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Any good hard sci-fi RPGs?

MF

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Paraphrasing Clarke, any technology so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic means it's not hard sci-fi.

Couldn't think of any, part of the reason why I made my own.

Science overtaking speculative fiction is a beautiful thing, and it doesn't change the spirit in which something was written. Otherwise, we might as well start calling Jules Verne steampunk.

Titan Outpost, mentioned above did scratch that itch for a while but it was incredibly unoptimized when i tried it and left me a bittersweet taste.

Yeah, sorry about that. It took a few months to get rid of the game breaking bugs we hadn't caught, and another six months after that to polish everything to where it is today. Knowing what I know now, I would have kept it in Early Access for all of 2019 at the very least.

Hadn't heard of Captive before, by the way. Looks interesting. ELEX is special in that it actually is science fantasy rather than soft sci-fi, which is also pretty rare if we don't count Star Wars. It's a fun blend.
 

demoman

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Yeah, sorry about that. It took a few months to get rid of the game breaking bugs we hadn't caught, and another six months after that to polish everything to where it is today. Knowing what I know now, I would have kept it in Early Access for all of 2019 at the very least.

Now that i see my quote on its own i feel that i did not do enough justice to your game. It was an enjoyable experience and it got better the more polish you applied on it. I literally played it for two days straight the weekend i got it and finished it a couple of times. Really hoping to see more things from you. Also nice post in general my dude!

Back on subject, Colony Ship is much awaited (by me at least) and kudos on some really fine mentions of less recent titles.
Then i checked rusty's thread and now I am speechless both from nostalgia and regret from not trying some of those games.
Also, I had a joke about Starfield but sadly it has already been made...
 

Peachcurl

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I loved Blindsight and Echopraxia... but I'm somewhat unsure about the 'hard scifi' categorization. I'm hesitant to say that something follows the laws of physics and logic if it has vampires, no matter how scientifc the explanation sounds.
 

Ol' Willy

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I loved Blindsight and Echopraxia... but I'm somewhat unsure about the 'hard scifi' categorization. I'm hesitant to say that something follows the laws of physics and logic if it has vampires, no matter how scientifc the explanation sounds.
Blindsight has a part about brain ignoring the unfocused image from the moving eyeballs. I was curious enough and tested it - true!

Stand before the mirror and look yourself in the eye, moving - left pupil, right pupil, left, right... you will notice that your eyes don't move, instantly jumping from left to right.

Now do the same, but use frontal camera on a phone or laptop, for example. You will see the difference.

This is the kind of stuff that makes the book a "hard" sci-fi, a real phenomena being exploited further.
 

Darkwind

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Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
progressive politics seems to be at the front-and-center while scientific accuracy and scientific intrigue are a bit of an afterthought. Sounds familiar...

Not to totally derail this thread, but those things are rayciss! including math as we've discovered recently. What is going to be really comical is when this 'good enough' style engineering starts being applied to spacecraft, aircraft, and other zero tolerance platforms. Yes you burned up in the atmosphere due to improper telemetry calculations but you died not a racist, so let's focus on what is important people!
 
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progressive politics seems to be at the front-and-center while scientific accuracy and scientific intrigue are a bit of an afterthought. Sounds familiar...

Not to totally derail this thread, but those things are rayciss! including math as we've discovered recently. What is going to be really comical is when this 'good enough' style engineering starts being applied to spacecraft, aircraft, and other zero tolerance platforms. Yes you burned up in the atmosphere due to improper telemetry calculations but you died not a racist, so let's focus on what is important people!

It’s grating, but its makes sense if you accept they’re trying keep dumb people dumb.
 

Tavernking

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progressive politics seems to be at the front-and-center while scientific accuracy and scientific intrigue are a bit of an afterthought. Sounds familiar...

Not to totally derail this thread, but those things are rayciss! including math as we've discovered recently. What is going to be really comical is when this 'good enough' style engineering starts being applied to spacecraft, aircraft, and other zero tolerance platforms. Yes you burned up in the atmosphere due to improper telemetry calculations but you died not a racist, so let's focus on what is important people!

Why would people's taste in entertainment have any effect on real-life engineering quality? Just sounds really stupid
 
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Why would people's taste in entertainment have any effect on real-life engineering quality? Just sounds really stupid

Assuming that's a genuine question, he is passive-aggresively asserting that those on the opposite end of the political spectrum from he are anti-science.
 
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Why would people's taste in entertainment have any effect on real-life engineering quality? Just sounds really stupid

Assuming that's a genuine question, he is passive-aggresively asserting that those on the opposite end of the political spectrum from he are anti-science.
Probably closer to asserting that hiring people(and other discriminatory practices e.g., university acceptance) based on skin color or gender is going to end up getting a lot of people killed.
Just remember the next time you need a serious surgery done: the average black and hispanic medschool applicant in USA has an MCAT & GPA much lower than the average asian or white applicant. Don't be racist when you need that surgery.
 
