The Black Campbell

(For this piece, I’m using the Quantum Mechanix Map of the Twelve Colonies — which we use for our Battlestar Galactica RPG campaign.)

First off, I had to get a general idea of how fast BSG ships move — using the speculations over on Battlestarwiki.org, I worked out that the sublight Speed Rating in BSG is rough half the percentage of C; in other words, Colonial One with its Speed 6 is capable of up to .12C. (Yes, that means raiders are capable of .18C — really bloody fast…but it’s sci-fi. Roll with it.)

Now that we know how fast the ships can go, we need to know the distances involved in traveling around the Colonies. The map specifies an SU as the distance from Caprica/Gemenon’s barycenter to the sun — about the same as an astronomical unit (handy!) or eight light minutes. We now have distance pegged from light speed. We can get fancy and measure the orbits on the map, but I’m not quite that OCD — each of the four systems seem to have their outer planets orbiting at roughly 5-6SU. In each of the four systems, that means that the Colony worlds are never more than roughly 2.5SU away from each other.  You can assume that a trip from, say, Picon to Tauron at their furtherest from each other, take a liner like Colonial One would take about 2.2 hours, but a trip out to Persephone would be about 6SU, which would take a ship like Galactica about five hours at flank speed.

For communications time, figure the rough distance between the worlds in SU, times by eight, and double it for a return message. So if Picon and Caprica are at periapsis (closest distance) the time to cross .2SU is 1.6 minutes. If Caprica and Tauron are 1.5SU apart, receiving the latest Caprica Tonight broadcast would have a lag of 12 minutes.

What about between the stars? Helios Α and Β, and Helios Γ and Δ are both locked in barycentric orbits with each other, with a distance of 60 and 70SU respectively, and both pairs of stars are locked together at about .16LY. A message sent between Colonies in Helios A and B would take between 7.3 hours (for periapsis) and 9.3 hours (at apoapsis.) This means Galactica at full burn would take between 73 and 93 hours to cross the distance from Tauron to Virgon, depending on their position. You would have comparable times between Helios Γ and Δ.

For example: Using this map and speed rating, the old girl was, in the miniseries, hell and gone from anywhere when the attack began. It was roughly 30 minutes to get a message to Caprica, so she was 3.75SU away…out near the Erebos asteroid belt. We could assume she was on her way home from Scorpia Yards, but since they specified the ship hadn’t done an FTL jump in decades, she did it sublight. The distance between the two pairs of stars is .16LY. Even at full speed, Galactica would take almost two years to transit from Scorpia to Caprica.

That means that travel between the four stars is perfectly doable at sublight speeds and would explain why there were a wealth of non-FTL ships plying Colonial space. One thing it does suggest is that to cut down on communications latency, the Colonies use some kind of courier service(s) to move data between the two pairs of stars. I envision a kind of packet boat that jumps from, say, Caprica to Libran, does a data dump of bank records, government documents, express mail, etc. and that from a central hub the data is broadcast out to the destination worlds. Government, military, and financial data is probably shipped daily, but personal stuff might go weekly.

It’s been two weeks since the last AAR for the Galactica game. This is partly due to the addition of two new players, so there was a lot of intro work. One of the new characters is a JAG lawyer who has been brought in to monitor the actions of the characters and their investigations into Cylon infiltration of the Colonies. They’re research has led them to suspect toaster involvement in several mega-lobby firms and non-profits…all highly politically connected. This positioning has the characters in a difficult place, where they cannot push too hard for fear of riling up politicians tightly connected to these group’s money stream. The lawyer is there to slow the investigation, as much as keep them legally correct.

The second new character is a Colonial Marine Corps sergeant who has been assigned to protect Commander Pindarus (the lead in the series). He’s a young, confident but not as smart as he thinks he is son of a fisherman from Picon, who is somewhat prejudiced toward the privileged and wealthy.

The new characters needed some intro time and the character crosstalk has increased dramatically, which is slowing the plot somewhat. This is one downside to larger groups — add a player and I find the crosstalk doubles. If you have a player who is more of a time hog than others, that also slows matters.

