Rent-a-Misjump

[Werner]

I'm pretty sure the LBB rule is simply to try to make the jump less than a death sentence, even though that's spelled out pretty clearly in the JTAS 24. It should be treated more like the cold start equation from ST:TOS "The Naked Time".

No pilot would willing risk their ship within the 100D.

A scenario I can think of is the PCs are being chased by somebody intent on destroying them and they don't have time to get to 100D before they are on top of them, so they press the Jump button and hope for the best. So if the enemy is going to destroy them, then they might take that small change of a misjump not destroying them as their only hope of escape, and in fact on another thread I outlined this very same scenario. A bunch of space pirates take off from a planet and a bunch of patrol cruisers are bearing down on the, the corsair can't hope to beat two patrol cruisers and there is no time to reach the 100D limit, so they press the Jump button, and end up inside an undiscovered Dyson Sphere located about 1 parsecs away from Regina. No one knows it's there, it has a thermo signature but it's fairly diffuse, and no one in the Regina system had reason to train their telescopes on an empty patch of space, and they don't do much astronomy there anyway.

Regina being a Moon of a gas giant, there are multiple moons and the gas giant itself which make this place an unpromising place to do ground based astronomy due to the light pollution. No one suspected that a huge artifact existed 1 parsecs away, it wasn't in any trade routes and nobody had any reason to jump in that direction until the pirates did, and they made a huge discovery! The pirates, not wanting to be caught, did not tell anybody about this discovery, after they exited from the Dyson Sphere, they recorded its location on their ship's computer so they could jump back to it if need be, this would make the perfect hide out and pirate base.

 

[kilemall]

How much interstellar history is made by these misjumps and people accidentally getting across rifts?


Might explain quite a few of those TL5- planets.

 

[Condottiere]

Or some idiot programmed the remnants of the fleet to fly into the local sun, after the colonists disembarked.

 

[Grav_Moped]

I'm pretty sure the LBB rule is simply to try to make the jump less than a death sentence, even though that's spelled out pretty clearly in the JTAS 24. It should be treated more like the cold start equation from ST:TOS "The Naked Time".

No pilot would willing risk their ship within the 100D.

<Grav_Moped gets on his hobbyhorse>
IMTU it's why the Type S has a bizarrely large fuel tank. It can snap off a Jump-1 in the 10-100D high-risk zone and still have Jump-1 -- maybe even Jump-2 -- fuel left over after a misjump* with which to self-recover. There's a 50% chance of a normal jump (7-), 41.6% chance of a misjump (8-10), and only an 8.33% chance of instant doom (11+).

Risky, but with only one double turret and a Mod/1bis computer (and in LBB2, a PP or MD hit cripples the ship), it's a better bet than trying to stand and fight.
</hobbyhorse>

The LBB2 rule takes the penalty for Jumping inside 100D (risks as above) and re-uses it as the mechanic for penalizing the use of unrefined fuel. Note that you can't get a "ship destroyed" result just from using unrefined fuel if you're outside 100D, but in the 10-100D zone it makes the odds much worse.

The JTAS#24 text oversells the risks (at least under LBB2 rules) in order to both discourage Jumps in the 10D-100D zone and increase the drama when it's done.


*Requires invoking the TCS/JTAS#14 power-down rule and pro-rating it by week instead of by month. This clearly wasn't why they made it that way in the first place (especially within '77 rules), but it's my way of retconning a nonsensical product of the design rules as written.

 

[Enoki]

