Purrgil stats?

[Rollenspiel]

I just watched Star Wars Rebels ep "The Call" featuring these giant, spacefaring quasi-cetacean creatures and wondered if anyone has come up with 2E R&E stats for them. All I've got are a few bullet points, but converting that to hard stats is a bit too challenging for me, as I'm relatively new to the rules.

1) They "feed" on a gas called Clouzon-36 which allows them to breathe in the vacuum of space.

2) The gas also enables them to enter hyperspace. 8)

3) They appear to be relatively intelligent, social animals.

4) They are sometimes harzards to shipping lanes.

5) They have several prehensile tentacles.

They would be 'starship scale'

[Naaman]

See....


This is what happens when you put a bunch of Disney tycoons in charge of a sci-fi cult classic....

My inner nerd is raging at the notion of a plant-like creature that can "enter" hyperspace, as if it is a "place" or an alternate dimension or some nonsense like that...

Sorry I don't have any stats for ya: I abstain from Rebels because I just don't like it, so I'm ignorant as to its nuances...

[Dredwulf60]

[garhkal]

[Dredwulf60]

[Naaman]

Well, maybe there could be some nebular cloud where there is enough moisture/gas etc.

Then you could have space whales feeding on micrscoppic space plancton and you could have space manta rays crashing into space fairers... just like in Star Fox.


Anyway, to the point of the original post:

I'm not sure of any creatures that are starship scale in RAW.

Not saying it can't be done, though. Its really the appropriate thing to do for space fairing life (anything smaller would be inconsequential to ships zipping though space).

I'm thinking it would need a few thimgs:

A strenght stat (duh).

A maneubering skill, probably under dexterity. This allows it to participate in chases or battles, etc.

Some skill that governs its ability "enter" and remain in hyperspace... perhaps this could be tied to stamina (at least for the duration piece).

They also need some way of limiting their stay time in true vacuum... the need to be able to get more "gas" once in a while (come up for air, so to speak).

Other than standard attributes, that's all I can think of.

[griff]

Starship scale creatures

Space slug episode 5, bigger than a star destroyer
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"EXECUTE ORDER 67. Wait a minute, that doesn't sound like order 67..... No, wait. Yes, yes it does. EXECUTE ORDER 68" Palpatine's last moments - robot chicken.

[Whill]

I've seen the episode as well. OK, to try to be fair here...

I've always thought of hyperspace as another universe (coterminous with realspace) where the natural state of things is FTL. What hyperdrives do is open a portal to hyperspace in front of the ship, and the "pressure differential" between the fast hyperspace and the slow realspace "sucks" the realspace ship into it hyperspace and up to FTL speeds. Conversely, when a ship in hyperspace either opens a portal back to realspace in front of the ship or decelerates to below the minimum speed of hyperspace, the ship falls out of hyperspace and the "higher pressure" behind the ship in the quickly closing portal is what decelerates the ship to normal sublight speeds.

So if you could accept some living being having some psionic (or some such) ability to open a portal to hyperspace without a hyperdrive, then by my version of hyperspace, it would be the nature of hyperspace itself that would suck the creature into hyperspace and propel it the minimum speed of hyperspace.

HOWEVER, my main problem with the purrgils is not being able to open a portal to (and from) hyperspace and traveling through it, but rather the creatures being able to survive hyperspace travel. Hyperspace Since 1980 Star Wars has had creatures able to survive space. And space slugs even seem to have the ability to manipulate gravity. But it has always been my impression that mynocks and space slugs hitch rides on ships to different systems under the protection of the energy shielding that protects ships from the ravages of hyperspace travel. (The giant slug in TESB could either be the result of evolution or a long-lived smaller one that just continues to grow as it lives.) So space slugs and mynocks don't need the ability to travel hyperspace themselves to exist in Star Wars.