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I certainly don't have the requisite knowledge or motivation to dispute that, but I really didn't read that sort of nuanced argumentative reasoning into:
those things are rayciss! including math as we've discovered recently.

Argument very well could be sound, just seems to me you're giving credit where it isn't due.

Anyway, in a feeble attempt to avoid totally beshittering this thread:

That Titan outpost looks interesting, put it on the wishlist.
 

Ranarama

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Paraphrasing Clarke, any technology so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic means it's not hard sci-fi.

Seems to me that you just ruled out stories set in the present day and after as hard sci-fi.
 

MF

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Seems to me that you just ruled out stories set in the present day and after as hard sci-fi.

Nah. You have to exclude laymen from that description. A microwave certainly seems like magic to my mom because she doesn't care about how it works. Doesn't mean a microwave fits the description.

I don't know about you, but there is nothing about any of our current technology that seems like magic to me. The quantum physics in something like a scanning tunneling microscope is certainly a mindfuck, but once you understand the concept you realize it's certainly not magic. Wireless data transfer is something that many people perceive as magic, but the physical layer of that OSI model is just plain old radio waves.

So it has to be indistinguishable from magic as compared to the sum of human knowledge.
 

JarlFrank

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Seems to me that you just ruled out stories set in the present day and after as hard sci-fi.

Nah. You have to exclude laymen from that description. A microwave certainly seems like magic to my mom because she doesn't care about how it works. Doesn't mean a microwave fits the description.

I don't know about you, but there is nothing about any of our current technology that seems like magic to me. The quantum physics in something like a scanning tunneling microscope is certainly a mindfuck, but once you understand the concept you realize it's certainly not magic. Wireless data transfer is something that many people perceive as magic, but the physical layer of that OSI model is just plain old radio waves.

So it has to be indistinguishable from magic as compared to the sum of human knowledge.

The basic principle of hard sci-fi is that the technology has to be explainable and understandable with our current knowledge of physics. If you cannot break down the technology used in your SF story into its basic physical rules, it's not hard SF.

Also you shouldn't use any unexplained unobtainium materials, like energy crystals or some shit. Tho fictional materials are fine as long as their properties are fully explainable with our current knowledge of chemistry.
 

MF

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It's a shame there isn't a Dunning-Kruger rating

I'm not implying I possess the sum of human knowledge, I'm just saying that is the yardstick you use in this definition.

Having encyclopedic knowledge is getting harder and harder as the sum of knowledge increases and we have long passed the time where a single human being could be a true homo universalis. That's not what I mean. Asimov was a biochemist. Doesn't mean he could only write about biochemistry, but it does mean he knew how the scientific method worked, how to read published research and how to project a scientific paradigm onto a fictional future. Doesn't have to be perfect. It just needs to be grounded in a plausible framework that is extrapolated from our own.

I'm curious though, what current technology you think is indistinguishable from magic to those who understand how it works?

The basic principle of hard sci-fi is that the technology has to be explainable and understandable with our current knowledge of physics.

Also you shouldn't use any unexplained unobtainium materials.

Yes.

By the way, I'm not into gatekeeping genres or anything. It's just a way to grade plausibility on a spectrum, but it doesn't mean one thing is more compelling than the other. If something is interesting, it's interesting.

Leviathan Wakes is hard sci-fi if you take out the protomolecule, but that sure is a cool plot element.

Back on topic, it's pretty obvious that those books are based on a tabletop campaign. The Rossi crew is such an obvious RPG party that I could practically visualize the players behind the characters. I guess now that the awesome Expanse streaming series has caught on, a PnP RPG release is bound to happen and a CRPG doesn't seem unlikely either.
 
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Darkwind

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Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
I certainly don't have the requisite knowledge or motivation to dispute that, but I really didn't read that sort of nuanced argumentative reasoning into:
those things are rayciss! including math as we've discovered recently.

The time for 'nuanced argumentative reasoning' is long past flabby neckbeard. Hide in your basement and peck away some more on your keyboard far away from places where any of this matters. Everything is downstream from culture. Politics, education, literature, entertainment, etc. Here is a little undeserved assistance for you. (links below) Stop responding to me, I find your pseudo-intellectual m'lady posturing tiresome like so many of your ilk who fiddle while Rome has been burning for far too long. I've neither the time nor inclination to do the intellectual heavy-lifting for you when a simple web search would show you the dire situation. (first article from 2017, it is accelerating rapidly)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/10/math-racist-university-illinois-professor/
https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/10...ach-seattle-kids-that-western-math-is-racist/
https://farleftfacts.org/white-people/math-yes-math-is-racist/
 

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