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In-Progress map of Whiskey

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eaton eaton's picture
In-Progress map of Whiskey
So, my players have made their way to Whiskey Station out in the Kuiper belt. Due to the distance, they'll probably be spending a nontrivial amount of time there, so I've been trying to flesh out the sparse details from Rimward. I've got an in-progress map and some ideas about the internal layout; a "fat" torus design, 1/2-km diameter, and a couple of central "tower" modules inside the station's rim would result in an effective population density close to downtown Manhattan's; coincidentally, the two stacked torus rings would each have about the same surface area as 3x5 manhattan city blocks. Thoughts? -- Updated with a link to the larger version...
ORCACommander ORCACommander's picture
Need a higher resolution
Need a higher resolution picture
eaton eaton's picture
Whoops -- I embedded the
Whoops -- I embedded the large version but didn't explicitly link to it. Fixed. Mostly, I'm curious if this particular design makes sense; it's closer to a squat cylinder with an inner structure than a classic "torus" but the numbers work out RE: what Rimward specifies.
eaton eaton's picture
Hmmm.
Back to the drawing board on this one; my unfamiliarity with some basic physics made a few of the planned elements (like ships docking on the outer ring) infeasible. Angular rotation to linear velocity is unforgiving. Will post updates if anyone's interested…
Chernoborg Chernoborg's picture
It's not bad in any really
It's not bad in any really unfeasible way. The original Stanford Torus was a rotating pressure vessel inside of a [em] stationary [/em] radiation shield filled with ore processing slag. Out this far they'd likely use the available ices. Then it's just a short hop onto a tram that matches the velocity of the torus to get inside. So you could dock on the outer rim if you wanted to. Or, just put a docking structure at the axis of rotation and use the towers as spokes connecting the dock to the torus. Th dock would still be rotating but the apparent gravity would be much less. Speaking of which, what gravity are you using for the station?
Current Status: Highly Distracted building Gatecrashing systems in Universe Sandbox!
eaton eaton's picture
Yeah, it's not a showstopper,
Yeah, it's not a showstopper, but it did force me to roll back some of the plans I'd been making for the "neighborhoods" that make up the rings themselves. Having docks and shipping hubs in the outer ring doesn't make a lot of sense if ships can't safely dock *on* that ring, for example. Based on the population figures from the book and a torus design, I've got it plotted out as about 450m in diameter, 240m "deep". That makes it a bit of a fat cylinder, rather than a classic "ring in space", but gives a lot habitable square meters for a relatively small spatial footprint. Spinning it at 1RPM or so would give the outer ring a quarter of earth's gravity, and the surface would have a linear velocity around 50pmh or so. I'll need to think about the tram solution: right now, there's basically one ring divided into two large "levels" — the inner and outer ring are structurally the same, but dividing them doubles the floor space of the station. Moving docking/shipping to the hub would preserve that, and I like the structural simplicity that results, but the tram would also make for a really nice thematic element. Hmmmm.
eaton eaton's picture
From a thematic standpoint,
From a thematic standpoint, though, I *really* like the idea of the tram being a dividing line between the docks/engineering/etc zero-g outer ring and the population-dense .25Gs inner ring. The more I think about it, though, I feel like the tram option would be a weird fit for a torus this size. The complete circumference is only about 1.5km, and it seems like keeping the two rings separated so one could spin and the other could stay static would add a lot of engineering complexity. Am I missing something?
Chernoborg Chernoborg's picture
Not necessarily, the space
Not necessarily, the space between the static ring and the rotating ring could simply be a gap with no connection between the two except when the tram switches between them. If you want some insurance that they don't collide, some strategically placed maglev style tracks would keep them apart via repulsion. A bonus is that it keeps the rotating mass low
Current Status: Highly Distracted building Gatecrashing systems in Universe Sandbox!
