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Callos_DeTerran
2009-12-01, 10:44 PM
Before anyone does any more 2001 quotes, I've never seen all of that movie myself and this thread isn't about rogue AI. Not completely anyway.

Recently my brain has been stuck on the 'terror on the spaceship' style of game, courtesy of EA's Dead Space, so naturally I've begun to think of how to craft a d20 Modern game for it. Floor plans, encounters, just what the hell is wrong in the first place, all of those things bounce about in my head. But I've run into a creative problem.

Assuming the PC's are under the guise of repairing the ship (they will be) what sort of problems can they fix aboard a gigantic space craft? (And I do mean big, as in having a crew in excess of a thousand people, not including passengers) What effect would they have? Sadly, my techy problem-fu is lacking so I turn to the Playground as I usually tend to do. What sort of problems could PCs fix aboard a giant ship and what effect could it have (good and/or bad) on their surroundings?

The Glyphstone
2009-12-01, 10:57 PM
Maybe look to Alien for good reference? Kinda the same thing, though monsters plural instead of monster, and less collateral damage civilians to get in the way.

erikun
2009-12-01, 10:58 PM
What does the spaceship do?

Just right off hand, I can think of: air leaks, water leaks, fuel leaks, thrusters maintenance, engine maintenance, structural integrety checks, docking maintenance, droid maintenance, computer systems check, gravitational systems maintenance, gravitational systems repair, or just screwing in bolts on the outside of the ship. Plus problems happening in just one section of the ship, such as a rogue droid taking appart machinery, maintenance hatches refusing to open, or general computer errors (Blue Screen of Death).

Of course, these are just the mechanical problems. There are also the people to deal with, such as slummers, drug trafficers/growers, rebel organizations, terrorists, and so on. You can combine several, such as a condemned section of the ship that has become a popular place for the poor, but an environment leak is slowing draining the air from the area. Throw in a hostile rebel group, and the party needs to try to move the homeless while watching out for armed rebels, or from wandering into a section where low oxygen levels threaten to knock the entire party out and kill then.

nyarlathotep
2009-12-01, 11:02 PM
In a ship large enough to house thousands of people you are going to have miles of wiring, and any section of the wiring getting damaged can cause problems. Big problems if it is the wiring that powers the computer that tells you where faults are in the wiring, or in the life support systems.

The reason I recommend this is that it is a problem that most people even without technical knowledge (assuming the guise comment meaning they aren't really repairmen) can fix, but the process of finding the short is still hard enough that there can be tension built around it.

Leewei
2009-12-01, 11:06 PM
Simple malfunctions that also have an element of danger to them. Wiring that seems faulty that doesn't go dead when the circuit-breaker is thrown, doors with faulty sensors and with the failsafe disabled due to a faulty air leak sensor, that sort of thing. The ship is a death trap. And the worst thing is that it might not be sabotage by any of its crew...

Dienekes
2009-12-01, 11:31 PM
And I was all ready to start singing Daisy.

But really, if your on a ship that big you're running a fully serviceable ecosystem. The machines that turn urine into drinking water, possibly the second most important machine in the entire spacecraft (after the one that converts co2 to oxygen or whatever you're using to get oxygen to circulate the ship)

So importantly things that do the necessities are of vital importance. Then we go to the ship itself. Screw the engines for the most part, the spaceship will still keep moving in the same trajectory with or without them. Air leaks are always popular. Maybe the machine that churns out soylent green is broken? That or the actual food supply is dying off for whatever reason.

Or you could get interesting and have a virus or disease start to spread among the population that the scientific doctors can't figure out how to cure. Really anything you can think of that would affect a normal society would be a real problem in such an environment. Plus whatever spacey ideas you can come up with. Everyone's in deep sleep except for a few people and yet all the support systems seem to blow. Or your trajectory is broken by an asteroid that knocked out your engines (see now engines would be a problem), alien contact, or simply realizing that everything's gone wrong and you're all alone in space.

Hope that helps in any way.

Iku Rex
2009-12-01, 11:47 PM
The Alternity adventure The Last Warhulk (http://www.amazon.com/Warhulk-Alternity-Sci-Fi-Roleplaying-Adventure/dp/0786912170/) might provide useful ideas and maps.

sonofzeal
2009-12-02, 12:20 AM
The #1 biggest danger is always decompression. Violent decompression should always be on everyone's mind, including yours when you lay out the ship. The more spherical, the better; the more modular, the better; the more redundant protections, the better. The characters should have to go through massive precautions when doing anything that has anything to do with the ship's hull, and should be seriously on edge the whole time. You can make the players on edge too by talking about these things for a bit and then having one of them fail. Just one, and there's backups, but that'll get the tension up. Speculate on what would happen to the residential area if a full decompression happened, ask your players for their ideas. You can get a lot of mileage this way....

Catch
2009-12-02, 12:38 AM
Star Trek reruns. Anything that can go wrong with a spaceship has happened in at least five different ST episodes.

The season really doesn't matter (though Voyager tended to have the most mechanical problems, what with the premise being Oregon Trail in space).

chiasaur11
2009-12-02, 01:09 AM
Marathon was mostly alien invasion and mad AI, but there were a couple of ideas in there.

Lessee, there was decompression, power failure, the automated door opening system was very much on the fritz, the computer systems crashed and when they did work often displayed random text, automated defenses were offline and when they went on sometimes worked wrong, to the point of attacking the security forces they were meant to help, the long range coms were down, and the teleporters sometimes went to the wrong location entirely.

Lots of fun.

Randel
2009-12-02, 01:11 AM
Things every ship need:

1. A power source.
A: Fusion reactor - Has no chance of exploding but if even the slightest thing goes wrong with the reaction then it shuts down. Cue people having to run through lots of diagnostics to get all the force fields and stuff properly repaired/replaced/and calibrated. Its a race to get it fixed while the back-up power source runs. It converts hydrogen into helium... which either gets tossed out or filled into tanks for balloons...

B: Nuclear reactor - Easy, cheap, and reliable. Little maintenance is needed but occasionally a leak in containment fills the area around it with radiation. Nobody ever stays around it for long (since robots do most work on it) but there is the chance of something mutating as a result of radiation exposure.

C: Ram Jet - A giant magnetic scoop that scoops up interstellar hydrogen as a fuel source for the fusion reactor. If anything electronic runs into the magnetic scoop, consider it fried. Much like a regular Fusion reactor but it constantly gathers hydrogen fuel so its unlikely that it will ever run out (unless the ramjet breaks in which case you have to fix it before reserves run out). A fluctuation in the magnetic scoop could conceivably start messing with sensors or other electronic gizmos near the front of the ship. Micro meteors may occasionally get caught in the scoop and mess with it until you shut it off and get the meteor out.

2. Support Systems
A: Oxygen cleaner - cleans up the CO2 and toxins out of the air. May include a greenhouse or hydroponics system that converts CO2 to oxegen with plants. Also, there has to be a proper mix of oxegen and nitrogen and such... if the system starts pouring out pure oxygen then fires flare up easier (may even result in metal burning if there is a hot enough spark). Pure oxygen also can really mess up a person. Also, if the nitrogen mix is too high without oxygen then people can suffocate without feeling short of breath (since I think our bodies can detect CO2 but not oxygen... we feel short of breath because we 'taste' CO2 not because we miss oxygen. Thus an inert gas can kill people without them noticing it... particularly if they are asleep).

B: Water purifier - As Dienekes said, need to keep that one properly maintained. The ship would probably have multiple water systems... one for drinking water, one for cleaning, one line for waste water, another for industrial purposes, and maybe one for the Ion Drive. Some crewmembers might have their own personal water purifier set up in their room or just drink bottled water instead of water from a sink. Also, cleaning might be done with alchohol or something... to save water and such. Remember that hydrogen and oxygen can be converted into water and visa versa.

C: Replacement part factory - Have something like a replicator set up (or just a shop with the equiment to make wiring an microchips and stuff) which could manufacture any part that there isn't a spare on hand. Keep in mind it probably best to have two or three replicators set up and spare parts in case one breaks.

D: Food supply - Unless you have a ton of stored food, some way to create food is needed. Maybe a replicator, maybe a hydroponics bay, maybe some sort of cloning factory or even live animals to raise. Its very likely that the cheapest food would be some sort of yeast/algae/tofu/protein stuff while more expensive food would include actual vegetables or even actual meat. Due to the expense of real meat (as opposed to cloned stuff if its available) then some people might bring chickens, guinea pigs, fish, or turtles to raise in a small space and sell them for meat. You may find various small animals who have escaped and gotten caught up in the wiring or something.

Note that microgravity can have strange effects on growing living things... like tree spouts that grow roots and leaves in all directions, or chickens with serious birth defects, also low gravity causes osteoporosis in bones. Thus if there are any low-gravity parts of the ship (which would most likely be much cheaper than ones with decent gravity) then some people might try raising stuff there so they don't take up space in the high-class graity areas. Thus, don't be surprised if you run into chickens on a start ship... or hideously malformed chickens with four legs and rubbery bones... and lets not get started on what happens if they get exposed to radiation from the reactor or cosmic rays.

Keep in mind, that when you eat your chicken nuggets you don't know what the chicken looked like before. Also, if people start vanishing and you hear about someone selling bacon or pork on the black market... well, unless someone brought along some actual pigs to get pork from then prepare for some crazy stuff.

E: Chicken soup vending machines - There will be vending machines, and someone has to make sure the chicken soup nozzle doesn't clog.


Also, if there are holes in the hull, then its likely that they are just little pinhole sized ones. To fix them just search for spots where the pressure drops and then stick some duct-tape over the hole until you have time to go outside. You could probably get into alot of the outside hull areas just by saying you're looking for hull leaks.

Also, the ships computer should have several backups all running... so when you have to run the defrag or something then it doesn't jam everything up in an emergency.

chiasaur11
2009-12-02, 01:13 AM
Oh, and the replicator should make a drink almost (but not quite) entirely unlike tea.

Mewtarthio
2009-12-02, 01:16 AM
Well, you are in a small, enclosed community that nobody can ever leave. How long is this ship going to be traveling? If it's a very long time (eg a colony ship, or a Voyager-esque lost ship), expect things to get really messy. In particular, resources are at a premium. If somebody commits a heinous crime, life in prison is out of the question: There will be capital punishment. If it's long enough that you expect new generations to be born, then things start getting really dystopian.

Randel
2009-12-02, 01:17 AM
Also, all consoles double as firecracker storage lockers (http://www.cracked.com/article_17316_instruction-manuals-uss-enterprise.html). Its your job to make sure that all bridge consoles contain enough explosives in them to let the people there know how damaged their ship is.

Also, if you have a holodeck then be sure and deal with that (no unplugging the damm thing and just replicating a PS3 for everyone... thats just cheating).

Fhaolan
2009-12-02, 01:22 AM
Here's a scenario that one of my gaming groups tried to pull off once. It didn't work out for us, but that doesn't mean it can't for you.

A reasonably large asteroid mining/refinery ship is traveling through a belt on a far garbage star (no habitable planets, just asteroids), looking for rocks with high enough mineral content to be worth processing. Near a fascinating asteroid with a high value of rare minerals they find a floating derelict. A very large ship with no registry, no name, no markings at all, and of an unfamiliar configuration. It's not 'alien' as such, it just seems... custom, and very expensive looking.

The mining vessel sends a salvage crew across (the PCs), but there's nothing there. No passengers, no crew, no life... and no bodies. All the escape pods are intact, nothing missing except the people. There's damage of some sort, to the power systems, life support, etc. so nothing onboard is working at all. The technology seems a little out of sync to what they're used to. Some of it more advanced, some of it out of date. None of it with makers labels or anything that seems to indicate the place of manufacture. The engines, if they worked, would be seriously oversized for the vessel indicating that it's intended to be *fast*. It somehow doesn't seem like a luxury private vessel; it has a para-military feel of austereness, but it has no offensive weapons of any kind.

