Originally posted by TWILIGHT:
Don't get sensitive mate... You're wandering off canon and there are resources elsewhere for that. As far as I'm concerned if my players want to chase giant lizards then there's a world at the end of the French Arm for that.
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr /> How much creativity do you allow for?
Me? Not much.. I prefer canon... and many do or the 2320 setting wouldn't be an extrapolation of 2300. But I don't mod this forum so it's not up to me.</font>[/QUOTE]So do you just want me to regurgitate everything I've read in the 2320AD book, or would you like me to add something new? Seems to me that is full body cyborgs are possible then some villian may use this technology to his advantage. I was just putting fullbody Cyborgs, genetic engineering, and virtual worlds together creatively, and it seems to me that a character in this setting might also. Yes, it is probably illegal, but there are criminals in this setting aren't there? Criminals have a tendency not to pay much heed to the law if they think they can get away with it, and it is a frontier setting, so there are alot of remote corners in this universe where a villian with means may set up a factory and a laboratory undisturbed by any authorities. There are about 60 colonial worlds, but their are more worlds than that, alot of undesirable inhospitable worlds, so there are plenty of places for this villian to hide and conduct his operations. The reality overlay allows this villain to train his cyborg brains in simulated cyborg bodies. The brains are cloned and kept alive in tanks with computers providing the sensory data. The villain controls them by giving the brains positive and negative stimuli, in other words he can by remote control stimulate the pleasure centers of each brain everytime it does something he wants, it is in other words a form of slavery.
So are you saying this idea is too science fictiony? Well I figure that it is a science fiction setting and you can have science fiction plots within it. We shouldn't just be restricted to analogs of the modern world with bank robbers and terrorists that substitue lasers for firearms and spaceships for getaway cars.
Originally posted by TWILIGHT:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr /> If there is a Hitleresque madman that builds an army of cyborgs, is that just too creative for the 2320AD setting?
Like the borg queen? Skynet? it's not original and we have provolution already.. also, cyberpunk is a dying form of SF (IMHO)</font>[/QUOTE]The Borg in Star Trek were very popular, if anything the fact that this was included in the Star Trek series validates the idea. Star Trek itself is not very Hard science fiction, but the idea of a controllable army of cyborgs doesn't violate any laws of physics, so I don't see why it cannot appear in a hard science fiction setting. If anything, hard science fiction requires greater creativity not less, because we have to make a greater effort to work around the laws of physics rather than invent our own.
As for time machines, there are hard science fiction time machines and soft science fiction time machines. An example of a soft science fiction time machine would be the TARDIS from the Dr. Who television series. Assuming time travel is actually possible, and I don't know that to be the case, I've consulted books written by professional scientists on the subject, and those books all indicate that to travel in time, you need to manipulate huge masses to create the gravitational fields you need to bend space and time, its unlikely that you can pack that all into a TARDIS. Its more believable that a massive object in space will bend the space around it to allow a seperate space ship to travel back in time.
I could have used something like a Tipler Time Machine which is a cylinder made of matter at neutron star densities rotating at half the speed of light, but that would have allow the players the ability to pick and choose what time period to enter, and I didn't want to allow that much freedom of time travel or to open up the possibility of Grandfather paradoxes. Now I don't think anyone's grandfather is 65 million years only, and a wormhole only connect two regions of time space together. If you don't like the time space region it connects to, that's tough as it was preset by the builders of this device.
We don't know much about the aliens that built the wormhole, it is not a physical object after all, but a distortion of space time made of of gravity fields. There is matter inside but it is a category of matter called
WIMPS (
Weakly
Interacting
Massive
Particles) The only thing thse particles possess is mass, ordinary baryonic matter (electrons, neutrons, and protons) will go right through it, also some of these
WIMPS have negative masses and are located in the center of the wormhole to keep the "neck" from collapsing into a singularity. This whole thing is just a plot device to allow characters from the 2320 setting to visit prehistoric "Dinosaur Earth" and to explore and perhaps even colonize it. There are other stars surrounding "Dinosaur Earth" and different aliens than the PCs may be used too, (Just as in
Star Trek Deep Space Nine by the way) but you can meet new and different aliens just by going beyond the space mapped out for the 2320AD game, having a wormhole really doesn't add anything except dinosaurs that wasn't already there in the first place. I never claimed any of this stuff was cannon, all the cannonical materials are in the published products including the 2320AD download, and I see no reason to repeat them here.
Originally posted by TWILIGHT:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr /> If the is some unknown alien artifact inbetween the stars, is that too creative?
AGRA. nuff said. or the ancients from MT or fading suns.</font>[/QUOTE]I'm not familiar with the
fading suns product, I don't have every RPG in existance, but I think it reasonable to assume that somewhere in this Universe there are aliens that are much more technologically advanced than we are. Is it really realistic to assume that all aliens you meet in the 2320AD Universe will have the exact same tech level as the human civilization or lower? The Universe is 15 billion years old after all, its reasonable to assume that some extraterrestrial civilizations could be far older than humanity, and may have risen and fallen way before humans even evolved from apes. I choose to keep the aliens that built the wormhole mysterious rather than to reveal them outright, they had there reasons to build it, which had nothing to do with humans, and their technological artifact either outlasted them or those aliens moved on to some other part of the Universe or to an entirely different Universe. They are not around to interfere with the political developments of the 2320AD sphere.
Originally posted by TWILIGHT:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />The wormhole is just a plot device to get the 2320 PCs to a location they couldn't otherwise get to. One great thing about the past is that there is lots of books about what sort of creatures inhabited the Earth back then, and by examining them, you may get some ideas about what sort of alien flora and fauna to put on other worlds as well, that is the whole point of the exercise. With a brand new alien planet to explore, you have to make things up as you go along, and the two pitfalls one may fall into is making the flora and fauna too familiar, or on the other hand too alien looking. The Earth 65 million years ago is not that much different from a Garden world the PCs might be exploring in the general category of things.
I've got my imagination and the 2300 source material. and as to your last point, the earth was very different than the Earth today. We would find the gravity and oxygen levels difficult... and when there are other garden worlds out there... OQC is more likely to quarantien than investigate.
//end rant. </font>[/QUOTE]The atmosphere was a little different, it probably contained a slightly higher percentage of oxygen for instance, nothing a human couldn't handle though. The gravity would likely be slightly less than it is now, as a number of meteors have fallen to Earth and added to its mass in the last 65 million years including the big one that wiped out the dinosaurs, but nothing really that a human would notice. the day would be slightly shorter as the rotation of the Earth would have slowed somewhat due to tidal forces in the last 65 million years, that would just make there watches and clocks run slow and they'd have to reset them every now and then so that it matches the position of the Sun as seen in the sky, but it is nothing that human biological sleep cycles couldn't adjust to. The Prehistoric Earth would be more hospitable than many of the habitable worlds in the 2300 sphere. the biology of dinosaurs is compatible with humans, we could eat there meat and they could eat ours, this is not a given in a completely alien planet.
) but the technical detail it includes. The greater the minutae the harder it appears, shoddy science or no.
