In case anyone's interested, a new subplotline is being considered: * Our Heroes, in making plans for a possible future colonization attempt in the asteroids, have funded/built/launched a robotic mission to build a refinery and fuel depot. (And if no colonization attempt is made, they hope for some medium-term profit by owning the only gas-station within a millions miles of that place.) * Remote telemetry suggests that something is going wonky over there. * Our Heroes build a 1/10th size version of their planned colonization ship engine (ie, a SM+6 ship), and build a ship that's roughly 5% living space, 45-50% engine (G:SS's Advanced Fusion Pulse Drive), and 45-50% fuel tankage. Planned mission profile: 3 days accelerating at ~0.05 gravities to 80 or 90 miles/second, using up half the fuel; coast for a couple of weeks; 3 days decelerating. * Arrive, investigate, fix if necessary. Refuel from local supplies. (If local fuel supplies turn out to be infeasible, wait for a fuel shipment from home.) * Arrive home having hopefully fixed/maintained/improved a piece of valuable colonization infrastructure, and at the very least having gathered valuable hands-on data on such trips.
Naturally, various complications will ensue before that last step - but I thought I'd check in here to see whether the overall approach looked at least roughly plausible to my fellow hard-SF-liking gamer-geeks here. So... how does it look? :) Thank you for your time, -- DataPacRat lu .iacu'i ma krinu lo du'u .ei mi krici la'e di'u li'u traji lo ka vajni fo lo preti _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
