Okay so my archeology idea didn’t work. My scientist is called upon by the New Republic to investigate why the supermassive black hole is more active than usual and sucking in things from a further range. I just need something for the scientist to be studying before he is called away. It has to sound fresh and cool.
What could a scientist in my Star Wars RPG be researching or working on?
- Thread starter Maximum7
- Start date
Obviously he's researching new technology for CRISPR drawers.
I think they have that already.
This is so frustrating! Everytime I find an idea it just doesn’t work. My scientist is called upon by the New Republic to investigate why the supermassive black hole is more active than usual and sucking in things from a further range. I just need something for the scientist to be studying before he is called away. It has to sound fresh and cool.
This is so frustrating! Everytime I find an idea it just doesn’t work. My scientist is called upon by the New Republic to investigate why the supermassive black hole is more active than usual and sucking in things from a further range. I just need something for the scientist to be studying before he is called away. It has to sound fresh and cool.
I decided to go with a quark star. It’s better than a black hole because we don’t even know if they exist. Perfect for expansion However, I still need something for him to be working on before he deals with the quark star. I’m looking not for a gadget or piece of tech. I’ve decided everything technological that we can think of, can be done. Speeders with deflector shields? Sure. We haven’t seen them but they can easily be done. I’m looking for something that would still be an emerging field of science. Something a Type II/III civilization would do next. Any ideas?
Eltab
Lord of the Hidden Layer
Hyperdrive cannot take you everywhere, there are zones and planes of random moving gravity wells that mess you up and drop you back into normal space. But a big powerful telescope placed in a nearby system would let us see into the masked zone and perhaps find out what sent these worlds adrift and moving. Your scientist was working on one such project and incidentally found some of the signs that a quark star might be lurking in there. He published a research paper describing his findings, and thereby became traceable via an "Internet" search.
wingsandsword
Legend
Given the limitations, I'd say the best shot, especially for something of military merit, is an improved cloaking device.
I don't know about in the reboot, but in the original Star Wars (that Disney brands as "Legends"), there were two basic cloaking technologies, using hibridium or stygium crystals.
Hibridium cloaking devices could be made with relatively normal materials, but had the huge disadvantage of being "double blind", that you couldn't see out from being cloaked. This was a significant disadvantage that required lots of creativity to make the cloaking devices useful (like in the Thrawn trilogy, when Thrawn launches a number of cloaked asteroids into orbit over Coruscant, creating a de-facto blockade since there was no safe way to leave or approach the planet without risking hitting an asteroid). You CAN fire out of cloak without de-cloaking, it doesn't forcibly lower the cloak, but it does reveal your general location, but not well enough for an enemy to get a weapons lock.
Stygium crystal cloaking devices worked more like the cloaks in Star Trek, where you could see "out", but not see "in". These cloaks were far more elegant, but were also many times more expensive (because stygium crystals were insanely rare and only were known to be found on one planet).
The actual source of the crystals was Aeten II, a planet deep in Wild Space. . .and after the known mines were depleted, the Empire blew the planet up in 3 ABY with the Tarkin superweapon (a prototype for the Death Star II's superlaser) so the Empire could mine the resulting asteroid field to find more crystals. . .which they turned into the TIE Phantom project to make mass-produced cloaking starfighters. . .but the Rebels destroyed them (and the self-destruct took the cloaking devices with them). . .ultimately meaning that after 3 ABY there's no known source for more stygium crystals.
Some way to improve on these limitations would be a major field of research, either a way to synthesize stygium crystals, or a way to work around the limitations of the hibridium cloaking device
For reference, one failed attempt to work around hibridium limitations in the Hand of Thrawn duology was using a supercomputer to mathematically calculate the probable location of enemy vessels based on known locations before the cloak was engaged and known tactics and attack patterns. Cloak during a fight so the enemy can't lock on to you, statistically calculate the probable location of enemy vessels based on last known information, fire in that direction. . .it didn't work.
I don't know about in the reboot, but in the original Star Wars (that Disney brands as "Legends"), there were two basic cloaking technologies, using hibridium or stygium crystals.
Hibridium cloaking devices could be made with relatively normal materials, but had the huge disadvantage of being "double blind", that you couldn't see out from being cloaked. This was a significant disadvantage that required lots of creativity to make the cloaking devices useful (like in the Thrawn trilogy, when Thrawn launches a number of cloaked asteroids into orbit over Coruscant, creating a de-facto blockade since there was no safe way to leave or approach the planet without risking hitting an asteroid). You CAN fire out of cloak without de-cloaking, it doesn't forcibly lower the cloak, but it does reveal your general location, but not well enough for an enemy to get a weapons lock.
Stygium crystal cloaking devices worked more like the cloaks in Star Trek, where you could see "out", but not see "in". These cloaks were far more elegant, but were also many times more expensive (because stygium crystals were insanely rare and only were known to be found on one planet).
