would eventually be called the First Sathar War. I posted the prologue to the story back in 2019.
I hope to spend some time every month working on one or both of these novels. If you’d be interested in seeing excerpts from the stories as I write them, let me know in the comments.
Technical Manuals
I mentioned the HSS History’s Hope Technical Manual above. Once that one is done, I plan to start doing more technical manuals of other ships. I think this, combined with the 3D modeling, is going to become my main focus. This is where my interest is being drawn more and more and I think that’s where I want to focus my time. We’ll see if it happens.
Miscellany
There are a number of projects that I started here on the blog that I may or may not get back to. Hopefully I will, but I’m not making promises at this point. In addition, I have a list of (currently 8) topic ideas for one-off posts that are sitting in my draft ideas folder. Some of those might end up as posts on this site and/or articles in the Star Frontiersman.
Website Work
The other major project that I have planned is to redesign and revamp all the websites I host. This site probably doesn’t need much work, but all the other Star Frontiers sites are getting pretty long in the tooth and need some serious effort and updating. I’ll probably start with the Frontier Explorer site but the list of sites needing work include:
the Frontier Explorer website (frontierexplorer.org)
the Star Frontiersman website (starfrontiersman.com – this one is going to Tom V)
the Star Frontiers Revival forum site (starfrontiers.us)
the Star Frontiers Network site – wiki, game forums, and old website archive (starfrontiers.info)
my New Frontier Games site (newfrontiergames.com)
a couple of personal sites
My plan is to consolidate and streamline those sites and make them more user and mobile device friendly.
Related to this, I want to get all the articles from the Frontier Explorer online as individual HTML pages that can linked and referenced. Some of them are already online and that was the plan when we started the magazine but it fell by the wayside. I’m planning on putting my librarian hat back on and getting them all finished.
There are a host of projects involved with this effort and I’ll report on them as they get completed.
Patreon
That’s quite a list of projects. The last item I want to mention is that I have a Patreon campaign that supports the work on this blog. If you’d like to support me in my efforts as I work on the projects above, consider becoming a Patreon supporter. You can click the “Become a Patron” button on the upper right of the page (or this link) to sign up as a supporter. I need to update my patreon page to reflect what is going to be happening still and especially update the goals/rewards, but the general idea is still there. If you’re already a supporter, thank you. If not, consider becoming one.
Last Thoughts
That’s it for this post. There are a lot of things I want to do. We’ll see which and how many of them I get to in the coming months and years. I hope to be here for the long haul but we’ll see how it goes.
As always, feel free to leave me comments or suggestions below. I have several old comments that I need to respond to, but I will be more responsive going forward and am interested in hearing what things you’d like to see on the blog.
I basically dropped off-line and out of the Frontier mid February and haven’t done anything related to Star Frontiers or RPGs (with one exception, see below) in the intervening time. I’ve even stopped posting my Detailed Frontier Timeline tweets. In hindsight, I was seriously burnt out and just needed a break. About the only communications I had relative to this blog or other gaming content were messages to my Patreon supporters to let them know that they wouldn’t be billed in March or April. They also aren’t getting billed in May (since I didn’t do anything in April). Thank you to everyone who has stuck by be through this.
The one thing that I did do, was get the next issue of the Frontier Explorer ready and out. It came out on the 28th and you can grab it at DriveThruRPG or on the magazine website. And to be honest, getting the magazine ready almost didn’t pull me out of my slump as I didn’t start on the magazine until the beginning of this month when I would normally have started at the beginning of March. But I haven’t had an issue come out late (even if my deadlines are self-imposed) and didn’t want this one to either. In the end I got it finished (even with a drive failure right as I was finishing that corrupted the document forcing me to redo the layout from scratch) and you can grab the current issue for your reading pleasure.
Looking Forward
There really isn’t anything to look back at so let’s look forward. I’m going to start out small and probably won’t get a post out every week but try to get back to that schedule by the end of summer. But to start I’m going to focus on finishing some small projects.
The first thing I’m going to do is get my Detailed Frontier Timeline posts back up and going. I need to create about a week worth of entries and I’ll have another month ready to post here. I’ll start posting on Twitter again (follow the #SFTimeline hashtag) on May 1st and work to get caught up. I’m several months behind so that might take a while.
The second project I’m going to focus on is the video series I was doing on drawing the deck plans of the HSS History’s Hope. That should account for a post or two.
Finally, I’m going to get back to working on the 3D ship models. I recently was lucky and picked up an brand-new, unopened Privateers boxed set and the minis are in pristine condition. So now I have all six and I’m going to work on trying to get one of those recreated each month. As I’m already halfway done with one of them, I will hopefully get the first one done in May and then one a month until October. We’ll see what happens after that.
