 April 12, 2013 - 5:49am | The American school system and science text books from when I was growing up gave the impression that only America did cool things like land suff on other celestial bodies. They just didn't instruct us in what the soviet accomplishments were- this is not a debate over the merits of that action just simply a statement of why the soviet space program is suddenly new and shiney to me in the year 2013. I've been wikipedia-ing the topic and purusing it since the announcement of citizen astronomers locating the possible resting place of the MARS 3 lander on Mars by crowd sourcing the scanning of photographs taken by the most recent NASA mission. Who knew the soviets were first to softly land a craft on Mars. or that they had robotic lunar rovers on the moon. I noticed the comment on the LUNAR 4 mission that it failed to make a course correction and flew by the moon. that means that the craft is still out there and it got me thinking about a plot device for SF: ship jumps into a system and collides with a 200 year old robotic probe that missed its mark and was sailing endlessly out of the star system. A. portray it as the ship being under attack and a crisis situation to start B. then its a series of skill checks to set the damage to rights C. then investigative- "what was that thing?" its largley destroyed so they wont get anything in the way of information but perhaps its course can be back tracked to a point of origin which requires the astrogator to study the solar system and back track the orbits of the planets as well. Need to look around and see if there is a deffinative list of space junk on the Moon and Mars as well. It brings up story lines similar to the Salvage 1 TV series with Andy Griffith. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvage_1 Story lines of Archaeological discover too: perhaps a probe found something and that knowleged was buried. Now decades latter things are coming to light. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 April 12, 2013 - 7:37am | That is a really cool idea. I was just trying to come up with a cool plot device to introduce a new species, this might be it... |
April 12, 2013 - 11:35am | That is a really cool idea. I was just trying to come up with a cool plot device to introduce a new species, this might be it... Also check out Tom S.'s Subspace Radio Article in FE #4 for ideas for introducing a new species. We decided to save space and time in that issue with using the saurians from Dragon mag rather than develop a new species but all the ideas presented are easily used for what ever species you want. In fact didn't the movie Alien start that way with a stray radio signal that needed to be investigated? I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 April 12, 2013 - 5:58pm | Neat idea. I heard about Snoopy being lost in a random recent story on NPR. It's the ascent stage from Apollo 10, that was jettisoned as they circled the moon for the return leg, placing it in a heliocentric orbit. Current location unknown but amateur astronomers are trying to find it. |
 April 13, 2013 - 1:47pm | Best guess about 50% of the missions to Mars have so far failed. Some missed completely others crashed into the planet without giving any good results. Never really discussed how the UPF or megacorps go about finding planets and initial surveys but there could be alot of failed robotic missions out there. How about the characters land on a planet that is supposed to be uninhabited. They soon discover ruins of the not so long ago inhabited type. Soon they encounter the remnants of a civilization which was almost wiped out when a robotic explorer landed on the planet and was not properly decontaminated before launch and spread a virus/bacteria/fungus on the planet killing most of the population. Take it from there. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
April 13, 2013 - 2:26pm | Best guess about 50% of the missions to Mars have so far failed. Some missed completely others crashed into the planet without giving any good results. Never really discussed how the UPF or megacorps go about finding planets and initial surveys but there could be alot of failed robotic missions out there. How about the characters land on a planet that is supposed to be uninhabited. They soon discover ruins of the not so long ago inhabited type. Soon they encounter the remnants of a civilization which was almost wiped out when a robotic explorer landed on the planet and was not properly decontaminated before launch and spread a virus/bacteria/fungus on the planet killing most of the population. Take it from there. Andromeda Strain in the Frontier I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