eaton eaton's picture
Gonna need to read up on that
Gonna need to read up on that to wrap my head around how the details would work (the coupling between the tram and the rings in particular—like you said, some sort of magnetic system to keep the rings from shifting would be critical). In the meantime, I've updated the map with an enlarged central hub to account for the shift in docking space… I'm starting to kick around ideas for the stuff that would actually be on-station, taking up space in the various habitable blocks. Hydroponic gardens, life support infrastructure, Hypercorp offices, bars/casinos/etc, pure residential space, etc…
eaton eaton's picture
Whiskey Notes
Just finished up a 7-session adventure set on Whiskey Station. It turned out well, and I was really starting to get a good feel for (my version) of the station. If anyone else is interested, I've put a number of the resources up in PDF format:
  1. Whiskey Station
  2. Docking Hub
  3. Warehouse
  4. Cairo Bar
  5. Public Theater
  6. Trio of NPCs
They have the scale marked, though the large-format map of the entire station is obviously just for perspective and positioning when people are exploring. The "blocks" and avenues in the rings correspond to Manhattan city blocks, and the population density is similar. Building it for that kind of scale made it easier to envision and describe things, and the number/letter designation for the blocks helped simplify the process of players orienting themselves. "It's on the C3 block, in the outer ring," etc. In addition, I roughed out a quick overview of different "neighborhoods" on Whiskey: The Hub Docks - Most ships drift around Whiskey at a safe distance of 4-5 kilometers and pop over via sleds or small shuttles, but some are willing to pay for actual docking space inside of the hub itself. Fast couriers are about as big as the hub can hold, and it's expensive for anything more than a couple of hours, but it's often the safest way to move contraband without risking a handoff in space. The hub properThe Zero-G center of the station. Physical arrivals from the hubs, small ship repair and maintenance work, large-scale fabbers are available rental. Lots of fast-turnaround trades happen here, and a handful of bars are good places to find workers. The main lift level is where the elevators from the outer rings dump off; it's a madhouse. Open Market Bazaar. Crazy downtown Tokyo shit. Dorian's, an XP recording studio and exotic morph shop, is here. Rumor has it the back room has… an interesting mix of specialty bodies. Planetspace Corporate / Planetary Consortium neighborhood, in the inner ring from A2-B3 including the B3 Tower. Mostly leased facilities owned by well-to-do locals and suspected committee members, though several corporations are working to acquire actual ownership of portions of Whiskey. Whiskey is the last wispy tendril of order, and there's a strong security presence for most of the corps here. They have limited control, though, and have to defer to the committee for anything major beyond property defense. Anthony Gilotti's shop is here. Uptown Higher quality residential accomodations—mostly biomorphs and the upper crust, includes two walkable parks that have been constructed from the O2 recycling and hydroponics infrastructure. Biomorphs who want to make a splash find rooms here, and it's a popular place to soak gatecrashers who made a big score and have credits burning a hole in their pockets. The Theater is here, as well as Anthony's Apartment. Crasher's Row Located in the Outer ring. Bars, hole-in-the-wall darknet facilities, gear shops and more. It has a reputation as the place for gatecrashing teams and last-stop Oort Cloud crews to have a last fling or get find like-minded mercs. Cairo Bar is here. The Pit Outer ring, A6-B6. Mostly station infrastructure, recycling facilities, and lots of shitty living quarters. Quite a few synths make their home here because their physical needs are... less demanding. The Warehouse is here.
nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture
Holy smokes... this is pretty
Holy smokes... this is pretty darn cool. I especially like the NPCs. Hat's off to you, sir/ma'am!
eaton eaton's picture
Thanks! The NPCs in
Thanks! The NPCs in particular turned out to be pretty fun; one of the new players ended up taking the role of Caleb rather than rolling up their own PC. He and Miriam could be an interesting duo for a pair of collaboration-minded players to double up on. The players are actually excited enough about the game that there's talk of fleshing this stuff out a bit and putting out a fan-published Whiskey Station guide, similar to the Stars Our Destination guide. You know you have a special group when they print up "I Visited Whiskey Station and All I Got Was This Lousy Morph" t-shirts.
Vladimiravich Vladimiravich's picture
I'm pretty impressed with the
I'm pretty impressed with the work you put into the map. I'm also running a campaign that began on Kepler station (in the Continuity starter adventure) and has moved to Whiskey station. I've printed a copy of your map and would like to steal/integrate your guide to Whiskey station into my own adventure that I am running. And just out of curiosity, did you write down any detailed overviews of your own campaign aboard whiskey? some plot hooks and ideas for events aboard the station would be fantastic.
Chrontius Chrontius's picture
After all the praise, I'm
After all the praise, I'm dismayed to discover the PDFs are no longer at the links specified. D:
eaton eaton's picture
Ugh!
