New: Dyson Sphere (free, open-ended, email, human, space, rpg, abstract)

From: donotreply@pbm.com (PBM List Autoposter)

Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 23:13:01 +0000

Name:		Dyson Sphere
Costs:		Free
Email:		sharlene79 zat mindspring.com
Frequency:		Daily or every 2 days
Type:		Science Fantasy, Space Opera, Exploration
Last-Update:		2005Oct09
Keywords: free, open-ended, email, human, space, rpg, abstract

Description:

While the origins of this adventure are similar to Battlestar Galactica,
the game itself is nothing like it.  Mankind has been all but wiped out by
its own creations, reduced to no more than about 125,000 humans in 200+
ships ... and a small contingent of a feline race which Terrans were once
at war with.  All players are HUMAN, no aliens or Synthetics.  Technology
is TL 11-12 by GURPS standards.  I have a spamblocker that will
auto-message you as a spammer until I get you added to my address book.
Posting is through Yahoo Groups.

The source of Mankind's eradication was the very machines it had built,
who had achieved a new level of sentience.  The Machines turned on their
creators.  Humans developed a new type of cybernetics, a Wetware referred
to as Synthetics.  This ivnetion turned the tide of the war so fast that
the Machines panicked and turned another of mankind's inventions on them.
They turned a stellar tap technology used to provide power to an
interstellar civilization into a dreadful genocidal weapon.  Rather than
tapping the stars for power, this new weapon rendered the stars unstable,
creating supernovae.  The Machines were determined to wipe out all life.
They very nearly succeeded.

The Machine war lasted some 4 years.  The Exodus, an attempt to flee the
guantlet of destruction lasted some 6 years.

The discovery of the Dyson Sphere was no accident. Or maybe it was. The
Fleet had been originally been responding to a distress call in the hopes
of picking up more survivors. Gillian Stargazer of the SS Windstar
detected the call. It had come from an area of space devoid of stars - or
so it was thought. But as the Fleet diverted toward the brief signal in
hopes of preserving other life the signal ceased. Unwilling to accept
failure and having no other course in mind the Fleet continued until the
discovery of a gravitational anomaly was discovered. The gravitonic
hyperwave from the hypernovae ignited by the Machines was a field effect
or rather a String effect. This effect was being felt by stars and
artificial gravity field many parsecs away. But one of the cargo techs, a
young woman named Amber Volkova had been running through the calculations
of the effects on stars around the origin point of the distress call. They
were old calculations used for schooling. Amber was just learning how to
use the equipment. Her figures were off. She received a B- on her
experiment. A little perturbed at her instructor she went back in and
re-ran her experiment, diverting power. Security flagged the action and
arrested her for possible treason. The mindless idiots thought she might
have been trying to send a signal to the Machines. Fortunately she had
made a friend among the physics students, a now 11 year old genius named
Mark Hamilton. She had managed to sneak spare parts for his various
accounts of mischief on more than one occasion. He broke into the
instructor's office and stole her assignment. It only took him a brief
look at her work to realize her math was correct. But what she hadn't been
able to do was determine the cause, nor the magnitude of the gravitational
field to produce the effects.

The Fleet was warped inside the Dyson Sphere.  And what they discovered
inside was impossible to any technology they new.  Inside the sphere was
over a hundred thousand bead-shaped planets strung together by gravitic
joints forged from neutronium.

[ This is a new entry for the PBM List. You can find the list
itself, and instructions for adding games or comments, at
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/pbm_list/ -- greg ]