The other challenges of space

[Dangerious P. Cats]

For a while now I've been dreaming up a space exploration setting that can be loosely described Enterprise if it were re-invented the same way the new battlestar galactica was. Basically the setting assumes minimal technology over TL8 with a little super science. There is space travel (obviously) but guns fire bullets rather than lasers, injuries require surgery that takes considerable time to recover from, and so forth. The premise is that humanity had to evacuate earth in the wake of a viral outbreak similar to the rage virus (o.k, not as hard science but zombies are cool) and did so in huge cryogenic ships each preserving 10,000 people. An unknown time later (one of the recurring themes of the setting is that it's not known how long its been since humanity left each) one of the ships came into orbit of a life bearing planet, the people inside were reawakened and colonisation began. The colony suffered at first, with many people dying, then in the year 15 (0 being colonisation) another cryo ship arrived. Increase in people power and working technology kick started the colony and by year 30 it was thriving, the economy had begun to harvest spaced based resources, the population was steadily growing and a second city had been founded to better access natural resources. It's not the year 275 and the colony has reached a golden age. Political reforms have achieved a stable democracy, resource efficiency have prevented environmental problems and the colony was even blessed with the arrival of a fourth cryo ship 3 years before. The colony has decided that it's time to explore the universe and has assembled a fleet of space vassals to boldly go where no man (from the colony) has gone before, which is where the players come in, functioning as the crew.

Taking ideas from the new BattleStar and also a bit from Stargate Universe (which let’s face it is star gate trying to be the new battle star) many of the problems faced by the crew/party will be drawn from general problems of being in space for that long, things like running out of water or fuel, or people going space crazy and psychotic, I'm trying to think of what other problems like that would be.

Also I am trying to flesh out the setting a little more, I've decide that when the players encounter new species they will be evolved humans rather than life evolved among the furthest stars. This plays into a possible subplot about the "seeders" since all the planet the colony is on shows obvious signs of being terraformed from earth life a very long time ago, and also there is the strange problem of why four cryo ships have found their way to a planet given the exceedingly small odds of a second finding its way there. At the onset of the campaign the colony knows of humans living out in space called Skellions who often raid colonial mining ships and even the colony itself early on. Skellions typically live in giant space stations made of stolen ships, they are very distrustful of people who colonise worlds (some theorise that the Skellions were colonists of other worlds forced to flee for some reason). Outside of raiding they do mine spaced based resources and grow food in artificial green houses, though they are closer to space rednecks than a functional space civilisation.

[Dustin]

Sounds like fun.

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

An unknown time later (one of the recurring themes of the setting is that it's not known how long its been since humanity left each) one of the ships came into orbit of a life bearing planet

This is troublesome without some additional handwaving. I have a hard time imagining an automated cryogenic system that doesn't track time somehow. Does the method of space propulsion itself disconnect ship time from universe time?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Dustin

Sounds like fun.This is troublesome without some additional handwaving. I have a hard time imagining an automated cryogenic system that doesn't track time somehow. Does the method of space propulsion itself disconnect ship time from universe time?

Even if it did there would be some astronomical way to measure elapsed time. Proper motions of nearby stars, relative positions of global clusters around the galactic nucleus, etc. Whatever the time scale there will be some way to measure it at least roughly.

Cryogenic STL sleeper ships just aren't going to take you that far anyway. Anywhere you could get in one would be relatively well known from astronomical observations. We're probably "only" 10 or 20 years from being able to detect really Earth-like planets around nearby stars as a routine thing.

Have the colonists invented FTL (or immortality) since landing? If not, what are they going to get out of sending out more STL ships?

Someone looking for a campaign in the mode of BSG or Stargate Universe (which is admittedly not me) can't be that concerned about science or logic but you might want to consider introducing some superscience like a semi-random jump drive or largely non-understood network of wormholes to make the whole proposition more reasonable.

Nobody is going to launch any sort of "Enterprise boldly going" mission at STL speeds to check out the local neighborhood.

