Encountering anomalies?

G

grymlocke

Mongoose
Since the games first appearance wayback when, the astronomic/astrophysic science community has made
a great deal of discoveries...from dark matter to micro blackholes.

To use some of these discoveries (in game terms) I thought I'd toss it out and let the brain storming begin...
so...
thinking: dark matter
if a ship jumps into a system of a particularly dense amount, I'm invisioning severeral possibilities, 1) resistance to movement or 'flows and currents' throws off navigation. 2) elctrostatic charge from passage through the matter causes feedback through the jump grid and causes damage.....any other ideas?

thinking: dark energy
cause sensor feedback? static? comm outages? or skip? sensor ghosts?
what about jump activation? cause an over discaharge blowing out circuits and fuses and flaring energy like a match in an oxy-rich enviroment? ....hmmm

thinking: stellar anomolies ?

lets hear your ideas for game effects and challenges that PC's might face.
 
off hand dark matter sure you could have some fun with it I imagine, offhand my understanding is it's the opposite of matter, negates gravity. maybe it makes the 100D limit less for jumps. Dark energy? meh

Stellar anomalies one that's been around for a long while, often ignored. this is using the 100D limit by stellar diameter by star type from, um, LBB5 scouts, but it ok for star sizes, get similar results any star diameter you get from astonomy....

Typical ship, J1/J2, doesn't have extra fuel for another jump when it arrives in system. Maybe on a schedule/route/time pressure, whatever. Oh and M1/M2 as well.

Problem stars, where the 100D stellar diameter is larger than the star's habitable zone orbit (the most likely place for the UPP world)
Red Giants (M0-M9 III), Red Bright Giants (M0-M9 II) Orange weaker supergiants (K0-K5 Ib) Red weaker supergiants (M0-M9 Ib) Orange K5 Ia bright supergiant Red bright supergiant (M0-M9 Ia)

Short of it, in best case situation, where you jump out at the 100D limit, the world is as close as possible to you, it takes...
(best case and most fun one) M0 III Red Giant 8d 19h @ 1g to get to the world (and as much again to be able to jump away!) 6d 5H @2G.
All the rest, it ranges anywhere from 8 days to 102 *days* just to get to the habitable orbit. If you were lucky there would be a gas giant in a nearer orbit you could use to not have to travel so long and far, fuel up and be able to get somewhere else. Mandatory GG refuel, no? For like the 102d, that's 14 weeks: you very likely would run out of fuel trying to get to the habitable zone world!

This can be seen even before you jump, hey that's a red giant we're going to! It's listed often in the UPP. Pity you take a cargo for delivery unknowingly, it's likely to mess up your schedule to say the least! Great example, in the Foreven Sector ("our" playground), of the five worlds with listed UPPs, Alenzar C000414-9 As Ni Cs is a.... M0 III!!!

Granted not an anomaly per se, more just one of the harsher deep space star-travelling aspects of the jump drive. So goin to/comin from Alenzar is a 2 week in port proposition very likely. InStarSpec Corp HQ odds are they have ship there to offer you fuel (their price) offer to haul the cargo in to the world for you (for a fee!) etc. You're in a standars free trader, you're not going to have enough fuel to burn all the way in!
 
Dark Matter isn't the "opposite of matter" at all... and it certainly doesn't "negate gravity" - the whole point of it is that it's (apparently) something we can only detect because of its gravitational influence. It's also large-scale - we can only really detect it in galaxy clusters (millions of lightyears across), but we apparently can't see it at the small scale of stars or planets. It seems to be some kind of non-baryonic particle that we can't detect with current technology - but maybe in a futuristic SF setting it can be detected and manipulated somehow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

Dark Energy is a similarly weird concept - I don't fully grok it myself, but my understanding is that it's a "fudge factor" that explains why the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Apparently it is related to vacuum energy, which is the energy contained in space that is completely devoid of matter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy


"Stellar anomalies" are much easier to deal with. The large 100D limits of big stars have been a known "lalala" issue for some time, in the sense that Traveller tends to ignore it. I encountered it when working on an Antares Supernova project - Antares itself is a huge red supergiant with a radius of about 5 AU - so its 100D limit is a whopping 1,000 AU (by comparison, Pluto's orbit is about 40 AU from the sun, so this is much larger than our entire solar system). Since Antares couldn't itself have any habitable planets, we actually put the mainworld of Antares around a young brown dwarf companion that was orbiting around 2,000 AU (I think) from the supergiant.

