jasonbrisbane wrote:

Hello All, So I am looking to take my players into a Gate and onto a space ship that shouldn't be where it is...

What size of ship are you thinking here? Not an LLOTV, obviously, but are you thinking like, long-haul freighter? Scum barge? USG Ishimura?

If it's a Scum barge, the still will be an industrial complex every bit as valuable and important to the crew as the mining decks. It'll be located next to the narcotics research and production deck, or the medical deck, or both. Want to freak the hell out of your players? Throw them onto a ship that looks like it was built by Transhumanity... But there's gravity. And try as they might, they can't figure out where the fuck it's coming from.

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:

If it's a Scum barge, the still will be an industrial complex every bit as valuable and important to the crew as the mining decks. It'll be located next to the narcotics research and production deck, or the medical deck, or both.

As if any scum barge/swarm with more than a dozen scum aboard would have only one still. Artificial gravity without spinning would be unnerving in the extreme to veteran EP players, yeah, though unexplained/handwaved A-grav is such a common trope in sci-fi that if you go that route I'd strongly encourage the prologue take place in a very obviously spun or microgravity setting. If you want to go Gatecrashing, that, I imagine, means the Vulcan gate or a second gate after the initial jump. Though thinking on it more...ever played Prey? Mediocre game, but having obvious artificial gravity walkways at odds with each other would do the trick, and has the advantage of being immediately sensible and phenomenally beyond anything EP transhumanity has developed. Just be prepared to destroy the ship if you're not prepared to completely upset the status quo of EP, but since when has there ever been a threatening, mysterious alien ship that hasn't blown up by the climax? ...Seriously, I'm having a hard time thinking of any. That are operational in the story, anyway. The opener in Alien came pre-blown up, arguably

