This is part of an ongoing series about the preparations I've made to
run Mongoose's revised edition of the Bayern campaign for 2300AD.
Spoilers for Adventure Seed 1.
This Adventure Seed is very lacking in visualisable detail, and
numbers. So here's my version.
The ship is near the asteroid belt which is this system's main feature
after the star, but in the outer fringes of it. (No sign of mining;
any asteroids mined have drifted away.)
The spacecraft is 10km long, and 1km wide. Visually it resembles the
Fasces: a bundle of rods with
bindings every so often to hold them together. But this bundle is
hollow: front and rear are open, and moving inward from the tubes one
would find a thin layer of ship's machinery, power plants, fuel tanks,
etc., then a shielding layer to keep the actual ramjet's radiations
from affecting the ship, and a lot of electromagnets.
Even Bayern, the biggest ship in the flotilla, could easily fit down
the ramjet. Probably sideways.
The visible external damage looks like space débris impact, not lasers
or explosions. Someone with naval experience can see that it looks a
lot more concentrated than would be usual in ship to ship combat (i.e.
it's a very high speed impact or a very small cloud of débris).
Each section (from binding ring to binding ring) is 500 metres long,
and each tube is about 4 metres wide (more like 3 on the inside), so
about 750 can fit round the ship's circumference in each section;
15,700 tubes total.
Hatches and ladders and so on are small; suggesting a creature about
1.5m tall and with a basically human length to width ratio. The tube
access hatches are just big enough to fit the pods.
Coming in from an external airlock on any ring, one climbs through the
"ceiling" door into a circumferential corridor. The floor is covered
with a rubbery high-grip surface. There are hatches on the side walls
every 4 metres or so. Less frequently, there are hatches in the floor
(other airlocks) and ceiling (to internal parts of the ship); a set of
closely-spaced bars and indentations is probably a ladder (and these
are in the airlocks too).
The nitrogen-methane atmosphere is at about -140°C. (The methane would
condense at about -160°C.)
Lighting is dull red; humans may assume emergency lighting, and indeed
power is low enough that hatch openings are sluggish, but this is
actually by design. Controls and displays on the pods and in the
machinery spaces get as far up as yellow and down into infra-red.
Within each tube (clearly designed for gravity, with a grippy surface
on the outer wall) are four parallel banks of the lifepods; this fits
about 2,000 pods per tube, something over thirty million total
passenger capacity. (This is probably a bit bigger than the writers
intended, but there's a sense of scale to convey here.)
The ship has a remnant spin of 0.3 rpm, enough to provide about a
twentieth of a gravity. It was intended to spin at about 1.6 rpm,
producing 1.5 gravities at the rim. (A comfortable human limit of 2
rpm would produce 2.2 gravities. The occupants could actually deal
with slightly higher spin rates.)
If none of the players thinks of a Bussard ramjet, an Engineer
(M-Drive) (EDU) should remind them of it. The world of 2300 never
built one; by the time it had recovered from the Twilight War and
might have tried, the calculations had made it clear that it would
only work in an area with denser interstellar medium, and better
technologies were available.
Things that might help the ship:
-
deal with the scavenger (which is native to this system, and more
can be found in the asteroid belt). Not a major concern but it'll
cut down the migrant loss rate.
-
inspect the ship's machinery. It is all on a vast scale, more even
than is needed for the size of the ship—the plan was that it would
survive the trip without maintenance, and mostly it has. The damage
that can be fixed by bulk materials (power conduits) mostly has
been; but the ship has depleted its stores of optical fibres
(selenium glass), and the manufactories will need some to start
making more.