The plot elements the last two weeks: Things are still moving at a quick pace. The characters had rounded up a group of suspects that were tied to their main target, a lobbyist for the Lucan Foundation, an educational non-profit that does a lot of policy work. They are the main force behind trying to downsize the defense budget in favor of social programs. these people had been smuggled past the customs at Caprica City Spaceport**, and one of them was later involved in an attack on Pindarus.

Their efforts are mostly a failure over the last two episodes. They make a move to arrest the lobbyist, but when they make their move to raid the condo of the man, all electronic devices, the power goes out for a two block radius of the building. Their quarry is gone, and all of his computers and storage media are trashed due to some kind of EMP bomb about the size of an 48 ounce drink cup — it’s technology far advanced of Clonial EMP devices. They find a strange mechanical fly, as well, and think it might have been a surveillance device that saw the breach team’s approach and popped the bomb.

The mission is jeopardized by the botched raid because the condominium was in the swanky Orpheus Park neighborhood — home to a lot of business, entertainment, and political figures. (Think the Upper West Side of Manhattan…) A lot of important people were inconvenienced and are blaming the Colonial Security Service. To make matters worse, the twelve other suspects they have all die in custody — the back of their heads popping from the “kill swtich” in their cybernetics. they track down the captain that brought them in, but he’s clean of cybernetics and cooperates reluctantly, but all his information is useless — save for one piece that links the lobbyist’s activities to the elusive Count Azarius Lucan — the man who founded the Lucan Foundation that the suspect worked for, but also the Prometheus Foundation, a policy think tank that is similar in size and scope to the Tides Foundation in the real world. Lucan has been a recluse since he suffered a near-fatal accident while orbital skydiving. He lives on a private island on Virgon, and it appears the suspect has been visiting the place off the books (something the foundation VP on Caprica says he would not have done.)

It’s obvious the Cylons know they are onto them and are trimming the loose ends. There’s other elements that have been in play, as well, family and friends and other distractions to keep the players off balance.

(**Worldbuilding element: the Colonies are supposed to have a freedom of movement between the Twelve Worlds, but  because of differing tax rates on various planets and some differences in product legality, travelers are supposed to go through customs checks. It’s a misdemeanor on most worlds to dodge customs.)

This week’s game would be called a “push episode” in TV vernacular: there was some movement forward on the various plots that have been coming together. The characters raided a Ha’La’Tha safe house in an old steel mill in the former industrial sector of Caprica City. Their target was Sio Faras — the local boss for what appeared to be a major crime cell connected to the attack on Commander Pindarus (the series”lead”) and to Ceros Grama, a powerful lobbyist for an educational foundation with tied all over the colonies.

The action sequence was quick, violent, and was the new player’s first encounter with Cortex combat rules. In the end, they had several of the baddies on the deck and Faras in custody. Fearing that she might be “lowjacked” like other Cylon agents they had tried to nab, they had two raptors on station — one to provide jamming, the other to do an extract to an isolated military location…in this case, the battlestar Galactica in high orbit.

They were able to interrogate the prisoner and while she didn’t give up much willingly, they were able to break down her sotry and find out 1) she worked for a Brigadier Davos — one of the last of the HLT commanders to be arrested (a few eps back), 2) She knew she was working for the Cylons, was terrified of them, and that the Cylons were using Tauronese desire to be out from under Caprica and Colonial thumbs as a means to motivate the crime syndicate. (They did not ask if she was a willing participant in the plot. She’s not.) 3) They were able to successfully CAT scan her head and find the cybernetic implants in her head — some kind of CPU near the medula oblongata with leads into her sensory-motor region of the brain, as well as her amygdala and pain centers.

They speculate she is a human “camera” — a probe that the Cylons can collect data through, either passively or through induction of pain/pleasure/whatever. They also have the connection they need to move on Grama legally, and they now know to turn their attention to this Davos guy.

Next episode promises to be more of the same, and I have a few surprises in store for them. (A few same decisions opened opportunities for me to seriously screw with them. I think I’m taking them.) All in all, the tone — of paranoia and Cold War machinations — has been holding up to extended play and as they realize how entrenched the Cylons are, the stakes are getting higher.

It’s been a crazy busy couple of weeks, between medical and dental appointments, child issues, and other stressors, I’ve not been able to post as often as I would like. So here’s an AAR for the Battlestar Galactica RPG.

