[Spaceships] Million Merchant Marathon

[Witchking]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Commerce can be a good excuse to take you interesting places where you do interesting things, but that's not actually a game about commerce, it's a game that's using commerce as a backdrop.

I would disagree...the East India Company was attempting to conduct commerce and make a profit. They were also ruling India. Commerce is a VERY broad catagory. A mercenary company is a facet of commerce.

I could see a boring game that would focus on Chartered Public Accountancy...but for every such example I can think of a couple that could or might be fun.

Trading Places could have been a boring explanation of the futures market...

Edit: Further thought; I am no lawyer but looking as a historian at the number of things the Federal Government is involved in via the Commerce Clause is truly breathtaking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by scc

I want to know if people think it would make for a good game, I'm not sure it last beyond one or two sessions, but it's repeatable and there are other places to go in the system and do the usual Traveler inspired tramp freighter things.

For the race itself, now that I think I understand how its set up (it's actually a regularly-scheduled race, like the Indy 500, starting starting each time whenever the optimal launch time to get to the destination from Venus is, and covers travel from Venus to the destination; the PC's can opt to participate in a race, or not, each time one rolls around), how do you intend to game it out? A contest of Navigation (with the crew assisting with various skills)? A minigame of some sort where each ship has multiple rolls to see who gets there first? Something else?


Personally, I suspect the race itself wouldn't be very interesting to game out, just a minor diversion that amounts to "Here is a low-paying-but-reliable contract, roll well and you can get a bonus for getting there first." But I can see plenty of complications that could arise (some of which wouldn't be appropriate for the crew of one of the ships involved to do anything about).

One would be a distress signal popping up, with the PC's ship being the one in the best (or perhaps only) position to respond. This could be another participant - perhaps they got sloppy trying to get there first and now something has broken down - or an uninvolved vessel (or even a station). Do the PC's give up their chance to win the prize in order to investigate and render aid, or just keep going and leave the other crew to their fate? Might it actually be a decoy - either by pirates wanting to prey on the participants, or by another participant who is obsessed with being the victor? Are the PC's even legally (or contractually) allowed to ignore a distress signal - and if they aren't but they want to anyway, how can they get away with it?

Another option would be to have some maniac (or, rather, group thereof) decide it would be a great idea to murder a large number of people and create a Kessler event in Venus' orbit, and so enters the race with a vessel bristling with hidden weapons. Just as the race starts, the ship opens fire, attempting to kill as many of the participants as possible before the particle accelerators serving to propel the ships can reposition and reconfigure to blast the saboteur out of the sky.

A final, for now, idea: with Venus' orbital defense systems occupied being used to accelerate all the ships involved in the race (I figure all those particle accelerators must have some purpose when there isn't a race going on), someone - probably, as above, someone who entered as a participant - takes advantage of the distraction to deliver an illicit payload down to Venus. The fact they couldn't get it there through typical black-market channels would mean it's got to be something serious - perhaps a Von Neumann machine designed to completely overrun Venus (and possibly spread beyond).

[scc]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Could you lay out your sequence of stages in this operation? It's a bit confusing. As far as I can tell, it goes like this:

1. Build a sunshade for Venus, let it cool enough for the CO2 to liquify.
2. Build a huge mass driver on Venus' surface, which is covered in liquid CO2 to a substantial depth. That ocean also contains enough of various acids (hydrochloric, hydrofluoric and sulphuric) to worry about.
3. Start chucking rocks off Venus to increase its rotation rate. You have to get them to at least Venus orbital velocity, through a nitrogen atmosphere that's three times as dense as Earth's. That looks rather hard. Or are you going to let Venus cool enough to freeze the CO2 and liquify the nitrogen? That may take a long time, since Venus must be expected to have radioactive heat in its core.

So for point 2 Venus has a differentiated surface, including three areas, continents basically that would likely be above the level of the seas that form and one of them is on the equator.

For point 3, yeah that was my thinking as well, bummer guess Venus is left with those long days.

Originally Posted by hal

Here may be a good thought to consider...

If a "mass" within the Sun's gravity well slows down - its orbital speed around say, Venus, will not be that OF Venus, but will work such that the ship will begin to "fall" towards the Sun.

No, it would just have an orbit just inward of Venus', leaving it to likely pulled back down to Venus.

