Just Speculatin'

[Kyle Aaron]

And so it begins...

​

Having finished Fourth Tiwesdæg, it was time for a new campaign. Last night we settled on Just Speculatin', which is not a Traveller universe, but can be imagined as the very earliest days of one.

"Humans are the only aliens."
​

GAME STYLE Cinematic (1 part) vs Realistic (3 parts). Space is dangerous.
Hack (2 parts) vs Thesp (2 parts). Entirely up to the players.
Schtick (1 part) vs Drama (3 parts). The universe is a dangerous place.


WHAT HAPPENS Action & Fights (2) - frequency depends on player choices
Building (1) – The characters are unlikely to have a lot of effect on the universe.
Character (3) – Who you are matters.
Character Power (1) – Character advancement isn't a big thing here.
Destroying (1) – As for Building.
Exploration (4) – The universe is not only dangerous, it's also big and mysterious.

HOW IT'S DONE
Combat, Communication, Driving, Gadgeteering, Medical, Persuading, Scholarship, Wilderness


"The year is 2037, and humanity has reached the stars. But they took their problems with them, and the only aliens we have met are other humans. A warp drive was invented in 2007, and it didn't cost much – if you could get 48km up, you could get to the stars. Coming back is up to you.

"With warp travel practical and relatively cheap, the one billion citizens of the West decide on indifference to resource depletion and climate change. There are always more worlds to get resources from, and more to travel to if this one becomes a mess. They leave seven billion poorer others behind.

"The characters will be freelancers. A lot of people went up, and didn't take all they needed. So there's good money to be made getting them what they want. Sometimes the jobs mightn't be quite legal, but there's not much law out there anyway. What kind of work do you do? You're looking for good trade, little jobs here and there, you're just speculatin'."

For a system, we're using Risk Dice 0.2, with random character generation - if you don't like what you roll up, you can roll another character, but only after character generation is finished. As old Traveller did, 10, 11 and 12 are marked as A, B and C, so that you can write your character as a string of numbers very briefly.

Phill rolled up

Roland de Thame
Strength8 Agility9 Fitness6 Education5 Perception8 Confidence6
Licence9 People6 Psyche5 StatusB TechnologyA Wealth5
Skills:- Acrobatcs (Uneven bars) B, Brawling (Boxing) 9, Fire 3, Hunting 5, Psychology 7
Roland is the main financier of the ship, and a bit of a toff.
Gear:- starship, shotgun with walnut stock and engraved barrels in fine mahogany case, extensive wardrobe
​

Aron rolled up

JJ Junior
Att: 4C7967
Fea: 4677A5
Skills: Acting (pantomime) 5, Aircraft 7, Climbing 6, Navigation (Astro) 8, Tracking 6
Gear: Vacc suit, marijuana seeds in "tarragon" jar, memory stick of "75 years of Playboy magazine, 1950-2025", fake pilot's licence in the name Ron Schneider.
​

Matt rolled up Troy, a thug, and took his character sheet so I don't have his stats. I do recall he said, "Like Jayne but with knives."

The party has need of an engineer, technician and/or medic, since at the moment they're relying on reading the manual. "Hey we put the engine back together but there's this part left over, does it need that?" "Dunno, I can't find it in the index."

In choosing the ship, they had 21 points to spend on: Speed, Size and Flash. They chose SpdC Siz8 Fla1. It's extremely fast, of a decent size (64t), but inside was stripped bare, only an empty metal space. The engines took up about two-thirds the ship, and are very noisy. Then Roland sacrificed 6 wealth, and JJ and Troy 3 each, to improve the interior somewhat. Now Roland has a cramped stateroom for himself - "I'm the Captain!" - while JJ and Troy share a communal area... well, the upper cargo hold with some bunks in the walls. They acquired a proper navigation computer, some classified ex-RAF sensors, and some decently ranged comms with okay encryption. Nav6 SensA Comms55. The sensors will get them in trouble if they're ever pulled up and inspected.

They have advertised at the Isle of Man spaceport, and are planning to voyage to the safari planet in the Arcturus system, taking paying passengers on an adventure.

More in time...

 

[Kyle Aaron]

The PCs' planned destination...

Arcturus (K2IIIp) is a red giant star giving off large amounts of infrared, and relatively 113 times brighter than the Sol, varying by a few percent every 8.3 Earth days. It has 1.5 times mass Sol. It's an older sun, and the system has relatively less metals than Sol.

It is 11.25 parsecs from Earth.

Warning: Arcturus has a large relative to Earth velocity of 122km/sec. This makes the Earth-Arcturus journey available only to those with large delta-V craft, or willing to spend time on gravitational braking. The recommended route is through Arcturus V-Zeus, and adds 30 days to the in-system journey.

