>Why not both?

This is the Vajra from Macross Frontier, a species of Giant Bug people who can fly through space and shoot organic missiles. The one in the picture is the smallest adult type encountered, and you should be able to see how big it is. The biggest ones, when standing up, penetrate the atmospheres of planets.

However, they are actually pretty chill and enjoy pop music. They have massive space carrier bugs meant to carry them to other parts of the galaxy, so you could park your entire space ship in it and not really take up any space.

You can have fun making your players react to being in a living ship where the bugs are way bigger than they are.


As for antagonism, you could introduce the Cordycep fungus IN SPESSS!, where some of them go mad and you have to fight fighter sized bugships who want to eat your face

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>>51586503
I downloaded it, but didn't upload the picture.

Any other Ayliumz you are including?

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>>51586533
OP here. I've got weird giant worm merchants who are secretive and have super advanced technology they don't share, giant extremely stupid caterpillar-ant guys who were uplifted by other aliens but then abandoned and don't understand how anything works so they just annoy other smarter species or act violently, and balloon-like aliens who are genius engineers and terrible at everything else and have an empire being ripped apart by a civil war that the main human government triggered to keep them from being a threat. But both the paradise and cyberpunk worlds I mentioned are human worlds.

pic has nothing to do with my setting, but I'm out of non-40K space pictures otherwise.

>>51586269
Howsabout a planet shrouded in smog where all life died out centuries ago and all that remains are AIs battling it out with each other.

The players have to land for emergency repairs/rescue another stranded human/whatever and find themselves being treated as another playing piece to exploit in an eternal war that's only the senseless clanking of machine on machine.

>>51586269
Depends how liberally you interpret the "semi" of "semi-realistic". Most of the hazards of space travel are the slow, imperceptable things that add up, like debris bumping into the ship or cosmic rays roasting your DNA. Asteroid belts aren't really a hazard at all, since the asteroids are separated by massive distances.

There could be a solar flare that damages their ship and they have to rapidly make repairs before the next one destroys them.

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>>51586620

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>>51586269

I could just post pictures. Might give you some ideas.

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>>51586935

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>>51586950

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>>51586971

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>>51586987

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>>51587005

>>51586950
I too like Ringworld.

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>>51587021

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>>51587032

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>>51587025
I need more pictures based off it.

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>>51587053

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>a few interiors

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>>51587123

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>>51587136

>>51586950
Oooh. Pretty.

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>>51587149

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>>51587166

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>>51587177

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>>51587203

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>>51587215

>>51587226
>>51587262
Got anymore space stuff?

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>>51587262

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>>51587025
This is a ringworld.

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>>51587274

Some though it's all pretty random.

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>>51587302

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>>51587315

>>51586269
>Planets

>The Hundred Moons of *topia
Dozens of tiny moons in orbit around a gas giant, each one terraformed by the simple expedient of covering the entire moon in a single giant, air-filled 'dome' (really more of a balloon at that point). The gravity is low enough that people can fly by strapping wings to their arms, and they do. The trees grow to absolutely ridiculous proportions. Each individual moon has its own weird-ass form of experimental government; the system was colonized by utopian thinkers who believed that no form of government could be perfect for everyone, so the best thing to do was to provide as many different governments as possible and make it easy for people to move between them. So literal anarchists live a half-hour shuttle flight from Scientologist theocrats and a lottery government in which all positions are assigned randomly, among others.

>The Hobo Planet
Planet plated coast-to-coast in giant apartment blocks by malfunctioning von Neumann machines; astropolitical disputes have left the planet in legal limbo, so it has become 'the planet of the squatters', with billions of the poor and destitute moving in to take advantage of the effectively free housing and public utilities. Several attempts by one government or another to lay claim to the planet have been repulsed by the 'Hobo Defence Force', who fear eviction or being forced to pay property tax.

>Mare Internum
A planet entirely covered in water circling far from its sun, its entire surface covered in a thick icy crust. This subsurface ocean is kept liquid and life-filled by the tens of thousands of volcanoes that sprout from its jigsaw crust, hosting a vast and complex geothermal ecosystem. Intelligent dolphin and octopi feud over the choicest reefs, although things have not degenerated into open warfare- yet. I'm sure the involvement of the PCs can only help defuse tensions.

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>>51587326

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>>51587339

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>>51587355

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>>51587366

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>>51587377

>>51587337
>>The Hundred Moons of *topia
>Dozens of tiny moons in orbit around a gas giant, each one terraformed by the simple expedient of covering the entire moon in a single giant, air-filled 'dome' (really more of a balloon at that point). The gravity is low enough that people can fly by strapping wings to their arms, and they do. The trees grow to absolutely ridiculous proportions. Each individual moon has its own weird-ass form of experimental government; the system was colonized by utopian thinkers who believed that no form of government could be perfect for everyone, so the best thing to do was to provide as many different governments as possible and make it easy for people to move between them. So literal anarchists live a half-hour shuttle flight from Scientologist theocrats and a lottery government in which all positions are assigned randomly, among others.
Stealing this, though I'm at a loss to explain how to make a giant oxygen bubble like that.

