Brainstorming a Ringworld adventure
- Thread starter Hakkonen
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Tom Kalbfus
Mongoose
Well the Ancients are part of the setting, if the authors decided that they should make megastructures, then they will make megastructures, whether it makes sense for them to do so or not. They could just as easily decided that Ancients just love to dine on human meat, and that they have ranches full of humans that they raise for food. I don't give a fig about the fictional universe in the official traveller setting, I am talking about your setting and your reasoning, its your decision whether there is going to be any logical consistency. I'm only saying that a ringworld would be built by people that needed to create pseudogravity by rotating a structure, that would imply that they don't have artificial gravity found in everyday Traveller spaceships and space stations. the fact that they would build such a large thing would seem to imply that they thought faster than light travel was impossible and figured that they had to efficiently utilize the resources of one star system, and that easy travel to other stars just wasn't in the cards.Sigtrygg said:
One "easy" way to create a "pocket universe" is to build a vast computer and run a simulation of that universe with simulated people in it, and if they just simulate all the known laws of physics, and have the computer track each partical and how they interact with other particles and the fundamental forces between them, they would have a pocket Universe and they wouldn't actually have to bend real space and time to make it.
Tom Kalbfus
Mongoose
Sigtrygg said:
Hakkonen said:
Circling back to your question - I'd offer enough to cover most if not all of the operating expenses (but not the mortgage payment) plus the Advanced Sensors, plus a fee for the sensor data. The Advanced Sensors mod is a pretty hefty award all by itself (BTW - don't forget to allow for the power point cost), but you could let them negotiate for the rest a bit if you'd like. If you have The Great Rift's DSE Handbook, you could use the Detailed Survey rules and base the sensor data fee on the Survey Index result. Throw in an adder (KCr50?) for discovery of a astronomical anomaly.
Sigtrygg
Emperor Mongoose
Back to the original question then 
Your set up has a ship crew stranded.
They are not the first, and no one else has ever made it back.
There is a functioning railway to the control centre.
Well they are not going to find a solution there or the previous ship crews could have done the same. So the answer must be elsewhere, which brings me to the point
What is it about the ringworld setting you want to hit your players over the head with? Starport - train - control centre, but we are on a ringworld, does not hit the players over the head.
They need to be out and about on the ringworld, they need to appreciate its scale and it potential.
You basically have planet of the week adventure just by going from ringworld square to ringworld square - what are the races, cultures and technologies of the inhabitants like? How will the players get from location to location on the ring itself - walking isn't an option
Your set up has a ship crew stranded.
They are not the first, and no one else has ever made it back.
There is a functioning railway to the control centre.
Well they are not going to find a solution there or the previous ship crews could have done the same. So the answer must be elsewhere, which brings me to the point
What is it about the ringworld setting you want to hit your players over the head with? Starport - train - control centre, but we are on a ringworld, does not hit the players over the head.
They need to be out and about on the ringworld, they need to appreciate its scale and it potential.
You basically have planet of the week adventure just by going from ringworld square to ringworld square - what are the races, cultures and technologies of the inhabitants like? How will the players get from location to location on the ring itself - walking isn't an option
Tom Kalbfus
Mongoose
Sigtrygg said:Back to the original question then
Your set up has a ship crew stranded.
They are not the first, and no one else has ever made it back.
There is a functioning railway to the control centre.
Well the are not going to find a solution there or the previous ship crews could have done the same. So the answer must be elsewhere, which brings me to the point?
What is it about the ringworld setting you want to hit your players over the head with? Starport - train - control centre but we are on a ringworld does not hit the players over the head.
They need to be out and about on the ringworld, they need to appreciate its scale and it potential.
You basically have planet of the week adventure just by going from ringworld square to ringworld square - what are the inhabitants, cultures and technologies of the inhabitants like? How will the players get from location to location on the ring itself - walking isn't an option
I would suggest flying. Maneuver drives don't work, a jet engine would however, there should be plenty of fuel to power a fusion reactor, what you need to do is direct the air intake to a heating element powered by the ship's fusion reactor, and you have a nuclear powered jet engine. If the ship is a scout ship, or a free or far trader, it already has a lifting body and could be made into an airplane. Maybey you might jury rig some landing gear.
steve98052
Mongoose
The fastest subsonic aircraft is the Boeing Dreamliner. It tops out at Mach 0.85 (1050 km/h, 650 mph).
To give an idea of the size of a 1 AU ringworld, 1 million km wide, let's fly a Dreamliner around it. 1 AU diameter is 149.6 million km. That times pi is 470 million km.
Dividing the 470 million km circumference by 1050 km/h is over 447000 hours travel time, 18650 24-hour days, or 51 years. That's a long time to fly without a refueling stop or maintenance.
