What tech level are these?

[Tom Kalbfus]

Stargate /portable wormhole

Replicator

I am thinking of detailing a starship with these two items and a time drive as well. the time drive is tech level 25, and I'm modifying the ANNIC NOVA to have these things. The replicator replaces the ship's locker, in most Traveller adventures, the ship's locker is merely a plot device, it literally isn't an "anything box" but if we're dealing with timeships, it seems an actual replicator like that found in Star Trek is within the realm of possibility.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

Depends on the setting used.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Depends on the setting used.

If these things were to appear in the OTU, then what tech level do you think they should be?

 

[Hakkonen]

Stargates are TL "Plot Device." In the show, they're Ancient technology which (IIRC) even the Asgard can't replicate.

I would be extremely leery of allowing replicators. They destroy the economy.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Makers are already a thing in T5, in the rulebook they are design systems but thanks to fanon they have become actual devices and get a mention in MWM's Agent of the Imperium novel.

A maker is a combination of computer controlled robotic assembly, 3D printing, (gravitics at TL 9+), and CAD/CAM - TL13+ versions will also integrate damper technology. They come in different sizes depending on what they can manufacture, they require a feed of raw materials and electricity. Some complex items take a long time to 'make' and so it is often a lot more economical and faster to have a dedicated production facility for things like computer cores etc.

Primitive makers appear at TL8 but require considerable oversight from an operator, by TL9 robotics and computer technology reduces the need for oversight.

In the novel a long range Imperial exploration mission 'gifts' the nominated new leaders of a world with a TL12 maker/fusion+ manufacturing unit on the understanding that when the Imperium finally comes calling the world will join up.

 

[Condottiere]

As I recall, Stargate stargates have unlimited range and instantaneous transition.

 

[Linwood]

The makers sound a lot like Von Neumann machines.

<starts looking for incoming Berserkers....>

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Stargates are TL "Plot Device." In the show, they're Ancient technology which (IIRC) even the Asgard can't replicate.

I would be extremely leery of allowing replicators. They destroy the economy.

Actually a Time Drive could be a replicator. A time ship is programmed to go back in time 1 round unless 999 identical time ships suddenly appear and if it sees 999 identicakl timeships suddenly appear from the future, it doesn't go back in time and now you have 1000 time ships. That is a replicator of a sort. This sort of time could happen if you have a time traveling device, unless there are rules against it. In a many universes model of time travel, there is one universe out of a thosand where this happens, and in 999 other universes the time ship just disappears along with some number of identical ships less than 999 that suddenly appear out of nowhere and then altogether disappear never to be seen again in that universe. If constructed according to the rules, each time ship costs one billion credits, so this thing saves a lot of money! But you are right they would destroy the economy, which is why in most campaigns time machines are rather unique, or bad things happen when one attempts to double one's timeline, or you have a self-consistency principle which means that if it wasn't witnessed to happen in the past, then one can't go back in the past anc change whatever was witnessed or known to happen. There is a limit to one's freedom of action in the past with a self consistency principle. So what one doesn't know, one can affect, what one does know can't be changed

 

[Hakkonen]

Actually a Time Drive could be a replicator. A time ship is programmed to go back in time 1 round unless 999 identical time ships suddenly appear and if it sees 999 identicakl timeships suddenly appear from the future, it doesn't go back in time and now you have 1000 time ships. That is a replicator of a sort.

No. No, it is not. All those ships still had to be built.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Actually a Time Drive could be a replicator. A time ship is programmed to go back in time 1 round unless 999 identical time ships suddenly appear and if it sees 999 identicakl timeships suddenly appear from the future, it doesn't go back in time and now you have 1000 time ships. That is a replicator of a sort.

No. No, it is not. All those ships still had to be built.

Well the first one had to be built, but if a time ship goes back in time to a point where it already exists, you now have two time ships with identical crews, this is called timeline doubling. Now the question remains what if the past time ship decides if does not wish to go into the past once it finds its future self arriving from the future? This all depends on what the rules of time travel are. Those rules are not specified, so the GM has to determine whether something like this is possible or not.

What do you think the rules of time travel should be?

 

[Hakkonen]

No. No, it is not. All those ships still had to be built.

I'm going to attribute this to posting while sleepy.

