12 Random Doo-Dads from the wall of a Spaceship

I always hate how cool Sci-Fi art, video game levels, assets, etc. always skip over the granular detail of the worlds they live in. With Faster-Then-Light travel and highly advanced spaceships, the art and description of these always seem to show this extremely detailed and textureful spaceship interiors, with lots of buttons, screens, weird pipes, and other do-hickeys hanging and built into the walls of your highly advanced spacecraft. But they never actually go into detail of what they do, or even more rarely do you ever get a chance to interact with them. I love these little gribbles, but what are you supposed to say if a player or reader randomly wants to interact with one of them? What will they find?

Roll on this list to find out! Conveniently; if you don't like psychic stuff in your sci-fi, you can just roll a d10 instead.

12 Spaceship Wall Doo-Dads
[1] Moisture Condensers. Black tubes feed your breath and shed skin oils back into the ship's recycler for water and nitrogen content. Everyone knows where the organic mass for your food replicator comes from, you still don't talk about it.

[2] Wall Capacitor. Usually a slightly raised panel with a bunch of buttons on it. Critical ship systems require a constant and uninterrupted flow of power; these act as extra energy batteries all across the ship. You can press the buttons to cut off or redirect the power held in this unit to somewhere else, especially useful for emergency situations.

[3] Gravity Shocks. These are shock absorbers, which look like long metal tubes or sticks along the side of a ship. Filled with compressive rubber cubes or discs. Whenever the ship hits a powerful g-force or gravity distortion, these absorb most of the shock so it doesn't crush the crew or anything else inside the ship. You can get away with a lot less of these then most people have, but it makes the ride more "turbulent". 

[4] Ship Patch Slot. Very thin door or material strip is pulled aside to reveal a tall but thin hole leading much deeper into the hull then you'd think. Only wide enough to put a hand inside. Within are several long, very thin plastic sheets used to patch small holes in the ship- the sheet is placed over the breach and a simple utility laser or low-powered energy weapon can melt the plastic to the wall to make it stick. Used until you can get real repair back in a stardock.

[5] Life Support Unit. Station dedicated to life support systems; oxygen and an appropriate temperature radiate from these to the rest of the room or area in the ship. Thermostat style controls including all breathable gasses, humidity levels, and PH balance. Ship Captains are notoriously strict about other people messing with THEIR preferred life-support settings. "I don't care how much methane your species needs to breathe, do you have any idea how much that's going to increase the fuel cost!?"

[6] Manual Lightswitch. Controls all the little LEDs that go up and down the hallways and flash red when the emergency systems are on. Sounds really dumb but people are used to hundreds of years of automatic doors and the AI dimming and changing the lights for them whenever they enter or leave so this seems like a really primitive, hands-on kind of failsafe.

[7] Charging Cabinet. Gentle, "hands off" method of recharging various atomic batteries and small appliances. Replacing the fuel cell on whatever gadget or tool you have is much faster, but you can use these cabinets as a way to store and also charge up whatever object. Charges about 1% of the items' battery per day, so really slow, but these mean whenever you bring out some ancient gadget or special tool it won't be out of energy from just sitting in a closet somewhere for multiple years.

[8] Hologram Anchor. Filled with mirrored discs and little pendulums to know which way is up- really important piece of equipment to stabilize and act as a reference point for any holograms or visual projections you beam inside the ship. If you don't have one of these the holograms will just be like clipping through the floor and their voices will sound like they're coming from the wrong room because the computer doesn't know where to put them otherwise.

[9] Binding Crank. Most ships use a semi-flexible membrane lattice and rubberized supports to let the vessel have some sway and ability to bend so it is not to brittle. These cranks let you tighten or loosen these supports. Despite clearing being made to be used by the crew- the torque required to turn one of these is so ridiculous that you basically can only get a robot to do it.

[10] Computer Junk-Data Sinks. Thin plastic bars with built in handles shoved into consoles along the wall; these are where routine computer check-sums, unrecoverable RAM, quarantined viruses and glitches are all stored. Often neglected because of how little it effects the overall ship AI's performance and because cleaning them is easy; you just run water on them in the sink. Everyone who got to the future by cryogenic freezing is extremely confused.