And then the mining ship explodes, taking with it all hands.

The PCs are now stuck aboard an unfamiliar vessel that isn't operable as it stands. Everyone on board has mysteriously disappeared, and their own ship just blew up for no apparent reason. There's little chance they will be found by another ship, and they've got no life support but what's in the suits they brought with them. Is the ship *really* empty? When they do get power going, why do all the logs and records on the ship simply end at the exact same moment of time, and at a completely different location in space? Where did all the people go? Where did they come from in the first place? Why is the ship completely 'scrubbed' of any kind of ident? Why were they out here in the middle of nowhere, next to this valuable rock with no mining equipment? What happened to our mining ship? Is it all connected somehow?

Combination survival and mystery game. I won't tell you the answers to these questions, because part of the fun is coming up with your own. :smallbiggrin:

BobVosh
2009-12-02, 01:29 AM
Things every ship need:

1. A power source.
A: Fusion reactor - Has no chance of exploding but if even the slightest thing goes wrong with the reaction then it shuts down. Cue people having to run through lots of diagnostics to get all the force fields and stuff properly repaired/replaced/and calibrated. Its a race to get it fixed while the back-up power source runs. It converts hydrogen into helium... which either gets tossed out or filled into tanks for balloons...

B: Nuclear reactor - Easy, cheap, and reliable. Little maintenance is needed but occasionally a leak in containment fills the area around it with radiation. Nobody ever stays around it for long (since robots do most work on it) but there is the chance of something mutating as a result of radiation exposure.

C: Ram Jet - A giant magnetic scoop that scoops up interstellar hydrogen as a fuel source for the fusion reactor. If anything electronic runs into the magnetic scoop, consider it fried. Much like a regular Fusion reactor but it constantly gathers hydrogen fuel so its unlikely that it will ever run out (unless the ramjet breaks in which case you have to fix it before reserves run out). A fluctuation in the magnetic scoop could conceivably start messing with sensors or other electronic gizmos near the front of the ship. Micro meteors may occasionally get caught in the scoop and mess with it until you shut it off and get the meteor out.

2. Support Systems
A: Oxygen cleaner - cleans up the CO2 and toxins out of the air. May include a greenhouse or hydroponics system that converts CO2 to oxegen with plants. Also, there has to be a proper mix of oxegen and nitrogen and such... if the system starts pouring out pure oxygen then fires flare up easier (may even result in metal burning if there is a hot enough spark). Pure oxygen also can really mess up a person. Also, if the nitrogen mix is too high without oxygen then people can suffocate without feeling short of breath (since I think our bodies can detect CO2 but not oxygen... we feel short of breath because we 'taste' CO2 not because we miss oxygen. Thus an inert gas can kill people without them noticing it... particularly if they are asleep).

B: Water purifier - As Dienekes said, need to keep that one properly maintained. The ship would probably have multiple water systems... one for drinking water, one for cleaning, one line for waste water, another for industrial purposes, and maybe one for the Ion Drive. Some crewmembers might have their own personal water purifier set up in their room or just drink bottled water instead of water from a sink. Also, cleaning might be done with alchohol or something... to save water and such. Remember that hydrogen and oxygen can be converted into water and visa versa.

C: Replacement part factory - Have something like a replicator set up (or just a shop with the equiment to make wiring an microchips and stuff) which could manufacture any part that there isn't a spare on hand. Keep in mind it probably best to have two or three replicators set up and spare parts in case one breaks.

D: Food supply - Unless you have a ton of stored food, some way to create food is needed. Maybe a replicator, maybe a hydroponics bay, maybe some sort of cloning factory or even live animals to raise. Its very likely that the cheapest food would be some sort of yeast/algae/tofu/protein stuff while more expensive food would include actual vegetables or even actual meat. Due to the expense of real meat (as opposed to cloned stuff if its available) then some people might bring chickens, guinea pigs, fish, or turtles to raise in a small space and sell them for meat. You may find various small animals who have escaped and gotten caught up in the wiring or something.

Note that microgravity can have strange effects on growing living things... like tree spouts that grow roots and leaves in all directions, or chickens with serious birth defects, also low gravity causes osteoporosis in bones. Thus if there are any low-gravity parts of the ship (which would most likely be much cheaper than ones with decent gravity) then some people might try raising stuff there so they don't take up space in the high-class graity areas. Thus, don't be surprised if you run into chickens on a start ship... or hideously malformed chickens with four legs and rubbery bones... and lets not get started on what happens if they get exposed to radiation from the reactor or cosmic rays.

Keep in mind, that when you eat your chicken nuggets you don't know what the chicken looked like before. Also, if people start vanishing and you hear about someone selling bacon or pork on the black market... well, unless someone brought along some actual pigs to get pork from then prepare for some crazy stuff.

E: Chicken soup vending machines - There will be vending machines, and someone has to make sure the chicken soup nozzle doesn't clog.


Also, if there are holes in the hull, then its likely that they are just little pinhole sized ones. To fix them just search for spots where the pressure drops and then stick some duct-tape over the hole until you have time to go outside. You could probably get into alot of the outside hull areas just by saying you're looking for hull leaks.

Also, the ships computer should have several backups all running... so when you have to run the defrag or something then it doesn't jam everything up in an emergency.

Your scifi-fu is quite strong.

Also in a nonmilitary vehicle a spaced crazy is a must. Absolutely require for one person to go insane.

Dienekes
2009-12-02, 01:32 AM
Oh, and the replicator should make a drink almost (but not quite) entirely unlike tea.

Also beware of joggers, I would also suggest that your ship be running from a giant mutant star goat and filled with telephone cleaners, but that's just me.

Randel
2009-12-02, 01:45 AM
Your scifi-fu is quite strong.

Also in a nonmilitary vehicle a spaced crazy is a must. Absolutely require for one person to go insane.

Thank you.

