Quote from: Premier;592778My thought, exactly. That crystalline fog around the ruptured pipe might turn into a firestorm if you heat it up and shoot a laser gun into it. Turning the ship back on again might start a complicated time bomb as pipes burst one by one and flood the interior with various substances. Careless opening of bulkhead doors might expose you to vacuum in section that have suffered hull rupture. Electric systems might misfire and go haywire. Plenty of fun!

Ah yes, we think along similar lines. I mean, in a hard sf game you are NOT going to find a derelict battlecruiser that's been adrift foe a long time, flip a few switches and have her combat ready in no time, that;s one thing I will not do.

Quote from: red lantern;592691I usually stop as I have trouble with the idea of a ship remaining intact for vast perionds on time in space without power or maintenance. I mean, I think to myself if the ship gets near absolute zero then liquids will freeze, pipes burst, a lot of stuff will be shattered by the cold, the hull will weaken due to extreme cold, if you try to reheat the ship it's hull may shatter due to thermal expansion, etc.

If a ship is designed in a vacuum environment then much of it will remain intact even over long periods of time. Beyond a few days it doesn't much matter how long a machine or material remains in contact with a vacuum.

For the stuff inside the pressure hull the damage will be largely done in the first few minutes of depressurization. Any liquid or gas will disperse to its maximum volume and slowly bleed out of the breach. Within a couple of years it will be effectively vacuum.

The only time a liquid will freeze into a solid if the pressure hull remains pressurized with air. Eventually the air in a pressurized hull will freeze solid if it not near a heat source like a star. Otherwise it will cool down until the amount of energy hitting the hull is equal to the loss of energy.

For solid certain materials that is in the pressure hull (plastics, etc) will evaporate part of their mass into gas. Eventually collapsing into dust or become very fragile. It is unlikely there will be much of that onboard due to the fact that it is a closed environment in normal operation.

Largely the physical structure of the ship will remain intact because a spacefaring civilization will have designed their crafts to operate in vacuum.

Quote from: Ladybird;592732Don't forget the micrometeorites, either!

In deep space that not much of an issue. Radiation flux could be an issue depending on how intense it is. The radiation would directly attack the atomic structure of materials. On a planetary bodies that lack atmospheres, micrometeorites would be a bigger issue as there is a constant "rain" of small particles that would erode away artifacts. But we are talking millenia here even longer.

Quote from: red lantern;593013A that's been adrift foe a long time, flip a few switches and have her combat ready in no time, that;s one thing I will not do.

The electronics will be likely vacuum welded. Adjoining materials evaporate into each other forming connections and short circuits. The difficulty of repair depends on the design. Remember that the ship is going to have a hull and then inside of that actual pressure hull. Not everything is going to be shoved inside of that and will be designed to operate in vacuum for long periods of time.

Quote from: red lantern;593011Yes, thank you, I do know people don't go "outland" in vacuum, actually. Now bulging eyes and bursting capillaries like the original 'total recall' is a bit more realistic.

Apparently not, no. Victims (well, the monkeys NASA tried it with) just void their bowels then die from asphyxiation. It's not very dramatic, no eyes popping out.

Its impossible to do "realism" in an RPG.  What you can do is "emulation", so the question has to be "what do you want to emulate"?

RPGPundit

Quote from: red lantern;592691I usually stop as I have trouble with the idea of a ship remaining intact for vast perionds on time in space without power or maintenance. I mean, I think to myself if the ship gets near absolute zero then liquids will freeze, pipes burst, a lot of stuff will be shattered by the cold, the hull will weaken due to extreme cold, if you try to reheat the ship it's hull may shatter due to thermal expansion, etc.

It's fairly standard in genre for such ships to have at least some power to keep life support going.  And if the technology is magical enough to support materials that can survive reentry and interstellar travel while preventing the crew from being fried by the hard radiation or heat and space travel and the power systems are magical enough to make routine interplanetary travel or even routine interstellar travel possible, the leap of faith needed to believe that such a ship could survive as a derelict, perhaps with some power still keeping things working at a minimal level to prevent decay, seems a very small leap to me.

We haven't really got any data on the long term effects of exposure to deep space vacuum on technological artifacts, but a lot would seem to rely where the artifact is located. If its in orbit around a planet it will either plunge into the gravity well after a few hundred thousand years or go spiralling off into space, unless powered.

And don't forget space is both really big and really old, so I'd think nothing of adding half billion year old hulks that have migrated over time from another galaxy, studded, strained and pocked with the detritus of millions of suns and nebulae it was moving too fast to be captured by. Asteroids are typically dated at between 4 and 5 billion years in the solar system, so there's plenty of leeway.

There's a good article on wiki here, basically atomic oxygen and solar radiation are the two biggest problems, which can be protected against with a thin coating of gold. I'd assume bizarre alien alloys would have advanced beyond that a bit. Volatiles like silicon and plastics tend to outgas over the course of mere decades and either form a cloud or deposit themselves on nearby surfaces, again though that's assuming they are exposed to some vestiges of atmosphere and radation.

If a ship had spent all or most of its time away from radiation sources, in interstellar or intergalactic zones, I would guess it could reasonably be expected to be intact. Even latent energy sources might not degrade too much if there was nothing to degrade them, nothing to interact with. There will be some erosion of harder materials but that happens on scales longer than the lifespan of the universe, so probably not an issue.

