Maintenance Drones

The Huey Drone from "Silent Running"
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=21755

We built these little robots in the times preceding the Diaspora, but they are now ubiquitous across human space. We created the drones to carry out simple maintenance tasks on-board spacecraft. They are specialists, mastering one skill at a time. Although slow and rather susceptible to injury, they are  cheap to build and repair.

They are also tireless, predictable, and programmable.

And, truth be told, they're loyal and cute. Many crews prefer them to Trelebs for these reasons.

Drones have one fine manipulator arm which can be adapted for a variety of tools and appliances. They learn skills using programming cards, as depicted in the picture below. These are inserted into programming slots on the drone's body. They store no more than three skills at a time.

Programming Cards
http://www.therpf.com/f9/silent-running-drone-programming-cards-52601/ 

OGL MECHANICS

Maintenance Drone:

• Skills: One skill at Good (+3), one at Decent (+2), one at Average (+1)
• If your drone has been programmed with ethical protocols such as the Three Laws of Robotics, reserve one skill slot with the Resolve skill.This slot can have a permanent skill level (this is an exception to the way the Programmable Stunt works - see below)
• Drones come "out-of-the-box" with one Language skill hardwired at Mediocre (+0). This does not count against the maximum of three skills.
• Stress Tracks: Frame (Body) 2, Data (Composure) 3
• Stunts: 
• Programmable. The skill card inserted most recently sets their apex skill. Any preexisting skills drop down one skill level. A skill reduced to Mediocre (+0) is deleted.
• EVA capable. Drones can work on the hull of a ship by magnetizing their feet.  
• ASPECTS:
• Man's best friend in space
• It can waddle through anything
• Accident prone, but eminently repairable

The Kepler 22-B System

Click on the image and check out the size comparison between the Kepler planets, Earth, Jupiter, and Neptune.

As you can see, in comparison with Earth, Kepler 22-B is the proverbial Vancian "Big Planet". Scientists in 2012 don't know the exact composition of the planet. The planet is 2.4 times the size of Earth, and it is within the habitable zone of its star. This means the planet is the right distance from its sun to have liquid water. The planet has a year of 289 days. Its star is slightly smaller than Sol. Specifically, its sun, Kepler 22 is an 11th magnitude G5 dwarf star in the Cygnus constellation.

The actual planet may have a very high gravity, especially if its composition is Earth-like. For the sake of the Kepler 22-B setting collaboration, I am assuming that Kepler 22-B has the following characteristics:

• A terrestrial planet
• About the same gravity as Earth
• Surface area significantly greater than Earth
• Less dense than Earth, and likely to have less metal in its core
• A great deal of liquid water on its surface
• A breathable atmosphere
• It is the most interesting planet in the system

Below you'll find my personal rendering of the system.

Kepler 22 in Diaspora

OGL Mechanics

Kepler 22 System:

• Technology -4: Stone Age (With the exception of some ruins on Kepler 22-B )
• Environment +1: System with a garden world (Kepler 22-B)
• Resources 0: Sustainable (No trade, and very little outside settlement yet
• ASPECTS:
• Many explorers here, but no top dog. Yet.
• A world dotted with ruins and anomalies
• Suitable for colonization if the native life doesn't kill you first

Rogue Transmission #1

If you're like me, your interest in science fiction gaming is probably pretty broad. Currently, I am digging 2300 AD (Mongoose Traveller) which finally made it to the Twin Cities last week. It's not anywhere near as bad as I was expecting, considering a lot of the neggy-weggy comments I've seen about it on the Mongoose boards.

And now we have an entirely free supplement, Rogue Transmissions #1.

It has content from two of the most unorthodox and creative Old School Renaissance bloggers out there, Porky and Hereticwerks. As my geometry teacher in high school used to say, "it is very straightforward" to convert creations like this to FATE games. And that is actually true.

No less importantly, the game this content was written for is Rogue Space, a really great SF RPG.

Rogue Space is a VERY reasonably priced, simple, clean, lean, and mean old-school SF RPG. If you consider the original Star Trek series one of your SF sweet spots, and like Golden Age flavored SF, check out the Rogue Space blog.

In the very near future, Rogue Space will be out in a new, sightly more expensive edition with cool new original art by the person who did the Rogue Space cover (the game designer's spouse happens to be a great illustrator). Be sure you check the blog and the game out.

This Planet Is YOUR Planet

Kepler 22-B that is! On John M. Stater's Strange New World blog Kepler 22-B is unfolding in all its glory as a system-free collaborative SF game setting. Different people are detailing specific sectors of the Big Planet.

This is James Garrison's Creative Commons (see my Usage section for details) beautiful logo for the world:

And this is a brief comparative system diagram, courtesy of NASA:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/multimedia/images/kepler-22b-diagram.html

You can see the master map for the planet here

I will be detailing Sector I-5 of the planet:

Sector I-5,mapped by John M. Stater

The map zooms down to the hex level. Each hex is 30 miles across.

