World Sized Starships

[phavoc]

Sure, that could work. The only problem with moving an entire planet is that how do you stop it from freezing in jump space? There's no light and the heat would go... somewhere? And then when you popped into normal space you'd have to be somewhere close to the normal distance from your original sun type in order for the plants and animals to do well. Terran plants might not do so hot under a red sun, or a dwarf star. And you'd get baked around a F class.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Sure, that could work. The only problem with moving an entire planet is that how do you stop it from freezing in jump space? There's no light and the heat would go... somewhere? And then when you popped into normal space you'd have to be somewhere close to the normal distance from your original sun type in order for the plants and animals to do well. Terran plants might not do so hot under a red sun, or a dwarf star. And you'd get baked around a F class.

The amount of energy needed to illuminate a planet to daylight levels is trivial compared to the amount of energy you'd need to push it around. Like all Traveller Starships, this one has a nuclear reactor at its core, the waste energy alone is enough to prevent it from freezing.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

I think I would want to change this map a bit if I were to use it in a Traveller campaign. Basically I'd want to double the scale to 300 miles a hex, making it a size 10 world, and perhaps change some of the names, to make them less English perhaps. Having a continent called "Tropica" which is Tropical is doubly obvious. A lot of the names are discriptive, they describe what sort of places they are, as if the writers had trouble remembering so they labeled everything with descriptive names. Everyone knows Frigia is a cold place and Tropical is a warm place, for instance. And you have the rocket train. I think a gravity of one half Earth's would help the Hawkmen quite a bit, and explain why Flash Gordon is such an heroic fighter, bashing Ming's minions left and right, where ever he goes. Now who built Mongo? No one really knows, I believe Ming was a member or a race of Magicians, in Traveller Terms they are psions. The machinery of Mongo is built to respond to people with psionic potential, and there are various psionic amplification devices including such which can give nonpsionic individuals psionic powers. Ming was once a court wizard, who overthrew the then royal family that ruled Mongo. Ming's Empire is based on a number of kingdoms which Emperor Ming squeezes tribute out of using threats and other various devices. the rulership I believe is similar to that of the Mongol Empire. Basically Ming doesn't govern so much as plunder, and it is usually mutual fear and antipathy between the various factions and kingdoms which keeps the planet divided and under the rulership of Ming. Basically what Flash does is undermine this arrangement and lead a rebellion against Ming and his forces! To get the planet in the Traveller setting. Mongo visits the Earth in the early 21st century, and Earth ship launched from Russia intercepts it, is shot down and has Flash, Dale, and Hans Zarkov on board. the trio makes contact with a bunch of natives and leads said rebellion by building a series of alliances with their ongoing adventures. Ming has a plan to conquer Earth, install a ruler to extract tribute from it, his plan is to guide Mongo into a close pass of the Earth. Mongo's gravity generators then cause massive tides, and create such chaos so that Ming and his forces can quickly conquer Earth. Flash foils that plan by defeating Ming and sabotaging the controls in Ming's Palace, this causes Mongo to pull away from Earth and initiate a jump while too close to Earth. Mongo misjumps and reappears thousands of years later in another part of space. Mongo's automatic guidance system brings it into a circular orbit within the habitable zone of the nearest star. Mongo then settles down and appears as a normal planet until the PCs make contact with it.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Here are the starship stats for Mongo, according to the tables I made up.

As for how much an Xton is or an Xcredit, I don't really know, but I suppose it is a lot!

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

I have an idea. What if the planet/starship used a different kind of jump drive which uses helium instead of hydrogen for jump fuel? Imagine at intervals of 500 km a tower rises 100 km out of the surface of the artificial planet, and releases helium on top of the breathable atmosphere. Since helium is lighter than air, it would stay on top of the atmosphere, some would mix with the atmosphere, but as a noble gas, it wouldn't burn. The Jump is initiated, it consumes the helium while leaving the planetary atmosphere intact. the towers also have flood lights to provide day light for the journey through Jump Space. The North and South Poles are walled off at 75 degrees latitude north and south. South of the wall around the south pole are the drives of the planet, the jump drive, maneuver drive, and the power plant. North of the wall around the north pole is housed the artificial sun, a giant space ship which flies out and orbits Mongo to illuminate the planet if there isn't a sufficient Sun.

 

[Reynard]

I was perusing my Traveller stuff and came upon a book from some no name little company called, uuuh, FASA back in 1982 called Fate of the Sky Raiders. The featured ship made me think about this topic.

