Dinosaur Worldbook

Tom Kalbfus

Mongoose
I downloaded a couple World War II Vehicle Traveller books, the American and German vehicles, and I just got to thinking, while perusing the various supplments there were these world books that just dealt with one Traveller World as an adventure setting. I have an idea for one such Worldbook download. How about Earth Circa 66,000,000 BC, it would include a map of the Earth in the Late Cretaceous, with the positions of the continents back then, some terrain types that were thought to exist back then, and most importantly, tables of animal encounters, basically dinosaurs, pterodons, large marine reptiles, primitive birds, and mammals all done in the Traveller creature format. I mean if we could have a supplement with World War II vehicles, why not one with dinosaurs, perhaps including some adventure hooks treating this Earth as a Traveller World, some way out ideas of how to get Traveller characters their, time travel etc. Just a thought. What do you think? The Cretaceous by the way had the most dinosaurs, so it was really the height of the dinosaur era, I chose one million years before the great extinction because even before the asteroid strike, the dinosaurs were in decline, so I thought 66,000,000 BC would be an excellent time period to showcase, some of the most popular dinosaurs existed at this time including Tyrannosaurus Rex, I believe.
 
Doesn't have to involve time travel. Could take a cue from Anne McCaffrey's Dinosaur Planet and Dinosaur Planet Survivors.. Where dinosaurs where transplaneted to another world by the Others, of course in the Third Imperium setting that could be the Ancients instead.
 
More than once I have inflicted Dinosaurs on players. It was one of the Great bit of the TNE era GDW games all using the same rules set. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs anyone?
 
AndrewW said:
Doesn't have to involve time travel. Could take a cue from Anne McCaffrey's Dinosaur Planet and Dinosaur Planet Survivors.. Where dinosaurs where transplaneted to another world by the Others, of course in the Third Imperium setting that could be the Ancients instead.
Just as World War II vehicles could exist on a backward Tech Level 5 planet, yes I get it. Though it the World War II vehicles book, the vehicles were depicted as German, American, British, or Soviet, and were presented as part of their setting. I think Dinosaurs too ought to be presented as part of their setting as well, and let the GM decide whether to have a Dinosaur planet. One potential name for a book would be Dinosaurs of the Cretaceous I think having a World Map showing where they live would be helpful. Remember the show Terranova? A setup like that would be neat. To present it as a Time colony World with its own Starport/Timeport. In this setting humans have barely scratched the surface, a colony with a population of 4 (tens of thousands of people), The timeline it is on id slowly diverging from the original, but since its in prehistoric time, it diverges more slowly, so its possible to construct a base, and have people living here for a number of years before travel between this timeline and the present becomes impossible. My house rule is it increasingly takes more and more energy to travel from this timeline to the present. In historic periods, the Timeline may remain open for on average 30 to 60 days for a time period within the last 1000 years, for 66,000,000 million years ago, the time period remains available for 10,000 rimes that or 300,000 days, (about 820 years) for 1000 colonists, for 10,000 colonists, (I'd shorten to to 82 years.
 
Here is how I would do the time travel.
There is something called a Time Drive, it is similar to a Jump drive, making a jump using a time drive follows the exact same procedure as a regular Jump drive, except to make a time jump, one must be within 1 planetary diameter of a World greater than size 3. The Jump itself takes about a week. There are six varieties of Time Jump
100 to 600 years
1000 to 6000 years
10,000 to 60,000 years
100,000 to 600,000 years
1,000,000 to 6,000,000 years
and 10,000,000 to 60,000,000 years.
The last two are needed to reach the age of the Dinosaurs and just barely. The problem is that the ships required to make these last two kinds of time jumps are huge. A 1,000,000 ton starship equipped with a time drive makes the first jump to 60,000,000 BC and stays in orbit around the Earth back then, then a smaller starship with a 200,000 ton hull is released from the larger one and makes the final jump from 60,000,000 BC to 66,000,000 BC. And as per my time jump rules, each Time Jump Drive leaves a part of itself back at its origin point so it can be recalled. in the case of the larger starship, that point is in the campaign present, which could be Third Imperium Earth at around 1100 Imperial, in the case of the smaller starship that point is 60,000,000 BC. Both ships leave a part of themselves back at their point of origin when they make the jump back in time, for the smaller starships, it is a mini-black hole of the same mass as the starship which made the jump, but in the case of these capital starships, what they leave behind is a Time Jump Gate. The time Jump gate is actually the opening of a wormhole, in this case one that is 1 parsec long. An ordinary starship at the mouth of this wormhole can then make a regular 1 parsec jump inside the wormhole to the other end back in time.

