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Wide Galaxy of Sports!

Ran Targas

Ran Targas

SOC-14 1K
Peer of the Realm
The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat!

I'm adding another layer of color to MTU and would appreciate everyone's take on x-treme and even traditional sports of known space.

So far, IMTU I've got:

- Zero-G martial arts; a particularly favorite of Imperial Aslan and ex-Imperial Marines

- Solar diving; races around a star in highly specialized craft, grazing the corona while avoiding prominences and lethal radiation!

- Solar sailing; an obvious choice for corporate bigwigs and adventuresome aristocrats

- Ring hopping; vacc suited solo and team races through planetary ring systems using minimum equipment

- Extra-atmospheric sky diving; ablative armor and grav belts, can you hit the right continental land mass?

- Megafauna hunting; often with archaic weapons, another Aslan and Vargr favorite

- Grav ball; zero-G soccer/basketball, the old sci-fi standard

Don't want to steal anyone else's thunder so I'll stop; but please add on!
 
Pool - this is a violent game of personal combat, primarily played by Marines. It involves long staves (called cues) and spherical missiles.
 
Atmosphere skipping- battledress and a "board" with a layer of cermaic tiles and ablative coating; you ride the board into the atmosphere at a shallow approach angle and bounce off. Points for style and staying alive.

Low-G Flying- Attach wings to your arms in a low g environment and fly by flaping and gliding. Sports can include various ball-games, races, diving to snatch items without killing yourself etc.

Space Yatch Polo -Only for the very wealthy. It's polo, your yatch is the pony and the field is a stretch of space, with or without obstacles. The stick may be a repulsor/tractor turret. The rules should place such restrictions on the ships that they would be uneconomical for almost any other use (you really don't want one of those scout types joining in a SOC A+ only event. ;) )

A take-off of Megafauna Hunting, Power-Suit Hunting: Hunting while in a partial exoskeleton with claws. Kill has to be made by hand. Chance for a humani to feel what it's like to be an Aslan.

I always liked Roller-Ball -the motocycles in Traveller would give it an anachronistic feel with all the exhaust fumes and noise.
 
Survivor: The Dark Side

Dropped off on the dark side of a tidally locked world, the teams have to survive for 3 weeks, while the hazards of near-Absolute zero temps, lack of food and water (spoiled by the corporation sponsoring the game), and "Meteor Punctures" (again corporation-caused.)

Alternatively, this is a show on the go, where both teams start with a crawler, and race for the middle...the prize is a new free trader, all payments made. The people that make it 2nd...don't make it off planet.

Something like that.
 
3-Door Monty

This is like a gladiatorial arena, where a team armed only with melee weapons has to answer questions, for money. If they fail they pick one of three doors, which opens to: A slight money reward, a Very Large money reward, or three hungry name-your-favorite-acid-for-blood-type-space-beast.
 
Merxiless, love that "Survivor: The Dark Side" - especially the second version....

How about something simple, like, 0-g acrobatics: lots of fru-fru tumbling and ribbon-waving. (Rings just wouldn't be very hard without gravity....)

Downhill skiing, with grav nodes set to flicker -1 to +2 g set like gates on the slope? You have to get just the right distance to sling around them when they switch from +2 (when you're uphill, preferably) to -1 (to push you downhill).

Powerlifting in a Hi-G environment.
 
Merxiless, that is a great idea; consider it stolen! ;)

I also like Ptah's shock wave surfing; seems like a natural off shoot to xtreme re-entry diving, like sky diving with a snowboard!

Any ideas on sports followed on a planetary or sub-sector scale? Sports whose best are holo broadcast heroes like today's celebrity athletes?
 
I would imagine that the grav/g-/magno-ball circuit would be a big subsector draw (perhaps even sector wide).

Also, I was thinking about speeder races, similar to what we have in NASCAR now. Which, now that I think about it, is pretty close to pod-racing in Star Wars Ep. I. <shudder>

But in answering your question, Ran, I think a high-speed racing circuit would certainly have cult heroes.
 
I forget what it's called in the book, but in Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds there's a sport that's sort of a cross between handball & rugby, played between two players. The tank it's played in has variable gravity that shifts during the game, including things like walls becoming the floor and high-g hotspots.

Human-powered ultralight aircraft races show up too.

- John
 
"Survivor" won't work as posited: No chance for attractive 'babes' (of gender/species appropriate to the target audience) to lounge around in skimpy clothing!

...is there a way to combine it with 3 door Monty?
 
Hover and Grav boarding: I desinged a bunch of these for T20, basically very expensive toys for rich thrillseekers. The controls are all operated by the feet of the rider, and they use the 'ride' skill rather than pilot or drive, and on top of that, I made a specialized "Vessel/Board" feat to use with them. I also aply the feat to surfboards and the like, but these things are very dangerous, and races are lots of fun.
 
There's gravboarding, which can be straight races over distance and/or obstacles; or can be anything goes with weapons.
 
Monkeyshines:

Take a 0-G hold, 2-4 teams, one ball. Object is to get ball to own goal. Hold is at least 3m x 20m x 20m, gridded with 2m apart bars; official is an 8x40x40m grid, with plexi walls, and 4 teams of 10: goalie, 2D's, 6 forwards. Full-head helmets, neck support/protection, full body padding, full contact. Touching the walls is a foul; each opposing team gets a free shot on goal, unless you're a goalie within 5m of the goal. Goalie's job is to catch the 20cm ball, and put it in the 25cm goal!
 
Originally posted by Aramis:
Monkeyshines:

Take a 0-G hold, 2-4 teams, one ball. Object is to get ball to own goal. Hold is at least 3m x 20m x 20m, gridded with 2m apart bars; official is an 8x40x40m grid, with plexi walls, and 4 teams of 10: goalie, 2D's, 6 forwards. Full-head helmets, neck support/protection, full body padding, full contact. Touching the walls is a foul; each opposing team gets a free shot on goal, unless you're a goalie within 5m of the goal. Goalie's job is to catch the 20cm ball, and put it in the 25cm goal!
Click to expand...
Hmmm, I like this, except the regular grid of bars is too tight... can we replace them with an irregular array of grav-powered handholds (built off of the fairly cheap remote recon unit in '101 Robots')? Then we can have the handholds moving along under control of a random number generator!
 
Not IMTU, as gravitics are far too expensive. If you want larger grid, fine, do so. The idea, though, is to put a grid in reach so that players seldom wind up stranded. The team members would be swinging bar to bar, not free-falling.
 
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