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[RFC] A Vaster Wheel: Secrets of the Stargates Revealed
[RFC] A Vaster Wheel: Secrets of the Stargates Revealed
#1
I've been sitting on this for a couple days now, time to see it if it sinks or swims. Comment freely and with great vigor. --Mal
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“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” ~ Carl Sagan

Transcript of Federation Council closed session, March 15 2024:

Pres. Alexander Mack: Well, Mal, it’s your show. Go ahead and start.

Amb. M. Fnord (Soviet): Thank you, Mr. President. Ladies, gentlemen. As per the annexation treaty this is the Soviet giving you formal 24 hours notice before we do something, and I quote, “ridiculous and possibly world-shaking.”

Amb. Roger Goldstein (Utopia/Mars): Well, that’s nicely ominous.

~***~

Transcript of Soviet Ministry of (Weird) Science press conference, March 16 2024:

Speakers:
Professor Deidre Griest, Minister of Science (moderator)
Dr. Thomas Palmer, Exo-Archaeology Dept. & Primary Investigator, Project BLUE HEAVEN

MODERATOR: Hello and thank you all for coming, I know that this was a bit of a surprise for some of you, so I’d especially like to thank those who had to mess with their schedules to be here.

As many of you might be aware, the Ministry of Science has been investigating the mysterious alien objects we discovered orbiting the stars Delta Pavonis and Zeta 1 Reticuli for quite a few years now. In the last few months we’ve made significant strides towards understanding the artifacts, and in the process we might have uncovered a deeper mystery.

To my left is Dr. Thomas Palmer, part of the Ministry’s exo-archaeology department and current primary investigator on Project BLUE HEAVEN. Tom is going to open us up with a summary of what we’ve discovered so far, and what we think it all means, then we’ll go to questions.

Tom?

DR. PALMER: Well, alright. Hello, everyone, I’m Tom Palmer, senior researcher at the Ministry of Science and the primary investigator on what we call in-house Project BLUE HEAVEN, the project working on the stargate pair. I’ve been on the program since 2016, and today I’m going to talk about some of our most recent findings.

Okay, so, just to give some background because I know not everybody knows much about the wheres and the whyfores, in 2013 the Soviet sponsored an expedition to the Delta Pavonis system, to check it out and see if there was anything colonizable around it. They found an inhabitable planet alright, but they also found this.

[Image: OD1sQl8.png]

This is what we ended up calling Tannhauser Gate, an artifact in a semi-stable orbit in between the planet Yggdrasil and its innermost moon Skuld. Now this thing is huge: scale’s a tricky thing in space photos but you have to understand that that ring has an inner diameter of around twelve kilometers, or about a third the size of Daniell Crater. Yeah, it’s big. Just finding this in and of itself was a goldmine, but through an amazing stroke of luck, we managed to turn it on without blowing it up. Tannhauser Gate was paired with another artifact, this one in the Zeta 1 Reticuli system.

[Image: gJYvx0E.png]

We called this one Night’s Door. Structurally it’s pretty much the same as Tannhauser Gate, but the control system, the software that was running it was way more complex than anything we’d seen before. We’ve spent the last decade picking that software apart, trying to understand the inner workings. There’s a lot of functionality there that we don’t understand, stuff that we can’t access or we don’t want to risk damaging the system trying to access. In the last year or so we’ve made a series of breakthroughs on how to control the stargates, enough to put together a basic user interface. This is some pretty crude stuff for all the scientific and technological know-how going into it, we’ve basically figured out how to turn the thing on and off. But even that is impressive, because our interface allowed us to find something incredible.

[Image: rOFXnCU.png]

What I’m showing you right now is a library of stargates that Night’s Door can connect to. Right now the accessible library consists of several dozen stargates scattered over hundreds, maybe thousands of light years. We’re still trying to figure out where these things are, the data’s still not firm, but the majority of these are within two thousand light years of Earth. Further analysis, which is again still pending so this may change, suggests that this isn’t an isolated network centered on Zeta 1, that this may, and I want to stress may here, be part of a larger network spanning who knows how far.

And, well, that’s kind of where we are right now. The Sozvezdie Soviet has voted to release all the available data on BLUE HEAVEN to the scientific community as well as the general public, because our world is about to become an order of magnitude bigger and we’ve decided that we can’t keep this to ourselves any longer. It’s big and it’s amazing and everybody should be a part of it. And on that note I think we’ll take some questions.