The rules for making this jump is the same as that for making a jump to a neighboring star system, only the conditions created by the Time Jump Gate allow the starship to make a Jump at the mouth of the Wormhole, even though the jumpgate itself is located within 1 planetary diameter of Earth. (There are gravity generators along a ring at the mouth of the wormhole which flatten space in its vicinity allowing a jump to be made at the wormhole mouth.) The jump coordinates are relayed to the starship wishing to use the Jumpgate, after a toll is paid, the starship still needs the required Jump fuel for making a 1 parsec jump.

The first Jumpgate covers 60,000,000 years, the 1,000,000-ton starship at the other end of the wormhole uses its engines to keep the wormhole it left behind open and allow the passage of starships 1000 tons and under with their regular Jump drives, the 1,000,000 starship also acts as an orbital starport. As each jump takes a week to make, the starport allows the crew and passengers a chance to stretch their legs, peruse the various shops and eat at the restaurants here. Some distance away along an access tube wide enough to permit a 1000-ton or less starship to pass through is the second Time Jump Gate, this one covers the remaining distance in time of 6 million years, it takes another week to make the second Jump, the starport at 60,000,000 BC also sells Jump Fuel here, to starships with Jump 1 drives so it can make a second jump. The toll for travel back in time covers a two way trip, that is the trip back to the present for the same starship is covered by the initial jump toll. At the end of the second wormhole is the 200,000 ton starship which made the second Jump to 66,000,000 BC, this too has shops and restaurants and acts as the orbital component to the starport on the planet's surface. Jump fuel is sold at the usual price. Starships can then proceed from here down to the planet's surface in the usual manner.

The Earth at 66,000,000 BC boasts a Class A starport, as the ability to repair and construct starships under 1000 tons is very important here. The stats for the Earth at 66,000,000 BC are the following:
A867444-F The law level of 4 only applies within the ground of the time colony itself, if one strays out into the dinosaur infested wilderness, the law level is 0, as there is not the manpower to enforce the law globally, the planet is just too big and 10,000 people is not enough to do this job.

There are people who live out in the wilderness, typically they live by their wits, and no one questions their possessing military hardware to protect themselves from both beasts and bandits.
 
Tom Kalbfus said:
Lord High Munchkin said:
There's always 'Flesh' from '2000 AD'.
I'm not familiar with the reference, perhaps you can elaborate some more.
'Flesh' was/is an on-off series in the '2000 AD' comic (like Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog, etc., etc.) that has as it's premise time travel from the future back into the Cretaceous in order to farm dinosaur flesh as a food stuff for a hungry future. There are a number of human bases from which this herding and processing takes place... but as you can guess, it all goes "pear-shaped" reasonably quickly.

Nearly all the ideas that you have postulated are already covered in it, so it might be a good read for you.
 
I think dinosaur farms are unlikely on their home planet, for one thing the planet is in the past, time travel is not common. Extensive modification of the planet's surface would cause this timeline to depart from the original much more quickly. With tens of thousands of people on the planet now, the timeline will remain accessible for 82 years before being replaced with a virgin one, where all the bases and signs of human habitation and humans are gone. What is valuable is sampling the various lifeforms and shipping them to the future, and perhaps stocking another planet with them, but dinosaur farming probably won't occur to a large extend on Earth circa 66,000,000 BC.
 
Tom Kalbfus said:
I think dinosaur farms are unlikely on their home planet, for one thing the planet is in the past, time travel is not common. Extensive modification of the planet's surface would cause this timeline to depart from the original much more quickly. With tens of thousands of people on the planet now, the timeline will remain accessible for 82 years before being replaced with a virgin one, where all the bases and signs of human habitation and humans are gone. What is valuable is sampling the various lifeforms and shipping them to the future, and perhaps stocking another planet with them, but dinosaur farming probably won't occur to a large extend on Earth circa 66,000,000 BC.
No, not farming. In 'Flesh' it was more herding and slaughtering for meat, which was sent forwards in time. There was no "extensive modification" of the environment.
 
AndrewW said:
Doesn't have to involve time travel. Could take a cue from Anne McCaffrey's Dinosaur Planet and Dinosaur Planet Survivors.. Where dinosaurs where transplaneted to another world by the Others, of course in the Third Imperium setting that could be the Ancients instead.

Or, an "Others" type of being could simply have seeded the simplest of single cell organisms onto Earth like planets across the galaxy and thus, "dinosaurs" eventually evolved on most Earth like worlds. On some worlds they didn't get wiped out by a cataclysmic event so exist up to the "present".
 
sideranautae said:
AndrewW said:
Doesn't have to involve time travel. Could take a cue from Anne McCaffrey's Dinosaur Planet and Dinosaur Planet Survivors.. Where dinosaurs where transplaneted to another world by the Others, of course in the Third Imperium setting that could be the Ancients instead.

