So I'm toying with some ideas for a new campaign and am looking to shamelessly steal from Bobby Dee (http://www.farcastblog.com/2013/03/082-breach.html). His idea is of a dead Brinker station on an ice/metal mass in the Oort cloud--basically a self-sustaining station a third of a lightyear outside the solar system, meaning farcasting there takes four months each way (though, of course, goes unnoticed by those being casted).
So in my version, the station has been dark ever since the Fall, but in actuality a few people back at mission control knew that the sleeving facility was still up and running, only they never sent anyone out of concerns over whatever destroyed the rest of the station. For whatever reason, the time has finally come to take a look at the station, and the players are asked to make the journey.
I'm planning to build it into a larger campaign where they create alpha forks to go off while they do the rest of the adventure, thinking that in ~8 months of game time, they will reappear and we'll have that adventure. However, I'm going to surprise them when after only 4 months, their forks step out of a Pandora Gate and want to talk.
It turns out that the disruption that destroyed the station was the creation/discovery of a Pandora Gate, which the players' forks were able to access and return home (after covering their tracks a bit first, of course). At this point, the question for the players turned to "What do we do with this gate?"
The physical location makes it less-than-ideal for most operations, of course, but I thought to balance it with an extremely extensive address book or some other feature that makes it worthwhile for whatever power would claim it.
So (finally) my question is this: what would such a gate be worth to a Corp or government? I'm trying to think of some kind of price tag for it, but for the life of me can't imagine what it would be worth, even as a trade for something else. Of course, in the short-term, the answer to it's worth is "Way more than the player's lives," but that goes without saying.
What would you pay for one?
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What would a new Pandora Gate be worth?
Fri, 2013-04-19 22:46
#1
What would a new Pandora Gate be worth?
Sat, 2013-04-20 21:25
#2
A Pet
It ain't stealin' if it's free.
Honestly, it reminds me a lot of Bruce Sterling's brilliant Shaper/Mechanist short story "Spider Rose." When faced with an object of inestimable subjective value, you would need a price made to fit the person selling it - different people will have different prices, and you'd have to shape the offer to what they want.
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[url=http://farcastblog.com]Farcast, an Eclipse Phase yearblog[/url]
Sat, 2013-04-20 23:25
#3
It's a stretch for me to
It's a stretch for me to believe that EP folks got a whole station 1/3 of a light year away.
Their ships do an AU a week. That's over 20,000 AU (a 40 year trip by modern ship).
You probably need to bring it closer?
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"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."- Isoroku Yamamoto
Mon, 2013-04-22 09:39
#4
The annual investment of .1
The annual investment of .1 to .5% of the Consortium's GDP, I'd say.
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Thu, 2013-04-25 09:00
#5
I was going to say. The most
I was going to say. The most distant stations are mere thousands of AUs away--still far enough?
Fri, 2013-04-26 05:45
#6
Maybe it was a shipt sent out
Maybe it was a shipt sent out a bunch of years ago to become a station? It was suposed to arrive a while ago and then someone would farcast back but no one has?
People think it's still there, but no one wants to spend the resources to check?
That said, it's worth a lot because it's a Pandora Gate. They cost hundreds of thousands a minute to use, and yeah, a four month trip out is a bit long but even that isn't that much of a slowdown on the number of people who want to use one. You might have to charge a bit less but it's still worth more than a whole boat of PCs lives.
Fri, 2013-04-26 08:19
#7
would it have to take 40 years?
I'm thinking if that was their set destination with no other in-system stops, why couldent the ship just continue to accelerate and acceperate, then spend 2-3 years slowing down, maybe get there in 4-5?
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"what do I want? The usual — hundreds of grandchildren, complete dominion over the known worlds, and the pleasure of hearing that all my enemies have died in highly improbable accidents that cannot be connected to me."
Fri, 2013-04-26 10:01
#8
Baalbamoth wrote:I'm thinking
A spacecraft has to accelerate its own propellant. If you carry enough propellant to accelerate for 3 years, you're not really going to be able to accelerate in the first place. Or, you're using an engine with such low thrust that you won't get their in the timeframe you're suggesting anyway. (Ion engines can accelerate for years at a time efficiently, useful for space probes)
Fri, 2013-04-26 13:29
#9
Baalbamoth wrote:I'm thinking
Propulsive efficiency drops off if the exhaust speed is very high (in the case of say pure fusion particles in the lowest propellant use scenario) vs. mixing in a bunch of hydrogen to increase thrust.
[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Propulsive_efficiency...
So you can squeeze out a more peak velocity on a long trip by using just fusion particles (bring lots of extra Helium 3) and little/no propellant (say hydrogen), but it might not be as much of a win as you're probably thinking. Also, since you know its a long trip you can use a relatively small fusion rocket to save mass (and thus gain it back with lower acceleration but higher final velocity). Just bring lots of fusion fuel.
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"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."- Isoroku Yamamoto
Fri, 2013-04-26 13:31
#10
brinkers, never say die, never really think things through...
yeah, and hey these were brinkers, they weren't planning on coming back so with a one way trip more fuel less problems.
and forgive me for being not so astrophysical but I thought in space with no resistance once you started to accelerate you continued to accelerate till you encountered something or reversed thrust..
is that wrong? now once your going godlike miles per hour your biggest problem isn't getting to the planet, its slowing down enough to land.
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"what do I want? The usual — hundreds of grandchildren, complete dominion over the known worlds, and the pleasure of hearing that all my enemies have died in highly improbable accidents that cannot be connected to me."
Fri, 2013-04-26 13:33
#11
Baalbamoth wrote:yeah, and
Still way too far out in my opinion. And their sleeving facility would be decades out of date (if it even could be called that).