Yeah, Firewall would be one concern. Of course, if word got out to any degree, you'd probably have singularity seekers and exhumans swarming the thing. Or trying to. And Ozma going nuts, the Jovians getting twitchy, the factors probably having something to say on the matter... Obviously it wouldn't immediately happen, but unless the thing is destroyed, the tech will eventually get out to some extent, even if just as a rumor that some lucky argonauts are working on something particularly esoteric. My point was more as advice for Jason, though, since huge setting paradigm shifts aren't something to jump into without being absolutely sure. EP's a fair whack of work to get up to speed on as it is, and something like that being reverse engineered would be a lot of work to pull off, is me warning. Not a bad thing, just worth noting. And Hollywood's sadly had a distinct "science is bad" trend for a long time. I blame the USA's anti-intellectual streak of the last few decades, personally, but I also blame the fact that "everything goes back to how it was" is just easier to write, frankly. Going back to ship basics, though, one thing to keep in mind is that in terms of look and build, the ship will reflect its intended orbital range. Purpose-built, after all. Just using our system as an example: Ships meant for inside a Sol-Mercury range will have heavy radiation shielding and be as bright and high-albedo color-wise as possible, water layers and other absorbtive materials in the hull to deal with the radiation, relatively modest solar arrays for power due to the sun's proximity balanced by the everpresent problem of heat dispersal. Think the ship at the beginning of Avatar (one of the only good parts of that movie...) where the ship had the heat arrays that were glowing from how hot they were. It's likely any ships meant for near-Coronal activity would resemble Coronal habs, being a huge electromagnetic generators surrounding huge tanks of water surrounding the working interior to protect it. You might see a lot of ships that are basically shaped like a huge umbrella too, creating their own protective umbra behind a huge shield of heat sinks and reflectors. And every ship would have a ridiculously shielded panic room(s) for Coronal Ejections and solar flares. You're also going to see ships with truly massive amounts of reaction mass. Fun fact: it takes almost twice as much Delta-V to go from Earth to the Sun than it does to go the other way around thanks to conservation of momentum, so ships will have to boost through that. Vacsuits will be closer to Mercury suits or hardsuits, since EVA in this environment gets lethal fast without a lot of protection (and even then, most EVA is done through teleoperated or jammed bots for exactly that reason) Heading toward Sol-Venus, the rad shielding would abate slightly, but it's still a very high solar activity zone, so high-albedo ships with lots of radiation shielding would still be common. Further out, you'd see ships more like those meant for Sol-Earth, our "standard" designs. One note on overall design: large ships are going to have a lot of struts, particularly inside the Belt, since it's the structural reinforcement that, on top of being cheap and effective, offers the least surface area. Again, heat management is a big problem to overcome. Sol-Earth, Earth-Luna, and Sol-Mars orbits are where you're going to see the most ship diversity, and the most uglies, ships cobbled together from other ships. Conversely, this is the heart of the corporate solar system, so a lot of ships are made by the same shipyards and there's more uniformity of design here than anywhere else in the system (excepting perhaps the Corona and Jupiter). This band of orbits, due to population and size, is the busiest in the system by a huge degree. A lot of that region of space is still a junkyard from the Fall and any number of other conflicts, and you're likely to see ships here having more point-defense and active debris countermeasures than anywhere else in the system (military ships notwithstanding). This being the core of the PC, you'd also see some of the largest and most luxurious ships, though even these are likely to look more spindly than sci-fi ships usually do. Again, heat-management. That said, there's no reason you can't make your struts out of diamond nanothread latices and twist them into something pretty, or paint your hull in all the high-albedo colors you want. (Makes me realize, scum barges probably look like the early 90s on the outside...) Between Sol-Earth and Sol-Ceres you're going to see steadily enlarging solar arrays and more and more anti-micrometeorite armor. This is also where reaction mass:other mass is going to be at the lowest, at least for ships that are operating within this band or orbits as opposed to transferring in- or out-system. And you'd see more ships with landing claws in this band than elsewhere, though with how spread-out the Belt is in reality, don't bank on that too much. Sol-Jupiter, this is where you start seeing some serious dichotomy splits. If the ship is meant to operate within Jupiter's Magnetosphere (which takes up something like a third of this entire orbital band, I believe) you'd see the return of high-albedo, heavily rad-shielded ships to deal with the gas giant's insane radiation. Micrometeorite shields and debris countermeasures make a big return near Jupiter too: there's a lot of rock flying around that big red gravity well, and the Jovians being the Jovians, lots of wrecked ships who though they could get by without paying the gravity toll. And, of course, any actually Jovian ship is going feature the red cross and blue circle prominently, right next to their overcompensator array of weaponry. You won't likely see any but the most secure ships looking like coronal designs, and there aren't any umbrella ships, but if you're going to see designs anything like the sunships, it'll be here. Outside the magnetosphere, however, ships are going to have bigger and bigger solar arrays as you approach the edge of effective solar power. You'll also start seeing darker ships, though only just, for the same reason. It depends on if the operators feel style is worth a bit more thermal engineering (and since the Greeks and Trojans are largely autonomist, flip a coin if you're unable to decide). You're also seeing fewer and fewer homogeneous designs as we move from the more-Corporate shipyards to the more-Autonomist ones. This is also where you start seeing things like mines. Not the explody-kind, but the kind that made you curse the heavens in TIE Fighter with laser weapons up the wazoo. It's mathematically predictable what vector a ship going anywhere in the system will be going, so it's not that hard to seed a few hundred beam weapons with tracking capability, solar arrays, and basic orbit-adjusting capabilities with a relative handful equipped with something heavier to punch through laser-abated armor. Not really a ship design per se, but worth mentioning as something any blockade runner is going to have to figure out a way to deal with that. Sol-Saturn orbit, solar panels are at their proportional apex, and you might see a few with focusing mirrors on the bigger ships. The further out you go from here on, the more internal power sources you're dealing with, particularly hydrogen-based reactors. Saturn's magnetosphere is nowhere near as punishing as Jupiter's, but you'd still see appropriate amounts of rad shielding for ships meant to operate within it. The outer edge of this orbital band, you're going to start seeing the more non-conventional ship designs en masse, heralding that we're approaching the rim. Ships that are nothing but processor loci with engines, ships that are sleeved, ships that are nothing but an engine and simple superstructure and crewed entirely by synthmorphs. Comm arrays are getting bigger too, and ships are much more self-sufficient, particularly outside Saturn's Sphere of Influence. There's comparatively fewer opportunities to stop and resupply out here, and it's only getting more spread out. By the time you reach Sol-Uranus, you're well and truly in Autonomist space for the most part, and solar panels, when they exist at all, are heavily augmented with focusing arrays. Past here you don't get much in the way of busy traffic beyond long-haul ships (and anything not operating within Uranus or Neptune's SoI is going to effectively be a long-haul ship by design). Nuclear reactors of various sorts are the main source of power out here, and volatiles are about the only thing that you can say is plentiful, so that means milking simple hydrogen, methane, ice, and so on for all its worth. This is also one of the last bastions of ships that have significant portions spun for gravity, since so many out here live their lives mostly or completely in microgravity. This means that you see a lot more cluster-style ships rather than central-spindles. One note: ships that are designed for going to and from Uranus' SoI are going to have noticably more-than-average reaction mass to account for the delta-V to burn into or out of the vertical orbit correctly. From Sol-Neptune and out, you're unlikely to see any solar arrays, but comm arrays have taken their place. Ships out here are also lower-albedo -- most people who come out here don't want to be found anyway -- and increasingly designed for synthetic or vacuum-capable crews exclusively. Heat management isn't the camel on your back that it was inner system here, but its cousin Scarce Resources has moved in and isn't paying rent, so a lot of ships out here are either essentially micro-habs or conversely just meant to jump between habitats in Neptune's orbit or in the Greeks or Trojans. Insofar as brinkers and autonomists this far out have anything resembling standard equipment, extensive simulspace processors and hibernation pods have joined fire suppression and other essential systems. At least where those essential, life support-based systems haven't been done away with. Beyond that, while big ships aren't unheard of, the sheer lack of mass and vast distances involved, mean you're going to see more small ships that are glorified probes, taking their simulspacing or hibernating crews from rock to rock across the course of months or years. All power is internal; the Sun's just another, somewhat brighter star at this point. Of course, this is autonomist space, so any rule is going to be rife with exceptions just because fuck you, man, you don't tell me what I can and can't do out here. It does take comparatively little delta-V to move out here too without any significant gravity wells to deal with, too, as long as you don't mind taking the slow and steady. Obviously you mentioned your ship was on the other side of a gate, and it could well be of alien origin, but if you want to play the "familiar to transhumanity except" card, letting the PCs intuit the ship's intended range would be one way to amplify the strangeness. Especially if you blend two or more regions in interesting ways. A ship operating out beyond a gas giant 30 AU out but built like a sunship is a puzzle all on its own. You can also extrapolate from this for more exotic systems, like one built to withstand a star that is throwing out more CMEs than normal, or a truly long-haul ship meant to go between two binary suns, or skim a hot Jupiter gas giant...or hell, if you're giving it super tech and really want to awe some players, have the the PCs realize after a few hours that this ship is somehow protecting them from a fucking pulsar. (I am hardly an astroengineer, so if I got something off-base in all this, do let me know. I love learning this shit)