Also, if there are people frozen or in suspended animation or whatever then you'll need somebody to keep an eye on them and make sure they are okay. That goes double for important people who might have assassins sent to pull the plug on them.

Heliomance
2009-12-02, 03:31 AM
E: Chicken soup vending machines - There will be vending machines, and someone has to make sure the chicken soup nozzle doesn't clog.


Bah. I was going to suggest that.

Radar
2009-12-02, 06:20 AM
In space, stars are your only guide and even they are useless, if you don't have very accurate information about them: mass, temperature, their star and/or planet system, specific chemical composition etc. Remember, that while you travel in space, you can't rely on star's brightness (changes with distance), color (changes with relative speed due to Doppler effect) or constellations. Account in nebulae that will obscure view. Now if you consider all this, your starcharts/catalogues are the only thing that makes difference between traveling and being utterly lost. It is obvious, you keep multiple copies of those, yet each copy is an immensly important object and should be well guarded. Navigational disasters can be as deadly as mechanical ones.

Also consider natural fenomena: crashing into uncharted nebulae; getting cought in a gamma ray burst from a magnetar. Sky is NOT the limit. :smallsmile:

BobVosh
2009-12-02, 06:27 AM
The problem with navigational issues is that you can't really make a story around stopping it. It can be used as a railroad source, but not much else.

Zen Master
2009-12-02, 06:39 AM
The wonderful thing about stuff that does not exist is that you don't need any real explanations.

If you tell your players that the last [bomb/hull quake/laser salvo/whatever] disrupted the Quark Flow Stabilizers, and that this need to be fixed or the ship will go boom - then that's the way it is.

Now, to fix the Quark Flow, obviously you need to replace the [power core/superconductor magnets/ion relays/whatever] ... and so on, and so on.

Really, sci-fi is just endless series of making up stuff that sounds right. And other than that, it's exactly the same as making a fantasy game.

Radar
2009-12-02, 06:56 AM
The problem with navigational issues is that you can't really make a story around stopping it. It can be used as a railroad source, but not much else.
Well... yes and no. First of, it's another layer of background and a way to remind the players, that outer space is not a nice place to be.

It also introduces a well justified MacGuffin into the scenario - there are numerous plots, that can be woven around stealing/hacking/destroying said charts. If you consider mutinity scenario, then it's an important element (one of the few mobile ones) of power struggle between the fractions.

Position of navigators would be significant on a spaceship, so if one of them died, it would catch attention of the public.

BobVosh
2009-12-02, 07:50 AM
Valid point, but still seems more like background fluff than a plot point. Although a treasure map is always useful.

More applications that I originally thought, though. Simply because losing them can be a campaign ender.

lesser_minion
2009-12-02, 08:23 AM
The wonderful thing about stuff that does not exist is that you don't need any real explanations.

If you tell your players that the last [bomb/hull quake/laser salvo/whatever] disrupted the Quark Flow Stabilizers, and that this need to be fixed or the ship will go boom - then that's the way it is.

Now, to fix the Quark Flow, obviously you need to replace the [power core/superconductor magnets/ion relays/whatever] ... and so on, and so on.

Really, sci-fi is just endless series of making up stuff that sounds right. And other than that, it's exactly the same as making a fantasy game.

Not so. Pointless technobabble is exactly that. It adds absolutely nothing.

Your story will get a lot more from a setting in which everything behaves in a consistent way, and where the laws of physics are followed as far as possible. Unless there are overtly supernatural elements in the setting, people expect the laws of physics to be followed.

You will have to break the laws of physics, and the best way to deal with that is to work out the implications of the change and work those into your setting.


Assuming the PC's are under the guise of repairing the ship (they will be) what sort of problems can they fix aboard a gigantic space craft? (And I do mean big, as in having a crew in excess of a thousand people, not including passengers) What effect would they have? Sadly, my techy problem-fu is lacking so I turn to the Playground as I usually tend to do. What sort of problems could PCs fix aboard a giant ship and what effect could it have (good and/or bad) on their surroundings?

This would vary, depending on how your spacecraft works. The first question is the scale of the issue.

Possible catastrophic failures:

- Radiators. Your ship has to vent heat into space somehow. If the ship's cooling system goes offline, then unless repaired, the crew will cook.

- Inertial Dampeners. If these go offline, then the ship's crew run the risk of being turned into sushi whenever they attempt to manoeuvre.

- Computing. Any spacecraft this big would be flown by wire. If the engineer messes up the VHDL or if one of the programmers messes up one of the programs, then there could be some pretty horrific results - systems going offline, or failing altogether.

- Augmented Reality. Instead of inertial dampeners, your crew might be kept in 'shock pods' with some lines for life support, and a VR interface of some sort. That could lead to an interesting way to interact with the ship's systems (note that security personnel wouldn't be necessary once the ship was underway - anybody boarding the craft would be reduced to sushi by the acceleration alone).

- Structural. If damage/cheap builders caused part of the ship's structure to fail, the results could be pretty varied - a bulkhead or compartment might rupture, a spar might shear, or worse. That could certainly leave a system offline - or damaged.

- Power. A total loss of power would leave the ship unable to do anything - all of the other systems would go offline (except life support). And that includes propulsion.


It would be very rare for an important system to go offline without it being a very big deal. If something just went offline for no reason or an engineering/programming error, then heads would roll when the survivors made their report. And not in a figurative sense.

If sabotage, monsters or supernatural events were involved, you would be able to explore it in the story, and it would make the events more interesting.

The only other likely explanations for any catastrophic failures are ship-to-ship combat damage and serious accidents (collisions, or accidentally flying into another ship's exhaust).



Well... yes and no. First of, it's another layer of background and a way to remind the players, that outer space is not a nice place to be.

It also introduces a well justified MacGuffin into the scenario - there are numerous plots, that can be woven around stealing/hacking/destroying said charts. If you consider mutinity scenario, then it's an important element (one of the few mobile ones) of power struggle between the fractions.

