Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Amon Assemon and the greater universe (Traveller Tuesday #25)

Now that we’ve got a nearly-complete image of Assemonite society, we can start to explore how they connect to the rest of the system and the rest of the universe.  Here again, we apply a progressive negative DM the further we get from the mainworld so as to achieve a crowded solar system while preserving the importance of the mainworld.  That makes this a 2d6-1 roll, which is a 3.  It’s pretty clear that the qweens of the Drag Moon have set it up as a separatist space, that they have retreated from the rest of the system as a way of building safe space (remember I said I had met some queer fascists in my life?  They usually ended up in fascism by proceeding from a misinterpretation of separatism) and to focus on their unique culture separate from the effects of living surrounded by people who are fundamentally different.  Why is that clear? Because that 3 indicates a Class E Starport ~ the lowest class at which an installation can be called a Starport.

The good news is that means there’s no cost to berth here!  But there’s also no chance to buy any of the drug mixture used by the biological components of the noetic drive to engage the Casey Jones Effect and achieve FTL.  Nor is there an opportunity to get your ship repaired at all.  What there is is a tiny chance that space pirates have taken up here and created a secret base.  2D6 have to roll 12 in order for that to be the case, and we get . . . a 7 :-(  I was kind of hoping for that to work out, too, cuz queer space pirates in extravagant outfits sounds hella cute.

We do roll an 11, however, on an unmodified 2d6 roll to determine the planet’s global extensiveness, which means that it is discordant.  In addition to it housing a population long famous for its strong opinions on politics, fashion, and damn near everything else, it seems likely that the Assemonite Twin Party isn’t the only one to have noticed the slow creep of fascism on the moon ~ others did and had quite a few different opinions about it, from the positive to the negative to the shady to the humorous to the bizarre.  Add in the religious divisions which seem to simmer beneath a veneer of shared vagaries of faith, and you get a culture that maintains its unity but argues within itself constantly.

As for its interstellar extensiveness, that 2d6 roll gets a +2 DM for its starport and another +2 for being conservative.  10+4 is 14, so, yep, definitely fascistic ~ that’s a strongly xenophobic result.  Amon Assemon is not terribly welcoming to outsiders.  Queer outsiders, at least, will be recognized as potential neighbors, even if it will take them years to earn a place in the community.  Another 2d6 roll comes up 2, showing that the law is enforced based on personal whim here on this moon.  Considering the various influences I’m pulling on for its culture, I’d say that this looks like a combination of the country/Wild West sheriff whose interpretation of the law is more important than the letter, and the famous tendency of fascist governments to foster individual abuses of power by people at all levels of government.

And that brings us to Amon Assemon’s technology level.  We start with 1d6, which means we start with  ~ actually, we don’t start with anything yet, because a world’s technology is partially dependent on its physical characteristics, which we haven’t determined yet.  We've already determined its diameter ~ 1280 km ~ when we worked out Ishee's seismic stress factor.  In order to determine its atmosphere, we roll 2d6-7 to get 0.  Amon Assemon, completely unshockingly, lacks any atmosphere whatsoever.  Size and atmosphere conspire to make the roll for the moon’s type a 2d6+2.  An 8 gives us a molten core, and a follow-up 3d6 roll of 15 means that Amon Assemon is just a bit denser than Earth, 1.06 times as dense, to be exact.

Now we start the math.  Size 0 is treated as 0.6 for these calculations.  0.6 divided by 8 is 0.075, which gets cubed into 0.000421875.  We multiply that by the density we just determined, for a final Assemonite mass of 0.0004471875 Earths.  As heavy as it is, it’s still tinytiny.  Calculating the gravity of the moon starts with squaring 0.6 (for size), which is obviously 0.36.  We then divide 64 by that, which results in 177.7777777777777778, and that is finally multiplied by the moon’s mass.  Ultimately, we figure out that Amon Assemon’s gravity is 0.0795 g (plus an infinitesimal tiny bit more after another 16 zeroes).  I would weigh about 14 pounds there, which is weird to consider, actually.

The amount of time it takes Amon Assemon to orbit Ishee (an Assemonite month) involves some big numbers, which is annoying.  The first step is to take its distance from Ishee in kilometers, which means I have to go back and check an older post, and divide it by 400,000.  16,720/400,000 is 0.0418, which is then cubed into 0.000073034632 and then multipled by 2793.64.  The resultant 0.20403246934048 is divided by Ishee’s mass, which I have to go back and check again.  Ishee is 0.0153125 Earth-masses, which means the penultimate step of this calculation turns out to be 13.32456942631706122.  Finally, we take the square root of that, and the result is the length of an Assemonite month.  Amon Assemon takes 3 Earth-days, 15 hours, 36 minutes, and about 24.5 seconds to orbit Ishee.

Its rotation is much easier to determine.  We start with that distance from Ishee divided by 400,000, which we’ve already determined.  It’s 0.0418, and we divide Ishee’s mass of 0.0153125 by that number, which comes out to be 0.3663277511961722.  We add 5 and then we roll (2d6-2)x4 ~ it’s 32 ~ and add that in, too, for a total rotational period (“day”) of 37.3663277511961722.  Which is less than 40, so we take it as done ~ Amon Assemon rotates one full rotation in 37 Earthdays, 8 hours, 47 minutes, and almost 30.75 seconds.  That’s like 12 times as long as it takes to circle Ishee!

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