On Apr 9, 2014, at 12:45 PM, Jeffrey Schwartz <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 3:27 PM, Grimmund <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> OBTRAV:
>>
>>
>> Characters get an opportunity to purchase a surplus Navy (or Scout, or
>> Merchant) ship at what appears to be a a ridiculously low price.
>> "It's a prototype, but we fixed all the bugs.  Really!"  Hilarity
>> ensues.
>>
>
> Or, for more fun, this is one of those "Do the shake down cruise for
> the new Type-S117x, and fill in all the IISS reports. _IF_ the Scouts
> sign the contract, you're in for 0.0001% of gross. “

OOOh, gross not net, that’s a good contract!

> Sort of like the "Success Only Tickets" in the old Book 4.
>
> Although, as Bruce would say, when you've been building starships
> since _______, the major bugs should be already dealt with

For the most part, if you stick with the standard designs.

But there are always guys who know they’re smarter than everyone else and they have the next new mousetrap, and unfortunately some of them work for the Naval Design Bureau.

That said, it’s really hard for us primitive screwheads to comprehend what a computer or ground car or starship would be like with 10,000 years of development behind it at a higher TL than ours is currently.

We don’t have any real cultural referent for something like that. 10K years ago we were chipping rocks for tools. We didn’t even have the wheel at that point. We hardly have *any* significant, widely used technology that’s that old.

> .. which
> raises a new idea:
>
> I could see some rich Vilani guy wanting an exact re-creation of some
> old-old (Pre-3I) design, "Because: Tradition."
> The players are hired to deliver the ship... and fill in the parts of
> the "operations" documentation that were lost during the Long Night.
> "Yeah, we found a great set of blueprints in the archeological dig,
> but there's no crew manuals. “

That sounds like a great idea for a campaign…chasing some sort of antiques across a subsector.

You get a rumor that so-n-so’s salvage yard has unearthed some weird stuff that’s ‘really old’, and when you get there he sold half his yard off to some guy looking to recycle the materials. So it’s a race to catch him before it’s fed into the smelter.

Or you find a copy of the crew manual, you think, but it’s on some sort of disk that we no longer have readers for…or a documented format.

Bet the AAB on Vland has it somewhere in their archives…cue scene of Gandalf deep in the sub-basments of Gondor looking at scrolls that haven’t seen light in millennia.

And when you get there the Librarians start scheming to appropriate the things for their collection.

Better yet. The patron knows where a copy is, and he wants you to duplicate it. It’s in a nice, alarmed glass case in the AAB museum, and no you may not take it out and xerox it!!!

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs