Hi all

Has anyone done anything with travel time/method on a planet? Obviously there's the rules for hyperspace travel in Fly Casual, but I'm currently running an urban, mystery-style campaign set more-or-less entirely on Coruscant, so I was looking for something (maybe something similar) to do with covering AROUND the planet. Any thoughts?

I'm also thinking of bringing in "random encounters" during travel around the planet - don't know if anyone's done anything in this space, either?

Thanks in advance.

Normal speeds in atmosphere of star wars vehicles is just around 1,000km/h, so its basically like anyone has access regular airplanes without all the extra time for boarding, etc
Turbolifts and other public transport systems are afaik supposed to reach similar speeds for longer distances, while there is usually especially fast travel via sub-orbital planes, those use much faster speeds and should reach basically any point on the surface within a few hours at best. Same applies naturally to space ships which can use the much faster non-atmospheric flight speeds and re-entry near their destination.

All said depends on the urbanisation of the planet. If you are in a rural area of the galaxy, though luck, the fastest form of travel might be a ride by Varactyl or your own speeder bike.

Dunno if you live in a city, but a planet sized city, one with hundreds/thousands of levels and a trillion + beings, I'd expect getting anywhere is a major pain in the @$$.

IMO, if a trip takes more than an hour or two, then you can probably save time by taking your spaceship up to orbit and transit at space speeds instead of planetary speeds.

I wouldn't allow it to be easy for just regular folks to move around Coruscant headache free. How do you evoke that feeling of a massive planet-city if there are no traffic jams? You think every one of the trillion+ beings don't want to save time and wouldn't be trying the whole ship hop thing? Air traffic control on Coruscant is likely a nightmare, and regular people are not just going to be allowed to hop hither and yon around the capital of the Empire as they see fit. That level of freedom doesn't evoke much of an 'evil oppressive regime' feel to me.

51 minutes ago, 2P51 said:

I wouldn't allow it to be easy for just regular folks to move around Coruscant headache free. How do you evoke that feeling of a massive planet-city if there are no traffic jams? You think every one of the trillion+ beings don't want to save time and wouldn't be trying the whole ship hop thing? Air traffic control on Coruscant is likely a nightmare, and regular people are not just going to be allowed to hop hither and yon around the capital of the Empire as they see fit. That level of freedom doesn't evoke much of an 'evil oppressive regime' feel to me.

It not LA, it's Paris or Vienna with a functioning public transport system. No traffic jams and mostly automatic traffic control systems and a manual driving according to the traffic control systems. Furthermore you have nearly unlimited roads as literally not even the sky's the limit for city traffic AND suborbital flights avaible, the later introduce a little extra time of boarding, but at the same time you get the advantage of non-atmospheric speeds.

Coruscant's upper level starts thousands of levels above the ground and has plenty of air space avaible for traffic, while the lower levels have plenty of turbolifts avaible … at least at the beginning, go deeper and you might be going on foot for the most part again, well outside of speeder traffic corridors, supply lines and the likes. You might find the traffic jams you are looking for there, though in the spots we have seen from the undercity, barely anyone has the money for vehicles, so traffic jams should be rare even there. especially as shafts for air circulation seem to be rather enormous and should offer enough "road" for the little traffic there is. So in other words, trillions of sentients on coruscant are more concerned about getting water and food, can't even pay for energy, and much less so owning or even just renting a spaceship.
The billions who actually have the resources to own ships, will most certainly use those resources, most of the time it is still easier to just hop into public transportation or an speeder instead of going orbital. Going orbital comes with the downsides of going through orbital traffic controls, needing and baying for a landing bay and all the other stuff attached to starship travel. Might as well just take a suborbital for your weekend trip to one of the holiday resorts on the south pole.


EDIT
Or to make it shorter: How do you invoke the feeling of a urban mega sprawl of planetary scale without public transportation allowing to you travel to any point of the city within short time and without much hassle?

5 hours ago, SEApocalypse said:

All said depends on the urbanisation of the planet. If you are in a rural area of the galaxy, though luck, the fastest form of travel might be a ride by Varactyl or your own speeder bike.

3

It's set on Coruscant, so Varactyls are probably out!

5 hours ago, 2P51 said:

Dunno if you live in a city, but a planet sized city, one with hundreds/thousands of levels and a trillion + beings, I'd expect getting anywhere is a major pain in the @$$.