In general, I'd expect the interstellar drive to work without any complications as far as navigational issues are concerned. Saying that, most interstellar drives would have operators who would almost certainly have the same kind of influence and effect on the story as your navigators - either psychic, or at least very strange. I don't think a computer would really do very well at handling something as bizarre as an FTL drive.

The Glyphstone
2009-12-02, 08:51 AM
In general, I'd expect the interstellar drive to work without any complications as far as navigational issues are concerned. Saying that, most interstellar drives would have operators who would almost certainly have the same kind of influence and effect on the story as your navigators - either psychic, or at least very strange. I don't think a computer would really do very well at handling something as bizarre as an FTL drive.

Personally, I find Turing-compatible AI's to be more likely than working FTL, or at least far more likely to come first.

lesser_minion
2009-12-02, 09:01 AM
FTL engineering would be a completely different world to other kinds of engineering - acausal control theory isn't particularly well-developed in the real world, after all.

I don't think it's really within the reach of electronic computers. A synthetic biological computer maybe, but not electronics.

Radar
2009-12-02, 09:28 AM
(...)

In general, I'd expect the interstellar drive to work without any complications as far as navigational issues are concerned. Saying that, most interstellar drives would have operators who would almost certainly have the same kind of influence and effect on the story as your navigators - either psychic, or at least very strange. I don't think a computer would really do very well at handling something as bizarre as an FTL drive.
True, on a spaceship (as it is with any sufficiently complicated machine) there are multiple vital systems and persons. One thing falls and you're in serious trouble. This means, that with a very large ship, with thousands of people, there are too many high priority targets for the security to reliably look after. Following: if players know, that something nasty is going to happen (for example catch a loose note about a planned sabotage), they won't be able to just fortify in few key structural points (with all important persons) and run a tedious and time-consuming security scan of the whole crew. They will have to actively hunt down potential criminals.

Zen Master
2009-12-02, 09:52 AM
Not so. Pointless technobabble is exactly that. It adds absolutely nothing.

Oh ok - I guess the guys making *every sci-fi show known to man* just don't know that. Oh - and the fans watching too =)

Radar
2009-12-02, 10:03 AM
Oh ok - I guess the guys making *every sci-fi show known to man* just don't know that. Oh - and the fans watching too =)
With any SF show you just sit back and enjoy the ride without giving it much thought. When you are a player, then world consistency is important to immerse oneself in the story and because you need to know, what things are possible (and what are the necessary means to do those thing) and which aren't.

Same thing with fantasy. In a movie "It's Magic!" will suffice, in a RPG not so.

lesser_minion
2009-12-02, 10:43 AM
True, on a spaceship (as it is with any sufficiently complicated machine) there are multiple vital systems and persons. One thing falls and you're in serious trouble. This means, that with a very large ship, with thousands of people, there are too many high priority targets for the security to reliably look after. Following: if players know, that something nasty is going to happen (for example catch a loose note about a planned sabotage), they won't be able to just fortify in few key structural points (with all important persons) and run a tedious and time-consuming security scan of the whole crew. They will have to actively hunt down potential criminals.

It depends - if the crew use shock pods during transfers then it would be very hard to infiltrate or sabotage it. And none of the systems on board would be particularly vulnerable to small-arms fire. Remember, there is no privacy on a spacecraft - to successfully sabotage a system, you would have to be the only active person in the compartment, and your activities would still be visible to the ship's Command staff.

The only places to hide would be the heads, the "private recreation" unit, and possibly the funeral area. Any deck, deckhead or bulkhead that doesn't divide two compartments would be made of wire mesh, possibly even fabric. Nothing especially dangerous would fit into the heads, and concealing a weapon while entering the private recreation unit would be difficult for even the most adventurous of individuals (the security personnel not being stupid).

I don't think sabotage would be particularly easy, unless you happen to be extremely good at improvising a high-yield thermonuclear device from a toaster. In which case, what on earth are these rebels doing putting you in the suicide squad? Spacecraft probably wouldn't carry escape pods.

Master_Rahl22
2009-12-02, 11:12 AM
John Ringo's "Into the Looking Glass" series has some excellent info for you. Their ship gets battered and broken and half destroyed all the time, with various degrees of things breaking in between those. They have serious issues with venting waste heat, running out of air/decompression, navigation problems, and several others that have been mentioned. It's also co-written by a physicist, so there's lots of good science in the sci-fi. :smallwink:

Callos_DeTerran
2009-12-02, 11:41 AM
The ship is going to be, originally, purposed as a deep-space mining vessel which is expected to be out at work for decades at a time. For that reason it's supposed to have enough space for miners, workers, engineers, and command personal as well as their families to help keep morale up and everyone happy. For food production and to take the strain off of the oxygen scrubbers, there is going to be a massive hydroponic bay to grow real fruits, vegetables, and grains to supplement the dry ration diet that covers the nutrients needed from meats and such. A small (compared to any other deck) animal pen provides real meat and such for special occasions.

At any given point, perhaps a full quarter of the passengers and non-essential crew to half of them will be kept in VR pods, with a limited connection to the VRnet and essentially providing a virtual environment for those in the pods to interact and enjoy themselves. While in the pods, they are kept going with IV nutrients and so on with the heaviest crew safety measures on the pods. A rotation continually switches personal from the pods to the ship and back again so everyone gets a turn.

Of course, by the time the PCs get there, everyone but the people in the pods will be dead or missing.

With the advice given above, I've come up with some sample problems and the rewards/consequences for fixing them or leaving them be.

1) The vessel's oxygen scrubbers are about to kick the bucket, replacements can be found on the PC's ship (before it becomes unavailable) that should handle the air needs of the players for the duration of the game. Barring a massive hull breach or something of the sort anyway. If the oxygen scrubbers aren't replaced then the PC's will find that portions of the ship will be without breathable air, requiring them to use their own life-support to move through those areas. More importantly, the hydroponic deck can handle the strain of a small group of people but not the 250+ in the pods.

