Okay, so give me a few details. Exactly which two Aspects would you like to spin it out into?



Yeah, sorry, I've been a smidge distracted.



Might be worth thinking about how you want to power them. And what happens when the power runs out?

For powering the consoles, interchangeable rechargeable batteries and a portable solar charging kit should work. Simple enough to show what to do. Take dead batteries out of the handheld. Put them in the charger. Put fresh batteries from charger in the handheld. Leave the charger in the sun.

As for the aspects, they're kinda spun off from he idea that the designers of the ship probably designed a lot of it to be reusable, have more than one use, and have various redundancies in place. The solar panels covering the entire hull of the ship were put in place to act as an extra power supply to supplement the reactor, but the designers of the ship should likely have known more use could be made of them if they did more than simply act as a layer of skin for the ship. So the aspects assume the solar panels are divided into two hemispheres. The top half of the solar network and the bottom half. They each relate to a different aspect.

First aspect: Solar Sails.
When taking solar power into consideration, there's one incredibly important detail to take into account: solar panels work best when facing the sun. Covering the ship's outer layer with panels is well and good when it's in space, but at some point the ship has to land, and then the panels will only be as good as their proximity to the sun. Making note of that, the engineers building the ship installed an apparatus attaching all the solar panels on the top half of the ship into one big flexible grid that itself attaches to a retractable pillar that can raise off of the ship and angle all the panels towards the sun using motors and tracking sensors. This network of solar panels, coincidentally, somewhat looks like the mast of a great ship. A vast sail, pushed naught by wind but instead pulled by the light of the sky.

Second Aspect: Solar Positioning Satellites
Covering the ship with solar panels is all well and good, but eventually the ship has to land, and whatever is beneath the ship is going to be crushed. Including the solar panels that are attached to the side of the ship that's meant to be landed on. No wanting to waste precious resources that are just going to be destroyed (and understanding that the hardest part about space travel is getting into space), the engineers designed the bottom half of the solar panel network to be spun off into a large network of satellites of varying functions to aid the development of the colony. Built to last long enough until the colony can hopefully get it's own rocketry program underway, these satellites are programmed to launch themselves from the ship as it readies to make it's descent and use disposable thrusters to position themselves into stable orbits. The process was automated so that it happened on its own as the ship went to land, but optimally someone would have been monitoring them and issuing course corrections where possible.

The solar mast and satellite networks have likely gone unnoticed for so long because whoever was supposed to know about them (a head engineer?) either hasn't been woken up yet or died in their casket. Repairs likely need to be made to all related systems just to get things functional and who knows if any of the satellites even survived without someone guiding their launch, much less ended up in orbits that are even remotely useful.

So anyway those are the two aspects I want to buy with fate points. Thoughts?

Neat Aspect ideas.

However. Now that energy supplies are no longer an immediate problem, the continual expansion of the Ship's colony is moving at the speed of plot; the colony will expand more when it is dramatically appropriate to do so than when there is enough energy. That is to say, as neat as all of this will look, it's not actually going to speed up the growth of the colony at all. Given that, do you really want to spend two FATE points establishing these Aspects?

Hang on. I'm pretty sure we established that Roger was notified that something triggered the camera script. In fact he should assume it was triggered because he was already aware of the fact that the root account was accessed whenever a Player Character was awakened. (He wouldn't refer to them as a 'Player Character' though)

Now, he couldn't check the camera feed as he was away from the ship. (I figure the ship basically has a cell tower antenna for email/SMS but not video. I know the camera feed was all black, because I remember you mentioning that Piper had hung rags or something all over the cameras.

So the fact that there is no evidence is HIGHLY suspicious and he would talk to David about that anyway.

I think I might still want to go for the Solar Positioning Satellites aspect. Throw a programmer at any satellites that successfully gained orbit to configure them into a useful network useful and we can gain ourselves all kinds of valuable bonuses. Ways to track movements of large groups of enemies... take pictures of enemy fortifications... provide targeting data for some really big ship based guns to blow those fortifications up from halfway across the continent...

If the Solar Sails aspect won't be immediately useful, I can just try and roll Engineering to declare it's existence because I do like the idea of having it there purely for appearances. Evoke even greater feelings of awe from visitors than they'd already get simply by looking at the pure mass of our ship. Also there's something to be said of removing the solar panels from the surface of the ship so we can start mounting fortified positions on the hull itself. Create a broad network of defensive bunkers ringing the top edges of the ship and line the resulting fortifications with a whole mess of machine guns and mortar tubes. Clearing the space for defensive purposes might itself be more than worth spending a point if my Engineering roll fails to establish the aspect. Felix is all about blasting potential problems from the face of the world, so it certainly appeals.

It would seem that my GMing notes missed a very important point here. I'll go back and edit.

I suppose it's worth remembering that if we have orbital weapon platforms that can be seen from the ground, then there's an excellent chance that we'll discover the Zemoch priests have an orbital weapon platform too: ours. We don't know enough about magic or it's range to defend against it or rule it out.

Less weapon platform, more spy satellite that can also be used to aim long range artillery from the base. Though I'd prefer to just use the satellites for spying if possible. The moment we actually use any long range artillery it would quite likely change the future in a noticeable enough way that Azash would be able to better act against us.

I hope the Covid beast hasn't snuck up on poor CCC...that would kind of suck.

Yeah I've been wondering what happened.

Hi all. Sorry I've been absent for a while.

Good news is, the COVID beast hasn't managed to get me yet. Well. Not as far as I know (you don't know for the first week or two, I'm told). It did, however, manage to sneak up on my schedule and throw a bunch of things in disarray there...

Roughly how difficult does Arkady, who speaks three languages and can get by in two more, think Elene is for Indo-European language speakers?

There's no particular points of commonality; Elene is a language that has developed entirely without the company of the Indo-European languages. It'll be about as difficult as learning Japanese, or Xhosa.

I wasn't actually asking if there were points of commonality. Some languages are rather rule bound, and once you know the rules you're fine. Some languages have rules mostly so you know what to bet against in any actual sentence. Is Elene a mostly regular or mostly irregular language?

Oh. Right. There you're in luck - Elene is mostly regular.

The rules are all different, mind you, to the extent that trying to apply English rules to Elene makes one sound like Yoda - but (a) Yoda can still be understood, and (b) Elene does obey its own rules.