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Nyrath

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  1. Ultracool stars take 'wild rides' around, outside the Milky Way

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-06/miot-ust060809.php

     

    PASADENA, Calif.--Astronomers have found that stars of a recently discovered type, dubbed ultracool subdwarfs, take some pretty wild rides as they orbit around the Milky Way, following paths that are very different from those of typical stars. One of them may actually be a visitor that originated in another galaxy.

     

    And who knows what eldritch cosmic horror your player-characters will be faced with when they attempt to explore a black subdwarf star that came from outside of our galaxy?

  4. My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

     

    If slightly morbid. :)

    Yes, but a little less morbid than the moral hit the crew will suffer, cooped up in the confines of the spaceship while knowing that the corpse of Joe is cooling on the slab in the next compartment.

     

    Out of sight, out of mind, and all that.

     

    If there were no pressing need to harvest the body's mineral components, it would be best to jettison it. But remember DUNE: "...but a man's water belongs to the tribe"

  8. Markarian's Chain of Galaxies

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090609.html

     

    Now imagine that the glorious Futurian Empire started in that large galaxy on the right, and spread along the chain to the left. The leftmost would be the frontier galaxies.

     

    Then the frontier is assaulted by the dreaded Dark Technomancers of Blortch. Can the Futurian empire survive as the Technomancers gobble up galaxies one by one?

     

    More to the point, can your player character group handle the excitement to be found in scenarios set in such a situation?

  9. My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

     

    Maybe an unpressurized chamber in the spaceship can be used.

    Who needs an unpressurized chamber? Wrap the bodies in a burial shroud, tie a vacuum-proof rope to a limb, tie the other end to a magnet, push the body out an airlock, and attach the magnet to the hull next to the airlock. Done.

  10. My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

     

    As for dead bodies' date=' I was thinking about a burial in space type of deal. Spacecraft may have a section for storing the dead until they get to their destination. Ship doctors may treat the bodies so that they decompose more slowly. Does space affect the decomposition rate of corpses? Not to my knowledge, but I may be wrong.[/quote']

    Depends upon what you mean exactly by "space."

     

    A corpse in the pressurized habitat of a spaceship will rot just as fast as one on Earth, free fall or no. In fact, it might rot faster if the atmospheric breathing mix is richer in oxygen.

     

    But if you put the corpse in the vacuum of space, it will rapidly turn into a dessicated mummy, and stay that way indefinitely.

  11. My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

     

    I'm not so certain. People can be very sentimental' date=' and turning grandpa into compost or building blocks isn't going to go over well with many people, at least not without a massive cultural change.[/quote']

    Well, yes, but circumstances alter cases. For example, the Donner party.

  13. My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

     

    RE: Crime and punishment.

     

    In the series Erma Felna (a furry comic book but with great hard science), being a good Samaritan is mandated by the law, failure to do so can result in fines or imprisonment.

     

    Consider, if you were on a colony space ship, and the trip took a very long time (years), the culture in the ship would become the culture of the colony.

     

    Now, if you passed through a seldom visited section of the ship, saw a small air-leak in the hull, and didn't tell anybody, you would be endangering the lives of everybody on the entire ship. You are therefore required by law to report such things.

     

    The same goes for failure to render aid to an injured person. This is often not done in the United States due to the well-founded fear of being sued by the injured person, but that does not apply in a spaceship.

  14. My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: My mostly hard sci-fi campaign

     

     

    Funeral Customs

     

    Spacecraft would probably have to jettison dead crew members, ...

     

    Garbage Disposal and Recycling

     

    Recycling would be mandatory in off-world colonies, as would be the production and use of recyclable material. Unrecyclable matter would be used in energy production, if possible. The use of unrecyclable material will be minimized. Littering would be illegal and offenders would face stiff fines.

    I'm afraid that jettisoning dead crew members would be illegal and offenders would face stiff fines. Everything is hideously expensive when you have to boost it out of Earth's gravity well, and that includes the chemical elements composing a human body. Such bodies can be converted into their elemental components by subjecting them to the solar-heat temperatures of a fusion torch, and passing the ionized gas through a mass spectrometer to sort it into individual elements.

     

    A more low tech solution would be to render the bodies into compost and use them in the farms.

  19. Titanic disasters of Old Earth

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/earth.html

     

    The Earth has survived many disasters. To keep our tale brief, let us focus on four: the Big Splat about 4.55 billion years ago, the Late Heavy Bombardment about 4 billion years ago, the Oxygen Catastrophe roughly 2.5 billion years ago, and the Snowball Earth events about 1 billion years ago.

     

    I'm sure an inventive game master can use any of these as a plot seed. Or all at once.

     

    My basic technique to turn history into a campaign plot seed is to ask "what if this was not a random historical event, but instead was intentionally caused by someone? Or something?"

     

    Special bonus: the last five mass extinctions

    http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/extinction/

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