The Cyrranus System from Battlestar Galactica

[Tom Kalbfus]

I have included here my treatment of the Cyrranus System for Battlestar Galactica

Here is the key to the codes:

And finally a map of the inner system around Helios Alpha.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Chart B

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

If you put it on a polar log plot, everything will fit on the same page. Also, as a side bonus, the scale for the orbital period can be laid out on the same page that way.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

If you put it on a polar log plot, everything will fit on the same page. Also, as a side bonus, the scale for the orbital period can be laid out on the same page that way.

Oh you mean a logarithmic scale. Well I already have charts of all the standard orbits out to orbit 19, and these charts could be used to plot movements of starships and spacecraft between the planets. Now the statistics of these planets are those before the final Cylon War, the one that nearly wiped out humanity from this system. 155,000 years later the physical stats are unchanged, their are still garden worlds here, the cylons weren't trying to wipe out all life, just the humans living on these planets, so they used radiation weapons (neutron bombs), a lot of the standing structures remained, it was 155,000 years of time which tore them down. I'm thinking of inserting this in the OTU setting. The radiation has long since died down, some humans and other sophonts have come to inhabit these planets. The ruins of various cities are still evident, mainly as rubble piles buried under freshly laid soil over the past 155,000 years. If one digs down one may find some bricks or broken glass from what was once Caprica City for instance. In the interceding years, some Earth life has found its way to these 12 worlds. Some animals, that previously lived on Earth 155,000 years ago, but are now extinct on the planet Terra, can be found on some of these twelve worlds, they were brought here within one thousand years after the humans were wiped out in the final war. By whom or what is unknown, there are some guesses however. Interestingly there is a pirate base on top of the ruins of what was once the Pyramid Stadium for the Caprica City Buccaneers.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

I might do a logarithmic plot later, this is a 4 star system after all, so it would be rather complicated.
I was thinking up some plot hooks. The pirates I mentioned earlier, what if they discovered the Caprican equivalent to Fort Knox? I think this would be accompanied by a drop in the level of pirate activity, a drop in the price of local precious metals, a number of kidnappings of local technologists and roboticists. A lot of strange transactions are going on in and around this system, A famous roboticist turns up dead and Scout Administrator Kara Thrace sends the PCs in to investigate. The Pirate Lord, an ex-noble who has been known the "hear voices" and talk to himself on many occasions, is in charge of this pirate band, his agenda, is not merely to seek wealth but to rule! A recent pirate raid included some clumsy robots armed with laser pistols, a witness said, "their face plates had a strange glowing red light which scanned back and forth, but they couldn't hit worth a damn!" Some of the remains of those robots were recovered, the manufacturer is unknown, the parts come from unknown suppliers.

And maybe I would not make it so blatantly obvious for anyone who may have seen the show. Kara goes under an assumed name, for the benefit of the players, to the characters of the OTU the name Kara Thrace would have no meaning. Got to make sure she doesn't steal too many scenes, that's why I would present her as an Administrator Patron. the pirates have ideas of producing a new line of Cylons, their first attempts were rather clumsy, sort of like that first prototype Cylon from the show Caprica.

Basically it is the old model on the left that they are trying to produce, as it has all electronic parts, the newer style Cylon on the right has some organic innards that didn't survive 155,000 years of floating in the vaccum of space too well, the organic parts have all been all dried up and mummified, and is no longer any use in controlling the inorganic metal exterior. The pirates have also managed to reverse engineer the old style Cylon raider, and made a few copies of that, as they are piloted by the old style cylons. The metacognitive processors they have need some work, they are going by the notes of Daniel Graystone that they found on a file at the Ragnar Anchorage station that they found still orbiting the gas giant. There are some missing elements, that Daniel didn't seem to have a clue about, so they are trying to perfect their cylons, and trying to start up a production line of cylons and raiders, and figure when all is ready, they will take over some of the surrounding systems, some of the cylons they are building might have some other ideas however!

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

The Pirates should probably be stripping the guts out of the new model Cylons and wedging in whatever piss-poor electronics and motors they can find. An intimidating exterior is still an intimidating exterior, even if you don’t have the right control system. Also, way better guns. Besides, why produce a whole bot when you can recycle the former top-of-the-line shell and outfit it with just enough actuation to skulk around and shoot at people? The Pirates can handle the smart stuff themselves. Then again, maybe the Pirates are too weaksauce to rob the graves of the mighty Cylons...

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

I think they should already have factories churning out Cylon bodies, the minds of those Cylons still need some work. The information they found at the Ragnar Space Station was all about finding the Cylon's weaknesses so they could be defeated in battle should the Cylons strike again, thus they had examples of the old Cylons they fought in the First Cylon War, they had no intension of building more Cylons, some of the secrets Daniel Graystone had to make these Cylons were taken to the grave with him, what happened to his daughter Zoe is a bit of a mystery, when the first Cylon War began, Zoe sort of disappeared, there were rumors of her leading a secret organization to fight the Cylons, it was all top secret stuff, stuff that wouldn't be found in the Ragnar Space Station anyway.

