Pumpkin-suit's Manual Preview #3

An Impulse Burn; also covered.

        

Orbital Maneuvers

Once free from the surface, a spacecraft must achieve a stable orbit. In truth every maneuver a spacecraft makes is an orbit of some sort, either around the moon or planet they launched from,or around the sun in an interplanetary intercept. While transfer orbits to new worlds are common enough, typical orbital maneuvers involve changing orbits around a planet or satellite in order to reach another spacecraft, station, or stable altitude for open flight.

Finite Burn Trajectories

This most difficult of orbital maneuvers are also the most common, as finite burn trajectories are required in order to achieve rendezvous for docking. The difficulty involved in finite burn trajectories comes from the incredible amount of real-time data needed to calculate such precise orbital chances. Up -to-the-second data on spacecraft mass, center of gravity, moment of inertia thrust vectors on reaction controls and propellant consumption must be gathered and calculated for moment-to-moment correction of course and speed. This kind of maneuver is, needless to say, best left to computers. Only AIs, Transhumans, and Nurillia cyborgs specializing in flight control can hope to perform such complex maneuvers without a flight computer.

Description: “The wait is monotonous and nerve-wracking as you spacecraft slowly crawls toward it's target. Everyone is strapped down, as even the motion of a floating passenger could trow off the delicate corrections necessary in order to line up for docking. The only sights are a star-field that seems to move not at all, and the only sound is the drone of the computers range slowly counting down and the occasional hiss of an RCS burn. Whoever said space travel was exciting had obviously never made a finite burn! Oh, well...best get some sleep.”

Classic D6

Skill: Spaceship Piloting: Spaceship Type

Difficulty: Heroic

Special: This maneuver is only possible with computer assistance, or by a Nurilla. Computer aid adds +2D to the Dice Pool, and Nurillas typically have extra dice in Spaceship Piloting as well as the Machine Memory Special Ability. For the purposes of these maneuvers, AI and Transhuman Characters are considered computers.

In either case, the Guidance Officer or Pilot includes the spacecraft's Sensors Dice into their Dice Pool for this roll.

A natural failure requires the maneuver be aborted. It takes a minimum of 90 minutes to reset for another trajectory.

A roll of 1 on the Wild Die that results in a failure causes an abort that requires moving to another orbit. It will take 90 minutes + 1D hours to reset for another trajectory.

A roll of 1 on the Wild Die that results in a failure by more than one Difficulty Level means that the spacecraft is in a bad trajectory that is not aborted, leading to a crash or an emergency correction (Difficult) to avoid.

 

Rocket Repos?

In...SPAAAACE!

        So on Saturday, thanks to slicing the tip of my right ring finger rather badly (It's held together with butterfly tape and Nuskin right now) I didn't get any work on the Pumpkin-Suit's Manual.  I spent the day cleaning house with a glove on the victimized hand and watching crime-solver shows on TV.  They kept advertising the new season of Lizard Lick Towing, which is a reality show that follows a team of redneck repo men as they get shot at, threatened with flamethrowers and generally abused verbally by men and women that would have been at home on The Jerry Springer Show.

         Sounds fun, right?

         The incessant repetition of the ad promo did infect me with an idea for a campaign arc in hard SF gaming that I've not seen really used that often:  Rocket Repossession.

         Repossession a la Repomen is, for those of you in Germany or Russia or other parts of the world, a "help-yourself" legal option in the US and UK that involves getting back a car, boat, plane or other financed item when the party with the right of possession defaults on their loan to pay for it.  The repo-men come for the defaulted item, and in the US at least, as long as they do not "breech the peace" they have every legal right to take the chattel without consent (informed or otherwise) from the debtor in a way that is very reminiscent of stealing, except that the repo man is taking back the property of the bank or car dealership or whoever and not for themselves.

