Astronavigation

For this session of Deepnight Revelation, I decided to do something slightly different and hand over responsibility for the navigation to the players. Normally I’ve been abstracting this, but at this point in the journey the route was spotty, with a number of different choices where it wasn’t entirely clear what the best route was.

This meant making heavy use of my implementation of the Deepnight campaign’s survey rules. As mentioned before, I’ve generated all the sectors in software, and can also track how well surveyed each star system is. This gives the players a limited view of a sector until they start scanning it.

The ease of scanning is based on distance and the brightness of the star. Brighter stars make it easier to detect the planets around them. Their map of Best Prospect sector was spotty at best, and initially they didn’t have enough stars on their survey to find a route across. As they moved across, their scans would pick up dimmer stars and find more detailed information. The longer they spent scanning, the greater distance they could look ahead, but at poorer quality.

Arriving at the Erad system on day 113 of year 1114, they officially entered the sector. After the previous session’s problem with the insects, the engineering and operations team are working hard on eradicating every insect they can find. Kirk is heard to mention that if he sees any more flies, he’ll have to space someone. A few days later, Kirk starts sticky bits of paper stuck high up on the walls all around the ship. Someone decided to go for quantity over quality in terms of fly traps.

Kirk sends a commendation to the engineer, who is surprised because the engineer did it in a fit of malicious compliance, expecting that it would actually annoy Kirk.

With high tech civilisations detected ahead, there is a decision to wargame out some scenarios. The first is a raid onto the ship to take the bridge. The ‘red’ team is led by Lt Jana Irekia, whilst the ‘blue’ team is led by Sir Alixe Vanaadi. At the end of the scenario, the attackers are able to take the bridge and prevent it from being taken back. Sir Vanaadi seems to go off to sulk.

A couple of jumps later they reach the Ugena system, where they stop to resupply at a world with algae filled oceans. They also spend seven days scanning ahead. There seems to be no obvious route across the Rift here, but more worlds are opening up along a potential route.

They drop down to Una, then to Rukusocis at 2309. The world here has a TL 5 civilisation – early industrialisation. They are humanoids, and have little in the way of organised government. The culture seems to be strongly libertarian, where in practice things are run by many feudalistic corporations.

Whilst a plan is made to resupply again without contacting any of the natives, Shinzaro reports back from the player’s own ship It’s a Sex Thing that the coffee machine aboard the Far Trader has broken. In fact, the entire food processor is only producing something tasteless. A requisition is made to replace it with bits from one of the food processors aboard the Deepnight Revelation, which is granted. The decision to repair the player’s own private ship with parts from the Deepnight I allowed to be a player one. They came up with a good reason as to why it would be allowed, so I let them make the decision.

It’s then realised that the Sex Thing’s jump drives haven’t been used for several years. In fact, none of the smaller jump-capable craft (the Deepnight advanced scouts) have used their jump drives for some time. Which meant that everyone had a sudden desire to test them. This seemed a good system to do it in, so half the ships were given a jump drive test – making a jump of a few AU which would keep them in-system, but still take a week.

One of the advanced scouts had problems – nothing serious, but the drive failed to engage (there was a poor DEI check). No ships or crew were lost. This gave the Deepnight a week to continue scanning whilst they waited for the ships to return.

Once everyone was safely back, the Deepnight continued it’s journey.

A couple of systems on from there was another garden world at the system of Reji 1609. More refuelling and resupply, a test of the other half of the jump ships (which went smoothly) and a week spent scanning. By now, they had a good route for the rest of the journey across the sector. This would take them to the system of Shosowify 0309 which was at one end of a belt of star systems.

There is a bronze age culture at Shosowify, and gas giants to refuel at. From here, they have easy access to the sector of Last Prospect, and the edge of the technological civilisation (one system shown in green on the map) that spreads out spinward from there.

On the moon at Shosowify are what appears to be the remains of a base – signs of a technological civilisation having been here at some point. Investigating this will need to wait until next session.

The Deepnight Revelations’s long range scans of the next sector have picked up signs of at least three technological civilisations, estimated at TL 10 in some cases. This is the most extensive high technology civilisation they’ve discovered since leaving Charted Space, so it should be an interesting region to explore. It is also potentially dangerous.

Most of this session was spent on navigation, but it seemed to go well. There was some role playing around what to do with the civilisations discovered, and also how to deal with the broken coffee machine. Next session will mark the start of the main plot at the end of The Far Side of Nowhere part of the Deepnight Revelation campaign.