2012 Conspiracy

[kafka47]

I have been toying around with resurrecting my Near Earth Traveller Campaign in Sept. In which, we follow the Traveller timeline up to First Contact with the Vilani in 2100AD. This is a game of intrigue and spies abound, as players work for different national governments but eventually become recruited by the UN and the mysterious Black Eagle Corporation (yes, there are shades of ME in there).

Plot so far...
1969 Brezhnev assassinated. And, embarks upon a Moscow Spring following selection of Kosygin as GenSec. Think what happened 20yrs later...
Mar 1969 Soviets land on the Moon
Jul 1969 Apollo 11 tragedy (Command Module & LEM explode)
Aug 1970 Nixon & Kosygin end the Vietnam War.
Jan 1973 Nixon wins re-election...Stagflation...America in decline. Soviets (now democratized) are ascendant.
Apr 1977 Lunar base established. H3 mining solves the "Energy Crisis".
May 1980 Cold Fusion established
Jun 1981 PRC launches its first Manned Missions
Jan 1984 World Wide Recession forcing the adoptation of Newer technologies and displacing the old
Mar 1989 American-Soviet-EEC mission to Mars.
May 1995 Mars colony established.
Jun 2001 SETI discovers a repeating loop pattern underneath a standard frequency (immediately hushed up by the major powers) from the Galactic Core.
Apr 2010 Exploration of the Asteroid Belt by Chinese-Soviet teams.
Jan 2012 the default present.

 

[kafka47]

Now, I need some help filling in what happens up to 2012 but consulting Wikipedia for 2012 some interesting facts emerge...

January

• January 31 - 433 Eros, the second-largest Near Earth Object on record (size 13×13×33 km) will pass Earth at 0.1790 astronomical units (26,778,019 km; 16,639,090 mi). NASA studied Eros. Eros could serve as the first Intra-Solar System Jump test

February

• February 5 - Super Bowl XLVI will be played at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana. FIrst time that NFL & the CFL have teams that reach the Superbowl together.

April

• April 17 - The United States will cede wartime control of the military of the Republic of Korea after 50 years and dissolve the Combined Forces Command. Two distinct military commands (South Korea and the United States) will operate in Korea during wartime, rather than one unified command under the Combined Forces Command. Korea then seeks peaceful unification.

 

[kafka47]

June

• June 18 – June 23 – Turing Centenary Conference at the University of Cambridge, in honor of the mathematician, computer scientist, and cryptographer Alan Turing, the last day of the conference being the hundredth anniversary of his birth.[1] The "Code" that SETI Scientists discovered...is finally broken it is in form of Ancient Babylonian...

July

• July 27 - Opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics begins in London at 7:30 pm UTC, 8:30pm BST.[4]

November

• November 6 - The United States Presidential, Senate, and House of Representatives elections. The America First Party wins a landslide.

December

• December 3 - Jupiter in opposition.
• December 21 - 11:11 UTC. Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, Summer Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.[5]
• December 21 - The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, notably used by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization among others, completes a "great cycle" of thirteen b'ak'tuns (periods of 144,000 days each) since the mythical Creation date of the calendar's current era.[6] On this day the Long Count date at creation—written 13.0.0.0.0 in modern notation, equivalent to August 11, 3114 BC in the proleptic Gregorian calendar—is repeated for the first time in a span of a little over 5,125 solar years.[7] The completion of this cycle and the repetition of the previous Creation's Long Count ending date have been central to various 2012 doomsday predictions since the 1960s. Academic researchers have not concluded that the ancient Maya themselves attached similar significance to this point in time.[8]
• December 23 - An alternative date for the completion of the thirteenth B'ak'tun in the Long Count calendar, calculated using another version of the GMT correlation[9] which is supported by a few Mayanist researchers.[10]
• December 31 - The Kyoto Protocol will expire.