The most interesting misjump would have to be (in the realm of messing with players) would have to be the Sargasso sea option.
The ships there would have run out of fuel so no power for weapons other than missiles. Missiles would take power for targeting and launch, but that could be handles by batteries.
Power for life support would be a problem for most ships as solar panels are not a common items on most ships. A scout survey vessel would be equipped with solar cells leaving at least one ship with a surviving crew. If the players are as paranoid as usual, they will make sure their ship does have solar cells installed giving them an edge.
I can't think of any player not wanting to loot every ship possible, believing no one would have survived due to power failure. The ways to make life interesting for players doing so would be scary. Think of a Droyne military destroyer with all crew in low berths, revived on a proximity alert, that has laid a salvage claim on all ships present that are being looted by your players. Hibernating space monsters, think Alien egg sacks.
Misjump the players to the near edge of a red dwarf system ort cloud with a gas giant in close orbit of the star. It would take at least a couple of years under drive powered by a solar cell array. A good engineer could modify the manuever drive for a very low power low G drive to move the ship into course to intercept the gas giant. What could go wrong with that? "creepy laugh"
A ship to do this job would best be a modified subsidized merchant. Replace the passenger cabins with extra stores, ships batteries, and a folded solar cell array. Upgrade the jump drive to J2. Install collapsible tanks in the cargo bay.
Find a good trustworthy lawyer to create a paranoid contract. Buy blue chip stocks with all cash left on hand, Add a professional righter to the crew to document the expedition. Pick up a couple tons of low tech trade goods for the inevitable low tech world you will get stranded on. Get parts to do proper maintenance on all your vacc suits and weapons. Get Extra parts to fix the jump drives after the misjump. Consider hiring a jump priest to bless the ship and crew before takeoff.

A variant of this that might be interesting is a twist on the zombie theme.

The pocket of space you end up in has a very different passing of time such that persons caught in it can live for centuries. But that doesn't preclude their minds from decaying to a point where they are little more than insane creatures who are extremely dangerous.
Write in your own variations here for how they are from cannibals to mind craving zombie-like, or whatever...

The ships likewise have been around for similar lengths of time in many cases and are useless except as museum pieces while those with more advanced computers have run so many iterations of programs, etc., that their software is completely corrupted and useless.
While that wouldn't preclude players trying to salvage it would reduce the windfall from it with the occasional gem tossed in.

I can't see fuel as the issue since it's normally hydrogen and you could get that from a nearly endless number of sources most macabrely rendering down the insane crewmen you find for their hydrogen...
On the other hand, if you have no navigation references there and are trying to jump out after getting fuel, you are doing it blind and could easily end up somewhere in deep space unable to reach a safe haven in any case... Let the players work on that one...

So, the players have centuries to figure out how to escape this nightmare but if they don't soon they're going to become just another part of it... :devil:

 

[Condottiere]

Ophiocordyceps unilateralis is an insect-pathogenic fungus, discovered by the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in 1859, and currently found predominantly in tropical forest ecosystems. O. unilateralis infects ants of the tribe Camponotini, with the full pathogenesis being characterized by alteration of the behavioral patterns of the infected ant. Infected hosts leave their canopy nests and foraging trails for the forest floor, an area with a temperature and humidity suitable for fungal growth; they then use their mandibles to attach themselves to a major vein on the underside of a leaf, where the host remains after its eventual death.[2] The process leading to mortality takes 4–10 days, and includes a reproductive stage where fruiting bodies grow from the ant's head, rupturing to release the fungus's spores. O. unilateralis is, in turn, also susceptible to fungal infection itself, an occurrence that can limit its impact on ant populations, which has otherwise been known to devastate ant colonies.

Ophiocordyceps unilateralis and related species are known to engage in an active secondary metabolism, among other reasons, for the production of substances active as antibacterial agents that protect the fungus-host ecosystem against further pathogenesis during fungal reproduction. Because of this secondary metabolism, an interest in the species has been taken by natural products chemists, with corresponding discovery of small molecule agents (e.g. of the polyketide family) of potential interest for use as human immunomodulatory, anti-infective, and anticancer agents.

 

[rlmercad069]

Sure. Better, have the drive itself jump while the rest of the ship just sits there.

How RoboTech of you. Just be certain that the PC's are in the SDF-3.

 

[Grav_Moped]

How RoboTech of you. Just be certain that the PC's are in the SDF-3.

Pretty sure Larry Niven did that in one of his short stories too. Borderland of Sol, maybe? I'd have to look it up -- it involved a bad guy using a micro black hole to kick starships out of hyperspace, and in so doing the hyperdrive vanished, sheared off at the mounts.

Edit to add: I was right.