Super Rings

Reynard

Emperor Mongoose
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/watch/ring-system-200-times-the-size-of-saturns-discovered/vi-AA8ErsA

Who saw this coming and we Traveller people learn more about what is possible Out There.

Can you imagine seeing those rings around Saturn all your life? That would be THE motherload for belters! If they ever find such a system - El Dorado.
 
Reynard said:
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/watch/ring-system-200-times-the-size-of-saturns-discovered/vi-AA8ErsA

Who saw this coming and we Traveller people learn more about what is possible Out There.

Can you imagine seeing those rings around Saturn all your life? That would be THE motherload for belters! If they ever find such a system - El Dorado.

Probably what you are seeing is a system of moons in formation, this is on a smaller scale how planets form.
 
Tom Kalbfus said:
Probably what you are seeing is a system of moons in formation, this is on a smaller scale how planets form.

This ring system is estimated to be 120 million km across. "Smaller" yes, but still really big.
 
GypsyComet said:
Tom Kalbfus said:
Probably what you are seeing is a system of moons in formation, this is on a smaller scale how planets form.

This ring system is estimated to be 120 million km across. "Smaller" yes, but still really big.
Probably it isn't stabilized by tidal forces. Saturn's ring system is billions of years old, this one probably won't last that long,
 
I think the implication is that this is a proto-Saturn; over time, the rings will form 'shepherd' moons, like Saturn's, and will probably become smaller. As Tom pointed out, this ring system is probably younger than Saturn's.
 
Still, it would be absolutely grand to jump into a system with that sight and that was the point I wanted to make.
 
Reynard said:
Can you imagine seeing those rings around Saturn all your life? That would be THE motherload for belters! If they ever find such a system - El Dorado.

This may be too much realism here, but belters wouldn't be attracted to basic accretion discs like this. There's valuable minerals, but it'd be spread out too much amongst the worthless rock and so on - it'd be like processing seawater to get the gold; it's possible but the energy input to get it is greater the profits.

Belters I think would really flock to situations where a planet that formed, managed to get a molten core and stick around for a few million years before something, such as gravitional stresses or even an impact, ripped the planet apart to form a belt. In this situation, time and gravity would have done the sifting for you, then the cataclysm that destroyed the planet would have exposed the materials for you to gather. Of course, given that conditions after such an impact would only last a few million years (with the best pickings possibly only for a few thousand years), such places would be relatively rare as they'd have to still be around when we humans are poking about, but that'd make them valuable. Even a single such place would probably drive the price of iron down to basically the cost of transporting it and make planetary mining completely cost-prohibitive for many jumps around it.
 
That would really depend on the composition of the accretion rings. Having a wide variety of useful material that already comes in small pieces so handy would probably attract some attention.

The other thing to remember is that a "Belter" in the broader sense is not just a prospector and miner, but anyone who lives without a natural gravity well. Its why the CT Belter career was one of the two that started a term earlier at age 14.
 
GypsyComet said:
That would really depend on the composition of the accretion rings. Having a wide variety of useful material that already comes in small pieces so handy would probably attract some attention.

The other thing to remember is that a "Belter" in the broader sense is not just a prospector and miner, but anyone who lives without a natural gravity well. Its why the CT Belter career was one of the two that started a term earlier at age 14.
I don't follow. Why would a Belter start his career with only an 8th grade education?
 
Reynard said:
The career isn't rocket science. Kind of a manual labor vocation, relatively speaking.
Lets say sometime in the mid to late 21st century, there are people who are mining the asteroids, in the real world, if this ever happens, can you envision people with 8th grade education only doing this work? I think the Asteroid Belt is not rural Appalachia. Well actually, I think mining asteroids is rocket science, rockets are how you get to the asteroids and rockets are how you would deliver the ore, the people using these rockets would have to know rocket science in order to repair those rockets that are the basis of their livelihood. I think a belter would have to know something about rocket engines and how to repair them, would they go to college for this, well depends, the first wave of belters are probably going to be engineers that graduated at the top of their class, they will be hired by large corporations to extract minerals from asteroids and send the valuable minerals back to Earth, their children however, might not make it back to Earth and get to those colleges, as travel to and from Earth is bound to be expensive in the early years, but they could study online, it wouldn't matter so much if they got the degree as much as they know how to do their job without getting killed!
 
I looked over the Beltstrike book for the Mongoose belter Chargen. Unless I missed it, I didn't see mention of an early enlistment age. We can assume they are like other careers though many belters are born into the job and have benefits related to this.
 
Reynard said:
I looked over the Beltstrike book for the Mongoose belter Chargen. Unless I missed it, I didn't see mention of an early enlistment age. We can assume they are like other careers though many belters are born into the job and have benefits related to this.
I think the more one needs to learn in order to start his or her career, the later the career is started. Now I can envision a Barbarian being considered a "man" after he reaches 14, certainly women in primitive societies are often married off at this age. The skills of a hunter/gatherer are rather simple and don't take long to learn.
 
Tom Kalbfus said:
I don't follow. Why would a Belter start his career with only an 8th grade education?

The term originated in SF being applied to everyone who *lives* in the belt, and you learn the reality of living in the belt early, or you die. Like barbarian it is a way of life more than a career. Classic Traveller started Belters and Barbarians at 14.

Mongoose treats the career as a career and lifestyle rolled into one, but doesn't start it early because it has the mechanic of Homeworld Skills to take the place of that.

Like many things in this game, painting definitions with a broad brush will only go so far. Every Belt is different just like every world is different. Some will be habitat and workplace together, others will be one or the other. The composition, size, and density of the belt and its constituent rocks will feed into that. Belts that are mostly rocky are generally going to be more dependent on outside supplies, at least until a few get hollowed out and turned into giant greenhouses. Belts with organics and ice are far more likely to be self-sufficient earlier in their development cycles for the simple reason that you can make your air and water on the spot.
 
GypsyComet said:
Tom Kalbfus said:
I don't follow. Why would a Belter start his career with only an 8th grade education?

The term originated in SF being applied to everyone who *lives* in the belt, and you learn the reality of living in the belt early, or you die. Like barbarian it is a way of life more than a career. Classic Traveller started Belters and Barbarians at 14.

The way I think about it is people growing up on planets develop skills like walking, jumping, running around and stuff that aren't really modeled in the Traveller game system, especially in the earlier iterations. You don't actually need and practice practical vocational skills useful in the Traveller game until you are getting to employment age.

Kids growing up in the Belt need to know how to manouever in zero-g, operate airlocks and life support systems, understand space navigation and orbital mechanics, use space suits and even operate space vehicles from the moment they are capable of doing so. These are every day things for them.

The situation in a near-future solar system is totally different. We're not going to be raising families in our asteroid belt for hundreds of years, even if we do start exploting it commercialy sooner than that. In the OTU, and most Traveller settings generated using the world generation system, long established communities of Belters with a distinct culture are assumed to be a common feature.

Nowadays homeworld skill systems, such as the one in MGT and the one introduced in Mega Traveller take up the slack, so it's not a big deal.

Simon Hibbs
 
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