Post by Catsmate on Apr 20, 2021 12:15:11 GMT
A. A. and The Box.
Part one.
Time machines come in all shapes and sizes, and widely varying levels of capability, from pocket watch to starships. The 'standard' of the Whoniverse is the TARDIS; internally spacious and sophisticated, externally compact, discreet1 and pretty much invulnerable.
Miracles of brilliant science and engineering, the culmination of millennia of development.
At the other end of the spectrum from these classic time ships is this ‘craft’: a six metre steel box fitted with a home-made Time Displacement Generator and camping gear.
But it works, it can carry it’s crew around in history.
Doctor A. A. Weaver.
Adrienne Alexandra ‘A.A.’ Weaver is not the typical image of a Mad Scientist (capitalisation absolutely necessary). She’s young (34), generally well groomed, articulate and female. Nor has she ever been heard to utter the phrase “I'll show them all”, despite having constructed a working time machine. Of sorts.
Background.
AA inherited Orchard House, with it's walled garden and the seven acres of ground around it, from her aunt Letitia when the latter was killed in a car accident. Well that’s what was supposed to have happened; AA has developed doubts about the way her aunt’s car is said to have driven off a cliff-side road in bad weather. Neither the car nor ny body weren’t recovered.
AA had been extremely fond of her elderly, rich and rather eccentric aunt. Letitia had encouraged her to follow her twin interests at university, which ended in a Double First in history and physics (blame their childhood Professor X marathons) but was surprised to be her sole heir. She got the lot; seven acres (2.8 hectares) of quiet land with lots of trees, surrounded by countryside, and a Victorian house, plus quite a bit of actual money.
Which helped greatly as her academic career was rather static, and might well be heading downhill quite rapidly after she’d punched the head of the university’s physics department. Patronising idiot that he was.
She used the money to establish her own consultancy business, taking on problems that interested her, and moved into the house. There she slowly began cleaning Letitia’s possessions away.
That’s when she found the sub-basement.
The house was big, designed for large Victorian families with numerous children, servants and odd relatives. The cellars were enormous and encompassed both the house and the former stables/coach house; there were sections for cold storage, wine, coal and general bric-à-brac. She’d explored them a bit, shortly after moving in, but left the matter for a later time.
The later time arrived when BB finally noticed she wasn’t paying for electricity or gas. Yet she had abundant power, heat and hot water, even in the depths of an East Anglian winter. She followed the cables and pipes into the main cellar and then into the floor. It took a while but she found the entrance to the sub-basement, well one of them, and her aunt’s laboratory.
The lab was huge and filled with a variety of equipment, including some rather expensive pieces of kit normally limited to well-funded universities or companies. But it was the electricity supply that intrigued her and she was amazed to trace the cables to an oak cabinet which contained, apparently, four truck-sized lead acid batteries; they were producing tens of kilowatts of electricity. Their excess heat, and that produced by two dedicated models that produced only heat, were linked to the boiler.
Cold fusion.
AA was concerned. She was quite intelligent enough to realise the implications of such a discovery becoming known; massive shifts in the global economy, social and political turmoil and quite possibly the collapse of human civilisation. She resolved to proceed with great care.
Further explorations of the cellar revealed much more, including a number of things that weren’t there any more. The last seven years of her aunt’s meticulous journals were gone, along with a lot of papers regarding various projects she’s been working on. There were notes on the fusion generators, but these weren’t from their original development, but rather methods to improve their efficiency.
Also present were rough notes on some odd quartz crystals that Letitia had been testing, some suggestions of very strange properties that they exhibited.
Several pieces of equipment were also missing; quite a lot of tools and gear, several fusion generators that were described were gone
The lab had been cleared of certain materials, but carefully and meticulously. It hadn’t been done in a hurry or a panic, nor had there been an attempt to destroy any of the devices and research materials. If it was a cover-up it was a very strange one.
It seemed more like a planned departure.
What was present was worrying enough; the fusion generators and the notes to build more were potentially world-changing but there were more; a device that extracted deuterium from hydrogen with great efficiency on a small scale using something referred to as the Tragellan Technique2. Methods to grow and deposit a film of a photonic crystal material with non-linear optical properties3 and form a material superconductive of heat and electricity at room temperatures4. Weirder still there was the description of an experiment, with functioning apparatus, that used those odd crystals and appeared to implement Maxwell’s Demon5.
This is a placeholder, I'll be posting the rest, including details of 'The Box' and stats for AA and her sidekick later.
The idea is one that was in my head for a while; another campaign set in (or at least based in) the present day and with a "low tech" time machine. The initial spark was the delivery to a neighbour of a six-metre Conex outfitted as a garden office which made me go "hmmmm".
AA is based on Dr. B. B. Miller from the obscure kids TV mini-series of the '90s Time Riders.
Comments? Suggestions? Questions?
1. If everything is working properly of course.
2. State of Change.
3. A theoretical concept today; such a material could be (among other properties) a better thermal insulator than a vacuum gap.
4. The subject of much research (including by me many years ago).
5. Maxwell's Demon. Which breaks the laws of thermodynamics.
Part one.
Doctor went back in time
Confident and clever.
Doctor went where she planned
Well, hardly ever.
Confident and clever.
Doctor went where she planned
Well, hardly ever.
