 May 3, 2012 - 7:20am | Anniversary of the Titanic disaster as well as the recent Italian cruise ship disaster got me thinking about an adventure seed that I wrote on a passenger liner called Titan being struck by fragments of a comet and basically being a SF adventure of the Titanic. So I did a bunch of searches and couldn't find it. Till I notice that searches for comet and titan were both turning up the 1000's of Sathar Agents thread: http://www.starfrontiers.us/node/3660 at any rate rather then resurrect the old thread I thought I'd simply dust of the Titan sections of that discussion. 1. The pirate or smuggler portions of that adventure could be reworked in that if this ship is truly crippled then a massive "Dunkirk" style rescue operation would be called for with every available ship responding to pull passengers off. (Give some reason why everyone just didn't take to the lifeboats- perhaps where the comet struck it took out 30% of the lifeboats). Among the responders is a thief/smuggler who docks with the ship and attempts to transship cargo but not allow passengers on board. 2. So the liner is HS20 and the only ship available with grapples is the frigate the Leo or the CMS Leo and a space fleet frigate . The shear mass of the titan is too much for these two ships to halt her progress on a course of death and destruction into a planet or the sun but they must try to buy some time hoping the jump tug called for makes it to the system in time. This means they latch onto the titan and red line their drives and they can't pursue and smugglers leaving that for the assault scouts. Any one want to speculate of the possibility of towing or altering course on a HS 20 ship by other ships with grapples? I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
May 3, 2012 - 7:29am | New idea: rip off the love triangle story from the Titanic movie but with a murder twist: basicly the Leonardo & Kate Winslette characters are murdered by the jealous fiancée who then endeavors to evade capture and slip away aboard some other vessel carrying the jewels. I was thinking that a murder mystery might be good in the midsts of this (only light on the mystery though) and the idea of casting the star crossed lovers as the victims had a satisfying feel to it in a Monty Python sort of way. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
May 3, 2012 - 8:45am | Tech question: what would military designers consider the appropriate amount of Life support or phrased another way: How many passengers could be evacuated from the Titan on board a frigate or an assault scout? I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 May 3, 2012 - 9:03am | The volume ratios between a HS 20 and HS 5 ship is 266.6. Assuming the mass ratio is the same, that means that the HS 5 ship is going to be trying to move 268 times the mass it was designed for. Basically this means that the acceleration possible is going to drop by that same ratio. So instead of max ADF of 4, you will have a max ADF of 0.0149. Now we'll ignore the question of does 1 ADF = 1g or 2.78g and just go with 1 since that makes the problem harder for the frigate. That means the maximum acceleration you get is .15 m/s/s. Assuming you're not trying to stop the HS 20 ship but just deflect it's trajectory so it doesn't hit something then you get the following results which shows the total deflection in kilometers as a function of time the thrust is applied.
So it only takes between 2-3 hours to deflect it enough to miss an earth sized planet, less than 10 hours to miss a Jupiter sized planet (actually less than 9) and less than 30 hours to miss a sun sized star (27 hours actually). So I say that yes, given a bit of time, they could deflect the ship. If you had a second frigate to help the times drop to 1-2 hours, 6-7 hours and 19 hours respectively to miss the various sized targets. Interestingly based on just the rated ADF and the volume ratios, an assault scout has more thrust to provide than the frigate by about 4.5% but they don't have grapples and that is probably a little unrealistic. I would also say these are worst case times as they are based on the ship headed toward the dead center of the object in question. In reality it would take less time to make it clear since you wouldn't be headed toward the very center of the planet or star so there would be less displacement needed. Also there is the issue of, based on scale and times, 1 ADF = 2.78g. This would give you a factor of 2.78 times the acceleration which would reduce the time needed as well. With one frigate under that acceleration the miss times would be 1.6 hours, 5.2 hours, and 16.2 hours respectively. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
