Style Guide

In order to provide a more cohesive idea of the looks, feels and sounds of Sol 2400, this page will show off pictures and videos from famous and less famous media, mostly videogames, movies and anime. It is difficult, without access to custom artwork, to accurately portray what a setting may look like, so this is an attempt at conveying a certain vision.

Inspirations

The major inspirations for Sol 2400 are mainly Star Trek, Space Battleship Yamato and Space Station 13. While Star Trek is less present visually, the idea of a well-meaning galactic government clashing with barbaric aliens is clearly Trek. Yamato is mostly seen in the ships, like the European and Russian ships. SS13, a game I played for thousands of hours, inspired the Syndicate, some of the corporations and aliens.

Here is a list of a few things which were majorly inspirational for the setting, including videos and pictures to start to understand the general vibe of the setting:

Games

Hardspace Shipbreaker
Helldivers 2
Halo
Elite Dangerous
Falling Frontier
NEBULOUS: Fleet Command
Barotrauma

These really set the visual idea behind Sol 2400: sleek, boxy starships, jagged lines, warning signs, caution stickers and intense greebling. Bosun's whistles, retro-thrusters, radio chatter. The orbits of Mars, littered with shipbreaking facilities and repair stations. Imposing military pyramid-shaped colossi in queue for FTL jumps behind private yachts. The Star Wars dogfights and ship broadside aspect is not as evident - in space, three-dimensional combat offers various creative ways of dispatching your enemy: fly in from below, hit-and-run at near light speed, fire missiles from behind entire planets. NEBULOUS is an excellent example of what Sol 2400 ship engagements may look like, although in order to keep some of the spectacle of Star Wars or Star Trek ship fights (see Sacrifice of Angels, Deep Space Nine or the Rebel reinforcement of Scarif in Rogue One) that has been toned down - it also features ships that fit perfectly with the setting, and as such have been included in the gallery and elsewhere. There's always a chance for a good ramming maneuver or a full blast of the ship's gun at point-blank range.

Movies

Alien
Star Wars
Starship Troopers
Greyhound

Here is where the interface and audio ideas really get in motion. While the earlier section had a lot of visual cues and a general style for ships, stations and technology, Alien's computers and consoles, with their clicky keyboards and buttons, constant sounds and saturated screens, very closely resemble what the majority of ships in Sol 2400 look and sound like: control surfaces that can be clicked and operated with gloves and spacesuits, big buttons, responsive screens, rather than expensive, unwieldy touch screens and holograms.

Greyhound is a different source of inspiration. It is based on a book detailing, in great military precision and realism, the journey of a group of Allied ships escorting a merchant fleet from the US to Europe. The vocabulary and the way the action takes place is not particularly used for RPG sessions, as it's too complex, but it was a big part of the original inspiration behind the setting.

Anime

Space Battleship Yamato
Patlabor 2

Space Battleship Yamato, though its scenes are a little exaggerated for this setting, showcases some of the exhilarating space battles that inspire the more grounded ones in Sol 2400. One particular aspect that is present is the creativity with which the Yamato's crew fights: upside down, scraping ice fields and ships, spinning, ramming. While the financial teams of the various navies won't enjoy it, it may sometimes be necessary to scratch up the hull by diving into an asteroid field or burn out the thrusters for a quick getaway. Patlabor instead displays, in particular, the mechs one might see in Sol 2400: the linked opening scene even shows Japanese mechs occupied in a United Nations mission. Tank and APC bodies attached to four-legged walker systems, bipedal mechs with swivel cameras and torso-mounted cannons, and similar models used for industrial purposes.

Looks and Feels

Sol 2400 is tactile, clicky, responsive. Sol 2400 is IBM Plex and DotGothic16 in green, splayed over a CRT screen. It's clunky, chunky, quick and efficient. In space, you can't waste Megabytes on animation and window transitions.

While this isn't constant, and newer ships especially in Asia may have sleek, Windows 11-esque interfaces, smooth keyboards and holographic projections, the general population is more likely to interface with reliable, cheap machines, solid levers and buttons, in a very physical experience. A spacer's life will likely not be spent among well-lit, clean, sleek hallways, but rather in oil-stained, off-white corridors wrapped in plastic coverings, padding, and a thousand safety instructions. Not the Enterprise, the Millennium Falcon. Starships aren't gracious vessels gliding through the stars, they are humongous masses of metal groaning and creaking as they are subjected to the forces of space - submarines preserving organic life behind thin (or at times armored) metal walls. Living on a starship is far from a luxurious experience, it involves cramped rooms littered with access points for piping and electronic equipment, red lighting to adjust to the darkness, vents, ladders, safety equipment, manual hatches.

Spacer life is noisy, though sailors find the noise soothing after being acclimated to it. Clicks, beeps, whirrs, mechanical ticks and groans of enormous machines operating. The constant hum of the engines and reactor, the idle humming of ventilation fans, the computer's laments - they become a relief from the unnatural silence of space. And so too does the voice of the captain, the bosun's whistle that declares a call to arms or an announcement, the echoey voice of "Chief Medical Officer requested to the Surgical Suite" and similar requests over the intercom.

Smelling metal, industrial cleaner, oil or fuel is common, as much as it's common to smell MREs and pre-packaged meals. A sailor's hands are perennially tainted with the smell of coins and steel from the handrails and walls, the pungent stench of hand sanitizer, the tacky scent of cheap soap and shampoo. It is not a glorious life, or a life for royals, kings and princesses. It is a life for mechanics, explorers, mercenaries, medics.

Sol 2400 doesn't sound like futuristic, esoteric lyrical and pop music, or classical and opera performed by AI and aliens. Sol 2400 is retrowave, synth, electro. Daft Punk, Kavinsky, Lazerhawk, Carpenter Brut. Sol 2400 is neon lights flickering in a dust storm on Mars, grand holographic jellyfish hovering gracefully over the Tokyo business center, it's a worker drinking a beer at the 400th level of a gigafactory, it's killer robots, aliens, and mecha.

Sol 2400 sounds like synth, smells like oil, feels like metal, tastes like nutrient paste. It also sounds like the anthem of your nation, smells like the Terran grass, tastes like exotic food, feels like a warm hand pulling you out of danger. Sol 2400 is about humans, about resilience, about hope in the face of gigacorps, pirates, galactic annihilation.

Sol 2400 is about hope, about a brighter future, about yellow warning labels, 80s electronic music, dial-up tones. It's about big ships, military strategy and mechs. It's about aliens, about justice, law and philosophy in space. It's about a bar floating in the orbit of Jupiter, and also about the President of the European Federation.

Sol 2400 is about us. Hopefully.

The Sol 2400 Playlist

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