Plotbunny for sale - cheap

[M Fnord]

Every science fiction fan worth his or her weight in Star Wars action figures knows that the Manifest Destiny of Mankind is to explore space, seek out new life and all that jazz, right? Nearly 40 years after the first moon landing, though, its kind of apparent that the rest of the species doesnt think that way. This depresses fandom to a great degree, and we wish that something would change.

The Windup
Next Sunday AD, multiple inventors come together over the internet and create a Plot Device composed of everything the budding post-scarcity society needs to get off the ground. This would normally be the point in science fiction when we fulfill our Manifest Destiny In Space, but it turns out that mankind is more interested in using the Plot Devices to bring everybody up to a decent standard of living. Sure, theres a certain amount of interest in space operations from governments and corporations, but no real interest in colonizing the Final Frontier.
The Pitch
This is a time for pioneers, people with skills and determination and who could be safely considered expendable by their patrons. People who've dreamed their entire lives for a chance like this, and are willing to risk it all for their dreams.
In short, it's time for the science fiction fans of Earth to stand up and be counted! The Mundanes may inherit Earth, but the Fen shall conquer the galaxy!
Well, eventually anyway.
They're working on it.
*insert appropriate dramatic music here*

---

The Punchline
This bunny is sort of Undocumented Features meets PlanetES, with a bit of Transhuman Space thrown in for grins. Basically it revolves around the idea of fanboys & fangirls getting to live the dream only to find that it ain't all it's cracked up to be. This would work well with OCs (obviously) or a cast from a halfway realistic show. (The cast of Genshiken would work beautifully. You could probably use Haruhi & Co too, especially if you need to blame the Plot Devices on somebody.)
The Plot Devices themselves are black boxes meant to represent whatever tech level the author wants to aim for. My original sketch was aiming for near-future tech, so it was all hard science-y nano and the like. They could be anything up to Trekesque miracle tech in nature, depending on the story.
Whaddya think, sirs?---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[The Hunterminator]

I love that idea. In fact, I love it so much that I'm actually getting the urge to write something, and it's been close to 5 months since I've had that urge.
This looks like the perfect setting for a collaborative fiction work.

[M Fnord]

---

This looks like the perfect setting for a collaborative fiction work.

---

Or a roleplaying game, which is the sort of thing I tend to write by reflex.---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Black Aeronaut]

I'm up for a collab. There's been recent breakthroughs in cybernetic interfaces that I'd like to exploit in an undertaking like this. ^_^
I'm open to bringing in anyone else.

---

Black Aeronaut Technologies Group
Aerospace Solutions for the discerning spacer
"To the commissary we should go," Yoda declared firmly. "News
of this kind a danish requires."

---

[Sirrocco]

I probably won't be much up for the collab, but it's also worth noting that we're within spitting distance of a reasonable low-level powered armor. Specifically, we've got a frame that fits a marching man and makes his pack act lighter than it is. This information is at least a year old, so there've doubtless been advancements since then.
They're also doing some pretty impressive stuff with wearable computing - in particular, computers that are designed so that you can wear them around, and use them more or less constantly as an aid to life, external long-term memory, and so on.
Limb replacement cybernetics are to the point that, with a strong ten-year push or so, you could start to see replacement limbs that people might think about giving up their original limbs for. They've had optic nerve translation (use eyes as video cameras, use video cameras as eyes) for a while now.
They're getting real close to cars that can drive themselves. They already have self-parking cars on the market (given a sufficiently large parking space, appropriate amounts of peace, etc, etc, etc.)
They're looking at putting a permanent base on the moon.
Thing to remember, though - the tech would not only have to be Nifty and Useful, but specifically be Nifty and Useful in colonizing space - enough to render the possibility at least feasible - and not just feasible technologically, but feasible monetarily. The requirement to lift all of your startup gear to orbit is notably nontrivial.

[Morganite]

For some reason, this makes me think of The Getaway Special.
I'm not sure if there's really that much in common between them though.

