Clearing The Path Of Progress: a Thermostellar RTDHyperspace, when people finally got around to properly exploiting it, proved remarkably practical as a mode of transport, as was the goal. It began a massive space exploration craze, people shooting off to nearby star systems, then to more distant star systems, then even further and further away in hopes of finding habitable planets, interesting resources or, dare one venture to say, sapient alien life? The latter, sadly, has not been documented to this very day, but other things have certainly been located, and a great many things found out about the universe at large!
Firstly, and most depressingly, was the fact that hyperspace travel had the disturbing tendency to fail catastrophically more than 75% of the time on first attempts, with the failure rate brought down to 75% after decades of study and refinement of the technology - fortunately, once one went somewhere through hyperspace, it was fairly certain once could get back as well and not die horribly, and the chance of negative effects decreased dramatically in distances not too far from Sol. Years of research did ensue in the wake of this discovery, and many wonders of technology did they invent - a hyperspace washing machine, a hyperspace junkyard, a hyperspace passenger liner - but alas, the technology seemed about as good as it was going to get, and that left only one possible solution - the universe was clearly at fault here, and needed a bit of adjustment.
Fortunately, the previous research did create an invention to help with that - the Hyperspace Bomb, which for reasons of sounding silly was instead renamed to the much more sensible Thermostellar Device. What did they use it for, you ask? Simple! It was decided that what was impeding hyperspace travel was nothing more than the configuration of the universe's bodies - the paths for immediate interstellar travel were unquestionably there, but going further than that was impractical, so it became rather obvious that paths needed to be built, and they did it by using TD's to wipe out any problematic stars and their respective baggage by basically ripping space into bits and then using the resulting confusion to rip matter into bits while physics weren't looking.
And so, their Thermostellar Devices primed and ready to go, many ships left Earth to make way for space exploration by blowing the shit out of any disliked spatial formations. You, dear players, are on one such ship. Each of you brave space cowboys has a Primary, Secondary and Tertiary role - a Primary role is something you can easily do (no rolls required), a Secondary role is something you're reasonably good at (d6+1, with exploding dice on 6s and 1s) and a Tertiary role is someone you can fill in for in a pinch (d6, no bonuses, no dice exploding), typically not with spectacular results (if you try to do something that isn't within the boundaries of your role, you roll a d6-1, no dice exploding).
- Hyperspace Technician: your job is to make sure that all the coordinates and additional parameters are entered correctly, and that the Hyperspace Drive and Hyperspace Array both work adequately at all times. Failure to do this will result in certain death.
- Thermostellar Engineer: your job is to check up on whether the TDs work properly - checking countdowns, monitoring internal activity, maybe fixing one if something breaks down and all around making sure the incarnations of pure destruction you're lugging around blow up how they should and where they should. Failure to do this will result in certain death.
- Communications Officer: your job is to receive and send transmissions, communicating with Mission Control on the Hyperspace Array, and making sure objectives are clearly stated, understood and performed. Failure to do this will result in certain death, as even vague suspicions of one of these ships going rogue is punished with immediate activation of self-destruct mechanisms on the ship.
- Medical Doctor: your job involves monitoring the crew for hyperspace-induced medical anomalies, which are assuredly not uncommon, and their immediate treatment, excision or socialization. And also presumably treating more regular things as well. Failure to do either will result in certain death.
- Maintenance Chief: your job involves in overseeing and helping the shipboard AI with any repairs of the more conventional ship systems, such as the radiation shielding and the seating arrangements, and also the matter replicators and such. Failure to do this will result in very likely death.
- Systems Administrator: your job involves making sure the shipboard AI (Hyperspace AI, in case you were wondering - renowned for its spectacular efficiency and hyperspace survivability, and also its not infrequent dodginess) does its job and there are no signs of AI madness looming (or worse, annoying software bugs in the user interfaces). Failure to do so will result in certain death, and typically not a pleasant one.
- Galley Master: unfortunately for hyperspace travelers, the hyperspace alterations that happen to humans after a venture into parts unknown apply equally well to things such as food and drink, or any other complex organic molecules - persistent and repeated analysis of food stocks is required to root out any peculiar formations and purify the mostly liquefied food stores of them while preserving a modicum of palatability, a job the AI has proven disastrously bad at. Failure to do this will result in certain death or, in the best case scenario, at least vicious diarrhea that will cause a spectacular failure in some other area of the ship's functioning.
- Trusty Chaplain: your job involves waking the crew at the beginning of each shift with a helpful sermon with a dash of TD propaganda thrown in - it is important for the phrases to be carefully chosen and pronounced, for their effects have been engineered by the greatest minds of EarthGovPsy to subliminally increase work efficiency and ward off space madness (or hyperspace madness, a particularly nasty subset of space madness, for that matter). Sermons, when not delivered regularly (once at waking and once when going to sleep, with a bit of adjusted noise played during sleep cycles to help absorption and internalization), evenly, variably, interestingly and with appropriate cadence, tend to have a negative effect on morale and efficiency. Failure to do all this will thus result in certain death.
- Hyperspace Pilot: your job involves you being the only one who stays out of their protective pod during hyperspace ventures - naturally, this is not healthy, but it is very much required for you to be present in the event of a critical emergency that the AI cannot readily comprehend due to its lower mental flexibility and just plain unreliability. While this opens one up to an even greater risk of hyperspace psychoses and physical deformations, it demonstrably increases survivability of ships, as the human mind is, unlike an artificial intelligence, rather receptive to the conundrums hyperspace travel tends to pose, especially with training from experts. So the hyperspace pilot remains a required member of a crew, and is very often venerated higher than many of their peers in the event of success, as his failure would result in certain death for them all.
With that explained, one might wonder why this sort of venture is viewed as slightly dangerous, and the answer to that is incredibly simple - each ship gets five crew members, the minimum amount for reasonable safety, five bombs, the maximum amount per five crew members, and five missions to fulfill before they can return - in case you were wondering, no, Thermostellar Devices are most certainly not permitted within a ten light year radius of any populated star systems, and failure to obey this directive will result in your certain death, as you will be carefully monitored at all times through the Hyperspace Array, which, if it goes out of order for too long, will be considered treason and punished with immediate termination. And jettisoning them is viewed as even worse, as they could explode anywhere and at any time if such a thing is done. So, you're stuck in space until the job is done, simple as that.
Now, mortality rates for missions that go swimmingly well in terms of final results are usually 0 to 20%, although such cases happen more and more rarely now that people go further and further away to build these new hyperspace paths and abnormality rates increase. Nevertheless, for anybody who manages a run that they survive, they receive a spectacular lifetime pension and living arrangements, and presumably never have to work again, though murder-suicide rates among survivors are reported to skyrocket if they choose to remain idle for the rest of their days. There are a few exceptional individuals who have chosen to go on a second run after their first has been a success - EarthGov is happy to give them the opportunity, all the while whispering
"you fucking lunatics" surreptitiously.
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Topic: Roller's Block (RTD Brainstorming Thread) (HAPPY LATE BIRTHDAY) (Derm is 5k) (Read 705284 times)