Originally Posted by hal

If I recall correctly, solar sails can be used to slow a ship just as much as it can accelerate a ship. Which means, it will fall into the sun, and require that the pilot plot a course to insure that his speed is no lower than that of Mercury if he doesn't want to get any closer to the sun than Mercury. Yes, it likely helps if your course doesn't point you straight at the sun despite being at the speed of Mercury, but that's not something I will go into. ;)

From there, the thrust from the Solar Sails will intensify due to the inverse square of the distance law until the ship reaches the maximum velocity possible from the use of its solar sails. Not sure what that velocity will do where it comes to reaching the orbit of Mars or what have you...

In theory? Your solar sail ships may NOT need to utilize Hohmann transfer orbits. Sadly, I don't have the math background to determine if this is feasible or not. The real problem however, is - the closer you dive towards the sun, the hotter your vessel becomes. I'm not certain what the safest approach is to the sun - nor what the actual orbital times will be.

Going from Venus orbit to Mercury orbit requires twice the Delta-V of Venus to Earth, and solar sails can only move outwards and they accelerate very slowly, which is why I'm doing ******** with particle accelerators

Originally Posted by hal

As for harvesting the Atmosphere of Venus - some time back, I read about a tether ssystem for which ships could aim for the tether that is at the end of a long cable connected to a satellite. Is there any reason you can't simply have Venus orbital stations with tethers that reach into the atmosphere, and suck atmosphere up? Yes, there will be drag involved, but if you're going to use a solar screen to hide Venus from the sun's full sunlight, I think you may have some options here. For example, what could you do with a bank of solar panels large enough to hide Venus from the Sun? Could those solar panels power some high powered lasers whose only goal is to accelerate the solar sails of ships moving away from the orbit of Venus?

What about microwaves being beamed into the atmosphere of Venus - where the skimmers dive into the atmosphere of Venus, use a portion of the atmosphere as reaction fuel powered by microwave powered ships (broadcast power) and have them bring up a fair amount of atmosphere back into orbit? Those skimmers would need a maintenance crew to keep them in top shape, and they likely require someone to operate them remotely (would YOU want to land on Venus due to a ship malfunction?!!) But here is where things can become even more interesting...

Tether system would require constant boost to keep orbit but that's not a problem for me, but you'd be sucking up atmosphere without the ability to separate it into it's component gasses.

No to both lasers and microwaves, they would take thousands of years to get rid of the atmosphere

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

I have to confess, when I did the prep work for my tramp freighter game, it didn't occur to me to figure out the economics of terraforming Mars. In large part because the kind of regular, bulk freight loads involved in carrying a small asteroid's worth of N2 to Mars are pretty much the opposite of tramp freight loads.

So I started working this stuff out because I wanted to figure out how far along it would be at a certain point in time, specifically 2250. In that year Africa becomes unable to feed it's population due to poor environmental practices, this results in over a billion starving refugees fleeing the continent, this in turns causes other countries to have food supply problems and they all fall like dominoes. I wanted to figure out if there was any chance these terraforming projects could be advanced enough to supply food in large enough quantities to prevent this, the answer is no, which is fine with me. Note that this collapse doesn't effect the terraforming projects.

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

But that's me, and my opinion shouldn't matter if you players think it is interesting. However, you asked, and I don't think it's a particularly interesting premise: what's the challenge here? Where are the opportunities for shenanigans and reversals?

As I indicated, I am currently running a tramp freighter game, and these are the things we've done:
* Intercept another tramp freighter to deliver a repossession team on board, and incidentally defend it from attack by pirates
* Smuggle 50 tons of highly enriched uranium (HEU), and deal with the consequences of the fact that the only people that are illegally transporting HEU are pirates
* carry a load of freight that the shipper neglected to mention contained genetically modified gladiator apes for arena battles, and have the apes' containment systems fall apart almost at the end of the journey and the apes get loose and start wrecking the cargo hold
* smuggle a huge load of precious metals, and fend off hijackings and pirate attacks and hijackings during pirate attacks because the PCs are bad at screening their passengers

Some of these plots have worked better than others, but they've all been entertaining. Shipping bulk N2 on Hohlman transfer orbits doesn't sound entertaining.

Pirates aren't possible in my setting, no free ports to sell stuff at, and no real large populations off Earth. Adventure comes more in what the crew gets up to in port.

Originally Posted by Anthony

In my experience running games, neither racing nor mercantile activity makes for a good game, other than maybe the very occasional theft or sabotage storyline.