I literally *just* reshuffled my Dropbox account and didn't realize I broke the links. Will get them back into the right spot this weekend, thanks! Update—back online. Thanks! The team is actually currently on a side mission to Habitat On The Rock; when they get back they'll probably have enough credits to their name to get off of Whiskey more permanently, or put down roots there. If they choose the latter, I'll probably be fleshing things out a bit more. Super curious to find out what you all come up with; I've actually been considering gathering up all of the background material that's gone into it as a sort of fan-made splatbook for Whiskey and a handful of (very tiny) locations in its general viscinity.
eaton eaton's picture
Vladimiravich: I've focused
Vladimiravich: I've focused mostly on a couple of key ongoing conflicts on Whiskey for backgrounds milk run missions, and one or two secret storylines for the team to unearth. According to the canon material, Whiskey has a couple of criminal factions but ID Crew is the resident infocrime/forknapping group. Their attempts to keep Nine Lives from muscling in on their "turf" gives some interesting options. The night cartel and ID Crew have a symbiotic relationship on the station in my scenario; the Cartel is the strongest local criminal faction, and provided most of the muscle when there are real conflicts. ID Crew helps them out when there's a need they specialize in. Most corps have an active presence, even if it's only to have in-person representatives to court gate crashers and similar folks. Whiskey also serves as a useful neutral ground. One non-canon hypercorp with a strong Whiskey presence is Lars-Meuller JSC. LM is a small but hungry group that's particularly keen on acquiring anything resembling infoweapons that pass through whiskey as gate crashers shuffle through. Locally, there are a couple of salvage crews that spend their time stripping the wrecks of any transports, shuttles, microhabs, etc in the general vicinity. In our continuity, the general asteroid density in the region means that there are more than a few very tiny communities, as we'll as the husks of attempts to start them, within a week or so via fast transport. The salvage crews can be extremely competitive, and rumor has it a few might even engage in piracy when they catch an isolated community or shuttle and they think they can get away with it. The ruling council on Whiskey is anonymous: it's a sort of invite only board that works to keep things stable: everyone benefits from that, and it's the common ground all of the power blocks share. Among permanent residents of the station there's a lot of speculation about who is, isn't, or has previously been on the board, but as long as nothing explodes too badly it's just idle gossip. In my continuity there are at least three separate Firewall servers active on Whiskey: the ones the players have been in touch with are headed up by Edward Kim, a high-rep connections guy who tends to recruit assets by leasing stolen egos with needed skills from ID Crew; and Noize, an infosec specialist who has some deeply paranoid approaches to ego integrity based on past forks' encounters with the exsurgent virus. The big "secret background" that's underway involves the three NPCs linked in the posts above; Anthony is top dog in the night cartel and runs a classic "import/export" operation under the cover of an antiques shop specializing in earth relics. He makes a big show of being a self-centered hedonist thug, but most of it is for show: he's funneling all of his assets into building a self-sustaining colony in a distant star system only he owns the gate coordinates for. He wants it to be a "lifeboat" for transhumanity when things inevitably go south in Sol. He'd sacrifice anything, himself included, to keep that plan on track. His two notable underlings are actually indentured to him: Caleb is a skilled intrusion specialist infomorph with wiped memories and a chip on his shoulder. Miriam is a theater troupe organizer who acts as Anthony's respectably bohemian soft skills specialist. She has a fairly hard to detect ghost rider module, and Caleb resides there most of the time when they do jobs for Gilotti. Neither of them know about his Big Plan, but know his funds are going to something off the books. They have a good working relationship with him and are the "face" of Gilotti on the station, but might just double cross humid it meant their freedom. Miriam in particular is in the shit with Nine Lives, and considers ID Crew's dominance on whiskey a safety feature. The PCs, when they first arrived from Kepler, made contact with an old criminal contact (Cam Winston) with more ambition than brains. He asked them for help recovering a shipment stolen from Gilotti, but it turned out he was the one responsible – he'd been trying to scam his boss and was working with one of the salvage crews. How the PCs handled that stuff determined Gilotti's initial disposition towards them.
Vladimiravich Vladimiravich's picture
Lots of good ideas you have!
