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I actually think that the mechanoids would do things involving turnips and gerbils to Galactus...

But the Xeelee though, that is a scary thought.

How would the mechanoids fare against humanity from the Golden Age universe though?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden ... _series%29

I mean, their entire military is one man. 500,000 years in the future and the entire military capacity of this civilization is packed into one guy...I don't think the mechanoids stand a chance.

I don't believe the Golden Age has FTL capability(I haven't read the third book yet), but very-near speed-of-light relativistic travel....in that regard the Mechanoids might pose a problem to them, at least until the GA could get ahold of an example of a non-psionic FTL drive.
The GA might be able to outhink the Mechanoids in virtuality, but the cyborgs might have the upper hand in terms of brute force...at least until the Golden Age ramped up from 'decadent complacency' to 'WE GOT A WAR ON!' mode and mobilized everything from solar lasers to tossing anti-matter.

Against the Culture, and even against Julian Mays' Galactic Milleau, with its high-level psychics, the Mechanoids would be toast.

Another fun Human culture to toss the Mechanoids at would be Tony Daniel's 'Metaplanetary', where the solar system is literally webbed by enormous megaconstructs, space is permeated with 'grist'(basic nanomaterial), there are enormous sentient post-human spaceships lurking in the outer solar system, and intelligent nano- and computer viruses are running around loose(one of the characters is a nanotech- and AI-viral-mutated Jeep SUV running ferally in upstate New York from 'car hunters' who hunt down other trucks and cars that have gone feral).

IIRC, MiO said the farthest humans were able to get to prior to the Coming of the Rifts was the asteroid belt, with extremely limited exploration past there (I'm thinking mostly probes and maybe a couple state-sponsored manned trips to Jupiter's orbit).

Wrong Golden Age, Beast. We ubernerden are refering to a sci-fi trilogy called The Golden Age(or Golden Transcendance)(John C. Wright) , which has as its basis a decadent future post-Human culture running the Solar System and making a few steps outside it, but still mainly concentrated around Sol(No great Diaspora has taken place, and a tragic failed colonization effort has appaerently come back to haunt the complacent cultures of the Home System).

It's a bit of a mind-bender trilogy, but I love it. A real old-school human nature sci-fi (the reason I also love Wall-E so much) combined with actual theoretical science...and some way out there stuff too. Trying not to give anything away, but the crap they pull with black holes is fantastic.

Mutants in Orbit screwed up though, because the writers didn't sit down and work through the ramifications of the Traction Drive (which provides constant 1G acceleration, forever). If you accelerate constantly for half your trip, then reverse the drive and spend the second half slowing down, even Pluto is only about three weeks away. And that sort of travel time means that setting up mining bases (or military outposts, or anything else) anywhere in the solar system is trivial.

So logically there's no reason why the major nations and corporations in the Golden Age wouldn't have had research bases all the way out in the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud, because getting there would actually take less time than it took to get people and material to the Mars colony using older drive technologies. And there's also no reason why the resource-hungry stations of Mutants in Orbit (who are willing to spend several months on trips to the asteroids and back) can't just build a bunch of traction drive ships and start mining resources on the moons of the gas giants.

Do not have the book. Did they have a traction drive then? Also if they had it, they may have had political/legal/financial situations like are presently keeping us at the point we are now when we could have more of a space presense

Traction Drive. Loop Hole, Exploit it.
Although the probable explanation is that the drive was experimental at the time of the Crash, most likely undergoing advanced field testing. With the post-Crash emphasis on survival, not exploration, long range missions were shelved and the drive program cannibalized of most of its extraneous hardware, until somebody realized that the Traction Drive could be mighty useful for getting to all those iceballs in the outer SS, and has begun selling the system(this could become part of a big campaign, where the PCs are gathering up the resources and a ship(or small fleet of them) for a big resource harvesting journey to the outer solar system..of course, there's a lot of folks who feel threatened by the mission(or rather by the PCs' possible success), and there's the possibility of encountering SOMETHING out there in the Deep...
Like Mechanoids perhaps?

The idea of long-range missions being shelved after the Crash because nobody at the time realised the potential of traction drives is just beyond stupid. This is a culture that only survives because spaceships are constantly going out and flying all the way across the inner solar system to harvest water and minerals. I think it's pretty safe to assume that the only way all of them could fail to understand the potential of the traction drive would be if every single ship captain, engineer, physicist, and highschool math graduate in the setting was infected with the I'm As Dumb As The Author Who Wrote Me plague. This is a drive that reduces a trip to the asteroid belt from an arduous journey of months to a quick jaunt that's a couple of days each way. I'm pretty sure that even if everyone in the setting was too stupid to do the math and work out how long a flight to Jupiter will take, they'd have figured out the potential of the traction drive the first time someone flew a traction drive ship from Earth to the asteroid belt.