~***~

Amb. M. Fnord (Soviet): We’re softening the blow a little for the initial release, but the key part is all in the raw data: we’re sure that Night’s Door is part of a much larger network.

Amb. Budi (Jupiter): How are you sure of this?

Amb. M. Fnord (Soviet): The “version for politicians” as Deidre calls it is there’s a specific flag in the library for gates like the Door. We’ve found two so far, even if we haven’t tried them.

Amb. Vinh Van (Earth): And still no sign of the builders?

Amb. M. Fnord (Soviet): Unfortunately no. We’ve tested one new address and we think there’s a Tannhauser signature on the planet the gate orbits, but nothing active.

Amb. Vinh Van (Earth): Ruins would be a start at least, the idea of the entire network being… empty, fallow worlds is a little creepy.

Amb. M. Fnord (Soviet): I won’t say you’re wrong about that.

~***~

Q: My question is simple. You’ve had unrestricted access to the gates for a decade. Why are you coming forward with this now?

DR. PALMER: Um, do you mean in policy or?

Q: In general.

DR. PALMER: That’s more a question for Deidre, I think.

MODERATOR: We’re coming forward with this now as part of the Soviet’s continuing dedication to the freedom of information. In addition to this press conference the raw data has been uploaded to our public web site, as well as the Alexandria Archive and Wikileaks among other places. Everybody is free to look at the information.

DR. PALMER: And that’s something we need. To be perfectly honest we’re just about hitting the limits of what we can accomplish on our own here. Don’t get me wrong, everybody on the project are really skilled, capable scientists but there’s a limit to our collective brainpower. By releasing the data we can let scientists from all over the system take a swing at it, maybe find things we missed or improve on our work. That’s how science is supposed to work, after all.

For the record, I can tell you that everybody on BLUE HEAVEN voted to go public, as did the xenoarch department and the Ministry before we took it to the Soviet for final approval.

Q: My question is, have you found any signs of the original owners, and as a followup do you have plans in place if you do find them?

DR. PALMER: To answer the question first, not yet. Sorry. We’re still hoping to find something, but so far all we have are the gates themselves. Now that we’ve expanded our access we’re hoping to find something within the first couple dozen new locations but again, that’s not definite, that’s hoping.

As for do we have plans in place, well yes we have plans in place. Most of them are variations on “lay low while we figure out the next step” but our field teams have at least a basic idea of what to do if we run into the Gatebuilders. More than that you’d have to ask somebody in Fleet, I’m just a lab guy.

Q: You said you don’t have any absolute location data for us yet on these gates. Why is that?

DR. PALMER: Part of it is that space is very big and not very well charted once you get a certain distance away from Earth. The best astronomical instruments we have have gotten reasonably accurate locations for stars up to five-six hundred light years away, but beyond that we just don’t have good information on any of the stars that are likely to be gate candidates. And there’s a good chance that we’re missing objects that are too dim to see within that sphere, like brown dwarfs or rogue planets.

The gates themselves do have some sort of coordinate system, and we’re confident that after enough study we’ll be able to translate that into something human-readable using Zeta 1 as the zero point. But that’s still on the to-do list.

Q: Have you tried any of these new gate addresses?

DR. PALMER: Yes, actually! We’ve tested one address so far, it was, give me a second, the initial address codenames are all randomized so they’re kind of a pain in the ass to remember.

MODERATOR: SILVER SAINT MARY.

DR. PALMER: Right, that’s it, SILVER SAINT MARY. The destination is a good example of our issues with location data. Our very preliminary analysis says that SILVER SAINT MARY is about 600 light years from Earth, on the far side of the Pleiades from us. We only know that much because our initial probe spotted and identified the cluster and the star positions were, well, reversed. It’s going to take a lot of time and observations before we nail down the gate’s location any better than that.

As far as places to go, the system isn’t too different from Alpha Centauri B, the primary is an orange dwarf and the planet looks habitable, a little warmer and drier than Earth if I remember the probe eval right. I should point out that none of this stuff has a proper name yet. I think we’ll be running a contest on the web site at some point?

MODERATOR: If we haven’t put it up already, yes.

DR. PALMER: Okay, so yes we’ll be running a contest to name the star, planet and gate on the web site.

Q: Dr. Palmer, you talked about “other functionality” you’re hoping to unlock. What exactly did you mean by that?

DR. PALMER: It’s hard to explain without looking at the raw data, but our best understanding of the stargate operating system suggests that it’s supposed to work like a data router.

