Unfortunately, he appeared multiple times on Art Bell's radio show, which, ah, hurts his credibility with me.
Ghost Ships
- Thread starter coliver988
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Unfortunately, he appeared multiple times on Art Bell's radio show, which, ah, hurts his credibility with me.
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
That sounds a bit like H. Beam Piper's concept of Paratime to me. You do not travel in time forwards or backwards, but crosstime.
Yup. If presented with that set-up, my groups would have most likely boarded to survey it's condition, recover any body or bodies aboard, put the 'boat in a safer orbit if possible, and then reported their find to the authorities. My groups were never the murderhobos beloved by many players in RPGs, due in part because I imposed consequences unlike many referees in RPGs and didn't run cinematic games. They weren't above bending or breaking an occasional law, they just weren't going to steal the 'boat, use it to fashion an interstellar WMD device with an FTL 1000 parsec radius of effect, and then extort one trillion credits from all the Major Races.
Well, I mentioned it was before the war, but you bring up an important point.
Shouldn't the Imperium suspend or, more importantly, reroute x-boat links during wartime and when war threatens? If a Zho fleet is trying to take Efate, you're not going to go on pumping a 'boat a day down the Boughene-Efate link. Look at the system I mentioned in that blurb; Biter. Part of the Sword Worlds before the 5th FW and a link on the (allegedly) only x-boat route between the Imperium and Five Sisters. The Imperium is going to "turn off" that route when the balloon goes up and setup others to replace it. The traffic management aspect is going to be a nightmare with 'boats piling up in some systems, not arriving in others, and purposely jumping to still other systems not yet ready to receive them. Jumping hither and yon to help sort out that mare's nest is perfect adventure fodder.
Our absent friend Hans would have been a huge help to you as he had a lots of Sindalian materials in various stages of "polish" ranging from short notes to articles nearly ready for JTAS or Freelance. He and I used to bounce all sorts of ideas off each other, good ideas on his part and Whipsnadian ones on mine. I miss Hans and I often wonder what happened to all his notes.
I'm quite impressed by his canon-reconciliation work in the Wiki in that section of space (District 268 and thereabouts). It's definitely shaped how I approach world building.
His notes on the Sindalian Empire would definitely have made interesting reading.
His notes on the Sindalian Empire would definitely have made interesting reading.
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Lycanorukke
SOC-13
If you're going to use an X-boat (or any warship really) be sure to spice it up a bit to make it more than 'just a missing boat'. Have something like the tale of UB-65. Even if it was just a 'normal' accident - a good backstory should make things more spooky. Even if they are just "Belters tales".
The boat has been considered 'unlucky' due to various incident - accidents during construction, life threatening faults occurring, etc and no one want to crew it due to 'the curse'. But it has to be pushed into action due the war - but on its last journey it simply vanishes.
And now the PC's come across it drifting empty...
The boat has been considered 'unlucky' due to various incident - accidents during construction, life threatening faults occurring, etc and no one want to crew it due to 'the curse'. But it has to be pushed into action due the war - but on its last journey it simply vanishes.
And now the PC's come across it drifting empty...
That's a great hook, and not just for a Detached Duty Scout PC party.Yup. If presented with that set-up, my groups would have most likely boarded to survey it's condition, recover any body or bodies aboard, put the 'boat in a safer orbit if possible, and then reported their find to the authorities. My groups were never the murderhobos beloved by many players in RPGs, due in part because I imposed consequences unlike many referees in RPGs and didn't run cinematic games. They weren't above bending or breaking an occasional law, they just weren't going to steal the 'boat, use it to fashion an interstellar WMD device with an FTL 1000 parsec radius of effect, and then extort one trillion credits from all the Major Races.
Well, I mentioned it was before the war, but you bring up an important point.
Shouldn't the Imperium suspend or, more importantly, reroute x-boat links during wartime and when war threatens? If a Zho fleet is trying to take Efate, you're not going to go on pumping a 'boat a day down the Boughene-Efate link. Look at the system I mentioned in that blurb; Biter. Part of the Sword Worlds before the 5th FW and a link on the (allegedly) only x-boat route between the Imperium and Five Sisters. The Imperium is going to "turn off" that route when the balloon goes up and setup others to replace it. The traffic management aspect is going to be a nightmare with 'boats piling up in some systems, not arriving in others, and purposely jumping to still other systems not yet ready to receive them. Jumping hither and yon to help sort out that mare's nest is perfect adventure fodder.
...
On the time travel sidetrack, I still smile at the conceit Niven used for the Svetz stories: travel to a time before time travel was invented takes one into a world with fantasy characteristics (and creatures) because before then, time travel was fictional so you find fictional things when you go back.
Niven's always good to plunder. Along with Svetz, there's the linked short stories in All the Myriad Ways featuring "sideways" time travel. He posits a few nasty side effects in the stories.
