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 Plot Point 3.
MET 653 days, 16 October 2302, two months and one more advance
since Cold. (Though this MET figure will become unreliable soon,
with different MET numbers given in different places.)
There are limited opportunities for role-playing during the survey
phase; rolling Science skills is all very well but it doesn't feel
very active, and I think one has to encourage scientific PCs to
speculate on the meanings of what they find and work out how to gather
more data. I suspect the flotilla should split up here, to maximise
opportunities for observation, though raw data will be processed
mostly aboard Bayern.
Obviously finding out about AGRA is the point of the campaign, so I
at least am not willing to let things go too badly. We're ultimately
looking for at least 11 contact points, preferably 15, though the
direct contact should add 5-6 on its own; that means 300-odd science
points purely on AGRA nodes. At an average of 15 per day, that's
something like three ship-weeks of node observations, another good
reason for spreading the ships apart. And almost all of that work is
being done by NPCs in both the groups for which I've run this.
The "gravitational architecture" is not well-described. I chose to
implement it as "rods" several AU long, sometimes ending at nodes,
sometimes not. These are of infinite thinness (they only show up to
gravity sensors), and about the mass of Ceres (10^21 kg). That's far
too small for something of that mass, which should have collapsed into
a singularity and then boiled away via Hawking radiation; there's one
gravity of acceleration about 80 km out, and a metre from the central
point it's in the millions of gravities, which will tear atoms apart.
I put the nodes' mass a little higher, a bit below that of Luna
(5×10^22 kg). At 10 AU wide, this is ridiculously low density. They
radiate a black-body spectrum similar to that of the stars they're
near, but without specific emission/absorption lines. (That ought to
mean a vast energy output, enough to dwarf that of the stars. That's
another inconsistency.)
The nodes and rods are "fixed" in space relative to the nearby stars
(moving with the cluster more or less towards Orion, rather than
orbiting the stars the way everything else is).
For all purposes except stutterwarp, the mass above holds. The
interaction with stutterwarp is inconsistent with any mass; the 1 AU
FTL threshold (6 AU from the centre of the node) would imply a central
mass of about 6 MSol, while the stutterwarp wall of "a couple of
thousand kilometres" (i.e. 5 AU and change from the centre) would
imply 4,100 MSol. None of this produces any actual acceleration
towards the node. And of course no sort of mass would make the drive
start discharging anywhere outside the wall, while it's still working.
There seem to be multiple statements about what happens to a
stutterwarp ship that approaches, bearing in mind that the probes run
on stutterwarp propulsion too. As I ran it, if there's no life aboard,
a probe vanishes and reappears 2d6 external days later with no
internal time passed. If there is life (from test animals upwards),
the external time passing is zero; the duration of the subjective
experience depends on how long the probe or vessel was intended to
spend inside; but the only thing that's changed is the memory of the
biological entities that have memory. ("The rat looks at you with the
eyes of a rat that has Seen Stuff.") Consumables haven't been used,
recorders have what they had on entry, etc.; indeed, for my relatively
technical players, one of the first signs of anything odd was a clock
offset error as the probe suddenly found itself out of sync with the
carrier vessels' clocks. (Smart PCs will instantly get debriefed of as
much as they can remember.)
A detail tweak to the inconsistent experiences: when PCs are looking
out of windows, they see different things. If they all look at the
same camera feed, they see the same thing.
If the opportunity arises, the AGRA-affected traitor may be seen
screaming during one of these trips. (They are of course still safely
frozen.)
Honestly I can't see any reason why the nodes need to be multiple AU
wide: having them bigger than their nearby stars, and visibly glowing,
means mucking about with the luminosity in order to make them not
obvious from Earth, never mind needing some hunting around in the
nebulosity to locate them close up. I'd be more inclined in retrospect
to put them at about the size of a large moon.
Of course, however much communication has been achieved, eventually
the expedition will have to give up and move on. Its work here may
well justify a follow-up expedition that's planning to stay on site
for years. At least that's what the crew will think, not knowing how
much the Käfer war has been intensifying back home.