<shiftyeyes>
Splitting up? Muahaha.
Recent Forum Posts
wait, marine pilots? not navy officer pilots? i think i missed this before in my attempt to read lol. we could still have PCs mostly be marines and combat oriented, but i think we might reconsider shaking up the military order established on the show. it's interesting to have the dynamic there of bootnecks v. officers. maybe Star Screamers are just badass pilots who took heavy combat training.
i figured the science types could be military officer types (cos you can attain a higher rank when you join w/ advanced degrees) with perhaps some civvie consultants. is that what you were thinking too, or…? think tank, baby (but without Baltar… maybe he's too damn arrogant and busy elsewhere.)
i like the idea of everyone having to simmer, not ICly knowing what happened. a little anticipation and freaky happening is pretty fun. should inspire some good rp.
speaking as someone who ended up playing a cylon the second time around (you know, i'm dead, no wait, 7 months later hi again!) it's really hard to do without stepping all over everyone else's rp. since Cor had already died, i wasn't too boohoo about the possibility of her being killed again (and never expected to survive running into Limmer the first time anyway). i think we should avoid over-use of skinjob NPCs and probably not have them as PCs.
also we should be aware that in having a station and a Battlestar, if they eventually split up, it'll be like running 2 games at once. (kinda like on BSP where there were civvie plots and mil plots.)
About the Battlestar: might want to make it be somewhat top of the line. I guess Valkyrie is pretty well up there. But you might want to consider something in that particular class with a different name. Something from classical mythology that has to do with life from death. Like Osiris or Isis. It makes sense for it to be top of the line if its guarding something top secret. The FTL shouldn't be on the fritz from disrepair or disuse or improper maintenance. Maybe a minor asteroid hit or something just prior to the Cylon attack on the colonies? So a good first project for the engineering group will be repairing the FTL so they are jump capable again.
As for the ship potentially having a cloaking device, I think that may be a bad move personally. There hasn't been any mention of one in the show, save for the 'stealth ship' that they created on BSG. If the Colonial Fleet had a cloaking device, you'd think they would have installed it on all their Battlestars. What would make more sense is if the station above the planet wasn't just all about terraforming. What if it were a Colonial Think Tank of the brightest minds in the Colonies and once the terraforming was begun, they could be set to other projects such as developing some sort of cloak device or new weapon. That'd give players opportunities to come up with weapon projects, develop them and then test and implement them ICly, providing some good RP.
I know Faraday has been posting and I know that you guys have the old database, too, so coding should be minimal, but I thought I'd volunteer if you need any assistance in that regard.
we could have some npc skinjobs with programming kick in (sleepers) when stuff starts to get hairy on the station. maybe they make small sabotages (which are, unbeknownst or perhaps unremembered by them, to be attempts to send some smoke signals back to the mother ship.) it would set the Colonials on guard even more, maybe a few months after opening. from there, if we got bored of the planet/station rp, we could always send out some recon, have them be detected by cylons, and initiate a merry chase (leaving a signature trail the cylons can follow? darn you, sabotage) which gives the Colonials that OHSHITBASESTAR moment. how are they following us? i don't know! crap, do we or don't we go back to the station and warn them, taking a risk that we'll be followed?
Hehe Rue. Ok, to answer your questions here. And I'm pretty open about things, I visualized an 'All Marine Battlestar', but as Landon and Geller pointed out, I'm just a GURL. :D No seriously. Genesis will now have NPC Navy for the time being. Heavy marine contingent and the Star Screamers are Marine Pilots in Gold Squadron. I plan on bringing in a Silver for Navy, at some point.
Navy is on the Support Station PAS. There are no skinjob, sneaky-cylons hiding in our midst. Ok no sneaky-cylons that we see on the series. Ok, not any skinjobs at this time… 'Not to say there may not be some corporate spy' }:>
As for the recons, yeah, this was my thoughts as well. I've added to the theme now of what I put on the MUSH and copied to the Wiki. I've added another Pic under the Genesis Station.
I am currently making small star system maps too, to keep an outline for myself of Beginning to End - I have a point where I figure they will end up. But RP can also change that. I'm not going to stomp in - You Must Go Here! Heck we may all blow up and just be space dust.
My idea is these Scientists, Astrophysicists or whatever is hanging around, plus the Military, has an idea of other Star Systems out there. Just like we in RL do and they have theories of these places. As I mentioned on channel they know the Cylons are --> over there at their homeworld somewhere and now they hit the colonies.
So, we wanna be --—> Way opposite of where they are. Can we sneak off? hmm…
Hiya. Thought I'd toss a hello, an introduction and some opinions down. So, in that order… Hi. I played Rue and Ozymandias on BSP. No, I didn't get a whole lot of play time, but the times I did, I enjoyed immensely.