*Points to Traveler*

Originally Posted by Varyon

For the race itself, now that I think I understand how its set up (it's actually a regularly-scheduled race, like the Indy 500, starting starting each time whenever the optimal launch time to get to the destination from Venus is, and covers travel from Venus to the destination; the PC's can opt to participate in a race, or not, each time one rolls around), how do you intend to game it out? A contest of Navigation (with the crew assisting with various skills)? A minigame of some sort where each ship has multiple rolls to see who gets there first? Something else?

A minigame. First there's a luck roll to see if they can score a government contract for other cargo or passengers, whatever they may be. Then there's activities for private tramp cargo and speculative cargo. Race strategy needs to be decide, then the pilot/navigator needs to plot course and captain checks it. Next race day, several rounds of pilot makes Pilot check, engineer makes Mechanic and riggers make Crewman checks to boost acceleration, then check to see their in danger of hitting someone or if they've been cut off by someone else, dropping acceleration in the next round. Then a few mid-course rounds to adjust course and finally arrival, see if they've won. Then cargo needs to be unloaded and check to see if speculative cargo made money.

Originally Posted by Varyon

A final, for now, idea: with Venus' orbital defense systems occupied being used to accelerate all the ships involved in the race (I figure all those particle accelerators must have some purpose when there isn't a race going on), someone - probably, as above, someone who entered as a participant - takes advantage of the distraction to deliver an illicit payload down to Venus. The fact they couldn't get it there through typical black-market channels would mean it's got to be something serious - perhaps a Von Neumann machine designed to completely overrun Venus (and possibly spread beyond).

So Venus at this point is like a bigger version of Pluto and there's maybe a million people living there on short term contracts to support the terraforming effort. Think antarctic base more then anything else. There's no defense system, because there's nothing to defend, there's a single particle accelerator used for this race and any other cargo leaving Venus for other parts, it was original built for extra-solar missions and still sees some use in that regard.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by scc

So for point 2 Venus has a differentiated surface, including three areas, continents basically that would likely be above the level of the seas that form and one of them is on the equator.

True. A bit of arithmetic reveals that there's enough CO2 in the atmosphere to create an ocean about 1,000 feet deep if Venus' surface was level, so parts of the continents should be above it.

. . . there's a single particle accelerator used for this race . . .

How does a single accelerator work with a race with lots of participants? Surely it can only accelerate one of them at a time?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by scc

So Venus at this point is like a bigger version of Pluto and there's maybe a million people living there on short term contracts to support the terraforming effort. Think antarctic base more then anything else. There's no defense system, because there's nothing to defend, there's a single particle accelerator used for this race and any other cargo leaving Venus for other parts, it was original built for extra-solar missions and still sees some use in that regard.

Each ship needs the undivided attention of at least one particle accelerator located at the origin for the entirety of the acceleration phase of travel, and the undivided attention of at least one particle accelerator located at the destination for the entirety of the deceleration phase of travel (unless your reactionless drives rapidly adjust their velocity to match that of the destination - probably something like "adjusts to match the nearest strong source of gravity" - in which case you can just "brake" at the end). Your "race" would consist of a single vessel accelerating to cruising speed, then the next vessel gets to accelerate, then the next, and so forth. Unless you have extremely short acceleration phases, you won't be able to have more than a few participants in each race, and you'll need to judge the winner based on who gets there with the least amount of travel time, rather than who gets there first.

A setup like this really calls for having a large number of particle accelerators in orbit, to be able to handle accelerating and decelerating vessels that are coming through. And, in a setting where civilians can own spacecraft, you have a need for planetary defenses - even around a world that is being terraformed, because a few dozen RFG strikes (which anyone with a spacecraft can manage) can absolutely wreck whatever infrastructure you've got set up (and kill a good chunk of your million-strong workforce), and some maniac is going to think doing so is a grand idea. So - have a bunch of particle accelerators in orbit, with the idea being that they'll typically serve for accelerating and decelerating spacecraft, and they can also serve for planetary defense.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by scc

*Points to Traveler*

.

<shrug>The last Traveller game I was in fell apart when the GM realized how much math was involved in a Free Trader game. I didn't find it burdensome but his eyes glazed over.

Buying and selling and trading is a game in itself in Traveller but it's mostly not a roleplaying game.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by scc

*Points to Traveler*

I've never seen a good Traveller game that was about mercantile activity.

[scc]

Originally Posted by johndallman

How does a single accelerator work with a race with lots of participants? Surely it can only accelerate one of them at a time?