1

Yeah, I'm a Londoner - run my game in a London pub.

5 hours ago, Genuine said:

IMO, if a trip takes more than an hour or two, then you can probably save time by taking your spaceship up to orbit and transit at space speeds instead of planetary speeds.

This seems...a bit of a copout. And not very in-keeping with what we see in the movies - I can't think of a single occasion where a character travels by spaceship for an intra-planetary journey. Although admittedly we don't really see a lot of attempts to travel long-distance on world either...except Naboo, of course...

5 hours ago, 2P51 said:

I wouldn't allow it to be easy for just regular folks to move around Coruscant headache free. How do you evoke that feeling of a massive planet-city if there are no traffic jams? You think every one of the trillion+ beings don't want to save time and wouldn't be trying the whole ship hop thing? Air traffic control on Coruscant is likely a nightmare, and regular people are not just going to be allowed to hop hither and yon around the capital of the Empire as they see fit. That level of freedom doesn't evoke much of an 'evil oppressive regime' feel to me.

My game is actually set in the Republic era, so the evil-regime thing is less of an issue, but I agree that having a sense of a trillion people all jostling for space is absolutely something I want to bring...but preferably without the actual tedium of real traffic jams! So I was thinking of a) drawing up some sort of time:distance reference chart, and then maybe introducing a random encounter element (anything from a pickpocket on a subway train to a full-on speeder accident hundreds of feet above Coruscant) depending on the length and direction of the journey.

I agree about not wanting tedium. Making them think about timeframes and be concerned with them is about putting time frames on what they are trying to accomplish and having them then have to conduct themselves according to the amount of time it takes from traveling to and fro. Leads to the dreaded split/don't split the party conundrum....

37 minutes ago, edwardavern said:

This seems...a bit of a copout. And not very in-keeping with what we see in the movies - I can't think of a single occasion where a character travels by spaceship for an intra-planetary journey. Although admittedly we don't really see a lot of attempts to travel long-distance on world either...except Naboo, of course...

Maybe, although saying that anything travel-related isn't in-keeping with the movies is also a copout, when you get down to it. I can't think of a single instance where travel time or distance is well spelled out. Naboo is the exception like you said - and there the Jedi specifically didn't have access to a ship of any sort, let alone one with orbital capacity; so that's not a great example. Sure, the characters in the movies don't travel around planets on their ships very often, but how often do they need to? I've always been under the impression they're just landing where they need to be. How often is there more than one destination on a planet that they bother with?

That being said, we have to look at other Sci-fi and real world info. In that case, moving into orbit for inter-continental travel is pretty standard, at least in cases where the cost of boosting to escape velocity is relatively cheap. And fuel costs are cheap in Star Wars. Traffic control will be an issue, sure, especially somewhere crowded. But filing a flight plan, especially with a little notice, shouldn't slow you down too much.

There is as well iirc an example for a suborbital flight. Heire of the empire trilogy or shadows of the empire iirc, mentioned for a trip to the south pole for vacation. Been a while, so if this is important to you, look it up.

Either way, the option for a trip to the pole of coruscant is mentioned.

In the prequels it seemed pretty clear that even though there was a massive amount of space that ships could be flying, there were specific traffic lanes (as noted by the single file lines in the skyline). I would imagine that it means Coruscant had very strict traffic laws.

There should be a cost benefit ratio. Fuel may be cheap but not that cheap and docking fees should add up quickly. Zipping around on a starship, especially silhouette 4 and up should be expensive but doable. While taking public transportation is much less expensive, it can take longer. I see it as the difference between taking your private jet to travel vs flying on an airline.

32 minutes ago, Ahrimon said:

There should be a cost benefit ratio. Fuel may be cheap but not that cheap and docking fees should add up quickly. Zipping around on a starship, especially silhouette 4 and up should be expensive but doable. While taking public transportation is much less expensive, it can take longer. I see it as the difference between taking your private jet to travel vs flying on an airline.

The bigger issue is that planets would be very busy and couldn't easily keep juggling landing pads for starships as easily. Think about busy airports and the bigger the airport, the more rigid the control around it as they have only so many gates. Same thing with landing pads. So, while a remote planet might have pads free at various towns, more populous planets wouldn't so easily free them up on short notice. Plus shuttles can easily hop from city to city and we see them used in Rebels even for jaunts to other planets.