How would you update AtB:Mutants in Orbit?

[gaby]

Tell Me How would you revisit and update AtB:Mutants in Orbit?

What do you think need to be Added?

[fbdaury]

Tell Me How would you revisit and update AtB:Mutants in Orbit?

What do you think need to be Added?

Rewrite it for AtB2nd obviously.
Strip all Rifts references.
Go Wild with the setting, especially a possible Squatter's War between CAN Moonbase and lunar 'squatters'.
Need to go re-check book for more ideas now

[glitterboy2098]

expand the setting to include more asteroid mining type activity (both NEO's and main belt), so you have more stuff going on outside the control of the main stations.
expand on the way the stations are run (since the current one doesn't really say, unless you include the RIFTS stuff), including plenty of dystopian type story elements spread around so they are all sitting in grey areas politically, ethically, etc. (these always open up fun plot stuff)
revise the spacecraft construction to be a little more useable, drawing on things like Clarke and Heinlein's novels, real world proposals, etc. personally i'd also get rid of the 'traction' drive (leave that as a RIFTS thing)


my notes on how i'd update the rifts side is rather more extensive, naturally..

[everloss]

New artwork, first and foremost.

[Nightmask]

Update the technology for one, particularly the medical/genetics technology. The book introduced easy home genetics kits even kids could use to create new lifeforms, so you'd think there'd be some bio-tech creatures used for various tasks, and Mars wouldn't be some Insect Apocalypse as creating a bio-agent to kill them wouldn't prove that huge of a problem. That and fix the issues with travel times and speeds in space and the lack of understanding that space doesn't have friction to slow something down so once up to speed something stays at that speed generally.

As already noted also do up some better ship construction rules (but keep the Traction Drive, it doesn't hurt the setting) and expand on the nature of mining in space and put in more coverage for constructing bases and outposts and similar structures as well. It's also a bit hard to accept that they'd leave all the material from a destroyed station where it was even to respect the dead when they clearly recycle so much already that's had to come from someone having died. There couldn't be that many dangerous space mines there or killsats (why would there even be any in that location in the first place?) that they couldn't have cleaned it up. Maybe have it as a joint recovery project where the community is slowly salvaging it or even trying to map out how to use it to create an entirely new station.

[Rali]

Aliens

FTL Ship(s) based on the Alcubierre Drive and the NASA ship design.

Come up with a better explanation to why the space colonies don't visit or communicate with the Earth. I've never liked the space debris and orbital weapons narrative.

[Nightmask]

Aliens

FTL Ship(s) based on the Alcubierre Drive and the NASA ship design.

Come up with a better explanation to why the space colonies don't visit or communicate with the Earth. I've never liked the space debris and orbital weapons narrative.

Not visiting isn't hard to understand, it's very resource intensive to send a ship down to the Earth AND get back (and since everyone's born and raised in space most aren't exposed to even faked Earth level gravity to handle being stuck under such crushing conditions). Unlike Rifts AtB Earth is also far more tech-poor and Resource-poor to consider it worthwhile to build a place to launch and retrieve space ships at let alone actually build one from scratch. They simply can't afford to do do anything like that for little to no return.

Communication probably follows under the same deal, why bother with talking to space/earth when you can't get anything from it but a conversation?

[everloss]

It would make sense to talk to the nations on Earth because they can trade resources and technology. The Coalition or NGR would absolutely love to have allies in space who can bombard their enemies from orbit, and would gladly launch rockets full of materials into orbit to benefit their space-born allies.

And its not like the orbital communities don't know about the human nations on Earth; they receive radio signals from the planet constantly.

[glitterboy2098]

It would make sense to talk to the nations on Earth because they can trade resources and technology. The Coalition or NGR would absolutely love to have allies in space who can bombard their enemies from orbit, and would gladly launch rockets full of materials into orbit to benefit their space-born allies.

And its not like the orbital communities don't know about the human nations on Earth; they receive radio signals from the planet constantly.

um.. this is after the bomb. not rifts. so the NGR and CS do not exist.

and i doubt that cardania or even the Empire of Humanity would have much the orbitals would want, even if it could be gotten up to the orbitals..

[Nightmask]

It would make sense to talk to the nations on Earth because they can trade resources and technology. The Coalition or NGR would absolutely love to have allies in space who can bombard their enemies from orbit, and would gladly launch rockets full of materials into orbit to benefit their space-born allies.

And its not like the orbital communities don't know about the human nations on Earth; they receive radio signals from the planet constantly.

Except they can't trade resources and technology (and as already noted we're talking the AtB version of space not Rifts version). It would take enormous capital expenditure to create a working space program on the planet and no one's going to spend that kind of money, time, training, and equipment on a space program for limited returns since they can't get anything back from space as they have nothing to spare (they're already squabbling amongst themselves over it) and certainly can't go shipping stuff up to space for the same reason.

Meanwhile the people in space have no ships capable of handling reentry and if they built one it couldn't return, not without an active set-up on the planet to be able to refuel it and boost it back into orbit. What technology they do have in space they've no reason to share with planet since the planet hasn't anything it can trade back. About the only reason to establish any kind of interaction would just be from a general 'gee wouldn't it be nice to get back in touch' sense and no one's really in the mood or position to bother with it. There'd need to be some kind of game-changing thing occur either on the ground or in space to provoke some kind of hook-up, like a resource windfall in space to supply motivation to hook up with earth (strong earth-gravity adapted workers being better choices), or emergency like needing fresh infusions of DNA to help with genetic diversity (since current estimates are you need roughly 5000 members of a particular species for long-term genetic diversity and stability).