One possibility is that she was "boxed" and placed in suspended animation at this space station by the Cylons, perhaps one of the PCs could find her, she has been in a state of suspended animation ever since. Whatever form she happens to be in at this moment. the leader of the Pirates is talking to some invisible person, that many of the pirates think exists only in his mind, but whoever or whatever it is, he seems to know a lot about the ruins, the Pirate leader was somehow almost single handedly able to write the translation programs for the various scripts and symbols on all of these ancient artifacts, it was with this that the pirates have been able to translate many of the manuals and handbooks pertaining to this technology. In the aftermath of the first Cylon War, they put a lot of stuff on paper and on microfilms, a primitive storage medium, but an effective one when you can't trust your electronics and computer systems, especially networked!

How did the pirates find this system? One of them unearthed a time capsule that was buried on the first anniversary of Founders Day, on a planet that was then called New Caprica. An Inscription by then President Gaius Baltar was on it. From that they discovered navigational charts locating the Cyrannus System. Few people know about it, had they known about it, it would have had a much larger population than it does, the pirates are a major presence in the system. the Pirate Leader has designs on the Imperium, he sees himself someday becoming its Emperor, it all depends on him building an Army of Cylons, and a Navy too of course, the number of pirates he has now are way insufficient, for this task, he already has millions of cylon bodies, and lots of Cylon raiders there is a wrecked but repairable battlestar in the system, that the pirates are working on. The missing link is the metacognitive processor which is needed to make all of this an effective fighting force, the PCs job is somehow to stop them from achieving this. Some of the technologists are hostages, others are willing contractors, they are working on this technology, and the pirates aren't ready to face the Imperium just yet!

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

This is orbit chart C:

This shows the second star of this quadruple system and how far it is. This star has Leonis and Virgon orbiting it.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

This is chart D, no new stars come into view in this one:

 

[fusor]

Can you just get a blog and stop spamming the board here please?

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Can you just get a blog and stop spamming the board here please?

What spam? What is the title of this thread? should I just start a thread and leave it blank? To properly show this system would require 9 charts, how would you do it?

 

[fusor]

Can you just get a blog and stop spamming the board here please?

What spam? What is the title of this thread? should I just start a thread and leave it blank? To properly show this system would require 9 charts, how would you do it?

I'd do it on a blog. All you've ever done here is write walls of text that are basically just streams of consciousness and brain dumps, and that's exactly what blogs are for. And you're often the only one who posts anything on the thread anyway - you're not looking for input, you're just using this board as a place to dump all your ideas and fan fiction and don't care about anyone's feedback or even whether it's actually relevant to Traveller. If that's what you want to do, it'd be better for everyone if you did it on a blog instead. There are plenty of free blog sites around - I'd recommend using wordpress.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Now fusor, let’s not Shawn all over this. While, admittedly, this is not part of Traveller Canon, he wants to use the Mongoose Traveller System. How he’s representing his custom content within the Mongoose Traveller System is relevant.

That being said, he could, say, post a link to imgur or something with all his maps, and then discuss them here more or less at once. Or he could compress them down to one image with a polar log plot of the orbit radii, but that’s a matter of artistic license.

Also, if he has some specific questions about things in his content we should look at, he should probably point those out.

 

[fusor]

Now fusor, let’s not Shawn all over this. While, admittedly, this is not part of Traveller Canon, he wants to use the Mongoose Traveller System. How he’s representing his custom content within the Mongoose Traveller System is relevant.

He's been doing this for years - either on this board or on CotI previously (just take a look at his previous posts). He disappeared from here for a bit recently and it's been nice and quiet (and posts have been far more relevant) without him, now he's come back I fear he's just going to swamp the board with his posts all over again. He also has a habit of not really listening to what anyone says and posting whatever he wants until he's got it all out of his system and then he moves on to the next shiny thing that he wants to write 20 pages about.

It wouldn't be so bad if he just asked questions and let people answer and discuss them like everyone else does, but he clearly just wants (needs?) to dump his ideas out of his head and online somewhere. It's like he has no filters and just wants to throw everything out there. He really does need to just get a blog where he can post whatever he wants and go on about it for as long as he likes - that would be a vastly better format for what he wants to do.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Now fusor, let’s not Shawn all over this. While, admittedly, this is not part of Traveller Canon, he wants to use the Mongoose Traveller System. How he’s representing his custom content within the Mongoose Traveller System is relevant.

He's been doing this for years - either on this board or on CotI previously (just take a look at his previous posts). He disappeared from here for a bit recently and it's been nice and quiet (and posts have been far more relevant) without him, now he's come back I fear he's just going to swamp the board with his posts all over again. He also has a habit of not really listening to what anyone says and posting whatever he wants until he's got it all out of his system and then he moves on to the next shiny thing that he wants to write 20 pages about.

It wouldn't be so bad if he just asked questions and let people answer and discuss them like everyone else does, but he clearly just wants (needs?) to dump his ideas out of his head and online somewhere. It's like he has no filters and just wants to throw everything out there. He really does need to just get a blog where he can post whatever he wants and go on about it for as long as he likes - that would be a vastly better format for what he wants to do.

And what have you contributed lately, besides just your criticism? What do you think this place is for, just debates and arguments? Have you done anything original, or do you just go around knocking down other people's work and calling it spam? The point of this site is to communicate with other people, to get other people's input and to contribute to the overall stack of creative work. These maps for instance are to plot spaceship movement between these planets, but you don't like anything creative, you just like a lot of nothing and emptiness. Shall I start a thread and then say nothing and contribute nothing on it, is that what you want? That way there'd be no spam. And I thought spam was just unauthorized advertising, if so then perhaps you could tell me, what I am trying to sell. What am I advertising for? Do I have a product I wish to promote?

 

[Reynard]

He's got a point there.

 

[fusor]

And what have you contributed lately, besides just your criticism? What do you think this place is for, just debates and arguments?

Funnily enough, yes, I do think that - it's for discussion, not for people to just post whatever huge walls of text spring to mind whenever they feel like. Creativity and originality is fine, but you just spew out everything that comes to your mind and dump it here without regard to whether anyone else could be interested in it or whether it's even relevant to Traveller. And yes, while I have been critical (I am very much a "Black Hat", that's just how I am), I've also contributed a lot of useful and relevant links, fact-checks and ideas to other peoples' threads.

I really don't understand your hostility to putting it all on a blog instead. You could still link to it here for discussion with a wider audience, but at least then you're not continually bumping up your threads to to the top of the page all the time as you add some new thing.

And I've done plenty of creative work, I just have the decency not to spew it out in places where it's not relevant - that's what spam is (and also, pretty much all of the material you're posting here is available elsewhere. You're just stealing pictures from other sites without giving due credit and regurgitating material from other sites when you could just be linking to that and using your posts to describe specific aspects that would actually be relevant to integrating it with Traveller).

Also, you should give credit where other people have done the work, and get permission to repost their work here. Otherwise how do we know how much of this thread is actually your material versus stuff you just stole from elsewhere? You certainly you didn't make the big "Twelve Colonies of Kobol" map and map of Caprica in the post below (and those are other peoples' copyrighted material - do you have their permission to repost it elsewhere, without credit no less?). Did you actually make the UWPs or the Orbit Charts yourself? You also copy/pasted all the UWP explanations wholesale from a Traveller book in your first post on that thread, which is also unnecessary since we know how Traveller works here.

e.g. the Caprica map is from http://sixu.deviantart.com/art/Caprica-Continents-Map-II-132716294 . Are you SixU? Did you get their permission to repost their work?
The Twelve Colonies map is from the creators of the show, shown off at: http://io9.gizmodo.com/5742034/a-detailed-map-of-battlestar-galacticas-twelve-colonies

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

This chart takes us out to the outer edge of this star system, as you can see, its huge, can't see much detail at this scale, and on the charts, I've shown only the brighter or each pair of stars. Which is why in the next chart I zoom in on places where we couldn't see much previous detail. First the Caprica-Gemenon system as these are two important colonies that are too close together to be properly shown on Chart A.

Here is the double planet Caprica and Gemenon, since Caprica is slightly more massive than Gemenon, the later is taken to be its satellite, although in reality both are nearly equal and rotate around a common center of mass, but for game purposes, I show Gemenon orbiting Caprica. You can tell by this chart that Gemenon is twice as far as Earth's Moon is from Earth, and in Caprica's skies, Gemenon appears twice as big as Earth's Moon does from Earth. Ocean tides are correspondingly higher The Day on Caprica is about 24 hours long, and the year and seasons are of similar length and magnitude as on Earth. Gemenon's day is slightly longer, about 26 hours long. Gemenon has a more rugged and mountainous landscape, and it has slightly less ocean coverage than Caprica, which is itself a close analog for Earth.

This is the map of Caprica itself, as you can see it has similar continental configuration to Earth, and similar flora and fauna as well. There is an analog for every land feature and climate found on Earth on this planet.

As for the information on my charts, I based it on this map, which serves the purpose of the logarithmic scale chart you asked about. This chart, of course is not drawn to scale, and would not be useful in plotting ship movements between these planets, it does show the relationships between the stars and planets however all in one picture.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

The Caprica-Gemenon system should be redone so that they orbit around the Barycenter.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Gemenon is 1.709421123428962 times larger than our Moon appears in our sky; somewhere between an additional 2/3rds and an additional 3/4ths.

The tides on Gemenon and Caprica have 20 times the pull the Moon does; they are more or less 80 times more massive than the Moon, at twice the distance, which divides the pull of the mass by 4. No ocean-front property without massive seawalls.
On the other hand, “King Kamehameha likey!”.