Wypoc Aswarm With Satellites...

Per our discussion on satellites... Survey Satellite, CSC, p. 176 Field Satellite Launcher, CSC, p. 175 Additional Boosters per Satellite, same entry Satellite Ground Station, CSC, p. 174 (Seems redundant with a Transceiver and sufficient TL computer program type stuff...) I figure we can mod a few Survey Sats with some “special sauce”, offer launch services for profit, and set up some recon on Maarg. We should even be able to work up an excuse of figuring out where one of our “rogue” satellites came down...

Survey Satellites: Beacon, Communications Relay Constantly Catalogs and Reports: Hyperspectral Video, Radio Frequencies, Electrical Power Signatures, Radiation Emissions, Meteorological Data, Geography, Unnatural & Sophont-made Structures Up to 6 can function as a medium resolution GPS system (But we’ve only successfully launched 4, and in a disorganized manner, no less!) Lifespan, 3-5 years in a stable orbit Figuring an LEO-type orbit, orbital periods would be somewhere between 1-2 hours each; efforts at retrying to contact the satellites should happen that often, albeit additionally limited by the weather. Pakkrat, did we get any infrared or life-signs off of the Survey Satellites at Maarg’s base?

We did see movement.  That Hyena Vargr chick pulled into the bunker garage sometime after the Assault Team arrived.  EMs, electrical and radiations from inside the mountain cannot be detected.  Infrared only shows flocks of Swoopers and what might be lumbering Dragons.  Weather systems indicate a trend towards the monsoon season soon.

So infrared can’t tell us how many people are inside, if any?

(( Just an OOC note about infra red. I know in games and in Holywood IR can work like a kind of x-ray vision that can see through walls and such. In real life there are two types of IR vision. High band IR and low band. High band can see the wavelength below red that is normally invisible to the human eye. It's the kind of light your remote uses to change the channel on the TV. It sees in the dark really well. Even better if you have an IR flashlight. That's why it is sometimes called "Active IR". Truth is you don't really need the flashlight unless you're in pitch darkness. Low band IR is the gear that can see body heat. We played with this a fair bit when I was in the army. Back then it was on a tripod and cost more money that we were all worth put together. These days I think you can get them for $50 at an Apple store. When we were playing with it I noticed that you can't even x-ray see through the side of a tent with IR. If you touch the side of the tent it makes a glowing hand print, but it's far from the "see through walls" stuff that you see in movies. Makes sense if you think about it. Most structures are insulated so that heat has trouble passing through the walls. ))

It depends on the materials involved. You can’t see IR through glass, if I recall. Regardless, there might be some other sort of “Life Signs” sensor I’m neglecting.

I think a densitometer is what you're after: "...can determine the internal structure and makeup of an object." I think they work by seeing the gravitational mass of objects? Closest thing to x-ray vision that Traveller seems to have.  .. apart from those x-ray scopes in the CSC... but ... yeah anyway ...  The down side of densitometers is that they're usually very short ranged. Spaceship scale densitometers can pick out fine details up to 10kms, can see the internal structure of an object out to 1250kms, but can only look at the external features of a structure past that out to 10,000kms.  NAS is cool too. NAS detects neural activity and intelligence. Again, the range is pretty short. This stuff is on p143 of the Rulebook. 

The Wypoc atmosphere is pretty turbulent with storms of all sorts, they atmosphere probably has a large volume of static creating massive interference, I believe the Packrat has tried to emphasize that we are going to get little intel out of scans and satellite data. i think we have al we are going to get in that regards. We do need some mystery in the game or it wont be as fun. 

I've been thinking about our little assault, and i think we need to recruit some help on this one and i think i know just who/what we need. The animals on this planet seem to react quiet aggressively to EM radiation, given that i think we should build some EMF squawkers. It should not be to hard to build a device that can create a large amount of EM radiation and put it on a drone, fly it to the gate and activate it. We could also place 1 next to each of the sentry drones. If they are powerful enough we should be able to get a few miles radius worth of animals to show up and do some of our work for us. We don't activate them till we are in place and we have a couple of spares to decoy the beasts so we can escape. If Marg and his guards are fighting dragons, they cant fight us. just a thought.   

Do you have some hard evidence to back up your assumption that the animals react to Electromagnetics? That being said, if we tag some critters with some noisy electronics, enough to alert the drones, the drones and the animals can fight each other off... the thing is, if either group spots us, it would be a gigantic cluster$&#*. Wouldn’t hurt as a backup plan to use only in an extreme emergency, though.

Packrat has said on many occasions that the go ape over EMF. That may be part of the reason the swoopers were on the satellite, that and the heat it was giving off.

I missed that; can anyone else confirm that?

As much as Kayleb may like the idea of every living thing in that base being fed to animals, it may be hard to get the cranky critters to differentiate between the folks we are there to "rescue" and the people we're there to terminate.  I agree that we may need help though. I haven't seen the results of the recon but if he has firepower we're really not up to going toe to toe with him. 

not much intel to report, there are about 5 drones in metal boxes around the out side and we have found the "back door" tunnel and it apears to be still accessible. Also the Varga Huntress is in residence at the OBJ.

No, 5 boxes, unknown number of drones per box. If we could get the drones to attack the animals, the animals would naturally fight back, killing some of the drones. Either way, local threats are neutralized.

What kind of drones? Did you guys get to see them in action? How many drones in each box?

No, we wisely stayed away from them. They might even be empty, for all we know, although that is rather unlikely. They might be filled with nukes instead. :P