Plotbunny for sale - cheap

[The Hunterminator]

*** Quote ***
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*.
*** End Quote ***
Oh definitely. I was thinking of my narrator having built a series of very basic robots and plugged them to plot devices, and is now finding himself with a crew along the lines of Bootleg, the robot that keeps collecting stuff from the web and selling it to people without access to the internet where they are.
(sorry, the quote button did a wacky for no discernible reason.)

[M Fnord]

---

Thought: If *we* don't have a specific list of what the Plot Devices can do...
...then maybe the characters shouldn't either.

---

That's actually brilliant right there.
As for origins, whatever the official story is is just a cover. As for me, I'm blaming Haruhi, because she is a Plot Device in her own right, a walking talking intelligent Plot Device that remakes the universe in her own image. Nobody else *knows* this (except the key characters who do, of course) and it would explain why the Plot Devices' capabilities keep expanding: they change every time Haruhi wants to expand her horizions.---
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!"

[Sirrocco]

That's... that's beautiful. It just showed up one day - and that gives the perfect meaningless argument for all of the *really* hard-core fen to have with one another.
"No, dammit! It's *obviously* protoculture! The similarities are blatant!"
Of course, some folks are going to be trying hard to figure out where it came from in the first place - but the chain of ownership just gets hopelessly muddled - especially after you get to the old lady who found a batch in a car that had been wrapped around a tree and abandoned. Further investigation revealed that the car had been stolen approximately 24 hours prior, hundreds of miles away, by a perp who didn't leave any fingerprints.
Oh - and obviously conflicting lies from official sources. We ought to have a few hard-core conspiracy theorists who are collecting obviously conflicting lies from official sources. Not too many - most folks just shrug and start figuring out practical applications - but a few.

[Black Aeronaut]

Sounds good to me, but all the same, I think we should have a list of "Things we know they don't, or should not, do."
Also, we'd better make up some guidelines for newbies that are coming into this midway. You know, just to keep the Mary Sue's to a minimum. Granted, that may be the pot calling the kettle black in an undertaking like this, but we should give fair warning. It'd make our lives more bearable to deter unwanted disruptions.
Oh, and will the person responsible for the coding that messed up this thread PLEASE fix their flub! It happened sometime between this post and my last one. I think it may have been you, Hunterminator.

---

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."

---

[drakensis]

Well, there probably shouldn't be any actual weapons applications (which isn't to say that people aren't trying).
Maybe it should be adaptive by person... it makes everyone using it a gadgeteer who can cobble together technology, but it only works that way for them - and it has to be their stuff, so there's no real mass production: if the maker isn't there then it won't work. Thus one person can make a communication system out of a phone and the other has a subspace transceiver but they both work and can communicate with each other because they both believe it should.
D for Drakensis

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

[Black Aeronaut]

Well, I've been thinking about it, and here's my take on it with a few ideas of my own thrown in.
It's an alien device. Where did it come from? Who is it for? Not known. All that is known is:
A) They can do practicaly anything. If ever there was a Deus Ex Machina, this would be it.
B) This is limited, though, in that each unit seems to adapt to the thought patterns of it's primary user.
C) They are self-replicating, but this is an iffy thing. We can ask that they replicate, but it seems that the devices have a mind of their own and know when it is warranted and when it is not. They'll usually do it by themselves if they sense someone who is in need of a device nearby.
D) They are sentient and very quirky. If given a computer to interface through they will interact people through it.
E) Depending on how they're treated, they'll either protect their user through whatever means necessary, or leave them to their fate.
Thoughts? Suggestions?

---

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]

Eh? Don't know how happy I am with the "they're all sentient" thing - particularly with the "protect or leave to their fate" aspect - with the degree of penetration these things are going to have in the applicable culture, it gets too close to mysticism/divine, too quickly. It feels like this works better if we keep it *away* from being a magic system. This would also cut out a bit of the "adapts to thought patterns" aspect.
Personally, I like the idea of Strange Biotech Goop. It lets you have reactions and interactions that are odd and potentially unpredictable, but doesn't fall into Appeasing The Gods of the Plot Device. It's not that they don't *like* you, it's that you're not *watering* them enough, and this particular strain reacts poorly to loud noises.
As implied, if we really crank up the mutation/adaptation rate, we can get different strains, families, and so forth. People can trade them back and forth while technobabbling unintelligibly about hybrids and crossbreeding. You can have hull integrity and life support handled by just plating your Conveyance Of Choice in the stuff. It maybe has some degree of awareness - up to about housecat level for large blocks. Full AI is then explained by the Nuku-Nuku effect, turned around a little. On the other end, you get delightful little bits like a propulsion system that wants you to *sing* to it while it works.
- there are some basic things that everyone can do (lift into orbit, establish hull integrity, basic life support, tool around the solar system to a degree.) These things are fairly reliable, though they may have one or two minor quirks.
- There are a lot of poorly understood ways of doing that work for one or two people, or a very small number of people. This should be due at least as much to technogeekish wizardry as anything else - and these things are flaky as hell, so figuring out what'll make it work *consistently* is at least as challenging as getting it to work the first time. (I really liked that image of the guy trying to stay as still as humanly possible in order to maintain his network connection. It appealed to me.) It also has to do with the way people treat their personal patches of goop, and the general nature of the goop in question. You *might* be able to duplicate something that guy over htere just did - or you might not.
----------
Side note: I have this image of a *hard-core* Giant Robot enthusiast who built an actual ridable mecha, complete iwht heavy on-board computational assets and a speaker system, and then liberally dosed it with goop.
"I live! I live, and my powers are like unto the gods. In honor of this, you may call me Deus. Deus Ex Machina."

[The Hunterminator]

---

On the other end, you get delightful little bits like a propulsion system that wants you to *sing* to it while it works.

---

Or maybe an hyper-drive that won't shut down unless you read it a bed time story.

---

Personally, I like the idea of Strange Biotech Goop. It lets you have reactions and interactions that are odd and potentially unpredictable, but doesn't fall into Appeasing The Gods of the Plot Device. It's not that they don't *like* you, it's that you're not *watering* them enough, and this particular strain reacts poorly to loud noises.

---

I like that idea. It makes it less 'godly-tech' and more 'Odd-tech'.

---

Side note: I have this image of a *hard-core* Giant Robot enthusiast who built an actual ridable mecha, complete iwht heavy on-board computational assets and a speaker system, and then liberally dosed it with goop.
"I live! I live, and my powers are like unto the gods. In honor of this, you may call me Deus. Deus Ex Machina."

---

A giant robot plot device with delusions of grandeur... I hope no one let's him/it learn about Ideon.

[Rieverre]

---

The proximity alert was ringing.
Damnit.
Why does it always ring when I'm in the shower?
I shoved the coffin lid of the sonic shower open - I hate those things, but the Uncertainty doesn't have room for a regular one, or a large enough water supply for that matter - yanking the amp plugs as I went along. It's annoying when your shower doubles as a sound system, and even more so when it starts ringing in the middle of taking a bath.
"Four-eyes, what the hell is it this time?!"
There is no such thing as a normal AI. Never has been, and as long as we don't try and make one the hard way, there likely won't be. As an example, the first registered artificial sentience was one owned by a Japanese Fan who used to set his laptop onto some handwavium and use it in lieu of a battery when he wanted to play his h-games. Guess what got Quickened?
Just one of the reasons why governments were still mostly poking and prodding at the stuff while whatever fen had gotten their hands on it ... weren't.
Though when the flatscreen monitor on the cabin's bow-wards wall flickered with an image from the mast-mounted camera I remembered exactly why I disliked staying in parking orbit around Earth these days.
#Good morning, friend in God, can we interest you in an issue of the Watchtower?#
I hit mute, and gave the white SUV displayed a glare.
"What're they fielding?" I asked after a moment, during which I grabbed and downed a mug of chilled mocha.
"Pathetic. Baseliners, almost all the way. We shall feast on their blood!"
"Uh-huh, Tee. Whatever. Give 'em an overcharge and hijack their sound system."
"Conquest!"
The relative motion indicator I'd cobbled together out of a rangefinder and laser pointer gave a fair reading that they'd stopped, and what I could make out through their windshield showed they didn't have a clue of what was going on after Tee hacked himself in through their navigational deflectors.
I hit my commo pannel, and slotted a flash drive labeled with various 'hazardous materials' warnings.
"Good morning, asshats. As a registered citizen of the Principia Universalis I find your actions to be offensive and a violation to the Discordia Accords. This is your mandatory warning."
Then I hit the Big Red Button and made sure the camera was set to record onto storage, rather than to the usual void-buffer.
Stranded in space, because Tee was still holding their drive, the big white SUV sat and shuddered. Then the frantic armwaving started. Hmm. An hour or two of bombardment should do it. A blend of Barney, fen reading Vogon poetry, and various other entertaining snippets was enough to convince even these guys to piss the hell off.
"Burn, mortals! Burn in your pathetic shells! Bwhahahahaha! Suffer the fires of hell!"

"Yeah, whatever," I grumbled, getting a grilled cheese sandwitch from null-storage. "Eh. Might as well check the agenda. What've I got on my planner today, Trigon?"

---

-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

[Acyl]

I have only one question.
If it's strange biotech goop...
...what happens if someone tries to eat it?
-- Acyl

[The Hunterminator]

---

...what happens if someone tries to eat it?

---

Oh my... I don't know. Something random and unpredictable I'd say.
Oh and, I was wondering, how and how often would the handwavium goop reproduce?
Would somebody's Handwavied car suddenly spout out a glop of it?
-Edit-
Wee, I've just found the perfect name for a Handwavied Ship. The Schrottplatz.

[Foxboy]

Like, oh, turning into Yodeling Swedes? (Talk about UNPREDICTABLE. Narf!)
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

[ECSNorway]

---

... what happens if you eat the stuff?

---

Maybe this is how the Anime Ninja Fanboy Collective got started. It works off of mindset, though, so it only transforms you if you have a strong self-identification with something else.
Back on Earth, they use it to cure body-identity issues. Transsexuals, anorexics, etc.--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[Norgarth]

---

If it's strange biotech goop...
...what happens if someone tries to eat it?

---

They get a nasty case of the runs followed by Mr Hanky the Christmas Poo coming out of their toilet for a visit. __________________
We are not ninjas, we are a hedge. Please move along.
___________________________
"I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." - George Carlin

[Morganite]

I don't know, cars being turned into spaceships reminds me a lot of TGS... (And yeah, I know it happened in UF too, but still. '.' )
Personally, I think it'd be kind of funny if nothing happened when someone ate some. I imagine some nut eating some, shouting "Now you will die, insignificant fools!" at whoever has good reasons to chase him, waiting, waiting... nothing happens, and getting hauled off.
>Oh and, I was wondering, how and how often would the handwavium goop reproduce?
I'd ask first, does it require actually doing something with it to make it reproduce, or will it do it on it's own given a reasonably suitable environment? Seems to me like the former would work better, but as someone with no intention of writing anything in this I lack authority. '.'
-Morgan, does have the mental image of throwing a bunch of power tools in some plotdeviceite to make an autoshop though..."I have no interest in ordinary humans. If there are any aliens, time travelers, or espers here, come sleep with me."
---From "The Ecchi of Haruhi Suzumiya"
-----(Not really)

[M Fnord]

(finally a moment to actually think stuff through...)
Hm, lots of stuff in the last bit. In rough order:
The biotech thing: I'm not enthused by the idea, but that's more aesthetic grounds on my part than any real mechanical objection. If we're gonna explain it I'd rather go with nanotech (the magitech of choice for the discerning 21st century sci-fi writer) but it could go either way. The concepts are similar enough, and keeping it ICly vague provides yet another thing for fen techies to argue about when they get together.
Limitations: I can think of only three hard limits that should be set on Plot Devices. First, they can't openly break the laws of reality. Since Fenspace operates (mostly) on the looser laws found in all quality space opera, that's the upper bound. No totally godlike deus ex machinae or the like.
Second, they can't be used to build weaponry. Some sort of safety lock that "breeds" true and can't be broken. (They can be used to *power* weapons, but if you want to use one to charge up the Reflex cannon you need to build a Reflex cannon first, which leads into...)
Third, they can't build genre vehicles from scratch. That is, you can't show a Plot Device a picture of the Milennium Falcon and say "Build this!" It's kind of arbitrary considering all the other stuff we're thinking of making the Plot Device do, but I think it's important to preserve the DIY feel.
---
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!"

[drakensis]

Going interstellar is hard.
Some say it's a real test of your cojones to go that far out. At least if you're in system and get in over your head, someone will generally be willing to wander over and save your incompetent kiester, for gloating points if nothing else. But the number of people with interstellar communciations is smaller and the chances are very slim that anyone will be able to get to you in time to do more than divide up whatever of your stuff survives you.
And those few who might save you are not likely to be the ones you want to be saved by. If nothing else, due to the humiliation.
But that's not really the problem. No, while there are no hard figures on how many people go to warp or whatever, it's actually pretty hard to fuck up badly enough to come a cropper out there. There's not much out there to cause problems until you get to a system and anyone who can get past Cochrane's limit (no, the guy who named it wasn't called Cochrane, he was just a trekker, and most us drop the 'Cochrane') shouldn't have any problem they can't deal with if there's an actual star system to work with.
Unless they find someone. Which, thus far, no one has that I know of.
No the problem is The Limit. Captial T, capital L. It's a notional sphere centred on the Sun and roughly eighty AU in diameter. Thus far, no one has managed to build a faster-than-light drive that works. Outside, Einsteinian physics can fuck right off. There's serious bragging rights in who can go faster and further. I think some kid from New York has the top slot right now for getting a clear thousand light years, but it took him two weeks and some of his numbers are suspect.
Inside? Light's still the fastest thing outside of theoretical physics and most of us only scoot around at about half that. Which means that it takes around, hmm, ten hours to get from the Earth to the Limit. Granted that ten hours isn't _that_ long given that a good number of us are apparently living in modified automobiles these days.
But the thing is, you're probably not alone. You're going out to take someone maybe, some dirtsider willing to pay for the experience (good money in that, even these days), or someone with a cargo they don't trust you alone with, or just someone to stand up and swear up and down that you did or saw what you say you did or say.
Ten hours with someone else in somewhat confined quarters that one of you may very well consider the only home and sanctuary that you have?
And then however long interstellar (if you can hold it together that long, a four light year hop to Alpha Centauri is maybe an hour at most and there's a fair sprinking of Fen in near there), plus getting into whatever system you're headed for.
And then back.
Some day there will be the equivalent of sevice stations on The Limit, where you can stop to de-stress. But not yet.
D for Drakensis

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

[Black Aeronaut]

I'll advocatre the nano-tech solution to what form it takes. It will resemble the biotech goop to a very reasonable degree, and yet still retain mechanized aspects. I.E.: the guy who shoved some into his laptop's battery slot? It suddenly takes on the shape of the battery that fits in there.
As for replication, that can be easy. Feed it more than it needs to maintain. The Nano's will go nuts and replicate like crazy until you got enough to spare to a friend. That said, we need something to feed these things that, while not so common place that they'd take over the planet inside a week, is quite obtainable.
Also, this can support the "What if somebody eats it?" notion. I'd imagine that it would either give a person a SINGLE special ability or perform ONE major change/transformation to said person. Either would depend highly upon said person's most heartfelt desires.
I agree with the three hard limitations you stated, Fnord. Sounds right to me. Besides, I figure that the light barrier can be circumvented some way within scientific reason. There's always hyperspace or whatever form of extra-dimensional FTL transit - this seems to be the favorite in sci-fi communities.

---

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."

---

[The Hunterminator]

As yet another satisfied customer paid me, I kept hearing the amused chuckles coming from all over the Spaceport. I glowered at the various onlookers and marched back to the Schrottplatz. As I did though, I couldnt help glancing at my ship, and I had to admit that I understood their amusement, it was a sorry excuse for a ship, no matter how much Handwavium you coated it with.
The worst is that I never really had a choice about it. One day, a group of my drones had gotten tired of me telling them that we didnt have any room to install every single device they wanted to build. So they flew away with my car one evening while I was not looking, and when I saw it next, the front half proudly jutted out the front of a formerly shipwrecked freighter.
At least, I had room for a real bed now. I was also one of the few Fen that could be hired for large deliveries and the most competitive when it came to serious space construction jobs. It was also great for attracting passenger jobs, provided they could live with the fact that they would be travelling onboard a rusty freighter/car hybrid named scrap yard in German.
I had barely walked through the hatch that one of AllCaps descendents spoke to me from the other end of the hold, easily audible over the noise of 5 drones welding what looked like a crane on the inside of the hull, Boss, we just received an invitation to a convention, though well have to leave right now to make it in time.
I mentally calculated the supplies we would need for the travel and a quick check revealed that yes, we had everything we needed to leave immediately. I nodded and replied, Ok, tell everyone to be ready for takeoff as soon as possible.
As I walked to the cockpit, I heard the AllCapist yelling the wake up call to the drone in charge of engineering, Yo Gramps, wake up the engine. Boss says were leaving now.
The call echoed across most of the ship, and the various other AllCapist drones quickly became audible all over the ship, waking everyone one up with their rather loud wake up calls. I looked around the cockpit, checking that everything was in order, and then steered towards my next destination.

[Black Aeronaut]

The 1986 Volkswagon Jetta was a decent little car. Unlike certain other year-models of the make, this particular one was known for being utterly reliable even having been horribly beaten. It was a good little car.
What it had not been meant to do was have some Handwavium shoved into the gas tank and used as an inter-system vehicle.
Benjamin felt that, that aside, he was doing pretty good. Using Gina, he'd become a pretty adept courier, swiftly shuttling small cargo loads, paperwork, and the occasional passenger or two through the system. The scenery changed and he met interesting people along the way. And at the end of the day he'd return to his homey little niche board the first orbital habitat over Earth.
At this time, Ben was sleeping. He'd been up late the other night on IRC once again. Doing so wasn't such a big deal. Gina handled most of the boring stuff without complaint. She'd usually entertain herself in the process by harrasing some alt. group on usenet anyways. Not that Ben cared - he never could get into Usenet.
Gina was more than just the Jetta itself. She was also a computer in the trunk. Ben had gotten fed up with the machine's sub-par performance one day and, for shits and giggles, pulled the old AMD Duron processor and RAM DIMM's out and stuck some Handwavium in their place and a few other key areas like the hard drive and graphics card, etcetera. The result was Gina.
While Benjamin slept, Gina had dedicated a process thread or two to staying on course while the rest she used to have fun tormenting the Trolls and EMO's on Usenet, Myspace, LiveJournal, and a few others. She also kept one on momnitoring Ben's e-mail accounts as he'd asked her to whenever she could.
Therefore, she was quick to notice the odd email that came in on from the Nation of the Fen mailing list. Briefly, she checked the message. Had she been human, she would have sighed and shaken her head. Never send a bot to do an AI's job. That aside, it looked like it was worth Ben's attention, and he'd slept long enough anyways...
***
"Yo, BJ! Wake up. You got e-mail from the Nation's all call."
"Guh?" I replied as I sat up in the reclined driver's seat and began to rub the bluriness out of my eyes. "E-mail? Put it up on the driver's side monitor." So saying, I pulled down one of the laptop LCD displays I had mounted in place of the visors. It was a small miracle that I was able to get matching ones, so it didn't look like such a bad kludge at all.
I sighed after reading the message. "Someone needs to shoot their secretary," I said as I reached for the track-ball I had mounted in the cup holder, hit the reply, and rapped out a quick aknowlegement on the split keyboard that was on either side of the steering wheel.
"Too bad they're doing this convention in a big space," said Gina. "I'd've loved to see the overcorwing issues we would have had back home."
"YOU would," I replied as I hit the 'Send' button with the track ball. "Don't forget who would actually have to live with that kind of insanity."
"Hah. You humans and your bioligical needs."
"You machines and your mechanical needs," I retorted.
"Hey!"
"Chill out. How far are we from Home?"
"We're about an hour out," she replied, plotting our position on a map of Earth Area Orbit.
"Traffic?" I asked.
"Probably because of that e-mail. It's timestamp was for five hours ago. Welcome to rush hour."
"Peachy."

---

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]

Well, nanotech works just about as well as biotech, I suppose - though I'm rather a fan of "who can tell?"
An expansion to a limitation: Handwavium doesn't build *anything*. It adds to, augments, and enhances. The core of the thing, whatever it is, is still going to have to come from good old hardtech. (Honestly, I think this has been pretty well established, but it sounds like it's good to have such things codified for RP reasons.)
Also: modifier to the stuff I put here - I'll happily edit/preread for anyone who wants it, but my writing bandwidth is both erratic and limited, and it's not likely that any of it is going to fall here. I'm mostly in the discussion out of an aesthetic appreciation for well-built universes. If any of the actual author-types really doesn't like the stuff I'm saying, feel free to ignore me.
Suggested limitation to the "eat me" effects: Inert works just fine by itself, but if you want to play around with wierdnesses, they should have the following attributes:
- Nondangerous: Whatever they are, they shouldn't hamper you past the "annoying" level in any practical sense. They shouldn't be horribly ugly. They will likely be rather on the freakish side, but you kew that when you signed up.
- Permanent: You get one, you get only one, and once you've got one, you never get rid of it. Do ya feel lucky?
- Balanced: most of these should have some benefit and some negative. Neither should be overwhelming. If it's the sort of thing you're really into, it'll be really cool, and you'll happily accept the minor issues it entails. If it's not something that you're into, it'll be added to the list of Life's Little Aggravations, though you do have to admit it comes in handy every once in a while.
(Image: one guy lucked into variably magnetic feet. It's really cool... except... you know how sometimes you get a cramp, and one of your muscles tenses waaaay up, and it takes you time time and effort to get it to relax again? Yeah.)
- Relatively Minor: Nothing overwhelmingly powerful. Nothing that naturally weaponizes (mind you, many of them could be things that might be useful in a brawl, once you learn how to use them, and a few might give you a bit of an edge right off the bat, but nothing like a Giant Scorpion Tail of Doooom, or anything)
- Explicable within the native psuedoscience: Nothing like lazerbeams out of the eyes unless you have a *really* good explanation. Basically, even if the Laws of Physics are just a guide, they should still be a guide.
In order to get the effect, you have to destabilize the stuff in some way - run some radiation through it, sit it under intense vibration, extremes of heat or cold, electric current - whatever. Eventually, the folks downstairs might figure it out well enough to really *tune* the effects - which, in turn, will allow a sufficiently well-trained tech with a sufficiently well-equipped lab to give you almost any body your heart desires - but for the moment, if you go with fast and cheap, the results are appropriately unpredictable.
Oh, and a suggestion: the goop provides some appropriate and reasonably doable way to lift off the ground and get into space, but it's *really* not fond of atmospheric burn - or even winds that are too strong. Getting out of the gravity well is surprisingly easy these days (personally, I figure it's some sort of wacky grav effect, but that's not important here.) Getting out of the *atmosphere* takes a while. This allows the average fen with average resources to get ahold of some goop, spend a while culturing it, and eventually leave mother earth, but means that trips up and down the gravity well will still be pretty infrequent for most of them. The moon, on the other hand....
Oh, and an NPC to throw into the mix: After an appropriate amount of time, you get the previously mentioned spaceworthy submarine. Seeing that they were bing left behind in the rush, eventually the military bit the bullet, and just started setting systems up, looking for quirks they could live with. They wound up lucking into a batch that has almost *no* requirements, quirks, or foilibles... except that it Really Really Likes John Philip Sousa music. A Lot. The folks in charge looked at this, shrugged, declared victory, and crewed it with a group of Seamen, Soldiers, Airmen and Marines who all scored high on the appropriate tests, and who *also* Really Really Like John Philip Sousa music. A Lot. The armed services do have access to a rather large pool of people like that, after all.
Also, it's worth remembering that the *ship* is the one without many foilibles. Before you decide to introduce this character, run a google search on ["bubble skippy" submarine]. It should help a fair bit.
For a second character... well, after you've infeced a submarine with handwavium, it's *really* hard to get it clean again - and that's without the moral issues. So what do you do with the thing? They figured, yank the weapons systems and sell it as surplus (this wasn't as expensive as you might think - the subs were due to be decomissioned anyway.) Now, that'd be pretty expensive for a single person - but the subs were pretty big. A *consortium* of military otaku....
(This becomes potentially even funnier because from external appearances there's no way to tell them apart - and the only way to tell them apart by communicator (assuming you don't know them personally) is that the real military types have John Philip Sousa in the background almost al the time, while the otaku only have him on at those times where the chief navigator has control over the stereo system.)
Feel free to yoink either for anything. Ownership devolves individually to first person to use them in a story. I personally suspect that they work better as people for your characters to run into, but it anyone wants to take a shot at running from an inside perspective, please do have at.

[Evil Midnight Lurker]

---

Third, they can't build genre vehicles from scratch. That is, you can't show a Plot Device a picture of the Milennium Falcon and say "Build this!" It's kind of arbitrary considering all the other stuff we're thinking of making the Plot Device do, but I think it's important to preserve the DIY feel.

---

On the other hand, if you're willing to build the initial mockup from scratch and then pour handwavium over it, and to settle for something way less awesome (and very different) than the fictional tech base... there are probably people out there who would try to create the Falcon or the Firefly or whatever.
And in some cases, the genre vehicle actually exists.
I guarantee you, rock-solid, that someone -- be it the JSDF or a consortium of elder otaku -- will raise the Yamato from its watery grave, refurbish it to look as much like the uchuu senkan version as possible, and then apply handwavium to every available surface. There is just no way that this would not happen.
The same community of otaku are likely to make Asteroid 6565 Reiji their headquarters. Call it Pirate Island or SSX Base... if this is the near enough future, they'd even bring Matsumoto-sama out there just so he could say he'd set foot on it. ^.^
--Sam
"Under this flag, will you follow me?"

[Florin]

Cars? RV's? BAH! You people think to small! If I decide to flex the sad atrophied thing that is my writing muscle, I'm swiping this! More information on it here.--
Comb your hair, damn anime hippies.
--
If you become a monster to put down a monster you've still got a monster running around at the end of the day and have as such not really solved the whole monster problem at all. 

[Acyl]

Oh, well...if I write anything myself, it's going to feature a guy who...
Well, you see, he's Fen, but he's the sort who'd rather just stay at home and surf the 'net. And play games and stuff. Actually flying around the solar system takes a certain...you know, mindset. Which he doesn't have. It's one thing to TALK about adventures in space, quite another to actually do it yourself.
But he enjoys talking to the folks who do. He wants to be part of the community, as it were.
So, the way I'm figuring it...he owns and runs a Space Station. That's what he calls it, anyway. Fen need somewhere to resupply, after all. Handwavium alone doesn't make good food, no matter how much you nuke it. Then there's essential things that every spacefarer needs.
Like, y'know, anime merchandise, big tables for wargaming matches, venues for CCG tournaments...
Now, it's still technically a ship, since it still moves. He had to get it off the planet to begin with, after all. But it really doesn't look like anything that should be flying.
Largely 'cause, in preparation for his move, he sunk most of his money into buying a couple or three old warehouses and a bit of surrounding real estate. Then he renovated them. Then he got a lot of handwavium, calculated just how far down his property rights extended, and...
The local authorities are still somewhat pissed off about the, er, crater's not the right word. Let's try 'divot', or possibly 'really big hole'.
-- Acyl

[Rieverre]

---

Handwavium comes in all sorts of different shapes and sizes, ranging from simple black cubes to a weird sort of guacamole-like ooze.
What?
Yeah, once upon a blue moon an associate got drunk enough to think switching the stuff with our dip was a good idea. The less said about that and its results, the better, though for some reason I seem to have come out of it the way I'd been when I'd come in.
The chunk that I called my own above all others was sitting smugly underneath the Uncertainty's table, humming away softly as it fed the drive-sails and pretty much everything else on board that required power.
It really was amazing. Such a little thing, and so much potential ... some used it better than others, though.
Speaking of which ... I shot a look at the navigational holosphere - formerly a disco ball, now hanging from the cabin ceiling - and grinned.
Energy sails are nifty ... or, you know, for me anyway. I don't know if anybody else has gotten these results. They don't really allow for a lot in the way of manouvering in the same way that the baseline handwavium gravitics do - changing their vector is a bitch and a half, for example - but for pure acceleration they're worth their weight in gold. Still, getting too close too anybody with them online is asking for trouble.
That's mainly why we didn't lift any old sailboat/freighter relic and try fitting it with those when Hermes Universal Deliveries was considering upscaling our little flotilla of associates with something that could carry bulk.
We were still mostly in the business of subcontracting those big jobs to people who've got the patience to maintain something big enough to pull them off, but we'd gotten our own hauler somewhere along the line.
And if I was reading the manifests right, it was heading for Phobos for some reason. I queried its Majordomo for a manifest, and found its cars loaded down with the sort of stuff you'd expect to be delivered for a ...
...
Oh, frag. I'd been wondering why I'd gotten so little mail in the past week.
"Trigon."
"Hmph."
"My mail. Now."

"First, it's 'hold all communications'. Then, it's suddenly 'my mail'. Humans. Make up your damn minds, worms."
Well, there it was. Huh. Been a while since I'd last gone to Convention, though seeing as this time I was at least heading in the right direction, more or less ...
Ah. Why not? There were no express deliveries going on that weren't being handled already.
I plotted the appropriate course adjustments into the 'helm', then reconsidered. I'd be there early if I really punched it, but what was I supposed to do with my time then? Terraforming wasn't really my cup of tea, you know.
Meh. Might as well try the long way around.
I hit the commo, and called up the space-train.
"Uncertainty here. Hullo hullo, Galaxy Express. I'm reading you've got some free space on you. Mind giving me a piggyback ride to Phobos, Maetel?"

---

-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