So, Human Contact arrived the other day and I'm already very excited about it. I do, however, have a few questions on the text. There may be very simple answers to all of these, but please bear with me!

Page 11: There is a lack of clarity regarding protagonists. Is it the intention that protagonists are all from the planet being re-colonised, that protagonists are academics, it's a bit confusing.

Page 12: Under 'Inter-Protagonist conflict', I'm confused over your intention with this. I'm sure this section needs expansion. If two protagonists are in conflict, the protagonist whose 'scene' it currently is gets to use their normal dice, but the opposing protagonist has to use dice assigned to them by the antagonist of the 'scene' protagonist? Is this correct?

Anyway, I like this all so far. Looking at the background, are the Academy always overt when they arrive at a planet (OK, so the sudden bright light in the sky might be a hint), but is there the possibility for a game where all Academic involvement is covert? Here I'm thinking of 'Inversions' by Iain M. Banks, where everything is from the point of view of the society being manipulated by the Culture. Maybe the 'shock' in this case is a societal or technological change caused by the covert activities of the Academy which has caused unexpected consequences (major civil war, revolution, societal upheaval) that the people being affected do realise stems from an external source? Anyway, this is all blather on my part.

Cheers

Malc

Dammit. I forgot one last idea: Because the starship enters on axis with the plane of the ecliptic, it's possible that no one sees them coming because the colonists all live in the opposite polar hemisphere. Around 90% of humans now live in the northern hemisphere, just because of where the landmasses happened to be when humans evolved. If they colony doesn't have satellites or observatories (or at least none that matter for some reason — it doesn't matter how powerful a telescope is if it's pointed in the wrong direction), the starship might be hidden by the colony planet itself.

It would be a hell of a burn to pull to a dead stop, though. I'll have to look up how long you'd need to do a 1g burn.

Soren said:

Alternately, you don't hide your needle in a haystack, you hide it in a needle stack. Hang out in the system's Oort Cloud and build yourself a monitoring station out of the goodies floating around there. Then, you can (for example) build a giant rail gun to sling payloads around the system more or less undetectably.

If the Academy intervene, they play it out in the same smart, cautious, minimum-force way they always do. Like Special Circumstances – one guy with lots of backup, at a level of precision as far removed from the messiness of 21st century warfare as an SAS assault team is from a 4000 BCE mob of howling savages with rocks and sticks.

That's pretty much what I was imagining: Special Circumstances style goings on with the absolute minimum number of people required (most likely 'one').

Given their longevity and experience, I imagine Academicians are very good at making themselves familiar with local customs, mores, and cultural attitudes? Perhaps above a certain technology level, it's difficult for them to arrive unannounced. Below a certain level it's much easier and they adopt a more stealthy, manipulative approach? Are lower-technologies societies more open to this? I guess that's an arguable point.

Cheers

Malc

Given their longevity and experience, I imagine Academicians are very good at making themselves familiar with local customs, mores, and cultural attitudes? Perhaps above a certain technology level, it's difficult for them to arrive unannounced. Below a certain level it's much easier and they adopt a more stealthy, manipulative approach? Are lower-technologies societies more open to this? I guess that's an arguable point.

I think that's the biggest issue. No one capable of looking up is going to miss this thing hurtling into their space. It's possible that they could be missed, and if so, they could send a couple field anthropologists of whatever appropriate persuasion ahead. Otherwise, they're just shining a huge flashlight at the locals.

Now, they're popping in about 6 light months away from the target. That means that the locals only have 18 months, give or take, before they show up. That's not a lot of time to get organized. If the ship were parked at an L-point behind a moon, or in as asteroid field ("No one here but us asteroids!") then they could be a mere astronomical curiosity. At some point, they could detach a small descent module ahead with an agent or three, decelerating at .1G for the appropriate amount of time, and being much less interesting than the entire starship.

Anyone with serious looking-up capabilites, though, are going to see them.

For example, for a culture based on status, warrior-prowess, and branding, the Academics might want to make their arrival as dramatic as possible. I don't think they'd be afraid to show their strength and superior technology at the start of a mission in order to impress the colonists in a non-violent way–in order to avert future violence, or at least make the colonists think twice.

Also a very good point. There are different entrances one might want to make. I'd love to develop a set of practical tactical options, then have the players work out the ethics on the fly. I'd guess they have about a week before they have to make a decision, based, if nothing else, on their need to slow down sooner or later.

Oo! Another option! They start braking once they're past the plane of the ecliptic. Pointing the torch the other way is a good way to hide it. Then they brake into the Oort cloud on the other end, pick up water from a comet, and then come land at their convenience.

The catch is, they're almost a light year away from the agent they dropped off on the way there. There are going to be no last minute rescues. The calculators tell me that, to speed up, slow down, and orbit, the ship will take on an additional 4+ years of travel. That's about nine years stuck in a building with your colleagues with only virtual reality and sordid, catty rumors to entertain you. And, I suppose, you can build a wormhole gate at the other end of the star, if there's enough weird shit you're finding in comets to build with. At this rate, everyone's living quarters would have to become ecosystem, turned over to waste recalamation, farming, and oxygen reproduction. Their mysteriously awesome power source and their comet-eating habits could provide for them, but man, that's gotta be rough for anyone onboard. Nonetheless, I think this is the "stealth" way to do it.

So, it would be really awful to do, the society of the starship would likely collapse, and the handful of agent(s) would likely get stranded there until another starship came through years later to see how they were doing. In short, I wholeheartedly endorse it.

It's interesting that you mention The Culture – they don't have rules, just a generally agreed-on set of goals (don't hurt people if you can help it, basically, and guide the target culture towards not being assholes, along with trying to be the least bad Outside Context Problem possible.)

It would be interesting to write more about the Academy's goals for contact – I like the idea of there being several different schools of thought as to the ultimate ends of the long-term contact project.

Interestingly enough, academics seem to be the only folks interested in seriously considering an OCP event.  The events of Human Contact, since they occur between humans, are several degrees below an actual OCP, but the guidelines are similar.  Academics for whom violence is the 'last refuge of the incompetent' would seek to establish common lines of communication first and foremost:  Between humans and nonhumans, binary messages using various methods of transmission (radio being first and foremost, with flashes of light being a close second) are prevalent in establishing an initial contact.  These messages are often brutally simple- this is our DNA, this is our understanding of mathematics, this is a little graphic of what humans are shaped like, etc.  See also the Arecibo message for further information.

Between humans, certain assumptions may already be established- or they may not, if you decide to complicate things.  A planet with a sufficiently nefarious atmosphere might result in a colonywide disintegration of the ocular membranes rendering useless humanity's preferred method of information gathering.  A colony on a planet with constant, deafening background noise might abandon hearing entirely, and so on.

In general, however, everyone but the military assumes alien cultures are peaceful and attempt to build trust by sharing as much universally applicable information as possible.  This is done unto a near-suicidal level; sharing the elements and structure of our DNA, for example, which could easily render us vulnerable to genetic manipulation & exploitation by a hostile alien culture.

For further research, CETI (not SETI) is likely your best bet… but nothing I can find indicates that we've gotten past the initial stages of 'how do we communicate with beings that may well not resemble us in the slightest?'