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 Interlude 5.
Officially it's MET 1039 whichever source you believe, but I
can't see this being a mere three days after reaching the Hyades. Give
it a few weeks at least. I'm putting it at 1134, so two more training
ticks after the previous adventure.
Timing is important in the setup here. Alas, we have no indication of
how long it takes to spin up a fusion power plant from scratch. The
plant has been taken down for major maintenance, so it's a completely
cold start; I'm going to declare ten hours. And even without subcraft
Bayern is rather slower in stutterwarp transit than Entdecker.
The "transponder" is a form of
ELT;
the sweep tone, standard since the 2000s, is distinctive. (And I like
this sort of detail, so I don't care that the world diverged before
the historical development of this sort of thing from the 1950s ELT.
Maybe the tone in "real" 2300 is different, just as the characters
aren't speaking 2026 English, but too bad.) It is intermittently
sending a 30-character hexadecimal code which is in itself
meaningless, though any spacer will know it's a beacon ID, unique to a
particular craft. Standard procedure in inhabited space would be to
check with authorities, which would have a copy of the ID lists and
contact information for ships registered to them or overtly in-system.
It is possible that somewhere in Bayern's data banks there's a
findable copy of the lists for the 2140s.
If a PC does it: Formidable (14+) Electronics (Computer) (1D hours,
INT) to search the whole corpus; +4 if searching specifically for
locator beacon codes. Success will give the record "Roskosmos
experimental vessel РАССВЕ́Т / RASSVYET, registered 2141, home port
Vostochniy, subcraft ID escape pod 3". If as seems likely no PC has
enough time aboard Bayern before the ships split up, Nicole works
with Ace to retrieve the data by the time Bayern arrives at Dawn.
T + 0 hours: Anton Dohrn returns to the flotilla in the system where
the collision will happen. Mission board is convened.
T + 1 hours: Entdecker is scrambled back to flight readiness.
T + 3 hours: Entdecker departs for Dawn. Bayern begins fusion
startup.
T + 13 hours: Fusion startup complete, Bayerrn departs for Dawn.
T + 33 hours: Entdecker arrives in Dawn system.
T + 35 hours: Entdecker arrives in planetary orbit.
T + 59 hours: Bayern arrives in Dawn system.
T + 62 hours: Bayern arrives in planetary orbit (if needed).
The planet is stated to be bigger than Earth but to have lower than
normal surface gravity. That suggests a low density, which isn't
really compatible with the abundant heavy metals! Instead I'll make it
smaller than Earth, but with Earthlike gravity; this is a clue for
anyone who cares to look for it.
Entdecker carries a Bushranger Wallaby hover ATV on board as
standard equipment; it's not clear how long it would take to
trans-ship any of the other vehicles from Bayern's holds, like the
Songbirds (which don't seem to offer any extra capability) or the
Explorer ATVs, but I would think some hours even using EVA bugs. I'd
allow one extra vehicle to be transferred.
The Wallaby looks like a decent option for getting around the
island—at least on the savannah and the swamp, and its jump capability
can get it onto and over the raised and largely bare ridge areas. The
rivers are the only way of getting it through the mangrove, and even
then there's too much in the way of low branches to make it all the
way to the crashed pod; it can get up to the four-way confluence, but
no further. Similarly, it won't be able to enter the jungle. A
Songbird or the hoverbikes will have similar performance.
If the Explorer is brought along, it can probably push through the
jungle but won't do any better with the mangorove.
The Kolibri, or aerial drones, can provide decent overhead views of
most of the sites, but sites in mangrove (the crashed pod) or jungle
(three individual dêbris chunks) are thoroughly overgrown. The Kolibri
is light enough that it can't cut a landing zone with its rotors; it
is amphibious and could land on the river, or very enterprising
explorers could rope down, though this would mean depressurising the
whole cabin. (It's a very light aircraft so probably only one
descender at a time, and quite fiddly piloting to hold it steady.)
The seven unspecified debris sites are single large chunks of metal.
Analysis will show that these are indeed parts of a spacecraft's hull,
they have suffered re-entry heating, and they probably weren't
intended to. (But since the parent craft largely disintegrated in
orbit, they weren't carrying any weight of internal components, and so
they're scorched by re-entry rather than melted.)
Dates are inconsistent, what a surprise Mongoose: the ship supposedly
departed in 2148 (p. 60), but the first survivor died in the crash in
2147 (p. 67). Oh dear.
We are 144 straight-line light years from Earth based on the
coordinates. The standard multiplier of 2.4× for straight-line
distance to traversable distance suggests that the ship would have
have to travel 346LY. And the specific difference in Bayern's CMD
value between this and The Return is 421LY. But that's for a modern
stutterwarp with 7.7LY usable range (and potentially disposing of a
drive en route), and we explicitly know that the early ones couldn't
reach that far (suggesting the multiplier would be larger as the
routes would be less direct); at the same time, I bet they were also
slower. So while Bayern with all modern shininess will take 282 days
to reach Earth from here, I suspect Dawn took at least twice as long.
So my timeline ends up as this:
2143: Dawn is launched; test flights. Setting up for a survey
mission, probably to Alpha Centauri.
2144: Pathfinder deoarts for Alpha Centauri. This race has been
lost. The conspiracy is definitely active by this point. Crew and
stores come on board, though there isn't a definite target yet.
2145: Vostochniy launch complex attacked; records lost. What's left of
Roskosmos agrees to the crew's suggestion that they set out now "for
Proxima". The ship is never seen again.
2147: Dawn reaches HD27808.
2150: Last survivor dies.
What do people in 2300 know of this? I assume that at least some
people on the Bayern mission will be enthusiastic historians of
space, and in any case the data banks have lots of room for books. At
the most basic, "the Russian ship Dawn left in 2145 for Proxima
Centauri, but never arrived". With a bit more interest and maybe some
Science (History) rolls, "the control complex was attacked by unknown
forces and Roscosmos, always a bit of a shoestring operation
post-Twilight War, never really recovered".