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Ghost Ships

At least one physicist on Discovery Science channel has come up with a theory that time travel is possible. But you don't travel back into your own past, you travel back in time to a parallel universe's you.

First step; find some negative energy.

Dr. Kaku I believe it was. Theoretical physicist.

Unfortunately, he appeared multiple times on Art Bell's radio show, which, ah, hurts his credibility with me.
 
At least one physicist on Discovery Science channel has come up with a theory that time travel is possible. But you don't travel back into your own past, you travel back in time to a parallel universe's you.

First step; find some negative energy.

Dr. Kaku I believe it was. Theoretical physicist.

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.
 
The IISS would like the XBoat's databank back, and will escalate the degree to which they'll insist on its return...


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.

Also, consider the possibility that it wasn't a misjump, but rather that the tender wasn't able to get to it (having been damaged or destroyed due to military action -- there was a war going on...)

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.

I'm working out details on an ancient derelict -- no, not that ancient: Sindalian Empire. First, their empire ended in ruthless biological warfare. Second, they had been and gone before the Third Imperium expanded into the region so they didn't experience the Psionics Suppressions, potentially meaning there's relic psionic technology to go with the residual biological warfare agents...

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.
 
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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...
 
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.
...
That's a great hook, and not just for a Detached Duty Scout PC party.
 
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.

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.
 
I still smile at the conceit Niven used for the Svetz stories...


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.
 
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.

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.
 
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.


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:
they're just entering fantasy worlds created from what little they know and don't know about the past. One soldier believes she's in Classic Rome, for example, but the reader (hopefully) picks up on the various anachronisms Bester places in that "Rome" like Caesar and Machiavelli(?) co-existing.


I also remember reading Gibson's "Neuromancer" for the first time and thinking that he had read Bester's "Four Hour Fugue".
 
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:
they're just entering fantasy worlds created from what little they know and don't know about the past. One soldier believes she's in Classic Rome, for example, but the reader (hopefully) picks up on the various anachronisms Bester places in that "Rome" like Caesar and Machiavelli(?) co-existing.


I also remember reading Gibson's "Neuromancer" for the first time and thinking that he had read Bester's "Four Hour Fugue".

I remember that Bester story. Everyone had a niche job...
Spoiler:
the poets were in a hospital and answered questions. I don't remember why they were in the hospital.

The General in charge of them needed something from them. He couldn't get it.
 
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I remember that Bester story. Everyone had a niche job...


From what I remember...

Spoiler:
... the US was fighting one of those interminable, draft/mobilize everyone with a pulse, nuclear wars that were such a 1950s sci-fi trope. Immediately utility for the war effort is paramount. All but a tiny number of jobs have to useful and all but a tiny number of people were slotted into those useful jobs. So few of these "non-essential" jobs exist that the general trying to determine what is happening has trouble finding a historian! When they finally got a historian he was able to quickly tell them what the reader should have already figured out; the soldiers were traveling to personal fantasy worlds and not the actual past.

IIRC, the historian is the one who tells the general that a poet will be needed to understand how and why the soldiers have been able to travel like they do. The O. Henry Moment then comes when no poets can be found at all! Apparently they're even of less "use" than historians. All the soldiers eventually disappeared into their fantasy worlds never to return taking their secret with them.
 
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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
 
From what I remember...

Spoiler:
... the US was fighting one of those interminable, draft/mobilize everyone with a pulse, nuclear wars that were such a 1950s sci-fi trope. Immediately utility for the war effort is paramount. All but a tiny number of jobs have to useful and all but a tiny number of people were slotted into those useful jobs. So few of these "non-essential" jobs exist that the general trying to determine what is happening has trouble finding a historian! When they finally got a historian he was able to quickly tell them what the reader should have already figured out; the soldiers were traveling to personal fantasy worlds and not the actual past.

IIRC, the historian is the one who tells the general that a poet will be needed to understand how and why the soldiers have been able to travel like they do. The O. Henry Moment then comes when no poets can be found at all! Apparently they're even of less "use" than historians. All the soldiers eventually disappeared into their fantasy worlds never to return taking their secret with them.

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.
 
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


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.

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.

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.
 
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 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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