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!

Suspension of disbelief is a weird thing. If someone is seriously having trouble with the automated spaceship then it is an issue for them but I don't think it makes them a bad person or anything.

Personally I can take almost anything as long as it isn't one of those "settings built around game mechanics" things or anything historical by White Wolf.

Quote from: Xavier Onassiss;594090If 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....

Nice twist, and stolen! I like my hulks to have some scars from the countless millennia usually.

Quote from: red lantern;594132If 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.

Potentially you could maintain some kinds of energy sources almost permanently in extreme conditions. Some kinds of batteries, internal combustion engines, etc could be left hanging until they heat up, in fact the stresses produced by heating could themselves act as an energy source for kickstarting larger engines, a stirling engine might help there. So the ship might be reactivated almost completely while being utterly dead to start with.

As mentioned, we just don't have the data to answer the question really. Spaceships like bridges would probably be constructed to withstand thermal expansion and cooling as well as the many other stresses they could be expected to face in space, so perhaps some minor damage to internal systems (which weren't designed for extremes) but the superstructure and main systems should be intact. Its not even really that hard to engineer complex components able to handle temperature extremes, we do it today.

Hauling it in front of a sun to thaw out wouldn't do it any good, but your footsteps won't be leaving cracks in the hull, I would say.

I prefer to think in of believability over realism. I don't need things to model reality, the sheer amount of rules you would need to model simple things just doesn't seem practical and I doubt it would add that much to the game. I do want stuff that happens in the game to be be believable enough that I can buy it. So a game where the mechanics establish that a character has been skewered on a pike through the belly, but within the next hour he is fully healed, would present a problem for me (unless it was fitting to the genre or setting somehow). On the other hand i dont need involved mechanics for healing and infection coupled with fully realistic heal times (if the guy that got skewered is back on his feet in a week, that is somehow enough time for me to buy it in game een if I know he would need much longer to recuperate).

Quote from: HombreLoboDomesticado;594010You'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?

That's one good way to do this, yes. Another is to clarify the "physics" of the setting as you go along, don't let people make mistaken assumptions their PC wouldn't make, particularly because the player is making logical assumptions based on "real science".

This has come up a lot in my superhero games, where some player wants to try to do something he thinks is clever, and I have to remind them "this world uses Comics Physics, not real life physics".

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