May 3, 2012 - 9:15am | How many could be evacuated is a good question. When I design my ships I always include a backup life support system that is equal to the original one. Assuming you could run both at the same time would give you some extra capacity. For example, a frigate has a crew of 25-30. Assume you built it with the LS system that supports up to 60 (the next lower one supports only up to 35 and that seems a little low). With your backup system on as well you could support up to 120 total or 90 additional above your crew. That's not a lot considering a HS 20 ship could probably have thousands of passengers. But, that rating of 60 beings is the number it can support without issue for 6 months. We're only talking about a few days to get everyone off the ship and to the nearest planet. So, unless the ship is almost out of suppies (not very likely as they would be replentished each time it docks), there is more than enough food. The only real question at that point is how much over capacity the system can run and for how long before it starts breaking down or not keeping up. The way I see it is that a major portion of the limit is going to be how fast the system can clean the air and water and get it recycled. It was designed for 60 people on normal schedules so we have to assume that it can at least keep up with 60 people up and awake at one time and keep the air fresh. While the design probably assumes that there are low load periods where the system can catch up if it starts to fall a little behind, let's assume that it can maintain 60 people always up indefinitely. What happens when you go over that. I'd say that you could probably double the load for a couple of days but beyond that you start to have bad air and water real fast as it just can't keep up. So I'd say as a absolute maximum, you could put 250 people into a frigate for about 2-3 days if you could find the room. For the AS, which has a LS capacity probably set to 20, you could get 80-90 people for a couple of days (although there just isn't room for that many in the AS). Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
 May 3, 2012 - 4:18pm | TerlObar, did you take into account that HS 5 then HS15 have different engine sizes than the HS 1 to 4 this may have to be in your calculations for your ADF/MR that you have. Also, the number of engines they carry should be accounted in you computation to see where the authors may be going with what is in the book. Maybe just maybe, some kind of clue may come to light by someone that could see something in there. |
May 3, 2012 - 5:37pm | To really do that correctly, you need thrust values for the different class engines and actual mass values but they don't exist and trying to compute them is futile since the system isn't consistent at that level. For example, a frigate is HS 5, has three B class engines and an ADF of 4. A HS 14 ship uses 6 class B engines and has a ADF of 3. The volume or mass ratio between the two ships is 60 but with only twice as many engines of the same size it has 3/4 of the ADF of the smaller ship. If anything that says the frigates engines are throttled and the available acceleration in the towing scenario is actually higher  .Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
 May 3, 2012 - 7:45pm | I'd think that part of the safety systems of a very large ship is freeze fields for each passenger. In this Titanic adventure the race could be to get everyone processed into a freeze field and loaded onto a rescue freighter as cargo before the system's LS fails. Or if you are going for the Titanic disaster parallel then the designers could have thought of themselves as onto a great idea by designing the most survivable ship in the Frontier. They design in some form of life boat sections which are entire hull sections that can be jettisoned. However they don't take into account that the passengers will not be in the right sections when the disaster happens and too many people are in some sections and can't or wont go to other sections for a proper evacuation. Now you can have a Titanic/Poseidon adventure mix. -iggy |
May 4, 2012 - 5:06am | Yeah iggy, plus throw in chunks of comet holing the ship and decompression of certain areas and there is bound to be at least hundreds that need rescue. Throw in the caption deciding to be the first to "fall" into the lifeboat and the situation quickly becomes confuses and going straight to hell. I greatly appreciate Terl Obar doing the math and I think the thing to do here is simply state that any frigate that would logically respond would be tied up for X number of hours employing its grapples and engines to deflect the Titan's course from being sucked into the gravity well of the local star and simply by module writer fiat announce that the frigate can do nothing else for that period of time. That then lets the referee dump any KHs scenarios on the PC's and their ship. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
May 4, 2012 - 7:15am | Your mention of comet holing and the captain abandoning ship reminded me of the latest cruise ship crash. I can see our star ship diverting to give the passengers a nice view of a comet. Given that the nice views are when a comet is close to a star and have a pretty tail. Now we have the recipe for disaster that can draw in the PCs as an ad hoc rescue party. -iggy |
May 4, 2012 - 9:39am | Your mention of comet holing and the captain abandoning ship reminded me of the latest cruise ship crash. I can see our star ship diverting to give the passengers a nice view of a comet. Given that the nice views are when a comet is close to a star and have a pretty tail. Now we have the recipe for disaster that can draw in the PCs as an ad hoc rescue party.