Anyway, you don't have two timeships or two crews, you have one timeship, temporally displaced. The ship that has not yet traveled must now travel, in order to become the ship that traveled. At no point is there more than one timeship; time travel merely allows the same ship to be in two places at once.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

No. No, it is not. All those ships still had to be built.

I'm going to attribute this to posting while sleepy.

Anyway, you don't have two timeships or two crews, you have one timeship, temporally displaced. The ship that has not yet traveled must now travel, in order to become the ship that traveled. At no point is there more than one timeship; time travel merely allows the same ship to be in two places at once.

The chronological consistency principle. When travelling within known history, no action one takes can ever change what was written in the historical record, unless that action somehow made that historical record record history inaccurately. On the positive side, there are a lot of unknowns in history, ones actions are freer when dealing with those unknowns, but if your going to kill Hitler and prevent World War II, then your mission will automatically fail. this sort of time travel preserves the timeline. Try as you might, you can't change history, if you do, then the Universe might get rid of you by accident and unfortunate coincidence to prevent you from changing history. However there are other things you can do. If you deliberately choose not to know about something, you can do a lot that will change what will be found out about it. If there is an unknown planet orbiting a star, you can go back in time and terraform it, and when you explore it in the present, it will be habitable!

In police work, you can have someone send messages to you from the future about a crime being attempted, the aggreement with that person is that he does not tell you if the crime was successful or not, he reports an incident, gives a location and time, and that's it, then you send an overwhelming number of security guards and police to that place and time to reduce they probability that the criminals actually succeed with that heist. Since one does not know the outcome, one can affect it, if the outcome is known, it can't be changed!

This is one sort of time travel, this sort reduces the work of the Referee, he doesn't have to come up with a completely new timeline. the downside is that if time can't be altered, then you lose one motivation for traveling in time, and that is to prevent someone from changing history.

The other kind of time travel is the Many Worlds/No Paradoxes model, pretty much a new timeline is created everytime one goes back in time, so essentially it isn't time travel at all. One can kill Hitler as many times as one likes, but back in your own history World War II still occurs, you can create another world where it hasn't occured of course, but that won't be the world you remember. A wormhole is a great way to get back to your original unaltered universe that you came from. All you have to do is bring one end of that wormhole in your timeship, and when your done messing with history, you can step through that wormhole, and you are back to that unaltered universe where you never went back in time and changes history.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

As I recall, Stargate stargates have unlimited range and instantaneous transition.

Yep, correct, range is not a factor, you do have to have a stargate at the destination to go there, and Jump Drive does not require anything to be at the destination, so to compensate, it has a limited range. Stargates, it has been established in the series to be wormholes, these wormholes are either in an open state or a closed state, it takes energy to open them up and keep them open, without that they close, they still exist but their throats are too small to allow passage to anything. Also in the series, each stargate connects to a network, and you can dial up different stargates to connect to. In my setting each stargate connects to one other stargate, they come in pairs, there is no dialing to do, but they do require an energy input to keep open, otherwise they shrink back to their natural state which is too tiny to allow passage of anything. I am thinking of having a time drive ship carrying a bunch of wormholes and visiting a bunch of eras in Earth history and prehistory leaving them there so people can travel there. Wormholes can connect different times and different universes, so where ever a time ship takes them, they will allow passage of additional things and people to that place even after the timeship as gone on to someplace else. this allows for colonization of different eras in Earth's past, and even arbitrary changes in the historical timeline on the other end of the wormhole. Wormhole time travel is less messy,, because they allow connections between two fixed points in time and space, you can't go back and correct things that you did wrong, none of this time paradoxes and other such stuff, but if you want to adventure in the middle ages and even change them, then wormholes or stargates are the thing to use. To have an interesting campaign, I think I would want a lot of wormholes and a lot of places that they connect to. Maybe have a space station in the present with all these wormholes connecting to past places on Earth. Maybe the Solomani would operate such a space station covertly in the Oort cloud in the Solar System, setting up their own colonies and infiltrating past eras of Earth history to change them. What would the Imperium do if they discovered such a space station? What if they found out that messing with history through the wormholes doesn't actually change the present? the wormholes are too small to allow passage of spaceships,, they are circular openings 2 meters wide, so a person with personal equipment can step through.