Also, please _please_ do not use the "spaceship running out of water" thing. It makes my head hurt every time I see it. Nobody who can build there own interstellar spaceship is going to be unable to recycle their own wastewater and keep their environmental systems going as a closed loop. If they aren't it's going to kill them in about 3 days and good riddance.

[starslayer]

Originally Posted by Dustin

Sounds like fun.This is troublesome without some additional handwaving. I have a hard time imagining an automated cryogenic system that doesn't track time somehow. Does the method of space propulsion itself disconnect ship time from universe time?

Also- they should know roughly how fast they were going and just be able to extrapolate the time; doubly so since a second ship showed up- they should have a relatively good number if computer moddeling still exists, or a general number if it does not and they have to rely on traditional astonomy.

IE- we were traveling at .02c, based on visible star patterns this location is 400 light years away: it has been ~20,000 years since we departed.

Second problem; even assuming a massive population boom for 14 generations, assuming everyone started breading at ~20 years of age, and then proceeded to have 5 children a piece and no one dies, ever, your population is:
20,000 *5, *14= 1,400,000

And that assumes you have some bicentennials hanging around through super-science medicine. In a more practical hard times, death by 60, not everyone has 5 children, stillbirths, crime, death by accidents, etc- you have less then 200,000 people.

They don't have time to head to stars, there are too few of them to risk to space travel unless there is a very good reason to go (the planet is missing a key element that they need for there technology; like say lithium, gallium, or uranium; but then it becomes a space mining game, not an exploration game). There is so much work to be done on planet to continue to make it fit for human population that they can't spare the effort to make an interstellar ship either- unless you want to say that the planet is unnaturally abundant in easily accessible resources AND the humans have access to robots which handle all domestic tasks, but if they have that, why not just send the robots to space stay home and create art or whatever else you do in the robot labor utopia.

[starslayer]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Also, please _please_ do not use the "spaceship running out of water" thing. It makes my head hurt every time I see it. Nobody who can build there own interstellar spaceship is going to be unable to recycle their own wastewater and keep their environmental systems going as a closed loop. If they aren't it's going to kill them in about 3 days and good riddance.

I don't see anything wrong with this plot so long as it is done in the right way- like how battle-star galactica handled it: IE- your ship with crew 300 is 99.5% efficient at recycling water, you could go essentially go forever with just a twenty thousand liter spare tank to handle ship showers and the slow loss due to that 99.5% efficiency, and the like (the shower water will be recycled eventually, but not fast enough to actually fuel other showers since most people shower in the morning or evening). Since each crew member needs about 4 liters of water a day (we'll assume excess over that like shower reclamation or post work out drinking is easy to reclaim is essentially 100% efficient) you only loose 6 liters a day out of your twenty thousand liter spare tank, so you can operate for 3333 days with no refill <and you can claim casual refill every time you pass a comet or other ice-ball>. Something bad happens and you loose ALL your water. You fix the tank, juice down some non-essentials <house plants, luxury greenery>, you reduce the amount of salt in all of the mess food and mannage to scrape together 100 liters, nobody can take a shower, and basically every day that 100 liters is reducing by 6 liters- you have 17 days to find water before drastic measure must be taken; The nearest comet might be more then 17 days away, and even if it's not, it might only be enough water to get you 25-50 more days- worse, the system may have been 99.5% efficient when it was put together, in drydock, and every weld was X-ray measured; with your fix it might be less efficent now, leaking tiny amounts of water into space through poor welds or leaving more water in the final waste due to whatever compromised your water in the first place.

[vicky_molokh]

Ah, high tech, low pop. Love the concept, and always have trouble justifying it. Also, feels a bit like Original War in space to me - but without the war, that is.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

For a while now I've been dreaming up a space exploration setting that can be loosely described Enterprise if it were re-invented the same way the new battlestar galactica was. Basically the setting assumes minimal technology over TL8 with a little super science. There is space travel (obviously) but guns fire bullets rather than lasers,

This could make sense if you mean hand-weapons, but if you've got starflight tech, STL or FTL either one, then heavier weaponized lasers (or something equivalent) probably will exist. They aren't superscience, they're on the horizon for us now, and any starflight technology will have the energy sources to power them.

