OSR Commentary - Trey Causey's Strange Stars & Stars Without Numbers Scavenger Fleets

 

Chris Floss artwork used without permission 


"The year is 3200 and mankind's empire lies in ashes.

The Jump Gates fell six hundred years ago, severing the links between the myriad worlds of the human diaspora.

Now, the long isolation of the Silence falls away as men and women return to the skies above their scattered worlds.

Will you be among them once more?'

 Our player's PC's want two 'new' space haulers and getting into the deep dynamics of it. I turned back to Strange Stars setting's blog entry, 'From The Sorcerer's Skull Starships In The Strange Stars and this has to do with the hyper drive systems which the players are after; "One example of a lost technology is superluminal drives. The vast majority of modern craft are sublight vessels that utilize the hyperspace network to short-cut interstellar distances. The most advanced current civilizations have a rudimentary understanding of the science behind some FTL travel methods, but they are are currently unable to build them." A space hauler equipped with such a drive would have an incredible advantage. However, there might be far more going on then meets the eye. And hence why the hyperspace networks were used and relied on. 
Hyperspacial drives might be far more terrorfying then then the player's realize and the standard spike drive is the alternative which became industry standard. There are other technologies that the PC's want too salvage;"The salvage of ancient derelicts or wrecks is an important (and lucrative) activity. Gravity generators and inertial suppressors are only two of the important technologies than many civilizations are able to exploit, but not necessarily manufacture themselves. Intact data systems are a particularly spectacular find. There is always hope of engineering schematic files executable in modern nanofactories." This dives into the heart of Stars Without Number's rules and setting. Although the fantastic pretech & overtech are available the secrets to thier manufacture are almost certainly lost unless some space wreck or other ancient starship remains gives up thier secrets. 
Then there's the matter of the salvage fleets that are still flying in hyperspace and using the secrets of spike drives. These might seem like thier unlikely to be found in a Strange Stars setting but think again. 

Mandate Archive: Scavenger Fleets has the details on vampire fleets of stellar ships that swoop in & strip bare a planet that has any pretech technology. This could well be true of the Strange Stars setting or at least ours. Space is big & there's more then enough room for these scavenger ships to vulture themselves off of high tech planets. Thier presence a constant strain on the interstellar community who might simply chalk such invasions and visits up to space pirates. The scavenger fleets are simply another incarnation of this. Making deals with Scavenger Fleets could prove deadly or lucative depending upon the scavenger fleet's reactions. One group of whom I'm planning on using within thier own scavenger fleet is the Caliban.  All of this gets back to the fact that my players are hunting for hyperdrives & it look like it's going to be lots of space craft crawling coming up.