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"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."- Isoroku Yamamoto
Fri, 2013-04-26 19:26
#12
Looking at Sunward, the
Looking at Sunward, the Níngjìng is the "most distant artifact of pre-Fall humanity" at 31 846 AU or 0.503 light years. (Tyche, some 50 000 AU or ~0.79 light years away, is said to have received a single probe with results that "brought more questions than answers." Perhaps a probe now non-functional probe, or a probe that failed en route?) The most distant known habitat is the cluster of ships around the Tycho Brahe, 8000 AU away.
I don't think that a pre-Fall vessel could make it to a point 0.33 light years away from Earth in a reasonable amount of time and set up a habitat with technology compatible with the cutting edge of humanity. (When did resleeving come about?) I don't think that a post-Fall vessel would, either.
Make it 0.03 light years away, and it would be quite doable. The distance is the only problem I see with the project, which otherwise is quite gameable.
Fri, 2013-04-26 20:59
#13
Magic, it solves every problem.
well, the other possiblility is use magic, um, I mean TITAN tech. somebody comes across a sleeving center signal way out in the middle of nowhere and no one knows how it got there or who built it.
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"what do I want? The usual — hundreds of grandchildren, complete dominion over the known worlds, and the pleasure of hearing that all my enemies have died in highly improbable accidents that cannot be connected to me."
Fri, 2013-04-26 21:12
#14
A passing TITAN might have
A passing TITAN might have made a stopover in the ship too. But if you want something that far out, it'll be primitive as it took a long time to get there. That's okay. I guess the question is how much will the PCs be interacting with the far away place? Start with that and use it as your basis for needing to explain/work out. Do you want a working station out in the middle of nowhere? Somewhere the PCs can use as a hidey hole (with lag) or...?
Also, go complain to Oversight because I'm stealing your idea.
Fri, 2013-04-26 23:10
#15
not really,
well if he's saying he wants a Pandora gate to be there, it doesn't have to be primitive and they don't really have to take a long time to get there. TITANS stop off on their way out of our solar system, simple explanation. What gets confusing is why in the heck would they build a sleeving station?
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"what do I want? The usual — hundreds of grandchildren, complete dominion over the known worlds, and the pleasure of hearing that all my enemies have died in highly improbable accidents that cannot be connected to me."
Sat, 2013-04-27 10:31
#16
Pandora gates are valuable
Pandora gates are valuable enough that if one pops up in a contested volume, factions will go to war over them. Their economic impact is something on the order of the Saudi oil fields; multiple industries and economies can be fueled by a gate.
It's the sort of thing where discovering it, if you're private individual and not supremely resourceful, is more of a curse than a blessing. The carbon prospector who found the Chat Noir gate has probably been murdered multiple times and wishes they'd never discovered the damned thing.
You should be asking yourself not what other parties will pay for such a discovery, but what lengths they're willing to go to to get it, and what will happen to the PCs if they don't play ball. >:) Because it will be obvious to any PC that no finder's fee they're offered will even remotely approach the worth of the gate.
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J A C K G R A H A M :: Hooray for Earth!
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Sun, 2013-04-28 04:49
#17
just rub some more Phlebotinum on the brinkers...
have some...
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppliedPhlebotinum
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"what do I want? The usual — hundreds of grandchildren, complete dominion over the known worlds, and the pleasure of hearing that all my enemies have died in highly improbable accidents that cannot be connected to me."
Sun, 2013-04-28 11:50
#18
When I say primitive I mean
When I say primitive I mean the ship sent by the earlier generation, the bodies are proto-splicers and discount synths, missing a lot of things for weight issues, the safe space is a 2x4x4 meter box with atmosphere, outside is the Ort cloud, there's enough power to send some people home but not all and so on.
You can add a lot of menace by building a mini-gate facility there though obviously designed for some form of extra horrible exsurgent. There's evidence that these things were there too. But they're totally gone now, it's safe. Honest.
That kind of thing.
Wed, 2013-07-10 11:35
#19
Just a side note, in response
Just a side note, in response to comments questioning the plausibility of a brinker outpost that far out, the entry was amended with slightly saner numbers. Just part of the service.
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[url=http://farcastblog.com]Farcast, an Eclipse Phase yearblog[/url]
Wed, 2013-08-28 18:09
#20
What if someone stumbled onto
What if someone stumbled onto the gate while gate-crashing (or gate-hopping)? The team was perplexed by the strangly familiar sky and then by the faint radio waves of transhuman origin, then excited when they realized what they had found. The gate could be connected to another solar gate through a number of jumps with one or more being intermittent at best (currently all known paths from a solar gate are closed/under control of an unfriendly faction, to make ego-casting the only way for the duration of the campaign). They were able to get a few necessary pieces of equipment through (like a nano-fabricator, a power-source, and enough important parts to make an ego-cast/resleeving setup), before the gate path was cut off, leaving them with a gate which is barely within the reach of trans-humanity's own technology to reach (though you might need a custom neutrino tranceiver of extraordinary power and size to make the jump; the gate station probably would only be able to do irregular out-going casts unless they had a ridiculous power source available).
I'm not sure what the limits of ego-cast range are, but I figure that most standard rigs are not designed for ranges much greater than our solar-system's diameter. They would need a significant source of resources to make a good station that can ego-cast that distance, either at the site of the gate, or from a reachable exo-planet.
Fri, 2013-08-30 03:32
#21
Baalbamoth wrote:and forgive
Acceleration always require force. In space without air resistance once you accelerate to a certain speed you will keep that speed. Constant speed, not constant acceleration. What's more is that the higher your speed, the higher your mass becomes and thus the higher your inertia and the more force is needed to accelerate you even further.
Anti-matter spaceships should still be able to reach some fairly impressive speeds, as the fuel shouldn't take up as much weight.
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