         A particularly high-end form of this business is aircraft repos, which can range from taking back a Gulfstream from a investor that lost it all when the US housing bubble collapsed, to a 747 from a European airline that's missed more than three payments.  This kind of work will net the handful of professionals that can manage the military-like operations needed to steal a plane from an airport between six and eight hundred thousand dollars a job.
         The guys that go after the big jobs (like the President of the Congo's private 747) seem to be pretty much distilled bad-ass, with a dash of awesome for flavor.  Kinda like PCs.

          So...how much would repo-ing a rocket be worth?

          In The Black Desert, a cheap, mass-produced Liberty Bell will cost about 12 million new, with a maximum depreciation of about 25%.  Add on financing at about twenty percent, the cheapest rocket will cost about ten million over a ten year mortgage, which sounds pricey but isn't that bad when you consider that at $20.00/kg, the 'Bell can haul five million worth of cargo a trip.  That being said, fees, expenses, fuel and crew salaries and maintenance will eat up most of those dollars and a free trader could easily see themselves too far in the red to hold onto their rocket.  A space transport company with a dozen rockets might lose the whole fleet because of lender requirements for "minimum upkeep standards" not being met.

         Then there are fusion-powered craft, which can cost up to ten times that much...and are typically military and armed with missiles and protected by Espatiers.

         So I could see a group of PCs being able to charge a couple hundred grand a job, go to exciting places, steal rockets, get shot at, clash with local authorities, and all that jazz.  In fact, it allows a resolution to one of (for me) the most difficult paradoxes in gaming in modern and future eras: If there is actual law-and-order in the society that the PCs operate in, how can they kick ass and blow stuff up like PCs always seem to want to?  It occurs to me that stealing a freaking rocket from orbit or a spaceport on any of three planets would seem to qualify.  Some of these real-life aircraft repo guys go after military assets in third-world countries.  That's right; they steal fighter jets from foreign air forces.  This is a scenario tailor made for gaming, RocketFans, and I for one am excited to run adventures for it.

Pumpkin-suit's Manual Preview #2

Aim Higher.

 Pumpkin-suit's Manual Preview #2

        Here is another  brief excerpt from Pumpkin-Suit's Manual on Astronaut Training.  It's just fluff-text at this point; the mechanics will be covered in Templates for the D6 systems and probably background Feats in the D20 rules set.  The different types of specialties and departments will also be presented as D6 templates and as Talent Trees in D20. 
Anyway, hope you like it!

COMM/AST

The majority of Mission Commanders and Flight Directors in both military and civilian life come from the Communications and Astrogation specialist field. These aqstronauts are trained not only in the operation of all flight avionics and radio equipment used aboard modern spacecraft, they are also highly drilled in information integration and the ability to make quick, effective decisions on little data. A proficient COMM/AST specialist often has a reputation for near prescient reasoning and intuition. This reputation is just as often completely justified.

 

Focused Skill: Spacecraft Operations: COMM/AST

 

Description: This Focused Skill covered piloting, astrogation, and communications systems aboard a spacecraft. In addition, COMM/AST also pertains to combat information systems and electronic warfare.

United States Space Forces Insignia

* * *

Training

Astronauts require extensive and specialized training in order to qualify for spaceflight status in most polities. While the training programs used by individual nations varies, most involve a two-year course of study with the first three to six months spent in ground school, followed by another three to six months tour in orbit, where the candidates learn how to function in free-fall and drill in real-life conditions. The second half of the candidate's training usually involves a training cruise in deep-space aboard an Interplanetary Vehicle, where the candidates are expected to be fully qualified officers at the end of the deployment.

Non-government civilian space programs also exist in ever-growing numbers in the modern System. The most notable of these are based on the model originally pioneered by the Destiny Foundation, and may involve full-immersion training, extensive team building and psychological testing, and even the inclusion of entire families in the program. These types of programs typically also last two years, but spend as much as eighteen months on the ground as the school's sponsors test the candidates for optimal compatibility in skills and temperament.