• Welcome to the new COTI server. We've moved the Citizens to a new server. Please let us know in the COTI Website issue forum if you find any problems.
  • We, the systems administration staff, apologize for this unexpected outage of the boards. We have resolved the root cause of the problem and there should be no further disruptions.

Quarantine, containment and not sneezing the natives to death.

B

Botcho

SOC-12
Knight
Hello folks,

Long time fan, first time traveller player. My character, a crusty Ol' genius of a doctor, is faced with the challenge of chief medical officer-ing a mixed bag of alien explorers as we attempt to survey the depths of uncharted rimward space. We anticipate contact with virgin populations as we go and our ref was kind enough to hint that the book "guns, germs and steal" my lend some insight on the challenges we'll be facing.

The germs part falls under my character's purview. Do you, dear Traveller veteran, know of any cannonical tech, cautionary tales, adventures and/or articles that can help me get a grip on the OTU's trials and triumphs with infectious micro-nasties.

Google and I are doing our best to wade through the available online material for any hint on third imperium quarentine and containment protocols, tools and preventitive measures but its slow going and the game begins in the next couple of days. In the mean time Doc Gore can cobble something together out of bio-sniffers, atmo analizers, and mobile airlocks but that all seems so, well, 20th century.
 
Annic Nova deals with a disease that leaves a ship derilict, along with details of how the adventurers who find it get infected by the disease.

Signal GJ deals not with a disease, but with a life form that could conceivably pose a threat to your ship itself.

JTAS #5 features a mini-adventure, "THE WEREWOLF DISEASE," dealing with a tech accidentally infected with a disease with interesting properties.

JTAS #13 has an article suggesting some ways to handle disease in the game.

JTAS #16 features a mini-adventure, "THE DAY OF THE GLOW," dealing with adventurers who find themselves on a world in the midst of a virulent plague.
 
There are two T4 adventures - one where a lost scoutship comes across a world in the grip of a plague - bio-engineered by a nutty end of the world type group. The other is about a scout contact mission on a new world when plague breakes out and they get blamed for it. I will dig out the books later.
 
Yup, I knew there had to be a plethora of good references out there. I am certain this reading material will give the insight needed to make playing a first contact Doc entertaining for all concerned.

I and my companions thank you noble Travellers.
 
Last edited:
Botcho said:
We anticipate contact with virgin populations as we go and our ref was kind enough to hint that the book "guns, germs and steal" my lend some insight on the challenges we'll be facing.
Click to expand...

The book is "Guns, Germs and STEEL", although "Guns, Germs and Steal sounds more appropriate to an RPG setting. :)

Virgin populations are pretty rare in universal history. (If they are all virgins there won't be many of them to find in the second place. In the first place, if I was going to travel to the ends of the universe for women, "virgin" wouldn't be in my search criteria.) :)
 
@D.W: yup I felt "steal"was a better descriptor and somewhat less redundant than "steel"

So here is my trouble guys. I am in the position of trying to make distinctions between TL 15 and 16 medical tools and processes. I am looking for tech protocols both active and passive that can help safe guard a Xeno-population against the pathogens that will be introduced by my menagerie of a crew.

My sense is that at TL 15 use of medical nano bot swarms to facilitate sopisticated organ regeneration/replacement is possible in a well turned out field operation. Would it be too far of a reach to assume at TL 16 Analisys of an immediate alien environments and production of fail safed biotechnical nanites acting as counter measures/competitors, immuno boosters or outright predators of the local micro fauna should be possible. The emphasis here is on the fail safe programming of these critters. This is not experimental tech, every nanite generation would be well calibrated to leave a neutral footprint once their usefulness had expired.
 
Botcho said:
@D.W: yup I felt "steal"was a better descriptor and somewhat less redundant than "steel"

So here is my trouble guys. I am in the position of trying to make distinctions between TL 15 and 16 medical tools and processes. I am looking for tech protocols both active and passive that can help safe guard a Xeno-population against the pathogens that will be introduced by my menagerie of a crew.

My sense is that at TL 15 use of medical nano bot swarms to facilitate sopisticated organ regeneration/replacement is possible in a well turned out field operation. Would it be too far of a reach to assume at TL 16 Analisys of an immediate alien environments and production of fail safed biotechnical nanites acting as counter measures/competitors, immuno boosters or outright predators of the local micro fauna should be possible. The emphasis here is on the fail safe programming of these critters. This is not experimental tech, every nanite generation would be well calibrated to leave a neutral footprint once their usefulness had expired.
Click to expand...

You obviously have zero idea how defective software is and how clueless the majority of programmers are concerning how not to develop defective software.