[11] Psychic Decoy. Electronic devices that look a bit like a clump of tinfoil. They emit false delta and theta brain signals to make it hard to track how many people are inside the ship and what they are thinking about. However, any psychic worth their crystal are going to notice a bunch of comatose people stacked up along the walls of the ship many times over any reasonable ship of that size would have. It was a bit of a fad back in the day, any old beater or "hand me down" spaceship is probably going to have a bunch of these.

[12] Anomaly Sensor. Looks like a plastic medal hanging on a lanyard. Experienced ship captains hoard these things and hang them everywhere like magic talismans. This is because these sensors have the almost miraculous ability to detect when things are just slightly "off" from normal, letting out a shrill electric beep and flashing a small light with its color based on the danger level- green for benign, yellow for caution, and red for danger. From time distortions, memory-voids, invisible energy viruses infecting your systems, or space madness- all things a computer or robot can't help you with. Nobody really knows how they work, but if you break one open and study its core you'll find a tiny amount of human neural tissue locked inside its circuits.

40 Minute Settings- Bombed Empire

On the distant planet of Wagan, the ships are bombing the surface. It's been going on for about two years. If you're here, that means you weren't able to get off the planet in time. Now you're kind of stuck. The royal blockade has kept everyone here. You stay alive off humanitarian aid and scavenging through the ruins; but some co-opt farms and underground grub farms work well enough.

The war all began when the last emperor gave up the planet. Now, four species fight over it. The clever Tulari, the militaristic Zimt, the repugnant Olgun, and the conniving Jess'et.

These four alien races are just small smattering of the ones that inhabit the galaxy. Wagan was a very cosmopolitanism place. But after the human emperor gave up the planet, moved the capital back to Earth after four hundred years of tradition keeping it here, the planet became a real hell hole. Humans, Tulari, Zimt, Olgun, Jess'et, other species too- the little people are stuck down here in the ruins.

Every day bombs fall over head, trying to knock out important power connections and religious or cultural sites. Every day anti-bomb defense bombs try to blow up the first bombs. It's hard for the people of the planet to do much about it, mostly because they're all up in space in cruisers and battleships. These ships send down small armies of elite troops, mechanized infantry and drones to try and capture locations, while other factions try to bomb the shit out of them at the same time. At this point it's probably just laughable.

It's easy enough to avoid getting rubbled for the most part; staying indoors is a good start because most of the buildings here are made of zirconian elements, pioneered by the Tulari, which are essentially compression and explosive proof. Still, the damage takes its toll. You can see inner-city markets spring up in neighborhoods that were attacked two, maybe three days ago. The smoke still rises but it's cleared up enough that you can move in for a time. Usually any place that gets destroyed stays clear for up to a week before the ships overhead move back into position to fight for the next useful speck.

Wars on the Ground

The soldiers in the sky aren't just interested in each other though; there are factions on the ground too. People down here are willing to sell their knowledge; secret tunnels, bomb shelters, and lead troops into ambushes against their enemies. Everybody down here wants somebody to win this war for their own benefit, if they're interested at all in Wagan politics. The Jess'et are promising to make the planet an anthropological paradise for all of the deep-space remnants of old cultural importance for many resources who, frankly, can't afford to keep them on planets anymore. Space is at a premium on planets when compared to the vast empty. But the Zimt are famous for well-planned central economies that keep people working and hearty pensions for veterans; of which civilians who aid them will be recommended for by the Zimt ground captains, naturally.

The players could take the role of minor leaders. They could be landed nobles from a quickly dissolving feudal land-ownership system, gang and rebel squad strongmen, or military commanders in way over their head. You lead squads of men into the rubble to rescue civilians, capture territory, or hold important objectives. You need to keep a good schedule of the ships above and where they'll be over next, and down here short hyper-wave transmitter scanners are as common as microwaves. Everybody, civilians and soldiers alike, listens to the Wagan Renegade- the hyperwave transmitter AI that gives coordinates and estimated time of payload hits, calculating wind resistance and gravity acceleration in real time to give the most accurate reports. Nobody is quite sure who set up this AI, but whoever did has saved far more lives then they would know.

