A MacGuffin is the thing that motivates the characters, NPCs or advances the story. This thread is for MacGuffins of all kinds.
The Rinland Sequence
The Rinland Sequence is a useful MacGuffin for adventures: what appears to be a way of charging up ordinary tantalum into stardrive tantalum using merely a decitesla NMR spectrometer. Put a piece in the machine, run the sequence a few hours. No need for offworld tantalum mines and isomer separation, just buy the cheap cast-off metal. If the Rinland sequence actually can do this it would upset the geopolitical landscape. Any nation or corporation willing to become a space power could make its own stardrives. The only limiting factor would be shipyard capacity. Running tantalum mines on King and in other inhospitable places would become unnecessary overnight. Or someone keeping it secret could get fabulously wealthy from minting stardrive tantalum. This is the kind of secret people, corporations and governments kill for.
The sequence itself is nothing much: a file of numbers denoting how a powerful NMR machine should act. It can be printed out, kept on a chip or just emailed. On its own it looks innocuous, and even together with the information that it is a NMR program its real purpose remains hidden.
The Rinland Sequence
Dr Rinland was annoyed. There was a small extra peak in his spectrum that didn’t decay and shouldn’t be there – something must have contaminated his sample. He took the other tube of tantalum hexafluoride and put it into the NMR spectrometer. He really didn’t want to be held up by tantalum, he wanted to go on to indium: that was where the real research was. Not that many people worked on heavy nuclear resonance these days but he was pretty certain his approach could find some new and exotic resonances. Tantalum was on the list just because everybody used it as a standard reference.
The new spectrum also had the extra peak. Even more annoyed he ran one of the earlier pulse sequences. The spectrum looked like it should except for the persistent peak that now stood out like a wart on the neat curve. The tube looked OK, but maybe there had been a microscopic leak somewhere. He decided to call it a day.
Next morning Dr Rinland was feeling hopeful when he arrived in the lab. The annoyances of yesterday were unlikely to persist today, when he was well rested and ready to go on. Dropping a tube into the machine and running the last sequence (a long and weird one his software had come up with) he relaxed in his chair, dreaming about finding a Goodman state in indium. That would be something.
The peak had grown twice as large.
Now he was starting to worry. Maybe the equipment was at fault? He ran the calibration tests and they came out clean. He re-ran the cylinder. The peak was now three times higher. It was a damn odd peak too, it wasn’t decaying at all. It was as if whatever it was became more prevalent every time he ran the pulse sequence. He tried an earlier one: no increase. He ran the sequence: increase.
As he shifted from annoyance to interest some sensible part of his mind recalled the old research saying, “a month in the lab can save you a one hour trip to the library”. Surely that peak was catalogued somewhere. He ran a query and got an instant answer: Ta-180m. Just an isomer of the vanilla tantalum nucleus. It almost seemed obvious: his sequence was for some reason shifting a few of the atoms into an excited stable state. Great, that would make a really good paper.
Then he froze. He was making tantalum 180m. He was making stardrive tantalum.
The new spectrum also had the extra peak. Even more annoyed he ran one of the earlier pulse sequences. The spectrum looked like it should except for the persistent peak that now stood out like a wart on the neat curve. The tube looked OK, but maybe there had been a microscopic leak somewhere. He decided to call it a day.
Next morning Dr Rinland was feeling hopeful when he arrived in the lab. The annoyances of yesterday were unlikely to persist today, when he was well rested and ready to go on. Dropping a tube into the machine and running the last sequence (a long and weird one his software had come up with) he relaxed in his chair, dreaming about finding a Goodman state in indium. That would be something.
The peak had grown twice as large.
Now he was starting to worry. Maybe the equipment was at fault? He ran the calibration tests and they came out clean. He re-ran the cylinder. The peak was now three times higher. It was a damn odd peak too, it wasn’t decaying at all. It was as if whatever it was became more prevalent every time he ran the pulse sequence. He tried an earlier one: no increase. He ran the sequence: increase.
As he shifted from annoyance to interest some sensible part of his mind recalled the old research saying, “a month in the lab can save you a one hour trip to the library”. Surely that peak was catalogued somewhere. He ran a query and got an instant answer: Ta-180m. Just an isomer of the vanilla tantalum nucleus. It almost seemed obvious: his sequence was for some reason shifting a few of the atoms into an excited stable state. Great, that would make a really good paper.
Then he froze. He was making tantalum 180m. He was making stardrive tantalum.
The Rinland Sequence is a useful MacGuffin for adventures: what appears to be a way of charging up ordinary tantalum into stardrive tantalum using merely a decitesla NMR spectrometer. Put a piece in the machine, run the sequence a few hours. No need for offworld tantalum mines and isomer separation, just buy the cheap cast-off metal. If the Rinland sequence actually can do this it would upset the geopolitical landscape. Any nation or corporation willing to become a space power could make its own stardrives. The only limiting factor would be shipyard capacity. Running tantalum mines on King and in other inhospitable places would become unnecessary overnight. Or someone keeping it secret could get fabulously wealthy from minting stardrive tantalum. This is the kind of secret people, corporations and governments kill for.
The sequence itself is nothing much: a file of numbers denoting how a powerful NMR machine should act. It can be printed out, kept on a chip or just emailed. On its own it looks innocuous, and even together with the information that it is a NMR program its real purpose remains hidden.