Okay, example: Take out your phone and look up a web page. Connecting your phone to that page takes a bunch of steps bouncing off the main internet trunk here in Korolevgrad, down to Kandor, back to Earth and to whatever server the page is hosted on. But you don’t have to manually step through all that to get to wherever you’re going, right? It’s all automated. Well, we think the gate network can be used the same way. If we understand it right, we ought to be able to hook into Tannhauser Gate and dial Planet Zug on the far side of the galaxy or whatever and then just step through, while the network does the hard bit.

But, and this is the critical thing, we don’t know how to do that just yet. Right now we’re stuck with stepping through point-to-point connections. Hopefully the data release will help us figure out how to make it work.

~***~

FastJack: The big question is, where the hell are they and why didn’t they leave anything more than the gates behind?

walkingcontradiction: Maybe it’s an automated thing, like a fleet of Von Neumann probes somebody lit off centuries ago and never remembered to send a shutdown signal?

FastJack: Could be, but it still doesn’t answer the question of where they are.

0_of_1: Maybe they set it up like this on purpose.

walkingcontradiction: How do you mean?

0_of_1: Okay, let’s say you’re an elder race that wants to foster connections between mature sophont civilizations. So you get your sophonts all lined up.

FastJack: Back in the Neolithic? ‘Cos that’s when the Reticuli gate was put in according to the commies.

0_of_1: Sure, why not? Modern humans date back to 70,000 years or so, might as well start early. Anyway, you’ve got your sophonts, and they’re going to develop naturally. Some are going to go extinct through bad luck or bad choices, whatever. The ones who survive you want to be mature, so you stick the gate somewhere close but generally inaccessible if you’re not starfaring.

walkingcontradiction: Why not pull a Prothean, stick the gate at the outer edge of the system? Getting from Earth to, like Pluto in a reasonable time frame would show maturity, right?

0_of_1: It might, but our hypothetical elder race wants us to be interstellar, which is an order of magnitude or more difficult than interplanetary, wave mushy or hard.

walkingcontradiction: So they want a certain level of skill and, what? Unity? Interest? Something like that, before they let us get to the gates. I suppose that makes sense.

FastJack: Except that your elders have to make people want to go interstellar. There’s always a minority interested in wandering, just look at our fine selves, but if you looked at Earth’s neighborhood before we started really sending probes you’d think it was poor real estate.

0_of_1: And naturally you’d probably be right. But if there was a set of planets within somewhat easy interstellar range with sufficiently compatible biochemistries…

FastJack: Son of a bitch, the Gardeners.

walkingcontradiction: Wait, no. The Gardeners? I thought they were a separate group, rogue artisanal terraformers or something?

FastJack: We think that because we’ve found Gardner work outside of the Builder network, like the aeroforming platform at Annwyn. But…

0_of_1: Yeah, but. So now you’ve got territory that any planet-bound race is going to be interested in exploring and exploiting, so actually discovering the gate becomes that much more likely. If you find one of the tributary gates like Tannhauser, sooner or later that brings you to a hub.

walkingcontradiction: And then once you’re at the hub you can go anywhere. Including where the other sophonts are. That’s a hell of a long game to set up.

FastJack: If the Gardeners are the same as the Builders then hell yeah it’s a long game. Gwynedd’s ecosystem is at least a million years older than either of the gates we’ve found so far.

0_of_1: Well, they might not be. The Builders are/were interested in Gardener worlds, we know that much from Arda and Arcadia. And if you’re building a intragalactic transit network you’d probably know all the stellar orbits. It might even be that they saw a cluster of Gardener worlds coming together at the right point and set up the network that way.

walkingcontradiction: I suppose we won’t know unless we get the chance to ask.

FastJack: Which brings us back to the question of where the hell they are.

0_of_1: If they’re running this whole thing as some kind of weird social experiment, I imagine they’ve got some sort of overlook or bluff that lets them see the whole network at once. Maybe the galactic core, or one of the globular clusters. If not, well, I figure we’ll find out what the deal is when we find the end of the line.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
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#2
Just as a comment... the ESA mission GAIA is running right now and will deliver a 3D fix of a BILLION stars in this galaxy in the next 5 years... Wink

With available tech (interwave, easy relativistic speed, FTL) I would guess we will have a 3D fix on ALL visible stars in Fenspace 2025.

(edit) okay, all visible stars in THIS galaxy.
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#3
Oh Gawd the ideas running through my head… I hope your happy M Fnord. I *NEED* my brain power for work

OK, breaking this down into sub sections as I work my way through things.