 

[kafka47]

Unknown dates

• Ireland will cease analogue television broadcasts.
• China will launch the Kuafu spacecraft.
• Pleiades, a proposed super computer built by Intel and SGI for NASA's Ames Research Center, will be completed, reaching a peak performance of 10 Petaflops (10 quadrillion operations per second).[11]
• Sequoia, a proposed super computer built by IBM for the National Nuclear Security Administration will be completed, reaching a peak performance of 20 Petaflops.[12]
• Start of the commercial operation of the first unit from the Novovoronezh Nuclear Power Plant II.
• The 108 ft (33 m) Elwha Dam and 210 ft (64 m) Glines Canyon Dam will be removed from the Elwha River in Washington state, marking the largest dam removal project in history.
• The Canberra class light aircraft carriers/large amphibious ships, the largest ships ever to be operated by the Royal Australian Navy, will be in service.
• On the sun, the solar maximum of Solar Cycle 24 in the 11-year sunspot cycle is forecast to occur. Solar Cycle 24 is regarded to have commenced January 2008, and on average will reach its peak of maximal sunspot activity around 2012. The period between successive solar maxima averages 11 years (the Schwabe cycle), and the previous solar maximum of Solar Cycle 23 occurred in 2000–2002.[13] During the solar maximum the sun's magnetic poles will reverse.[14]
• The United Kingdom will complete a 5-year process to cease analogue television broadcasts region-by-region, with Meridian Broadcasting, ITV London, Tyne Tees Television and UTV being the last areas to switch off analogue.[15]* Portugal will also cease their analogue television broadcasts, after a 4-year simulcast with digital ones. After that, DVB broadcasts will be the only system to be used in television (DVB-C for cable, DVB-T for terrestrial and DVB-S for satellite). The five free-to-air channels on terrestrial network will also start broadcasting in high-definition 24-hours a day.

Lots of these tidbits can be woven into a Conspiracy that will lead the path toward 2100, say, for instance the Sequoia, was used to calculate trans-solar Jump coordinates...



Look forward to hearing from others how make the Conspiracy come alive...

 

[Sturn]

This sounds like a fun campaign. X-Files meets Traveller?

What grand conspiracies were you thinking of? Perhaps clues arise through a series of adventures that some of the rising space age accidents weren't really accidents but sabotage by a shadow organization against space development? The players might eventually discover people who act strangely and speak a completely unknown language are behind the sabotaging of the space race. Even stranger is the culmination of an epic campaign where the players discover these people have powerful technological devices and are in fact human-looking aliens! The players are then instrumental in defeating these Vilani scouts (who were on a secret mission know by few in the 1st Imperium) and finding out about the nearby station at Barnard's Star from them. Information that Earth nations (without public knowledge) later use to spur the interstellar space race and invent a jump drive due to the secret threat.

 

[beowulf2044]

If I recall correctly, there's the 'Thing in the Ring'; an eccentric bit of something that baffles present day astronomers in regard to Saturn. Also, the Daedalus Project (using nuclear explosions as propulsion) was projected to be able to make an approach toward Saturn by 1977 or so, had we not canned the project.

 

[kafka47]

<snip>X-Files Meets Traveller</snip> I like that! Consider it stolen. Yes, I was thinking more along the lines of James Bond (reboot) Meets Traveller.

The Conspiracies that I would plan are both Ancient and Modern. With lots of opportunities to work in space, as the Traveller official history assumes that we closer to Kubrick/Clarke's 21st century then what has happened.

Add to that international rivalries that will take place in the next 3yrs.

 

[Mithras]

Can we go back further? Tunguska? The date when the Vilani first encountered Earth ... and crashed. Did any survivors make it to the surface?

 

[kafka47]

Yes, the [FONT=arial,helvetica]Tunguska event does play a role but more from a powerplant that went critical. Survivors became the Archons...[/FONT][FONT=arial,helvetica]Sometimes, a nudge here or a prod there...but just as not to upset the balance and consensus. [/FONT]
[FONT=arial,helvetica]
So, while it is tempting to find an Illuminati Conspiracy with the Vilani pulling the strings throughout recorded history...this little blue dot did not warrant much attention from the Vilani Imperium.

Often, Terrans blundered in the dark with the Archons patiently watching, waiting...
[/FONT]

 

[savage]

Ark

Lets not forget the Templar Knights recovering the Ark from Warehouse 23 to back the future rulers of the world.

 

[IUnknown]

Nemesis

Sounds awesome...

wanted to do something like this a long time ago with TNE and Twilight rules.

Here's something else that could be fun to work in:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(star)

 

[saundby]

Lessee, some wild ideas off the top of my head...

The Powers That Be knew that the Jupiter Effect would cause the eruption of Mount St. Helens on March 10th. 1982. They "assisted" it in erupting in 1980 for nefarious reasons--a cover-up, or eliminating an inconvenience or getting uncomfortable news off the front page.

Comets Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp were engineered events. Check the internet, plenty of material.

