The Black Campbell

Our Battlestar Galactica campaign returned last night after a week’s hiatus, and launched straight into a fast-paced push episode. Our Colonial Security Service (our analogue for the FBI) discovered a link that they had disregarded for more time-sensitive ones — that the thirteen suspected Cylon agents they had picked up had all attended a science-fiction convention on Leonis. Researching the event, he found out it had the venue moved from he usual 2 star hotel convention hall to a swanky high-end spa on the outskirts of Luminiere, the capital of Leonis.

This is immediately suspicious, as the spa is one of those 300 qubit/night places…hardly the place that they would move a convention. The spa is isolated, high-end, and has all manner of the therapeutic treatments for stress and injury. The place, to him, “feels” important, and the photo of the owner is familiar to him, but he can’t place where. It’s a weekend, and the leadership of Operation RIPTIDE is not in for the day. Realizing the link is very tenuous, but he has this gut feeling is very important, he convinces Commander Pindarus (another PC) to get them a loaner raptor from his soon-to-be new command Galactica. (There’ a fleet tradition that if you’ve been assigned, but haven’t officially taken command, the current CO will loan you non-mission essential gear.)

The characters grab a few of the Colonial Marines that are attached to RIPTIDE but haven’t left for their weekend travels yet, snag a raptor, and jump to Leonis to check out the lead. They arrive at night and we get a view of Luminiere, the “City of Lights”. The “Old City” is very Parisian, with old, elegant buildings, a river with bridges, everything lit with old style streetlamps. The rest of the city is a riot of neon, holo-ads, reactive streets that illuminate with traffic info to supplement the heads-up on your car. It’s like Shanghai, but without restraint.

The spa is in a forest preserve outside of town, and the officer characters, Pindarus and the Riptide lawyer CPT Querro, go in with the CSS agent, Chaplain, as patrons (expensing the trip.) Their four marines, one of which is SGT Cadmus (another PC). they set up in the trees on a bluff overlookng the facility ad have a few run-ins with the guests, pretending to be other patrons of the spa. While they’re out in the rain, with the mists from the hot springs and cool rain (very atmosperic), the officers tour and enjoy the facility while Chaplain hacks the mainframe and finds a wealth of information on the Cylon operations — the kind of technology they’re using, the people they’ve used it on, and he manages to snag much of it and dumps it to a cloud drive on the LeoNet, with a timed forward to his CSS email account. He goes to find the officers and when he opens the door, there is a moment where he faces off against the wife/surgeon side of the couple that run the place.

Pindarus and Querro question the male half, a physical therapist who looks a lot like Rick Worthy. They find him pleasant and seemingly authentic, and they get him to give them a tour of the new medical facility where guests will be able to get cosmetic surgery. There they link up with Chaplain, in some sort of daze while the firmware that the Cylons put in him ten years ago during his car accident (and the inspiration for his fantasies of being abducted by aliens) — he’s been the information link that has been allowing the Cylons to stay ahead of Riptide. He has actively worked for them; they just monitor his senses and short-term memory and collected data through him — a human camera or bug.

The place is part high-end, minimalist aesthetic surgery, as advertised, but the wealth of creepy biomechanical tentacles equipped with surgical instrumetns and clusters of senors added a good creepy quality. They also see the other surgeon here…a twin or something of the owner! They quickly realize the danger they are in and the fight ensues in which we get a taste of the speed and strength of the Cylons. Even these non-combat models do a pretty good job on the characters and I had an initial worry of a total party kill. Pindarus gets pretty badly banged up, Chaplin a busted nose, and Querro — the man that almost never gets range time as a legal officer — saves the day by using a dropped pistol during the fray to drop one of the Cylons. (Chaplain got the woman.) the other surgeon escapes.

Outside, the marines get aggressed by a copy of the woman and a pair of highly-professional, but oddly robotic moving men. She drops two of the marines using a crossbow, the men have suppressed P90s that do a good job on another, leaving Cadmus alone to fight them. He takes a bolt in the ass, manages to wrestle away the P90 but it jammed (botch roll), and he wound up using the body of one of the men to catch rounds, then rolled with him down the hill they were on and off a 20′ cliff into one of the hot springs below. The woman follwed, leaping into the pool, and he stops her with a well-places underwater shot to the head (deafening himself in the process.)

The PCs link up outside the medical facility and run for their car in the parking lot. Minutes later, the medical facility (not the whole spa) blows itself all over the place in a mighty explosion. The characters inform the local CSS branch and local cops and beat a retreat to CSS HQ, where Chaplain is adamant about being debriefed immediately, the others go for medical attention.

End of play for the night. There’s a few obvious issues for the characters: What was going on with Chaplain? Pindarus is paranoid enough that this will definitely play out next session. Is the information he uploaded safe? What about the people they saw — two pairs of twins? What are the chances of that? Can the Cylons clone people? Or were they machines with flesh covering? How will the brass — already peeved over other high profile mistakes in the last few sessions — going to handle a major explosion with at least a half dozen civilians injured and off-duty three marines dead? (Not to mention to officers injured…)

I’ve been watching Blood & Chrome, and on the whole I’ve enjoyed it. I have a few quibbles about seeing some of the ships from the Exodus period — Valkyrie and the Berzerk, for instance; I would have assumed these newer vessels from the big deal they made about Galactica‘s age in the miniseries and the assumption that there would have been some advance in ship design from the war to the Cylon attacks. Okay, fanboy moment over!

ORION CLASS BATTLESTAR (Heavy Cruiser)

[Sizes very very approximate based off of a screen cap or two…] Class: Orion   Type: Heavy Cruiser   Scale: Spacecraft   Length: 1250′   Beam: 300′   Draught: 290′   Decks: 9   Crew: 150+pilots

ATTRIBUTES: Agility: d6   Strength: d10   Vitality: d6   Alertness: d8   Intelligence: d6   Willpower: d8

Secondary Attributes: Life Points: 18   Initiative: d6+d8   Armor: 3W, 2S   Speed: 6 [SL/JC]

SKILLS: Heavy Weaponry: d4, Mechanical Engineering: d4, Perception: d6, Pilot: d4

TRAITS: DRADIS Absorbant Hull d4 [adds to difficulty to spot]

ARMAMENT: Medium Point Defense System [d10W Planetcraft scale, Skirmish Range], 12 Medium Spacecraft Scale Railgun Batteries [d10W, Capital Range], 8 Missile Tubes [d10W Medium Spacecraft scale, Short DRADIS Range], 4 Nuclear Missile Tubes [d12+d6W Spacecraft scale, Short DRADIs Range]

AUXILIARY CRAFT: 10 Vipers, 6 Raptors, 2 Shuttles

This is a best-guess Osiris from the Blood & Chrome webseries.

Thanks to reader Geoffrey Loggins who supplied us with a compilation of the errata for Battlestar Galactica. It can be accessed through the BSG Resources page, or directly at this link.

(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.