NimbleJack3 wrote:

Thanks guys - looks like my original dramatic mental image doesn't reflect what actually happens, so it's back to the drawing board.

Well I for one like that dramatic image and i think you shouldn't be afraid of applying rule of cool to fill in gaps in scientific knowledge. Steal shadowdragons idea posted above, throw some NPCs in there, add a bit of necromorphs...uh, exsurgents...badda boom. If one of your players asks why this mining ship isn't automated, slap them with a space roach. ...or just explain that shadowdragons plane(copyright) is outfitted both for scientific surveys and for mining, and these scientists have balls of artificial diamond to be snooping around a dangerous environment.

ShadowDragon's idea sounds pretty good. Have a huge spaceplane (I really like the idea!) that dives into the upper atmosphere to harvest He³, stays there for *as long as you need* and then gets back into orbit with a rocket propulsion system. An other idea could be: The players are (part of?) a repair crew that has to go down to fix something on an aerostat before a huge storm hits. They don't have time to get back into orbit and have to outlast the storm on the aerostat

Claustrophobic, creaking vessel designed for efficient gas mining (not transhuman luxury, go climb in a simulspace!) that is filled with horrifying abominations that lurk... all of this sounds like a delicious scenario seed!

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:

... There's some important things to note. This atmosphere does [i]not[/i] have an oxidizer. Traditional engines will not keep you aloft here the way they will on Mars or Venus. If you're going to dip down into the air, your loiter time is limited by the velocity you had coming down, unless you've done something truly novel and equipped your spaceplane with electrically-driven propellers.

Alternative propulsion method: nuclear thermal jet. Draw atmospheric gasses in through intakes, heat them with a nuclear reactor, dump superheated gasses out the back of your aircraft for thrust. :D

Strictly speaking, an LLOTV type vehicle (which can be configures as space planes) shouldn't need an oxidizer. They're either hydrogen-oxygen or metallic hydrogen which operates by un-metallic-ing the hydrogen to produce thrust. I'm not sure how the turbofans on the aerostats are supposed to work, but that sounds like developers' problem, not ours. And since a LV MH LLOTV can hold like, 350 transhumans they can probably haul a lot of gas. MH generates enough thrust to get off Saturn. A fusion rocket does not (going by core's x2 gravity in thrust rule, with Saturn at .91). So a skimmer/cargo vessel would probably be a LLOTV-type frame with probably some serious metamaterials hull and advanced surge protection.

NimbleJack3 wrote:

Isn't the whole point of going down there to come back with a cargo hold full of He3? You're throwing away valuable morphs, too.

I wasn't talking about gas mining, I was talking about a firewall op to clear out a gas giant aerostat.

NimbleJack3 wrote:

In that case, why not simply remote-pilot a bomb into the aerostat instead if you're simply going to let it fall into the depths once you've painstakingly cleaned it out?

I like the way this guy thinks.

Aerostat bouyancy systems tend to be passive, for just that reason. Aerostats stay bouyant because they're gigantic balloons full of human-breathable atmosphere, suspended in a thick atmosphere (gas giants, Venus,) where that atmosphere, contained inside the structure, floats. Basically, they're Cloud City, but they're not held up by jets or antigravs or anything, just pressure differential and bouyancy principles. I mean, in THEORY, you could order every airlock on the city to open at once, assuming no mechanical interlocks to prevent just that. The folks aboard would have a lot of time to stop that, though.