The Network

So the gates work LIKE a data net. This implies a few things:
a) The gates have ridiculous range, practically NO limits on range at all. Why this conclusion? Well, the gates can’t work exactly a data network, otherwise they’d have to be more like Stargate universe style stargates (which are matter/energy converters like Star Trek transporters, but coupled to wormholes to go FTL). Nothing so far written about the gates indicates this style. Thus the gates are ALL point-to-point. The data net-like form must come about by the gates passing messages between them to work out the distance/orientation/motion parameters so the wormhole can form.
IF the gate network IS, in fact, spread across the galaxy, that gives a range of roughly 100,000ly (depending on your estimate of the Milky Way’s diameter). Add in orbiting dwarfs and we’re adding another zero to the end of that.
b) the gates have a comms network between them with superior range and speed to Interwave comms. If it’s a QEC network, it’s superior to the current Fen QEC network in throughput.
c) there HAS to be some sort of busy signal. I very much doubt multiple gates can connect to a single destination at the same time. No-one’s tried it yet to see.

The image of the net you are showing only has 23 gates on it, rather than the several dozen talked about in the text. Unless the other gates are above or below the gates shown. That would be interesting too…

Aliens

So the Soviets have discovered Gardener tech?
Quote: FastJack: We think that because we’ve found Gardner work outside of the Builder network, like the aeroforming platform at Annwyn. But…

This also means we have THREE confirmed alien species: The Squiddies (via beacon signal), The Gardeners, and The Gatebuilders.

The Interstellar Civilisation Project

OK, not only does this provide SO MUCH fodder for the conspiracy fora, but what does it mean for the Fen? We’ve jumped a whole lot by the Wave, are we screwing up the plan at this point?
I won’t get into the whole question of ‘did someone seed the Wave to screw with the Project?’, given we know the gates use a form of wave…
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#4
what this means for the fen is that we have the same Pandora's box decision to make about looking through our gates that they did in the Stargate movie/tv series.

1-do we even bother to start the gates up and look to the other side to find out what's out there?
2-who goes looking if we do?
3-what authority do they have (if any) to negotiate on behalf of the fen, the Earth, or any nation there of?
4-what dangers/help could they find out there?
 
Reply
 
#5
Cobalt Greywalker Wrote:Oh Gawd the ideas running through my head… I hope your happy M Fnord. I *NEED* my brain power for work
Yes, well, that was kind of the point. Big Grin

Quote:IF the gate network IS, in fact, spread across the galaxy, that gives a range of roughly 100,000ly (depending on your estimate of the Milky Way’s diameter). Add in orbiting dwarfs and we’re adding another zero to the end of that.
I haven't yet fully sketched out the network, but it runs along at least one spiral arm and possibly more with some potentially interesting outliers.

Quote:The image of the net you are showing only has 23 gates on it, rather than the several dozen talked about in the text. Unless the other gates are above or below the gates shown. That would be interesting too…
That is more a casualty of quick-and-dirty infographicing than anything hard and fast. There are more gates in the library than listed on the graphic, I just ran out of patience generating does names after gate 23. Wink

Quote:So the Soviets have discovered Gardener tech?
The Soviets haven't. Or at least they haven't found anything obviously lying around -- there has to be something maintaining Valinor's ecosystem but best guess is it's buried deep inside the moon. The aeroforming platform was found by Greenwood's colony expedition to 36 Oph A.

Quote:I won’t get into the whole question of ‘did someone seed the Wave to screw with the Project?’, given we know the gates use a form of wave…
That would be telling. Smile
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
Reply
 
#6
This brings my mind back to the original 'genesis' post I made a few months back which got rejected by the community....

I'd rather like to put forward the idea of there being *something* beneath the ice-sheet of antarctica. Nothing particularly goofball or crazy, something crashed or maybe trash like an old coke bottle washed up on a pristine island paradise, -or maybe whatever the hell was used to seed some of these gardners worlds with life - they had to get their green-green from somewhere, why not here? Something that's enough for Doctor Katsuragi of the Tsoukalous Institute to organise an expedition to Mt. Markham to find it. While everyone laughs at Shinji's response when he finds out....(I'll admit, that's the sole reason for me putting that forward,)

As it is, I wouldn't be averse to the alien 'predecessors' remaining unmet, while their wreckege is left behind like so many roadside picnics.

