They were just starting to talk about possiblity of the quantum jump gate when our colony ship left for Alpha Centauri.  Pie in the sky by and by was all well and good but the astronomers really wanted that second point for triangulation.  The comet that blew the Cape of Good Hope into the mantle and set back civilization by half a century might have had something to do with it too.

Even with the PULSAR array pushing our kites we only hit about point two cee so the trip took twenty years.  By then they'd built and tested the array and started sending out the reciever probes to distant stars.  Without all the people and supplies they were pushing hard on point eight cee.  We were pretty busy building habitat domes for our second generation and trying to get the hydroponics working right by the time they walked the second extra solar colony's volunteers through the gate.  It took ten years for the message to reach earth that they'd arrived okay.  They teach the math in grade school these days but I could never wrap my head around that one.  The point being that they'd technically arrived before they left but the round trip for the signal had to add up either way.

Of course, our news from earth was always a good three and a half years late.  I guess that's why we don't know what happened.  Why they stopped transmitting.  It took us a while to get in touch with the other colonies but they were all further behind than we were and relying on the gate relays for communications.  Having gone by gate, they didn't have much more than a couple little survey sats in space, so we saved time and built a PULSAR array of our own and used it to send and recieve messages while we built the fleet it would eventually push back towards earth.  Because, while man-power's a little short, even now, with three generations of twelve kids in every family, and a zero percent death rate we are definately going back to find out what happened.

Quote from: David JohansenThey were just starting to talk about possiblity of the quantum jump gate when our colony ship left for Alpha Centauri.  Pie in the sky by and by was all well and good but the astronomers really wanted that second point for triangulation.  The comet that blew the Cape of Good Hope into the mantle and set back civilization by half a century might have had something to do with it too.

Even with the PULSAR array pushing our kites we only hit about point two cee so the trip took twenty years.  By then they'd built and tested the array and started sending out the reciever probes to distant stars.  Without all the people and supplies they were pushing hard on point eight cee.  We were pretty busy building habitat domes for our second generation and trying to get the hydroponics working right by the time they walked the second extra solar colony's volunteers through the gate.  It took ten years for the message to reach earth that they'd arrived okay.  They teach the math in grade school these days but I could never wrap my head around that one.  The point being that they'd technically arrived before they left but the round trip for the signal had to add up either way.

Of course, our news from earth was always a good three and a half years late.  I guess that's why we don't know what happened.  Why they stopped transmitting.  It took us a while to get in touch with the other colonies but they were all further behind than we were and relying on the gate relays for communications.  Having gone by gate, they didn't have much more than a couple little survey sats in space, so we saved time and built a PULSAR array of our own and used it to send and recieve messages while we built the fleet it would eventually push back towards earth.  Because, while man-power's a little short, even now, with three generations of twelve kids in every family, and a zero percent death rate we are definately going back to find out what happened.

Screw the setting - I'd read that book :haw:

It's good, got a system in mind? Any plans for it at all or is it one of those burning ideas you just HAD to get written down?

Yeah, David. I like the setting. What do you want to do with it?

-clash

I like this as a start and would like to know where its going.

Thanks...well, as I'm moving towards the completion of the Galaxies in Shadow rules, I'm looking at False Start as a core setting.

The reason is that sfrpgs tend to get labeled by the setting they come with, so settings with any space opera elements at all tend to get labeled and discarded by the "hard science" fans without a second glance.

I'm figuring on putting a hard science setting in the core game.  With the various colonies returning to Earth to investigate the silence, there's a great opportunity for human variety relating to genetic engineering and other adaptations.  Keep in mind that the portal colonies arrived before they left by a factor that relates directly to distance, the farther they are, the longer they've had, and as such are further along than the time line might suggest.

For instance, if a light speed signal will take ten years to get to earth from the colony, they will actually be twenty years along by the time the signal arrives.  Yes this means I'm making some assumptions about the conservation of relativity regarding quantum information transits.

The colonies make quite extensive use of robots for construction and resource extraction, incidentally.  The small robots that went with the original probes were self replication factories and the use of robots to build more robots is a key feature of the colonial strategy.

Incidentally I intend to keep the simple sf game I posted a few days back as an entry level system that will also use the extensive Galaxies in Shadow substructure of tech design, world and alien creation.  It won't include that stuff of course, people who want a simple game don't want it anyhow.  But the underlying structure will be compatible.

Our ship, is a thing of artistic beauty, right out of the classical-absurdist instalation art movement at the end of the twentith century.  Or if you prefer, it looks like an egg beater mounted on an upside down tea cup in a vaguely sexual manner.

The cup is the main reciever for the beam input the PULSAR array puts out.  It contains a thin atmosphere of hydrogen atoms that cushion and and distribute the heat generated by the beam so it doesn't just cut through the ship.  The old colony ship used kites on tethers, but the engineers think the new design will be more efficient and get us maybe point five cee.

The beaters are the fuel tanks, we're using water for reaction mass because its common, heavy, and does double duty as radiation shielding for the crew quarters and work stations.  It also doesn't tend to explode, a feature I'm particularly fond of.  Then there's the spin gravity cage.  It's a long way back to earth and while we'll be sleeping in two year shifts, we'll still need to get our exercise.  It also gives us some stored momentum as a gyroscope.

The cranks stick straight out and contain our braking sail array and extended sensor pylons.  The launch bays and hangers are the egg beater's handle, up front with the particle shield deployment tubes.

Our fleet consists of a dozen ships.  Two really big ones and ten smaller craft.  It might seem like a bit much but we don't know what we're facing back there.  There's military landing craft, strike fighters, and tanks in the hangers.  It's enough to make a guy wonder if somebody at the top knows something.

We launched the first probes before we even started on the fleet.  If all goes as planned, we'll accelerate straight at Ay Cee One, pick up a slingshot, then the PULSAR will kick us up to point five.  Once we're up to speed we deploy a particle field to intercept any micrometeors, missles, or projectiles and wait.  About half way there we should start running into data from the probes and then we can begin to make some plans.  Once we pass Jupiter, we run out the sails and start braking.  After that we shed most of our velocity with two bounces past the sun and set sail for earth.  Anything that tries to stop us gets nuked.

The gate relays presented an interesting engineering problem.  Because the information passing through the gate technically arrives before it left, there's no way to signal back through the gate before light could make the round trip to and from the destination.  This ment that a colony twelve light years away couldn't be contacted for twentyfour years after it left, but for the colonists it was thirty six years.  When pressed for explanations by politicians looking for progress on the problem the physicists always just shake their heads and answer "Because it literally can't be done."

I'd never expected to walk on earth again, to feel a fresh clean breeze sweeping across a field of wild flowers under a warm blue sky.  I know that sounds idyllic, poetic even, but it's really chilling.  Because what we found was a virgin world, the air and water were clean, the wildlife healthy, and several extinct species mysteriously back from the dead.

Every trace of thousands of years of human habitation had been wiped away.

In that context, the blue sky and fresh breeze were chilling reminders that six billion people, their cities, their monuments, their great works of art were all simply gone.  Oh, we found some evidence that it was once there, the oil was still missing from some of the old deep bore wells and they were only plugged and covered for a couple hundred feet.

Since the PULSAR array was gone without a trace, heck the American flag on the moon was even gone and the foot prints swept away, we had no way to get home.

I guess some of the other colonies that sent ships saw it as a wonderful opportunity though.  I guess that's how the fighting started anyhow.