Heh. I, uh... I got taken by a strange mood. [url=https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qzYS44O_vMqH5GaRpENwOHnWSSxLnA8ixnol... Dippers.[/url] [h1]Gas Dippers[/h1] [b]Inspired by NimbleJack3[/b] Most people who know anything about the topic (or, indeed, have their muses look up the topic,) can tell you that there are generally two schools of thoughts as regards extracting and utilization of the gaseous resources of gas giants such as Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter. Those are the “Aerostat” and “Skimmer” schools of thought. In the first school of thought, vast floating platforms, some as big as (and/or intended for use as) cities are left to float in the atmosphere, doing their thing, collecting and compressing the gas they were made to harvest (usually He3), and transferring it to vessels which dock with them (or “land” on them, usually,) and then boost back into orbit. In the second school of thought, large numbers of small drones, transhuman-sized Cloud Skimmers, dive into the atmosphere of the gas giant, collect their load, and boost back up. Aerostats have the advantage of scale, and can become habitats in their own right, but have the disadvantage that a major failure destroys everything at once. Drones have the advantage that you can replace any one or few drones with relatively little investment. There is a third option, however, somewhere between using a swarm of tiny automated drones and building a cloud city. That option is to use a Gas Dipper - a fully-fledged spacecraft in its own right, whose purpose is to descend into the atmosphere of a gas giant, process a lot of He3, and then boost itself back into orbit. Gas dippers can bring back more per trip than dozens of drones can, and have the advantage that being space-ships, they can mount scientific experiments too large or massive for a small cloud skimmer drone, and carry crew and passengers. Here’s an example of two of them: an old, hypercorporate gas dipper, and a new, Titanian microcorp skimmer. [h2]V.S. Jupiter[/h2] So named because this aging vessel was originally designed for use in and around the largest of the solar system’s gas giants, Jupiter was one of the few Russian assets to escape the devastating and decisively short conflict in the Jovian system at the end of the fall. Russian survivors fueled the vessel and burnt out of Jovian orbit, arriving in orbit of Titan. The survivors hoped to push their way into positions of power in the Volkov energy cartel, but found themselves quickly marginalized and their ship under the control of the hypercorp. Jupiter is a creaky, old, heavy, industrial, thoroughly Russian design. Only nominally aerodynamic, it’s largely an unpressurized shell containing processing equipment and storage tanks, with pressurized catwalks to access vital systems and bays, and a capacious crew section up front. The ship is known to creak ominously as it descends into the atmosphere of Saturn, though with generous use of smart matter and a few strategic braces, the risk of a breach is allegedly negligible. The ship has two and a half drive systems, making for a complicated but versatile ride. Jupiter’s main drive is a dual-phase, early-model fusion rocket. In exoatmospheric actions it operates much as one would expect, using the incredible heat from a powerful fusion plant - fusing the very same He3 that it harvests from gas giants - to superheat hydrogen (conveniently, also a product of gas giants,) into a super-energetic plasma state, which it then expels for thrust. In atmospheric mode, however, it does much the same thing, except with direct intake air instead of stored reaction mass. This mode of operation needs much more gas than exoatmospheric use, but because gas is an abundant resource even in the upper levels of a gas giant, this is not a problem. As a result, this ‘nuclear thermal jet’ mode of operation allows the Jupiter basically unlimited operation time in a gas giant’s atmosphere. The secondary engine is a simple metallic hydrogen rocket, used to accelerate the Jupiter back up to orbital velocity and to escape from the atmosphere. Jupiter can be frightening for new passengers or crew, but if you have credits to spend, Volkov is more than happy to have you along, whether you just want to take a tourist flight into the business end of a gas giant, want to conduct scientific experiments, or want to jump out an airlock at a specific place and time without questions being asked. One of Jupiter’s curious graces is her speed - the nuclear thermal jet is capable of pushing the craft to a spectacularly fast speed all on its own, so unlike other dippers like Quicksilver, she can evade a fast-approaching megastorm without resorting to abandoning the atmosphere and burning for orbit. [h2]C.V. Quicksilver[/h2] If not for the successful C.V. Quicksilver, Cronos Ventures would likely have sank completely in the wake of the Cloud Holm disaster, instead of limping on as it does. Quicksilver is a fantastic blend of old and new, greatly resembling a fantastic vessel out of zeerust science-fiction. It’s an enormous, silver-bodied delta-wing spaceplane, sleek and aerodynamic, built with liberal use of metamaterials and smart materials. Quicksilver was designed not to bull through the clouds, but to soar through them with something approaching majesty. With massive He3-processing and storage tanks located in her gargantuan wings, leaving the main body free for a cockpit at the front and a generous passenger section, ahead of a large, Orbiter-style hold mounted in the middle, able to open enormous doors on the hull both dorsally and ventrally, to allow for deploying a wide variety of payloads, or for modular mission pods (including, if nothing else more pressing is available, another gargantuan He3 storage tank) to be mounted. Quicksilver can be said to be a gargantuan aircraft first, and a spaceplane second, and this is never more true than when you see her atmospheric engines active. The designers of Quicksilver chose deliberately not to use a dual-phase fusion rocket/thermal jet as was used on Volkov’s Jupiter, and so they looked to the past for a novel alternative: the propellor. Largely forgotten in an age of ionic drives, the Macroscale Skimmer design team at Chronos realized that nobody had ever taken a look at what could be done with a propellor, taking full advantage of modern smart- and metamaterials. In profile, Quicksilver resembles a toy - two propellors mounted on the aft of each wing in a pusher configuration, each prop stretching from wingtip to wing root. But Quicksilver is the size of a megajumbo jet. Her two props, which deploy out from the wing and retract into the rear surface when not in use, are fully-modern smart materials, capable of withstanding the incredible velocities they’re driven to, and allowing Quicksilver to loiter in the atmosphere of Saturn indefinitely. For exoatmospheric flight and return to orbit, a simple metallic hydrogen rocket suffices. Quicksilver is capable of flying in Titan’s atmosphere as readily as it flies in that of Jupiter. She’s theoretically capable of landing, if a sufficient runway were built, but owing to the size of the props, landing and take-off under power are challenging. Thanks to the smart material in use, her landing gear can extend far enough, but as yet her trips to Titan have ended as have those her trips to Saturn - with a rocket-powered return to orbit. In theory, she could also land in a glide configuration with her gear at a much shorter, more reasonable length, and even take-off in such a configuration under rocket power from her metallic hydrogen rocket.

