Space Kraken

[allanimal]

So I'm refereeing the Pirates of Drinax campaign, and after the characters did a bit of carousing in a starport, they heard the rumor "The Space Kraken is hungry this year..."

Now, though they are still thrilled with the piracy bits, and though this rumor is surely a red herring (the Drinax intro doesn't specify which rumors are false and/or which chapter they belong to), the players really want to encounter this "Space Kraken".

On one hand, I thought maybe it can be completely underwhelming and like many rumors, something blown out of proportion. On the other hand, perhaps it should be a massive destroyer of worlds. Either way, the "Animal Encounters" book doesn't seem to cover starship hazards (or do I need to reread that book??)

I imagine something that can wrap its tentacles around a starship with a beak that can pierce its armor. Does it eat the crew or feed off something like jump drive energy? Can it jump itself, or does it "swim" through space at sublight speed?

So, any ideas what it should be? How would you stat it out?

 

[AndrewW]

Doesn't have to be an animal.
Could be a ship that happens to vaguely resemble one.
Old derelict mining platform that's been floating out there for centuries.
A group of psions calling itself the Kraken and 'sucking' the minds of others, hence the hungry.
Could even be a code word for something else. Classified government project perhaps.

 

[Captain Jonah]

Kraken 1:
The system has some very odd and never charted gravitational flows, criss crossing the system and bleeding across from subspace. Alone they are tiny and all but impossible to detect but every so often the planets and sun align just so and all of these tiny Gravatic flows are drawn together to form a raging torrent of gravity, a plane of Gravatic force powerful enough to tear smaller ships to bits or rip chunks of larger ones.

A small ship encountering the “Kraken” may well be dragged off at dozens of gravities, bits falling off and escaping the flow to be found later. The crew helpless, crushed to the decks under many times their own weight and doomed to a slow death.

Larger ships will have sections torn off or pulled apart, almost as if some great monster had torn chunks of the ship apart.

Because this effect comes and goes as it bleeds across from subspace often the only warning a ship will have is the scream of alarm from gravity monitors detecting a massive presence close by.

Kraken 2:
Their name has long been forgotten. An ancient race now nothing but a handful of ruins and a few trinkets. Destroyed in an ancient war that no human ever saw.

All save one last ship, barely functioning and under control of an insane AI.

Once they covered the local stars with ships, then came the war. Great dreadnaughts, swift cruisers and merciless gunboats sought out the enemy. But for times when they wanted to capture enemy ships intact they used boarding cruisers. Fast and powerful, designed to overtake an enemy, disable it with concentrated weapon fire and grapple with it to allow fierce troops to take the ship and slaughter every living thing aboard it.

Late in the war one such ship was heavily damaged and set adrift in an asteroid field, its entire crew dead. Over thousands of years it slumbered, only its massive military build and advanced technology kept it from rusting away.

Then its orbit bought it clear of the asteroid belt and dust clouds, its hull began to pick up enough sunlight from the distant star to generate power. The AI awoke and found itself crippled, alone and with significant damage to its data banks.

The ship has no jump capability, its main power plant is gone so it takes several years to store enough solar energy to become active for a few days. It is heavily stealthed and of an advanced design well above Imperial standards so all but impossible to detect before it strikes.

Well armoured (12 to 18) but with significant damage (no hull and 6-8 structure left), fast (8G but with the equivalent of 20 hours of power till it needs to hide and recharge). Its banks of missile launchers now empty and useless, its single fusion bay badly damaged and barely working (does 6D damage but counts double targets armour because fusion flow is dispersed across a large area. Its mechanical grapples still work, the boarding tube in the ships nose no longer has its high tech anti matter cutters but it can still crush its way through a ships hull and vent it to space.

Superstitious spaces come across these victim ships from time to time, great tears in the hull, a big section of hull torn out and large areas of the hull melted and burnt. Some whisper of great claws that grip a victim, some talk of a beak that can bite 10dtons of ship clean off, others talk of fiery breath hot enough to melt hull plates.

Silly talk really but some spacers are a superstitious lot.

Kraken 3:
Poor thing. Space dwelling life forms need to be big to survive, big enough to retain internal body heat, able to generate a natural ION field to move. A great thick shell for protection, able to life in the depths of space far from light or air.

In the entire history of the Imperium only a few have been found, long dead, just a shell and some desiccated flesh, all that remains of wonder of life.

Apart from this one, maybe the last of his species. Some 400Dtons in size, a great oval shell thick enough to block some weapons fire (2 point). He drifts slowly around (0.1G normal with 1 hour of 3G every day) basking in the stellar winds, feeding on the odd asteroid of comet.

