so... I just watched the beginning of Dark Matter yesterday (as in:
the first 2/3rds of the first episode before it got a bit too stupid
for late at night). The acting was slightly off, the special effects
were about 15 years out of date, and some of the character development
was weird. It felt a lot like a 90s SF show. Even the characters
seemed to tick off all the boxes for cliches used back then.
But I did like the beginning of the episode. I was thinking about how
to do that in Traveller: a group of people wake up without memories on
a ship without identification and now they have to find out who they
are and what they are doing there. This would allow a group of
characters to explore the setting more fully, to understand the ship
and the surrounding star systems.

Knowing nothing about the plot of the later episodes I cam up with
this: a shipping company wants to commit insurance fraud (think the
Titanic/Olympic theories). So they build two ships, one ultramodern
cruise ship, one a cheaper and very generic trader. Their plan is to
sell the cruise ship outside the imperium, and at the same time claim
a loss of the ship on the way to its first destination within the
imperium. So they switch transponder signals and try to drop the
trader into the sun of a low-traffic system.
The main characters are stuck on that trader that is supposed to drop
into the sun, and they are all mindwiped and don't have a clue what is
going on. (the whole ship has been scrubbed of identification). They
were low-berth Travellers on the shipping lines ships and had all
roughly the right qualification, so they spirited off and claimed to
be the crew of the cruise ship (for additional fun the company tries
to cash in on their life insurance as well).
But they were woken up due to some quirk in the system. Maybe a spy in
the company who didn't want them to die, maybe some computer routines.

Thoughts? I was thinking about using this to introduce the system to
two people who haven't played it before.

On 22 June 2015 at 12:52, Fred Kiesche <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
> Some Sy Fy series are good. Some are not. It appears to be a inverse
> relationship b/t the front office and whatever production studio is running
> the show.
>
> Here's hoping "The Expanse" (based on James S.A. Corey's series--also VERY
> Traveller-esque!) is faaaaaarrrrr away from the Sy Fy front office.
> Faaaaarrrrr away.
>
> On Sun, Jun 21, 2015 at 9:55 PM, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Jun 21, 2015 at 9:50 PM, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> There are also elements of Firefly (Crazy Young Psychic Girl and Guy With
>>> BIG Gun) . . .
>>
>>
>> And I just realized that the copying is even more blatant than that: Guy
>> With BIG Gun is an aggressive and highly mercenary brute, who is derisive of
>> Crazy Young Psychic Girl ("How old are you, anyway? 15?")
>>
>> --
>> Richard Aiken
>>
>> "Never insult anyone by accident."  Robert A. Heinlein
>> "A word to the wise ain't necessary -- it's the stupid ones that need the
>> advice." - Bill Cosby
>> "We know a little about a lot of things; just enough to make us
>> dangerous." Dean Winchester
>>
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>
>
>
>
> --
> F.P. Kiesche III
>
> Husband, Father, Good Cook. Reader. Keeper of abandoned dogs. Catholic
> Liberal Conservative Militarist. Does not fit into a neat box or category.
> "Ah Mr. Gibbon, another damned, fat, square book. Always, scribble,
> scribble, scribble, eh?" (The Duke of Gloucester, on being presented with
> Volume 2 of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.) Blogging at Bernal
> Alpha. On Twitter as @FredKiesche
>
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