Starship Idiosyncracies

[kristof65]

Ok, I just read the following article, and it occured to me that it would be quite funny to do the same thing to a group of Traveller PCs who just acquired a starship.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/odd_marijuana_gas_tank

Basically, guy took his recently acquired car in to figure out why the tank always said half-full, and they found marijauna stashed in the gas tank.

I could easily see a Free Trader being modified with a special storage compartment in the fuel tank to be used for smuggling. This, of course, could result in a somewhat shorter range, and problems with the ship if it weren't accounted for.


So what other idiosyncrocies could used starships have?

 

[Zowy]

You can do nasty things with a ships lifesupport system, just make it expensive to fix but not life threathing :twisted:

 

[alex_greene]

There's plenty of vacuum available, so it's possible to create a still out of an engine's intercooler system, and use it to brew some powerfully heady stuff with whatever bits of vegetation you might have available.

Also, all ships are designed with a round figure cargo bay, e.g. 10 tons, 100 tons, whatever, with "spare space" meft over after all other components are taken into consideration.

If the vessel in question has more than 4 tons spare, it's possible to construct an entire spare stateroom's worth of hidden space, house a small family in the wainscotting, or riddle your ship with countless small nooks and crannies, like that secret compartment in the hold of Serenity, or the access tunnel Mal used to get from the cargo hold to the sealed-off corridor leading to the bridge of the same ship.

 

[Kilgs]

Former captain loved the smell of bacon waking up. Rigged life support to emit cooked bacon aroma every time ship clock hit watch change.

 

[Dave Chase]

Unknown to the players the ship sends out more information about it self when pinged by Imperium ships. (its computer was modified for a sting operation and the Imperium forgot to remove the system.)

The cool engine upgrade is not actually the full upgrade. It is a cheap version that takes up more space than normal. It has a happy gas that was used by the prevous owners to 'get high' on during jump time.
(Taken from an article I remember about NO2 engine conversion that was not actually used to feed the engine but the passengers.)

The ship belonged to a former movie studio/producer, who's tastes in making movies were voyeur(or porn if you want). Each stateroom is wired with hidden videos, audio and such. These all either feed into a certain room or hidden computer. Its still running and recording.

Dave Chase

 

[AndrewW]

Spores have taken up residence in the ship's life support system and smell like chocolate.

The ship is haunted by a previous crew who went crazy after their ship got stranded in the middle of nowhere before being found by a salvage hauler.

 

[Epicenter]

The ship's electrical system was (jury) rigged by a very skilled and very knowledgeable guy who nevertheless was sort of sloppy or ad hoc. This guy (or gal) left the ship/died/didn't think to change the electrical system back before the ship was sold.

This can have lots of odd effects, ranging from the humorous to the potentially deadly:

* If the power for the rear loading ramp is left on (even if the loading ramp isn't actually being used) it diverts power from the turrets resulting in longer recharge times, slower turret rotation (to-hit penalties), and so on.

* The life support is on the same circuit as the as turret power...

* If the lights in the staterooms are turned on in a certain order or in a certain combination, all the interior doors in the ship will open due to a short, including the anti-hijack door to the bridge...

* There's some non-standard lights installed in the crawlways of the ship, but they're on the same circuit as the ship's computer. If the crawlway lights are turned on while the ship's computer is doing something, the resulting power shortfalls will introduce glitches into computed numbers, like say, jump coordinates.

* Certain lights turned will result in other lights on the same circuit turning on dimly, making people more superstitiously inclined to assume some sort of supernatural infestation on the ship. Alternatively, it automatically turns on an old music player which proceeds to play some old Terran ditty played very dimly over the ship's intercom - for best effect use that "Daisy" song from 2001, the song they play at the end of Jack Nicholson's "Shining", or one of the opening songs from the "Fallout" series of games, depending on the age of your gaming group so they'll "get" the reference.

 

[alex_greene]

Under a loose panel in the floor of the cargo hold, the crew find three large, leathery eggs that peel open at the top ...

 

[kristof65]

The ship's electrical system was (jury) rigged by a very skilled and very knowledgeable guy who nevertheless was sort of sloppy or ad hoc.