The actual source of the crystals was Aeten II, a planet deep in Wild Space. . .and after the known mines were depleted, the Empire blew the planet up in 3 ABY with the Tarkin superweapon (a prototype for the Death Star II's superlaser) so the Empire could mine the resulting asteroid field to find more crystals. . .which they turned into the TIE Phantom project to make mass-produced cloaking starfighters. . .but the Rebels destroyed them (and the self-destruct took the cloaking devices with them). . .ultimately meaning that after 3 ABY there's no known source for more stygium crystals.
Some way to improve on these limitations would be a major field of research, either a way to synthesize stygium crystals, or a way to work around the limitations of the hibridium cloaking device
For reference, one failed attempt to work around hibridium limitations in the Hand of Thrawn duology was using a supercomputer to mathematically calculate the probable location of enemy vessels based on known locations before the cloak was engaged and known tactics and attack patterns. Cloak during a fight so the enemy can't lock on to you, statistically calculate the probable location of enemy vessels based on last known information, fire in that direction. . .it didn't work.
wingsandsword
Legend
Also, I don't know if it would fall under your "teleportation" prohibition, but the Gree did have their hypergates throughout their area of space, and to a limited extent on other planets (like the one on Dathomir). The Gree lost the ability to activate (or maintain and repair) most of their super-advanced technology like the hypergates (think Stargates from the Stargate series, or Iconian gateways from Star Trek), leaving them as inert relics on so many worlds.
Trying to research a way to activate the remaining ones could be a big thing too. I don't know if reactivating ancient Stargate-like transportation devices would be too close to your teleportation ban though, but they ARE something that already exists within Star Wars (heck, the "Terror from Beyond" raid in the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG involves some horrible Lovecraftian tentacled monstrosity trying to come through one of the few functioning hypergates from some unknown part of deep space)
Trying to research a way to activate the remaining ones could be a big thing too. I don't know if reactivating ancient Stargate-like transportation devices would be too close to your teleportation ban though, but they ARE something that already exists within Star Wars (heck, the "Terror from Beyond" raid in the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG involves some horrible Lovecraftian tentacled monstrosity trying to come through one of the few functioning hypergates from some unknown part of deep space)
Mustrum_Ridcully
Hero
Hypergates are interesting.
In my own Star Wars campaign, I settled for "Hypergates" as an ancient, inferior hyperspace technology. Sure, your ship doesn't need a hyperspace engine, but you can only travel between linked Hypergates. Which meant transporting
ne of the gates the non-FTL way. Later, maybe some tricks allowed "blind" jumps into a gate, and allowed establishing the second gate at wherever you blindly jumped to, but that required considerably trial and error.
Once the "modern" hyperdrive was invented, it was vastly superior. It required a certain level of logistics, to chart hyperspace routes, keep ships updated and requires computational resources. But it was vastly more flexible, since neither entrance nor exist point required a per-existing installation. And, also important- they only need power when someone actually uses them, not to maintain the link between the two gates.
Hence, Hypergates fell out of favor. People stopped maintaining them, or actively scrapped them for raw materials.
Maybe your scientist is studying Hypergate technology for new tweaks, say, altering it that it helps a ship using its own hyperdrive engine to travel faster. Or maybe a new Hypergate technology that can switch between multiple linked gates on command, making it more flexible than before. Or maybe he's just repairing a Hypergate that leads to a for some reason still working gate somewhere in the Unknown Region or the Deep Core where hyperspace travel is risky or unreliable due to astrogation hazards or lack of star charts.
In my own Star Wars campaign, I settled for "Hypergates" as an ancient, inferior hyperspace technology. Sure, your ship doesn't need a hyperspace engine, but you can only travel between linked Hypergates. Which meant transporting
ne of the gates the non-FTL way. Later, maybe some tricks allowed "blind" jumps into a gate, and allowed establishing the second gate at wherever you blindly jumped to, but that required considerably trial and error.
Once the "modern" hyperdrive was invented, it was vastly superior. It required a certain level of logistics, to chart hyperspace routes, keep ships updated and requires computational resources. But it was vastly more flexible, since neither entrance nor exist point required a per-existing installation. And, also important- they only need power when someone actually uses them, not to maintain the link between the two gates.
Hence, Hypergates fell out of favor. People stopped maintaining them, or actively scrapped them for raw materials.
Maybe your scientist is studying Hypergate technology for new tweaks, say, altering it that it helps a ship using its own hyperdrive engine to travel faster. Or maybe a new Hypergate technology that can switch between multiple linked gates on command, making it more flexible than before. Or maybe he's just repairing a Hypergate that leads to a for some reason still working gate somewhere in the Unknown Region or the Deep Core where hyperspace travel is risky or unreliable due to astrogation hazards or lack of star charts.
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