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>>51587399

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>>51587424

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>>51587448

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>>51587462

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>>51587481

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>>51587493
I don't think I have much else to upload. Hope I at least helped people gather some good images for possible use.

>>51587520
Thank you mysterious image poster.

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>>51587520
Yeah, not much else in these folders but robots.

>>51587337
>cont.

>Mongo, Shadow-World of the Space Pirates
This apparently-artificial world travels erratically through hyperspace, only occasionally emerging into the real universe. The only ones who know the secrets of its course is the Cult of the Tyrant Sun, who swear only to reveal their secrets to those who will use it to spread anarchy and destruction. Thus, the world has become safe haven for all manner of space pirate, terrorist/freedom fighter, and criminal, launching raids upon the hapless and unwary worlds Mongo travels near. Every attempt to attack it has ended in failure as it retreats back into hyperspace; every attempt to steal the secrets of the Cult has failed before their unshakable will and infallible judgement of character.

>>51587403
It's fairly simple; I was being literal when I described it as a balloon. Wrap a tough, flexible, transparent sheet (ideally tough enough to walk on, so repair crews can move around easily) around the target moon and pump it full of air; the internal pressure of the air inside will hold it aloft. Moving things between the inside and outside of the envelope might be tricky, but with the low gravity and future materials technology it would be entirely possible to build a skyscraper high enough that its upper levels emerge from the envelope into space to form a docking area. (Also since the 'altitude' of the bubble is variable based on its diameter, you could possibly have a sky that ends only a hundred stories up.)

>Hazards

>Pulsars and Neutron Stars
Formed from stars too big to become white dwarfs but too small to become black holes, the staggeringly ferocious magnetic fields formed by these stellar remnants are perfectly capable of hiding ships from detection, messing with electronics and robots, slowly killing everybody with horrible radiation poisoning, and anything else plot-worthy a stupidly, overwhelmingly powerful magnetic field could plausibly do.

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>>51587540
you're welcome, please give them a good home

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>>51587577

>>51587571
>cont.

>Robot War!
The system of (Insert name here) was young, planets not yet formed out of its asteroid belts. The entire system was bought by (asteroid mining company), who decided to use it as a testing area for their new design of self-improving mining robot. They set thousands of them loose in the system, with instructions that the highest-performing robots would be granted additional resources, upgrades, etc. while the lowest-performing would be decommissioned. For a while, the robots extracted more metal than the executives' wildest dreams as they frantically upgraded themselves; then they thought of sabotaging each other. Starting with simple cyberwarfare and moving on to space piracy before finally landing at all-out war, the company found its override codes and failsafes useless, the robots long having upgraded such vulnerabilities away. The entire system is now a robotic warzone, with each faction of robots frantically producing new designs to try to get an edge over the enemy, the original end goal- metal for the galactic economy- long forgotten.

>Hyperspace ghosts
Ships that enter hyperspace and don't come out don't just vanish- they hang around in bizarre half-lives, occasionally crossing paths with normal ships, which they will desperately try to infest in order to try and return to real space. Often, they accomplish nothing but spooking people, dismissable as simply some sort of hallucinations; sometimes, though, they trap the other ship in hyperspace as well, unless the crew can find some way to fend them off before they, too, become hyperspace ghosts.

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EVENT: Your crew's ship is pulled into the path of an ionic space storm that moves throughout the galaxy on a random path; you must navigate through the wreckage of other doomed ships (orbiting the storm) to protect yourself and guide yourselves out.

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Here's a hazardous world template if you like

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>>51588075

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>A cold, dead world around a cold, dead star. Perhaps the surface holds ruins of some long-dead species, preserved by freezing cold and vacuum.
>Perhaps some ancient race has chosen it as a site for a library, time capsule, or ark of some sort; with no tectonic activity, no stellar activity, and no reason for anyone to visit, such a facility could lie undisturbed for millions of years.
>Perhaps some philanthropic organization holds the cryo-preserved bodies of plague victims here, taking advantage of the cold to cheaply keep them in suspended animation until a cure for their disease is found.
>Perhaps a clade of glacial cyborgs calls this desolate place home, seeking to leave the hustle and bustle of the wider galaxy behind for slow lives of monastic contemplation.

>Or, most likely, there is nothing of interest here at all.

