The finely call on the Jump is the Captains, she will go with what she says.
IC yes, but OOC we should really come to an agreement :P
Edit:
This is probably the first "dangerous" decision we have to make. Therefore I think we should take the opportunity to establish how we decide these things fairly.
Should we go by simple majority ?
Or should particularly dangerous or risky ventures require more ?
Tiebreakers?
Yep Ill take the group vote, yes or no
My Vote is No
We should scan for another jump point and see if there is one.
I would say simple majority. No need to get complicated, though if someone should very much disagree with a very seemingly dangerous action, we maybe should continue discussion.
Anyway, I also vote no, and to scan for another jump point. : )
Don't know enough to be scared both IC and OOC, so I'm ambivalent.
I want to see what's there. My vote is to Jump and see what's what. (I should point out that my curiosity has killed 2 characters and counting.)
It's not hot enough to be a star. In a perfect world, we have a lovely door that will keep people out of our system of worlds. How cool would that be?
It could be a star, just a red and big one, thats what I am thing, and they can be very big, flying a week to get out from its outer carona would be danger roll city you did hehe/
Tally:
For: 1
Against: 2
No opinion: 1
In the interest of not causing a tie, I will err on the side of caution and lay down my vote. But I'll think of something :P
That last bit of data with a weak star field just intrigues me more. Seems like whatever the effect is, it is likely to have safe areas.
@mdt,
Regarding Ceres's last post, could we shore some probes up to be more heat resistant ourselves?
That would be a plan ...
Basic heat shielding would be to reduce the surface area (less area to radiate too, and less convection if applicable) and a paintjob (helps with absorbed heat).
Then slap on a few heat sinks and hope for the best! Water works decently, but it might give us undesired jets of steam ...
There would also be the matter of wherever the sensors and optics are actually capable of producing a useful reading at these temperatures...
Heat sinks would only help if the surrounding 'void' was cooler than the probe. Otherwise, it would heat up faster.
We need to make it shiny, as shiny as possible, to reflect any IR radiation, or light, that is in the area. Build a gap between the outer shell and an inner shell, connected only by small points of non-conductive materials (like some foams), and then turn the gap into a vacuum. Circulate something very cold (quite a lot of liquid hydrogen might work) on the inside of the inner shell and it should be able to hold off for as long as the outer shell material can keep from either melting or ablating.
How well the sensors would work in this situation is a good question. The good news is that we don't have to worry so much about weight, since they are just jumping there and back, and not really traveling around.
Sorry, a heat DUMP is the proper English word I was looking for : )
But, unless we end up inside an actual sun or between multiple suns of a larger solar system - one side of the probe should be pointed at something cooler (bleak infinity of space). However, orientation might be a hassle anyhow in that case ...
Edit: 1400K is a fair bit cooler then the surface of a "true" star. The H-R (Hertzsprung-Russell) diagram in my astronomy book stops at 2500K. The coldest spectral class of stars is M, which cites surface temperatures of ~3000K.
So it sounds unlikely that we will end up IN an actual star. Unless the probe failed to heat up quick enough before it was destroyed, but then a constant temperature reading seems unlikely.
So most likely we are either exiting a bit away from the star(s) proper or we are dealing with a brown dwarf (a ball of gas too small to sustain hydrogen fusion like a real star). The presence of harsh radiation does seem to suggest that there are some fun processes going on, which leans in the direction of a 'real' star, but then again - it could be from a million and one other sources : )
I'd also be concerned about the lack of transmission material. I mean, heat sink/dumps only work because there is something else around to absorb the extra energy. And while space is not an absolute void, if it is in the middle of a coronal ejection, or something like that, then the only material around is actually going to be letting off energy, not absorbing it.
Basically, I think the best idea is to reflect off as much heat giving stuff as possible, and bottle the innards of the probe up like a thermos, and having it be pre-cooled to as cold as possible.
Than again, half of golden-age sci-fi is techno-babble anyway, right? : )
A heat dump is basically that extra transmission material carried around handily. We would be adding extra mass just so it would take more energy to heat up the probe, slowing the process down a bit : )
But yeah, reflective shielding -> insulation -> 'heart' of the probe.
As for materials, we are/should probably carry around extra repair material for our own heat shields right? We can borrow some of that!
Edit: We should also invert the polarity of our *something*, just in case :P
I feel like a tachyon phase shield needs to be in there somewhere too...
Soo can we jump now :)
No one is allowed to do anything unless it is channeled through the main deflector dish...
I'm slammed at work this week, sorry folks. Are you transiting, or do you want to wait for the tertiary location searches to complete?
transiting, but GM if you need a week, we can hold the game until you have more free time.
:)
I agree, transiting.
It seems "safe-ish". We will have to check how the LZ actually is on the other end, to see if our other ships can come too.
However, quite obviously, the drones can't make the transition themselves so any drone we can't carry can be left behind to continue our scan :)
could you NPC my PC for a wile
Yep, condolences.
I hope things get better, Wombat!
Sorry to hear about your troubles - I hope it turns better : )
This has been a long week everyone, sorry. I'm setting aside time on Saturday to try to kick everything down the road again in all my games. So expect multiple posts then. Been trying to do a quick response here and there as I can.
Just a note, because it's a binary system, and there's so much real estate, you're going to need a LOT of sensors to scan it. You will likely need to bring the freighters over to work on the scanning.
McTavish can speed it up, but only by going active on the sensors.
You can bring over 5 probes at a time on the freighter, but it's going to eat into your fuel supplies doing double jumps to bring them over.