I have to say that the idea of a secret installation that the Cylons can't easily get at is a pretty good one. Another thing that I think should be a must is guaranteed (and somewhat frequent) combat. Social RP is an awesome thing, but nothing pulls numbers (and lifeblood in the form of players) onto a game like good ol' shooting of things.
I don't know about Marines being in charge of a starship, though. You mentioned having pilots, which sort of means having Navy, unless the pilots weren't navy and were marines… but that sort of seems counter-intuitive to the way the show and Pacifica portrayed the organization of the Colonial Fleet. Navy pilots fly Marines to the ground or to other ships where they do their shooty shooty thing with big guns and blow things up.
But back to shooting things. You might consider not having any skinjobs in the fleet. Why? Because this detail, out in the middle of nowhere, super top secret and (seeing Jonas2625's comment right below this one as of this writing), the force protecting this project never had the CNS system installed by Baltar. It stands to reason then that maybe it was secret enough that the Cylons never infiltrated it. The Metallic Toasters are scarier (and much harder to take down) anyway. If you didn't have any skinjobs, you'd also avoid the issue of having A. players play them or B. having to have staff NPC them. Also, between BSG and Pacifica the 'oh noes, anyone could be a cylon' thing has been done. Granted, it's a part of the Battlestar Mythos, but there are other ways of instigating conflict and giving players that good old 'oh shit' factor.
Why not let them simmer a bit with no communication (also in relative safety as no one knows where they are), before someone gets the bright idea to go scouting. Start sending recon patrols out quick like flint to the Colonies, start to piece together what happened, run into a Cylon Baseship or ten (oh shit!). They flee home, we brood about the demise of civilization, then we decide payback is going to be a bitch and use this awesome hiding place of ours to stage attacks and rescue people.
And, if we really want to get themely, toss in some religiousity in the form of some obscure 'forgotten' book of some prophet… think how the Catholic Church rejected some gospels from the final cut of the Bible… describing some of the events taking place. The end goal would be continuing the war, establishing a new home (perhaps the project was started just in case the Cylons DID attack), and if you want some continuity, have the game end somewhere around the time that Pacifica's timeline wrapped up with permanent settlement and the two New Colonies making contact.
Or something like that.
Whatever you end up doing, can I be a pilot and pewpew things?
<3
Ok, basically, they will be in this area for a bit.
What I'm looking at here, from the way I did my little map. Is they are three jumps away from the colonies. What is that? Half a light year or something? Anyway, they'd be pretty much off radar for a little while.
If we start up 45 days before the attacks and manage a month after, I think that will give us the amount of time to get butts in gear. Planning, strategies, etc.
Genesis Zero Hour
o The Armistice Station is destroyed by Cylon forces.
o The Twelve Colonies are heavily bombarded by nuclear bombs.
o Picon Fleet Headquarters is destroyed.
o Galactica engages Cylon Raiders and survives with moderate damage and 85 dead.
o Last transmission from the Colonies received to Galactica.
o Commander Adama assumes overall Fleet command and orders regroup at Ragnar Anchorage.
o Caprica Government Headquarters destroyed. All top secret military files lost. Caprica investors buried under tons of rubble when Raiders hit the Hylar building.
Genesis Days Begin - No One Knows We Are Here.
T-Minus Day 45 BCH - Players start roleplaying.
Day 3 ACH
o Last transmission from Colonies. Static leaves transmission a puzzle.
Day 5 ACH
o Transfer ships for rotating marines fail to arrive.
o Major Stiger raises Alert to Code Orange.
Day 10 ACH
o Supply ships fail to arrive.
Day 11 ACH
o Picon and Aerelon response units reportedly hiding people in an underground bunker.
o Sagittaron Resistance begins.
Edits this: DING. Ok, you meant the wiki. It is in the code. ;) Updated.
Hehe, thanks for the catch. I'll fix it.
Er..when I find it again. Hah.
I'm sad that there's no Lance Corporal rank under the marines. It's my favorite. Might I humbly suggest following the USMC rank list?
Private - PFC - Lance Cpl - Corporal - Sergeant - Staff Sgt - Gunnery Sgt - Master Sgt - Sgt Major
Note that this has 9 ranks, whereas the old BSP rank list only had 8 (old goof on my part). You could fix it to make the Navy/Marines match by adding a Petty Officer 3rd class, which is the missing rank between Specialist and PO2. Then they'd both have 9 ranks.