In my mind, hyperspace should not be a pleasant environment for lifeforms. Purrgils having the ability to enter hyperspace and survive it is just too much for me. You can still have intelligent 'space wales' without them having them go lightspeed. Rebels is a Daddy-Son Star Wars tradition since it started, and my six-year-old loves it. But the show seems to be getting more and more ridiculous as it goes. It's got some interesting adventure ideas here and there, but that's it.
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[JironGhrad]

The issue that I see with hyperspace as alternate universe (even if coterminous) is the affect of gravity wells.

Hyperspace as we are all aware is limited by realspace gravity. You can't jump too close to any gravity well and interdictor cruisers/pirate asteroids/gravitic anomalies/etc. all drop ships out of hyperspace. By that reasoning, hyperspace can't be an alternate universe; it seems more like a desynchronized bubble.

[Whill]

[JironGhrad]

[Zarn]

It doesn't make sense to suggest the distinction "hyperspace is a state of being rather than an alternate place".

At the time one's material body is fully somewhere else, as confirmed by sensors (i.e. not being here), there's functionally no difference between a "state of being" and an "alternate place".

In my opinion, we're basically edging into a discussion about branes and the brane cosmology, which is about 12 parsecs past where my phyiscs and maths stop.

Hyperspace is basically a coterminous dimension (coterminous meaning that except for certain exceptions, each point in realspace - our space - corresponds to one specific point in hyperspace) where the whorls that constitute Hyperspace are influenced by gravity from realspace.

This means that by going through Hyperspace, we're still following a track that corresponds to some track in realspace, but we're not constrained by the universal speed limit - light speed. (Star Wars, as most space opera, ignores the causality problems that this introduces.) We are constrained by gravity, that naughty little consequence of energy.

So, even if we can't see into Hyperspace directly, we can plot a likely course based on a vector and a point where someone jumped - that was shown for instance by the response when MF pretended to do an attack run and latched on to the superstructure of the Star Destroyer. There's also some EU fluff about "Cronau radiation". This course is constrained by the drift of (major) (point) sources of gravity, such as stars, black holes, and the mother of whomever was insulted while playing CS: GO last night.

Interestingly, more diffuse sources of gravity, such as nebulae, have a more varied influence, ranging from being a barrier to hyperspace, to severely restricting the allowable vectors for Hyperspace travel (the way I read the ThonBoka, for instance).

I like the idea that movement is the natural state of Hyperspace - that's their relative reference. Also, even though every point in realspace (more or less) is coterminous with one point in Hyperspace, collisions seem to be rare. And, it would also explain the streaking of stars during the jump - you're actually seeing the effects of time travel (or rather, moving from 4D space - realspace - to Hyperspace is in effect much the same as time travel). The flicker of 'jumping' to Hyperspace isn't acceleration - it's an artifact of actually doing time travel, i.e. pseudomotion.

Hence, collisions are rare because you're essentially in your own time waveform and would have to be extraordinarily unlucky to interact with someone else - and it would also help explain why there's no Hyperspace battles. Which means that synchronized jumps to a system is much more a matter of when than a matter of where.

It also explains why mishaps with your Hyperspace drive can lead to what is feted as time traveling - Bobsit Matarcher is one, the Ashanda Ray another - though it technically always is time travel (but that's ignored in-universe).

I can accept Otherspace - barely - but the sub-hyperspace and phantom energy introduced in the novelization of TFA? I'm not sure. It doesn't 'fit' properly in my head, though it conforms to the effects observed in the movie.

Also, may I suggest a reason why gravity interferes with Hyperspace? Because time dilation - and it is actually this time dilation that distorts hyperspace, not mass per se - but mass, energy, and time dilation is intrinsically linked in our realspace, so you (mostly) can't have one without the other, except in certain circumstances.

[cheshire]

Isn't the "dimensional explanation" of hyperspace the basic premise of the WEG adventure "Otherspace?" I haven't played it, but I've read a few summaries. I could be wrong, but IIRC they PCs get trapped in the hyperspatial dimension.
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Before we take any of this too seriously, just remember that in the middle episode a little rubber puppet moves a spaceship with his mind.

[shootingwomprats]

[Whill]