"In my continuity there are at least three separate Firewall servers active on Whiskey: the ones the players have been in touch with are headed up by Edward Kim, a high-rep connections guy who tends to recruit assets by leasing stolen egos with needed skills from ID Crew; and Noize, an infosec specialist who has some deeply paranoid approaches to ego integrity based on past forks' encounters with the exsurgent virus." Stealing that! XD I might use your idea of the conflict between the ID crew and nine lives as a potential plot point as well. If you where to write a guide book to Whiskey station (like "The Stars Our Destination) then that would be amazing. I'm running an distinctly horror campaign that is a direct sequel to the Continuity Adventure. When my PC's got off Kepler station and destroyed both the station and the Istari. Before leaving they salvaged the flight recorder from the Istari and farcast the data over to the Argonauts representatives and the Firewall cell over at Whiskey station (only one person on the team is a firewall agent, the rest are Argonaut researchers) When they arrive at the station one year and 6 months later. They will be contacted by both organizations. The Argonauts will want to hold the PC's for extensive questioning and temporary quarantine due to fear of the PC's being infected. Firewall would want to recruit the entire team to deal with consequences of the team sending them the flight recorder data. When Firewall got flight recorder data they sent a team to investigate the Istari's previous whereabouts to discover where it had picked up the exsurgent virus. The team discovers a large derelict warship. The firewall team moves on board to plant a bomb to destroy the vessel. Unfortunately they are attacked by exsurgents and one by one become infected. The derelict vessel is destroyed but not before one of the infected team manages to ego cast over the whiskey station after reactivating the vessels ego casting facility. On board Whiskey station the infected firewall agent starts killing right away using their new found async abilities. A whole tower on the space station is evacuated and security moves in to take out the berserk async. In the mean time all live feeds to that part of the station are shut down by station security to prevent word getting out that there is an exsurgent on board the station. When the players investigate the scene and get ahold of the security footage they (i'm still working on this part) 1. discover that some of the security personnel where infected, which will initiate a mission to find and take down the infected security personnel oooorrrr 2. the infected firewall agent got away, which will initiate a manhunt to find the infected firewall agent before starts killing again. In the meantime the ID crew or nine lives is leading their own manhunt, as a powerful async can be a quite profitable in the right market. The surprise twist to make things worse is the exsurgent infected agent(s) is also a TITAN fork that believes its Trashuman.
eaton eaton's picture
Sweet! I ended up moving to a
Sweet! I ended up moving to a completely different arc after Continuity — I made some bad calls on in-game timing due to early misunderstandings about travel speed, and put them on Whiskey just a few weeks after Continuity. Realizing I'd botched that was actually what got me started down the road of documenting and fleshing things out better. In my campaign they got involved with swatting down a few local pirates early, and stumbling into a deeply suspicious ring of spacefaring ne'er do wells. In the end, it turned out to be a pile of forks of one guy — aptly named "Ricky Ricky" — who was trying to bootstrap his own little criminal gang on the cheap. Along the way, they got their hot little hands on a chop-shopped SLOTV that they used to jet around the general vicinity of Whiskey. They spent some time turning it into a sort of small-scale home base, and the resident infomorph started tricking out its onboard computer systems so he'd have computer to spin up many forks of himself. …That's when they discovered that the shuttle already *had* a preponderance of onboard compute, and that even with administrative overrides on the shuttle, he couldn't get access to it. Turns out, though, that the whole Preponderance Of Rickys thing was being orchestrated by a semi-autonimous TITAN infowar weapon trying to bust itself out of a Lars-Mueller research facility. It copied itself onto a charter shuttle and "leaked" juicy information about its routes in hopes that a pirate would capture it and take it off the grid where it could lay low. Our heroes ended up driving it right up to Whiskey, parking it on the station's mesh, and giving it time to incubate before realizing there was something very, very, very not okay going on. It turned out alright for them, but Lars-Mueller was after them as well. I really like your continuation of the Continuity infection vector; in a large space like Whiskey it'd be particularly terrifying…
nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture
eaton wrote:
eaton wrote:
The team is actually currently on a side mission to Habitat On The Rock;
I'm curious what this mission is (and how it goes).
eaton eaton's picture
Quote:I'm curious what this
Quote:
I'm curious what this mission is (and how it goes).