On Arcadia there're even lifeforms that live off of the energy from gate-wreckage and have handwavium as an integral part of their biology.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
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#7
I can't imagine Gina'd be exactly thrilled either. Or worse, maybe she would.
Reply
 
#8
Quote:Dartz wrote:
This brings my mind back to the original 'genesis' post I made a few months back which got rejected by the community....

I'd rather like to put forward the idea of there being *something* beneath the ice-sheet of antarctica. Nothing particularly goofball or crazy, something crashed or maybe trash like an old coke bottle washed up on a pristine island paradise, but enough for Doctor Katsuragi of the Tsoukalous Institute to organise an expedition to Mt. Markham to find it. While everyone laughs at Shinji's response when he finds out....(I'll admit, that's the sole reason for me putting that forward.)

As it is, I wouldn't be averse to the alien 'predecessors' remaining unmet, while their wreckege is left behind like so many roadside picnics.
For all we know, Fenspace's wavium might come from a discarded alien repair kit or something. XD
I've got some Exploration ship ideas myself, going to work on those quietly.
_______________________________________________________________
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Sabre Fang
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#9
(Popping in while a snafu regarding my mother's funeral arrangements gets resolved...)

Okay, this is listed as "RFC", so it doesn't have to happen. Granted, it's a request for comments from the guy who created the setting, so yeah.

Squidleighs: Currently, we're looking at at least two years each way just to go see the neighbours. If this is a go, then all we have to do is find the closest gate to their homeworld, surf through to it, and either meet them at their colony in that system or go visit their homeworld. Travel time drops from years to weeks; that's a major game-changer.

Antarctica: Please, no. I really, really want there to be no hint of "alien astronauts" in humanity's prehistory.

(Snafu resolved; back to more important things than Fenspace)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
Reply
 
#10
A coke bottle under millenia old icepack?

[Image: cat-aliens-history-channel-1a7B2.jpg]
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll
Reply
 
#11
Cobalt Greywalker Wrote:The Network

So the gates work LIKE a data net. This implies a few things:
a) The gates have ridiculous range, practically NO limits on range at all. Why this conclusion? Well, the gates can’t work exactly a data network, otherwise they’d have to be more like Stargate universe style stargates (which are matter/energy converters like Star Trek transporters, but coupled to wormholes to go FTL). Nothing so far written about the gates indicates this style. Thus the gates are ALL point-to-point. The data net-like form must come about by the gates passing messages between them to work out the distance/orientation/motion parameters so the wormhole can form.
IF the gate network IS, in fact, spread across the galaxy, that gives a range of roughly 100,000ly (depending on your estimate of the Milky Way’s diameter). Add in orbiting dwarfs and we’re adding another zero to the end of that.
b) the gates have a comms network between them with superior range and speed to Interwave comms. If it’s a QEC network, it’s superior to the current Fen QEC network in throughput.
c) there HAS to be some sort of busy signal. I very much doubt multiple gates can connect to a single destination at the same time. No-one’s tried it yet to see.

I had a few ideas about this involving (technoblabble incoming) a tuneable quantum entanglement... like normal entanglement, but if you know the "address" you can dial a receiver. Very difficult to do right, especially on long distance and without the special elements involved in the gates.

The catgirls at Nostromo have been trying to make sense out of the atomic crystal structure of their share (~ 500 gramm) of gate metal, but the only thing they got until "now" are a few improvements for their normal waved QEDs (mostly in terms of bandwidth and device size).

What do you think about the idea?
Reply
 
#12
A little more story stuff, because why not?
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USS Indiana Jones (NCC-1936)
Unnamed planet, system designation SILVER SAINT MARY
May 3, 2024


One of the most important things when conducting archaeology is the site survey: getting a general feel for the size and layout of a dig site is critical, not just for the context of the site but also to make sure that you don’t accidentally park your port-a-johns on top of something important. When doing a dig hundreds of light years away from Earth, the site survey becomes even more critical. In the brave new world of the twenty-first century, the traditional surveyor’s techniques had been enhanced by the use of long-range orbital scans, which would get a snapshot of how big the site was before sending the archaeologists in to do things the hard way.

So as the Indiana Jones drifted in low orbit over its target, the scientists had little to do but wait for the scans to finish, look out the window at the off-green world below them and gossip.

“So they still haven’t named this rock yet?” One of the geophysicists said. “It’s been, what, a month? Two?”

