Am translator, can confirm.
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Ha
Wondering if I should look into capes next. Kinda feels like I should make a hat trick for weird research for this scene.
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If someone here feels like writing sci-fi with anything resembling realism or cohesion, don’t. My creative process today consisted of figuring out how fast I want spaceships to go, figuring out how much fuel they would need to accelerate and decelerate, adjusting the speed of the ships, figuring out the size of their fuel tanks, designing a space kayak, and then finally deciding how buying fuel in bulk would impact its price.
Meanwhile my actual game only got a few hundred new words today. Amazing.
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Space kayak! Sounds fun.
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Something that helped me:
Describe how a car works.
The point of the exercise is that most people when asked would not get super detailed on the inner workings of a car (either out of lack of knowledge or an understanding that a technical explanation would last all day), and it is largely irrelevant to the quality of a story told about a car. There are brilliant scenes that involve the technical workings of a car like the best scene in movie history, but it’s a fun party trick (and that scene actually features more facts about car economics than about engineering). The reality is that no one cares how much gasoline a character will need to fill up their tank with to drive to work.
In other words, you do not actually need to do the calculations.
Unless you find it fun, in which case do more and get weird with it.
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This is one of many reasons I write fantasy. I can just make everything up. 
I’ve dabbled in space opera, but tried to keep it less sciencey and more fantasy-leaning so I didn’t have to compute all the moving parts. I have a friend who writes art heist romances and the amount of research she does is commendable. Her books are fabulous, and the realism with all her research really adds to the believability, so I’m sure the logistics you’re working on will add to your story as well (if they’re needed). Best of luck with it!
Also this. When I write sci-fi I take this approach. Most of the time I find those tricky details aren’t needed.
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I mostly try writing realistic, but I usually just look at the laws of reality, and decide to ignore it. My main project other than my main WiP is set on a steam train, and while that leads itself to highly realistic depictions, I am also determined to have fun with the setting.
This is where I have fun. Several hours of research into the exact way a steam train would behave in certain situations that it realistically would never occur in is both rewarding and tiring. Trust me, I wanted to make the train do a loop, but then I was dismayed to discover that would actually cause the engine to explode. Still, I love trying to come up with nonsensical situations then trying to explain them realistically. my personal favourite example of this.
This scene works, because:
A) The film has already established the train as semi-magic, so it can just decide to ignore the laws of physics if it wants.
B) Trains don’t have directional steering, because they are made to travel along tracks - they only need a throttle and a brake. But with the levers that the engineer pulls in the scene, and comparing it to the real life model Pere Marquette 1255, this nonsensical scene is actually plausible.
In short, a steam train pulling off sick drifts is not a plausible situation, but it is definitely very fun.
I encourage anyone who wants to come up with nonsensical situations like this and explain it using math and science. It makes my little geek brain tingle.
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Google’s AI Bard is actually pretty good at this sort of if thing where you can describe it but you don’t know what it’s called, or if you know there’s this person who did this thing but you can’t recall his name.
You see, the thing about spaceship fuel is that it’s not a tricky detail that I decided to flesh out for no reason. It’s actually kinda fundamental to how the whole setting I’m designing works.
Spaceships are not cars. They do not suffer from drag, they do not make quick turns, they are not usually subject to speed limits. The sole thing which determines how fast they go is how much fuel they carry and what accelerations that fuel allows them to reach. And since there are no trains or planes in space, their access to said fuel determines the speed of all travel and transportation between planets and other objects, which in turn makes spaceship fuel the most crucial resource to the functioning of everyone and everything. And that’s rather significant worldbuilding wise.
And sure, I don’t need to think any of that through, it’s not like anyone will ever call me out on my space economics not quite lining up. But I’m the person who ran a whole simulation of the Solar System just to check if I got the distance between Earth and Saturn on September 30th 2239 exactly right for a single line in my story. I’m not letting some fuel calculations defeat me, I’m an engineer for Jupiter’s sake. It’s a matter of honour at this point.
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Having once written in a review that I struggled to suspend my disbelief for a particular game because of the slapdash worldbuilding, including ridiculously fuel-inefficient space travel, I strongly suspect I’m going to be a fan of whatever you write. (Andy Weir would approve, too.)
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A critical resource is worth fleshing out, for sure. And I’d say that level of worldbuilding always shines through, even if the reader only gets fractions of the details in the end. I didn’t realize you’re an engineer. That’s fabulous. I’d expect that perspective will bring a good deal of believability to your approach to SFF. Sounds like you’re doing well with it.
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Hi, hello, hoping I’m allowed to post here (still very new to this forum, lots I don’t know).
My goal for the first chunk of December is to finally get through a scene in Those Long Dead (my IF WIP) that I’ve been stuck on for a while! No real reason why this single tiny scene is tripping me up, it just has been. Hoping I can sit down for a few days and stumble my way through a decent full draft of it!
Hope the rest of you are taking care of yourselves, and I wish you happy holidays if you celebrate any this time of year.
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Welcome to the Writer Support thread for December!
We are glad to have you here, and we will be here to cheer you on as you work on your scene for December.
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Almost all of that is true for gasoline! It’s important for stories about travel, transportation, logistics, and the ever-popular space opera political interplanetary war dramas with tonnes of intricate worldbuilding, but not all sci-fi needs to be about that 
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I’d hazard a guess and say it’s not important for space opera, unless you’re having some fuel management mechanic, or have a plot point about running out of fuel and want to avoid doing that just after refueling, which would be ridiculous unless something’s wrong in the system.
Although if the resource management is part of the mechanics, I can imagine it being important, especially since if it is a concern, you’ll probably not having fueling stations behind every corner and as such must consider what you’ll take along.
But I’m currently wondering if I’ll bore my potential readers to death by comparing the pros and cons of different transportation methods, so what do I know.
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Oops, all scope creep!
I read through my previous project. I’ve come to realize why I dropped it: way too ambitious. Dice system, three different outcomes for each individual stat check, a fully fledged Conlang.
Sorry, past self. There are quite a few things I’ll have to remove and then define some actual goals if I want to release this within my lifetime.
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Conlangs are fun! 
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Babylon V is still one of the best sci-fi shows, and Straczinsky’s apparoach to “when do the starships arrive at their destination” is, statedly, “when I need them to.”
Like, if you don’t tell people distances, you also don’t need to tell them speed, and vice-versa.
The thing is, people don’t need to know those things for @Omeg 's game. They just need to know that:
a) ship speed is determined by the amount of fuel they carry, which means that fuel access is the resource of primary importance for space travel and logistics, and
b) when they decide to move ships about, how much fuel out of their reserves it takes to get them there before X event.
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I have a sneaking suspicion that I might be ill again, which is just unfair.
Ah, my nemesis, the scope creep! it is indeed all too real.
Every time I decide to shelve one project, to write something simpler first, the new project ends end growing bigger than the prior one.
Every single time.
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I’ve not been writing past few days but for once I’m not too worried as I am a at a point where I have a reasonable goal and enough planning that when that spark strikes I should be able to catch up
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