You'd still have issues of "jump masking" (ok, let's assume we have the obligatory flame war about whether or not this is "real" in Traveller and move on) - in Antares' case, we found that the star's jump shadow effectively blocks all trade from a huge part of the mainworld's sky (since any trade coming in from the other side of Antares would intersect its 100D limit, come out of jump on the other side of the star, and then require that you go at sublight speed for 1000s of AU to get to the main world). And since the mainworld in this case orbits a brown dwarf that is itself on an orbit that takes thousands of years to complete, that means that the systems that were able to trade effectively with Antares would have changed as the mainworld moved over to their side of Antares in its huge orbit.

The thing is though that the bigger stars should (realistically) have non-habitable planets, and so this shouldn't be as important an issue as you'd think since (again, realistically) their worlds probably wouldn't be as highly populated as the habitable worlds around main sequence stars.


Another "anomaly" that should be commonly encountered is that of massive solar flares from Flare Stars. These are M V and to a lesser extent K V stars that occasionally (and unpredictably) erupt into enormous flares that vastly increase their luminosities for a few minutes. They are very common events at such stars and would cause significant problems for life on planets around them and for anyone exposed to the vastly increased radiation (in EVA or in spaceships).
 
Well, these aren't all that new. Dark matter just is the newest name for what was once called the "missing mass." It encompasses all the matter that isn't in stars throwing off light, hence "dark" matter.

We're sitting on a piece of dark matter, now. The thing is, that it's hard to account for all the mass we see in galaxies elsewhere by trying to say it's all planets, comets, Oort clouds and so on. Though as time has gone on it's been possible to account for a higher and higher proportion of dark matter without resorting to explanations that use exotic forms of matter or energy (matter's just energy rolled into little balls, but that's another discussion.)

So the thought is that there's a form of matter that makes up the difference that interacts with "normal" matter through gravity, but not in other ways. There appears to be a halo of dark matter around the outside edges of galaxies, that extends in substantial quantities out to about twice the radius of the visible parts of the main disk of the galaxy. The thought is that since it interacts gravitationally, it would also tend to "pool" in places where there's a mass of "normal" matter. The stuff hanging around the edges of the galaxies is there because it can't fall inward because of its momentum, which it can't get rid of because it has so many limitations on how it can interact, and therefore get rid of the momentum it has.

So, you may find this makes a handy explanation for the 100D limit, and you may use it to limit jumps outside a galaxy or near its rim, or just where ever you don't want jumps happening.

As to dark energy, it only has minor effects over long distances. Like between galaxy clusters. I suppose you could give it as the reason for the J-6 limit, or at least why anything over J-6 hasn't turned out to be economical, though a J-100,000 limit would be more like it. ;)

Anyway, what you do in YTU is up to you, obviously. If you want it to be a bit more "scientifical" ;) you might want to look up some online articles or check out a copy of Astronomy or Sky and Telescope to get some ideas. *shrug*

Or, you can create a race of dark matter people. Who can only interact through gravitational forces directly, but they may have some go-betweens of an odd type of normal matter that can interact with both sides. No reason to think that the majority of the mass of the universe can't be organized enough to form life when you're in an SF game, right? :D

Maybe they mess around with your party. You keep using the "dark matter" excuse--dark matter hosed the jump, dark matter is interfering with sensors, dark matter is clogging the plumbing. They start to get frustrated, then maybe they start to realize that the dark matter seems to be doing things to them on purpose.
 
I think that the point is about discovering anomalies - things appearing in locations where they shouldn't, and conversely things not present in places where they should.

I think that the best way to run such stories is to run the standard SF style structure for a short story, namely:-

1. Characters encounter anomalous phenomenon, or are directed towards it by their Service, e.g. Scouts.

2. The phenomenon begins to interact with the characters and their vessel, generating some initially beneficial effects, but then some deleterious ones.

3. The characters' first attempt to resolve the problem only serves to exacerbate the deleterious effects of the phenomenon. People start dying.

4. The characters' research pays off. What they thought was one thing is actually another thing altogether. From their analysis, they quickly devise a plan to extricate themselves from the situation.

5. The characters strive to apply their plan. Some minor hiccups occur, but the characters' ingenuity sees them prevailing.

Think of the TNG episode "Booby Trap:"

1. Enterprise encounters a Promellian Batle Cruiser lying in an asteroid field. It has been there for a thousand years or more.

2. The Enterprise attempts to leave the field, but finds that its energies are being absorbed by the field. The field begins bombarding the ship with radiation.

3. The Enterprise crew realise that this is a booby trap, left behind at the end of the Promellians' final war. However, this is of cold comfort to them as the radiation increases with every attempt they make to destroy the field.

4. With time running out, the Captain makes the bold move of turning everything off. A burst of mpulse power, and the ship is to be piloted out of the field using thrusters only.

5. The plan is executed. The ship moves out of the field on its own momentum alone. An encounter with a heavy asteroid turns into an opportunity for escape, as the Captain uses the asteroid's own gravity to slingshot the Enterprise out of harm's way. Once safely away from the lethal field, the Enterprise destroys the booby trap.

When working out the anomaly, you have to work out the following:-

a. Is there an explanation for the phenomenon? (e.g. The region has no apparent radiation because there's a constant nuclear damper field operating in it).

b. How does the anomaly affect the crew and the ship? (e.g. The ship takes one radiation hit each space combat round it remains in the field).

c. How do the characters extricate themselves from the phenomenon? (e.g. they invert the Jump field somehow to create a "portal" that sucks the anomaly through it).
 
I thinks folks are missing my question, so let me ask it this way....

what game mechanic (dm's, difficulty degrees, etc..) would you choose when players find themselves confronted by one?

like my example thinking-outloud:

jumping into a region with a particularly dense dark matter concentration, what could happen to the ship? what systems could by effected? with a reasonable sounding decription?.....loss of momentum from particle density, any thrust gets reduced 10% per turn. Electrostatic buildup interfering with j-field stability, srong possibility of miss-jump unless vessle gets degaussed.

or...things like: Varible star in active period, duration hours-to-weeks, interferes with comms (difficulty level?), sensor readings, radiation hits

jump into a system with a blackhole, is the event horizon at the pre-collapsed stars original 100d limit? and once inside that what kind of mods effect a ship trying to get out? it should be harder to, closer in to escape?

shionthy (red zone) listed as having possible anti-matter particles in system, what happens when you hit one? is it like a nuke? missle? or does the ship just go away?....

that's what I;m asking, lets here your brain storming ideas for anomolies and their effect on game play...not just answer to mine, BUT YOURS! what do your player meet?
 
Inside the event horizon of a small black hole, you're probably already dead. Around a huge black hole, the event horizon may be far enough out that you've just changed settings from Traveller to Vor.

I do recall a story or two many years ago that involved a society that could play and settle in the zones around a black hole that had such a huge accretion disk that there were a lot of people there. The idea was that the closer you got to the Event Horizon, the more time dilated relative to normal space. Long term facilities like government archives and a prison or two were taking advantage of the dilation. The story I recall involved the main character needing to talk to someone in a deep zone and facing the fact that just visiting that person would cost him a decade or more in normal space.

For Dark Matter, you would need to decide if it acts like normal matter. If it does, then perhaps a system has several worlds that just don't show up on visual scans from much beyond eyeball visual range. Imagine the survey crew getting spooked because their long range sensors keep recording stellar occlusions consistent with planets, but nothing else can confirm those planets' existence. No visual, radar doesn't bounce, and the densitometer is having trouble resolving anything. Not until one of these occludes the local star or they get enough tracking on the visible planets to notice the gravity influences would a survey crew realize what they had stumbled on.

Now imagine trying to plot jumps into or out of such a system...
 
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