Event: Message in a Bottle (Day 16, EA, Observatory)

[Anastasia Winters]

Anastasia seemed pretty annoyed about it, but did manage to map the source as Reinhardt requested - even an unenthusiastic effort seeming up to the task. She wore a white button down shirt with black pencil skirt and flats.

Leaning back in the chair after pecking in the coordinates with her right hand, she kicked her feet up on the ancient console, ignoring the angry glare her sister gave her, and not seeming to mind her skirt hitching up a little and showing off some leg... and the tip of a nasty looking gun strapped to that leg.

(Passed: https://orokos.com/roll/864739)

[Comstar]

As a result of their efforts, after the first half of the trip came to a close, a cart loaded with storage disks was even now being wheeled onto the loading ramp of the Fury by loading staff, holding a collection of the more interesting data collected by the array over the last 300 years. Far from comprehensive, it still would serve as a delightful reference point for future efforts in cosmological mapping, studying the effects of gravitational forces exerted by superdense objects such as black holes, and also sufficient data to, with a lot of time and effort, map the jump routes for a score of coreward systems.

At the same time, Colette managed to take a fairly comprehensive review of the public facing areas of the station, even if she spent far too long in the gift shop comparing all the novelty T-shirts, and then dawdling in the employee showers. Still, the material would provide a useful reference for Star League architecture, along with documenting many interesting minor details, such as maintenance access points, junction boxes, and other high definition views of building safety and layout features which would be of interest to future developers. Finally, she wandered into the executive offices, finding a wealth of personal items which could be referenced by anthropologists of all stripes for comparing inter-house interactions in different centuries.

The most important task, from a certain point of view, went to Reinhardt and Anastasia, and though the first attempt was almost successful, but failed, the other two didn't have any hiccups, and soon they had cross referenced the database, charted the origin point of the transmission to a system roughly 17 jumps away, coreward, and managed to align the installation sensors back toward that point. Now they just had to figure out how to use it... and if the extremely amplified device would be able to cross that distance quickly enough to get a response before planetary rotation blocked the attempt.

-----

Choose last two activities.

[Dr. Reinhardt]

"I think the first and foremost one should be seeing if we can get any sensor readings off the Origin System or establish any communications, I am open to suggestions on the other task, based on anyone's ideas or some of the tasks we have not yet tried."

[Aloysius Jones]

"If there's time, I'd like to do a quick sweep of the building for anything else of interest." Aly said. "But, we need to make sure we have all the data we want."

[Colette Rupelle]

"I found ze executive offices maybe zere are zings zere zat might be of use." Colette suggested. "Maybe do a sweep around ze head office to see if zere are codes or keys... or a secret vault."

[Jan Novak]

Jan shrugged. He had preferences but he was unwilling to debate them, letting others have their way. Unless there would be some schematics for jump drives here somewhere. Or one could be traced to its last destination. Wait...

"I want to find a working jump drive. Or as much jump-related data as I can get. What matters is what the management wants though." He shrugged again.

[Dr. Reinhardt]

"I am not sure if there are any jump drive tech here, but is there any use for how the Hyper Pulse Generator works?"

[Comstar]

While the basic science of how a jump drive worked was fairly common knowledge, the process of building one was not - similar to nuclear warheads in the 20th century. More, the idea of being able to track a ship as it left or arrived... that had always been little more than theory.

It was possible that the large data dump might provide some information, given the immense fidelity of the data they had already collected - it would be little more than hints at a starting point, but that might still be more than anyone had gathered thus far.

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The process of attempting to activate the HPG system on the base wouldn't be easy - without a trained Comstar acolyte, the process would be trial and error, interspersed with a hasty review of any available operation manuals - though the system did at least seem to be largely automated, so it was just a matter of attempting to correctly trigger the right functions. Success here wouldn't help operate a normal HPG, but it would at least potentially send their message.

The task would consist of successfully making the following checks:

Investigation/Perception at TN 40
Computer(Coding)/Intelligence at TN 80

In order to make these checks, up to four attempts can be made to help (in total), making a roll on one of the checks (properly noted as being a helping roll in the description) and then adding 1/2 of their result (rounded down) to the final attempt. A character cannot help on a task if they are making the final attempt - and no character can help on the same task more than once.

If requested, the Winters sisters could each provide one help in place of a PC.

[Dr. Reinhardt]

D16 Message in a Bottle, Computers HELP roll: 5d10o10k4 20

-10 to Computers TN


Reinhardt does his best to help with looking over the computer system and making sure to double check the code.

[Dr. Reinhardt]

"Director Winters, can you take a look at this code and see if you can help with some of it, I am afraid it's a little above my level"