Or, an "Others" type of being could simply have seeded the simplest of single cell organisms onto Earth like planets across the galaxy and thus, "dinosaurs" eventually evolved on most Earth like worlds. On some worlds they didn't get wiped out by a cataclysmic event so exist up to the "present".

The trouble is the motivation of the others, to them the Earth 66,000,000 years ago is nothing special, just another planet with animal life on it, it is special to us because it is our own past Earth, but to aliens living at the time, they had no idea what it was going to turn into. S.M. Stirling wrote in his trilogy about a Planet Venus inhabited by dinosaurs The Sky People, he had his Others who stocked Venus with Earthlife, including humans, and they did this from 100 million years ago to the ice age, setting the stage for humans to discover this Venus and Mars. The only problem is I can't find a logical reason for these others to do these things, other than to write a great story.
 
Tom Kalbfus said:
The only problem is I can't find a logical reason for these others to do these things, other than to write a great story.


Who knows? Trying to discern what would be logical for beings that are perhaps a billion years more evolved than us is probably a fruitless exercise. Like an ant making sense of humans sending a few men to walk around on an airless moon...
 
sideranautae said:
Tom Kalbfus said:
The only problem is I can't find a logical reason for these others to do these things, other than to write a great story.


Who knows? Trying to discern what would be logical for beings that are perhaps a billion years more evolved than us is probably a fruitless exercise. Like an ant making sense of humans sending a few men to walk around on an airless moon...

Lets see: We're Aliens. We come upon a planet with a lot of big animals on it, that we somehow know is going to evolve intelligent beings in 66 million years, so lets move some of these animals to another planet just to give them a surprise."

Also in 66 million years, those animals on another planet will evolve into something we don't recognize, so the Aliens will have to put them all in low berths with timers set for 65 million years and then release them on the planet to run wild for future evolved humans to find.

Time travelers make more logical sense.
 
Tom Kalbfus said:
Lets see: We're Aliens. We come upon a planet with a lot of big animals on it, that we somehow know is going to evolve intelligent beings in 66 million years, so lets move some of these animals to another planet just to give them a surprise."


You didn't actually read and understand the scenario I wrote. :roll:
 
sideranautae said:
Tom Kalbfus said:
Lets see: We're Aliens. We come upon a planet with a lot of big animals on it, that we somehow know is going to evolve intelligent beings in 66 million years, so lets move some of these animals to another planet just to give them a surprise."


You didn't actually read and understand the scenario I wrote. :roll:
What scenario? Men walking on the Moon? to say we cannot undestand the motives of aliens that are far beyond us, is not a scenario.
 
Well, then - aliens terraform a planet to have multiple continents, each with a different era of dinosaur (and plant life, presumably) on it - Jurassic, Cretaceous, etc. (presumably you'd need something to stop them from crossing from one to another), each of the dinosaur populations have been gene-modified to prevent mutation, but allow it to breed up to a viable population. As for motivation - it has been set up as a 'living (pre-)history' museum/wildlife preserve, with hidden observation areas connected by tunnels/protected monorails/teleporters or whatever. And you have a dinosaur planet with multiple eras, big stable populations that are recognisably the same types after 66 million years or so. Put a visitor centre and either a beanstalk or shuttle landing area at one of the poles and voila.
 
Find a reason for Aliens to be overly interested in humans and dinosaurs, as if they had not better things to do, and especially if they didn't have 66 million years to kill while doing this. That is the main flaw with the alien theory

Theory two: Time Travelers

Theory Three: Its a matrix

Aliens seem the least likely, because they would be the least interested in us, any more than we'd be interested in a bug underneath our shoe.

If they are capable of doing this and they have been around for 66 million years, then they would be incredibly advanced, these aren't the sort of aliens you'd meet at the Star Wars Cantina, no way!
 
I actually find the theory of time travelers going back to get the dinosaurs the least likely, but that is just my opinion. :D

Aliens seem the least likely, because they would be the least interested in us, any more than we'd be interested in a bug underneath our shoe.

Yes. And no. Whilst it is, by definition, difficult to understand the motivations of an alien star-spanning race, perhaps they were never interested in homo sapiens at all. Perhaps, instead, they found the dinosaurs incredibly fascinating and diverse, sampled them over a period of time, then lost any interest in Earth once the dinosaurs had ceased to exist.

Of course, if you really want a time travelling explanation - why not have the aliens as intelligent sauropod or saurischian dinosaurs who developed space flight before the 'dinosaur killer' ELE, escaped to one of the other planets (Mars, Venus or even 'Phaeton' if you want to go down that route) and developed interstellar flight and time travel, but had no interest in repopulating Earth.
 
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