[This is a repost of something I wrote almost four years ago. Last night, I found myself thinking about space suits in science fiction RPGs and decided to write a post about it. As usual, I soon realized I'd done it before. Rather than abandon the idea, I thought I'd repost this, since its initial appearance was very early after I'd returned to blogging and was therefore not widely read.]
When I was a child, I owned a copy of the Marvel Treasury Special adaptation of 2001 by Jack Kirby. I can't recall how I acquired it, though I suspect it was a gift by a well-meaning relative who knew that I liked science fiction. I am certain that I read the comic before I ever saw the movie (which wasn't released on home video until 1980). The combination of Clarke's story, Kubrick's visuals, and Kirby's art was a heady mix and I was equally enthralled and frightened by what I saw in those large newsprint pages.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I became a fan of 2001: A Space Odyssey when I finally did see the film and it remains one of my favorite movies. I recently re-watched it; my feelings toward it are unchanged: I consider it not only one of the greatest science fiction films of all time, but one of the greatest films regardless of genre.Even if you disagree with that assessment, it's hard to deny how influential the movie is. Without even paying close attention, you can recognize imagery, set designs, costuming, even plot details that have clear echoes in subsequent motion pictures. Ash from Alien owes a lot to HAL 9000, for example, particularly in his having been given a hidden agenda at odds with those of the human characters. Likewise, the Enterprise's encounter with V'ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture would have been impossible without the final act of 2001, "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite."
Growing up in the immediate aftermath of the Apollo lunar lanading, astronauts and space suits were everywhere. 2001 has particularly stylish and iconic space suits – so much so that I am convinced the multi-colored thruster suits from the aforementioned Star Trek film are a tribute to those in Kubrick's masterpiece. Come to think of it, Alien also had remarkable space suits, but those are the work of French artist Jean Giraud, better known by his nom de plume, Moebius.
On the other hand, science fiction like Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica didn't have a place for space suits – flight helmets, yes, but not full suits of the sort seen elsewhere. It's probably for this reason that I've subconsciously come to divide space-oriented sci-fi into space suit and non-space suit categories, with the former being more "serious" than the latter. The lack of space suits is something I associate with action-oriented space opera rather than idea-based science fiction. Obviously, this is a completely unfair distinction, one largely based, I imagine, on the prominence that space suits had in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Nevertheless, it's a distinction that's been lurking at the back of my mind since childhood, affecting even my feelings about science fiction roleplaying games. One of the most basic and ubiquitous skills in GDW's Traveller is Vacc Suit (though I've never discovered the origin of the second "c" in the word). Consequently, I've always seen the game as a sober, serious, and indeed thoughtful game, compared to, say, TSR's Star Frontiers, which, while I have a great fondness for it, didn't even mention space suits or their equivalent until the release of the Knights Hawks expansion a year later. Ironically, it was Star Frontiers that saw an adventure module based on 2001: A Space Odyssey, not Traveller, which only goes to show how arbitrary distinctions like this can be.
I've seen several suggested explanations for the extra "c" in Traveller's vacc suits.
ReplyDeleteOne was that "vaccuum" is the accepted future spelling of the word in the same way humanity (and other group names with similar construction) is now humaniti.
Another said it was an abbreviation of "vacuum containment suit" but that feels like a stretch.
My favorite is the idea that GDW was poking fun at the extra "l" in Traveller (at least from an American POV) by throwing an extra "c" in vacc suit.
But the most plausible is the simplest. Someone didn't know how to spell vacuum correctly in the first place and shortened it inappropriately, it didn't get spotted in the proofread, and once the error made it to print it became tradition.
The last explanation is the most plausible.
DeleteAs to the extra "l" in Traveller. Loren Wiseman told me that it was purely for esthetic reasons. The folks at GDW thought the title "looked better" with the double-l and went with it.
I would agree with them. I use this spelling of “traveller” too.
DeleteMark Miller confirmed in an interview in the GROGNARD Files podcast that the spelling of Traveller was chosen essentially because it looked different (at least in the U.S.).
DeleteTo be fair, once Star Frontiers did do space suit rules in KH, they did a good job with them. You do NOT want to go into combat in a vacuum in that game, and the mechanics really sell how dangerous it is even with suit armor. The number of patches you have on you is more important than your Stamina, and gods help you if you get caught by full-auto burst or whacked with a big melee weapon.
ReplyDeleteI don't think any other game prior to the modern industrial-scifi-horror stuff made suits feel as just plain fragile as KH did. Kind of key to a more serious scifi feel, which is ironic considering how gonzo things like the ecology of Volturnus was.