It sounded like Jonas' idea involved 'bugging out' after the initial attack, though, and I thought you wanted them to stay in that system with the planet?
I can imagine them holding off the first attack, if the Cylons sent an underpowered force, but with hundreds of base stars at their disposal, it seems impossible for the Colonials to hold out for long if they stayed in the system.
good ones.
I like it, Cor likes it. Consider it sold as workable. :)
Top secret Colonial terraforming project, located on a planet with the basic requirements to sustain life, Gravity, radiation requirements, atmosphere essentials, etc. Project is kept off the grid for security reasons. All communications routed through black ops research stuff, need to know basis only.
System has natural mining resources due to heavy asteriod presence, with a small spotter station on the fringe of the system with DRADIS relay bouys set through the system to aid navigation through the asteroids. trying to navigate through the asteroids without this is a nightmare.
Due to security and blackout considerations, this force was never installed with the CNS system created by Baltar, and is therefore immune to the Cylon 'Smash through your military' virus. Still, the force consists of only one Battlestar, a few military support ships and a number of other military forces, such as a planetside base more dedicated to terraforming.
Cylon attack would be overwhelming, but the colonials could fight back and eventually bug out. Number superiority would be with the Cylons, but home court advantage would be Colonial, who have 'dug in' considerably. Skinjobs could be few, but present, and with all the security, would be hard pressed to do much of anything under the tight lockdown in the system, and more able to move only after the attack.
There's my spitballing ideas out there.
yeah. we need us some Cylon repellent.
I agree, Fara and Aima bring up good points. As I'm giving this a poke with the timeline I put up, that we'll have something worked out six years before they attacked. This is why I wanted to pull in the Valkyrie class. I've been around numerous forums with speculations. It was used with Adama as Commander of it, when he sent the guy across the armistice line and he was captured. Adama had the stuff nuked, then later on figured he may have begun this war, due to crossing that line and trying to get info.
We know very little of what the Valkyrie actually is or did. Speculation is it was going to be a much faster and smaller ship to replace the old ships and Pegasus was the 'new big ship'.
One reason I have put the Marines in charge of it instead of the navy fleet command? It is a warship, albeit a smaller one. Adama had it and then our Super Sekret Ninja forces took hold. Does it have capabilities no one knows about yet? Very possible it will come out as I'm sure the Major knows. ;)
I didn't want another Pacifica, we had so much fun there and we ended our time. But, I did know people missed space and combat, for some ungodly reason. HEE!
Babylon 5 Meets BSG? I didn't think that, but I do like it.
Skinjobs. They are around. These people probably have no idea, there won't be cloned copies of any of the ones we know here. Do they know about this government project? I dunno, do they? They were so fixated on Caprica, nothing about the other colonies were really mentioned. They exterminated people, they took them over as the war progressed, but all files are now destroyed. That is my main point of:
No One Knows We Are Here.
I'm not saying they will never discover it. In fact, they probably scouted it at some point. The moon is dead, the planet is inhabitable, no scans would have shown human types. It's probably on their starcharts. But not anything they are interested in, for the time being. Rad field? Heavy asteroid fields? Small sun goes nova? I agree we need a defense line. :)
Sorry so wordy :)
Okay, here's another idea, taking the deep space idea and expanding. Right now in our own RL world they are surprisingly close to actually making devices that will bend light and other forms of radiation, thus cloaking objects. Basically, rendering them invisible. Why not have a smaller Battlestar model that's been built in secrecy with cloaking technology? It would still somehow have to deal with the Cylon virus or be rendered useless. But as a cloaked ship it would be quite a weapon against the Cylons. Maybe we wouldn't be towing a civvie fleet per se either, having maybe incorporated the few civvies found in space. It wouldn't hurt if the ship maybe started the war deployed all the way across the 12 Colonies on the opposite end of where the Cylons attacked. There's room to maneuver with this idea too. If we don't want to be too powerful against the Cylons, then make it that the cloaking device requires a lot of energy (like the Romulan ship in TOS:ST). That way the battlestar couldn't actually fight while cloaked, but could still pull a mean ambush. And if you don't want any Cylon skinjobs, just make the resultant cloaking field highly disruptive to Cylon 'biology'.
I like the sort of "Babylon 5 meets BSG" aspect, but…
sounds like folks want Cylon combat (who can blame them?), so that presents a difficulty. Need to figure out what keeps the Cylons from finding the station and then nuking it into oblivion. Something like Aima's idea about the rad field might work, but even Ragnar didn't keep the Cylons out indefinitely. It just discouraged them. And it's unlikely that there'd be a base with several thousand people on it secret enough that the Cylons couldn't find some record/mention of it in the Colonial databases.
