Having just concluded a gruelling week of conferences and workshops about global catastrophic risk I have a number of nasty ideas that might be useful:
Dark comets: there is a discrepancy between the number of comets that enter the inner solar system and we find there. Either they disintegrate surprisingly well, or they become covered by a thick layer of very dark material. Such dark comets might be a real hazard for planetary impacts, but we do not know enough to tell. In 2300, they could presumably be found with a gravity scanner. But they would still make great secret bases - lots of volatiles under the surface, very stealthy. And if you use a stutterdrive to suddenly move it in the way of a planet you could suddenly cause a major disaster.
Pandemics are supposedly licked by 2300 medicine, but as the Nous Voila quarantine (and plenty of adventures) show at least in the colonies they could be serious threats. Worse, the biotechnology of the setting probably means that engineering a pathogen is easy. Bioweapons are a real danger, and there are groups who might want to use them. For example, letting loose a plague on Earth might serve Provolution perfectly. OQC would be forced to place the planet in quarantine, the economic and political disruptions would further the cause of colonial independence. If there was an antidote they could barter it for the release of imprisoned members.
Terrorist nukes are already part of the setting. In 2300 there are numerous ship nuclear reactors and missiles. Maybe the reactors do not use highly enriched uranium (they could be pebble bed) but they could still be used to make dirty bombs. The missiles have nukes in them to drive the X-ray lasers and they do not seem to be kept under that tight control. It might also be possible for terrorists (or plain incompetents) to cause orbital weapons to fire - which could trigger wars.
Electromagnetic pulse weapons (or just atmospheric nukes) could wipe out the information infrastructure of advanced colonies or Core worlds. A colony that is not too dispersed would need just one to be paralysed. On a densely populated core world the disaster would be enormous, with billions dependent on a complex economic infrastructure.
We have already discussed physics disasters in the black hole thread. Beside black holes, there could exist strangelets that convert matter into more strange matter and magnetic monopoles that catalyse matter-to-energy conversion. Another unsettling possibility is that vacuum decay could happen (in one game I had a villain who collected weapons. His most prized possession was a little device in a glass box that - if a certain physical theory was right - could trigger vacuum decay and destroy the universe).
What if Eta Carina or WR 104 goes gamma ray burst on human space? Here the deadly radiation front would move one lightyear per year, so it would be possible to escape it with enough ships. It is not inconcievable that the first news would be from a returning scout ship with a crew suffering from acute radiation sickness, having seen it a one or two lightyears out from a colony world. The rest of mankind may have decades to plan, but what will the inhabitants of Vogelheim do if they need to escape within 10 months? Another interesting possibility is that the burst has displaced one or more alien species who now try to migrate out of the way. They suddenly come across human space.
Ecological collapses could occur on colony worlds when suddenly a minor interaction between human and alien ecology cause a crash. A soil bacterium might be spreading that wipes out the local grass-analog, causing wildfires, massive erosion, dieouts of local herbivores and in the long run threatens the entire biosphere.
Economic crashes are not unheard of, and might even be engineered (Deathwatch Program, anyone). A massive disaster (or more likely, two near each other) might cause not just insurance companies to fold but reinsurance companies. They drag the banking system with them, and now the stockmarket is in chaos. Remote outposts will not get their supplies because the cargo company is bancrupt, politicians promise anything to stave of civil chaos while trying to hide evidence of how bad things are, black ops teams are called in to secure certain strategic assets. People start doing stupid or desperate things...
Advanced AI in 2300 is pretty useless since it inevitably goes nuts. But what if there appeared (accidentally or as a stupid experiment) an AI that spread using the Link like a virus, becoming more and more capable? The idea its creator (and itself) might have is to gain control over enough resources to really solve the madness problem before the AI crashes. So over the span of a few days it takes over Earth or Tirane, desperately trying to solve the problem with all resources while fending off pesky humans and increasing psychosis...
Nanodisasters are probably not in line with the 2300 style, but clearly one could do something fun with self-replicating robots or the invention of a really cheap fabber that could build nearly anything (including fabbers).
Lots of possibilities. Both as a threat for the PCs to try to stop ("You must get into the asteroid and disarm the defenses before it crashes into the planet!") or to suddenly encounter as a "What the $*$&$ moment" in a campaign. It is a good way to test the resilience of the PCs: what do they do when the world is suddenly in free-fall and all the expectations are subverted?
