Building a Spaceship in Dungeons and Dragons, Part II

Previous installment here.

Now we come to the interesting part: propulsion.

Two Links

I'm all over the place!   Specifically, my article "Alternate Nuclear Wars" can now be read at Alternate History Weekly Update.   In addition, my previous blog post on third-generation nuclear weapons can now also be read on William Black's deviantart.   Although most of you have probably already read that, you should check out his gallery anyway; Mr. Black is an extremely talented digital artist, who has contributed many of the images of Orions and other atompunk spacecraft you can see in such places as Atomic Rocket.

Sadly, I must warn you not to get used to this pace of updates.   A bunch of projects just happened to be completed at once.

Third-Generation Nuclear Weapons

I ran into this stuff while working on something else, and thought it was interesting enough to be worth sharing.   I may or may not do a longer article on this at some point; getting more information on this is likely to be very difficult, given that the US government holds this stuff pretty close to its chest (as it should).

So what, exactly, is a third-generation nuclear weapon?

Building a Spaceship in Dungeons and Dragons

Why? Because we can, that's why.

D&D space travel has been done before, usually with teleportation magic (or Spelljammers). What I'm setting out to do here, though, is to build an actual spaceship, that actually traverses the space it crosses. Specifically, I want to design a spaceship that can be built at the lowest level possible – most of the components are actually fairly cheap since the designers weren't expecting you to apply physics to them. The ship will be designed for a 1-man crew, but should be readily adaptable to larger crews.

In case it isn't obvious, I'm well aware this is deeply silly. For those of you here for the nuclear history, don't worry. This blog is still about history; this is just a momentary diversion. So if you don't like D&D just skip this and come back later.