“Oh you wouldn’t believe how crazy it is right now,” Jade Hasegawa said, ears drooping. “Communications is like in open war with ballot-stuffing channers. An entire eastern European country’s worth of computers are trying to force ‘Planet Dickbutt’ through the website. Aunt Katze’s just about ready to send in the marines—like actual Fleet Marines. It’s just nuts.” She sighed dramatically. “We should just name the stupid thing Bob and be done with it.”

“Somehow I don’t think that’ll work any more than Planet Dickbutt,” the geophysicist pointed out.

“Yeah, I suppose.”

The annunciator chimed. “Bridge to lab,” the XO’s voice said. “We’re coming up on the Tannhauser signature. Scanners are hot.”

“Understood, bridge,” Jade replied. “We’ll take it from here.” The waiting over, the lab section shifted into gear as scientists took their assigned consoles and started pulling feeds from the Indiana Jones’s sensor array. Jade took control of the main array and pointed it at a hot spot in the Tannhauser display. “Okay guys let’s get ready. Target should be coming into visual in five minutes.”

Five minutes later the ship crawled over the unnamed planet’s limb and the visual scanners picked up their first glimpse of the target. The image was pretty stark: a large, pronged tower draped in thick vines, jutting out of a mound in the center of the plain. Where the bare surface was visible the metal glittered the unmistakable red-gold color of stargate alloy. “Woof, okay yeah that’s our boy,” Jade said, aiming the sensor array. “Confirmed Tannalloy readings, getting some stuff on the manatron too. Looks like it’s got residual magical signature if nothing else. Anybody else got anything?”

“I’m looking at the mounds around the structure,” replied an archaeologist. “Those look really regular for dunes. Might be building remains.”

“Check that maybe,” the sensor operator said. “I’m picking up refined aluminum, some hydrocarbon... might be plastics, and maybe some handwavium. I think we’ve got a settlement.”

“Have we seen anything like this elsewhere?” Jade asked.

“Not yet, but if it’s in that level of disrepair we might not have seen it on the low-gain. We only have this resolution on the scanners because of the Tannhauser signature.”

“Hrm.” Jade tapped open a comlink. “Lab to bridge: when we get a spare moment put in a request for a dozen or so satellites with high-gain planetary survey scanners. We’ve got signs of prior settlement but we can’t tell if this was an outpost, a colony or a homeworld from here.”

“Understood,” the duty officer said after a brief pause. “We’ll let Command know on the next message buoy. Have you made any progress on our signature?”

“Only that it’s pretty big, still intact and it hasn’t shot at us yet. We’ll let you know more as we figure it out. Lab out.”
~***~

Excerpt from “The Weave Gazetteer” (2034):

THE STATIONMASTER: An artifact believed to be of Builder manufacture found on the surface of [REDACTED] during the initial survey of the Core Node systems. The Stationmaster is a vertical pillar of gate metal reaching some 550 meters from the prairie of [REDACTED]’s northeastern continent, making it easily visible for kilometers in all directions. Researchers believe the tower to be hollow, or at least that much like the gates more complex machinery can be found within but to date have not found an access point to the interior. The Stationmaster is believed to be active in some fashion, as it emits a steady stream of RF and manatronic radiation.

The area around the Stationmaster includes the ruins of a settlement established roughly 8,000 BP. This settlement (nicknamed “Shining Time Station” by the surveyors) appears to have been built well after the Builders visited [REDACTED] and is clearly focused on the Stationmaster. The exact purpose of the settlement; scientific, religious or otherwise, is still a matter of some debate as little useful data has been gleaned from excavation...”
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
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#13
"Well, to give you an idea of the sort of energies we could get out of this stuff, both of those batteries can provide something like 500 kilowatts, continuously, for 5 hours. Five of them would finish LeMans without stopping. The actual metal inside them's only about the size of a AA battery. It's an order of magntitude below nuclear, but still massively higher than chemical reactions.

All the rest is there just to keep that and the power systems from melting. If that all came out at once - well - it'd be a bit of a bang alright but it's self-regulating. The hotter it gets, the more it expands and the reaction throttles down to a safe level. Just by regulating the temperature, the load and the inducer coil we can charge it and throttle it pretty good even without superconductors. We used them to power motoroids, and a few other little things. It completely dominated even the best handwaved power supplies.

I didn't know that each battery had more gate metal in it than had been recovered from just about anywhere else to that point. I mean, nobody else had really worked with macro-scale amounts of the stuff since all the scientists and archeologists had been too afraid of damaging the intact gates to take more than the slightest shavings.

