Saturday, May 21, 2011

Characters and What Every PC Knows for 'A little Trouble on Morris'

            John M. Corradin, Daniel Newton, and Walter have told me they want to play. I have the following roles available (Walt told me last night he wants to play the Mechanic)-
            Captain Clarice/Clarence Perry (gender depending on player), from Old Earth, Herself, owns 60% of The Good Ship 'Molly Brown'
            (Walter) Rudolph Meems, who grew up on Morris and has family there, the Ship's Mechanic/Engineer. Owns the other 40% of MB.
            Spencer Thirteen, part of a clone set, runaway from his family in the League of Free Stars. The spare pilot and super cargo. Been with MB for a year.
            Doc Hop, a rabbit-like alien scientist who is qualified as a medic. His people have a unified interstellar state on the far side of the Star Kingdom of Shenandoah and are currently at peace w/ same. Been with MB for years.
            Cookie, the Cute Rookie, who signed on at Leslie and has earned her nickname by taking over the mess. She's an undocumented treasure and talked her way on through some freinds of the crew at Leslie. She's obviuosly familiar with ships, maybe eve grew in a merchant tramp like MB; she's a mystery, but good people.

The Game Year is 2831 AD; they probably use some other Date System...
           People went out and settle part of the galactic, had some wars and generally lived like humans, not saints. Earth is still the most populous human planet- most other places may top out at hundreds of millions, but a typical planet has a small population, a few tens of millions. Earth is still pretty much the center of science and development; or rather it is, again, after falling of the wagon for a few centuries.
           The Star Kingdom of Shenandoah is 500 years old, and settled organically, with natural population growth. The League of Free Stars was settled about three hundred years ago, and has grown very rapidly with cloning technology; clones still have to be raised, just like the more normal kind of human beings, and there were some horrible mistakes made early on, but their homeworld of Pleroo, 'Plenty', is just about the most populous, other than Earth, and intends on expanding, bring their light and reason to other worlds...

Cut and pasted from my blog-
            Let's look at two possible planets, cleverly calling them Morris and Leslie-
            Planet Morris is 1.5 Earth masses and has a gravity of about 1.15 times that of Earth, 1.3 times the surface area, 663 million square kilometers. It has more water surface, having managed to get and hang onto more, 86% (~3/4^1/2), so the land area is only 93 million, but most of it is arable, nearly half again as much as on Earth. It's a little farther out and cooler, but has more atmosphere, ~2 bars, 1.8 N2 plus .2 O2, which makes it warmer all over.
            Planet Leslie is .5 Earth masses and has a gravity of a little under .8 times that of Earth. 332 m km^2, 50% water, so the surface area is about 10% more than Earths' and about a quarter of that is arable, some 42 m km^2, a little bit more area than Africa or the Moon. Leslie is a little closer and hotter, but with less water vapor as a greenhouse gas, and less atmo over all (.2 inert plus .2 oxygen for .4 bar), the temperatures tend to swing more to extremes over the course of a day or a year.
            People from Morris and Leslie wouldn't stand out much in a crowd of Earthlings, but over all, Leslies are taller and scrawnier than Morrisites, who are more heavily muscled, with less body fat, stronger and faster. They probably live a few years less, too, in a maritime environment, coastal farming, deep-sea mining perhaps, but warmer and milder temperatures. Probably no appreciable snowfalls, but monster storms race across the oceans, sometimes going around and around the planet, getting stronger and stronger until the they spend their fury upon the land...
            Leslies live a little longer, in a more extreme climate with few big storms, but probably lots of desert, and lots of places where tornados stalk the land. The planet's core is more run-down than Earth and the surface more worn-down, too, so there are few mountains and more coastal plains and low, wet, flat marshy and swampy lands by the seas or ocean.

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