Interesting thread. I’ll lay out that Uranus might be the better candidate for large scale He-3 mining, given a cost benefit analysis between safety and distance. Uranus has a much more benign atmosphere than Saturn, but—of course—less convenient in distance. Also gives a good reason to tour the outer Outer Solar System. I'd posit that these stations routinely receive raw materials sufficient to fabber rockets sufficient to lift cargoes into orbit for retrieval and transport. No sense in shipping down complicated parts. A rocket with a cargo payload kicked off one of these stations would have a long way to fall before its engines needed to kick in. Brute force engineering. Here’s a question—what morphs should be available for the occasional farcast to one of these stations? Are biomorphs useful at all? I’d posit that a few might be in cold storage for the infrequent visit by supervisors and repair crews. What customizations would morphs have? This is a good situation where PCs 'cast in in morphs they did not design, what you see is what you get, and whose capabilities are predetermined based on projected need.

Something I've been trying to answer that doesn't deserve its own thread I think: why would spaceships in EP ever have crew sleeved in biomorphs? Whether they be warships or cargo haulers or cloud skimmers? It's basically way more efficient and safer to have them in synths so you don't need to worry about stuff like like support. Which is kinda disappointing to me since a scenario like Alien would be much less interesting (and less scary honestly) if the whole crew are just egos sleeved in robots. The only answer I've come up with is that we as humans generally prefer meat bodies because we've been living in them for thousands of years, and simulating having food or sex only gets you so far. But of course thats what a filthy, backward Jovian would say...

NimbleJack3 wrote:

Hypercorp ships usually do just use infomorphs to save on pesky things like life support or synth maintenance or hollow space within the hull. And you get to delete and re-fork the indenture once they think they're done, too!

Nothing wrong with an infomorph ship. The idea of using actual biological organisms for space trucking is a little extravagant, especially when the machines can be flexable and self repairing. But using a professional instead of an indenture, and letting it learn from it's experiences... that will get you a better and more efficient crew as time goes on. Better to have a few professionals than dozens of laborers. If it can be done by a moderately skilled infomorph indenture that can be wiped and reloaded, there is no reason not to just use a synthetic intelligence instead. There might be some wiping though. maybe crews would edit out the down time, so they only have memory of significant events. Keep a rolling recording of their consciousness, and give the actively running copy access to the last 30 minutes before whatever scheduled event or unscheduled alarm they need to deal with. wipe the rest. No boredom, every day on the job is full of interesting things to do, learn fast without forgetting anything... That downtime could be spent in a virtuality instead, but why? Why not just crew with a dedicated fork or morph, and whatever productive you'd be doing in the virtuality could instead be done hab-side by someone (perhaps another fork of you) that does not need to worry about crewing the ship at all.