High Tech Low Tech Items

[spank]

Story.

How married are you to the backstory, are you trying to progress a story, or set up a setting?

If you are trying to set the stage for a setting I might have a suggestion.

 

[JAFARR]

The story has mutated from the wild west back to the wild frontier. The 2 hour conversion time is not the big problem with the drives. They consume fuel at twice the rate of the old jump drives. Two hours without drives is no problem right now if it gets them to the new worlds, but once ships of this sort become more common, pirates will develop tactics to find and attack during the changeover especially if it turns out that practically the points for activation of the FTL drives or entering the system are limited.

As someone earlier pointed out I needed a better rational than I started with. The search is the rational, but how long will it take? They haven't been found in the present system. Will they be in the next system or the system beyond that? Will it be best just to set up a colony as a base? That requires a minimal amount of infrastructure at the very least. I think that some organizations will try to establish colonies while some hardy individuals will atempt to go solo or at most a small group. It is this type of person who will be my main character.

 

[JAFARR]

Had to move this to the back burner as we are getting ready to move. (Wife got a job paying 3x as much when she gets her license to practice in S.C.) Main character has diary of an ancestor with notes on "planet #1", etc. Diary is more than 500 years old and only vaguely identifies the worlds so it is a sort of verbal treasure map to be de-ciphered. Not yet sure of how he gets transportation to these other worlds. Patron in form of some company, wealthy enough to provide his own. etc. Think I need to work up some main worlds for each system as well as a map before I do any specific writing.

 

[ditzie]

A small, sealed fusion power plant. Assuming you can build these at TL12+ and ship them to TL4+ worlds, and assuming refuelling and maintenance is at worst a yearly thing.

 

[JAFARR]

A small, sealed fusion power plant. Assuming you can build these at TL12+ and ship them to TL4+ worlds, and assuming refuelling and maintenance is at worst a yearly thing.

Works great for a factor's station. For that matter you could use a ship's power plant while setting up the station.

 

[Drakon]

What is the possibility of a binary system with the stars in far orbit around each other and both stars having an earth type planet? Say one is inhabited and just reaching space travel tech levels and some company in the space tech industry decides to send a colony to the other world.

A few years ago, I did an analysis of the Alpha Centauri system, with the help of an astronomer. The idea was to figure out just how likely a habitable planet in that double/triple star system.

Both Alpha A and B are far enough apart that they can each have habital planets. They never get closer than about 11 AUs, and the major unknown is how much material can be ejected by one star, and aborbed by the second one.

My analysis, based on 50 computer simulations of solar system formation, "guesses" that the odds of a habitable planet around Alpha A are greater than 50%, Alpha B is greater than 12%, the probabilities are additive, (total for these two stars is above 62%) and believed low due to lack of understanding about mass transfers between the stars in their early years.

[Note: Proxima is very unlikely to have a habitable planet, as not only is it small, but its a flare star. Any planet it might have, would be routinely sterilized by massive X-ray bursts. Also there is some debate about whether Proxima is part of the system or just passing through, due to the fack that we've only discovered it about 100 years ago, its slow moving, and there is not enough data to accurately map its orbit.]

Hope this helps.

 

[JAFARR]

Introduction

Oasis is a small world, actually the moon of a gas giant in the Void. She has seven neighboring systems that form the Oasis cluster. The old empire settled Oasis as part of what was called the “High Jump” passage across the Void, over 600 standard years ago. The unit of interstellar distance used by the empire was based on distance a ship could travel and called a jump. One jump covered one parsec. The Void is our name for the region of space in which the cluster is located, the empire called it something else, but that name has long been lost.

According to the information left from the empirical days, It required a ship capable of what was then called jump 5 technology to reach Oasis, the gateway system to the cluster. The rest of the cluster could then be reached by a jump 2 ship or a jump 1 ship with extra fuel. About 100 years after Oasis was settled, something happened with or to the empire because no ships were using the passage. It has been over 500 standard years since the last ship arrived at Oasis from outside the system. We have many ships in this system, but they only have sub-light drive systems. The other worlds and the asteroid belt have all been explored, but this system lacks one resource that is required to make the so-called jump drives that moved the old empire through space, a source of lanthium crystals. We have the technical understanding and equipment to make the machinery, but we have not been able to find a source or make an artificial crystal that would function reliably in the so called jump drives.

About 100 standard years ago, our scientists made a discovery that might allow them to modify our in system drives into a FTL drive. Now, that possibility has become a realty. The big problem is size prohibits mounting both drives in the same ship. This has been resolved by making it possible to convert between the two systems. This conversion requires about two hours and leaves the ship without drives during conversion. That is not good, but that is what we have at this point.

It’s time to visit some other systems and see if we can find some lanthium crystals. Our only choices are the neighboring seven systems as the upper limit to our current drives is roughly jump 2.