The first time on Arcadia, we brought back a chunk wighing about 450 kilos. On that mission, we brought back ni - uhm - six tons or so but we ended up having to give that away because the Federation didn't like us doing that, and diplomancy and all that. I think it went out to the usual research people after that. They probably had a cat....

And we sold about fifteen Judy motoroids, with two batteries each, to the Public before the lid got popped off. So yea, fifteen people now own genuine 5-gram pieces of Arcadia Tannhauser gate."
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#14
I've got to say that I don't like it.

It basically stretches the setting too thin. Now instead of small towns on a frontier, it turns into single-man cabins scattered across antartica, with chance of aliens/zombies/zombie-aliens/oh-god-why-is-everything-on-fire. We don't even have a lot of fiction outside the solar system, and like you said, there's only what? 10 million people Up?

It SHOULD eventually happen, but it's just too far, too fast, not enough people to keep the feel.

Think about it, for a reasonable travel distance of say, 15 lightyears from any one of the 23 named gates, you're looking at 20-30 stars on average. Someone will stop by, look, go home, and they're basically effectively meaningless for the plot. We've already got so much territory to cover in our own backyard that even in the projected fluff the first extrasolar settlements practically next door to us don't really pass 50k permenant residents until 2020/2025.  This will basically... add nothing to the setting, and the implications could twist it in unwelcome ways. Shouldn't we have, I dunno, a mass exodus from Earth actually driving extrasolar settlements before we go jumping to 'we can now jump 2000 lightyears away from earth'?
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#15
I don't think that the actual discovery of the network needs to be put off, after a point you've got to fire Chekhov's Gun, right? A good bit of what I want to use the gate network to explore would be helped with a decent-sized timeskip. (I've got some awesome ideas, but I can't quite articulate them, argh.) Of course the timeskip brings its own frustrations to bear and its... I don't know.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

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#16
M Fnord Wrote:I don't think that the actual discovery of the network needs to be put off, after a point you've got to fire Chekhov's Gun, right? A good bit of what I want to use the gate network to explore would be helped with a decent-sized timeskip. (I've got some awesome ideas, but I can't quite articulate them, argh.) Of course the timeskip brings its own frustrations to bear and its... I don't know.

Issue is, the sheer discovery alone is suspicious as the Mass Relays in ME, and would send up all sorts of alarm bells. That alone would warp the setting as much as the Boskone War as people try to figure out WTF. Dozens, hundreds of gates with mysteriously terraformed worlds? That's so far into Admiral Ackbar's territory that I shouldn't even need to suggest it.

Ultimately, my problem is something about three or fourfold:
One: For the purposes of storytelling, the gates don't offer any use yet due to the stated population of the fen, and would require a significantly massive warping of the tone of the series to really exploit it, with either a massive danelaw backed exploration and colonisation push, or something else to force the issue.

Two: Where the potential fridge-horror of fen engines is easy to wave away (heh), it's basically impossible not to draw disturbing conclusions from 'for at least 2000 ly from earth somebody terraformed and left a giant gate network without ANY markers or contact attempts'. As I said, this just screams 'trap'. Navigational beacons, a message saying. 'All these worlds are open, you're welcome', something. There is an implication that either a force is screwing with humanity, or that whoever built the gates went away very suddenly.

Three:The KISS principle. It doesn't really add to any story or storyline that I think of other than the squiddies (which could be solved by them activating a single gate near their own world instead). It's a big distraction, and adds dozens of new potential wrinkles for people to need to address or solve.

I know why you want to include it, but... I just don't think that your broad implimentation will do anything good for the setting. It's plot kudzu.
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#17
Actually, now that I think of it, could it be postponed until after Lun's 2024 mission..... I'd been hoping for it to lead into something big (Originally the discovery of gatebuilder ruins on Earth).... maybe the sensor technology built for Lun leads to some sort of discovery related to this.

That thing was basically built to quickly survey a planet for broken and inactive gate-bits and similar signatures, so it comes with all the fun stuff like a full gradiometer array and a 'tanalloy sensor' that's probably doing more than anyone realises once the Big Minds get a look at it.

Otherwise, I'm really struggling to come up things for thise beyond what I've already done on the subject.

-----

Quote: or that whoever built the gates went away very suddenly.

I quite like things like this that may not be directly stated, but implied.
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#18
Okay, it MIGHT be possible to make this work without breaking the setting too much.