What about flying edge to edge? One million km divided by 1050 km/h is 952 hours, or 39.7 days. That's more plausible as an adventure goal: just travel to the edge of the ring, with Interesting Events along the journey.
To give an idea of the size of a 1 AU ringworld, 1 million km wide, let's fly a Dreamliner around it. 1 AU diameter is 149.6 million km. That times pi is 470 million km.
Dividing the 470 million km circumference by 1050 km/h is over 447000 hours travel time, 18650 24-hour days, or 51 years. That's a long time to fly without a refueling stop or maintenance.
What about flying edge to edge? One million km divided by 1050 km/h is 952 hours, or 39.7 days. That's more plausible as an adventure goal: just travel to the edge of the ring, with Interesting Events along the journey.
Tom Kalbfus
Mongoose
the ship will need to land, the ship will need maintenance, and that can't be done while the ship is flying in an atmosphere. It will have to land a few times, and in those places, you can have encounters of various sorts.steve98052 said:
Tom Kalbfus
Mongoose
In other words it cannot fly by its normal means, but it still has a fusion reactor, an Engineer might be able to jury rig something that will allow it to fly within an atmosphere, perhaps using its areodynamic body shape to provide lift if it is pushed forward. Such a cobbled together contraption will likely require regular maintenance, and will have to set down on the ground to effect such maintenance, this is where the encounters come it. The Travellers will have to set up camp while repairs and maintenance on the ship is being performed.Sigtrygg said:
PsiTraveller
Cosmic Mongoose
Things will depend on the tech level of the inhabitants. Is there a functioning high tech society still operating on the Ringworld? A functioning train system seems to indicate yes, unless it is robot maintained long after the society has fallen.
If the society is still running does it control all of ringworld or is the ringworld balkanized?
Where do raw materials come from? Asteroid belts in system? Matter transmutation from energy to matter facilities on the shadow squares? This is technology the rest of the universe will kill for.
If society has fallen you get the Wu Escape paradigm. Any mistakes can be outrun. You can fly away from your mistakes and meet new peole every day/week/adventure. Don't fly so fast the meteor defense system shoots you down again.
Goal of adventure: Is it to simply escape? They crash, repair a ship and manage to escape. Now what. A massive ringworld changes the imperium. Think of the possibility of an infinite army with 3 million worlds worth of people to get infantry from. Set up and train, teach high tech weapons and tactics and you can drown the opponents in cannon fodder. Or does the Ringworld contain high tech infinite wealth technology for everyone?
If the society is still running does it control all of ringworld or is the ringworld balkanized?
Where do raw materials come from? Asteroid belts in system? Matter transmutation from energy to matter facilities on the shadow squares? This is technology the rest of the universe will kill for.
If society has fallen you get the Wu Escape paradigm. Any mistakes can be outrun. You can fly away from your mistakes and meet new peole every day/week/adventure. Don't fly so fast the meteor defense system shoots you down again.
Goal of adventure: Is it to simply escape? They crash, repair a ship and manage to escape. Now what. A massive ringworld changes the imperium. Think of the possibility of an infinite army with 3 million worlds worth of people to get infantry from. Set up and train, teach high tech weapons and tactics and you can drown the opponents in cannon fodder. Or does the Ringworld contain high tech infinite wealth technology for everyone?
Tom Kalbfus
Mongoose
PsiTraveller said:
Which is why I recommended the Matrioshka Brain idea. Here is an article on it:
https://curiosity.com/topics/a-matrioshka-brain-is-a-computer-the-size-of-a-solar-system-curiosity/
You see a ringworld is so big that its shadow squares alone could simulate all of charted space, or else the ringworld floor material could. And you would need some piece of exotic technology similar to a Star Trek transporter to download and upload material objects into it. The creators of the simulation probably imposed limits on what can be uploaded into it, due to limits on its computational budget, it simulates other universes as well! The simulation running of Charted Space has some extra things in it such as the Jump Drive, and easy gravity manipulation and creation, these things don't exist in the Real Ringworld Universe, though within the Charted Space Simulation it projects an image of the Ringworld, if a ship in Charted Space comes within a certain distance of it, it gets downloaded onto the real ringworld floor, those still in the simulation will see a tractor beam grab the ship in question, and then drag the ship to the surface of the ringworld, communications with the grabbed ship is temporarily blocked by the "tractor beam" but what really is happening during this time is that the ship is being downloaded onto the surface of the ringworld. Meteors in the simulation aren't really a problem, if one is on a collision course with the simulated ringworld, it simply passes through, and sophonts on the surface of the meteor are transported to the surface of the ringworld in the process, but the meteor itself safely passes through. Real meteors in the ringworld real universe are a different story!