As you can see this has potential to tie into Traveller very easily.

After re-reading "Exiles to Glory" I have decided to use a superheavy element with atomic number 127 named "Millerium" as the missing resource needed to make the high temp. superconductor needed to make jump drive work.

Also I am going to start in the middle of a series. Some Millerium has been found in the Oasis system, but not enough to use for mass production of jump drives. Enough has been found to make 2 100 tn scouts and a 1000 tn transport. A source of Millerium has been located in a belt in another system in the cluster. Now a world in that system is being used to raise food to supply the belters mining the belt to get the Millerium.

Notice 2 things I have assumed. 1 high temp superconductors are required to create the jump drives (by high temp, I mean as high as 200 degrees Centigrade or higher). 2 Superheavy metals are required to make the superconductors.

Added: The superheavies are not named beyond 112 or so on the chart I found. Would "Marcerium" be better than "Millerium"?

 

[Peter Schutze]

>and both stars having an earth type planet

depends on HOW earth-type ..... shirtsleeves or just "not instantly fatal without protection" ?

In our solar system we have 3 candidates that could have been "not instantly fatal" with slight differences:

if titan were less cold with a thinner atmosphere (both likely if it were closer in to Jupiter)

if venus were further away from the sun thus being cooler if we could breakdown the co2

if mars had an atmosphere worth talking about (does it even rate "trace" in traveller ?) and some heat

they could all be "not instantly fatal" habitable at least in some areas eg coolest at the venusian poles or warmest at the martian equator .... so I wouldnt expect its too outrageous if the other system of some binaries had a marginal planet that could be "fixed" with imported life

 

[aramis]

>and both stars having an earth type planet

if mars had an atmosphere worth talking about (does it even rate "trace" in traveller ?)

Only in one edition. I forget if that's TNE or T4...
In CT and MT, no, it doesn't.

 

[JAFARR]

In addition to Marc Miller I would like to pay tribute to those who have contributed so much to the Traveller heritage by using their names for worlds, animals, etc. For example Fugate's World, or the Keith Belt.

Any help is welcome.

 

[Agemegos]

A few obvious thoughts:

Communications satellites and navigation satellites to be placed in orbit on the way in. Solar powered, or with long-lived isotope-thermocouple generators. Made at high TL, these things will last for yonks.

Solar-powered radios, quartz-crystal clocks, GPS receivers, cellular phones, and communications cells. Teaching machines.

Information, derived from orbital surveys.

Cast titanium cookware with boron-carbide and boron-nitride ceramic coating.

Breeding stock, particularly pharm animals and pharm-plants, and genetically-engineered deep-rooted perennial food crops. A lot of very useful drugs and other chemicals and chemical feedstocks ought to grow on shrubs, and a field once planted should never need re-planting.

Self-sterilising surfaces, self-cleaning cloth.

 

[LordVince]

A question.

Is the basis of your story a tale about ONE ship -- and crew -- visiting MANY planets? Or is it a tale of One ship -- and crew -- travelling to ONE planet and STAYING THERE, no matter what? OR...is this the foundation for a SERIES of stories, each about ONE ship and ONE planet?

I ask, only because, after reading all this material, I'd suggest on of 2 alterations to your backstory.

Suggestion 1: The "Wild West Tech" IS the Tech level of Oasis -- it IS the best they can produce. The STARSHIP, however, is "left-over" Imperial Tech -- something "lost" or, somehow, "left behind" on Oasis, when the Empire "disappeared". Being Imperial Tech, the ship is very rugged, very automated, and quite "idiot-proof" -- thus allowing the Steam Age technicians of Oasis the ability to "restore" the ship. Possibly the ship could have an AI that can advise/help the Oasians(?)

This could be a foundation for any of the options I asked about, abouve, AND allow you your "Starships and Six-Guns" tech mix.

Suggestion 2: The Oasians(?) have the tech base you've outlined, but instead of trying to build STL and FTL capabilities into ONE ship, they keep 'em separated -- that is is, they build an FTL CARRIER framework which holds/carries multiple STL Survey ships. The Carrier jumps into a system, just outside the Jump Limit, drops off a ship, or ships, which head in-system, then jumps out towards the next system, and repeats the process. Once all the planets of the Cluster have had ships dropped off in them, it starts the journey back to Oasis, either picking up ships that have determined "nothing of interest here" in the systems they were dropped off in, or picking up reports from the Crews who DID find something interesting, and have started building a base -- and please send more colonists.

This option best allows for the One Ship, One Planet concept. As for the "Wild West Tech" dichotomy, you could handwave that away as a political ploy of the Oasis Government -- they INTENTIONALLY send the colony SUPERIOR items of LOWER Tech level simply because they don't want the colonists to get uppity, and try on any silly ideas of Independence -- six guns may be quite effective against hexapumas, but they SUCK against power-armored laser troopers.