Basically, what you're wanting is: (I think)

A) Reveal more about the gatebuilders/gardeners without meeting them. Currently, as it stands, you do it, but not nearly to the extent that you multiply existing questions and raise disturbing new implications in that all the worlds explored are empty/ruined, and the only thing found is a single settlement so far.
B) Expand the frontier greatly. Kind of pointless, since there's hundreds of stars within a month's travel of Earth, so dozens of gates is ludicrous overkill.
C) Force an encounter with aliens.

I think you could get away with the current story with a bit of work. Have it be that the exploration wakes up the local gate network cluster AI. After explorers start coming back from the various destinations, probing the system gets rejected by the gate, with it probing the ship systems for language files. It proceeds to respond, saying that the explorers are violating primitive species protection zones. One or two are left open, like the Silver Moon one with the spire, which the gate refuses to directly answer on, but but the identity code suggests it was a hub station that was abandoned. (Impact/got uneconomical to leave people there). When prodded again on the subject, it makes another gate available, which leads to a system about 50 lightyears from the Squiddies (which is determined from seeing engine trails or picking up transmissions at long range).

Less icky trap sensation, but depending on how you frame the response, you could keep from implying that the gatebuilders/gardeners were a happy-go-lucky UFoP. It could just as easily suggest that they left because they realized that a lot of planets along the spiral arm were developing sentient life, and they didn't want to put up with it, and leave it open enough that there's questions without those questions being annoying or setting-breaking. And, we get to play with the Squidleigh without there being a crazy travel time, while leaving the timing of our encounter up to the authors.
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#19
The thoughts behind the gate network... well, there were a couple reasons for doing it.

First of all, I wanted to spread some deeper weirdness and mysteries into the Fenspace galaxy. The Gatebuilders were always going to be just the beginning of it; I had an incomplete (& honestly awful) piece about a gate expedition coming across a wrecked Byzantine starship somewhere in the further-flung reaches of the network, which would then serve as a lead-in to one of the crazier bits of lore I was hoping to use.

Second, I wanted to give the writers the opportunity to get out of the solar system and go somewhere they wanted to go. Clearly the frontier-as-developed, which interesting in a worldbuilding sense just doesn't generate stories the same way that running across, oh I don't know, let's say Westeros in the gate network would. If nobody wants to go write about Little-House-On-The-Prairie shit in the Alpha Centauri system well fine, we can background that and set up a way for troubleshooters to go shoot trouble elsewhere in the galaxy.

But apparently I misjudged. So, yeah, um, sorry.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

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#20
M Fnord Wrote:The thoughts behind the gate network... well, there were a couple reasons for doing it.

First of all, I wanted to spread some deeper weirdness and mysteries into the Fenspace galaxy. The Gatebuilders were always going to be just the beginning of it; I had an incomplete (& honestly awful) piece about a gate expedition coming across a wrecked Byzantine starship somewhere in the further-flung reaches of the network, which would then serve as a lead-in to one of the crazier bits of lore I was hoping to use.

Second, I wanted to give the writers the opportunity to get out of the solar system and go somewhere they wanted to go. Clearly the frontier-as-developed, which interesting in a worldbuilding sense just doesn't generate stories the same way that running across, oh I don't know, let's say Westeros in the gate network would. If nobody wants to go write about Little-House-On-The-Prairie shit in the Alpha Centauri system well fine, we can background that and set up a way for troubleshooters to go shoot trouble elsewhere in the galaxy.

But apparently I misjudged. So, yeah, um, sorry.
Well, like I said, it could still partially be salvaged if you immediately limited it off again like I suggested, which would deepen the mystery in a non-Lost way. Would the gate system be shutting the fen out from most of those gates because they think the fen are hackers? Or is it because the gatebuilders are going Clint Eastwood and telling us to get off their lawn? Or is it a prime directive flavor? Is it even an intelligence instead of a really smart dumb computer making judgement calls? I was going to suggest leaving one or two gates open because the system is trying to get us to retreat the remaining researchers across (because whatever locked the fen back out doesn't want us trying to throw super-AIs at it to break the network?) and lets the guys on the other side call up a gate connection that people from our side exploit to send more through.  And maybe shunting the fen towards the squiddies as a time-buying measure (or so the theories go).

If you're wanting more frontier stories, there kind of needs to be more people Up in order to generate the pressures to go Out. Or maybe some kind of crazy Pandora-world where a lot of Boskonians ran to after they got their pants and socks knocked off by the combined military operations. 

It could still work, it just needs to be thought out more.
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