We’ve had two “episodes” so far in the new “season”, which started with the addition of a new member to the gaming group. (His blog.)

The players are, respectively, the commander of Aegis from the rest of the gaming reports (now reassigned after the “screw up” during his mission to do reconnaissance in Cylon space to the soon-to-be decommissioned Galactica) who is on a three week leave before his next command — he has effectively been beached by his political opponents in the Fleet; and a Colonial Security Service (think FBI) special agent that is on the Fox Mulderish side, seeing conspiracies everywhere (and sometimes correctly so) and who suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident that had him recollecting an alien abduction that was most likely just his imagination integrating the medical attention he was getting at the time (now he’s starting to think it was Cylon experimentation he suffered…)

They have been looking into Cylon influence in the Colonies. Previously, the commnader discovered that Colonial citizens have been taken and altered by the Cylons. They apparently are brainwashing, or through cybernetic implants controlling the actions of people in the 12 worlds. One of these was a high powered lobbyist working for his wife, who runs one of the premier, pro-military-industrial complex lobbying firms in the Colonies. The discovery has temporarily damaged the influence of the Pindarus Group (the firm), and given them some insight into the Cylon operations: the Cylons appear to be using lobbyists, educations foundations, politically-powerful non-profit NGOs — the highly influential, but mostly unseen kingmakers of the Colonies — to tweak military policy, create social unrest, and plant agents through the Colonies.

The two episodes (about 3 play sessions, so far) revolve around the investigation of another high-powered lawyer/lobbyist for the Lucan Group, an educational non-profit that is connected to the Democrat-Republican Party (pro-Colonial government, but seeking a more federalist system with the individual colonies having more autonomy and sovereignty) and based on Virgon. Count Lucan is a rich and powerful former member of the Virgonian government who has gone recluse after an orbital glider accident. He is also the man behind the Prometheus Foundation (think the Tides Center for level of influence). The lobbyist was spied moving people onto Caprica around the customs at Caprica City Spaceport, and this got the CSS onto him. The special agent (Chaplin) gets roped ito a most secret operation called RIPTIDE, which he is shocked is investigating Cylon infiltration. He also realizes that Commander Pindarus (the other character) is crossing the Cylon’s path on several occasions…he doesn’t believe in coincidence, so could it be the Cylons are targeting him? He pulls Pindarus into the investigation, getting him seconded to CSS for the next few weeks (something the commander is happy to be involved in.)

After a high-power gala at the local Carnoss Club, Chaplin “looks the lobbyist in the eye” and realizes how dangerous the man is. (He has the Intuition asset, making him preternaturally good t sussing out things.) He also notices the man making cell phone calls while worriedly watching the characters at the party. Shortly after they leave, Chaplin notices a tail on the commander’s car. It turns out to be a planned “accident”, where the Pindarus car is tee-boned with a delivery truck. Paranoia is a watchword for the two characters and they avoid the second part of the bad guy’s plan: using an ambulance to abduct the commander and his politically connected wife.

Through a few slip-ups due to it being 2 in the morning and people not thinking straight after the accident, the ambulance crew gets away. Later, they figure out one of the drivers was one of the people smuggled into Caprica by their suspect. They attempt to arrest the guy but wind up in a firefight. The driver, shrieking for help and apparently not in contro of his actions, hurls himself through his seventh-story window to his death.

There was a lot of investigation work of cell phone records, traffic cameras, etc. but they figure out the operation was run by Tauronese organized crime elements (the Ha’la’tha) and that the “boss” of the group is in hiding. They get her location, and once they have her, they may have enough evidence to bring in the lobbyist, who is powerful enough they are worried venal politicians and other power brokers might shut their operation down before they can get any traction.

We ended with two plotlines ongoing last night: the raid on the Ha’la’tha hideout in a former steel mill in the rundown former industrial sector of Caprica City (damn those Canceronians and their favorable corporate tax rates!), and their hopes to arrest the lobbyist. It’s pretty obvious that sooner or later they’ll be headed to Virgon to confront the  mysterious Count Lucan, and a hint of the timeline they’ve got left was dropped — Galactica is due to be turned into a museum and decommissioned in six months.