I had a post ready to go for today but I am moving it in favor of this dream I had last night.
My wife and I are HUGE Star Trek fans. One of the very first things we did as "just friends" was to watch the premier of the first episode of Star Trek the Next Generation together. When the episode "All Good Things" aired, we were taking our first vacation together as a couple. When Voyager began we were dating. When it ended we were married, had a house and a kid. Throughout our relationship Trek has been there.
Right now, we are in the process of re-watching all the Trek series. We didn't go in order, but we have watched Enterprise, Voyager, Discovery, and now we are on Strange New Worlds. Likely to hit The Original series next.
Where am I going with this? Well Trek has been on my mind lately. I was chatting with Steve over at Vulcan Stev's Database (a great place for Trek information) about his Beckett Mariner post that inspired my own. I have been doing TARDIS Captain's Character Challenge and one of my popular posts was about my USS Challenger and Capt. John Adnerg. AND I have been talking a bit in the FASA Star Trek Facebook groups about printing more FASA-era Starships on my 3D-Printer. So yeah. The fact that I am dreaming about Star Trek is no shock or surprise; save for what I was dreaming about.
Stardate 1000000.0
One idea I keep coming back to is extra-galactic travel in Trek. During the Next-Gen eras travel was still confined with the Alpha and Beta quadrants of our galaxy. The Gamma (Deep Space Nine) and Delta (Voyager) quadrants had been stepped into, but only a little bit. Even in the post-Burn, post-reformation of Starfleet and the Federation of the 32nd Century (Discovery, 3190) have not ventured outside the Galactic Barrier.
I must have had the DC Comics "DC One Million" on my mind as well. This takes place in a future where DC comics, from their then current numbering system would hit issue 1,000,000 of Action Comics. That would be 853rd Century CE.
For my Stardate 1000000.0 I figured it would be 200 or so years after the end of Discovery. Trekguide.com tells me that Stardate 1000000.0 is Thu Jul 23 3407 08:33:20 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time). So, the start of the 35th Century CE. Memory Alpha has nothing for this time period.
So what is this all about?
The mission for this Trek game (and I have NO idea what system yet) is a newly constructed ship made mostly of programable matter and holotech, leaving our galaxy to explore the Andromeda Galaxy. This obviously goes way beyond warp drive. It is 2.5 million light-years from Earth.
Extra-galactic travel is not really a thing in Star Trek. Though there have been some run-ins with refugees from the Andromeda Galaxy in Trek (some androids, the Iconians) there has been enough to explore in our own Galaxy. Extra-galactic travel is a thing in many other franchises like Dune and Doctor Who, and very recently Star Wars.
I don't know what system to use yet (13 Parsecs maybe), nor what the general adventure hooks are save for "explore strange new worlds." I am not planning on a huge horror element, but given that this is me talking horror is going to be there somewhere. I don't even know what sort of drive will get them there or even what ship. At Warp 9.0 it would take 2000 years to get there and I have no idea how fast the new (3191) Pathway Drive is.
In any case, this is not something I am going to take on soon. But I'll keep thinking about it and see where I end up.
Gee, I wish I was close enough to play in this game with you.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like fun.
Literary ideas to mine:
ReplyDelete1) In the Lensman books, travelling between galaxies turned out to be much faster and easier than expected (at least for the Patrol - Boskone already knew about it, and probably some neutral-ish civilians as well). That was due to the density of matter between them being much lower than predicted until someone went out and tried it, which probably wouldn't hold up in Trek. OTOH, even with accurate calculations of matter density, there's plenty of other pseudoscience babble you could throw at things to make the trip faster than projected - spacetime curvature is just plain different Out There, or warp fields behave in peculiar ways that boost their effects but make precise control harder, etc. Having travel times be even more unpredictable is easy if you want it to be.
2) Vernor Vinge's setting for several books has galactic gravity wells limit the development of intelligence and makes truly advanced technology fail or break down over time. The supposed emptiness between galaxies is chock full of super-intelligences with Clarke technology so far out there that even designing workable UIs for dimwits who had the bad luck to be born on planetary bodies is tricky. It's possible that even the miniscule gravitic field generated from the mass of a human body might be too much for the most advanced species/technology to survive in. Trek might well discover the same thing, or something similar.
3) While no one likes to talk about them any more, Alan Dean Foster's run on TAS Captain's Logs back in the day included what amounted to a specimen collection safari beyond the Barrier at the behest of the lactrans, an alien species who casually provided a handful of moon-sized FTL-capable constructs that provided a gravitic cage for the (supposed nonsentient) astrofauna they wanted a sample of for their zoo. The thing was an ergovore kind of like a living light sail, millimeters thick but with a surface area measured in meaningful fractions of a light year IIRC, hence the scale of the capture equipment. And that was a "small" specimen.
While Kirk and company managed the mission easily enough, as they were hauling their catch back to the galaxy "baby" started yelling for help, and the climax turns into a race to get past the Barrier and into the gravitational "deeps" again before adults of the species can catch up. Enterprise makes it, of course - but at the finish line their long-range scanners are detect something closing even faster from way far out there that isn't the same species and absolutely dwarfs the distressed parents (and most star systems). Thankfully it breaks off pursuit, but it's not clear why it does so. Was it a predator chasing the distress cry? Was it the equivalent of a farmer trying to keep a calf from falling in quicksand? I like to think when the Federation eventually went to re-contact the Lactrans they found their entire star cluster just plain gone, with nothing left but trace debris after something that dwelled in the intergalactic void decided to see what had happened and make sure their wouldn't be any repeat occurrences ever.
And that could be waiting for your players.
This is good stuff. Thanks?
DeleteJust wait and Andromeda will come to you -- in 4 billion years, that is, but if you're going at light speed it will be in the blink of an eye.
ReplyDeleteThe extinct species from Andromeda that made the androids on Planet Mudd was known as the Makers. Perhaps in the future Starfleet finds one of their ships, complete with a handful of helpful androids.
ReplyDeleteUnable to retro-engineer the ship's "super-mega-Kamehameha-dragon" warp drive, Starfleet calls for volunteers to take the ship to the Andromeda galaxy. The exploration of the ship and its mysteries thus becomes as much a part of the journey as exploring the Andromeda galaxy.
I imagine the drive slingshots around black holes to attain trans-galactic speeds, sort of like how Starfleet ships can slingshot around stars to travel through time. Unfortunately, the speed of communications is limited (Traveller-style) to use of ships between the galaxies, so the explorers, like the Voyager crew, are pretty much on their own...
Perfect for players who love Star Trek, but do not like being given orders from the upper ranks...