Time machines come in all shapes and sizes, and widely varying levels of capability, from pocket watch to starships. The 'standard' of the Whoniverse is the TARDIS; internally spacious and sophisticated, externally compact, discreet1 and pretty much invulnerable.
Miracles of brilliant science and engineering, the culmination of millennia of development.
At the other end of the spectrum from these classic time ships is this ‘craft’: a six metre steel box fitted with a home-made Time Displacement Generator and camping gear.
But it works, it can carry it’s crew around in history.
Doctor A. A. Weaver.
Adrienne Alexandra ‘A.A.’ Weaver is not the typical image of a Mad Scientist (capitalisation absolutely necessary). She’s young (34), generally well groomed, articulate and female. Nor has she ever been heard to utter the phrase “I'll show them all”, despite having constructed a working time machine. Of sorts.
Background.
AA inherited Orchard House, with it's walled garden and the seven acres of ground around it, from her aunt Letitia when the latter was killed in a car accident. Well that’s what was supposed to have happened; AA has developed doubts about the way her aunt’s car is said to have driven off a cliff-side road in bad weather. Neither the car nor ny body weren’t recovered.
- There are suggestions of other vehicles involved and a curious amount of activity afterwards. The coronial investigation was brief and stated that the car must have been washed out to sea. Nothing was recovered.
- There’s also the person seen by witnesses in the car with
Letitia Weaver, someone who’d apparently been living, discreetly, at
the house for months prior to his apparent death. He's never been identified.
AA had been extremely fond of her elderly, rich and rather eccentric aunt. Letitia had encouraged her to follow her twin interests at university, which ended in a Double First in history and physics (blame their childhood Professor X marathons) but was surprised to be her sole heir. She got the lot; seven acres (2.8 hectares) of quiet land with lots of trees, surrounded by countryside, and a Victorian house, plus quite a bit of actual money.
Which helped greatly as her academic career was rather static, and might well be heading downhill quite rapidly after she’d punched the head of the university’s physics department. Patronising idiot that he was.
She used the money to establish her own consultancy business, taking on problems that interested her, and moved into the house. There she slowly began cleaning Letitia’s possessions away.
That’s when she found the sub-basement.
The house was big, designed for large Victorian families with numerous children, servants and odd relatives. The cellars were enormous and encompassed both the house and the former stables/coach house; there were sections for cold storage, wine, coal and general bric-à-brac. She’d explored them a bit, shortly after moving in, but left the matter for a later time.
The later time arrived when BB finally noticed she wasn’t paying for electricity or gas. Yet she had abundant power, heat and hot water, even in the depths of an East Anglian winter. She followed the cables and pipes into the main cellar and then into the floor. It took a while but she found the entrance to the sub-basement, well one of them, and her aunt’s laboratory.
The lab was huge and filled with a variety of equipment, including some rather expensive pieces of kit normally limited to well-funded universities or companies. But it was the electricity supply that intrigued her and she was amazed to trace the cables to an oak cabinet which contained, apparently, four truck-sized lead acid batteries; they were producing tens of kilowatts of electricity. Their excess heat, and that produced by two dedicated models that produced only heat, were linked to the boiler.
Cold fusion.
AA was concerned. She was quite intelligent enough to realise the implications of such a discovery becoming known; massive shifts in the global economy, social and political turmoil and quite possibly the collapse of human civilisation. She resolved to proceed with great care.
Further explorations of the cellar revealed much more, including a number of things that weren’t there any more. The last seven years of her aunt’s meticulous journals were gone, along with a lot of papers regarding various projects she’s been working on. There were notes on the fusion generators, but these weren’t from their original development, but rather methods to improve their efficiency.
Also present were rough notes on some odd quartz crystals that Letitia had been testing, some suggestions of very strange properties that they exhibited.
Several pieces of equipment were also missing; quite a lot of tools and gear, several fusion generators that were described were gone
The lab had been cleared of certain materials, but carefully and meticulously. It hadn’t been done in a hurry or a panic, nor had there been an attempt to destroy any of the devices and research materials. If it was a cover-up it was a very strange one.
It seemed more like a planned departure.
What was present was worrying enough; the fusion generators and the notes to build more were potentially world-changing but there were more; a device that extracted deuterium from hydrogen with great efficiency on a small scale using something referred to as the Tragellan Technique2. Methods to grow and deposit a film of a photonic crystal material with non-linear optical properties3 and form a material superconductive of heat and electricity at room temperatures4. Weirder still there was the description of an experiment, with functioning apparatus, that used those odd crystals and appeared to implement Maxwell’s Demon5.
This is a placeholder, I'll be posting the rest, including details of 'The Box' and stats for AA and her sidekick later.
The idea is one that was in my head for a while; another campaign set in (or at least based in) the present day and with a "low tech" time machine. The initial spark was the delivery to a neighbour of a six-metre Conex outfitted as a garden office which made me go "hmmmm".
AA is based on Dr. B. B. Miller from the obscure kids TV mini-series of the '90s Time Riders.
Comments? Suggestions? Questions?
1. If everything is working properly of course.
2. State of Change.
3. A theoretical concept today; such a material could be (among other properties) a better thermal insulator than a vacuum gap.
4. The subject of much research (including by me many years ago).
5. Maxwell's Demon. Which breaks the laws of thermodynamics.