OMG, that reminds me so much of when I used to the tech at an amusement park, working on pinball machines. The guy before me would fix broken wires in pinball machiens (a common problem because of the vibration) not by resoldering them, but by using those 8-10" test leads with alligator clips on both ends. They would fix the problem temporarily, and then finally fall off, to which he would simply clip them back on.

End result was he was repairing these machines in less than 5 minutes versus 10-20 minutes, but was having to "repair" them more frequently.

If you had a previous starship engineer doing something equivilent, you could have a ship that is vulnerable to certain things, but is "repairable" quickly, but where permanent repairs would take much longer.

So you could have starship that has some sort of primary power feed to a semi-critical system that get's disconnected every time the ship takes a hard landing, or hard knock in combat that only takes the engineer a couple minutes to "fix", but will require several hours or even days to properly repair.

I'd make it something that first shows up when time is of an essence to the ship - like combat. Let the engineer "fix" it quickly, and not mention it again until either the PCs bring it up, or it happens again.

 

[Epicenter]

There's all sorts of humorous things you could have occur in starships. They don't have to be totally over-the-top sci-fi. Truth is stranger than fiction and stuff you encounter IRL is great fodder for creating weird situations.

Here's another one:

Your player illicitly land on some planet and decide to do "frontier refuelling" on some sort of amber or red zone type world, or perhaps in some restricted part of some world. This happens a lot, right, players being who they are and the kind of adventures GMs like to throw at them.

The players refuel from some local body of water, piping the water into their tanks to be converted into fuel later. While they're sucking up water, they suck up some small-ish aquatic creatures (like fish). Chances are, whatever's in the tank will die when the water is all siphoned off into the purification machinery.

However, unknown to the players, one of these fish or creatures was extremely endangered (perhaps the reason for the restricted zone in the first place) and like one of a few hundred of its species left. The species was tagged by biologists to follow its movements.

MoJ fugitive tracking teams happen to use a very similar ping-return passive transmitter for tracking drugs or to prevent people out on bail from leaving a planet, and so sometime when the players land on a starport, the track responds to the local MoJ fugitive control system, and the MoJ is all over their ship. The MoJ doesn't find a fugitive, but in the process, perhaps they find other illegal cargo the players are carrying. The dead creature of an extremely endangered species would also carry with it stiff fines for illegally transporting the creature off-world. Plus, landing without a permit in a reserve zone. Finally, they could be linked with whatever they were doing on that planet for prosecution purposes.

Of course, it's possible the players who really are fugitives, get into some nasty gunfight with the local MoJ and perhaps even Imperial Marines and get away, but if they don't find the pinger in their fuel tank, the same thing will keep happening every so often ...

Another one:

Players are refuelling at some civilized world starport and have set up their itinerary to go another world a jump away. Assuming the players will follow their flight plan, some covert group (it could even be drug smugglers) leaves something on the ship, perhaps in the fuel tank again. They expect when the players arrive at their destination world, their compatriots can simply retrieve the item without the players ever being the wiser. However, players being who they are, don't fly to their stated destination, but instead somewhere else...the item might even be like someone instead of something in a self-contained low-berth.

 

[alex_greene]

Deep in the recesses of the ship's spare space, in an area unlisted on the deckplans, are four active cold berths, and one empty one. They run on ship's power, but they have small backup batteries in case power gets shut off.

As it does when the ship next puts into port for maintenance.

The previous owner had used the secret space to house four beautiful women, all of whom were ... unwilling ... to be parted from their homeworld. They're bitterly resentful at being kidnapped, and at least one of them is a dangerous Psi - Warrior who likes the taste of others' fear ...

And why is the fifth one empty? Could be that there were five occupants, but one has only just recently escaped ...

 

[Supergamera]

A previous engineer freed up space between the hull and the waste reclamation system, to set up an "indoor growing operation". The plants and mushrooms are fed by treated waste product. A modified repair drone harvests and maintains the crops.

There's also a normally covered porthole in the growing room, which is rigged to only open in jump space. Apparently, there is a market for "jump-grown mushrooms", which some claim have boosted properties. Whether that is true or not remains to be seen...

 

[CaptnBrazil]

there's also this older site: http://www.estarcion.com/kaleja/77quirks.html

 

[kristof65]

That's a cool site.

Just came up with a few more:

- the ship's computer has a "hidden" program that takes over all the unused computing resources on board to run an interactive roleplaying environment (WoW on steriods). It was used by a past crew as a way to entertain themselves during jumps. The problem with the program is that if it's not shut down properly, the program fails to release computing resources which can randomly affect other computer related functions in a variety of ways, usually negatively. If this happens, the whole computer will need a cold reboot.

- sticking hatches. At some point in time, the ship took a pretty good hit (either combat, rough landing, etc) that did a bit of damage. It was expertly repaired, but there was a bit of tweaking to the overall hull that was unrepairable that resulted in hatches or doors along a certain frame or axis not quite being in alignment. They're still airtight, but have a tendancy to stick, and require extra effort to pull open or closed.

- unexplained rattle. In one portion of the ship there is a distinctive rattling or knocking sound that can be heard when the ship is under full acceleration (and only when under full acceleration). From the engineering logs, the last 3-4 engineers have seriously looked for the cause, but have been unable to find it.

- the ship has two sets of engineering logs from the previous engineer. One log - the "public" one - shows meticulous details of work done, parts bought, prices paid, sources of work and parts, reports to the captain, etc. However, some of the supposed work done doesn't match what the log says. Upon digging, the PC engineer will find a second, hidden log. This one is much more casual in nature, but matches the true work done. It shows that parts bought were used, cheap knockoffs, non-licensed contractors used, etc. From comparing the two, it seems the previous Chief Engineer was supplementing his own income by telling the captain one thing, and doing another.

- similar to above, but a ship's previous steward was skimming by charging things like high end wines and other non-perishable luxeries to various high passage passengers, but stashing them in a secret compartment in the ship. Unfortunately, he died before he could take advantage of his bounty, and the whereabouts of the secret stash aren't indicated in his own records. Buried somewhere in the ship is a secret compartment with months worth of delicacies and expensive wines.

- There is a ground loop* in the electrical system of the ship's intercom. This causes a slight echoing whenever the ship's intercom is used from certain microphones/stations. It's not bad enough to be detrimental, but it can get slightly annoying. Unfortunately, being a ground loop, it could be anywhere in the system, and ship's engineer is resigned to "I'll find it when I find it." If YTU says that most of the signal wiring is fiber-optic, the echo could still happen, it would just have a different cause.

- one of the crew staterooms was modified to be more comfortable for a previous alien crew member.

- One of the previous owners had the entire interior of the ship paneled and veneered in woods from around the sector. Every surface possible is covered in wood - ceiling, floor, walls, etc. Those surfaces that can't be covered in real wood - like iris valves, the jump machinery, etc have been painted to look like wood.

- killer entertainment system. One of the previous owners was a high end audiophile/videophile. Even though standard shipboard entertainment systems are pretty high end compared to our real world systems, that wasn't good enough for this owner. A half ton of space is devoted to a top end entertainment system (at least it was at the time it was purchased), and seperate high end networking, components and cabling has been installed to to support the system. The system even has it's own power system, and can run for a few hours even if all other power to the ship is dead.

- part of the plumbing system sits too near some portion of the j-drive. During the transition to/from jump, this means the water in the system gets heated to scalding. For an hour or so after jump, you run the risk of burning yourself if you run water anywhere - using a toilet is particularly dangerous. On the plus side, this does mean that you can make a quick cup of instant coffee right after you go into/out of jump.

- a previous owner/captain was an avid model builder, and glass display cases are fitted into every nook and cranny of the ship's public spaces so he could show off his models. Of course, the models he used to proudly display there are long gone now, leaving it up to the PCs to decide what to fill all those display cases with.

- thanks to a previous modification, there is a crack in an area of the galley (kitchen) where food particles can get pushed into. This crack leads to a small void space nearby, and over the years it has filled up with all sorts of food particles, leading to a spongy, moldy mess within. Fortunately, this hasn't led to any particularly unpleasant odors, and is benign - until somebody opens up that void space for another reason.