Beyond that, I have no idea what will happen but that’s enough to get me started. I have several topic ideas that I might flesh out into full posts but we’ll see how things go.
Last Thoughts
This post also marks 3 years since I started the blog. There have been 196 total posts (including this one) over those three years, even with the two and a half month hiatus I just took. Thanks to all of you who have followed along on this journey so far and especially to my Patreon supporters.
There isn’t much else to say. I’m looking forward to posting again and hope to keep doing so for a while.
Can you believe it’s 2021 already? Time seems to be really flying. Probably because I’ve been so busy. Truth be told, I’m glad January is over. With the university starting up, it’s taken a bit to get settled into the new routine. Hopefully things have settled down and going forward it will be a little less hectic.
Looking Back
As expected, I wasn’t able to keep to a regular posting schedule this month, and probably won’t in February either. That said, I still managed to get five posts out (six if you include this one) even if they were relatively small ones.
We started with the usual Detailed Frontier Timeline post. Related to the timeline, there were two battle report posts (Battle of Theseus and Second Battle of Kawdl-Kit). There was originally going to be a third one (in the Kisk-Kar system) but looking at the orders of battle, the UPF decided it wasn’t in their best interest to get annihilated when they could fall back to a stronger position, so they evaded that combat. There is another battle coming (Battle of Pale) that should have been posted this month, but I’ve gotten a bit behind in the timeline posting and playing out the battles. With my reduced time to work on projects, I just haven’t had time to work through it. Also related to the timeline, the last post of the month was a discussion of the fleet designations I use for Spacefleet and the sathar.
The other major event was that we got issue 31 of the Frontier Explorer out the door. You can grab it on the Frontier Explorer website or DriveThruRPG. I’ll be working on getting the print version set up in the coming weeks.
Behind the scenes, there hasn’t been much happening as I’ve been settling into my new job as a computer science professor at the local university. I’m no longer working from home and that has required a change in everyone’s schedules. The biggest impact is that I have less free time, taken up by the drive to work, but I do get to spend more time with my wife as we drive in together (she’s been an astronomy professor there for 13 years now). That said, I did start working on a new 3D model, recreating a miniature from the Privateers box. The box calls it the Moonbright Stinger, but you may recognize it more as the Gullwind from the Dramune Run adventure. The picture at right shows where the model is currently at.
Looking Forward
We’ll have a timeline post as the first post of the month although it might be a few days late. I’ve got to get the timeline caught up and play out that last battle and I’ve fallen behind over the last week. There’s also going to be another battle later in the month. Those two fights are going to be pretty important and determine the way the Second Sathar War will proceed. So that means we should have two more battle posts this month.
I hope to finish the Moonbright Stinger model this month. I’m about 5 hours into it and probably have 5 more to go but I should be able to finish it up. All of the “positive” features are done, and now I need to go through and carve out all the features that are etched into the body of the miniature.
Otherwise, I don’t know what else we’ll see. I’ll probably spend a bit of time converting the files needed for the POD version of the Frontier Explorer to the new format. It is just the cover file that needs to change and I don’t foresee that being difficult, but it is going to take some time, maybe 20-30 minutes per issue. Although it is the same process for each cover and I I can use the same template for each issue so Imight actually be able to get each one done in 10-15 minutes. But with 30 back issue to process, I’m looking at 5 to 15 hours of work just for that. Assuming my estimates are correct. I’ll probably spread it out over a couple of months. But if you want the Frontier Explorer issues as saddle-stitched POD version, you’ll need to head over to DriveThruRPG and order them this month. I’ve also been asked about building omnibus editions of the Frontier Explorer and putting say 8 issues into 400-page soft or hardback editions. So I might look at that for both the Frontier Explorer and the Star Frontiersman.
Otherwise, I have ideas for a couple of starship related posts but those are going to require some work. And I hope to get back to the adventures I started with blog with years ago and make some progress on those.
Final Thoughts
Truth be told, I can’t believe I’ve kept the Detailed Frontier Timeline going for over two years. It has spun off some interesting side projects like everything related to the HSS History’s Hope. In fact, that is the only part of the timeline not specifically related to the Second Sathar War at the moment. But that’s okay since I originally conceived the timeline to focus primarily on the war.
If you have ideas or topics you’d like to see explored, feel free to reach out to me and let me know. I’m always interested in feedback.
I’ll end with a big thank you to all those who have supported me on Patreon over the years. You have really helped to keep this blog going. If you are already a supporter, thank you again. If you’re not a supporter, consider helping out.