Of course, urban combat in such a chaotic environment is brutal. Half of warfare is about setting up hardpoints and using technology from the various races to augment your own forces, or make it hard for the enemy to catch up. The Zimt are experts in energy field manipulation, and while their ships and brigades sent from above are the best at it, most races can hack together some energetic fields that displace blaster fire or make force fields that cannot be passed except by those with the right keys. The Olgun are a special example as they partially terraform entire city blocs; pulsating moss growing on every surface fast enough that you can see it, turning interior spaces into gas-spore infested condemned buildings. Their race is adapted to breathe it with their air gills, you probably aren't.

There are wars in the Sky too. The ships above are in constant stalemate. The large carriers and cruisers holding the weapons refuse to cross over the horizon line close enough to see another ship; going too far over the curve of the planet means laser weapons can annihilate you at the speed of light. Instead, they play a careful game of posturing and delayed bombing. For the second half of the second year, kinetic rods were all that has been used since traditional ammunition has seem to run out. But if the council is anything to go by, new shipments of payload is coming in to replace the old. As such, some rebel civilian groups have even banded together to stop it from arriving. But how to get out into orbit and stop transports carrying military weapons with just our own scrap, planet-locked forces? That's the tough part.

War in the Council

Meanwhile, near the heart of Wagan is the Council building. The huge, laser-protected dome is one of the few megastructures not yet bombed to shit by the above cruisers. The garden terraces around the building can always be seen from below and above; a jealous look of cultural elegance that is anything but. Just about as much violence is inside the building as around it.

In truth, the Council is just about as cutthroat as anywhere else. Racial diplomats at the end of their rope; assassins hired among the staff are constantly stalking the halls. Young privates and custodians with no experience are quickly promoted to official liaisons, even generals, as the body count keeps growing. The Jess'et are pretty close to wining this war just through attrition; their RNA unsequencer poisons placed in cloth fabrics and ventilation shafts kill quick and clean.

Pointless debates over if cyber-bounce grenades should be banned by military troops who don't follow the guidelines in the first place rage on as slimy arms dealers try to undercut the expensive imported military goods from space, since the space elevators were cut at stratosphere height ages ago, by using cheap local manufacturing. Some of the most well off people on Wagan are those who put shell casings together by hand in what used to be a preschool.

Hyperinflation is the bane of most fiat economies- in Wagan? It's another form of attack. By getting the mints to mass duplicate credit codes, you can destabilize and cause hyper inflation in your opponents army. Of course in a month when things change and you're now reliant on the codes to supply your own side you'll do anything to shut down the computer farms that duplicate the digital currency; like bomb them from space. Now you can see the problem.

The Goodness tucked Away

All over the planet; people are just trying to get by. While some sectors seem almost well cleaned after the constant destruction, some don't even look inhabited. Young people get along as well as they can in education, requiring digital uplinks and learning from archaic methods, like reading books or watching videos, as opposed to full VR education exercises. Holographic imaging technology requires a lot of infrastructure a lot of people here just don't have anymore; theaters do plays in person with costumes and everything. It's a time of great cultural expansion; the people of the planet looking inward when a galaxy who has forgotten about them keeps turning the great wheel of productivity.

Wagan was once a planet of nothing but gray sludge formed into building shells and maximum utility centers of industry. Almost all of its natural resources were stripped a long time ago; a great desolation occurred hundreds of years ago when the humans settled here. It seems now, with their leaving and the jealous war over the aliens who are descended from their imperial ambitions, life untethered is making a come back. Species who were intentionally made extinct by city planners during the great urbanization have been seen in rumors around mossy-covered parks. Escaped Olgun specimens and mold-children have actually somewhat melded with the common ecosystem. Underground birds have begun to reappear, the lack of skyscrapers coating every inch of inhabitable ground means that the air currents that they navigate by with their eyeless little faces are opened up to them. In some ways, life has made a combat only through mass destruction. Perhaps it is just a temporary change as the result of a great, mostly pointless conflict. Or perhaps it is a change here to stay.

