Laux the Ogre wrote:Rallan wrote:Okay let's break it down.
I go exploring in the Oort Cloud. At insanely great expense, and with a fair potential for danger, I'm sent out to catalogue large chunks of rock and ice. Because my employers think it's vitally important to waste heaps of money sending ships out to waste heaps of time combing through tens of trillions of cubic kilometres of empty space just to find the occasional lump of rock and ice that has nothing in it which can't already be extracted from the hyperabundance of lumps of rock and ice that are already in the solar system itself.
Has any human being, in real life, every been to the Kuiper Belt? No? Well then how the heck do you know that the objects in it are even remotely similar to the bodies closer to the Sun? Oh yeah, you DON'T.
Dude, I'm making an assumption that's pretty solid here: that if the Oort Cloud was included in Mutants in Orbit, they'd have made it pretty much exactly the way astronomers say it is.
Throughout the book, Mutants in Orbit always strives to be factually accurate about space stuff. It gives the right distances for everything, it gets conditions on Mars and the Moon right, it cares about the effects of growing up in microgravity, it realises why Lagrange Points are important in an orbital society, it gives realistic interplanetary travel times, it generally goes the whole nine yards to get its astronomy correct and be the closest thing Palladium Books has ever done to a hard SF setting.
So if we want to include the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud in a MiO campaign and we want to do it in the spirit of the setting, then the sensible approach is to stick with what the wonderful world of science thinks those places are like. You can fill your Kuiper Belt with so many comets that they're always bumping into each other if you want. You can fill it with solid gold christmas decorations the size of killer whales, hurtling through the void and waiting for a lucky prospector to find them. You could say there's a roof just past Pluto's orbit and if you accidentally crash through it you wind up in Heaven for all I care. But if you want something that looks like it belongs in MiO, your best bet is to fill the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud with a whole lot of desolate empty space, the occasional barren icy crag, and a huge swag of not much else at all.
Rallan wrote:Despite the needle-in-a-haystack odds, I successfully find some largeish rocks. I catalogue their locations and their motion, so we can build up a database titled "Lumps Of Rock In Interstellar Space: A Spotters Guide That Nobody Except Astronomers Cares About". One of them is Comet A. It's about half a light year out from the sun, so it only took me a year of my life to reach via traction drive (don't ask me how many years of my life I wasted searching for it). I know now how big it is, what it's orbital path is, and exactly what mix of rock and ice it has. I also know exactly how worthless it is, because I can work out how many days it would've taken me to just fly to the moons of saturn, rent a bulldozer, and fill the back of a truck with that much rock and ice. Instead of, y'know, wasting a year coming out here.
Would you say that the Apollo missions were a "waste of time"? Can't find anything on the Moon that you can't on Earth...
The Apollo missions were a pioneering feat of exploration and a proof of concept. They pushed back the boundaries of human achievement, both in the visceral "we were there and we did this" sense, and in the sense that a myriad of huge engineering problems had to be overcome to make any of it possible. Even if the Apollo astronauts had never done anything at all except play golf on the moon, the lessons learned from just getting them up there in the first place have enriched mankind immeasurably.
In a setting where spaceships with constant 1G acceleration are commercially available (and relatively commonplace if we're doing a version of MiO where they actually get used sensibly), a flight to the Oort Cloud is just a long trip. It's been done before. It will be done again. And even if you're the first person to ever lay eyes and set foot on a given Oort Cloud object, there's still very little sense of achievement, because it is one of
trillions of similar objects out there. The first dude to set foot on a lump of rock out there is a bit of a pioneer. But not likely to be remembered as well as the first man on Mars, the first men on Mars' moons, the first man in the asteroid belt, the first man on a Jovian moon, the first men on each of the other Jovian moons, and so on through everything else in the solar system. You're going to find some insignificant specks of rock, and you're going to do it using proven technologies that needed little or no adaptation for your mission. And knowing the fickle hand of fame, you'll probably be remembered more as the first man to cross the heliopause than as the first man to stand on yet another rocky crag. And if you're part of the second trip to the Oort Cloud, or the third or the fourth or the fiftieth, you're a nobody. And you're also not even contributing very much to science. You're giving astronomers incremental little bits of knowledge so they can build a more precise picture of how many useless lumps of rock are out there, but you're not really getting much data on fundamental mysteries of the universe.
And really, at this stage I'm struggling to see why everyone's fixated on the Oort Cloud's utterly nonexistent natural bounty as a reason for going there. Hiding is a reason to go there. Finding other people who are hidden is a reason to go there. Derelict old shipwrecks that drifted out of the solar system is a reason to go there. A harebrained scheme to build a huge station more than a lightyear from Earth as the first step to eventual interstellar colonization is a reason to go there. A clandestine meeting of crime bosses aboard their sleek, heavily armed cruisers is a pretty stylish reason to go there. Sifting through the vacuum so you can find and catalogue the N millionth semi-identical asteroid is just the reason why a spacecrew will end up like the characters from Dark Star
Rallan wrote:Years pass. My farcically expensive, time-wasting, useless mission has been forgotten by almost everyone. And then some terrorists from Outcast Station look up Comet A in a database, waste a year of their life flying out to it (they're terrorists, they're dedicated enough to do this), attach some traction drives and a piloting computer to it, and set it up on a collision course for some diner in the asteroid belt that served them a really lousy coffee this one time.
Fortunately my hard work exploring and surveying Oort Cloud objects means we've got plenty of warning because...
If you were smart you attached tracking-devices on the large ones you've found.
Why? Anyone who's going out there to use them for nefarious purposes will just sabotage the transmitters. You'll look 'em up in the handy catalogue that previous explorers have built up, vandalise the trackers on a bunch of rocks, and use one of them (or better yet, a rock that was never tagged in the first place) to build your secret pirate lair on or to use as your doomsday weapon. Or you could leave the beacons intact and just carve up the objects they're attached to. The distances involved are so great that it'll take weeks (or months if you're far enough out) before anyone even knows that a beacon has dropped out, and much, much longer for someone to go out there and check it out (by which stage the vandals could be anywhere).
And remember, if we're dealing with a traction drive doomsday weapon, a lot can happen in the six months it takes for us to notice that the beacon is dead. In the six-month timelag between when the asteroid is hijacked and when we notice that it was hijacked, the thing will have accelerated to half the speed of light and will now only be a quarter of a lightyear away from us.
Rallan wrote:So basically I wasted several years of my life surveying lumps of rock because some guy back home had the "brilliant" idea that if we catalogue all these comments, then even though we can't observe them at all to see if they're still where they're ought to be, we'll somehow magically be safe from just this sort of terrorist plot.
Only because you and your employer didn't have the fore-sight to actually put something on the cometary-bodies that would allow you to track them.
No, only because I had the foresight to think about some sort of beacon system while I was writing that and decide that it's impractical because really, what's it going to tell you?
That's as bad as putting Groo in the mothership.I'm sure it's against some sort of space law.