That Italian ship captain was very much on my mind and your right PC's being ad hoc rescuers certainly works perhaps even better then having them in a militia force. You don't even need the liner to be HS 20 its just that if you have an ice berg hitting a ship and a disaster scenario then it practically begs for you to call the ship the titan especially with the 100th anniversary of the titanic sinking this year. With the ad hoc rescue scenario you could put the accident in an unihabitated system- PC's are either passengers or few of a passing ship named Carpathia. Now things are desperate. Now when pirates or smugglers show up the don't even fake being rescuers and simply make passengers transship cargo at gun point. Will the PC's try to take down the pirates and capture their ship or will they let them get away with what they want rather then risk the firefight?I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
May 4, 2012 - 5:15pm | Ah the other system idea for the cruise. I like the idea of the cruise ship visiting some exotic star system with a cool world(s) or even nebula. The passengers are there for the show and get hurt in the process. Maybe the system is very full of comets and they have come to see a "comet shower" swing by a young star in a nebula. TerlObar, do all of these fit together in a system? Anyway, the cruise is a once in a lifetime chance to see something cool so the space liner is there with the rich in posh first class and the dedicated in the passenger class. The ship is over booked because it can easily turn any bed space into a paying passenger for this event. The backup life support engaged full time to accommodate the extras and of course there are not enough life boats because the captain and ship owners are risking it for this one trip. This has to be an Ifshnit owned ship.  The PCs could be on one of a half dozen research vessels in the are for the science of the event when this unexpected ship of tourists shows up to enjoy the show and drives in too close to get the best experience. -iggy |
May 4, 2012 - 8:34pm | The short answer is no, not really . The long answer is a couple semesters of astronomy but I'll try to say something.1) Nebula - While they are denser than a pure vacuum. Almost all nebula have less material in them than the best vacuums that can be produced here on Earth. When astronomers talk about a "dense" nebula, they are talking about something that has 100 to 1000 molecules per cubic centimeter (compared to the typical 10 mocules of interstellar space). A good "hard" vacuum on earth has typically 10-100 million molecules per cubic centimeter. The only real exception to this is the very dense cores that are actually forming stars right at that moment. 2) Comets - You could get a "swarm" of comets. You may or may not remember comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 from back in 1994. In 1992 it passed too close to Jupiter and was broken up into about 25-30 different pieces. In 1994, those pieces slammed into Jupiter over the course of a week as they came back around in thier orbits. So it is possible to get a large grouping of comets that are formed from the breakup of a larger one. However, it's not going to sneak up on you. SF ships are just too fast, even with only an ADF of 1, to not be able to get out of the way. For example, typical cometary speeds are going to be in the range from 5 (far from the sun) to a few hundred (near the star) km/s. At 1g acceleration, it only takes 5.5 hours to get up to 200 km/s velocity. If you see something coming you can get out of its way. 200 km/s is 12 hex/turn on the KH map. And that is matching speed with the thing. To just move a few thousand kilometers laterally out of it's path doesn't take long at all. 3) About the only "once in a lifetime" event I can think of is a supernova or nova and if you're up close to see those your life is over, hence once in a life time . Astronomical processes are slow on human (or dral or vrusk) timescales. They take ten to hundreds of thousands or even millions of years to happen. If something interesting is going on, it will probably be still happening for your great great great grandchildren. You could have transient events like the comet hitting Jupiter as well but these are fairly small scale.I can think of things you might want to go see that would fill your ship and have lots of extra people on board but I just can't come up with any astronomical danger to damage the ship. It would almost have to be some sort of mechanical (or crew) failure of the ship rather than something hitting it. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
 May 5, 2012 - 2:21am | If you cannot find something astronomically sound to actually cause a disaster, there is always the old fashion sci-fi way, just make something up. Create a new phenomenon and have it happen. You could also use some type of creature too. The tourist ship goes into this newly discovered system to view whatever event and there is a creature(s) there that come to feed on the ship itself. Maybe there is no way to stop the creatures and the ship has to be abandoned. Not only will the ships coming to help have to get passengers off, they will also have to watch out for the creatures themselves. Maybe even some of the lifeboats get attacked as they try to escape. As the creatures eat away at the ship, sections could decompress, making time a very real factor in getting away. I had a biology professor in college create a Saber Toothed Guppy. There was a history with it and an actual dummy creature(a dried out guppy with toothpick fangs) for us to see. They terrorized submarines by eating through the hulls and causing the subs to have to surface to make repairs. So, maybe a small creature that eats hull metal and causes small leaks and this creates bigger problems. They are too small to shoot so the ships cannot use weapons to hit them. Possibly a swarm of small creatures the size of anchovies floating in an asteroid field looking for metals and then a ship comes in the system and they swarm to attack. |
May 5, 2012 - 8:34am | I don't think that its all that implausible that the ship could get struck by something it did not detect and the cause a cascade of problems. A bit of a perfect storm thing where everything works just right to magnify the disaster. Overbooked ship, incompetent captain (though a captain for a HS 20 ship is not green though perhaps its a situation with a ship owner and a skilled pilot and the owner is amoral. Engineering glitch that shuts down the engines when the ship is damaged and hostile entities known and unknown- everything adds up to a cluster screw up. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 May 5, 2012 - 11:30am | Perhaps ya'll remember the Doctor Who episode (with Kylie Monogue) about the cruise ship (named Titanic) that met a bad fate due to an insurance scam. That could be reworked as a Sathar Agent trying to eliminate so top Military or Government or Corporate Officials. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
