Hello! I've been lurking here a short time, and I'm very excited about this game. I'm trying to put together a first adventure, and I have a couple tech questions for you hard sci-fi pros.
This is a limited story arc for my group and me to get familiar with the system and the setting. The PCs will be "space truckers" on a hypercorp freighter shipping raw materials between habitats.
First, I wanted to have them do a spacewalk to let them roll a few dice and do something cool in a low-pressure situation (haha). I basically want to know how to hit their ship with something while it's traveling. If there was a bit of debris the size of a baseball drifting through the freighter's path, would the ship's sensors detect it before it struck? If the sensors did detect it, could the ship avoid it with thrusters without expending more fuel than it would be worth?
Next, let's say the crew arrives at a small hab or research station and finds the hab's orbit decaying. The hab's occupants don't respond to attempts to contact them. The crew would probably radio their corporate sponsor and ask for advice. The sponsor would ask the crew to go aboard and try to stabilize the hab's orbit. I'm sure the crew would rather wait for a commando team, but with the hab out of commission I'm guessing egocasting is out of the question, right? Or would a freighter have the quantum equipment necessary for receiving egos? Even if they could receive commandos, the commandos would have to use the PCs' bodies, so I'm hoping the PCs would resist that idea.
The other problem I see with trying to get the PCs into the hab is that they might try to nudge the wounded habitat far enough up the gravity well that it wouldn't fall any further by using the freighter itself. I might say that that will burn enough fuel that they can't get to their next destination, but so what? With the clock no longer running they can sit tight and wait for rescue. Is there any way I can thwart this cleverness if it happens?
Any other glaring problems with getting the PCs into the hab?
Thanks much!
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Some tech questions about my first adventure.
Wed, 2009-12-23 08:52
#1
descrii
Some tech questions about my first adventure.
Sun, 2009-12-27 16:03
#2
puke
Re: Some tech questions about my first adventure.
its pretty much up to you. if an object is actually in the ships path, theres a pretty reasonable chance they could pick it up on active sensors. if it is intercepting their path at an oblique angle, they might never see it. if it hit them from behind, they'd almost certainly not know about it until it happened.
space is big, and its hard to run into shit. today, we send probes through the asteroid belt completely unguided. on the other hand, its hard to spot small unpowered moving objects. things can move at very high speeds relative to you, and you cant realistically look everywhere at once.
i think you can transfer egos without a quantum farcaster, it just takes longer. not sure on that, though. pretty sure you need a ego bridge if youre not using a cyberbrain.
regarding moving a hab with your ship, you could always rule that the hab is too massive relative to the ships engines, and that the ship does not have enough thrust to move it significantly -- or that the hab isnt structurally sound enough to survive being pushed in that way. are the PCs structural engineers? do they know how to find a load-bearing section to apply force to? will they tear modules off the habitat or rip the whole thing in half?
Sun, 2009-12-27 20:49
#3
descrii
Re: Some tech questions about my first adventure.
Ah, thanks, good thinking about the structural integrity, especially if I use something other than the typical cylinder.
Actually I went another direction, as I ran the game on Sunday. After the spacewalk I had them encounter the drifting wreck of a blockade runner from the Fall. The ship had been employed to rescue humans from earth, but on the second attempt it got hacked and the bots and synths turned on the biologicals and murdered them all. The players came aboard without much prompting from me at all (fortunately the one playing the captain built him as an impetuous Han Solo type).
A couple minor earth relics were looted, bots were destroyed on both sides, the PC pod got hacked, then the reaper came out and chased them all out of the ship as hilarity ensued. My favorite part was when one player panicked during a fight and locked himself in a cabin as the rest of the players escaped out the airlock. He failed his stress test and got the shakes and wouldn't come out of the room for a couple minutes because of the -20 penalty he was suffering from stress damage until he mastered his fear a little. It was just a really nice scene that highlighted some of the strengths of the system.
Next time: back to civilization.
One thing I did notice was that it was a little difficult to prevent the uber-engineer in the group from making an army of robots remotely piloted by an army of forks without saying "cuz you can't, that's why." He's a good guy, though, and not out to break the game, so he restrained himself. I think the problem was that the players were on a ship, where they were pretty much beyond the reach of the law, so if they hacked the safeties off the CM and started building illegal stuff no one would find out unless they brought it all back to a habitat with them. It's not a problem, necessarily, just something to keep in mind... give the players a ship with a CM in it and they'll start hitting targets in space much harder.
edit: They actually found a number of guns on the blockade runner which they used in the fight, but when they got back to the habitat they spaced the guns, figuring it would be too tough to get them through customs.
Mon, 2009-12-28 03:58
#4
standard_gravity
Re: Some tech questions about my first adventure.
Sounds like a fun and exciting first game!
This discussion (or variants thereof) has cropped up many times on these fora and beyond. Generally, there are a few constraints. First of all, CMs need energy and raw materials, which may not always be available to the extent required (especially not on a spaceship where mass is kept to a minimum to save cost). Secondly, you need the relevant blueprints. If your PC is a robotic engineer, he may come up with his own, but this will take time. Otherwise, they need to buy them with credits or rep (and in the inner system, blueprints for illegal gear requires contacts/networking and the price will be much higher).
Thirdly, and more generally, whatever the PCs can do, the NPCs can too! Not to mention the joy as a GM to have the PCs bots hacked and turned against them :)
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