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>A cylinder habitat, abandoned, its ecology collapsed. What happened here?
>Did some plague wipe out all its inhabitants, whose immune systems had atrophied after generations in a tightly controlled, clean environment?
>Did the air slowly become septic after some failure in the life-support system snowballed beyond the ability of the inhabitants to repair, forcing an evacuation?
>Did its systems slowly fail over centuries, after cataclysm on the homeworld cut off the supply of spare parts, everything endlessly recycled until finally there was nothing left, population falling below sustainable levels until they finally died out of inbreeding?
>Did some economic collapse force the eviction of the inhabitants as the bank foreclosed, only for everything to decay as decades passed with no new buyer?
>Was it evacuated in anticipation of an impending war and never re-occupied, a casualty as surely as if it had been physically destroyed?
>Was it simply abandoned as obsolete, as new technologies made spin-gravity and windows hopelessly quaint?
>Did maintaining an ecosystem in a can turn out far harder than its designers anticipated, population dying as it was afflicted by catastrophe after catastrophe ground-bound theorists never foresaw?
>Did a revolution of the lower classes kill off all the technical personnel, only for the victors to realize what a horrible mistake they had made as the air turned stale and the sun-lamps dimmed?
>Or something stranger? There is much weirdness out between the stars.

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>A rad-blasted desert world, in orbit around a binary of black hole and its dying companion. The mere fact of its existence demands explanation, as it would have had to survive a supernova to be where it is now.
>Was it defended by some native alien species, whose shielding technology was /almost/ up to the challenge of keeping their homeworld safe from the incomprehensible violence of a supernova?
>Was it a captured rogue, falling into orbit around the bleeding pair centuries or millennia after the detonation?
>Is it actually a planet at all? Perhaps it is a stupendously vast creature-machine, travelled to this system to sup at the incredible x-ray energy unleashed by the accretion disc.
>Perhaps it is, in fact, the ghost of the planet, destroyed in the supernova as all logic dictated; but its psychic echoes remain.
>Perhaps something more bizarre than even these; such an extraordinary survival demands an extraordinary mechanism, after all.

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>A graveyard in space; ships of every era gathered in orbit around a single, unremarkable world. How did they all come to be here?
>A collector or hoarder of some type, trawling through hyperspace for derelicts and bringing them all here?
>A sargasso of space, eddies in hyperspace and hypertime drawing in the lost and the damaged and spitting them out in this system, only the barest handful actually falling into orbit, the rest sailing into space or smashing into the ground?
>Perhaps a psychic siren on the surface, luring crews to their doom in shuttles with telepathic messages while the ships themselves are left, discarded, on the surface.
>Some ramshackle refugee fleet's last stop, everything that could fly pushed as far as it could go until it was decided that this was as good a place as any to stop?
>Let us not neglect the mundane; a scrapyard, ships placed in mothball orbit until a free slot opens up at the breaker yards, all in the same place because it makes for easier book-keeping.
>Other explanations? The galaxy is wide enough for a thousand such junkyards, each with its own unique circumstance.

What are good and simple sci-fi systems that have a magic system? I want it easy to run online.

>>51586590
>So many giants
So are humans on the lower end of the size scale?

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>>51588278
>>51588392
>>51588492
>>51588601

You, sir, are pretty fucking cool.

bump

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>>51588601
>>51588492
>>51588392
>>51588278
Quality posts, man. Keep them coming, if you would?

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Martian Death Quest
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/24928926/

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>>51590237
>What are these ruins, and how did this man come to be here?
>An interstellar gateway, once the center of a bustling metropolis. What happened to the mighty empire that built it? Unknown, but the gate remains functional even after all these megayears.
>A one-way portal into the future, built to escape some inescapable cataclysm. He's gone too far into the future; or perhaps not far enough.
>A vast and bizarre telescope, a sort of 'light-amplification zone' that makes the air itself an incredible, perfect lens. The machinery that created it is long corroded, but somehow the zone persists.
>The arch is an arch; the man an explorer, growing increasingly weary of all these tombs. Sometimes, it seems the galaxy is a galaxy of graves.
>Some other explanation? There are a million ways for a planet to be ruined, and the species of the galaxy have explored them all a thousand times over.

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>What the hell happened here?
>A hyperspace predator, wrapping its prey in stasis-jelly and shoving it into realspace to keep it safe from potential rivals until it gets hungry. Can the crew devise some way to escape in time?
>A test of an experimental shielding system gone bafflingly wrong. It worked fine on all the unmanned test-beds; why did it only fail now?
>Amber from one of the mega-trees of Yggdrasil IV; the crew made the mistake of landing on a branch of a mega-tree. They managed to break out of the wave of sap on antigrav, but exposure to vacuum only made the sap solidify. What now?
>Nothing is wrong; the ship is mothballed, and coated in a thick layer of sealant resin to protect the inert ship from radiation and meteorite strikes. Simply spray on the counter-agent and watch it sublimate away.
>Or something else?

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>>51586533
At the other end of the scale, we had a thread a few weeks ago about microscopic aliens building pocket sized spaceships to interact with human sized environments.

Lot of fun and interesting stuff here.