12 FTL Methods

[1] The whole “you need an amount of energy approaching infinity to reach the speed of light with physical matter” principle is sound. It's just not that hard to get infinite energy. Build a energy amplification engine or perpetual motion machine, hook it up the ship, and get blasting.

[2] Speed of Light doesn't work the way we think it does. Just put on more rockets and boosters. It will go faster then light, don't worry about it.

[3] The Speed of Light being a constant in the universe is actually just a time dilation problem in appearance. Away from any planet or gravity well, relative time slows to a crawl. You can reach distant stars of the galaxy in few months travel objectively, the time of travel in between the gravity wells just stretches on and on. You need immortal computers or cryogenic stasis to get crew there.

[4] Do the whole wrinkle in time thing. Artificially bridge the distance between two places much shorter then it actually is; bending space is easy. Can also be used as a weapon; entire spaceships are compacted into the space of a micrometer if directly in front of a wrinkle-ray.

[5] Hyperwaves. Just use some yet misunderstood type of energy to shift the ship into a hyper dimension. Here, a few hours of travel equates to hundreds of millions of light years in normal space.

[6] Wormholes.

[7] Literal magic. Scientists got tired of trying to figure out the blips of unknown knowledge. Started to wave sticks at it and say mumbojumbo until it worked. Eventually a spell that can help things move faster then light was discovered. Nobody knows how it works.

[8] Psychic powers. Ships can travel faster then light based on using the “speed of the mind”, which is faster then light apparently.

[9] You go through a subspace dimension, where distances are closer. The subspace dimension can have evil warp demons, dimensional god-beings, or even more strange alien races living in the “spaces between spaces”.

[10] Direct current of electricity has a very special property. Gravity along the “line” shifts towards the “end” the more powerful and long lasting the current is. In other words, after some warm up, it makes things go really, really fast.

[11] Transportation across vast distances is possible with quantum entanglement. However, the type of software and advanced scanners needed to detect and anchor to these points are heavily reliant on gravity, and aren't super precise. This means you can warp to gas giants, but are reliant on local transport to get around the smaller moons and planetoids. Derelict ships in deep space are totally stranded and shit out of luck.

[12] Yet unknowable cosmic entities only allow FTL travel with the sacrifice of a cute animal pet. It's sadistic as hell and yet that's the only way they know how. It can't just be a stray either, it has to be cute and loved by at least one person. Assholes.

12 Spaceship Special Featuers (that are more trouble then they're worth)

[1] Rearranging hull. During combat or to shift from atmosphere, underwater, or interstellar modes- computer rearranges the mass of the ship for optimal conditions, scrambling the location of everything. Primary rooms and cavities within the ship are mostly kept the same, but crew quarters and other rooms are jumbled and compressed, especially storage lockers and the objects within.

Whenever this is used, you may be trapped in a cavity with one tiny vent to the life support system, as the computer figures that's good enough to keep you alive to make space for its new flight mode or extra large storage bay. Anything vitally important has a 1 in 4 chance to get lost in a really unexpected place.

[2] Ship AI. It is highly advanced, remembers things, and can fully advise and manage many aspects of the ship. The ship can organize cargo shipments, resupply itself, lock/unlock doors as needed, and many other useful functions. However it is installed with several preset “personalities”, each one having their own problems. There is a kindly grandpa personality which grates on the ears and chides party members for swearing or engaging in effective but dishonorable tactics. There is a sultry female personality which throws mild and temperamental mood swings if not constantly sated with gifts or praise. There is even a highly effective default “factory” personality which works great except it constantly needs to shut down to update and pesters the party to buy it “essentially new features!” straight from the corporate servers.

[3] Adjusting life support. This life support system is highly advanced, pushing bubbles of air and moisture and customizing rooms based on the inhabitants as they move through the ship. It uses tractor beams to pull around globs of water for aquatic creatures, blasts heat and disperses it just a few inches away for creatures from lava worlds. Aliens of wildly different environments can live here together somehow. However the ship stores the information on its database which could be scrambled or hacked, and occasional hiccups to the system make it send electrically charged clouds of acid smoke for humans to breathe or spraying reptile creatures with liquid nitrogen, since it may accidentally think they need to stay cool due to their temperature being low. Less lethal hiccups, like regulating the inside temperatures and pressure to create weather effects inside the ship are not uncommon when this system fails.