Scanning wise, I was more thinking (immediately) to watch the star near the jump point for a bit and see how stable it is. That way we can decide how insane it is to ask the other ships to jump and then haul &$% for safety.
We can scan the rest of the system after figuring that out.
On the bright side, entrance to our sphere of interest is rather hard to find/use. And we'll have 50 years until it becomes easily accessible ... :P
Life as they say gets you, I'm sorry to say with work, family difficulty's. I'm dropping out all but one of my Pazio PbP games.
This is the only game I am keeping,
I think the GM is amazing, this level of detail and the way this game has grown, the suspense, just epic.
thank you mdt :)
Sorry to hear that GMCW. I'll try to keep you entertained.
@GMCW: Sorry to hear that things are so rough. I sincerely hope things get better.
@GMCW - Sorry to hear, I hope your situation resolves as well and quickly as possible : )
@Party/plan - just to be clear: My idea is
1) Plot a random course so it is not painfully obvious which way we came from if we start our active sensors
2) Follow said course a bit so no manoeuvre jets or anything is still firing.
3) Boot up active scans and check out the system, make sure we are alone. We'll need to do it some day anyhow, and probably easier to slip away just this one ship if needed instead of the entire "fleet".
4) Give an all clear signal back home and instructions for the rest of the ships to rejoin us.
@GMCW, I've been through something like that before, and I wish you well!
@Ceres, I can agree with that plan.
@Holt - I really enjoy chatting about hypothetical space related situations, just let me know if I turn annoying :)
ps - I hope it is not to late already !
Wow, one busy day at work and I miss all the coronal ejection chit chat. ;)
I'm on board with Ceres plan.
We're three that explicitly voiced our support for the plan 'go back and fetch a helping hand'.
Perhaps we should stagger our return/arrival back here just to be careful (ie - first our ship returns, then the next one 48h later and so on)?
Sweet motherload! Very nice : )
Hopefully one or more (two would give us plausible deniability, we'll just claim we came from the other direction!) will lead to civilization : )
Now, if that is the case - we should find a suitable boring excuse and set up a space station around the alpha star, so if anyone catches us heading there we can use it as an excuse. Any our our ship can lay in wait there until they receive an all clear and jump home : )
But really, I'm getting ahead of things!
What do we do now?
We can:
A) Continue sweeping
B) Explore the nodes sequentially
C) Explore the nodes at the same time.
A: Is kinda boring, but we might just leave a few drones in case of ("survey" drones? We can claim some finding of moderate interest as an excuse for a future station around the alpha star).
B: One at a time - we will be less likely to be overwhelmed or stretched thin, but if we find civilization on the first try - how do we know which of the other nodes to claim as our origin?
C: A probe in every node - we'll might get in over our heads, but we will have an easier time picking where to go reasonable quick. And, if we encounter civilization we'll have more knowledge to spin our lies of : )
One at a time, probes passive , pick up chatter we jump
Go shopping
@Ceres, I like the discussion too, though I'm not sure the gameplay thread was the right place for it. Maybe here or through PM?
Anyway, yes, it is a lot of energy being thrown at an object, but I believe being in the presence of the magnetosphere actually makes it worse. All that of that energy gets absorbed by the atmosphere and then has to go somewhere, and the satellite being a conductive object, I think it gets most of the discharge.
Being below the atmosphere magnetosphere is fine, since the discharge (of what isn't reflected) is mostly going to be things like EM radiation and ion releases (lightning strikes). But being in it is more like a funnel redirecting the errant energy towards the satellite. You can think of the power lines the same way, where the lines are 'catching' the electro-magnetic energy and directing it into the various transformer and power stations.
Though, to be honest, it has been a long time since I got that physics minor, so chances are good that even my high level explanation is rather off. : )
- - - - -
As for my vote, I agree with exploring sequentially. Even if we hit 'dead space', the mapping and contents could still be useful.
- - - - -
@mdt, once the sits arrive here, and we refuel, how much fuel would the freighter still have (in jumps/operation time)?
If you are refering to the freighter refueling your ship and the drones, then, assuming you haven't topped off since you left, you've been operating for about 5 months now, and have done 4 jumps on all the ships, and two extras on the McTavish.
Unfortunately, I haven't had time to make the freighter tanker up yet (been buried at work). So... I'm going to say you've probably used about 70% of it. So you'll likely want to spend a few days resupplying the tankers.
Note, you're almost out of food on the McTavish as well, so you will want to resupply from the freighter as well.
So, things just got exciting!
It would seems as if the signals where coming from mostly one source, so probably not a huge giant space fleet of doom waiting for us. But then, whom knows ...
Could be any number of things - some dangerous, some really nice.
How do we want to proceed? It seems as if this is a significant enough discovery that we should alert homeworld - but we can't lead any potential aliens there ...
First thing. :) Figure out what we can from the signal.
Send probes to fly past, find a place to hide in this system,
If we are lucky they could be tech level 1960s
We could find a remote place, kidnap one of the locals and probe it,
Then send it back.
Be a great soceal study
By the way my new 8ios from apples spell checker was designed my cretins
I would like to go to apple and slap them saying
What the #%%^ where you thinking !!!
sooo whats next
We have one more jump point. Perhaps we should check that out before we investigate the alien signal.
We don't know anything about the signal, it might be harmless.
I do like the idea of hiding the fleet in this jump point before sending the McTavish in to investigate the signal solo. She's best suited for investigation.
So then, jump -> hide fleet -> jump back -> jump to alien
Sounds right to me.
I have no idea where we are, are we in the system with the signals?
or some other place??
there where 3 jump points 2 we looked at
1: Signals
2: Nothing
3: ??