In the book they're described as a new drive system that was just starting to come into use when the end of the world happened, so they've been around since then. They're commercially available in Orbit, but described as not being particularly common or popular because of its low acceleration compared to other drives. Which would be a perfectly good reason not to put them on, say, small fighters that just exist to protect a station or a mothership from attackers, but it's obvious that Siembieda and co. never realised that the traction drive is the best drive for getting from point A to point B for pretty much any trip that involves leaving Earth orbit.

That's why the Mars in my campaign is clean of bugs.

Gotta love those big honking traction drive troop carriers and battleships...they may start out slow, but when they get moving....

Here here!! Bloody good idea!

It should also be why the moons of all four gas giants in your games have got miners and prospectors on them. If travelling a few months each way just to mine the asteroid belt was economically viable, then you can bet your ass that travelling a week or two each way to mine the fabulous wealth of those moons is ridiculously lucrative.

And if you want to get a bit more epic to make up for the fact that even Pluto isn't a remote and distant frontier, it should be why prospectors and adventurers are out beyond the Kuiper Belt and into the Oort Cloud, scrounging among impossibly remote chunks of rock in interstellar space to try and find legendary pre-Flash research vessels (and possibly even old military bases, hauled out there to be completely undetectable and provide the ultimate second-strike capability).

The moons of all four gas giants have colonies on them in my campaign. The Oort Cloud is the main source of exploration-style adventures, while the Asteroid Belt tends to be where most long-voyages start from. Currently I've got the PCs looking for Voyager II.

Just as long as you've actually got something out there to explore. A bunch of really really really remote lumps of rock and ice aren't gonna be too exciting to anyone except astronomers, since the rest of the solar system already has an abundance of lumps of rock and ice that are way easier to find.

So what you need is reason to go out there. Pre-Flash research vessels and weapon stations. Relics of extra-terrestrial exploration. Rumours of hidden pirate bases where the outlaw scum of the solar system can get repairs and trade their wares safe from the long arm of the law. That sorta crap.

Otherwise the Oort Cloud is "Ooh an icy rock that looks EXACTLY LIKE ONE I COULD'VE SEEN IN THE ASTEROID BELT INSTEAD"

Don't forget charting missions. Excursions to go scan, map and chart possible "loose" chunks in the cloud that might be easily pulled away by an errant gravity shift. This could lead into discovering something or merely blowing up a few particularly threatening chunks of ice and rock.

On a similar note, the mission could be the establishment of a base.

Oh, and don't forget the possible rumors of a Mechanoid (or Riathenor, or Toogarth, or Invid) invasion!

The Oort Cloud is four light years across, and the chaps in labcoats currently believe that all the asteroids and comets in it probably add up to about five times the mass of the Earth. I think it's safe to say that your chances of accidentally colliding with a chunk of ice and rock out there are so close to zero as makes no difference, and the only time any chunks of ice and rock out there are "threatening" would be if you're deliberately flying towards one at high speeds.

So with no natural danger and no native economic resources, I think we can safely say that the only reasons to go there are either to find stuff that other people put there, or to use as a hiding place.

That still doesn't discount that there may be threatening bodies out there and when technology permits manned missions, one priority would be to go out and map the big chunks, since it is known that comets come largely from the Oort Cloud.

What threatening bodies? The sheer insanely huge distances involved makes the odds virtually zero. Saying "Gee being hit by Oort Cloud comets would suck, I'd better map it to make sure none of them are on a collision course for our space station" is like saying "Gee being eaten by tigers would suck, I'd better ring every zoo and circus in America to make sure none have escaped". I mean sure, you could have a comet hit your space station, and you could be eaten by an escaped tiger the next time you're on holiday in New York City, but both of them are so unlikely that preparing for them is a complete waste of time.

Now if someone flew out there and strapped some Traction Drives to a lump of rock a few kilometres across, then you'd have a pretty damn credible threat. But random collisions with interstellar debris? Pfft.

Condescension is the mark of the unimaginative btw.

The bolded is exactly why you'd map this crap as soon as you were able to make manned missions. If you can do it, then odds are someone else can either now or soon.

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.

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.

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...

... well actually it doesn't, because nobody is watching any of the objects that I found, on account of its pretty much impossible to detect cold dark lumps of rock against the cold dark backdrop of interstellar space when they're several light-months away. Funny how that works out.