A couple of background bits. If anybody playing in the Cairo campaign is reading this, well, you're only spoiling things for yourselves. ;-) --- In our campaign, the mystery of how HotR pays its bills and what's going on in the inaccessible-to-the-public parts of the habitat have a simple answer. Buried deep inside the asteroid is a sixth Pandora gate. HotR exists as a cover for the only known privately-held gate in the Sol system, and only a handful of trusted business partners are aware of its existence. There are rumors, of course — as per the Gatecrashing book, many people suspect there are other gates and the belt is as likely a location as any. Firewall has been monitoring HotR for a couple of years, but thus far hasn't managed to place an asset on staff or penetrate its security; the non-public portions of the habitat are airgapped and exist on a private secondary network with no wireless access. Unfortunately, luck runs out for HotR's owner; on one of their gate excursions, only one member of the expedition team returns alive… the async. Not only that, she comes back *wrong*. On return, she tears up the HotR security team, demonstrates some extremely troubling manifestations of high-level Psi sleights, bleeds from her eyes, and upon mulching security proceeds to walks over to the gate and start keying in the coordinates for a previously unvisited destination gate. That's about the last that the security team catches before cameras in the gate room go dark and everything is security-quarrantined and locked down. In a panic, power for the habitat is killed to prevent the gate from spinning up; civilians and nonsecurity/nonresearch staff are evac'd to a separate section of the habitat, and it's sealed off — with the cover story that there's an infrastructure failure and they'll need to make do under "lifeboat" conditions while it's repaired and help is sent. In reality, communication with the outside world is cut off and HotR's owner scrambles to figure out how to contain the problem without letting any bigger fish in the pond know what exactly is happening and how the gate is involved. After a day of failed attempts to secure the gate room, station security falls back and a terrifying stalemate is reached: The few remaining members of the security team have set up a kill zone in the corridors leading to the gate room, hoping to keep it contained until a better plan can be formulated The Async is injured but controls the gate room, lying in wait and eviscerating any security members who try to enter. It continually probes the network, attempting to restart the habitat's primary power systems while security tries to keep it in check. Meanwhile, in the outside world, Firewall proxies on Whiskey station grow concerned that Something Has Gone Down™ on HotR. A team of sentinels is sent to investigate, but one of the proxies (Edward Kim) believes they may be in over their head. He snags several previously untapped assets, slips them onto a shuttle passing near HotR, and pressgangs them into service as the B Team. That's our gang — the PCs in this campaign are the unlucky B Team. By the time they arrive, nearly a day after the first Firewall team, about 1.5 weeks have passed since the incident. HotR is broadcasting automated messages warning passing ships not to dock, its farcaster has been dark since the incident, and there's no word back from the first firewall team. They must: 1) Get into the locked-down habitat 2) Navigate through the HotR facility, avoiding or defeating any automated security systems they encounter 3) Find their way into the secure private portion of the habitat where the Gate is located and figure out what happened 4) Kill the Async and prevent it from reactivating the habitat's power systems 5) Optionally help the survivors of the first Firewall team escape with information about the gate There are a lot of ways to mess up; being compromised by the exsurgent strain that infected the Async, reactivating the station's primary power without realizing it will allow the gate to spin up and Horrors From Elsewhere™ to pour through, or simply getting mulched by the Async (who's sleeved into a pretty beefy Ghost morph and possesses at least one or two Psi-Epsilon sleights). They managed to *just barely* pull it off, allowing the power to be restored but killing the async, then fighting through compromised industrial drones in the habitat's infrastructure core to permanently disable the primary fusion reactor. They got the hell out of dodge, bringing a badly injured member of the first firewall team and two cortical stacks with them. They limped back to Whiskey and are laying low — very low — while Firewall sorts out the intel, the owner of HotR rebuilds, civilians are finally evacuated, and apologies for the "industrial accident" are made to the visitors who spent a week trapped in the "safe" portion of the hab. It's affording the players their first real chance to be in contact with Firewall, and setting up a lot of interesting future stuff on Whiskey and in the Kuiper belt in general. Along the way I plotted out maps of portions of Habitat on the Rock, basing many of the public areas on Chicago's Science and Industry Museum with a dash of O'Hare's Airport's attached hotel for public visitors. The actual areas with the gate are classic "secret research facility" stuff, and the only path between the two portions of the station is a two-phase security airlock with extensive neural image and brainprint-based security checks. Even without the exsurgent disaster, it could form the basis of an interesting Oceans' 11 style heist mission, too.