John Hinckley had a handler, someone behind the 20-year assassination cycle, and who also set up Ray in '68 as part of another cycle: Ghandi '48, Tso-lin '28, Carlos I '08, Kinney 1888, McGee 1868, Kohn and/or Pellegrino 1848, Shaka Zulu 1828, 1808: Dos de Mayo, attempt on Napoleon III, the Peninsular War fiasco. Etc. (1988, Ehud Barak perhaps, depending on where your future history is, 2008, pick your target.)

1912: Nikola Tesla supposedly demonstrates that you can bring down a building or "split the Earth" with minute vibrations of the correct frequency. A Centennial demonstration is planned by Tesla fanatics--not intended to be a dangerous demo, but certain to go wrong, of course.

A new comet is discovered. Millennialists everywhere decide that it was the true "star of Bethlehem."

A scientific study is completed which determines that socks really do disappear with no explanation. A newspaper science writer calculates the figure for the energy the lost socks worldwide would represent. A working scientist finds a disturbing correlation to that figure in nature.

 

[Ishmael]

the weirdness/scandal magazines in grocery store checkout lines are great sources for this sort of thing.
I actually miss "The Weekly World News".... lots of stuff mined out of that one.

 

[kafka47]

Lets not forget the Templar Knights recovering the Ark from Warehouse 23 to back the future rulers of the world.

Now, that is just getting plain silly...

No, I don't want to do Tabloid Traveller (although, it does have its merits and we will see how the Campaign goes), I would rather focus on the real events of the 20th century in abstract.

Indeed, I will be seeing some Twilight stuff being recycled cleansed (possibly) of the limited Nuclear War. For as I said, I want to stick very closely to the OTU which has forecast the relative decline of the USA that was met with the rise of other powers.

So my vision is very contemporary save for the continued existence of the USSR (albeit as a reformed Socialist Democracy) and China lagging behind. And, naturally, religious fundamentalism will play a much lesser role, as it will be starved of its 1980s Cold War props.

Terrorism will continue to play nation-states but in a more muted role with secular issues dominating (hence more 2300AD) and the corresponding parallel polis shaping up in the background build around more transhumanist issues.

So, hence, why it is more James Bond (reboot) than X files. The Nemesis (star) plot is still at the hypothesis stage and would rather dismiss it as pseudo-science. For sure, there is dark matter, but an entire star...goes against our understandings of the formation of the Solar System and our observations to date. What resides on Pluto within the Traveller canon will be explained (and sure as hell will not be the MiGo) as New Horizons will rightly prove.

So, does anyone have the specifications of First Imperium ships for me...:file_23:

 

[Andrew Boulton]

So, does anyone have the specifications of First Imperium ships for me...:file_23:

They're in GT:IW.

 

[Ishmael]

Not tabloid Traveller, but just mining tabloids for ideas

http://weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/9818/woman-beats-fawn-to-death/
http://militarytimes.com/forum/showthread.php?p=107582

Was the fawn aggressive?... are the behavior patterns of wildlife changing is unlikely ways?
Was the lady suffering from severe paranoia? If so, why?

Could it be an affect of government testing of chemical weapons like project-112/SHAD?
or just a covered up leak from a secret NBC weapons facility.....

 

[leo knight]

the weirdness/scandal magazines in grocery store checkout lines are great sources for this sort of thing.
I actually miss "The Weekly World News".... lots of stuff mined out of that one.

GDW's "Dark Conspiracy" RPG actually suggested this tactic. Great minds think alike.

 

[savage]

2012

Now, that is just getting plain silly...

No, I don't want to do Tabloid Traveller (although, it does have its merits and we will see how the Campaign goes), I would rather focus on the real events of the 20th century in abstract.

Tabloid? o: I've been in a Templar estate and must say where one would hide an Ark bigger than a breadbox takes serious imagination.

Indeed, I will be seeing some Twilight stuff

Always a good thing!

So, does anyone have the specifications of First Imperium ships for me...:file_23:

So the First Viliani Empire see a "stubborn race" and make a mediocre effort to beat the inferiors down with an effort to take over... Of course it backfires when the predicted solar flare wipes out most of the fleet sending it crashing to earth but not damaging the planet.
So is born the Rule of Man. :rofl: Excellent.

 

[kafka47]

Well, 2013 is the catalyst year (and as the campaign advances 2014, 2015, etc.), so does the timeline, while my players may research and find out things about 2100 or 2097AD. Nothing is in stone. The future may yet alter. All it takes is an alteration such as a butterfly to swiftly change the winds a continent away...

The Solar System of the OTU circa 2013 is still a big place. It is still open enough to allow lots of room in the sandbox.