injuries require surgery that takes considerable time to recover from, and so forth. The premise is that humanity had to evacuate earth in the wake of a viral outbreak similar to the rage virus (o.k, not as hard science but zombies are cool) and did so in huge cryogenic ships each preserving 10,000 people. An unknown time later (one of the recurring themes of the setting is that it's not known how long its been since humanity left each) one of the ships came into orbit of a life bearing planet, the people inside were reawakened and colonisation began. The colony suffered at first, with many people dying, then in the year 15 (0 being colonisation) another cryo ship arrived. Increase in people power and working technology kick started the colony and by year 30 it was thriving, the economy had begun to harvest spaced based resources,

Why did they bother? With ~20,000 people, any habitable world would have all the resources they would likely need to sustain them and even a luxurious life-style (assuming they had sufficient automation to maintain a luxurious life-style with 20,000-30,000 people, not all of them working age). If your automation is that good, you've got a small paradisiacal town, if it's not that good, life is still a struggle to get by and space flight is a dream for your descendants to worry with.

the population was steadily growing and a second city had been founded to better access natural resources.

This is just way too fast to be believable, for the technology setting you've been describing.

It's not the year 275 and the colony has reached a golden age. Political reforms have achieved a stable democracy, resource efficiency have prevented environmental problems and the colony was even blessed with the arrival of a fourth cryo ship 3 years before.

It would be far, far more believable if you moved the year to say...Arrival
+2750 years, assumed that technology had retrogressed during that period and been redeveloped to the level you want, and that there had been some warfare, chaos, and the other nastiness of human nature along the way before the utopian civilization rose. That would give your population the time to grow to something substantial and some reason to look beyond the planet for resources or knowledge.

The colony has decided that it's time to explore the universe and has assembled a fleet of space vassals to boldly go where no man (from the colony) has gone before, which is where the players come in, functioning as the crew.

Taking ideas from the new BattleStar and also a bit from Stargate Universe (which let’s face it is star gate trying to be the new battle star) many of the problems faced by the crew/party will be drawn from general problems of being in space for that long, things like running out of water or fuel, or people going space crazy and psychotic, I'm trying to think of what other problems like that would be.

Depends on how realistic you want to be. BSG II and SGU are not realistic at all, so maybe it doesn't matter. If it does, though, keep in mind that any technology that can build a starship can construct reasonably self-contained water recycling systems. They might malfunction or be damanged, or itr might be overstrained, but as a general rule starships won't run out of water unless they have some other problem to cause it.

If they don't have recycling technology that good, then they won't be launching starships for exploration, they won't even be doing very much at an interplanetary level in the first place.

Food is more complicated, it's easier to believe in running out of food than water, but still, there are non-superscience ways to recycle food, too, and any technology capable of starflight would almost surely know about them (if they don't, that's a story in itself!). They might not be as efficient as with water, but they work or as far as we can tell should work.

(It might be plausible that the life support system can recycle some nutrients but not all, so stores could be an issue there. Likewise, food recycling might be inherently less efficient than water in such a small closed system, so maybe raw materials would have to be carried in greater supply, too.)

Space craziness is a question mark. We don't have much real data on this subject except from long ocean voyages and remote outposts and the like. It probably can happen...but if the people picking the crews are even modestly competent, it probably shouldn't happen often. I could easily imagine, for ex, that one of the training stages for the crews for these ships would be living in an enclosed environment with other potential recruits for a year, or something of the sort to weed out unsuitable personalities.

Now, it might turn out that there's something totally unknown about interstellar space that messes with the human mind, or some human minds, over long periods...that could even be true in the real world for all we know. Astra incognita and all that...or maybe the FTL drive has some such effect.

Also I am trying to flesh out the setting a little more, I've decide that when the players encounter new species they will be evolved humans rather than life evolved among the furthest stars. This plays into a possible subplot about the "seeders" since all the planet the colony is on shows obvious signs of being terraformed from earth life a very long time ago, and also there is the strange problem of why four cryo ships have found their way to a planet given the exceedingly small odds of a second finding its way there.