Since odds are there weren't 5000+ of each animal that can be found in space (particularly the large animals) that might be seen as a story hook to motivate an attempt on the side of space at least to create traffic between the two settings but that would end up a large campaign given what it would take to create a ship capable of going down and being able to return and establish contact with a group that could supply the bodies and resources to get back up.

[Rali]

All you need is a good story. Economics and politics in a game setting are usually just background colour for the setting and shouldn't be used to dictate the "logic" of a story. This is after all, fiction.

If you need a ship that can enter and leave the atmosphere, you have one. Don't worry about how it got build or how it was paid for, unless that's a pivotal part of your campaign setting. How did they pay of the ship? They sold your section of the space station for scrap.

As for why would the orbital stations communicate with the ground? Science, information, and entertainment!

Biodiversity in the orbiting population could be handled with the EGG pods to add stable diversity to the populations genome. As for living in low gravity, that would be handled with spinning space stations that produce their own "artificial" gravity, so sending someone from that environment to Earth wouldn't be that great of a shock to the system; or, if you want to retain log-G space stations, have those that go down to Earth require the use of an exoskeleton suit.

Who's going to spend the kind of resources to build/rebuild a space program? The Academic Underground. There's really not much reason given in the book for calling this group the Underground, so I've always used them as a convenient Plot Device. The Empire and Cardania would if they find out that there's something in orbit that they need for [insert plot objective here].

[everloss]

It would make sense to talk to the nations on Earth because they can trade resources and technology. The Coalition or NGR would absolutely love to have allies in space who can bombard their enemies from orbit, and would gladly launch rockets full of materials into orbit to benefit their space-born allies.

And its not like the orbital communities don't know about the human nations on Earth; they receive radio signals from the planet constantly.

um.. this is after the bomb. not rifts. so the NGR and CS do not exist.

and i doubt that cardania or even the Empire of Humanity would have much the orbitals would want, even if it could be gotten up to the orbitals..

Sorry, I was thinking of the actual book and not the sub forum.

In ATB, there is nothing at all preventing ships from Earth reaching orbit, other than maybe a very few killer satellites. Also, consider that in ATB2, there wasn't a Flash, the planet wasn't nuked to the stone age. A genetic disease caused the rampant mutation and massive death of humanity, not radiation from a nuclear war.

So, my point still stands. Unless you really believe that the orbital communities don't want or need raw materials, processed metals, food, or other goods.

Also, the Empire of Humanity colonizes Venus in the far future as shown in Transdimensional TMNT. In case you guys forgot.

[Nightmask]

It would make sense to talk to the nations on Earth because they can trade resources and technology. The Coalition or NGR would absolutely love to have allies in space who can bombard their enemies from orbit, and would gladly launch rockets full of materials into orbit to benefit their space-born allies.

And its not like the orbital communities don't know about the human nations on Earth; they receive radio signals from the planet constantly.

um.. this is after the bomb. not rifts. so the NGR and CS do not exist.

and i doubt that cardania or even the Empire of Humanity would have much the orbitals would want, even if it could be gotten up to the orbitals..

Sorry, I was thinking of the actual book and not the sub forum.

In ATB, there is nothing at all preventing ships from Earth reaching orbit, other than maybe a very few killer satellites. Also, consider that in ATB2, there wasn't a Flash, the planet wasn't nuked to the stone age. A genetic disease caused the rampant mutation and massive death of humanity, not radiation from a nuclear war.

So, my point still stands. Unless you really believe that the orbital communities don't want or need raw materials, processed metals, food, or other goods.

Also, the Empire of Humanity colonizes Venus in the far future as shown in Transdimensional TMNT. In case you guys forgot.

They did actually have a nuclear event, as nations panicked thinking what was happening was a full-scale terror attack rather than simply the profound stupidity of a group of young people who didn't even remotely think through what they were actually doing and unleashed a pandemic no one could stop.

[Rali]

Also, the Empire of Humanity colonizes Venus in the far future as shown in Transdimensional TMNT. In case you guys forgot.

Actually, TD:TMNT isn't necessarily cannon for AtB, and I don't recall that it's the specified that it was the Empire of Humanity that colonized it.

[Nightmask]

Also, the Empire of Humanity colonizes Venus in the far future as shown in Transdimensional TMNT. In case you guys forgot.

Actually, TD:TMNT isn't necessarily cannon for AtB, and I don't recall that it's the specified that it was the Empire of Humanity that colonized it.

Even if they did that would be centuries after the starting point of the book, when they'd actually built up an industrial base to support not only traveling through space but setting up self-replicating and self-sustaining colonies on Venus to where they could eventually transform it into the replica of Earth it became (too bad it was presented as a Planet of Hats with a total xenophobic 'no one even attempt to come here under pain of death' mindset). It would be decades at least if not a good century before anyone was stable and large enough to consider space travel, without some kind of outside event pushing it (such as in the Crucible of Time where the alien race was forced to develop Space Travel to survive as a species due to impending planetary destruction).

[Rali]

Also, the Empire of Humanity colonizes Venus in the far future as shown in Transdimensional TMNT. In case you guys forgot.

Actually, TD:TMNT isn't necessarily cannon for AtB, and I don't recall that it's the specified that it was the Empire of Humanity that colonized it.

I was wrong. I pulled out my TD:TMNT and found that it was clearly stated that the Empire of Humanity was responsible for colonizing Venus.

If that carries over to the future history of the 2nd Edition version of AtB could be up for debate. After all, the background for AtB 1st Edition and 2nd Edition differ quite a bit, so they could be seen as dimensionally separate settings.