I kind of wish scifi RPGs treated suits more like the way Larry Niven's belters did, where they were arguably your single most important personal possession. You could tell the difference between serious vacuum workers and "casuals" who rarely did any EVA by their suits. The tyros used pretty much stock suits straight from the manufacturer, while the real belter suits were all heavily tweaked and customized and often featured elaborate and unique artwork, kind of the way WW2 pilots paid for nose art on their ride. Bit like the difference between the average computer user and the folks who build their own systems, only with your life on the line from vacuum, temperatures and hard radiation.
ReplyDeleteSo where does Star Trek fall on the spacesuit/no-spacesuit line? Obviously there *are* spacesuits in Trek but they almost never wear them. Indeed, they only turned up for the first time in the first Trek movie and have only occasionally reappeared since then. Entire seasons of Star Trek shows have come and gone without anyone suiting up!!!
ReplyDeleteSpace Suits turn up in Star Trek in the original series in 'The Tholian Web'. The same suits appear in the episode 'Whom Gods Destroy', albeit as Hostile Environment Suits for an inhospitable planet.
DeleteMoreover, the Animated Series had "Life Support Belts" that created a bubble of breathable air around the characters. Invented purely for the reason of economy in animation, but certainly appropriate to Trek's quasi-magical technology.
DeleteThe TAS life support belts should have been more widespread in gaming than they were (live action canon be damned) simply because they offered a plausible excuse for living through a high-setting energy weapon hit or two (as seen in Beyond the Farthest Star, their first appearance), and it's not hard to imagine extending the idea to combat models that were even more resistant. Given the relative costs of the props and SFX involved it's honestly rather surprising the field belts didn't get translated into the films and later series to save buying suits that wouldn't be used much anyway. Even before cheap CGI a glowing aura outlining a character was still cheaper than a full-body prop costume that also obscures the actors' features.
DeleteDon't forget the space suits in the ST:TOS episode The Tholian Web
ReplyDeleteI do remember spacesuits in a single episode of original Battlestar Galactica, "Fire in Space." Some screen grabs of suit here http://sayhellospaceman.blogspot.com/2016/01/battlestar-galactica-fire-in-space-1978.html
ReplyDeleteYou know, one of the things that 2001 sneaks past people with it’s vision and its production level is that it was made pre-moon landing in 1967 and released early 1968. Most casual audiences think it is a later film. But this fact is also picked up by the conspiracy fringe to make anti-moon landing arguments. Still the fact that it looks like it could have been made today is a testament to the film’s overall quality.
ReplyDeleteSo, if we walked on the moon 55 years ago, why is the current effort to return to the moon so dang challenging? NASA delayed it *again.*
Deletehttps://www.cbsnews.com/news/nasa-artemis-moon-mission-faces-delays-space-agency-pushes-ahead-60-minutes/
I'm hard pressed to think of a 20th century feat that wasn't repeatable by the same organization 55 years later.
The moon mission successes and delays were both entirely due to the politics of their days. The Space Race mentality of the 50s and 60s made NASA a linchpin of national pride in a lot of ways, with a clear "enemy" in the form of the USSR to compete against - and they beat us to a lot of firsts, which further stimulated the willingness to throw money at NASA until we could better the Reds. Success in space was seen as a patriotic goal.
DeleteThese days, NASA is seen by far too many people in and out of government as a pointless waste of money, there's nothing like the level of public interest in current projects that there was for the manned Lunar landings, and the contractors that NASA is forced to rely on for their hardware are quick to back out of a contract when (not if) they screw up and run over budget and over time and realize there's no profit in it. They couldn't have gotten away with that back in the 60s, it would have been called a national security issue and the executives responsible would have wound up up in jail.
The world has changed, and arguably not for the better in this case. It's all about the money that can be made in space, not the pure science or national pride.
NASA in the 1960s consisted of men on a mission.
DeleteNASA today is a jobs program.
>>It's all about the money that can be made in space, not the pure science or national pride.<<
DeleteThen you'd think a corporation could repeat a 55 year old feat, that the government did 6 times in 4 years. You don't think Bezos or Musk want to walk on the moon?
...Or any other nation on Earth? Only the US has national pride as a motivator?
>>NASA in the 1960s consisted of men on a mission.
DeleteNASA today is a jobs program.<<
And what was NASA in 1973? Or 1974? Or 1975? Or all the years from then to now?
Cold War politics were the essential ingredient in NASA's achievements during the 1960s and 70s. "National pride" in this case was wrapped up also in "national security" and competition for global hegemony. Even at the time, the space program had vocal critics who thought it was a waste of resources. U.S. Interest in manned space flight waned very rapidly once the moon race was won, and the post Bretton Woods economic landscape did not encourage the same kind of spending. Historically, I think exploration without a profit motive has been very rare, and the hypothetical profits from space exploration are currently outweighed by the costs. Space flight is extremely difficult and expensive for myriad reasons -- especially when leaving earth orbit. A lot of the institutional memory from NASA's glory days is gone, both in government and in aerospace engineering. Anyone who wants to duplicate the Apollo program will have to do a lot of re-inventing the wheel, so to speak.
