Hey Onno, My thinking was that the majority of the first in crew are the equivalent of the old Crusader second and third sons. Young driven individuals who lacked opportunity or the ability to compete in their home systems but looking to make a name for themselves and willing to take extreme risks to do so. Without an existing return gate the risks of their mission is extreme and of an unknown duration. The majority of the Morethan invaders will be warriors, techs,sabatours, or drones. Their entertainers, politicians, scientists and other support staff will remain in their home systems. I'm thinking of using a small contingent of Morethan politicians to start negotiations with the humans once things get heated up, but their mission will really be to insert sabatours/assassins and generally delay any significant military counter response as long as possible.
The adventures I'm envisioning are dealing with Morethan raiders/pirates, human special interest groups (mercenary missions), and if the PCs are interested in it possibly some higher risk missions involving the Morethan - possibly even some privateering against their fleets and assets (very risky considering the size and armament of Morethan spacecraft). Many of the remote system's will also be looking for ways to deal with the Morethans with as little reliance on Terran warships as possible to minimize the Terran influence in their system despite the general lack of any local fleets capable of fighting this threat. PCs may also find themselves afflicted with a Morethan Gremlin/Imp infiltrating/sabotaging their ship (possibly trying to use it to damage a gate during transit). If the PCs become famous enough they may actually be involved with different Morethan special interests plots (from both internal Morethans and returning ones). Much smaller deep space gates may be the way to go - capable of sending 10KTon ships would "only" cost about 170 billion each and take about 1/30th of a Morethan jumpgate of materials. 8 small gates could be constructed (allowing the 18 ly gap to be bridged in both directions) or even just 2 if long delays are acceptable. I would be tempted to go even smaller but the Morethan's do like their big intimidating spacecraft. A smaller jumpgate facility with a very short range (say 30% total mass of the gate but with only 1 ly range allowing for ships 6 times the single gate capacity to travel) would be very effective at intrastellar assault. It would only be good for the initial injection of ships who would then need to fight their way through the system from there. I have been thinking of instituting a certain minimum energy cost to initiating a jump to keep tiny gates from being all over the place - but even with that the strategic value of such a thing may be worth the invaders time. Even uncalibrated the landing distribution is pretty tight, all they would need to worry about is the crit failure chance smearing a few of the fleet ships on landing - and some risk in inherent to any military endeavor. The stellar dust interacting with the arrival mass could be a problem as well, but again minor compared to the value of a sneak attack. They might even be able to calibrate the gate before the actual invasion if the system wasn't expecting the tactic. Build the gate 500 AU out or so behind a comet or something to hide the gate and the fleet ships and you could send a test shot out and receive the signal from the probe in just two or three days - even with several days to calibrate the gate a fleet could be launched inside a week. The targets would need to notice the probe, realize what it was, recognize its risk, deliberate and argue whether it was from a distant or close gate (if they even thought of a close gate), and react in those few days. If it were the PCs who discovered the strange probe that would be an excellent adventure idea right there. As far as the question of the arrival flash - I hadn't thought much about that. It could have a lot of implications I will have to consider. My initial thought is that there would be somewhat of a flash as excess energy from the gate source bleeds over as well as the occasional stray particle arriving too close to another particle causing a small amount of telltale radiation - but not enough that the arrival would be obvious if you were not looking for it. When the Morethans left human space they had come from the typical system culture influenced by their particular lens of perspective. So they were rebellious, egotistical, ideologues who felt morally, intellectually, and physically superior to their human counterparts. After leaving they had to find people to do all the unpleasant jobs society needs done - and the majority of the Morethans were used to being soldiers and scientists - not janitors and craftsmen. To to alleviate the social strain this caused, they created a subrace of "drones" to do the menial labor. These drones are still smarter than typical humans (average IQ of around 110 or 120) but are genetically predisposed to being followers rather than leaders, and bred to have a form of programmable autism. This allows them to fixate on certain tasks (ones programmed into them during their training and formative years) without becoming as bored or unhappy. It also makes them somewhat less social. Certain "genius" drones can reprogram themselves to different tasks given some time and effort and could be an interesting character to play. The lower castes were mostly formed after the exodus of the Morethans, and the "losers" of the meritocracy have had little power or influence and no other options until contact with human space was re-established. The human persecution and hatred of Morethans also discouraged the have nots from trying to return to the human sphere, this fear and hatred has been encouraged by the Morethan training programs, as well as the idea of Morethan natural superiority being a prominent idea throughout their culture. An interesting idea would be for a human or human sympathizer team to infiltrate Morethan society and try to incite political unrest and rebellion amongst the lower castes and "have nots". I also reformatted the other space station and tried to resend it a couple of times to no avail - it is still too big for some reason. Thanks, Clint ************************************************ >From Onno: would the Morethan send automation or workers? And is volunteering for a first-in crew a way for Morethan who did not quite "make it" into the meritocracy at home to earn their laurels? Or do they send just the worker castes onto these high-risk missions? What is the adventure, by the way? Is there a chance that the first ship can't build the gate before their supplies run out? Or that it can't find some essential raw materials? > Deep space gates are possible, but no one has as yet come up with the > capital to build two preassembled gates just to get further away. > Proposals for doing so are frequently brought up by both the human > interests and the Morethans who are trying to relink with any other > survivors in distant worlds. The first gate of such a pair -- or all but the last gate in a chain -- can work without much calibration. And did anybody consider an interstellar assault by sending the first gate of a pair within a few lightmonths of the target and use uncalibrated launches from there for the assault? The error for 0.3 lightyears would be 0.036 AU, right? > Some limited communication has occurred over > the years by Morethan scientific jump researchers sending small masses > much further than normally possible. These experiments have an extremely > low success rate and risk sending their encoded messages inside the zone > of human influence tipping their hand. So this communication is very > limited at this time. A small, stealthy package which tries to fix the position, and only transmits within the target area ... Or is there some kind of "arrival flash"? > A small portion of the Morethan population were human > sympathizers or prisoners of war and remained in system and lived with the > prejudices, and other transhumans who lack many of the obvious physical or > political signs of the Morethan rebellion still reside in human space as > well (with varying degrees of persecution). When a meritocratic society offers only Hobson's Choice to its citizens, why should the "losers" stay in the game, instead of leaving that society? Or does Morethan society guarantee even "non-fittest" Morethan a better condition than normal humans get? Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