2) Navigational array is busted. The vessel had a course before everything began to go wrong, but with the array offline it's simply going in the last direction it had received directions to, which is the wrong way for safety. There are some obvious benefits to fixing the array, like putting the ship back on a safe path towards safety, but a PC dedicated to that task can do the same with difficulty. If the array isn't fixed then the PCs will need to navigate 'without eyes' so to speak, relying on star-charts and sensors to constantly correct the ship's course. This could suck up time they could be using to repair the ship or even try to end the trouble's it's having. If they completely neglect the array or navigating the ship, they'll be warned it's entering into the debris field around a planet soon enough and it becomes a race against time to fix the array/pull out of that path before the ship starts getting pummeled.

3) The futuristic equivalent of Agent Orange is being pumped into the hydroponic bay, the result of waste-run off from the reactor and various systems. The PC's have to find out where the waste is coming from and how (without being exposed to it themselves) before it kills of hydroponics and possibly them. If hydroponics is lost then they are either relying on the oxygen scrubbers they replaced, or if they never replaced those, a limited amount of time to find replacement life support and a solution that'll keep them alive long enough to escape this death-trap of a ship.

4) Fusion containment failure, part of the problem above yet one all it's own, containment has failed around the reactor and must be fixed. Radiation, extreme heat, all serious dangers to trying to fix it. If left untended, eventually the ship will be left without power and very few options to change that. This can very well lead to a 'game over' since the ship can no longer fix it's course, life-support will begin to stutter, and other vital functions are halted or begin stuttering from lack of power. Not to mention leaving the PCs at the mercy of whatever did this to the ship in the first place.

5) VR-pods being secluded from the rest of the ship. Other computers, especially the one from the command deck, alert the PCs that the passageways leading to the VR-pods have both been locked down then had their hulls breached, isolating them from the rest of the ship. It also warns that an un-authorized simulation is running that has a 98% chance of killing all of the sleeping crew-members and passengers. It'll take some work to get the PCs into the pod-bay, but once there the only solutions will be diving into the simulation themselves to save the people or try to reason with the VR-AI (one of several AIs on the ship) which has become corrupted. This is going to be one of the bigger problems for the PCs to fix, not only could it lead to the death of 500 people but if they DO die then much much worse things begin to happen and the only viable solution for the PCs is going to 'finish up the repairs needed to get the frak off the ship or to get it moving while we hide'. Even if they are saved, things will take a turn for the worse but not nearly as badly.

I do appreciate the help, but keep the ideas coming! I've got the beginnings of a good workable plot in my head now and ways to fix these problems but I'd like to think of more too.

lesser_minion
2009-12-02, 02:31 PM
Oh ok - I guess the guys making *every sci-fi show known to man* just don't know that. Oh - and the fans watching too =)

I didn't respond directly to this earlier, but actually, a lot of TV shows do make some effort. Even Star Trek.

However, I don't think there are many Star Trek fans who would dispute the claim that Star Trek gets nothing from technobabble.


@Callos:

Another possible issue could be with the ship's FTL drive. An accidental jump could have some pretty horrible consequences - for example, it might only affect part of the ship (catapulting that part of the ship some way across the galaxy) or it could 'seal' the ship inside a singularity or a warp bubble.

How the ship manoeuvres is also an interesting question. You could equip the ship with a reactionless drive (one which manipulates space-time to produce an appropriate gravity potential gradient across itself), in which case drive problems could threaten to tear the spacecraft apart (or just crack open the nearest planet when the ship collides with it).

If the ship uses its reactor exhaust as propellant (modern rockets do, but ones using nuclear, fusion or antimatter power might not) then you could have a blocked thruster making it hard to manoeuvre in a particular direction.

Alternatively, a ship that uses something else as propellant could have a propellant tank rupture, meaning that the players have to be as efficient as possible in controlling the ship's movements - or they will run out of propellant and be stuck in space for the next few years until the reactor fails.

An interesting drive type that doesn't really get seen much in sci-fi is the nuclear salt water rocket - it's quite effective, but it does have the twin drawbacks of difficult engineering (probably more plausible than antimatter, though) and exploding rather violently if the fuel tanks rupture.

Antimatter also has a habit of being not very nice if it gets out of storage.

In order to save weight and make the engineering a bit easier, it wouldn't be uncommon for an antimatter reactor or a nuclear reactor to only use a shadow shield rather than any kind of full containment (a shadow shield is basically a radiation shield placed so that the inhabited/biological parts of the ship doesn't get irradiated by the reactor - radiation escaping into deep space isn't really an issue). Obviously this isn't really an option for dangerous fuel such as nuclear salt water or antimatter.

Randel
2009-12-02, 04:55 PM
On the issue of antimatter reactors, it would need several failsafes to keep the explosive antimatter fuel from exploding in contact with normal matter:

1. Put it in a zero-gravity environment - with no gravity pulling it 'down' its much easier to keep it centered in the reactor and away from the edges.

2. Keep it away from the ship - Have the reactor trailing behind the main area of the ship, or at least on an extended 'arm' or something. Since a ship in space has no need to be areodynamic, then you can have the reactor held out far from the ship at the end of a mechanical 'arm' so that if it explodes then it just takes out that bit. Maintenance robots don't need to breath so it won't need life support going to it. And in the rare cases that a human goes to work on it then they can wear a space suit.

3. Eject system - The reactor has a giant spring eject system set up and its held in place with a magnetic clamp. Instead of someone pushing an 'eject' button to jettison the reactor, the reactor needs a constant 'a-okay' signal from the system to keep it in place. So, as soon as the reaction is in danger of going out of control then the reactor is immediately launched out of the ship... the engineer has to make sure things get fixed up before it gets dangerous.


Also, about ship designs:

Space ships don't have to aerodynamic, they just have to be structurally sound enough to survive the acceleration and maneuvering of the ship. So, they could just as easily be a giant cube, or a cylinder, or a long string of modular sections hooked together.

Heck, your 'ship' might consist of a normally immobile space station with smaller 'tugboat' ships hooked onto it that provide the thrust to move it around.