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.

Seriously Rhomphaia, there are plenty of believable hooks a good GM could come up with to explain why dudes in MiO who've got traction-drive ships would travel beyond the solar system and start mucking about in the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud. Clinging to a demonstrably lousy reason isn't particularly constructive or imaginative.

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.

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...

If you were smart you attached tracking-devices on the large ones you've found.

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.

I am not going to bother addressing any of your points because this one needs to be made.

And again with the insults. You need to stop this for me to start taking anything you say seriously. You can make all the sense in the world (btw, your post only halfway made sense) but when you start insulting people, all that goes out the window. I have disagreed with you before, but you haven't been flat-out insulting. You are approaching this point and if you cross it, you're going to find yourself ignored and reported.

Just a warning.

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.



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



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.



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?

Considering the fact that there isn't a true consensus on what constitutes the "dirty" of "dirty balls of ice" your statement doesn't support your arguement.

Um, last time I checked insects(of any size) wouldn't last an hour on Mars.

Again, no clear consensus on what makes up the "dirt".

Being facetious doesn't help your arguement. No one mentioned any of those things.

That doesn't mean those "barren icy crag"s don't have interesting "dirt" within them.


So I'll rephrase: Would you say the the Apollo missions after 11 were a "waste of time"? Or that all but the first of the shuttle missions were a "waste of time"? Or that the International Space Station is a "waste of time"("It's been done before" and "And you're also not even contributing very much to science" would both apply)?

As modern science doesn't know what exactly is in those celestial-bodies, there isn't really any way to definitively say that the Oort Cloud's resources are "utterly nonexistent". Also, at this stage I'm struggling to see why you take such a rude-tact in your arguements when your points could be made clear without being snarky.

Those are decent reasons to go out there, but then again so is viable-economic-incentives.

If they have knowledge of them. You seem to assume that your unnamed-employer in this example shares the info with others outside of his(company/station/nation/syndicate/religious-movement).

That's assuming your employer doesn't have assets in the area. Which if s/he/it is willing to send you out to scout things out there s/he/it would be stupid not to.

Again, it would be highly-retarded not to have assets in the area(otherwise why pay someone to map it out, if not for your warships to claim anything valuable?).

Position, orientation, composition, and topography are all things that could be recorded and updated regularly. Installing a basic sensor-system would also warn of possible claims-jumpers.

Congratulations to you all. This topic has been hijacked!

In Soviet Russia, thread hijacks you.

Whatta Contry!

I want Yakov Smirnoff statted out.

In Soviet Russia, Yakov Smirnoff wants you statted out.

I think we've just hit on the ultimate weapon against the Mechanoids!!!

In this corner of the galaxy, weighing in at 64x10E8 lbs the undefeated champions; the Mechanoid Empire! And in this corner weighing in at a mere 150lbs and out of the public eye for over 25 years... YAKOOOOOOOOOOOV SMIRNOOOOOOOOOOOOOFFF!

He would kill them with bad jokes and a horrible (but brain scarring) catch phrase. They might kill him, but for the next thousand years any time one of their number responded with either "In Soviet Russia, (insert part of prior comment here)'s you" or "Whatta Contry!" they would be killed by their fellows. As well, many would recognize that and whenever they even thought it, they would self-terminate.

It's perfect!!!

So what's your point?

Kinders and tinker gnomes. That's as bad as putting Groo in the mothership.I'm sure it's against some sort of space law.

Don't forget the Dohwar

Sticking to Palladium, I think its about time someone pointed out to the Mechanoids that the Dominators are humanoid.

Branching out...

Call the characters from the Skylark series by Doc Smith.

Or the Lensmen.

Launch something like the Blight Countermeasure from the "Zones of Thought" universe (just make sure you can survive on a pre-industrial world first).

Send the Marduk fleet after them.

call in gillette think they could make a shaver that could erase them lol.....

Gillette the best mankind can get..


or just send in Hulk Hogan..... or Warrior...

A few singularity warheads detonated inside the engine room ought to do the trick.

Bring the hammer of the Emperor, armed with both sacred flashlight and rape whistle, the holy ships that ferry them to and fro, as well as his mighty angels of death, and you have an exterminated xenos.

Vexxarr: "Rapacious genocidal cyborgs with robotic legions? Sploorfix, read them your blog."

Rift them or trick them into going to the Splicers world.

I'm sure the nanobots would find them delicious.

Not enough Human DNA left in them. Though NEXUS would still want to eliminate them as competition.