For a life form he is fairly tough (2 Hull, 6 Structure and heals one structure per week and one hull per day) and recovers quickly from injury. He isn’t sentient but has a animal level of Intelligence and cannot communicate except with others of his own kind (a telepath would get some very strange psionic feedback when within 10,000km)

He is lonely, very old, his senses are no good anymore. He wants some company.

If you are in an oval or cylinder hulled ship 50-200Dtons he may swim along side and bump your ship or rub along it as he would do socially with others of his kind. If you are in any other shape of ship and not under power he may decide you look tasty (1 hull damage per turn then he leaves since he has bitten through the shell and doesn’t like the taste of the inside.

Or if your ship is 400-500Dtons and oval or a cylinder he may remember back when he was younger and had the urge to mate :shock:

 

[rust]

So, any ideas what it should be?

Since the first thing that comes to one's mind when one
hears "space kraken" is an animal, it should certainly not
be an animal - no surprise there. So perhaps the nickna-
me of a band of pirates or of their leader, or the name of
their (flag)ship. Add a little story, for example the remains
of a navy which lost a war and turned to piracy instead of
to surrender to the hated enemy, a long series of success-
ful daring raids and a "space kraken" symbol as the band's
mark, and you can add some colourful non-player charac-
ters to your campaign.

Just an idea. :wink:

 

[AdrianH]

It could even simply be local jargon. Any ships which have gone missing are attributed to the entirely mythical Space Kraken, especially if no official reason why they went missing has been released yet The local regular bar clients can have a lot of fun at the players' expense if the players start asking about where they can find the Space Kraken. :twisted:

 

[locarno24]

Take inspiration from the 'Biotech Vehicles' supplement and apply to spacecraft, I guess...

Making a suitably disconcerting 'squid-thing' shouldn't be too hard.
I'm working off the assumption that the players are still in the Harrier and haven't somehow acquired a Sylea-class battleship or something silly.

A space-borne lifeform isn't impossible, and squid-ish isn't too bad. It seems a highly improbable thing to evolve, but is something one of the ancients might create (essentially a - literally - uplifted squid species) as a sort of 'system denial' weapon.

A shell, with soft bits inside (void-protected) with hardened skin covering tentacles and sensory organs protruding from one side.

The shell would be starship alloys. I've had mundane, non-genetically-enhanced whelks break apart titanium bolts that they happened to settle on (which was annoying as they were holding something rather important shut), and subsequently incorporate that material into their shell as they grew (cyborg whelks. Seriously. The world is doomed). The Kraken would therefore have a layer of titanium, crystaliron or bonded superdense, depending on the local diet.

Tentacles and ink clouds are the weapons - I have a couple of suggestions for those - snaring tentacles and ripping tentacles.

Sensory organs - I'd assume something in that environment would be adapted to 'see' heat and radio, although when dealing with biological tissue, the obvious option is a psionic analogue to an NAS. Place one set of sensory organs on tentacle tips and you have extended arrays, quite useful for a lurking predator.

Manouvrability is the big thing. In order to close and grapple, it has to be Thrust-6 (at least). Which means a reactor rating of 6. I can just about get an organic 'grav organ' but a biological fusion reactor seems to be pushing it. The thing is that a chemical plant requires a ludicrous quantity of fuel...

One possibility is to provide it with both a solar sail and solar panels that it can unfurl (either held vorlon-fashion from the carapace or in a membrane between the tentacles) - this allows it to 'drift' indefinitely without consuming power, until it either sees prey or needs to swing by a gas giant to 'drink'.

Weapons - well, it should have tentacles. Half grabby and half rippy.

The grabby ones can be modelled as magnetic harpoons from S&P 57:

Only usable at short range, the magnetic harpoon is used to pull a targeted ship closer so that a seal can be made and assault troops sent across in a boarding action. Any ship successfully hitting its target with magnetic harpoons before boarding will receive a +4 DM bonus to the roll used to initiate the boarding action itself.

Range - Short
Damage - D6

The rippy ones can be considered a Breaching tube plus something nasty to come aboard through it. Using the predator generation rules, we'll consider the 'tip' to be something akin to the worms from Deep Rising - but big.