There might be a company or race who builds lots of spaceships who are designed to combine together to support eachother. Like a fleet of ships connected via force fields... only some of the ships have actual engines but the kinetic energy gets transferred to all of them to move the entire fleet. Or there could be combining spaceships that can all link together like some sort of anime super-robot... kind of an extreme example of the docking manuvers that link ships together but this way they are integrated enough to effectivly become one larger ship (actually, they would probably look more like individual lego-blocks than a super advanced ship).

Callos_DeTerran
2009-12-02, 05:09 PM
@Callos:

Another possible issue could be with the ship's FTL drive. An accidental jump could have some pretty horrible consequences - for example, it might only affect part of the ship (catapulting that part of the ship some way across the galaxy) or it could 'seal' the ship inside a singularity or a warp bubble.



I was actually looking at FTL drives to put on the ship (coming up with stats usually helps me think of other things) and had come across something similar with one of the engine systems that can be put on a starship. It catapults the ship into an alternate dimension for the duration of the journey (can't alter course any more so all sort of things could go wrong on the ship and it'd still arrive at the destination). Of course then a mini-adventure seed sprouted and I've incorperated that into one of the many many things wrong with this ship.

Gamerlord
2009-12-02, 05:18 PM
Ship is stranded when it attempts to warp out with a badly damaged warp engine after an ambush, warp malfunction causes severe damage to whole ship, PCs are warped in on a shuttle to fix it, problem is, the assistant AI robots across the ship have gone mad due to the damage, and the unknown hostile vessel warps in shortly after the PCs dock...

Ormur
2009-12-02, 08:56 PM
Just a few observations from a Sci-Fi enthusiast. I you want to keep your spaceship realistic this site (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.html) is very good.

Tecnobabble is incredibly boring, instead make it simple and consistent. I know Star Trek has a lot of it but that's it's biggest drawback. Don't pretend it's hard Sci-Fi if you don't know how things work (which is fine it's the future after all).

If you want to have it FTL I'd recommend the Alcubierre drive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive), it works by contracting space ahead of the spaceship and expanding it behind it, kind of like warp drive. It requires lots of energy (antimatter drive or lots of fusion perhaps) some kind of exotic matter with negative mass and the edges of the bubble it travels in have incredible tidal forces that could rip it apart if anything goes wrong, it's also not certain you could actually shut the bubble down from inside. In real life it might mean it's impossible to build, in fiction it means plot.

If this is such a huge space ship that's supposed to travel for a long time with thousands of people it would make sense to have all the life support systems essentialy an almost completely self-sufficient ecosystem instead of carrying enough supplies for the whole trip. You've probably got lots of energy so you use that to grow plants, algae, fruits etc. that can be turned into food and also to scrub the air of CO2 and provide oxygen. You'd also use it to recycle urine and waste. It means everybody is in danger if something bad happens to it that screws up the process.

A big spaceship perhaps with lots of empty mining equipment and hydroponic bays. This screams for space horror. Things start breaking down like in a pattern, is it aliens, the computer gone bad, crazy hermit crew members or just isolation feeding their paranoia.

Callos_DeTerran
2009-12-02, 09:58 PM
A big spaceship perhaps with lots of empty mining equipment and hydroponic bays. This screams for space horror. Things start breaking down like in a pattern, is it aliens, the computer gone bad, crazy hermit crew members or just isolation feeding their paranoia.

That's essentially the idea, though I now have a cause and such if people really want to see it.

Wyvern_55
2009-12-02, 11:05 PM
If you have an AI on board, You HAVE to play with it! either make it a supremely loyal servant with a monotone voice (this will creep everyone out, they all expect it to go rogue) or have it have a slightly odd priority for it's ethical programming ("the mission will not fail.")

Also, if you liked Dead space and are thinking of going that route, then stop whatever you are doing and track down a copy of 'System Shock 2'.

Do it.

Now.

chiasaur11
2009-12-02, 11:22 PM
If you have an AI on board, You HAVE to play with it! either make it a supremely loyal servant with a monotone voice (this will creep everyone out, they all expect it to go rogue) or have it have a slightly odd priority for it's ethical programming ("the mission will not fail.")


If you do the former, make sure the robot has "The exact same voice as Kevin Spacey. It's uncanny."

(And don't forget the third option. Lovable total psychotic.)

Randel
2009-12-03, 12:53 AM
Another possibility: An intersteller ship where everyone is in suspended animation pods. Or rather they are inside liquid pods and hooked up to a VR simulation (like in The Matrix... but for an actually good reason). People in the pods use less oxygen, food, space, and age slower than if they weren't. Also, the liquid surrounding them would act as a constant all encompasing 'seat belts' or even a realistic for of inertial dampners.

Thus, with everyone and everything inside secured in pods or storage areas then inertial dampers aren't necessary and the ship can make sudden turns and decelerations without hurting anyone. Most people are hooked into a virtual simulation while the engineers have the option of piloting the robots that move around and do maintenance.



Another idea, if the ship has a central computer AI then its not actually an AI. Instead, its a person who's cybernetically hooked up to act as the computers personality. They might go insane but its generally no more likely than a normal person, in fact much less so if the ships psychiatrist helps them cope with stuff. Using a person as the ships computer personality is good because they don't have to worry about building an AI or it going nuts, and a human is pretty much immune to software viruses (hypnosis viruses might get to them but they can't make them do anything they wouldn't want to do naturally.)

However, it takes alot of training and cybernetic implants for someone to be useful as a Medium (the human who acts as the voice and interface with the ships computer). They have to have a really clean record to ensure they don't abuse their power of make mistakes (cue a Medium who did something that might disqualify him from his job and someone is blackmailing him. Then a series of events to cover up that mistake and all knowledge of it).

