Sunday, July 8, 2012

A restart, of sorts!

Sooo - we'll try this. I'll be posting here and on G+, and you are welcome to post comments either place. I just won't expect any here, and be pleasantly surprised if they do manifest. :D

Stuff that's happening:

I'm working on the adventure to be included with In Harm's Way: Pigboats. It's called Turmoil in Truk, and it's set in the Caroline Islands in September 1942. This will be in effect a short campaign rather than a single session game. It has pregen characters which you can use as and if you wish, NPCs with personality and goals, and enemy resources.

Klax is working on a supplement for StarCluster 3 - 5 ships, with floorplans and 3D models. It's designed to show the flexibility of starship creation in the game, so they will be a greatly varied bunch. I have seen one so far - a 10,000 ton resource extraction (mining) ship.

Albert and I have started work on a new game. I have referred to it before - it's currently called "Lowell was Right!" and it's a hard SF game, with the science being the state of science at the end of the 19th century. Development of that science is extrapolated to a time much closer to our own. Elements and molecules are are knots in the ether rather than discrete particles. The universe is some millions of years old rather than billions, and the sun shines from it's own gravitational collapse. The further out a planet is from the sun, the older it is, but life has grown on all these worlds, and some still retain life. The asteroids are the remains of an exploded planet, not chunks of rock left over from the birth of the solar system. Mankind is in space, but so are the other peoples of the solar system. Hopefully it will interest one or two people beside Albert and I.

-clash

6 comments:

  1. re: Turmoil - could you write a catchy blurb setting up the adventure? I'd like to try this out with my players, but might need something snappy to get their interest. One of them is WWII history buff, so he ought to be a soft sell, but the rest...?

    re: Lowell - this definitely sounds creative and unusual. What will the spacefaring aspects look like? I'm personally hoping not too much like Flash Gordon or Space 1889

    Chris

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Chris!


    Turmoil is a mission to penetrate and photograph installations on the
    islands in Truk Lagoon, the "Gibraltar of the Pacific". The lagoon is the home of the Japanese Combined Fleet, and is stuffed with very powerful warships as well as juicy merchantmen and tankers feeding Japan's all-conquering Navy. The lagoon is ringed with reefs, and is very difficult to get into, and far harder to escape from. It is set in September 1942, less than a year after Pearl Harbor, and the sub is carrying faulty torpedoes which no-one in the brass believes is faulty.

    With Lowell, I will forward Albert Bailey's synopsis of the available spacefaring technologies:

    "I redid some of my calculations, and it looks as though a material with both negative inertial and gravitational mass is workable. This is good, because negative gravitational mass alone causes difficulties; items with different inertial to gravitational mass ratio travel at different speeds in the same orbit. By constructing a craft with a mass to antimass ratio of nearly unity, it is possible to travel into space and through space with relatively little energy. The hitch is, it is important not to jettison any additional mass, or it becomes impossible to get back down without using energy or jettisoning (presumably expensive) antimass.

    Two additional etheric inventions would allow for travel through space. The first is ether turbines, allowing for reacting against a large equivalent mass of ether. (So far as I know, the density of ether is undefined, as long at it doesn't normally interact with matter.) The other is a material allowing for the conversion of light to electrical energy with high efficiency (>50%). With perfect efficiency you could accelerate 70 tons (or much more with inertial mass reduced) of spacecraft at 0.005 gravities. This would get you to Mars or Venus in a month or two with 1 square kilometer of solar panels. Travel to the outer planets would require getting your equivalent mass very low, because you wouldn't have that much solar energy that far from the sun.

    While this is a good means of travel in space, it won't get you into orbit. I have three possibilities. The first is "braided" hydrogen. Braids are introduced into the etheric knot of a hydrogen atom, adding energy. It would be useful to have the material be a liquid at room temperature. Under proper conditions (heat, pressure, sound ?) it breaks down into regular hydrogen and releases energy, producing a propellent with a specific impulse at least 3 times greater than hydrogen-oxygen rockets.

    Another possibility is a good stored power source. A material with a very high electrical breakdown would allow supercapacitors with a very high energy density. This energy could be used to power a mass driver, most anything being used as reaction mass.

    A final possibility is to allow the material with negative mass to break down under proper conditions, releasing energy. This would also solve the problems caused by the need to avoid losing too much mas by rocket exhaust.

    Both the "braided" hydrogen and the antimass breakdown have the feature that they might eliminate the need for ether turbines, which I rather like."

    -clash

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ah, so more egg-heady than flash-gordony then. Gotcha!

    Chris

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yeah - it's "Hard" SF for 1898, set in something around our time. :D

    -clash

    ReplyDelete
  5. I rather enjoy this blog. For the record, and do read even if I don't have a lot to say. Brain busy with move, writing, art, H&S2E and so on :D

    ReplyDelete