2001 (2041) A Space Odyssey as a setting

[Tom Kalbfus]

What do you think of this as a setting?

here's the other version of the Discovery.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

2001 is a great setting to role-play in using Traveller.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

2001 is a great setting to role-play in using Traveller.

Yes, I was thinking of using the Orbital varient of Traveller. Since I'm trying to place it in the future, I think 2041 is a suitable year, one where we are likely to have a Moonbase and an orbital hotel. My guess is there would be a crewed facility on Mars as well, though that doesn't figure into the story.

The Discovery is in the 6000 ton range so I would have to use a version of High Guard to develop the stats, it is a government ship operated by NASA, I figure the furthest manned outposts would be in the asteroid belt in this setting. While there are a number of probes in the Jupiter system, there is as yet no manned outposts here. One question is whether to put the Monolith at the L1 point between Io and Jupiter as the movie stated, or whether I should go with the book and place it in orbit around Saturn. What do you think? If its around Saturn, I could make a clean break with the movie. The Monolith is a rectangular stargate of dimensions 1:4:9 I think this would be a good setting to connect with orbital Ringworld which I am also developing, maybe ditch the nanotechnology thing and go with a straight stargate as shown in the Movie, I'm just changing the destination. Maybe the monoliths could be a series of stargates. It would be a bit open-ended for a movie, but for an RPG setting, it would work just fine.

Politically the Earth is much as today, the two main superpowers are the United States and China, with India looking to be an up and coming superpower. There are a lot of wealthy space tourists making trips to low Earth orbit space stations and the Moon, the Clavius Base being one such location. Only very wealthy individuals can make it to Mars on their own dime, there is a smaller Mars base, and a bunch of highly automated asteroid mining operations. There is a research station orbiting Venus, Mercury has no permanent residents.

 

[AndrewW]

Since I'm trying to place it in the future, I think 2041 is a suitable year, one where we are likely to have a Moonbase and an orbital hotel.

Be careful if you use that Moonbase for nuclear waste storage...

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

I just play it as an alternate 2001 year rather than in the future.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

I just play it as an alternate 2001 year rather than in the future.

We could not build the USS Discovery in 2001, the main body of the ship would be from $500 billion to $1 trillion , this is 6000 tons to orbit, it would require 60 Saturn V launches to low Earth orbit just to get the construction material there, or about 300 launches of the US Space Shuttle. I suppose if the President of the United States was a maniac space buff, the country could probably do this, the main sticking point is we would not have been able to build HAL and we would not have had those low berths in the centrifuge wheel. The Moon base would have been nothing to write home about, just a few cans on lander legs, the wheel space station would be unaffordable, we could barely afford to build the USS Discovery, there would not be much money left over to build that double hulled wheel space station.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Since I'm trying to place it in the future, I think 2041 is a suitable year, one where we are likely to have a Moonbase and an orbital hotel.

Be careful if you use that Moonbase for nuclear waste storage...

That is very energetic nuclear waste I would say!
There is only a superficial resemblance between Space 1999 and 2001 A Space Odyssey. 2001 was carefully researched, they had aerospace engineers design the various movie spaceships, Space 1999 spaceships were designed by artists based on their coolness factor, the Eagles for instance had triangular windows because those were features of the Apollo lunar lander, the reason it had them is the engineers wanted to save weight by having smaller windows, and getting rid of the acceleration couches. Apollo astronauts landed the LEM while standing in the cockpit, and since they were standing they were closer to the window, and so the window could be smaller to save the weight on glass. Glass was not as strong as aluminum, so thick and heavy windows were reuired to hold back the atmosphere inside the LEM! The Space 1999 Eagles were multipurpose craft able to land on large worlds with atmospheres and then take off again, there was no reason to give them Apollo LEM style windows except for the coolness factor!

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

I just play it as an alternate 2001 year rather than in the future.

We could not build the USS Discovery in 2001, the main body of the ship would be from $500 billion to $1 trillion , this is 6000 tons to orbit, it would require 60 Saturn V launches to low Earth orbit just to get the construction material there, or about 300 launches of the US Space Shuttle. I suppose if the President of the United States was a maniac space buff, the country could probably do this, the main sticking point is we would not have been able to build HAL and we would not have had those low berths in the centrifuge wheel. The Moon base would have been nothing to write home about, just a few cans on lander legs, the wheel space station would be unaffordable, we could barely afford to build the USS Discovery, there would not be much money left over to build that double hulled wheel space station.

What do you mean we couldn't build all that stuff? I'm talking about an alternate 2001 setting to role-play in using Traveller's die mechanic.

 

[Condottiere]

Could be that the moon blasted off while the Discovery crew is still hibernating; cause of the explosion blamed on chemical dump, actually some alien artifact was at fault.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

I just play it as an alternate 2001 year rather than in the future.

We could not build the USS Discovery in 2001, the main body of the ship would be from $500 billion to $1 trillion , this is 6000 tons to orbit, it would require 60 Saturn V launches to low Earth orbit just to get the construction material there, or about 300 launches of the US Space Shuttle. I suppose if the President of the United States was a maniac space buff, the country could probably do this, the main sticking point is we would not have been able to build HAL and we would not have had those low berths in the centrifuge wheel. The Moon base would have been nothing to write home about, just a few cans on lander legs, the wheel space station would be unaffordable, we could barely afford to build the USS Discovery, there would not be much money left over to build that double hulled wheel space station.

What do you mean we couldn't build all that stuff? I'm talking about an alternate 2001 setting to role-play in using Traveller's die mechanic.

With 2001 era technology, we couldn't build HAL 9000, that was the key to my picking the date 2041, because according to Moore's Law, our computers whould be up to the task of simulating an entire human brain by that time, We con't have cold sleep either, and the USS Discovery was a sleeper ship, would could have built the ship in 2001, but we could not have built the low berths or HAL 9000, two key elements of the plot. It would be very hard to accelerate Moore's law, private industry is already pushing this technology as much as it could be pushed, I doubt any amount of government spending could change the timeline where we achieve human level machine intelligence.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Could be that the moon blasted off while the Discovery crew is still hibernating; cause of the explosion blamed on chemical dump, actually some alien artifact was at fault.

Space 1999 was a kid's show, just like the Adventures of Baron Munchausen.