The Expanse rpg; several starships, Annual scifi tiles and Cosmographer
JimP
🖼️ 280 images Cartographer
I started working on this awhile back. Maybe I'll finish it, maybe not.
I had to jump up the Bulkhead effects so they would show up at this scale. Longest is 410' widest is 240'.
900 pixel jpg, 2000 gallery.
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More detail. The red letters in Engine Room says Danger and Power Supply. Probably need to make them larger.
I really like this Jim. It looks like it would be loads of fun to use in a Traveller game, or as a battle map for a game of Warhammer 40,000 Crusade.
Thanks. I got a deal on The Expanse rpg pdfs. Rules are a bit too 'cinematic' for me. But I can use it for my Traveller site to.
Excellent!
Makes me think of what a Borg ship (smaller) would look like.
Cal
Not cubular though. I just don't have the skill to draw a 3D hull.
Did a bit more. I'm getting tired so I will do something else.
Added more rooms and things. At this point, restrooms and personal stowage is presumed but not drawn.
900 pixel jpg, 2000 in gallery.
Well, going over this map... you can't get there from here... Needs a central passageway, two side passageways, and connect from there.
This doesn't have that. Anyway. I added restrooms and showers.
900 pixel jpg, 2000 in gallery.
In case folks are wondering what I'm doing... I like to look over old map threads, to see if I need to work on anything about once or twice a year.
This star ship needs some rework.
After a bit of debate with myself... I added the above ship to my Expanse web site.
I now have the Beyond the Ring official pdf. Wormhole device, ancient civilization technology, found beyond the Oort Cloud. No planet maps, but info on each one. So, I'll be making them with FT3+ and editing in CC3+. The wormhole station is run by... something.
And encountered a type L zero star... Never heard of it. Looks to be recently added, well, recently in astronomical time. Brown dwarf star cooler and than a type M star.
The game doesn't use the Hertzsprung-Russell star type diagram, but a different one. I"ll figure it out I'm sure.
Why yes, I am just waiting for EQ 2 to come back up after a patch.
I'm going to be using this thread for my The Expanse rpg maps, etc. that is why I edited the subject line.
This game chose to use a ring station, that is an opening for a wormhole, to connect to over a thousand planets. The 'entity' that runs the station is a bit odd.
Anyway, here is a preliminary map of the Ring.
There are some ships that orbit the ring, but some ways off. The 'entity' that runs this had a speed limit set of 600 m/s for any object approaching the center. Those ships had to be abandoned, and the resulting 'debris' is now being used by the station as building blocks of some sort.
The station assimilated, and altered any people who went on board. And not in the 'nicer' way the Borg do it.
After having read more of the pdfs, this comes across to me as more space fiction horror than as sf.
The Expanse is a series of novels, Jim - I'm sure the game is based on them. And Space-Opera / Space Horror is a good description. They're a very good read, with a better than average streaming tv adaptation as well.
It is a bit confusing. One site said the game was first, another said the books were first.
The game is rather cinematic, but there are definitely horror aspects to it
It all started, apparently, as a roleplaying game the two authors, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (who write under the pen name James S. A. Corey) were involved in. The worldbuilding there became the basis of a computer roleplaying game they were hired to develop by a company that went under. They ended up retaining the rights to the setting, and decided to write novels set in it (a total of nine, plus several shorter works that are mostly background material on the major characters). The novels start off as dystopic future, and proceed to post-apocalyptic (literally), and can certainly be described as horror sf. The novels became the basis of the SyFy TV show (later moved to Amazon), but the published RPG is based on the novels. (There's some oddities in the licensing, which is apparently being done novel by novel - the original game covered the first novel only.)
The differences between the TV show and the novels are very minimal, however, primarily because Abraham and Franck were on the writing staff for the show, and were diligently listened to. (Because of how it all came to pass, when they were writing the series bible - one of the first steps in developing a TV show from a book - they had to actually trim out a lot of material instead of expanding on it.)
The TV show is one of my all time favorite sf shows ever, because I like hard scifi, and they really put the "science" in the "science fiction."
The novels are better.
The Wormhole nodes. The galaxy is a map made by NASA based on data and research.
I found this map years ago, our local star area. I found it on this site: http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/
Note it isn't https.
A bit of improvement. I used earlier ships...
Jim nonchalantly walks in, posts Deck 1 of the Generation ship mentioned in The Expanse rpg, and yes the ship is 32 miles long. Generation slow ships, well under the speed of light, have to be large enough to carry supplies, people, recreation, etc. Likely be adding more walls, at lower resolutions.
Jim walks off, whistling nonchalantly. ( Parenthetically, likely it wont be finished, but I'm starting it.)
The name changes are from the game. Yes, the scale bar says 25000 feet.
I might use this method for remaking Starship wanderer on my Traveller site. Only time will tell.
My thoughts on the star ship is to make generalized floor plans like the one above for each deck. I might try to change the hull shape so it isn't so blockish.
Then make sample rooms like; kitchen type 1, storage room 1, etc.
Yes, there's no reason why it shouldn't be whatever shape that's desirable.
It's also important to fit out a generational starship with features such as food production facilities (essentially farms), since the storage won't go far without it, and those kitchens will have nothing to do otherwise. We had a chunk of this discussion previously regarding the Metamorphosis Alpha RPG and its gigantic generational ship, the Warden, though.
Unfortunately, the link I put in there for the Starship Warden publication no longer works, so I've changed it just to one for the original edition of Metamorphosis Alpha - as I can't establish why the Troll Lord Games "Warden" book no longer exists...
Are there going to be engines on every Deck? Or just selected ones?
This is labeled as deck 1, but it should be relabeled as deck 10. To put them more on the center line. With a change to 21 decks.
Starship Wanderer on my Traveller site has a few recreation areas with a forest in one.
Hydroponic gardens definitely need to be in both.
A bit of a change. Fractalize at strength 20, no other changes in that requestor. I only clicked once as I didn't want to have a flowing hull look. I had to use the node editing to get the hull back under the deck in a couple of places.
I've changed this to Deck 10, instead of Deck 1. And gotten rid of the Hotlinks due to it going up on a web page. I'll just add a small, page specific, menu so viewers can get between each deck.
Before I forget, I know of Metamorphysis Alpha and The Warden. I knew people back in the 1980s that ran it. Also in several sf stories I have read mentioned it as a side-story.
Oh, I read a few years ago a group of people completely mapped the Warden.
Deck 11
Kitchen type 01
Field and Water Recreation Area
An update on Deck 10. I think this is it at this scale level.
Emer. is Emergency gear. I wonder how this entire deck will reach it in case of a hull breach ?
I noticed that you have a couple of rooms labeled as main passageway. But then I looked at the width of those interior bulkheads. They're roughly ~1500 feet wide (~500 meters). Wouldn't it make more sense in a layout like this that the corridors are actually part of the walls?
I hadn't thought of that. I'll think it over.
Not all decks will be this big.
I haven't done that for this one yet. But here is an update. Hopefully the layout is better.
Deck 11
Not a map update, but I found some navigation menu errors on my site and fixed them.