Spacecraft and Space Travel

This is the chapter that you’ve been waiting for, the one on space travel. How are you going to handle spaceships, space travel, and space combat in your Fate Space game? This is a big deal, because it’s what makes the game one of space adventure.

The principles of Fate still apply to the rules for space travel: they should showcase the characters as proactive, capable people leading dramatic lives. So rather than systematizing space travel, our concern is dramatizing it.

• Low-plausibility space travel is what you see in Star Wars and similar space fantasy. Technological black boxes let us just hop in and go, without much concern for the physical laws governing real-world space travel. It’s all about feel, and often it feels like something else: WWII dogfights and bombing runs, or WWI naval combat, or even swashbuckling on 17th-century ships of the line.
• Medium-plausibility space travel is mostly what you get in Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica. Certain dramatically interesting constraints based on real-world conditions are maintained throughout the fiction, but they are only taken so far. The choice of technologies creates the feel of the setting: one might have teleporters and matter transmuters; another might have gravity weapons and warp-capable fighters.
• High-plausibility space travel is the province of The Martian or The Expanse. Real-world constraints are adopted and used to shape the setting as well as constrain actions and choices. A character who wins usually does so because they understand how the universe works.