I will be sharing some location/encounter information as works in progress on FATE SF. I will also be providing some FATE conversions here for things I create on the FATE SF blog, since the Kepler 22-B project is system-free.

There is still time to request some real estate, and there is no reason why other FATE gamers who like SF shouldn't get in on the game. In fact, I think one of these sectors would be an excellent FATE G+ sandbox!

So, if you'd like a piece of the action, just contact John M. Stater using the information on his website!

Diaspora Conversion for Mass Effect

http://axl99.deviantart.com/

I have updated the FATE SF Links page with a link to M.Gooding's Hacking Diaspora to Mass Effect netbook. Check it out! It is hefty!

The First Diaspora

Without generation ships, the first Diaspora would have been impossible. Humanity had not yet discovered the means of FTL travel. We can't be sure what drove humanity to the stars, but the ancient literature of The First Diaspora period does provide some clues. This is particularly true of the epic poem known as The Aniara, with its intimations of technology gone awry and planetary catastrophe.

We know that over the course of two centuries, the environmental consequences of runaway industrial development and uncontrolled patterns of consumption caused Earth to became unlivable and irreparable. But for some reason, governments and people, long at war with one another over resources, finally and suddenly acted in concert to preserve humanity. No one knows why this happened for sure. Maybe there was some greater and imminent disaster. A rogue planet? Gray goo or some other runaway technology? Further catastrophic changes in the Earth's environment?  Sudden, deadly changes in solar output? Mounting evidence suggesting Earth was in the path of the death beam of a hypernova?

There had to be something to provoke the change. And  a Second Great Leap Forward was required. Humanity had not gotten far into space. Technologies used to create the island communities and orbital refuges of the very wealthy and privileged suddenly became part of the material basis for the design and construction of long-range, intergenerational starfaring vessels.  These elite technologies were combined in new creative ways with technologies designed to create a sustainable eco-commons for humanity, such as the Arcosanti Project and Fuller Design Science.

http://bfi.org/about-bucky

Fleets and fleets of generation ships were constructed in near Earth orbit. Whole populations were moved off world and onto the space arks. Worlds within worlds took flight. When the fleets of The First Diaspora left the Sol System, the vessels had many different designs. Some had Buckminster domes outside the main hull as autonomous habitats for the human supercargo and diverse biota; these designs were often cribbed from the few remaining off-planet biological reserves which had been preserved in final, desperate acts of violent resistance to the corporations' and Earth governments' disinterest and abuse of the environment. Other designs sheltered crew, supercargo, and biota within the main hull of the vessel.

The generation ships were designed to be self-repairing and were typically festooned with redundant backup systems, repair modules, failsafe technologies (such as reserve crew in hybernation), and evacuation systems. They were built to last.

While a few of the great vessels had mutinies while still near home, and turned back to the poisoned Earth, many more experienced a myriad of challenges and disasters in the extrasolar Deep. More on that next time.

OGL MECHANICS

The Sol System at the time of The First Diaspora:

• Technology 0: Exploring the system
• Environment -1: Survivable world (but the trajectory is toward E -2)
• Resources -2:  Needs imports (environmental decline and excessive global consumption)
• Aspects:
• Most of us will not survive
• Now that it is too late, let's work together
• The Diaspora Project is our last, best hope

Table 2: Touchy Technology Aspects

What do you REALLY know about that piece of unknown or unreliable technology? How do you even work it? How DID it work last time? WILL it work this time, like it did last time? How much trouble are you in with that thing? Let's find out!

http://www.startrek.com/database_article/slaver-weapon-the  

Table 2: Touchy Technology Aspects

1. Really, who thought it was a good idea to label this thing in Esperanto?
2. It has multiple settings; too bad there's no labels...
3. It's alien. If your fingers won't work the buttons, try your tongue
4. It's like a distruptor, but it HEALS
5. Too bad we don't have an owner's manual
6. I got it off a guy who got it off a guy
7. Does it always vibrate and screech like that? 
8. It just needs you to complete the circuit
9. This is top-of-the-line technology...too bad it's 200 years out of date
10. It's twice as effective when its malfunctioning
11. What is that needle in the grip for?
12. I already pushed that button - I think
13. Somebody's gonna pay top dollar for this
14. Just the tool for the job... if you can get it to work
15. It would fit right in my hand... if my hand were three times larger
16. Alien technology is so sexy
17. Using it is straightforward... at least 50% of the time
18. It has too many buttons and dials to be a weapon, right?
19. There are no buttons or dials on this thing at all
20. I can use it as a shield if worse comes to worst
21. I can use it as a club is worse comes to worst
22. This is the souped-up version
23. It needs a remote
24. It is a remote
25. Incompatible with our systems
26. Disconcertingly adaptable to our systems
27. I think its been rooted
28. It's phoning home
29. Have you noticed that when this thing turns on, other things turn off?
30. This might save us, yet!