 

[baithammer]

A better solution is the Space Fold drive as its instantaneous.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

A better solution is the Space Fold drive as its instantaneous.

A Time Drive should operate much as a space fold drive, the only difference is that it folds time, not space. Velocity is preserved and relative, In other words if your ship is moving at 1% of the speed of light, relative to the ship, the Universe is moving 1% of the speed of light in the opposite direction. And if you happen to be moving toward Alpha Centauri, then the time drive will treat it as Alpha Centauri is moving toward the ship, and at 1% of the speed of light, Alpha Centauri will take 430 years to arrive at the ship, so if you want to use the time drive to get to Alpha Centauri, you accelerate your ship to 1% of the speed of light, which is 3000 km/sec, it will take 3.5 days to accelerate to 1% of the speed of light at 1-g, you wait another 3.5 days to gather enough particles with your accumulator, then you make your time jump of 430 years, you are in the vicinity of alpha centauri and you slow down for another 3.5 days. As fars as the external universe is concened, your ship disappeared for 430 years and then reappeared 4.3 light years away, that is if you make a forward time jump.

Your ship exists as dark matter in temporal stasis for 430 years as it continues its journey towards Alpha Centauri, for the crew and passengers they experience no passage of time during this transition. All the while the path of this ship is affected by gravity fields and its trajectory is adjusted accordingly. So a forward time jump converts the ship to dark matter in temporal stasis, and then converts the ship back into normal matter once the time jump has ended. With backwards time travel Velocity is preserved during transition, but the path of the timeship through space is opposite since time is reversed. So in this case you accelerate away from Alpha Centuari and you make a time jump backwards of 430 years, a little more since you want to go further than the star system and end up moving towards it at the end of your time jump. if you don't want to travel in time when making this jump, simply make a second jump of equal magnitude but in the opposite direction in time from your first jump, this will effectively duplicate the effect of a space fold drive without any net time travel involved.

Time drive can go through stars, and planets, you just don't want to come out of your time jump within them, this is usually not a problem since most of space is empty vaccum not inside a star. if your path takes you through a black hole an interesting thing happens, time itself comes nearly to a stop just outside the event horizon of a black hole, if you are in the middle of a time jump when your ship in stasis approaches the event horizon of a black hole, the black hole increases the amount of the time jump by the amount the black hole slows down time, this can convert a time jump that is limited to 6000 years per jump to something much greater, such as 65,000,000 years for instance. If you can locate a black hole, and make a correct astrogation check, you can go back to the age of the dinosaurs in a single jump in stead of 11,000 jumps as you would need to do with just the time drive alone! Black holes are useful if you want to visit Earth's geological past, instead of just going back to a historical time period or the last ice age for instance.

 

[Nobby-W]

Stargates are TL "Plot Device." In the show, they're Ancient technology which (IIRC) even the Asgard can't replicate.

I would be extremely leery of allowing replicators. They destroy the economy.

I always thought the combination of a replicator and transporter would be a good way to fabricate and deliver nuclear weapons (or eve large conventional explosive devices) to your target. I think the makers of Star Trek missed a trick.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Time Travel is ultra high tech, I wouldn't be surprised if a timeship had a fabricator instead of a ship's locker. Basically the fabricator can fabricate any tech level 15 item that can fit within the confines of a ship's locker, or it can fabricate parts that when fitted together can make larger items. A fabricator basically needs all the right elements or raw material as input to fabricate the devices ordered. Typically the timeship is under the control of a Artificial intelligence with its own agenda involving the players. The time machine comes from a time when humans are obsolete, everybody from that time has uploaded to machines. One of those machine intelligences has obtained a time ship and decided to go into the past, it keeps a low profile, they humans that find the timeship may at first think they are piloting it, the ship has controls and a bridge, it can be flown like a normal starship. But when time travel occurs, that remains under the control of the machine intelligence.

This kind of allows for the GM to prepare in advance where the players are going to end up, and set up an adventure there. Otherwise the PCs just pick a random date, and they GM has to suddenly run off and do his research. For example, what nations existed in 4004 BC? What is the GM going to do if the players suddenly decide to take their timeship to March 21st 4004 BC, who is alive back then?