"Moore's Law of Mad Science states that the IQ needed to wipe out humanity decreases by 1 point every 18 months."
Dark comets: there is a discrepancy between the number of comets that enter the inner solar system and we find there. Either they disintegrate surprisingly well, or they become covered by a thick layer of very dark material. Such dark comets might be a real hazard for planetary impacts, but we do not know enough to tell. In 2300, they could presumably be found with a gravity scanner. But they would still make great secret bases - lots of volatiles under the surface, very stealthy. And if you use a stutterdrive to suddenly move it in the way of a planet you could suddenly cause a major disaster.
Pandemics are supposedly licked by 2300 medicine, but as the Nous Voila quarantine (and plenty of adventures) show at least in the colonies they could be serious threats. Worse, the biotechnology of the setting probably means that engineering a pathogen is easy. Bioweapons are a real danger, and there are groups who might want to use them. For example, letting loose a plague on Earth might serve Provolution perfectly. OQC would be forced to place the planet in quarantine, the economic and political disruptions would further the cause of colonial independence. If there was an antidote they could barter it for the release of imprisoned members.
Terrorist nukes are already part of the setting. In 2300 there are numerous ship nuclear reactors and missiles. Maybe the reactors do not use highly enriched uranium (they could be pebble bed) but they could still be used to make dirty bombs. The missiles have nukes in them to drive the X-ray lasers and they do not seem to be kept under that tight control. It might also be possible for terrorists (or plain incompetents) to cause orbital weapons to fire - which could trigger wars.
Electromagnetic pulse weapons (or just atmospheric nukes) could wipe out the information infrastructure of advanced colonies or Core worlds. A colony that is not too dispersed would need just one to be paralysed. On a densely populated core world the disaster would be enormous, with billions dependent on a complex economic infrastructure.
We have already discussed physics disasters in the black hole thread. Beside black holes, there could exist strangelets that convert matter into more strange matter and magnetic monopoles that catalyse matter-to-energy conversion. Another unsettling possibility is that vacuum decay could happen (in one game I had a villain who collected weapons. His most prized possession was a little device in a glass box that - if a certain physical theory was right - could trigger vacuum decay and destroy the universe).
What if Eta Carina or WR 104 goes gamma ray burst on human space? Here the deadly radiation front would move one lightyear per year, so it would be possible to escape it with enough ships. It is not inconcievable that the first news would be from a returning scout ship with a crew suffering from acute radiation sickness, having seen it a one or two lightyears out from a colony world. The rest of mankind may have decades to plan, but what will the inhabitants of Vogelheim do if they need to escape within 10 months? Another interesting possibility is that the burst has displaced one or more alien species who now try to migrate out of the way. They suddenly come across human space.
Ecological collapses could occur on colony worlds when suddenly a minor interaction between human and alien ecology cause a crash. A soil bacterium might be spreading that wipes out the local grass-analog, causing wildfires, massive erosion, dieouts of local herbivores and in the long run threatens the entire biosphere.
Economic crashes are not unheard of, and might even be engineered (Deathwatch Program, anyone). A massive disaster (or more likely, two near each other) might cause not just insurance companies to fold but reinsurance companies. They drag the banking system with them, and now the stockmarket is in chaos. Remote outposts will not get their supplies because the cargo company is bancrupt, politicians promise anything to stave of civil chaos while trying to hide evidence of how bad things are, black ops teams are called in to secure certain strategic assets. People start doing stupid or desperate things...
Advanced AI in 2300 is pretty useless since it inevitably goes nuts. But what if there appeared (accidentally or as a stupid experiment) an AI that spread using the Link like a virus, becoming more and more capable? The idea its creator (and itself) might have is to gain control over enough resources to really solve the madness problem before the AI crashes. So over the span of a few days it takes over Earth or Tirane, desperately trying to solve the problem with all resources while fending off pesky humans and increasing psychosis...
Nanodisasters are probably not in line with the 2300 style, but clearly one could do something fun with self-replicating robots or the invention of a really cheap fabber that could build nearly anything (including fabbers).
Lots of possibilities. Both as a threat for the PCs to try to stop ("You must get into the asteroid and disarm the defenses before it crashes into the planet!") or to suddenly encounter as a "What the $*$&$ moment" in a campaign. It is a good way to test the resilience of the PCs: what do they do when the world is suddenly in free-fall and all the expectations are subverted?
"Moore's Law of Mad Science states that the IQ needed to wipe out humanity decreases by 1 point every 18 months."