Prey Tendril
Size: 12 (3,200 kg)
STR: 25 (+6)
DEX: 4 (-1)
END: 21 (+5)
INS: 11 (+1)
Armour: 5
Weapons: Thrasher, 3D6+2
Skills: Melee (Natural Weapons)/1, Recon/2, Explosives/1
Special Rules: Low Metabolism (initiative-1, life support requirements halved) Secrete chemical fumes which work as Tranq Gas (in low quantities) or TDX explosive (in larger quantities).

Now that thing is approximately equivalent in volume to 32 humans, halved to 16 so we'll say the organs supporting and storing it are equivalent to 8 double staterooms, so 32 dTons for each one. Add in the breaching tube and that's a nice round 35 dTons per 'tearing arm'.




Net idea:

Astrateuthis Majoris ("Space Kraken")

Body - Partially Streamlined Stealth Class A, Aerofins and Fuel Scoops (10 Hull, 10 Structure, Atmosphere Piot DM+2)
Shell - Single Layer of armour from common prey ships (Titanium Steel, Crystaliron or Superdense)

Propulsive Organ - TL15 Manouvre-X equivalent (Thrust 6)
Digestive System - TL15 Chemical-X equivalent (Rating 6), 22 dTons fuel processors, 1 dTon Mining Drones
Fuel Sac - 440 dTons - 1 week's endurance.
Tentacle Membranes - Combined Solar Sail and Solar Panels (Thrust 0, Rating 1)
Stomach - 40 dTons space
Healing Cell Marrow - 1 dTon Repair Drones
Eyes - Basic Military Sensors x2 (Sensors DM+0)
Forebrain - Model/7 Computer, Auto-Repair/2, Intellect/3, Expert Pilot/3, Expert Sensors/3, Expert Tactics (Naval)/3
Hindbrain - Model/7 Computer, Fire Control/4, Evade/2, Manouvre/0

Tongue - Grappling Arms x4
Beak - 50 dTon docking clamp
Ink Cloud - 4 x Single Turret (Sandcaster), 40 Sandcaster Barrels

Sensory Tentacles x2 - Advanced Extended Arrays (Sensors DM+1, long range, +2 to detect)
Grasping Tentacles x4 - Single Turret (High Yield, Accurate Magnetic Harpoon)
Ripping Tentacles x4 - Breaching Tube + Prey Tendril (above)


Infesting gas giants, beast will drift in close proximity to the jovian, rarely venturing far from its source of nourishment, emerging to attack anything attempting to refuel. It can subsist off the thin chemical fuels extracted from the gas giant's atmosphere and the occasional asteroid to provide metalic elements, but the possiblity of a starship - with its processed metals, complex biochemicals and warmth - provides and irresitable temptation and can provoke a bezerk feeding frenzy.

Furling in its delicate membranes and sensory tendrils, it will accelerate in fast - very fast - and attempt to spear the target with one or more metal-clawed tentacles. As it closes, it can spit out clouds of ink like its marine counterparts - these jets, however, instantly turning in the airless void into sprays of crystalline vapour not dissimilar to a sandcaster burst, which can be used to protect it from laserfire or missiles.

Once caught, the beak will lock on and the four main tentacles will go to work, ripping at the hull of its prey and trying to burn their way inside. Once in, any useful material (fuel and...organic material...) will be consumed before the hull will be broken down and used to patch any wounds in the creature's carapace.

If you want to make it particularly deadly, give the Prey Tendrils psionic strength and Awareness and/or telepathy, and - if you really want to make it scary, look at the Psion book - add in some K-Vault organs and a psionic stateroom for a psi-organ; you can even make it jump-capable this way!

The space kraken is, indeed, hungry this year....
...Perhaps a small-craft version for the young? :twisted:

 

[allanimal]

Wow, those are all excellent ideas. Thanks for sharing your creativity!

Now that I know I was too narrow in my thoughts, I will come up with something great.
Maybe there are two phenomena being called the space kraken...

 

[2330ADUSA1]

All I can say is..WOW!!!

I like this idea so much I cut and pasted it into a word doc on my pc to save and use in my own campaign. Puts the fear back into the game for those Gas Giants...LMAO!!!

 

[Captain Jonah]

Happy to help. :wink:

 

[2330ADUSA1]

I also use Space Herpies too...nothing like a good ship to get infested with those Things LMAO!!!

My players just LUV to hate them!!!

 

[locarno24]

Had a quick try with it last night - a Harrier crewed by 4 buccaneering types getting set upon by an Astrateuthis bursting out of a jovian's upper atmosphere, starting at short range.

It didn't end well!

It took Astrateuthis two rounds to close - using the Maximum Speed order it had a 2G advantage over the normally fleet-footed Drinaxian ship.

