Federation Commander

[GM arbitrarily moves the story forward before everyone can respond.]

You see no sign of ambush here.

Muankaal enters the bridge. "Engineering-- is everything in order?"

"Aye captain," says a voice over the comm. "The engines are hot. We can move whenever you give the word."

"Helm, prepare for takeoff."

"Captain," says an attractive Klingon communications officer. "Starport Authority has refused our request for immediate departure and placed us on lockdown."

Muankaal strokes his goatee thoughtfully. "It's worse than I thought. Suggestions...?"

He takes a moment and looks at Jack, Marcus, Skexis, and Fred expectantly....

[GM Note-- Hopefully everyone can decide *something* to be doing within 24 hours -- you don't have to be in the bridge if you don't want to be-- you can hang back in the cargo bay or whatever you want to be doing if you think you are no help dealing with the Starport Authority.]

Captain Jack asks, "What reason did they give for the lockdown?"

The communications officer looks to Muankaal for a second... and he nods imperceptibly.

She then says, "Starport Authority states that the lockdown is due to routine safety and security procedures that have yet to be completed."

"Interesting," says Muankaal. "I don't seem to recall this happening before during a takeoff from Donjebruche. They must be onto us, but they have to stall us because they don't have enough evidence to take us in."

[OOC question] Is this star port's lock down the "we use a tractor beam or some other method to prevent you from taking off" or the "we're just telling you not to take off, but can't stop you without shooting you down" type?[/OOC]

mojo_billbo wrote:[OOC question] Is this star port's lock down the "we use a tractor beam or some other method to prevent you from taking off" or the "we're just telling you not to take off, but can't stop you without shooting you down" type?[/OOC]

[GM checks GPD Feds. Donjebruche has a population of 10,000. Tafelland is a minor colony world. Ruling: The downport is a few glorified cargo containers and lots of empty space. They don't have assets like a tractor beam-- just a few shuttles, techs, and some bureaucrats. They can put any area navel vessels onto you in a pinch though.]

Captain Jack looks at Muankaal, "Do you have a data terminal that we can make a link into the spaceports sensor grid... I might be able to take the grid offline so that can't track us for a few minutes before you can warp us out of the system..."

mojo_billbo wrote:Captain Jack looks at Muankaal, "Do you have a data terminal that we can make a link into the spaceports sensor grid... I might be able to take the grid offline so that can't track us for a few minutes before you can warp us out of the system..."

"Do it," says Muankaal.

He nods to the communications officer and she stands aside, leaving her console open for you.

[When you try it... please give as much detail as you can manage about exactly what you're doing.]

While humming some catchy federation popular song from a decade ago, Captain Jack sits down at the computer terminal, remotely accesses the sensor grid using the federation standard remote administration terminal protocol, knowing that these passwords are typically horribly weak in civilian systems since the military grade stuff is strictly controled. Even though the passwords are encoded UTF64, runs an appropriate tool for the day (probably written in Perl256) to get into the system as the first attempt.

mojo_billbo wrote:While humming some catchy federation popular song from a decade ago, Captain Jack sits down at the computer terminal, remotely accesses the sensor grid using the federation standard remote administration terminal protocol, knowing that these passwords are typically horribly weak in civilian systems since the military grade stuff is strictly controled. Even though the passwords are encoded UTF64, runs an appropriate tool for the day (probably written in Perl256) to get into the system as the first attempt.

Okay... you are humming the Federation equivalent of Superfreak. The Klingons in the room arch their eyebrows at you... not sure what to think. [You get extra glory for success though... and extra shame for failure... due to the bravado.]

I'm breaking this down into two rolls. One to get in and the other to make the system do what you want.

GM Ruling: You get +1 due to it being a civilian system and +1 for using Perl. So you have Expert Skill (Computer Security)-11. Also you have Klingon (Alien Culture) [2] which means you don't get penalties for unfamiliar Klingon consoles. 13 or less gets you in!

Okay... you are in like Flynn.

[Maybe I made that too easy.... Hm. Actually... with an 8 rolled... I could have slathered on the penalties and you'd still have made it. Thank you dice for taking GM guilt away!]

Next... You are in the system... you see... an object model for the sensor grid... and also... you see piles of historical sensor data.

Now... just a basic Computer Operation/TL10-13 roll to see if you can make any sense of all of this. No penalties due to your general computing and Spacer background.

Okay... you grok all that mess. [Man... another 8!] You can have your way with it if you wish... just tell me exactly what you want to do.

Oh.

One more thing: this is a Klingon E3 Corvette.

Step 1: Start to download the historical sensor data.
Step 2: Shell another process while the data downloads
Step 3: adjust the sensor screen to reduce sensitivity to the point of not recording any launches or landings while we get away...
Step 4: delete all logs and checksum recordings that would have noticed our intrusion...

Once the download is done, issue a sensor grid shutdown with a diagnostic routine process run on startup to delay repair/reuse of the sensor grid until we're well into warp...

Once the sensitivity is reduced to mask our departure, Captain Jack turns to
Muankaal and explains: "Now would be a good time to make our departure..."

Captain Jack also checks the last 72 hours of sensor data for anything "abnormal" and/or unlisted...

(OOC: sorry. I got busy. I'm back now)

Skexis can't help much right now so he straps himself into a chair and prepares for launch.

GM Ruling:

Step 1 is a programming task. (Computer Programming/TL10-11)
Step 2 is free
Step 3 is a computer Operations task.
Step 4 is a programming task.

So... 11 or less, 13 or less, and 11 or less.

ZOMG! [You roll an 11, a 9, and an 11!]

These are atrociously ugly scripts, but they get the job done. If there isn't anything major about this computer system that you don't know about... then you successfully achieved everything you wanted to do.

[GM pauses for the weekend to give the other players a chance to do something before takeoff. Oh hai! There's Skexis strapping in. Okay, good. Giving Marcus one last chance to put his two cents in then....]

You review the sensor data... and you see that there have been no arrivals in the past two weeks. That is out of the ordinary. A few freighters have departed normally at the usual intervals. Other than that... nothing looks weird.

[OOC] W00T! [/OOC]

Captain Jack gives Muankaal the sensor log data, just incase it's useful for him and prepares himself for launch as well...

"That is one catchy tune..."

[Captain Jack scores one character point... and two points of "status" vis-a-vis these Klingons in shipboard situations. Not so much for being successful... but mainly for being awesome. Well played, sir! I haven't decided what status is for, yet, but we can figure that out later if it seems like it should ever matter. Though it would make sense if they could be cashed in for rank, contacts, allies, or favors at some point.]

[OOC]

High Level Overview of the situation:

You are blasting out of Taffeland in a Klingon E3 Corvette. Unless you guys do something crazy, Muankaal will order his ship to proceed directly to the Neutral Zone at Warp 7. You suspect that Muankaal has an Old Kings artifact on board the ship-- the one you recovered for him in your first adventure. Other than that, all you know off hand is that you seem to be safe from Federation authorities at the moment.

Taffeland is about 208 parsecs away from the Neutral Zone, so this is liable to be a good jaunt. It will take a little more than 11 days for you to get there. (Setting note: Warp 9 or so would get you there in about half a day, but it would sacrifice your mobility altogether if the maintenance costs due to that kind of travel forced you to return to a shipyard for a few months!)

You are free to ask questions about Muankaal, the ship, the local geography... anything! You can do this out of character or in character or both. If you choose to do this in character, you have a lot of leeway in terms of where and how you do it. I do not have any particular scenes in mind for the travel portion. If you want something to happen, you will have to "look for trouble" yourself!

SO... you have some time to poke around the ship if you like. After that... I will present the next encounter/obstacle/challenge/situation. Of course... if you want to earn status in this context like Captain Jack just did, you'll have to figure out some way to make yourself useful around here!

Good luck!