Quote from: The Traveller;593635We haven't really got any data on the long term effects of exposure to deep space vacuum on technological artifacts, but a lot would seem to rely where the artifact is located. If its in orbit around a planet it will either plunge into the gravity well after a few hundred thousand years or go spiralling off into space, unless powered.

And don't forget space is both really big and really old, so I'd think nothing of adding half billion year old hulks that have migrated over time from another galaxy, studded, strained and pocked with the detritus of millions of suns and nebulae it was moving too fast to be captured by. Asteroids are typically dated at between 4 and 5 billion years in the solar system, so there's plenty of leeway.

There's a good article on wiki here, basically atomic oxygen and solar radiation are the two biggest problems, which can be protected against with a thin coating of gold. I'd assume bizarre alien alloys would have advanced beyond that a bit. Volatiles like silicon and plastics tend to outgas over the course of mere decades and either form a cloud or deposit themselves on nearby surfaces, again though that's assuming they are exposed to some vestiges of atmosphere and radation.

If a ship had spent all or most of its time away from radiation sources, in interstellar or intergalactic zones, I would guess it could reasonably be expected to be intact. Even latent energy sources might not degrade too much if there was nothing to degrade them, nothing to interact with. There will be some erosion of harder materials but that happens on scales longer than the lifespan of the universe, so probably not an issue.

Interesting.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;593428Its impossible to do "realism" in an RPG.  What you can do is "emulation", so the question has to be "what do you want to emulate"?

RPGPundit

You'll have to make sure that everybody in the group is emulating the same thing, though. How would you make sure of this? Referring to inspirational sources?

Quote from: The Traveller;593635We haven't really got any data on the long term effects of exposure to deep space vacuum on technological artifacts, but a lot would seem to rely where the artifact is located. If its in orbit around a planet it will either plunge into the gravity well after a few hundred thousand years or go spiralling off into space, unless powered.

And don't forget space is both really big and really old, so I'd think nothing of adding half billion year old hulks that have migrated over time from another galaxy, studded, strained and pocked with the detritus of millions of suns and nebulae it was moving too fast to be captured by. Asteroids are typically dated at between 4 and 5 billion years in the solar system, so there's plenty of leeway.

There's a good article on wiki here, basically atomic oxygen and solar radiation are the two biggest problems, which can be protected against with a thin coating of gold. I'd assume bizarre alien alloys would have advanced beyond that a bit. Volatiles like silicon and plastics tend to outgas over the course of mere decades and either form a cloud or deposit themselves on nearby surfaces, again though that's assuming they are exposed to some vestiges of atmosphere and radation.

If a ship had spent all or most of its time away from radiation sources, in interstellar or intergalactic zones, I would guess it could reasonably be expected to be intact. Even latent energy sources might not degrade too much if there was nothing to degrade them, nothing to interact with. There will be some erosion of harder materials but that happens on scales longer than the lifespan of the universe, so probably not an issue.

Another source of info on exposure of a wide variety of different materials to vacuum is the archives of the Long Duration Exposure Facility experiment, which was supposed to last for a year, but went six years due to delays in recovery from orbit. The question is, how technical do you want to get?

If it were my campaign, I'd give the "ancients" ship some sort of nano-tech repair system so that it appeared to be brand new when the PCs found it, but what they wouldn't immediately realize is that the repair system itself was faulty... and that it identified their equipment, including their pressure suits and other survival gear, as "raw materials" to be collected for future repairs, shortly after they came on board. Then the fun begins....

I'm always amused by the smug stupidity of gamers when it comes to "realism" for two main reasons:

1) The number of gamers with the tiniest clue of what the fuck they're talking about in regards to science and history is miniscule.

2) What's really going on is people trying to pass off their own limited imaginations as the result of knowing oh-so-much about science. Someone can imagine a spaceship that can travel many times faster than the speed of light, but can't imagine such a ship containing automated maintenance and repair systems to keep a derelict ship functioning in one piece? Oy vey!

Apparently some people didn't get what I was saying. If a ship had functioning systems then it's not a dead wreck/derelict.

If a ship has functional systems then they must be producing some sort of heat which the players could likely detect especially if the ship was adrift way out in the deep black.

I was talking about a dead, or apparently dead, wreck. I wondered if once a lot of material had frozen to near absolute zero if it would be ruined by the cold beyond repair.

At a minimum it could take months to very slowly heat up the ship evenly, which could be very hard to do if it were very large. Uneven heating could result in fracturing of the hull, etc.

Quote from: Elfdart;594114I'm always amused by the smug stupidity of gamers when it comes to "realism" for two main reasons:

1) The number of gamers with the tiniest clue of what the fuck they're talking about in regards to science and history is miniscule.

2) What's really going on is people trying to pass off their own limited imaginations as the result of knowing oh-so-much about science. Someone can imagine a spaceship that can travel many times faster than the speed of light, but can't imagine such a ship containing automated maintenance and repair systems to keep a derelict ship functioning in one piece? Oy vey!

If you have such a low opinion of gamers why hang around them?

Quote from: red lantern;594133If you have such a low opinion of gamers why hang around them?

I don't know if Elfdart's comment applies to all gamers - just the ones who try too hard to impress with bogus ideas about making RPGs "realistic." I'm inclined to agree with him, as a gamer who used to over-do that sort of thing until I wised up and focused on running games that were entertaining, and put realism in a strictly supporting role.