The Arcturus system has the following planetary bodies,

• Arcturus I, 2.1-2.3AU eccentric orbit, Nemesis, gas giant, 0.8M(J). No moons.
• Arcturus II, 4.9-5.7AU, asteroid belt
• Arcturus III – Jurassic, 9.13AU, large warm terrestrial. Claimed by Commonwealth, but has civilian Federation (US) presence.
  • 1.14G
  • two moons, small terrestrial
  • 1.4bar N-O atmosphere
  • 30-45°C.
  • 64% land, 36% water, 0% ice caps.
  • Day of 42hr
  • Plant and verterbrate land and sea-dwelling reptilian lifeforms, no mamals.
  • No substantial metal deposits.
  • Capital City (pop 102,468), Alpha (pop 57,800), Beta (43,777), scattered settlements
  • Spaceport at Capital City routine quality, repairs available
  • Government by five different corporations with shareholder/citizens voting. Dominant corporation Baille Institute (bioresearch).
  • No standing military, just private security.
  • Firearms prohibited except by permit within Capital City.
  • No major exports.
• Arcturus IV, 12.1-15.6AU, asteroid and comet belt
• Arcturus V, 18.61AU, gas giant, 1.1M(J), 2 small terrestrial, 1 small ice moons, numerous scattered rings and tiny rock and ice moons. Orbited by several navigation beacons.

 

[Golan2072]

A warp drive was invented in 2007

So we already have a warp drive working today? Yey

Alternate histories aside, I like the fact that the drive could work at the altitude of 48km - so you don't even need to get to orbit. Makes things simpler as you need to carry less fuel for take-off/landing. So does warp deposit you on a similar altitude above the target-world?

 

[Kyle Aaron]

Hey, it's an alternate history

The warp deposits you wherever you want to be deposited. It's not a jump, but a journey from A to B passing at FTL through all the points in between.

A warp drive forms a warp “bubble” around a craft. From within and into this bubble nothing can travel, and it acts as a frame of reference for the craft. All that's visible of it along the edges inside and out is the glow of atoms striking it and becoming plasma. The warp bubble can be shaped from within, and when one side is flattened, it rolls forwards at superluminal speed – 1,191 times light speed, in fact, or 1parsec per day. During this time, those inside the bubble feel acceleration in the direction of travel of 8.5msec-2, almost Earth-gravity.

The warp drive itself is small, and can be built with $5,000 worth of components. However, it requires high temperature superconductors and cooling with liquid nitrogen, so that fixing it is time-consuming, and its parts are not easily replaceable.

Activating it takes energy proportional to the area of the warp bubble, and the mass contained within. The longer the warp bubble takes to form, the larger its internal area. In practice, a large internal area is bad because it's more difficult to keep stable; a small internal area bad because its edges are “thinner”.

The energy required is also inversely proportional to the time taken to form it. It might seem that it would be good to take a long time to form the warp bubble to save energy, but as noted above, this will be more difficult to maintain, and the optimum time is a second.

The bubble's surface reacts to the universe around it. No energy or matter can pass through it, but space-time curvature will curve the bubble surface. The warp drive can adjust to this, but not too quickly. In practice, the warp drive can adjust to any decline of local gravity forces, but no more than 1ms-2 increase. So for example a craft could enter warp while in orbit around Earth, but if returning to Earth in warp, could not come closer than 335km. Attempting to come closer leads to bubble collapse, as below.

As noted, matter touching the surface of the warp bubble turns to plasma. This destabilises the bubble causing it to collapse, and implode on the craft. This means that a craft cannot safely create a warp bubble in atmospheres denser than 0.1% of earth's atmosphere, that is 100Pa or 0.015lbs/in2.

The implosion will utterly destroy the craft, and render it into fragments.

The craft retains its subluminal velocity relative to where it last entered warp, and when arriving at the target must have its own means of catching up to or slowing down there. For example, a craft warps from 500km above Earth to 500km above Mars when the two are in conjunction; Earth has an orbital velocity of 30km/sec, and Mars 24km/sec. So the craft will be travelling 6km/sec relative to Mars. Orbital speed at that altitude is 3km/sec, so the craft must lose 3km/sec of speed.

In practice, then, craft wanting to warp will launch to a level of low atmosphere (100Pa is found at 48km altitude on Earth), “aim” the craft, form the warp bubble, travel to their destination, dissolve the warp bubble, orient themselves, form another warp bubble and travel, and so on, until they reach an altitude of some few thousand kilometres above their target. If they have little relative velocity, they'll then let themselves fall, form another warp bubble to go backwards and fall again, until they have enough relative velocity; if too much, they'll do the same but with aerobraking and/or simply bleeding off speed.

That's why the description of Arcturus noted its large velocity relative to Sol. The PCs will have to use passing Zeus to bleed off some relative velocity, by taking a ballistic path past it, warping back and doing it again, and so on. At some point the ballistic path will be an eccentric orbit, they just wait until the point of their orbit where their velocity most closely matches that of an orbit about Jurassic, then warp again.