Originally Posted by Varyon

Each ship needs the undivided attention of at least one particle accelerator located at the origin for the entirety of the acceleration phase of travel, and the undivided attention of at least one particle accelerator located at the destination for the entirety of the deceleration phase of travel (unless your reactionless drives rapidly adjust their velocity to match that of the destination - probably something like "adjusts to match the nearest strong source of gravity" - in which case you can just "brake" at the end). Your "race" would consist of a single vessel accelerating to cruising speed, then the next vessel gets to accelerate, then the next, and so forth. Unless you have extremely short acceleration phases, you won't be able to have more than a few participants in each race, and you'll need to judge the winner based on who gets there with the least amount of travel time, rather than who gets there first.

A setup like this really calls for having a large number of particle accelerators in orbit, to be able to handle accelerating and decelerating vessels that are coming through. And, in a setting where civilians can own spacecraft, you have a need for planetary defenses - even around a world that is being terraformed, because a few dozen RFG strikes (which anyone with a spacecraft can manage) can absolutely wreck whatever infrastructure you've got set up (and kill a good chunk of your million-strong workforce), and some maniac is going to think doing so is a grand idea. So - have a bunch of particle accelerators in orbit, with the idea being that they'll typically serve for accelerating and decelerating spacecraft, and they can also serve for planetary defense.

So the particle accelerator is a somewhat plausible system designed to make for an interesting setting, but it is not a small or low powers system, it's at least 10 TJ in power and likely a lot more. It's operating in a wide angle beam projection for the race, if each ship need a dedicated accelerator for a time period there wouldn't be a race as the launches would be spread as much as possible.

Originally Posted by Anthony

I've never seen a good Traveller game that was about mercantile activity.

Right, but it provides the backbone for another adventure.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by scc

So the particle accelerator is a somewhat plausible system designed to make for an interesting setting, but it is not a small or low powers system, it's at least 10 TJ in power and likely a lot more. It's operating in a wide angle beam projection for the race, if each ship need a dedicated accelerator for a time period there wouldn't be a race as the launches would be spread as much as possible.

I had considered this possibility, but that doesn't really work for a race. Either you need the beam spread out enough that you are wasting a lot of the energy (due to empty space the beam goes through; if that 10 TJ particle accelerator can safely manage up to 5 ships, each of those ships could probably manage on their own with a dedicated 1 TJ particle accelerator... and five 1 TJ devices would cost around half what one 10 TJ device would), or you need it narrow enough that all the ships would have to cooperate with each other (which is basically the opposite of a race) to avoid collisions (as otherwise the vessels in the back will block those in the front, causing the former to accelerate more rapidly).

But maybe I'm coming at this from the wrong direction. Are you going for realism here, or are you wanting more cinematic pay-no-attention-to-the-math-behind-the-curtains play?

[Anaraxes]

It seems that the game has to be cinematic enough that the something can threaten the outcome, and that the PCs can do something to improve their chances. If it's a straight race, then the game has the Cold Equations problem.

I also don't understand how the PCs can afford to take time off to have any sort of adventures. There's not really anywhere "along the way" from Venus to Mars, other than an extremely fortuitous Earth-Luna position. (There's probably some wacky flyby scenarios that might involve Mercury or Jupiter or whatever, but I'm not competent to calculate those. But even if there were such, it'd just serve as a Great Filter for the racers; everyone who thinks of it winds up in the winning pack -- see the Cold Equations problem -- while everyone else automatically loses.) If the timing of the race is at all close, then you can't stop for a side quest, or you just lose the main one. The game would have to be cinematic enough that your hotshot pilot or brilliant engineer is somehow going to speed the ship up or make the route shorter to make up the time, unrealistic as that is.

The description reminds me more of "Around the World in 80 Days". That's a race with side adventures being the main point. But it's also a setting where the travel is extremely unpredictable and erratic, with a fair portion of the adventure happening precisely because the racers don't have access to the latest and greatest technology means of transport (like railways and steamships) on demand. Missed connections, scrambling for alternate routes, and so on. But the PCs aren't carrying all that nitrogen in their steamer trunks while negotiating to hire one of the few sporadic tramp freighters going in their general direction. There's a million ships making exactly the same trip they are, all of them already full.

To me, a race sounds more like one event in a campaign than the basis of the whole campaign. The suspense of the race would seem to have to come mostly from skulduggery on the part of the competitors, perhaps politics and bureaucracy in getting a nitrogen contract in the first place (nods at Traveller's "Exit Visa" adventure). Once the ships launch, about all you've got to work with is the discovery of sabotage or stowaways. (And of course the nitrogen pirates, no doubt would-be competitors that didn't make it through the bureaucracy stage.)