Gate chat! (and namespace chat, but we'll get there)
Okay, for Ye Record this is more or less how I'd seen gate operations going. Much of this is liberally borrowed from Eclipse Phase, since they did a pretty awesome job of outlining exploration via wormhole and you should totally give them money if you like good sourcebooks.
First-link: This is the first step when exploring a new gate address. The operators open the wormhole up to the smallest aperture they can and then stick a small probe through. This probe is designed to survive at least for a little while in all kinds of environments, and it relays back basic temperature, atmosphere composition/pressure, gravity and radiation data to the control center via a fiber-optic line. It also gets a live visual feed of the immediate surroundings. Gate control looks at this and decides whether or not to go to the next stage in a first-link. If the world looks reasonably okay, then the wormhole is inflated a little bit more and a drone - basically a ROV on a leash - gets shoved through. This drone will get a better look at the surroundings as well as do some basic sample work, look for life if there's nothing visible, etc. If the drone doesn't find any show stoppers, control proceeds to the next step, the first-in team.
First-in: What everybody thinks of as 'gatecrashers,' these are the guys who get to be first through to another world. SOP is to walk through in suits; just because the drone didn't find anything immediately dangerous doesn't mean there isn't anything, so proper biological sequestration is required until the third or fourth visit at minimum. Most crashers haul their gear (tools, rations, portable survival shelter) on their backs with a motorized cart for heavy stuff, though a few teams have proper vehicles available. In any case, the first-in team's job is to reconnoiter the gate's general area out to at least a fifty-kilometer radius. This is generally done using free-flying ROVs but also involves a fair bit of hoofing it, especially if there's something interesting close to the gate. Gatecrashers are more than often armed, especially on missions to Gaian worlds, because while the first-link drone might say the atmosphere is safe it
won't tell you there's a flock of giant murderstorks just over the hill that might consider humans tasty.
The first-in mission usually lasts for a fixed period, between 24 and 100 hours depending on the nature of the world visited. The more interesting or potentially valuable the place looks on first-link, the longer the first-in mission normally is. The gate is operated from the far side and it's on a schedule, so if a team misses the connection they're SOL; if nobody comes back the address is usually locked off. There might be a followup if the world is promising enough, but for a stranded crasher team that's a thin thread to hang hope on.
Vulture missions: These guys are the followup people. They're all still gatecrashers - the average team will do four or five vulture missions for every first-in - but they get the unglamourous job of going in after the first-in guys and setting up the new world for resource extraction or colonization or research. Despite the insulting name, vultures still run a considerable risk; new worlds don't stop being dangerous just because the first-in guys came back after all, and murderstorks are always potentially over the next hill. Vultures generally tend to make up missions 2-10 to a new setting.
Colonies: In 20XX there are three major colonies and a couple dozen minor ones scattered along the gate network. The majors are Hyborea (mapping to mainline Yggdrasil), $Planet_to_be_named_later (mapping to mainline Arda) and Grand Central (not a mainline world, orbits a nondescript G1 about 550 light years away). Hyborea and $TBD only connect to Oberon and each other, and have been nicknamed the Local Triangle by operators and fanboys. Grand Central is significant because it seems to be a major network node with hundreds, if not thousands of potential links (as opposed to the 1-200 links from Oberon). Most of the heavy gatecrashing activity in Fenspace happens on Grand Central.
Aliens: As of 20XX nobody's seen a real, live alien. Or at least nobody's claimed to have seen a live alien and brought back actual proof of the encounter. There have been plenty of signs that there are aliens
out there, however: gatecrashers have discovered dozens of sites through the network that show the gates have been used or known for a very long time. Traces of alien civilizations ranging from ten million years BP to just a few decades prior have been found, so somebody obviously is using the gate network. Which leads into the next topic of discussion...
The Great "What:" Two years ago, the gatecrasher team 'the Order of St. Grimace' did an otherwise routine first-in mission on a planet that seemed to support primitive life and had some odd ruins strewn around the gate. The Order quickly determined that the planet (officially tagged "Strangelove" in the databases) had gone through a severe nuclear war sometime around 2,500 years BP, a war fought with salted fusion warheads that quickly killed off all the higher lifeforms. Then the Order found remains of the local sapients.
They were
not expecting to find human remains.
Since the discovery of Strangelove, Convention gate authorities have been reevaluating all their data on past "alien" civilizations and are finding that yes, some of these may indeed have been human. The further discovery of Tellus Secundus (again by the Order) has thrown pretty much everybody for a philosophical loop. Who built this duplicate of Sol system? Why did they build it? How in the hell did humans show up in the network? And the $64,000 question: are there more duplicates out there?
Now, the question of namespaces. I'm not opposed to the idea, though if we want to make actual seperate namespaces and not just fake ones I'll have to engage in a little server-side cocking about with config files to make it work. So not quite as simple as all that but hopefully easy enough.
Mr. Fnord
interdimensional man of mystery
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