Hey /tg/? In a setting without faster than light travel, communication or aliens, but has been colonized by humans over thousands of years, what would be a reason for a party of space traders to leave their home system and throw themselves into a stasis pod for decades at a time to travel the cosmos?
>>44633892
Profit.
>>44633892
Watch Interstellar.
Watch and read space movies/books.
Tbh I guess mine would be adventure or exile
>>44633928
>consume sci-fi media
Well, d'okay then
>>44634052
Not that anon, but Interstellar is a movie that deals with time dilation and its ramifications.
>>44634539
I saw it. It's one of the reasons I wanted to run the campaign I'm working on.
>>44633892
Pretty sure that space pirates are just something you can't do with hard scifi. Like mecha and walkers, after a while their core reasoning is "It'd be totally cool"
>>44633928
>Watch Interstellar
But it's shit.
What happens if they stay in stasis, due to a glitch, for one thousand times longer than originally planned? Maybe by that time FTL travel will be a thing.
>>44633892
They are Space Mormons looking for their individual planet
>>44634750
I agree anon interstellar was a shit movie fucking almost killed me from boredom.
>>44633892
MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONEEEEY
>>44633892
Exile
Immigration
Adventure
>>44633892
Well, most humans wouldn't be able to handle that kind of travel. Your traders would be more likely to have no close family members, since traveling between stars in the manner you describe would mean they could only make a few trips before everyone and everything they knew was dead and gone.
Perhaps they are exceptional but lonely individuals who banded together and readily took on the challenge of such work. Or perhaps they've hit rock bottom and need the capital from such long term commerce to survive, maybe they're pure mercenaries and have little care for the outside world and took up interstellar trade because it turns a huge profit.
Any way you look at it, such travelers would have to be either extremely dedicated, desperate, or slightly maladjusted/sociopathic to gravitate towards a profession that by definition meant they couldn't really make bonds or stay in one relatively small place for any great period of time.
The ecosystem or some shit on their home planet is fucked, and they have to travel to a more advanced planet to find a terrifying device to fix their planet within a certain period of time
>>44633892
They want money or some sort of desperate circumstance drove them to leave their home planet (maybe they desperately need money).
When they arrived on the new planet they found it was too radically different in terms of culture and technology for them to properly integrate, as a result they end up forming small communioties with people in similar circumstances, scattered across various spaceports across settled space. They keep traveling because the don't really have any alternatives.
Maybe there are businesses that create nice gated communities that cater to these people and the hope of one day being able to afford such a place is what drives lots of them.
Same reason man was put on the moon, for the sake of it.
>>44633892
What are they going to trade? It'd have to be something that is unreproducable on other planets due to the cost and time involved with travel.
What they could be doing is acting as an information exchange hub, where they travel to a planet and negotiate and trade information for mass media, technology, and various cultural oddities which they can then sell to their host planet for a vast amount of money due to the information's scarcity. You'd be competing with other ships to get back from a particular planet before anyone else so you can reap the profit. If you fail you essentially earn nothing. It's a brutal business, but for the successful there's a killing to be made.
>>44633892
Visit their mom
Actual Trade (this is the most common impetus for a trading party)
Change of scenery/Boredom
Vacation
Trade Conference
On the run from the law
Have to go back somewhere to resolve something; a deal that went sour, a ship that was impounded, a buddy in prison, etc.
No choice: ship was destroyed and they're in the life pod (or they're prisoners en route to a prison planet, etc)
Lucrative trade
Need a spare part or to pick up a new ship
Local conditions are untenable: civil disorder or oppressive controlling faction/s
Local Trade just isn't that profitable, and the mortgage is due.
The space king sends you on a space quest to kil a space dragon, even though you guys are traders, he makes a very good case and you were all chosen due to a random lottery. It will be dangerous, but he will provide his best space knight to assist you, and a squadron of noble space steeds.
They discover a temporal distortion that allows them to warp to the future, destroy their time duplicates and then carry on with no time lost.
>>44633892
>Hey /tg/? In a setting without faster than light travel, communication or aliens, but has been colonized by humans over thousands of years, what would be a reason for a party of space traders to leave their home system and throw themselves into a stasis pod for decades at a time to travel the cosmos?
They're outcasts on search for the perfect loliplanet.
>>44633892
Dire need.
And don't make it water, water is everywhere. Don't make it a new home either, that's really over used.
Also Interstellar was shit. Watch the real Space Odyssey.
>>44633892
A dastardly scheme where they stock up on some material that they know will be scarce in the future or wherever they'd be going (possibly because they intentionally made it so) so that they can sell high when they wake up.
In other words, fun and profit.
>>44633892
The book A Deepness In The Sky is about exactly this.
>>44634802
The sequel A Fire Upon The Deep is exactly this.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=035cpHEowS4
>>44636311
You mean like every profession involving long voyages since humanity began exploring?
These would be the same kind of people you found on whaling ships, spice traders, british and spanish navy men during the heyday of colonization, hell even long haul truckers today to some extent.
There are no shortage of men wanting adventure, running from troubles at home or just disillusioned enough with their prospects at home to jump on a boat or spaceship with the possibility or even guarantee of never coming back.
It ain't unusual at all.
>>44633892
>DA DAH DAH DAH DAN
>DA DAH DAH DAH DAN
It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere~!
>>44633892
Conflict. You belong to a group of undesirables and need to flee whatever region of space you're in, but you don't have the creds to do so because the guys hunting you control a phenomenally large area.
You're testing out your theory for an alternate, affordable method of survival. You try to hide out in the vast emptiness of space within the region by sealing yourself in a small, hard-to-detect stasis vessel running on low power.
>>44633892
Because they, like sci-fi and fantasy writers, have no sense of scale. The solar system itself is unfathomably huge, has resources to sustain a population of arouund 10 quadrillion human beings, and is perfectly traversable at subluminal speeds.
>>44633892
Immortality
You get to live hundreds- maybe even thousands of years if your ships go at relativistic speeds.
>>44638590
>And don't make it water
This almost stopped me watching BSG and did stop me watching SG:U. Fucking waterfags are the worst.
>>44641603
To be fair, BSG had their tanks blown up and a fleet of refugees to support. Then again they have space angels, and their space planes fly like airplanes most of the time. I never tried with SGU.
>>44633892
Extremely related
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud6LiVJkwyA
>>44633892
Curiosity.
>>44633892
Well, they might me black, muslims, christians, humans who leave earth because they're literally genocided because that's what makes mankind human?
Another possibility would be that there are very desperate individuals of a group who haven'T taken a part in a crime and still are gonna die.
This prompted them to band together to leave the planet because they believe with the whole heart that there's nothing worth staying and proving anymore.
Both scenarios feature the following outcome:
They might die, and that's okay.
Everyone dies eventually, at least the pain, desperation and fear is over.
There was nothing to live for anyway.
Or:
A new start in a very harsh and deadly environment where they have to tame the planet enough to sustain themselves, while doing their best to avoid past mistakes, while building anti-orbital defense systems to prepare an insurance for the possible ongoing persecution.
Of course, they have to catch up technology as fast as possible to make that happen.
>>44634869
kek'd so hard I might actually use this one day.