*for those of you who don't have a working knowledge of electronics, a ground loop is where signals "echo" back through via an electrical ground. Typically this is caused by a grounded noise shielding component being grounded in two different places, rather than one like they should be. More often than not, those are because the outer wire sheilding (that braided fine wire or foil you see on the outer part of some multi-wire cables) on long wire runs has been connected at both ends of the wire, when it should only be connected at one.

 

[AndrewW]

- the ship's computer has a "hidden" program that takes over all the unused computing resources on board to run an interactive roleplaying environment (WoW on steriods). It was used by a past crew as a way to entertain themselves during jumps. The problem with the program is that if it's not shut down properly, the program fails to release computing resources which can randomly affect other computer related functions in a variety of ways, usually negatively. If this happens, the whole computer will need a cold reboot.

Sounds a bit like the Spaced Out game in PartnerShip by Anne McCaffrey and Margaret Ball.

 

[Epicenter]

- Warning: Ghoulish: The ship was being used formerly by an organized crime syndicate to smuggle illegal immigrants from one world to another utilizing the gaps in the double-pressure hull. The ship landed on a planet, the illegals were sealed away from customs inspections (they usually had liberty of the ship during the voyage) then the operators of the ship got wind that law enforcement were onto them, so they just left the areas sealed and sold the ship for a pittance to a local ask-no-questions "used ship" concern who in turn sold the ship cheaply to the players. The pressure hull areas aren't something that would be inspected, even during major overhauls (except a surface inspection for stress on the metal itself). However, a curious ship's engineer might find suspicious "doors to nowhere" in the jefferies tubes or behind toilets or something, perhaps one day or hull damage will rupture the outside hull one day and inside will be about a hundred bodies of adults, children, and even some infants where they died, sealed away. If you want to be even more horrible, do it to the players when they're extremely cash strapped and emphasize how the bodies, since they were traveling to a new home and had brought the best of their worldly belongings - a tidy pile of jewelry consisting of some precious metals and a lot of precious and semi-precious stones or "ethnic" jewelry that could be sold for a pretty good sum, at least enough to make payments on the ship or pay for enough repairs to make the ship spaceworthy again...

- The ship apparently suffered some sort of catastrophic damage at some point and was cobbled together from two (perhaps more) hulls of ships of the same class, but were assembled at different times in different shipyards. The local shipyards assembled the hulls from materials that were the best combination of price and durability available at the time and wouldn't matter if it was a homogeneous ship, however since it's some Frankenstein job sold for cheap (if the price is too good to be true...) it causes some problems. It's not really apparent from visual inspection due to paint and panels and so on. However, solder that works on one part of the hull won't work on another (or will react badly), hull metal harmonics are wild and odd and make it difficult to prevent your own ship's hull from interfering with the more sensitive sensor devices, incompatible materials inside of the ship have led to wiring ducts being held together with tape, the "standardized components" used in parts of the ship are different. As a result, repairs to the ship cost 25% more, and without careful research, there's a 33% chance that any component bought for the ship will be incompatible with the part of the ship it's being put into (or partially-incompatible, leading to reduced performance).

- The typical pings, pops, and groans of metal in the engineering section of a ship are investigated by the Engineers and nobody thinks anything of it, just the usual problems of an older ship. That is, until one day, the comms officer is down in Engineering and swears on the Holy Texts of his Religion that the pings and pops are Morse code for "Save Us" (or perhaps "Save Yourselves" :twisted: ) and he's known as a sober and serious fellow about such things, not one to tell tall tales...

- The drinking water system was adapted for the last (non-human) owners of the ship. A water filter/reconditioning unit introduces trace minerals into the water to improve the taste (for the non-humans). However, these trace materials, while harmless to the aliens are additive in humans without detoxification. Growing amounts will cause some sort of reaction, like hallunication, Tourette's-like symptoms, fatigue, hemophilia-like symptoms, or paranoia. Or if you want to be sadistic, perhaps it causes the opposite - it makes the crewmembers possessed by an unnatural good cheer with the crew essentially feeling like they're in the early stages of Oxygen narcosis or being "giggly drunks" - even the manly men. While this doesn't sound so bad, it will result in contagious laughing fits during inappropriate situations (falling into helpless laughter at a funeral, for some reason finding an instruction to "observe noise discipline" during a covert op to be hysterically funny, etc.).