Particle beam fire was largely ineffective due to the short range - the first hit cracking the shell slightly (1 armour hit, 1 hull hit) but doing nothing meaningful to the beast's vast bulk, whilst the second hit caught it in the eye (disabling one sensor set) but seemed only to enrage it. It was too close to use smart missiles.

Astrateuthis, in return, speared a barbed grasping tentacle through the base of the Harrier's win (1 hull hit) and reeled the ship in. With the +4 from this, and the +1 from not needing to line up with the ship precisely, the docking test was a formality, and the prey tendrils started to burn through the hull.

The Harrier had three turns to prepare - firing three ineffectual shots from the slowly slewing particle beam (with a -3 to hit at adjacent range), before two tendrils burst through the roof of the bridge, one of them moving immediately to slam one crewman hard against the wall, leaving him on about half STR.

Burst Fire from the couple of Gauss Rifles the crew had handy caused impressive but nowhere-near-fatal damage to one, knocking out most of its 21 END, before the second tendril flattened another crewman, again to 1/2 STR.

The lights flickered and emergency lighting came on as - elsewhere - a third tendril started flailing wildly in the starboard power core, causing a single ship-scale hit (36 damage) with it's corrosive chemicals. The engineer in the port machine space was (understandably) somewhat nervous...

Just to make matters more fun, a third tendril broke open the iris from the common room into the bridge antechamber - breach the bridge iris and the crew would be trapped.

In the subsequent turn, another gauss burst managed to shred the end of one tendril, but not before it injured the last bridge crewman, and the second one left another unconsious and critically injured. Fortunately, the third tendril outside failed to breach the door, although the distubing sound of it pounding the metal could be heard, whilst the one in the engineering space continued to trash the starboard section, this time putting a hit into the jump engine.

The two remaining bridge crew did eventually wound the second tendril enough that Astrateuthis withdrew it, but by that time the third breached the bridge and finished them off. It took somewhat longer for the last questing tendril to locate the engineer, but by that time he was trapped on his own, in an unpowered ship, and there was very little he could do to change the result.

End result: don't mess with the space squid.

Make sure you start this thing at at least medium range from your players. Also, probably would be good to let them take on the tendrils one-by-one, unless they are especially well armed.
I'm sure a 1000 dTon warship would shoot it to pieces at range, but the players are a lot less likely to have one of those!

 

[Jame Rowe]

Capt. J, I like your ideas (esp. #2) but...

Or if your ship is 400-500Dtons and oval or a cylinder he may remember back when he was younger and had the urge to mate :shock:

:shock: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

 

[Captain Jonah]

Anyone remember the scene from Crusade when the Destroyer was drifting deep in the void and it came across the giant glowy space anemones.

The captains comment just after the loud steady bumping noise begins says it all really :lol:

 

[Colin]

In the "Big Nasty Aliens" book for Core Command, I created a space kraken, Sacnoth 82-something-something. It was a fun beasties, rather like some of the ideas here.

The kraken described above could easily be some sort of bioship as well. <evil ideas form>

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

I have seriously considered adapting some of the ideas in Colin's Biotech Vehicles Special Supplement book to starships.

The adaptations (Higher/Lower Size and Cost) could easily be applied to starship sized components.

 

[Colin]

Since 2300AD requires a subset of biotech starship construction rules, there may well be a Special Supplement in the near future on biotech ships.

 

[Captain Jonah]

Cthonian Stars, the 3rd Imperium and now 2300.

In space no one can hear you scream because something is eating your ship :lol:

 

[locarno24]

Since 2300AD requires a subset of biotech starship construction rules, there may well be a Special Supplement in the near future on biotech ships.

That'd be interesting.

Looking through the biotech vehicles book...

Biotech autopilot matches up; skill/1 for it's operating roles.

Neural link would apply as a bridge type.

Limiting the armour would be good - there are direct equivalents:
Reinforced Chitin = Titanium
Spun-Silk Carapace = Crystaliron
Diamondoid Chitin = Bonded Superdense
I'd say that the armour itself should be as good but the max armour but the maximum value should be lower - half, maybe?

Limited stealth ability - -1 rather than -2, just due to limited metallic content.
Heal 1 point of damage a day also translates across.

Monofil webs as point defence.
Swarm cannons as missiles.
Crystal/ink as sandcasters
Biolaser as...well...lasers.



