Our timeline gets parachronics in 2022

[KarlKost]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Exactly. It's more work than it would be if it was possible to use conveyors as instant bomb-delivery-to-anywhere systems. Travelling from Beijing to New York on an undeveloped world is not trivial.

No, it's almost trivial. You just need a boat and a missile truck. Seriously, it's not that hard, since you can do it mostly by ship.

The point is, no matter how harder, it's risk free and completely undetectable. They'd do it.

[KarlKost]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Not just China and Russia, there are many dictatorships that would do the same. Some nominal democracies would do the same. And some otherwise decent democracies as well.

Few of these nations would face much criticism for it either.

China and Russia have more means at their disposal to get it done. It's not that I dont think that North Korea, Iran or Saudi Arabia wouldnt want to, but rather that lack the means to build/research conveyors or to assemble effect "para-world" invasions.

As for democracies, it's always a little harder, althought there's always some dirty, it's far harder to hide the accountability.

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by Willy

As far as I know you don´t need a projektor for travelling inside a quantum. In fact if I read Infinite worlds P 28 under conveyors right. Any conveyor can jump to any point inside a quanta. They bill for a subquanta conveyor is peanuts compared to what some nations put into their military.

Even if a projektor is necessary, the payload for a conveyor to deliver a nuke is quite small, which reduces the necessary costs and size of the projector, again look what a modern warplane costs and you understand what I mean.

Since everyone who can built such a thing can calculate the right coordinates, we will have a constant all against all threat of a anytime no warning, not to defend against nuclear holocaust.

Nah, nobody's going to nuke anyone anytime soon. The nuclear powers are pretty much all major trading partners, and there's no percentage in nuking the people who pay you on the regular.

[dcarson]

New Zealand was around 1200 for first settlement by humans about that same time as Hawaii and Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Samoa was the start of Polynesian settlement around 800 BCE. Bermuda was 1609. Falklands 1764 although it was probably visited earlier by South Americans but not settled.

What other late settled areas are there?

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by dcarson

New Zealand was around 1200 for first settlement by humans about that same time as Hawaii and Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Samoa was the start of Polynesian settlement around 800 BCE. Bermuda was 1609. Falklands 1764 although it was probably visited earlier by South Americans but not settled.

What other late settled areas are there?

Iceland (settled in the 8th Century, abandoned, re-settled 870)

The Azores (settled 1436)

Mauritius (discovered about 975, settled 1638)

Réunion (settled 1665)

Diego Garcia (discovered by Europeans in 1532 and settled in 1793)

St Helena (discovered 1502, settled 1658)

Tristan de Cunha (discovered 1506, settled 1810)

Ascension Island (discovered 1501, settled 1701 (shipwrecked sailors) / 1815)

Cocos Islands (discovered 1609, settled 1825)

I think the first year-round settlement on Svalbard wasn't until about 1904.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by KarlKost

Lets be real here:

China and Russia would move nuclear bombs inside any new world in order to resurface them back into Home World as soon as they got their hands in that technology. And they would use it to destroy all other world nuclear powers (including each other).

For what? To die in the retaliatory strikes?

Other than that, there is ZERO doubt that Russia and China would use this to conquer and enslave HUNDREDS of worlds as soon as they got to them.

I doubt it. I'm not as confident of this as Peter Zeihan, and certainly not as jubilant, but Russia and China have zombie economies and are facing severe demographic problems (their populations and workforces are shrinking, their populations ageing, their dependency ratios rising). They will be lucky to survive this decade as unified states, and are simply not in any sort of demographic or economic shape to conquer even one world, let alone hundreds.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

What would happen if we invented conveyers and/or gates now? Postulate that, at least for a good while, we only have access to one world. It is TL 3 no mana.

Pandemics, like those that killed ~93% of the population of the New World between 1491 and 1610.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Pandemics, like those that killed ~93% of the population of the New World between 1491 and 1610.