[4] Replication Engine. The ship has some simple mining/extraction equipment, that can break down scavenged metals and asteroids and use it to create armor plating and munitions. The inside of the ship can be converted to a mini foundry to create and shape these metals and weapons. If left on however, it may flood the cargo bay with dangerous, primed warheads and a single gravity failure in the ship will cause molten metal to float out becoming a lethal hazard.

[5] Ship-Wide Holodeck. Everything in the ship can be made of solid state holograms; seats, control panels, clothes or personal items, fake crew members acting as visual aids and assistants to the crew, etc. Holograms don't 'despawn' when no longer needed though without supervision; you'll run across historical figures, game simulations, weird sex fantasies and so on running around the ship all the time. If the program is turned off, the control panels of the ship will disappear along with your seats and safety belts; the holograms were aids to assist with the now very inaccessible internal control and machine networks.

[6] Personal Butler-bots. The ship has a few robots, one per each major crew member, who waits on their every need, cleans up after them, and assist them in their duties. The butlers have all the regular protection protocols and some basic personality circuits; they would never attack the regular living crew members. But they start to scheme against each other, getting in each other way, and stealing each others batteries and server presence to better assist their own personal owner's jobs around the ship. Eventually, they will begin performing combat maneuvers and equipping themselves for gladiatorial combat- your maid bot starts smashing objects to slam the glass into the sensors of a rival machine, who is fiddling with the controls to the airlock to eject the offending robot out into space, and accidentally the rest of the oxygen in the living quarters too.

[7] Spontaneously generated music played over the projected loudspeakers. Give everyone on the ship a “soundtrack” for their life. Gets annoying fast, even if the music is generated unique and fresh each time. You can ask to turn it off, but it comes back as “subtle background music” in a few hours. You'll get used to it, and eventually go crazy like everyone else. There's at least one crazed naked man in the vents, stuffing his ears with cotton stolen from pillows and sleeping next to the loudest engine machines, just to drown out the music and hopefully go deaf.

[8] Hologram crew members. After someone dies, they can be simulated and “revived” via a perfect copy of their brain scan and personality from recordings by the ship's computer. Though they are not physical, they are still part of the crew and have the same duties and responsibilities.

Because of this feature, the copies feel as though they got no reprieve even from death, now forced to continue to work and exist in this limited, nonliving state. Also, it is entirely possible for the entire crew to die, becoming nothing more then hologram ghosts in a dead ship they cannot touch.

[9] Extremely fast acting and easy-access hibernation pods. Metal ports are installed in the back of the neck of the crew members; an easy plug in causes immediate deep, unaging sleep. Crew spread out their lives over eons if possible, taking century long naps along with tiny sleeps of just a few minutes while waiting for their food to cook. Any mistakes in programming and the 'alarm' could be hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years off. With the other crew sleeping 99.99999% of the time, any mistake like this could easily leave the ship unattended and without vital maintenance or repairs for decades.

[10] Biochemical adaptation. Each crew member has their tools, living space, and even personal needs met with generated biomechanical constructs, created from cloned DNA and shaped into various helpful organisms. Naturally, these beings must be fed a nutrient rich slurry from dispensers around the ship. Once these resources run out, they will become mad with hunger and attack the only meat they can get their hands/claws/protoplasm on.

[11] Gravity displacement engine. Allows artificial gravity to be selectively altered in real time along different axis; letting you walk on walls, create heavy zones to keep prisoners contained and on the floor, light zones for industry and ease of movement, and so on. Every time the computer reboots or the ship's engines go out the gravity wildly shifts and fluctuates; 1 in 6 chance minor black hole is formed somewhere in the ship.

[12] Weapon adaptation. The weapons aboard this ship automatically adopt to rearm and calibrate to go past new types of armors and energy shields. Using energy and munitions in an extremely efficient matter. The computer AI always goes for the most powerful method of destruction, and as such the ship starts to become a hazard. Soon asteroid fields are obliterated causing collateral damage, and tether-tractor beams are pulling holes in a friendly's boats hull, just to sate its bloodlust.