It's an asteroid starship 10 km x 8 km x 7.5 km for about 50 billion dtons capable of housing millions of people. The ship's systems are dispersed as thousands of modules throughout. When found, it had been operating for centuries thanks to onboard agriculture. Has Jump-1 and can make 3 successive jumps but it traveled the Great Rift by sublight firing the engines for almost a year then coasting powered down.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

I was perusing my Traveller stuff and came upon a book from some no name little company called, uuuh, FASA back in 1982 called Fate of the Sky Raiders. The featured ship made me think about this topic.

It's an asteroid starship 10 km x 8 km x 7.5 km for about 50 billion dtons capable of housing millions of people. The ship's systems are dispersed as thousands of modules throughout. When found, it had been operating for centuries thanks to onboard agriculture. Has Jump-1 and can make 3 successive jumps but it traveled the Great Rift by sublight firing the engines for almost a year then coasting powered down.

A pretty cramped urban environment, as the asteroid is about the size of Manhattan. Lots of tunnels are possible though and the inhabitants can live 3 dimensionally, not 2-dimensionally as the residents of Manhattan do, excepting the towers of course. I'm working on a dungeon/starship myself, it is a bit larger than a football Stadium, one deck is about 2000 dtons all by itself, I was thinking of making it a cylinder. The idea of the adventure, is the PCs get hired by a patron, they sit down to dinner to discuss their mission, but unbeknownst to the PCs, the patron has drugged their food and drink, knocking them unconscious. The patron is an eccentric Noble/scientist, he takes some DNA samples from each of the PCs while they are unconscious and place them all in low berths, then he grows clones, minus the thinking part of their brains, substitution a transciever/computer in their place. Each clone is force grown until the body reaches a physical age of 18. The patron then revives the PCs from the low berths while injecting drugs into their system so they remain unconscious, he then inserts wires into their spinal column and sensory centers of the brain and places then on control chambers similar to those in the movie Avatar. The PCs wake up, seemingly on the floor of the Patron's Dungeon ship, where a bunch of robots in different rooms and creatures attack the PCs as they explore, the dungeon is also filled with traps and all sorts of challenges for the PCs as they attempt to get off the starship. Some of the older characters might wonder why they are in 18-year old bodies of themselves, they might assume they received agathics treatments, but no their original bodies are in chambers with feeding waste removal tubes stuck in their bodies, radio communication gives them the illusion that they are in the clone bodies of themselves. The Patron has set up a game for his own purposes, he left a trail of clues leading the adventures to themselves. If a PC gets "killed" in his clone body, he wakes up in another clone body, maybe not the same sort of body he started in. The PCs might not realized they are controlling teleoperate clone bodies of themselves with their brains, and if a comrade "dies" a dog might suddenly appear afterwards, the dog might seem to want to tell the PCs something, but unfortunately he is incapable of human speech, he can only bark, and is in fact one of the PCs in another body. I suppose he could try writing his name on the dust on the floor in front of the PCs to give them a clue. dog paws aren't the best things for doing so however, the rest of the PC party would notice that this particular animal was acting strangely. If the dog clone gets killed, a parrot might then fly in and tell the characters what happened. Just think of all the possibilities. Just some ideas I have kicking around in my head, now that you reminded my of a space dungeon I am working on.

 

[Condottiere]

Participants could be driven into paranoia.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Participants could be driven into paranoia.

Haven't made any decisions yet, still drawing rooms. I can't just have a bunch of guys in combat armor shooting at them in every room. I need a more interesting theme, I figure on having different science fiction themes in different areas, distributing treasure liberally. So basically the characters have to "rescue themselves" in order to get off the ship. The ship is sent to a remote region of space that the patron would like explored, the encounters onboard the ship are part of a test. The opponents are fleshbots controlled by the ship's computer. I'm also including "bonebots" and "corpse bots" basically the science fiction equivalent to skeletons and zombies just for fun. A bonebot is a robot built out of a human skeleton, it has cameras in the eye sockets. Corpsebots are robots built out of human corpses. No evidence whether the corpses were actually ever people, since there is a lab that grows body parts and organs onboard the ship. The fleshbots have computers instead of brains in their cranial cavity, each computer receives instructions from the ship's computer about what to do. The PC's control their own fleshbots which they may think at first are their own bodies. It is a little bot of insurance, allowing the GM to kill the PCs a number of times, and have some logical explanation on how they get resurrected. The theme is basically hack and slash, a bit of traps, with lots of clues spread out all through the ship. After the PCs take over the ship, they find themselves in a remote sector of space. They might as well do some exploring, they want to do that anyway, if only to find their way back home.