The return of smallpox which would go through our modern society like a buzzsaw (it hasn't been seen naturally since 1977) until vaccine production was resumed.

[hal]

Originally Posted by KarlKost

No, it's almost trivial. You just need a boat and a missile truck. Seriously, it's not that hard, since you can do it mostly by ship.

The point is, no matter how harder, it's risk free and completely undetectable. They'd do it.

OK - not to pick on KarlKost (seriously, I just skipped to page 3 and picked the first one whose comment matched my counter-point!).

1) depending on who develops the technology first, determines which military sees the implications FIRST - which in turn, may very well determine what happens in the broad sequence of events.

2) depending upon the materials required to build such a "Conveyance" - and how easily it is to monitor the arrival and departures of said para-chronic travel, determines how much of a warning some nations may have.

3) we already have the technology to match up the isotope ratios to determine the origins of where nuclear warheads originate, that isn't going to change. Nuclear Warheads, biological warheads, etc - can eventually be traced back.

4) if anything, the exploitation of resources will become a massive issue as the other world's resources will be under-utilized by the native cultures and in high demand by the higher tech world. This is very much like what happens in history. The higher tech goods made cheaply, will garner in trade, the cheap (to the lower tech world) resources that have high value in the newer world. That's a simplification of course, but it will be the general case.

5) New lands to inhabit - the concept of going native will become all the more likely. Despots with the ability to arm their troops with technology that the lesser world can't effectively fight on their own resources, will potentially result in invasions. But to counter THAT scenario, High Tech nations may very well enter into treaties of protection - which will very closely mimic colonial era politics from the olden days of our history. It could very well come to pass that wars will break out on the newly discovered world that will be proxy wars for the higher tech world. Anything is possible in that context.

Now, imagine that, in exchange for modern medical access for the ruler of a low tech nation, a treaty is signed for the right to build colonists in his kingdom. As money pours in, these colonies become more and more like High Tech enclaves, who in turn, provide a new powerbase for a new political class that merges old world with new world technologies and socio-political aspects. Toss in religious issues and missionaries - and yea, as was said by another poster upstream in the threads...

"it is going to get ugly"

Energy sources can be spotted easily enough by their signatures. How MUCH energy is required is likely to be significant. The first thing that comes to my mind is the Jump Drive in Traveller. It may very well produce some sort of gravitational signature, electromagnetic signature, or what have you - each time the conveyor breaks connection with this "locale" and enters the "other locale".

In the end, as the GM who puts this "game universe" together, you may want to examine the implications of all of your game decisions and ask yourself "If A implies B, and C implies D, what do A and D imply? What does B and C imply?

For instance? Let's say that the total cost involved - per conveyor trip, is $1,000,000. For any such commercial success, the cost of your conveyor's trade or plunder, has to exceed 2 Million dollars (remember, 1 Million per TRIP is x2 for a return trip). That is going to drive a few things right there. If the trip costs less than $1,000 per trip, the economics of such travel will change things in a big way.

As GM, I would definitely scare the bejesus out of my players with having an NPC come down with a disease that science has never been exposed to. I would also likely do the Cortez scenario where, a few handful of explorers end up decimating an entire empire simply by infecting the natives and having it wipe out 90% of the population. That oesn't even address the issue of whether the lesser technological culture will worship them as Gods or not. Hell, that doesn't even begin to address the issue of linguisitic incompatabilities.

Hopefully, this is food for thought.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by maximara

The return of smallpox which would go through our modern society like a buzzsaw (it hasn't been seen naturally since 1977) until vaccine production was resumed.

If the other world had domesticated cattle, yes, smallpox or something like it. And they might well have analogues of other zoonotic diseases such as chickenpox, avian flu, swine flu, dengue, measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, plague etc. that are different enough from our accustomed versions that we are not immune to them. And in another world they might well have different epidemic diseases from analogous domesticates, or even unfamiliar domesticates.