Lost Starfleet Ships and the Colonies they Start Up...

[Shran]

Here's the deal...

USS Universe, NX-3000 has been found at the other end of the galaxy after an event involving a supernova and a drunk flatulent Klingon. The captain of that ship, Jack Cardigan did what he could to set up a colony on a nearby world. Given the technology of the Federation as of 2311 (when the Universe vanished), what would his grandson, the Sovereign's chief engineer, find when he got there?

The episode is sorta a birthday present for my son, whose character has been wondering about his grandfather's failed transwarp experiment.

The game is Dec 6th, and boy, does he want Granddad to be alive... wow. (My son never met his real grandfather, and he's really relating to this plot thread, so it has to be good. That why I've come to you guys!)

(And yes... the backstory is stolen from that Tomed Incident novel, but I only read the back cover...:P )

[Cmmdr JT Wayland]

Shran,

A couple of questions for you regarding the Universe.
How about the ship, was she destroyed or did she manage to make orbit, before she was abandoned? Was any of her equipment and technology was salavagble?
How Many Crew aboard her? How many survived? Where there any other ships dragged along with her? e.g. Klingons;

There is a couple of suggestions for you:

Option 1: The ship was crippled, but most of crew survived and were able to colonise the planet using the every surviving scrap of technology and equipment available to them, even so they have regressed to mid-21st Century Technolgical Levels;

Option 2: The ship was destroyed in the accident, the surviving crew was able to get to the escape pods, but where scattered over the planet, they set up several small colonies, but their technology regressed to mid 17th Century Technolgical level.

Does this help?

[Dan Gurden]

If you have only read the back cover... This plotline is more based on the events in the novel, rather than stolen.

Just so that you can deflect any questions and comparrisons in favour of your plot... There are a few details the back cover cannot give you that are different from the story you are running (and in your universe your plot is correct)

SPOILERS AHEAD...





The universe was unmanned and crewed by several 'ghosts' as part of a grand intelligence operation. Using the identities of several dead starfleet crew and sensor generators to make it appear that the ship had a skeleton crew. The destruction was intentional...

- This is the least relevant section considering the true plot you are running. Which sound seriously funky.

However the Universe was actually testing an update from Trans Warp, as Trans Warp was the failed experiment. The new technology, actually called Hyper-Warp was an adjustment to starfleet warp drives that somehow incorporate Cloaking devices to increase warp velocity (it is unclear if these cloaking devices are equally capable of hiding the ship, but implied as no)...

So with this, your crew would also have some familiarity with cloaking technology.




SPOILERS STOP HERE...
and some ideas begin.

Also a ships crew of that time period is still quite small, and so a Colony built up of just the Starfleeters would be very small even a couple of hundred years later (maybe 10x the crew size)... Take for example the DS9 episode Children of Time as a good scene setter...

So you would likely have a small colony of reasonably technical descendants. And also the possibility that they may even be sharing the planet with a native species, maybe the Prime Directive has also watered down and tech is being shared and inter-marridges? Maybe a few original survivors still live, but the decendants have made a happy home and may wish to stay, while equally curious about their heratige...

[Balok]

Because of the small size of the crew, the first generations would operated under strict genetic compatibility testing, to ensure dangerous traits weren't introducted by inbreeding. Figure a generation every 20 years or so, and some of these rules might have been coded into law.

Other deviations from typical human practice might have arisen, based on requirements for a small colony. Resource allocation, living arrangements, and similar social properties might have changed to accomidate the small colony size.

You could start his grandfather sick, from some age related disorder that the Federation has since defeated. This puts him in the position of being able to save the man, who could then offer him insights into what it was like "in the early years".

Another twist would be assume the planet was originally inhabitied by an advanced race (cause of their departure mysterious) -- and their artifacts have influenced the social evolution in various ways. Perhaps they left behind robots that enforced their particular moral code -- and a religion has grown around this. Or perhaps they left behind records, and the colony has *better* technology than the Federation of the 2370's or so (whenever your campaign is set). This technology might include medical science that has left the character's grandfather hale and hearty at a relatively old age.

[qerlin]

If you want to make certain the graddad's alive, in addition to having been blown across space, do it in time, as well -- maybe have them wrenched forward a decade or two so that there's not as much time between the disappearance and their rediscovery.

I'd think, depending on the damage to the ship, the colony could be anything from subsistence living (if it was trashed) to a stable but small settlement using what tech they could scavenge off of the ship.

[Arnold Rimmer]

You could take the Titan A.E. Route... After they find the ship, there is a holographic message that can only be unlocked by a certain genetic sequence, passed down from generation to generation.

[TheAntisocial]

Or who says there even is a colony, maybe the ship's prototype warp drive sent then x years to the present day (whenever that may be) and when they finished their test flight they were wherever and sent a transmission back to federation hq back on Earth, and ala TNG the Sovereign just happen to be the clostest starfleet vessel and are sent to investigate.
The the crew of the Universe it was 2311 just yesterday.

[Shran]

According to Starfleet records, Universe's Transwarp drive misfired, sending a destructive wave of energy across Tomed's densely populated northern continent. For 75 years, that's how it was, Enterprise-B was there, the only Federation ship to survive the incident.

Captain Harriman's report aside, here's what really happened.

When the Universe engaged its Transwarp drive, it attracted a String Fragment. The fragment struck Tomed, killing millions of its Pre-warp inhabitants, several hundred Romulans, and a thousand or so starfleet personnel stationed at the drydock that had been built to facilitate Universe's construction. Universe was pulled along the string's length, to the other end of the Galaxy, where, for reasons not fully understood, the string is anchored.

Knowing they were stranded, the warp coils completely destroyed by the String, Capt Cardigan ordered the ship stripped of all usuable material and the colony was started on a nearby world. (A very close world, BTW)

The current date is 2380, the String matured into a wormhole (that's what they do, ya know...) and now the Federation can make contact again...