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synodiporia_ooc2016-01-05 10:23 pm
powersthatbe) wrote in synodiporia_ooc2016-01-05 10:23 pm
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ESCAPE FROM JUNKWORLD: JAUNT INFO.
Welcome to the Junkworld of Gehenna: a radioactive cinder twice the size of Earth, used as a rubbish heap and ship graveyard for centuries by cultures across the cosmos, guarded by automated gunstations (left by cultures from across the cosmos), and with its only native inhabitants being Leaping Fireworms who feed on metals and thrive in heavy-gravity environments. Occasionally used as a penal colony as well, but really a death sentence - the only way people are sent to Gehenna is being placed in gutted ships in decaying, unguided re-entry orbits. Still, over the centuries, some have survived this process, and settlements have grown on the surface, giving the world a total population in the high hundreds or low thousands.
And now, the Tachyon Storm is coming. Nobody knows exactly what that means, but it’s bad.
You see, tachyons are particles that travel faster than light and back in time, and the slower they are, the more energy they have. And what few sensors on Gehenna work have started detecting increasing bursts of tachyon radiation, denser and denser, slower and slower moving. The best guess is that some incredible high-energy phenomenon is coming in the near future. No normal lightspeed shockwave can be seen before it hits - so by the time anyone knows what it is, it’ll be too late. And judging by the rate the tachyons are slowing down, it’s only a few weeks away.
The refugees, prisoners, scavengers, smugglers, and accidental colonists of Gehenna have a plan - or some of them do. Smuggler ships small enough to slip to the surface past the automated gun satellites are too small to travel faster than light, and they don’t have time to call for a ride. But the planet is all but covered in wrecks, hulks, derelicts, and crashes, and two large, durable vessels of dubious design are nearly intact. It’s just barely possible to put them together, strap on the smuggler vessels as armed outriders, and blast off for escape.
But as the source of the Tachyon Storm gets closer, things are getting weird. The laws of physics are bending or breaking entirely. The ships, barely understandable or able to be kept together as it is, are behaving in strange ways, and that strangeness is carrying over to the synthetics and cyborgs who interface with ship systems to operate them. And everyone on Junkworld Gehenna had an agenda or an axe to grind, anyway - trustworthy, safe, sane people don’t wind up banished to radioactive cinders, after all.
Ancient, unknown ships falling apart around them. The combined dark secrets, dubious pasts, and skeletons in the closet of a hundred different interstellar scofflaws. Even with an oncoming shockwave approaching at least as fast as light, the open question is still: what’s going to get around to killing them first?
THE SHIPS
A shape like an iron, or a bullet cut in half with a ring welded to the top, this five-decked vessel is 25 meters in height, 25 meters in width, and 125 meters in length. It’s built from cobbled-together Hecatite, Gorgon, and Human wrecks, with a few unknown pieces in its gravity and hyperlight systems. Filled with analog hydraulic circuitry of an ancient alien design, its arc-shaped crest is a power generator, a Hecatite particle accelerator fusion generator. Its prismatic crystalline viewports are hand-grown Hecatite replacements for the originals, long missing. Its hull is alien alloys patched with Gorgon-fused ceramic tiling, also hand-made and jury-rigged. Its sublight drive unit has been replaced, salvaged from a human Orion-class vessel: a nuclear-explosion driven propulsion system. Its hyperlight drive uses the same thrust nozzles but relies on alien mechanics and strange particles from an experimental Hecatite particle accelerator to fuel a quantum entanglement reaction which pulls it through space at an acceleration of approximately 150 kilometers per second per second, up to a maximum of about 100c, or 30 million kps. Its gravity systems are complex, allowing variable gravity inside, as well as on or near the hull.
This vessel resembles an almond-shape buried point-first in the top of an hourglass, with folding-fan wings extending from the waist of the hourglass. These wings are tachyon sails, which carry it at a steady speed of up to 30c at hyperlight speeds, and almost instant acceleration and deceleration as they are activated or deactivated, but sublight accelerations of no more than 100 kps, It has no exterior viewports, but an electrically charged hull that can ‘feel’ particle flow with synthetic or cybernetically enhanced crewmembers plugged into its systems - and many of the control systems only operate via plug-in, although kit-bashed interfaces have replaced many of the consoles on its electroplasma conductive relays, which are high-powered but prone to overload and possibly explode. It has seven decks, more vertically cramped at 22 meters in height, a maximum width of 30 meters, and an overall length of 156 meters. Its power system is a sealed, eerily glowing, highly radioactive bio-fission generator, using hypothetical particles of biological origin to propel itself, and its interior corridors are segmented circular tubes with gravity even along the walls and perfectly balanced (nonexistent) in the center. It is completely unknown what species designed and built this ship.
Small, nimble smuggling vessels with conventional weaponry but without the capacity for hyperlight drive, ten to twenty meters in length, as many as four can attach to the exterior of the larger ships and be carried along faster than light. Outriders are cramped, usually with room for no more than four people inside. Players are encouraged to design their own. if interested.