Well, evolution takes time. On a human scale it takes a lot of time for it to turn humans into something reasonably classifiable as 'not human'. Even with the new selective pressures and high birth and death rates in the colonies, even with higher exposure to mutagens, it takes a long time.

So either (as you imply) somebody else messed with the genes, or...as others have noted on-thread, it's just not plausible that the cryoships would not have some way to know how long they'd been in flight from Earth. In fact, they would be expected to have lots of ways to know that. Redundant timers, clocks, radioactive-decay clocks, astronomical observations, scientists could make an approximate guesstimate from the condition of the ship itself at arrival.

So...suppose the cryoships that arrived on the colony passed through some kind of time anomaly, or were held in flight by these 'Seeders', while the other colonies evolved and changed. Maybe everybody else arrived on their target worlds 50 million years ago...

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Ah, high tech, low pop. Love the concept, and always have trouble justifying it.

Given sufficient automation, it's plausible, especially in 'matural colonial' environments.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

The colony suffered at first, with many people dying, then in the year 15 (0 being colonisation) another cryo ship arrived. Increase in people power and working technology kick started the colony and by year 30 it was thriving, the economy had begun to harvest spaced based resources,

I don't think so. 30,000 people are not going to be building a space program. Even if you have contragravity, ship building is going to require an industrial infrastructure that simply won't exist.

colony has decided that it's time to explore the universe and has assembled a fleet of space vassals to boldly go where no man (from the colony) has gone before, which is where the players come in, functioning as the crew.

So do they have faster than light drive?

Taking ideas from the new BattleStar and also a bit from Stargate Universe (which let’s face it is star gate trying to be the new battle star) many of the problems faced by the crew/party will be drawn from general problems of being in space for that long, things like running out of water or fuel, or people going space crazy and psychotic, I'm trying to think of what other problems like that would be.

Running out of water or fuel isn't especially likely given the setup. Stuff like that happens on Stargate Universe because they are on an incredibly old ship that is breaking down and is mostly out of their control. It happens on Battlestar Galactica because they are a rag tag fleet overloaded with refugees who left with about an hour to plan their departure. A actual planned expedition doesn't run into that kind of problem unless it was put together by some kind of fly by night scam artist or massively corrupt government. Hardly a golden age.

Now what could happen is that after the ship is a long way out, it gets into a battle and has to limp home, wrestling with resource problems and failing systems...but unlike Enterprise any sane commander would do exactly that if he got into a battle. Limp home and wait for the ship yard to fix his ship up.



A

lso I am trying to flesh out the setting a little more, I've decide that when the players encounter new species they will be evolved humans rather than life evolved among the furthest stars. This plays into a possible subplot about the "seeders" since all the planet the colony is on shows obvious signs of being terraformed from earth life a very long time ago, and also there is the strange problem of why four cryo ships have found their way to a planet given the exceedingly small odds of a second finding its way there.

The odds wouldn't be small at all. People actually set courses you know, and there aren't all that many stars near Sol that are particularly good candidates for Earthlike life.

Outside of raiding they do mine spaced based resources and grow food in artificial green houses, though they are closer to space rednecks than a functional space civilisation.

They make war, mine, grow food and maintain advanced technology. What more would they need to be functional?

[Zed]

Originally Posted by Dustin

Sounds like fun.This is troublesome without some additional handwaving. I have a hard time imagining an automated cryogenic system that doesn't track time somehow. Does the method of space propulsion itself disconnect ship time from universe time?

Maybe the ships had a year 100,000 problem. ;)

Also, if the ships were shut down completely in interstellar space and reactivated when there was enough light energy available, chronometers would be off. The cryo could be passive, only becoming active when the ship thaws out near a star.

I see a bigger problem with the evolved humans 'messing' with the colonists. If the Evo's had FTL and "preseeded" the planets and then redirected the cryo ships toward them... why? Social experiment? Reality show? Didn't want the lowly humans lowering property values in their parsec? Only good reasons I can think of is that unevolved humans are better at surviving in the rough. The Evo's need them to make the planet's Evo friendly (cell phone networks and cable tv yo!). Once the regular humans advance enough. POW! repo!