Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Grandfathered.
Anybody still playing M0
- Thread starter AndreaV
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Foundations, straight lines, dry riverbeds, and excavated cavities tend to be clues.
Oh don't be ridiculous. You're just seeing what you want to see. Those are just naturally occurring patterns created by dust-devils and left over remains from stormfront activity and flash flooding . . .
In our game, that has a few more layers of meaning then normal.
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
GPR also tends to be short range. VERY short range.
Keep in mind that geography can narrow down the areas to be searched. Populatons often cluster at natural bays, mouths of navigable waterways*, etc.
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* or their prior locations. For example the Mississippi River really "wants" to shift its channel over to the Atchafalaya River -- (wiki) it requires active management to keep it in its present channel. Without that management, New Orleans, LA, gets stranded and loses a big chunk of its economy. In the context of the game, it could be abandoned in favor of the new river mouth....
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Of course 1700 years (as suggested) is a LONG TIME! ... You are looking for ruins lost in the jungle around AD 400 (the fall of Rome), not ruins lost around AD 1600 (500 years ago when the Spaniards crushed the Mayan Empire) ... and METAL buildings will fare far worse than STONE buildings. So you are looking for signs of pre-Mayan roads and earthworks, not Mayan Stone Pyramids, under the jungle canopy.
Sure they are there, like the Lake Dwellings of Switzerland, but they are not easy to identify. In TRAVELLER, you are probably scanning the surface for high concentrations of Iron Oxide Deposits to identify former cities to send teams to perform detailed Scans below the surface. If they deposit topsoil at the average rate on Earth, the city street is located 1.7 meters below the forest surface.
Sure they are there, like the Lake Dwellings of Switzerland, but they are not easy to identify. In TRAVELLER, you are probably scanning the surface for high concentrations of Iron Oxide Deposits to identify former cities to send teams to perform detailed Scans below the surface. If they deposit topsoil at the average rate on Earth, the city street is located 1.7 meters below the forest surface.
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Interesting concept.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that most planetary exploration, specifically early exploration, is resource based.
Rough mapping, looking for readily identifiable and extractable resources to exploit for market.
Planets are BIG, really BIG. Space is BIGGER, but planets are just, you know, BIG.
So easy targets are will win the day early on, since coming back for a more detailed look is likely much more expensive. I mean, we still have "unexplored" areas of our own world.
Canadian Diamond mines are an interesting story. According to wikipedia, the mining areas were not discovered until the early 1990s. But almost a century earlier, someone found several diamonds in Indiana, but hypothesized that they were glacial deposits that came from from a source in Canada. It's not clear, but I assume this was a lead used by the geologists that made the actual discovery.
The fundamental point that finding interesting resources on a planet is going to take much more than some orbital scans. Those scans and imaging might lead someone with the inclination to review the data to find potential areas of interest enough to warrant a Boots on the Ground mission to gain better analysis.
Obviously if you see a bunch of lines in a square that suggests a city ruin, visible from space, then, sure, send in the archaeologists. But looking for ruins in a random planets random jungle, that's going to be quite the chain of events to get a team in there to start potentially digging stuff up.
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
IISS Survey does the scanning and mapping.
IISS Exploration follows up on any "probable finds" that require a closer look based on the survey data.
Exploration can still be relevant "inside the border" rather than being something exclusively conducted "beyond the border" (so to speak).
IISS Exploration follows up on any "probable finds" that require a closer look based on the survey data.
Exploration can still be relevant "inside the border" rather than being something exclusively conducted "beyond the border" (so to speak).
I wonder how good that mapping is. Orbital mapping.
Compared to, say, the typical USGS Topo map, which were, at least originally, guys on the ground, hiking through the mountains, doing actual surveying.
Just curious what the orbital maps might miss. Cave entrances, things under shelves, water source maybe?
No doubt a gross scan is likely "ok" for many purposes, just curious how it would compare to something like we have today.
casquilho
SOC-13
I wonder if it is "Layers of quality". The first scans are rough and may miss stuff like you said, cave entrance etcetera. The based on those first passes, other, better surveys might be ordered and preformed. Adding quality and details to the map sets.
Just a thought.
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
This is very likely to be the case.
