Murder in TL10 Space Opera

[Langy]

How do you know? Can you see past the event horizon? :)

The person dies way before they reach the event horizon due to tidal forces. That was my point.

Time dilation is on both ends. The outside viewer percieves him stuck on the event horizon forever while the universe continutes normally, he would percieve the universe as having stopped (if he could see outside) while he continues on normally.

That's odd. I understand him seeing the universe slow down, but what causes him to 'stop' prior to the event horizon compared to the rest of the universe?

[Jasonft]

Larry Niven's "Gil the ARM" series had an absolutely wonderful murder mystery set on the Moon where, so it turned out, the impossible murder was commited with a fairly standard laser rifle.

The trick was the reflective surface used - a nearly perfectly shaped mirror made of ice with (if I remember right) a light silver coating. When the sun came up (which happened long before the cops got to the location of the 'sniper') the ice sublimated and all the evidence was gone. The mirror was rather cleverly and cheaply made too, all you needed to do was spin a bowl of water at just the right speed while freezing the contents.

As another idea for TL 10, might I suggest some method of directed radiation? Silent, invisible, and under the right circumstances not detectable until far too late. Has the added roleplaying aspect of leaving a still living but soon to be dead and we can't do anything about it victim.

Rogue computer programs are pretty good murder weapons too. Given the likely prevalence of computerized systems in your setting almost anything could, at least in theory, be turned into a spy or a murder weapon.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Jasonft

L

As another idea for TL 10, might I suggest some method of directed radiation? Silent, invisible, and under the right circumstances not detectable until far too late. Has the added roleplaying aspect of leaving a still living but soon to be dead and we can't do anything about it victim.

I don't know what the OP's definition of "too wild" is for bio-tech but in the Gurps book of that name you can reverse radiation poisoning with TL9 gene therapy.

Just working with TL8 ability to keep people alive if they love to make it to the hospital and then dialing that up two notches injuries that are slowly fatal but untreatable are going to be a very limited category. You want something that really kills _dead_ before the medics get there.

As long as we've got Bio-tech open why not look at Hypercoagulin on p.151. At TL10 it won't be a poison unknown to science but it will be in every crash and military emergency kit. It's also fast.

[lexington]

Originally Posted by Langy

That's odd. I understand him seeing the universe slow down, but what causes him to 'stop' prior to the event horizon compared to the rest of the universe?

I have no idea, it's probably an issue of the relativity of simultaneity. I am quite certain that in relativistic time dilation both sides see the other slow down. Honestly, lwcamp would be the person to ask about physics.

[Cernig]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2
A little on the sophisticated side for TL 10

That was part of Weber's idea too. It was bleeding edge tech so no-one knew about it or had the forensic capabilities to go looking for it's traces.

[LordOfDorkness]

Thanks for all these wonderful ideas. It at least inspired me to look for some alternative methods to commit a fellony in TL10 :P

And concerning what is too wild in g-verse, basically, anything that stops you, as a player, from relating to a human who lives in the future. So you won't find anyone who uses nanoviruses to turn herself into a cat-girl for instance. And no technologies that prevent normal warfare, like virusses that alter the way you think.

But still, some nice ideas here :)

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Langy

The person dies way before they reach the event horizon due to tidal forces. That was my point.

You're no fun. :)

[scruggsw]

I'm somewhat surprised, no mention of the man who just about invented the sci-fi mystery?
Issac Asimov wrote a lot sci-fi murder mysteries. 'Caves of Steel', 'Beneath the Naked Sun', and 'Robots of Dawn' are just from his Elijah Bailey trilogy. The Lucky Starr books are juvenile sci-fi mysteries. That is where I'd go for inspiration.

[Anaraxes]

Post #2. Though I did fail to mention Niven's ARM stories (even though they were in my mind).

Here's even more, only about half of which I've read:
http://www.sldirectory.com/libsf/boo...mysteries.html

(I completely forgot that Dream Park has a mystery investigation behind it.)

[Captain-Captain]

Before Nightline, ABC ran a variety of late Night programs and made very cheaply for TV at that time slot movies. I recall a versionof the Broadway Superman musical, for instance and Craig Stevens doing a turn as the Thin Man.

In one of these, someone found a good work around the problem that you can't get a hypnotized person to commit suicide etc. In this case, the victim was an astronaut in space who was hypnotized to believe he was in the Simulator, and thus stepped outside to go speak to the Adminstrator.

New technological way to kill someone: This is a gimmick. Pure and simple.

An inventive way to kill someone: That's a mystery.

A new tech for killing people is restricted knowledge for the most part. The killer is p;robably the only viable suspect who knows of it, realistically. Unless you have all of the suspect 'just happen' to know of it and could have used it on the victim, identifying cause of death becomes a negligible effort to discover unless every single suspect, including the utterly innocent have some fully credible reason to not mention the tech to the investigators.

The problem is that most innocent suspects have no reason not to tell investigators about this. Excep;tion: your PCs have no official status to investigate and in fact are also suspects.


Let's try something though. You have a visiting Royal Princess. She's pregnant with the Crown Prince of Princess no less. This is both because of lineage and the fact the fetus has been proven to be psionic, a prerequisite for the Throne, with her race.

She's specifically on this planet because of a mishap (or sabotage) that wrecked the medbay on her ship. Her race hails from a distant sector and the big hospital on this planet is the only one able to accomodate the needs of her species and a psi fetus.

The Hospital's psi tech lets doctors communicate to the fetus without being psi themselves, but the computer system operating it while state of the art, isn't particularly secure, both because it's specialized software has to override anti-virus protocols and because no one expected there would be need to hack proof a specialized system.

Someone hacks in and programs the fetus to recognize and lethally attack a person with a specific mental signatrue. There's little question that the royal fetus killed the victim. The question is who hacked the system and put the kill command into it.

Complications, having killed with it's mind, the fetus is likely to grow up to be a telepathic serial killer, hardly suitable as a monarch. However tech of this time allows a fix. Limited time window and knowing exactly what the programming was would greatly help.

If the cure can be made in time, this becomes a minor regretable incident and NOT a major diplomatic crisis.

Complications: access to the Princess will be limited to the Investigators. How much limitation is left to you.

Motive? Kill the victim? or render the heir to the Throne unsuitable by means of making it kill? Or both, someone interested in messing with the politics of those people who had a reason to kill the victim?

Was the mishap onboard the Princess' ship done to bring her to this Hospital, or the plot rapidly adjusted by her location?

Have fun!