DeleteBut we have the blueprints of a successful, working wheel from 55 years ago. What exactly are we reinventing?
DeleteIn terms of profit motive and national pride, India, China. and a private US company all landed unmanned craft on the moon *this year!* So clearly, there is a desire and a motive. But apparently not the capability of a manned landing, something that supposedly happened with astonishing regularity over 50 years ago.
Unmanned spaceflight is easier than manned spaceflight because one does not have to worry about astronauts dying. The Apollo program succeeded so quickly because you had a corps of people basically working together for years in a sustained and focused way with loads of US government cash at their disposal. There was, for lack of a better term, "institutional momentum." Once NASA locked itself into the spaceshuttle program, the know-how and infrastructure for making Saturn V rockets began to go away. I'm sure NASA has people who are familiar with Mercury-Gemini-Apollo operations on a theoretical level, but all the practical knowledge is gone, apart from the few retired engineers and astronauts who are still alive. It isn't as simple as dusting off all the blueprints and just reading them. It really is a matter of expense and practicality -- this isn't some dodge. If China wants to spend (in comparative terms) what the US spent in the 1960s, then Chinese people will land on the moon. If you're implying that NASA never landed men on the moon in the first place, then we will have to agree to disagree.
DeleteFair enough.
DeleteBy the way, did you know that some moon rocks were found to be fake?
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna32581790
Whilst it didn't mention space suits specifically, the last picture in the expanded rulebook did show 3 people in zero-G in varying states of getting suited up.
ReplyDeleteThe distinction of 'spacesuit scifi' (hard science fiction) vs 'non-spacesuit scifi' (space opera or science fantasy) is an insightful one.
ReplyDeleteClarke, Kubrick and Kirby: a gathering of titans!
Being fair to space opera as a genre, it didn't always ignore the need for suits. Iconic space opera author EE "Doc" Smith was consistent about characters requiring vacuum protection in his books. He even understood the need for specialize dsuits in extreme environments, with a unique super-insulated rig for a visit to Pluto because conduction is a thing. He also anticipated Heinlein's Starship Troopers with his powered "space armor" to go along with the more fragile civilian suits.
DeleteAdmittedly, he also had some xeno species that could live comfortably in a vacuum (and on Pluto, pretty much a resort colony for Palainians) so the science was pretty optional, but at least for humans you needed a suit. Even Kimball Kinnison couldn't breathe vacuum. Probably best not to ask about his kids, though. Even if they could somehow ignore that sort of issue they were considerate enough to pretend otherwise around less evolved folks.
That 2001 adaptation spun-off into an apparently wild short-run ongoing, which introduced a character who still shows up occasionally (Machine Man).
ReplyDeleteI've actually never seen the movie, I keep missing it for whatever reason. I did read the book though, which was very good.
Yeah, if you haven't read the Kirby 2001 series that followed the film adaptation you're missing out. It's only nine issues and includes some of the most far-out scifi the King ever did. It's mostly one-shots and a few two-part stories that roughly parallel the film's events in different settings/situations, usually with the protagonist winding up dying or doomed to die, getting absorbed by the out-of-nowhere Monolith, and winding up turned into a cosmic space baby - a "New Seed" in Kirby parlance - and sent out to explore the galaxy and spread life and intelligence. They're thoroughly weird and run the gamut from caveman stories to Bronze Age barbarian fantasy to straight scifi complete with alien invaders and Dream Park-style superhero cosplay.
DeleteThe last three issues break the mold by focusing on robot X-51, aka Aaron Stark aka Mister Machine aka Machine Man, with the Monolith only appearing a couple of times acting as a deus ex machina to rescue him and not even showing up in the final issue. No "New Seeds' here, instead it's a cautionary tale about not treating your newborn AIs like machines instead of people.
Effectively served as a stealth test run for the Machine Man (the name they finally settled on) solo series, which ran 19 issues and continued straight on from 2001 #9. Kirby stayed on the art until issue #9, after which Steve Ditko took over for the rest of the run - not an improvement, IMO. Aaron was barely part of the Marvel universe until late in the series where he started getting team-ups with parts of the FF, Alpha Flight, and a few villains - although some of the unique villains created for the series later showed up in Marvel continuity as well.
Space suits? Pshaw. A game that pays attention to, and has good rules for, immunology is serious science fiction; everything else is space fantasy!!!
ReplyDelete(Kidding, yes; but not 100% kidding.)
What caught my attention in Classic Traveller's Double Adventure 1, Shadows, there were some diagrams of tunnel structure and the characters are wearing Alien-style vacc suits. Those suits are ponderous but they fit with the "workingbeing" nature of CT.
ReplyDelete