Take astronomy, for example. There are all kinds of sky surveys that have been taken which have (insert greek letter for multiples of 1000) bytes of data in them, which then has to be sifted through to find "interesting stuff" to concentrate research (and research papers) onto. A SINGLE survey is NEVER enough. You need MULTIPLE surveys, preferably with different instruments for different targets to determine specific details that answer specific questions.
It's never enough to survey a star system/world/whatever JUST ONCE.
You need to resurvey for cross-comparison and to provide more data to work with and analyze.
For a "many star systems" polity such as the Imperium (or others), this kind of survey work is NEVER a case of One And Done™.
STUFF HAPPENS in planetary systems around stars all the time.
Comets.
Collisions.
Precise calculations of orbits requires longer duration observations to reduce the amount of potential error in assumptions following observations (via longitudinal tracking).
Surface features and environments can be altered by impacts and/or even solar flares/coronal mass ejections and the like.
And then someone FINDS something really interesting in a survey record and wants to focus more attention on that "something" ... at which point the work of Exploration rather than just mere Surveying begins.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
First thing you scan planets for, is oil deposits.
Then gold and other rare earths.
Then gold and other rare earths.
Actually, imagine the concentration of rare elements in all those abandoned electric vehicle batteries and advanced electronics that decayed in those cities ... just strip mine the old cities!
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
Even with the sensors we've been told about in Traveller, that's going to be time consuming and subject to walking confirmation. I'm also not a fan of the overtly magical sensors as depicted in MegaTraveller, preferring to apply the described technologies in ways that make for a better game. TL15 is still not Star Trek by a long shot, but *some* of Trek's usages aren't magic either. In M0 at TL12-13, several of those sensors are at pretty basic development stages, so ground survey is even more necessary.
Oil, on Earth anyway, hides in places that don't show up very well on what we know of densitometers, as everything involved in those structures tends to be fairly close to the same density. We can sometimes pick them up via acoustic survey, but you have to either plant a lot of ground sensors and have some big thumpers available, or be able to use earthquakes with that sensor grid. Orbital gravimetrics are likely going to be too wide a resolution as well.
For GPR, short range is set by life-friendly power output and the resolution of ground penetrating wavelengths. That is currently about 12:1. A one-inch object can be detected at 12 inches depth. Below that it would be invisible. Assuming you can use GPR from a flying vehicle or even orbit without cooking the surface life, you're still limited to finding BIG objects or structures.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Because, you have to figure out if it's worth colonizing.
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
There's a difference between colonizing and
So first thing you look through the histories, find a system that was colonized but did not have the tech for full system exploitation, and find notes that the colony failed/died out, whatever. Send a survey team to see if there are exploitable resourses on the other bodies in the system and a first contact / archological team to the planet. Unless the referee has something planned, it might as well be a solo play where nothing happens and the dice rule if there is something good there.
"Strip mine the old cities" Ahh yes the bank vaults full of rusted steel coins, cerramicrete structures, and the city stripped of usefull materials 1500 years ago by the neighboring system that failed 500 years ago due to being unable to maintain thier heavy industrial output, and now just have gotten back to TL 2. At some point you throw away the old star maps and re-survey every system. If you are looking for exploitation targets, there are hundreds of brown dwarf systems out there that may not have been visited back then for every charted OBAFGKM system. Batteries? with all thoes chemicals, imagine lead acid batteries after 1700 years, you can perhaps find some lumps of lead and some copper, the best would be the generators. I have found 40 year old car batteries out in the desert in western Colorado, case broken, perhaps even shot a few times, the PbSO4 long since dissolved away, the only thing left of value is Pb and PbO(various oxidation levels) I salvaged it for the lead to cast minatures with. Now https://glginsights.com/articles/th...ion-battery-recycling-are-strong-and-growing/ assumes all the batteries are intact where as with 1700 years of weathering, chemical reactions, and natural fire /plant grow cycles I would think that much of the black mass would just be gone, washed away to the nearest watercourse the carbon black burnt. You want the fort Knox vault of the 1950's, instead you have the radioactive crater of 3824 with all the gold carried aloft and redistrubited as fallout over 100,000 square miles. (Or was the gold stolen before the nuke/rock was dropped on the vault?)
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