Lets get a few things straight, in my Universe, what I would call the Ringworld Real Universe (RRU) all the know laws of physics are in play, there is no FTL, and no easy gravity manipulation, so all downloaded technologies based on those two things do not work. The speed of light is the limit. I would place my ringworld in the Alpha Centauri system,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri
mainly because one of the two stars is a very close match for our Sun in the light it gives off, the other one is a type K2 V star with about 90% of our Sun's mass, most of that mass goes into creating a stationary ring around Alpha Centauri A. Inside the Stationary ring is the actual ringworld with one thousandth the mass of the Stationary ring, and orbiting closely to the Sun are the shadow squares. The equivalent habitable zone for an earth analog planet around Alpha Centauri is at 1.23 AU. The Alpha Centauri ringworld would rotate once every 10 days instead of the 9 days it would around our Sun. The gravity produced by this spin would be 0.9965029066485806 G, which is close enough as to make practically no difference. The shadow squares would orbit Alpha Centauri A once every 100 days and there would be 11 of them evenly spaced. Alpha Centauri B would have to be taken apart to make the stationary ring, and it would consist mostly of hydrogen and helium bottled up and walled off in compartments behind solid walls.
The RRU would have no implications for the OTU as the OTU is being simulated by it, the simulation perameters woukld not permit the uploading of enough materials to make much of a difference, and there is not much anyone within the simulation can do about it either, as they are subject to the simulation's rules.
Yatima
Cosmic Mongoose
Godwin's law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1."
Krenstein's law: "As an online discussion about Traveller grows longer, the probability of the discussion getting derailed by someone's hobby horse approaches 1."
True.
J
Krenstein's law: "As an online discussion about Traveller grows longer, the probability of the discussion getting derailed by someone's hobby horse approaches 1."
True.
J
Tom Kalbfus
Mongoose
Well, I do have a solution, if you don't want it, then you have to think of another one. There are 11,000 Worlds in the Third Imperium and the Ringworld has 3,000,000 worlds of surface area, about 272 times all the worlds in the Imperium plus the fact that not all the worlds of the Imperium are equally habitable, so I may be tooting my own horn and saying "I told you so", but I am also throwing down the gauntlet and challenging you to find a better solution. Finding 3,000,000 garden worlds worth of living space is no small thing after all.Yatima said:
Reynard
Emperor Mongoose
How many surrounding star systems would you have to strip out to create a ringworld let alone a dyson sphere? Why would any race with the ability to decimate entire systems create a single structure to contain a million planet habitat instead of just terraforming a million worlds? This sounds like a machine entity.
Tom Kalbfus
Mongoose
Well the System I'm talking about in particular is Alpha Centauri, there are two stars in the immediate vicinity, a sunlike star that has 1.1 times the mass of our sun, and a dimmer K2 V star that has 0.9 times the mass of our Sun. Since Alpha Centauri A is more sunlike than Alpha Centauri B, we sacrifice Alpha Centauri B to build out ringworld, a typical star just as that easily has over a Jupiter's mass of solid material from which we can build a ringworld and then some. The "and then some" is what we use to build the containers to contain the hydrogen and helium which makes up most of Alpha Centauri B when we take it apart. Hydrogen is the lightest element in the Universe, but it still has weight, and the gravity of Alpha Centauri A at a distance of 1.24 AU is quite small, so we need many times the mass of the ringworld in the stationary ring for the weight of the stationary ring to equal the outward centrifugal force of the spinning ring, the forces then balance out and with course corrections, you can have a stable ringworld around Alpha Centauri A. Probably fusion rocket motors would be on the stationary ring, because that is where all the fuel is, the rockets would keep both rings centered around Alpha Centauri A. Probably you would want to compartmentalize the hydrogen and heilum to prevent it from "balling up" under its own self gravity and forming another star.Reynard said:
Alpha Centauri is also conveniently located, ir provides more material than our own solar system for building such things, and also there is a nogostalgia factor of not wanting to tear apart our own Solar System, because the nearest Solar System has a Sunlike star, we don't have to. There is a process called starlifting where one uses the energy radiated by a star to power a magnetic field to induce artificial solar flares. Stars aren't very efficient at converting mass to energy anyway. Since the layers of large stars don't convect, such starts tend to leave the main sequence while having plenty of hydrogen to fuse in the stars outer layers, and that hydrogen ends up mostly in a planetary nebula. If you mine a star, you are extending its lifetime, if you take it all apart, you have an energy source that can last many trillions of years. So they hydrogen you put in tanks serves a double purpose, it can power many fusion reactors and it has mass and weight.
Reynard
Emperor Mongoose
So they have the ability to extinguish stars without causing an immediate gravitational collapse creating a singularity?! Also they can manipulate the orbital physics of the other star(s) so the loss of the delicate gravitational balance doesn't send the stars winging off into the void? That's science definitely bordering on magic.