If nano-techonology ever gets out of the lab into everyday use, we are doomed.
 
david.wendelken said:
You obviously have zero idea how defective software is and how clueless the majority of programmers are concerning how not to develop defective software.

If nano-techonology ever gets out of the lab into everyday use, we are doomed.
Click to expand...

What are you talking about? Just look how successful the AI program was on Kinunir!;)
 
Techniques for contacting minor human races without wiping them out unintentionally was developed long ago in the wake of the Plague of Duskir. AFAIK there is no description of just what those techniques consist of, but they were implementable at TL12, so they should be even more effective by the Classic Era.


Hans
 
david.wendelken said:
You obviously have zero idea how defective software is and how clueless the majority of programmers are concerning how not to develop defective software.

If nano-techonology ever gets out of the lab into everyday use, we are doomed.
Click to expand...

Oh, I am painfully aware of just how good we are at turning wonderful abstract algorithmic solutions into bad code. When and where there is no need for rigorous error free code none will be provided. We are simply to lazy, distracted, and fearful to do the work needed to approach such problems. But we are, what, TL 7, 9 on our best days. By TL 12 we've made some headway on problems that have frightfully small margins for error. I suspect by this stage most of our code monkey work has been out sourced to the expert systems, agents and intellects. While not inspirational this work will be profoundly better written as, among other things, the sheer number of "man hours" put in to the debugging process will be orders of magnitudes higher then we bionts can afford to spend on it.

As we move through TL 13-15 these "coding agents" will go through a rather brutal ecconomic selection process. Those that can't perform up to the constantly rising bar of keeping us alive as we insist on moving farther and farther outside of our comfort zone will be abandoned for something that can.

Yes all the above is weak rationalizations of technological advances I couldn't possibly understand but the implication of having a TL + is that we have gotten better at solving the problems of TL -. Given that, my attempt at finding the point we Develope the tools to approach a problem as complex as a biotechnical nannite solution to the xeno-pathogen problem that is reliably footprint neutral in the mid term is a heck of a lot more entertaining than a ignoramus bluster thinly masked as an insult on my intelligence ;)

For those of you still with me, is TL 16 too early for nanite programming complex and reliable enough to positively effect an immediate alien invironment for both sides of a first contact scenario? This would require the ability to efficiently identify, accurately predict and temporarily neutralize potential vectors while not permanently harming the host environment.
 
Botcho said:
For those of you still with me, is TL 16 too early for nanite programming complex and reliable enough to positively effect an immediate alien invironment for both sides of a first contact scenario? This would require the ability to efficiently identify, accurately predict and temporarily neutralize potential vectors while not permanently harming the host environment.
Click to expand...
Actually I think it is far too high.

Your bio-nanites have to be genetically modified viruses and bacteria or even completely artificial biological 'machines' - nano scale 'mechanical' machines are a thermodynamic impossibility.

I have long been of the opinion that the various drugs presented in Ct are actually such tailored bio-nanites.

I have also long been of the opinion that way back in the history of the OTU the human genome was deliberately modified to make everyone much more resistant to disease. Otherwise ship crews jumping from world to world would be constantly exposed to pathogens to which their body's have no defence - no antigens. A TL9/10 development, certainly no higher than TL11.
 
mike wightman said:
Actually I think it is far too high.

Your bio-nanites have to be genetically modified viruses and bacteria or even completely artificial biological 'machines' - nano scale 'mechanical' machines are a thermodynamic impossibility.
Click to expand...
Wrong, Mike. Only fast nanoscale machines are thermodynamically impossible, but the nanoscale machines themselves are not. It may require some interesting environmental modifications (like mild emp's) to charge them, tho... And even then, they're going to need to use some environmental means of power transmission - glucose oxygenation is a good candidate...

Self-replicating grey goop nanomachinery is bordering on impossible, and fast grey goop is well over the line.
 
Ok - the fast stuff that is popularised in shoddy sci-fi is thermodynamically impossible ;)

I doubt if in the real world when we eventually make nano-scale machines that they will be distinguishable from engineered viruses.
 
aramis said:
Wrong, Mike. Only fast nanoscale machines are thermodynamically impossible, but the nanoscale machines themselves are not. It may require some interesting environmental modifications (like mild emp's) to charge them, tho... And even then, they're going to need to use some environmental means of power transmission - glucose oxygenation is a good candidate...

...
Click to expand...

Tesla power source? One you have to walk near (in civilization) once a week min but probably on a daily basis.

A special door way that you walk through and it charges them up

Dave Chase
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top