One ship would likely have multiple Mediums who take shifts. Being hooked up to the ship for prolonged periods of time results in the Mediums conciousness starting to 'grow' into the ships computer. This results in stuff like the Medium getting addicted to being hooked up and suffering withdrawl when disconected or they start creating a digital 'ghost' of themself in the computer that does their job even when they aren't hooked up. The ghost in the computer can work just like the Medium for a while and has their memories but its just an imperfect copy and its much more likely to go insane before completly fragmenting into nothing.

Maybe the ships primary Medium is murdered. Their ghost is still in the computer and is going through the motions of running the ship. If the new Medium hooks up into the computer they run the risk of the ghost getting erased or invading with their own personality. The ghost has trouble remembering who killed it or even understanding anything other than doing its job... but it may be possible to find out who killed the last Medium by hooking up another Medium and having them channel the ghost for a bit and reclaim its human memories since the ghost can only act like a human if it has a human brain to use. Can the group risk hooking up the new Medium knowing that channling a ghost could cause psychological problems? Should they try to 'save' the ghost even though its inevitably going to dissolve into corrupted data? And, if the new Medium is able to channel the ghost... how do they know the information is accurate? Or did the new Medium kill the first one and is just pretending to channel info to incriminate someone else?

Oh, and the idea of Mediums as an interface for the ships computer was inspired by these (http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20071005) strips (http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20071008) from Girl Genius

Zen Master
2009-12-03, 11:25 AM
I didn't respond directly to this earlier, but actually, a lot of TV shows do make some effort. Even Star Trek.

However, I don't think there are many Star Trek fans who would dispute the claim that Star Trek gets nothing from technobabble.

Hm ... Star Trek is wall-to-wall technobabble. As far as I'm concerned, pretty much the entire genre is wall-to-wall technobabble, with the few exceptions being endless desert journeys of boredom and needless or uninteresting details.

Being scientifically accurate is, in my experience, never an advantage.

I mean ... really? Star Wars, Star Trek, Matrix, Isaac Asimov, I forget the other guys name - no one who's ever attracted any sort of real audience never bothered with real science.

Random832
2009-12-03, 12:11 PM
I mean ... really? Star Wars, Star Trek, Matrix, Isaac Asimov, I forget the other guys name - no one who's ever attracted any sort of real audience never bothered with real science.

You don't have to 'bother with real science' to refrain from pretending at great length to explain how the stuff supposedly works. That 'pretending to explain' is what technobabble is.

Fhaolan
2009-12-03, 12:21 PM
<snip> Isaac Asimov, I forget the other guys name - no one who's ever attracted any sort of real audience never bothered with real science.

I dispute this. Isaac Asimov was well known for his hard sci-fi, and was a professor of biochemistry, and wrote science textbooks for physics, chemistry, and other topics. The other guys names are likely Arthur C. Clark, and Robert A. Heinlein. Yes, their science is considered out-of-date now, but at the time it was accurate. Remember that these guys were writing before Sputnik was launched, and when radiation treatment was used to cure acne.

Radar
2009-12-03, 12:51 PM
Hm ... Star Trek is wall-to-wall technobabble. As far as I'm concerned, pretty much the entire genre is wall-to-wall technobabble, with the few exceptions being endless desert journeys of boredom and needless or uninteresting details.

Being scientifically accurate is, in my experience, never an advantage.

I mean ... really? Star Wars, Star Trek, Matrix, Isaac Asimov, I forget the other guys name - no one who's ever attracted any sort of real audience never bothered with real science.
I'll repeat myself here, but i do have to stress it out: what works for a movie or a book, doesn't work for a RPG. It also isn't all about sticking to real science, since SF works beyond our hard knowledge - first and foremost it's about internal consistency.
Players have to have some knowledge about the system, in-game physics and such, so they can actively find solutions to problems given to them by DM (or at least should be able to gain that knowledge - you don't have to drown them in exposition). Without such a work-frame the game would fall into one long DM fiat and it's not healthy. One obviously doesn't have to know percisely how every thingamajig works, but it would be helpful to have spaceship plans laid out and some general information about vital systems established.

On the other hand, it's easier to build such a work-frame on real-world physics and fill the missing places with speculations that are already floating around and are somewhat plausible.

In a nutshell: directors fiat is good (or at least tolerable), DM fiat is bad.

Gamerlord
2009-12-03, 02:57 PM
Why does everyone care about it being realistic? Its fiction. SCREW PHYSICS!

Radar
2009-12-03, 03:05 PM
Why does everyone care about it being realistic? Its fiction. SCREW PHYSICS!
Sure you can screw physics, but if you aren't consistant while doing so, players won't know, how should they react to a given situation, since it's all arbitrary and decided on the fly.

lesser_minion
2009-12-03, 03:12 PM
Why does everyone care about it being realistic? Its fiction. SCREW PHYSICS!

A commendably bad attitude in this case.

The worst game designer who ever has or ever will exist, and who I shall not name, was crippled partly by his excessive focus on 'realism' (his other fatal flaw was an inability to keep his own tastes out of his material even when they proved inappropriate)

However, that doesn't mean that avoiding realism makes a game better.

Everything in the setting has to at least be consistent in order for the players to experience any kind of immersion, which in this case is vital to the game Callos plans to run.

Part of that is making sure that in the few situations where the laws of physics have to be ignored, they are broken in a consistent way, and that the effects of any phlebotinum/handwavium are considered fully, and have reasonable limits and consistent availability (you DO NOT forget about the phlebotinum/handwavium - even in Star Trek, this qualifies as a screw-up).

Leon
2009-12-03, 04:29 PM
Make sure to have a backup supply of Dogs Milk

Callos_DeTerran
2009-12-03, 10:30 PM
Everything in the setting has to at least be consistent in order for the players to experience any kind of immersion, which in this case is vital to the game Callos plans to run.

I consider immersion to be an integral part of any RP, but even more specifically it is vital for horror games (in my opinion) since the pinnacle of a horror RP isn't just scaring the characters in the game but the players too. If the players don't feel like they are part of the world their characters are in then it becomes harder to frighten them.

In other and only slightly related news, I'm moving this game from it's IRL format to in the PbP forum on these boards. Preference mostly.