[Epsilon]

There is a novel series with almost this premise.
Basically some geek invents the first hyperspace transport device in his garage. It's made of parts you can buy for about a hundred bucks at your local electronics shop. It can run on a gas engine. He then publishes the plans for free on the internet, making certain that the information gets distributed everywhere pretty quick.
The government has no capacity to shut this down after forty-eight hours. Soon enough, you get tourist doing space jumps all across the galaxy in converted recreational vehicles and other stuff...
It's kind of silly, but also fun.
---------------
Epsilon

[M Fnord]

Y'know, it's funny you should mention Getaway Special, 'cause I've been kicking around an RPG setting loosely based on that book for a bit now... but yeah, there really isn't all that much in common between the two ideas.
Anyway, moving back to Fen In Space:
I'm starting to get an idea or three on what kind of a story could hang off this structure. The pitch unfolding in my brain is sort of a pisstake of the classic UF/Serendipity kitchen-sink-SI space opera. It's not an 'oooh, realism' deconstruction or anything, more like... well, kind of like The Tick's The City.
Picture it: The story begins with a group of eager young space cadet fans who get their hands on a Plot Device. Being fans with a strong interest in space travel, they decide to build a spaceship with their Plot Device and go travel the stars being all heroic. So they build a spaceship out of whatever's handy (possibly incurring the wrath of local Authority Figures for nebulous reasons) and take off.
When they get into space, our heroes find that they're not the only ones out there by a wide margin. Other fan groups had the exact same idea and got there first. Crushing disappointment! Angst! Woe! But wait! The collection of fen and their Star Defense Forces and Frankly Magnificent Starships are banding together, an alliance that's part Starfleet, part trade union...
And that's about where the thought trails off so far. Consider that an opening sequence, or backstory for something beginning in media res.
As for the Plot Devices themselves, I don't think they should be detailed to any huge degree. I'm resisting my fiddly gearhead urges to say it, but the story works better if the Plot Devices remain fairly black-box and in the background. They exist to build a mundane utopia on Earth and provide power/lights/gravity/air/what have you to the Frankly Magnificient Starships and that's it. ---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Black Aeronaut]

I like that idea, Fnord - something I've always wanted to do (as if Lost in Lost Worlds wasn't indication enough). ^_^; Hell, it'd probably even make a great RP.... Or wait, someone's done that already, right?

---

Black Aeronaut Technologies Group
Aerospace Solutions for the discerning spacer
"To the commissary we should go," Yoda declared firmly. "News
of this kind a danish requires."

---

[Rieverre]

---

Crushing disappointment! Angst! Woe! But wait! The collection of fen and their Star Defense Forces and Frankly Magnificent Starships are banding together, an alliance that's part Starfleet, part trade union...

---

Of course, there's bound to be some malcontents thinking 'hey, no alien life detected? let's _make_ some' and calling dibs on some planet, naming it Qo'noS, and so on and so forth.
Am I the only person here to whose mind the thoughts 'Hey, let's go check out Zeta Cygni, just because' came upon reading through the thread?
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm

[Black Aeronaut]

No, but we are not going without an Super Dimensional Fortress. If we're gonna be tongue-in-cheek about it, then why not play it to the hilt?

---

Black Aeronaut Technologies Group
Aerospace Solutions for the discerning spacer
"To the commissary we should go," Yoda declared firmly. "News
of this kind a danish requires."

---

[Rieverre]

An SDF would be a bitch and a half to crew.
I was actually thinking of orbit-lifting an old decomissioned Soviet submarine base/nuclear missle silo and turning it into a space-station. Just because.
Hell, why not use the idea from the Macross SEED thread and instead of building hulls, fit Plot Device into submarines or something.
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm

[drakensis]

transferred
D for Drakensis

You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.

[Bob Schroeck]

Ah, kinda like Explorers for college-age folk...
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...

[M Fnord]

---

Of course, there's bound to be some malcontents thinking 'hey, no alien life detected? let's _make_ some' and calling dibs on some planet, naming it Qo'noS, and so on and so forth.

---

Well of course. These are fans we're talking about here. By nature they're going to drift into similar peer groups, and since those peer groups tend to build up around specific fandoms, hilarity ensues. You've got the Trekkies and the Warsies and the Whovians and the Whedonites and the BSG fans and fifty shades of otaku and they're all jockeying to be Big Damn Heroes to the combined mass of Fandom.

---

Hell, why not use the idea from the Macross SEED thread and instead of building hulls, fit Plot Device into submarines or something.

---

While that would work, laying hands on a submarine would be a bit out of range for your average group of college kids armed with a Plot Device. It'd work as an antagonist, assuming you wanted to drive down that road. ("Onoes, the big bad mundanes are trying to take over our plucky space heroing operation! And they've got better guns than us! Angst! Woe! Heroism!")

---

Ah, kinda like Explorers for college-age folk..

---

Man, I remember seeing that movie when it first came out. That was a great one. %)---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Rieverre]

---

It was no, strictly speaking, what you'd expect from a summit meeting.
On the other hand, the small pocket cruiser Uncertainty was floating around in geo-synch, hooked up the the first true orbital habitat. That this habitat consisted of an old Grayhound, a Winniebago, several trailer homes, and a number of old train cars that desperately needed reupholstering, all hooked together, was being ignored at the moment.
The simple fact that they were still there after the last few days meant that the structural integrity fields were holding fast, and deflectors were still working too. None of the geiger counters had as much as twitched, which was an added measure of comfort.
It was about as close to being a summit, literally, as things got.
For once, the meeting wasn't to discuss some new and innovative way of applying the Black Box Technology. There was plenty going on in that direction anyway ... and most of the discussion consisted of enough shouting to make a person want to space someone after a while. No, this was a more civil group, gathered around the small table sitting in the middle of the boat's equally small cabin with cup ramen and ideas steaming.
Logistics, they said. Demand, they said. The need to provide supply, they said. There were plenty of things that people just trampled over in their haste to get here, and would be willing to pay to have handed to them without much of a fuss.
In the fumes of miso flavoring and brewing coffee, the first, the first Universal Delivery Company of the New Age of Spacefaring (*drumroll*) slowly took shape, born out of necessity, opportunity, and the want to make a quick buck.
Well, no. Not really.
They were mostly just tired of cup-ramen, by this point, saw that the others were too busy to think about this sort of thing but _would_ likely shell out for pizza and chinese take-out, and went from there.
Not quite as dramatic, or awe inspiring, but it worked.

---

It seems like the sort of thing that just has to happen, no? After all, where there are fans, there's take-out. It's in the rules, somewhere, methinks.
Might as well make something of it.
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm

[drakensis]

transferred
D for Drakensis

You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.

[M Fnord]

We were goofing off around Saturn when the call first came in. Officially we were on the clock; a friend of a friend of a friend who worked for JPL had asked us to take some HD movies of Titan for the enlightenment of the scientific community. This wasn't what we'd signed up to do way back in the beginning, but a job's a job, it paid okay (considering the bitch of a currency conversion rate) and it was as good an excuse as any to spend three weeks out on the edge of the system. We'd canned the Titan footage and were in the process of getting a few candid shots of Cassini just for giggles when the Explain Star's email server chimed.
It was the *ship's* email, not one of our personal accounts, that meant it was something the Nation wanted to discuss. Nation email is always interesting to read; when you've got several hundred ships in the solar system representing twenty different fandoms plus maybe another three dozen independent ships & stations comprising somewhere around a quarter-million people all told, and and there's *one* all-call mailing list that everybody's subscribed to... well. From our position near where the sidewalk ends, it's fucking *hilarious,* I'll tell you that much.
Anyway, I was on pilot duty, so I punched up the old laptop we'd crazy-glued into the Star's control panel and took a look at whatever the Nation wanted to herd us into *this* time. What I got was this:
Date:
From: command@sos.co.jp (SOS Brigade Supreme Headquarters)
To: all-call@nation.fan
Subj: CONVENTION!!!!
Note all fan:
We came empty here the earth of one thing of heart: Because you become the hero. Our hearts it echoes the dream of bravery in our centers, that is our obligations to those dreams fufill! Our 2 weeks of the group hearby call of SOS for splendid conference where that of heart and, at the place of Phobos it should you grasp from today. There we organize because because of the star you become the hero, start!
Everyone who obtains this message is invited. It has your boat and your story, do!
--SOS Brigade Supreme Headquarters!
From the message text, I could tell two things. First, somebody needed to shoot their machine translator before it could harm helpless verbiage again. Second, we were going to have to hit the inner system earlier than I'd previously thought.
Whoever "SOS Brigade Supreme Headquarters" were, they'd called a Convention. Conventions are serious business for Fen; since we moved off Earth, they've become sort of our United Nations. Every so often the movers, shakers and poseurs of the Nation get together, get drunk, get laid, exchange pleasant threats, debate the few issues that can't be handled inside our own little fractions, make a few policy statements like "bow before our might, pathetic Earthlings!" and then go home with hangovers and some interesting blackmail material. So it's not entirely unlike mundane government.
The *point* is, when somebody calls a Convention the major power players in the major fractions (along with free agents like us) *have* to come out, hear what the organizer has to say and be civil to each other for a week or so. We're so scattered through the system that Conventions aren't as regular as they used to be, so they're that much more of an event.
In this case, the SOS Brigade (whoever they were) had called for a Convention and had specifically invited *everybody*. Thankfully they wanted to use Phobos; the Martians were using it as base camp for their terraforming ops, the place had been mostly hollowed out and there was plenty of room for everybody and their rides. What they were calling the Convention *for* on the other hand... the machine translation fucked that up enough that I couldn't quite figure it out. Idly hoping that whoever was speaking at the con had better translators, I fired off a quick reply:
From: explain-star@sandwich.net (Sandwich.Net Dungeon Crawlers, LLC)
To: command@sos.co.jp
Subj: Re: CONVENTION!!!!
We'll be there with bells on. Will also bring booze from the Ringed Planet. -ES
Figuring that should keep them happy, if confuse them a bit, I turned off the email client, opened the navicomp, set up a brachistone for Phobos and turned on the intercom.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I said in my best airline-pilot voice. "I'm afraid that our vacation around sunny, tropical Saturn has been cut short. We've been invited to a Convention at Phobos, so if you guys will pack up the cameras and make sure we've got enough beer to last us, we'll be on our way. Launch window in-" I glanced at the nav window "-one hour. Cockpit out."---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[The Hunterminator]

Mmm... I'm definitely getting the urge to write. So, what form will this take? Collaborative fiction, or role playing?

[Sirrocco]

It could easily support both, I'd think. No good reason not to. If you have a story to write, write it. If you have a character to play, find others who will do the same. Don't apply significant delta to the characters of others without permission and don't make any characters who are too cool for school.
Easy answer is stories (or RP-turned-story) for the bits where you're off by yourself, and RP (which may then get massaged into story) for things like Conventions that have lts and lots of everyone.

[The Hunterminator]

Mmm... anything I contribute to this thread will probably be mainly roleplaying based, mainly because my writing skills are the result of the large amount of roleplaying I've done.
Now, there's only one thing I'd like to know. Is there anything that the plot devices cannot do? Because I'm planning on using them as excuses for any technological obstacle I meet.

[M Fnord]

---

Now, there's only one thing I'd like to know. Is there anything that the plot devices cannot do?

---

They can't be blown up for great justice. Breaking the black box simply lets out the magic blue smoke and it stops working.
Beyond that, it's a question of consensus. My bit aimed for something around neoBSGish in tech (artificial gravity, miracle go-fast engines with ~0 fuel storage, sorta-kinda FTL coms to keep the intertubes going, etc.) Your milage may vary, and it ought to be put up for discussion.
So, discuss.---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[The Hunterminator]

I was thinking of something that adapts to what you connect it to, so it makes vehicles space worthy, computers become true AIs and other various effects.
(Just noticed the obvious mistake)

[Black Aeronaut]

Cool! I like that idea... Though if we are gonna be doing this a la RPG style, then we'd better set some ground rules, and fast. I myself am getting twitchy to write about the fastest delivery boy who tears around the system in an old VW Jetta he's dubbed "Gina" and has adorned with an Autobot symbol.

---

Black Aeronaut Technologies Group
Aerospace Solutions for the discerning spacer
"To the commissary we should go," Yoda declared firmly. "News
of this kind a danish requires."

---

[Sirrocco]

Thought: If *we* don't have a specific list of what the Plot Devices can do...
...then maybe the characters shouldn't either.
"Gee. I wonder.... What would happen if we hooked one of them up to a blender?"
It does give you an excuse for Person X to have a nifty application of the Plot Device that Person Y doesn't know yet.
Also, if it's going to be a plot device of Many Blessings, then at least the handwaving should *vaguely* justify that.
Of course, this is the point where I immediately take the hard left at "any sufficiently advanced technology" and keep going out the other side, but I'm a fantasy geek by nature, and make up magic systems with my spare cycles just because. I do feel like we want to keep this one at least vaguely in the realm of science fiction.
Perhaps a crash-landed alien ship (or similar source) with a strange, adaptive alien biotech that is impossible to duplicate but relatively easy to breed? It's not quite the same as the original thought, but I don't think you sacrifice the feel all that much, and it lets you justify the enormous leaps in large numbers of technological fields without pushing society forward in time much at all.
On the other hand, do we want to hand the characters proof of extraterrestrial intelligence? Of course, there's always the Bizarre Archeological Find as a source for the stuff... with or without a message saying "gee, took you long enough" but that still requires that the Others have been here At Some Point. I dunno. I'm just throwing some stuff out there at this point. Thoughts?
Oh... one thing - since these *are* fen, it occurs to me that the likelihood that the name used for the stuff *by the characters hemselves* is pretty likely to be something like handwavium, unobtanium, or Plot Devices.
Oh, and just a thought on the feel on this... (if no one's said it already - it's late enough my memory's starting to go.) whatever the tech is, and however good it is when used *properly*, everything they're using out there is jury-rigged. There should be quirks, foilibles, and annoyances. This stuff should have *character*.