 

[kristof65]

- the ship's computer has a "hidden" program that takes over all the unused computing resources on board to run an interactive roleplaying environment (WoW on steriods). It was used by a past crew as a way to entertain themselves during jumps. The problem with the program is that if it's not shut down properly, the program fails to release computing resources which can randomly affect other computer related functions in a variety of ways, usually negatively. If this happens, the whole computer will need a cold reboot.

Sounds a bit like the Spaced Out game in PartnerShip by Anne McCaffrey and Margaret Ball.

never read that. It was actually inspired by something that the proprietary computers I work on can do if a certain code database isn't dumped every so often. I just had to deal with a tech support call for one, nad it inspired me.

 

[barasawa]

Why that engineer always talks with a slurr... An engineer had a liking for "rocket juice", a type of homemade alcohol that uses some of the engine fluids popular with mechanics & engineers. And his distillery is still hidden in the guts of engineering still gurgling away... (Overflow accident? Mysteriously drunken mascot/pet?)

Glowing review of smuggling... There is a relatively small (footlocker) sized space in the drive. It takes 10 minutes or so of mechanical/engineering work to get to it, if you know it's there. Not suitable for life forms or radiation sensitive materials. Rad exposure of 1d6/hour if drives are running more than minor maneuvering. (Thrust 0.) This compartment and it's contents are undetectable by sensors, scanning, or normal means. Although someone doing engine repairs or an overhaul might stumble on it... (What's in it, and who found it. Plot hooks galore.)

Blueprint Blunder... Trying to repair something you follow the conduits, and you find an area sealed off that's not supposed to be there. Cutting it open, you find - ? (RW ships have had this happen. One of them even found a fully equipped machine shop that had no doors.) This could be a mistake from the initial building, a subsequent overhaul/repurposing, or an attempt to hide something...

Andomeda's cousin... You're having fuel problems. You keep running low on fuel before you really should. It started small, but it's been increasing. There must be a leak somewhere. After much searching and hair pulling, you found the culprit. In a bizarre event, you've somehow taken on a microbe that likes liquid hydrogen and is growing happy little slime mats in your fuel tank. Is it useful somehow? Will it ever stop growing? How do you get rid of it. And strangely enough, it doesn't seem to produce any waste ?! (as if living in and ingesting liquid hydrogen wasn't flaky enough.) Oh yes, it has no problems with hard vaccuum or hard radiation.
(Maybe it's usable as a raw psibooster or other exotic drug. It might be intelligent, err, sort of. Maybe it's somebody's idea of a library, now if you could just read it. Have you infected anyone else, and if so, what are they going to do about it.)

 

[whtknght]

The players can find a Tree Rat (JTAS 10 page 40) or not find it onboard their ship. Shinny and colorful items keep vanishing when only the players are onboard. Worse yet, a female has given birth to a litter of "cinnamon thieves" and as they grow up, they could cause all kinds of problems for the crew. Untill the players find the nest and retrieve their items.

How about the players buy a ship that was known to the authorities as a smuggling vessel. The previous owner sold it because it was to well known. Everywhere the players go, they are harassed by the local authorities determined to find contraband on board. The players could jump through all kinds of hoops trying to get the officials to leave them alone, or they could leave the area and pursue their trade elsewhere only to have the ships past catch up with them over and over again.

 

[khazwind]

The players can find a Tree Rat (JTAS 10 page 40) or not find it onboard their ship. Shinny and colorful items keep vanishing when only the players are onboard. Worse yet, a female has given birth to a litter of "cinnamon thieves" and as they grow up, they could cause all kinds of problems for the crew. Untill the players find the nest and retrieve their items.

I had this idea:

the players are hired to transport a hiver to a system where he/she/it knows there is a hiver vessel/medical center/whatever. The hiver has, essentially, the 'flu. It's not cross-contagious, so the crew are not in danger.

However, part-way through jump, the hiver spikes a high fever and accidentally gives birth (a survival trait, when close to death hivers spawn to prevent the loss of their genetic material).