In more general terms, biotech ships would lack raw strength and large energy-manipulating ability compared to hard-tech, but gain on the ability to build (and rebuild) complexity, and small-scale energy manipulation and AI.

general suggestions:

Power supply will be the big thing. Until you're at high-end BSD equivalent materials, internal fusion organs are out, so it's chemical. However, as with earthlife, there is rarely a 'reactor' - instead, distributed ATP (or some improved equivalent) consumption in local cells. So components would be increased a % in size and cost, but there would be no discrete p-plant (although there would still be 'fuel' - either your digestive system or fatty cell clusters. High TL (15+) you can have biofusion.

Jump fuel would still be needed - the whole 'need hydrogen for jumps' thing isn't tech-specific. More likely to encounter a bio-version of metal hydride storage, though, as Lhyd storage is an unnecessary bugbear.

As noted above, armour would be lower. However, I'd suggest that biotech would compensate for the lack of durability compared to hardtech for hull integrity (micrometeors, etc) with an ablative approach - unlike a dead metal block it's easier for the shell of a living thing to be deposited continuously and to modify, repair and reinforce as needed in flight. Self sealing should be available at any TL, and probably reinforced hull as a preferred alternative to armour.

Repair robots (in this case organelles) are essentially zero volume and probably come as standard.

Biolasers being TL14 for vehicles is okay (compared to TL9/10 for an equivalent hardtech weapon) - I'd suggest, for reasons above, that hard rounds should be the weapon of choice, not energy weapons; smart guidance is essentially free for biological munitions, which makes up for the lack of power to fire speed-of-light weapons. Plus you can grow your own ammo.

Plus: warheads packed with swarms of nasty critters. You may lack the ability to punch through armour with raw power (although a biofusion warhead is easier than a reactor since your materials don't have to be able to survive the experience), but you have other options.

A round may struggle to pierce the main armour belt, but there's a hole in the armour belt for the bay mount where the barrel protrudes allowing it to traverse and elevate. Of course, you can't shoot into that gap because the gun mantlet at the base of the barrel covers and overlaps the edges of that gap, so there's no weak point for laserfire or micrometorite (barring some laughably improbable series of ricochets). A warhead delivering a cluster of void-adapted creepy-crawlies with malevolent intent, however, can climb round the gun mantlet, through the cap and back up into the bay mount, chewing through flexible seals as they do so.



Organic version of psion integration chamber and advanced k-interface would be another good one. K vault, k defence grid, and ship integration talents makes for genuinely useful combat capability enhancements. I wouldn't push foldspace because it's a bit out-of-left field, like adding warp or teleport drives into a standard rules set/

Fold space is probably something to leave out of a 'standard' universe, but drive augmentation is a useful ability.

 

[allanimal]

Last night, the characters in the game I am running discovered the remains of a 2000-year old ship that was attacked by the space kraken. No sign of the beast/machine/??? yet, but they are quite scared now...

Thanks again for the great ideas. I am having fun with combinations of all of the ideas, and the players are loving it. In my game there is a real kraken out there (whether beast or machine, I don't quite know yet), but there are also people using the old spacer's tales to their own nefarious purposes...

Trying to work out how the players, the real kraken and the kraken poseurs can all meet at the same place & same time.

 

[Captain Jonah]

One of the great things about something like this is that you can never meet "The Kraken" but still be scared of it.

You could find ships destroyed by it. You could find nothing but debris that is all that remains of it, a hull section that looks like something bite it off the ship for example.

You could hear the rumours and stories, know of ships that have vanished then later on find some pirates have been using the stories to take ships and kill the crews without being caught since each loss is blamed on the "Kraken".

Of course once you have proof that there is no "Kraken" and that its just pirates, that is when the pirate ship is found with big chunks bitten out of it :twisted:

You could have an encounter with a Kraken and not even know it. How to kraken move between systems. There has been some talk of organic FTL.

How about instead they normally hibernate while drifting across the voids, some die, some survive but they spread to new systems. But they have found a new way to move. Baby Kraken latch onto ships and ride with them into jump.

Your crew plot a jump. The jump feels odd, the pilot reports the ship seemed sluggish, the engineer reports the jump field is a tiny bit off. Drawing a few % more power than normal.

When the ship comes out of jump there is a strange bumping and the ship rocks. Everyone will no doubt fear a miss jump but when they check they are exactly where they plotted the jump to.

Of course the next time someone goes outside the ship and checks the hull they will be hard pressed to explain the sucker/claw marks and scratches. :shock:

We fear the darkness becasue of what may hide within.

If we know what is there it is not so scary but as long as we are never sure then we will fear what could be out there :twisted: