On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 10:20 AM, John Geoffrey <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

> Knowing nothing about the plot of the later episodes I cam up with
> this: a shipping company wants to commit insurance fraud (think the
> Titanic/Olympic theories). So they build two ships, one ultramodern
> cruise ship, one a cheaper and very generic trader. Their plan is to
> sell the cruise ship outside the imperium, and at the same time claim
> a loss of the ship on the way to its first destination within the
> imperium. So they switch transponder signals and try to drop the
> trader into the sun of a low-traffic system.

> The main characters are stuck on that trader that is supposed to drop
> into the sun, and they are all mindwiped and don't have a clue what is
> going on. (the whole ship has been scrubbed of identification). They
> were low-berth Travellers on the shipping lines ships and had all
> roughly the right qualification, so they spirited off and claimed to
> be the crew of the cruise ship (for additional fun the company tries
> to cash in on their life insurance as well).

> But they were woken up due to some quirk in the system. Maybe a spy in
> the company who didn't want them to die, maybe some computer routines.

If I was rigging this, I would vent the ship to vaccum when leaving,
and just shut off life support to any of the cold sleep births.  I
mean, if you're gonna murder people, be efficient about it.  Why
bother wiping their memories if you're just gonna croak 'em?

> Thoughts? I was thinking about using this to introduce the system to
> two people who haven't played it before.

You want to get rid of the dummy ship, you need it to burn someplace
with enough traffic that people will see it burn, but not enough
traffic that someone will try to DO something about it successfully.

But that still leaves you a ship short.  People will look for the
survivor to try and back-engineer what happened to the deader.

--

"Any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from a genuine
kook." -Alan Morgan