First, there's a slowly building existential crisis occurring among the general populace. When faced with the incontrovertible fact that many indistinguishable copies of themselves exist on nearby timelines, people are committing suicide more often because they can no longer see themselves as "special".
Second, the "pilots" of the machines traveling between timelines have learned the hard way that the longer you stay away from home the harder it is to find your way back. The home line has a beacon, but the beacon's signal begins to "fans out" across multiple time lines the longer you stay away from home. "Pilots" are starting to return to the "wrong" home time and meeting "themselves" with predictable consequences.
Pohl's "The Coming of the Quantum Cats is another "sideways" time travel book whose ideas I enjoyed. The idea that the development of time travel will sooner or later trigger multiverse-wrecking "reality quakes" was intriguing.
My favorite time travel 'physics' was that used in "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" by Alfred Bester: any changes you made had no effect on anyone else, but over time, with enough changes, you erased your own existence.
There was another one about cross time I believe... Spiders and Snakes fighting a time war.
I have some of Dr. Kaku's books. In one he talks about a number of things in sf that simply cannot happen and why.
That's a great short story and a great twist on time travel. Sadly, Bester is oddly forgotten today.
In another of his stories, a group of hospitalized soldiers develop an ability the authorities first believe is time travel. However, it turns out that...
Spoiler:
I also remember reading Gibson's "Neuromancer" for the first time and thinking that he had read Bester's "Four Hour Fugue".
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kilemall
SOC-14 5K
Just to throw into the hopper, there are two card games that assume time travellers from different realities fighting over which one will win out, including a cockroach that wants nuclear war.
You fight over alternative outcomes to 'our' timeline or alternatively try to collect dinosaurs, art, etc. But each time you leave a linchpin event unresolved, it is a paradox- too many paradoxes and the universe collapses.
https://www.looneylabs.com/games/chrononauts
http://www.looneylabs.com/games/early-american-chrononauts
You fight over alternative outcomes to 'our' timeline or alternatively try to collect dinosaurs, art, etc. But each time you leave a linchpin event unresolved, it is a paradox- too many paradoxes and the universe collapses.
https://www.looneylabs.com/games/chrononauts
http://www.looneylabs.com/games/early-american-chrononauts
Yes, I agree with your spoiler.
The US Navy had a ghost blimp once. The crew was off shore looking for Japanese subs and somewhere along the way the 2-man crew vanished. As I recall the investigation said something was maybe wrong with the cabin door and probably resulted in one guy falling out, and the other guy falling while try to rescue him.
It is still not really solved and even the official guess creates more questions than it answers, but I thought of what could happen to a two-man crew on a Type S if one of them had a problem and the other went outside to get him. A cable breaks, the ship keeps drifting away under Gee...
But even that sounds sketchy. The crew probably wouldn't go outside the ship for any reasons if it was under acceleration or even had a drifting vector since an accident or miscalculation could lead to the ghost ship scenario quickly.
It is still not really solved and even the official guess creates more questions than it answers, but I thought of what could happen to a two-man crew on a Type S if one of them had a problem and the other went outside to get him. A cable breaks, the ship keeps drifting away under Gee...
But even that sounds sketchy. The crew probably wouldn't go outside the ship for any reasons if it was under acceleration or even had a drifting vector since an accident or miscalculation could lead to the ghost ship scenario quickly.
Great example. I remember reading about that one too. Everyone thought it was returning from a routine patrol when it hit some telephone poles and crashed. That's when they realized the crew was missing.
Not really. People do weird things all the time and they do weird things even more often when they're complacent.
As a tech rep I was visting at a FP&L construction site in Indiantown, FL back in the early 90s. The crew was going to land and bolt up a piece of capital equipment my company manufactured. The crew "tooled up" - including safety harnesses - put everything on a cart, and we rode the elevator to the top of the plant about 6 or 7 stories up. We got in position, a crane lifted the equipment up, and we began aligning it. One of the guys with the drift pins couldn't reach the holes he wanted to align so he climbed outside the safety railings. Someone even asked him about putting on a harness but he replied it would "only take a minute". Sure enough, he lost his balance, failed to grab the railing with his free hand, and began to fall backwards. Three of us were one step away and were able to grab him quickly. If we'd been two steps away he would have fell.
I can easily see someone popping out a dorsal hatch of a scout/courier under thrust for "just a minute", getting into trouble, having the other crewman try to help, and both being lost.
It would all depend on how the crew perceived the problem to be resolved. Whipsnade makes a really valid point that if someone thinks a task isn't risky they'll accept that risk, regardless of what could happen. It also happens when people don't have all the information that could enable them to make a more accurate risk assessment. So if there was something going on outside the Type S that produced observable data that appeared to be similar to a known and low-risk problem, a couple of crew members may decide to just deal with it quickly. Then, things sort-of go to poo while they're outside the ship...
[Eerily soothing computer voice] "I've just picked up a fault in the AE-35 unit. It is going to go 100 percent failure within 72 hours."
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