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>When experiments testing the viability of tapping into the quantum vacuum for energy were performed on the Apollo 21 Lab Station, reports devolved into strange ramblings about how their conclusions were inconceivable to human minds. Before all communication ceased, garbled messages were sent to earth from the astronauts about their experiments revealing to them the "howling face of the sun." A rescue crew was violently repulsed from the station by corpses in the astronaut's space suits. Footage of the incident show ghostly images of tormented figures hanging just behind these corpses, struggling, but seemingly unable to pull themselves apart from their decaying bodies.

Does anyone have a link to the copypasta about the staring woman?

I am on my phone at the moment or I would find it.

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Some superstitions aboard spaceships:

>It's thought to be good luck to bring a little piece of Earth, and later Mars, along with you on a long space flight. Most often, this takes the form of a small stone or pebble that can be carried in a pocket, but potted plants or small jars of dirt by themselves are not terribly uncommon.

>Tapping, drumming or banging on machinery and especially against bulkheads or the hull is considered tremendously bad luck.

>New crewmates on modern tramp ships and military vessels of the past often willingly spend an hour inside the airlock without a spacesuit, tresting the moderate cold and the threat of a crewmate opening the outer door as a rite of passage and test of trust. Newbies who don't last the hour or don't enter the airlock at all are mocked as cowards.

>ghost ships
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w34fSnJNP-4

> Sneezing during any kind of crew inspection or ceremonial guard duty on high ranking official arrival is considered an extremely bad omen. Probably dating back to the early colonies when it was common for some passengers to bring illnesses with them, potentially/actually ruining some early outposts.

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>If you're a professional spacer, you must always kiss Earth when you return to it. It is believed that if you wouldn't show respect the planet will disown you, and you will never see its surface again.

I think most naval superstitions would fit.

>>33292581
>I think most naval superstitions would fit.

What about professional spacers getting Zodiac / Planetary Symbol tattoos to represent the planets / sectors they've visited like how sailors and naval seamen would get various symbolic tattoos.

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>>33291717

>Rigg drivers serve as the backbone of the Keiper belt hauling the goods the miners dig up to ship to the refineries and ultimately to their final destinations.

>When new Riggers get licensed and can fly on their own it is customary to introduce one's self over the Solar net band and get a call sign from the other senior riggers. This not only builds solidarity but also acts as a means of figuring out who's legit and who's a pirate pretending to be a rigger.

Ritual branding with a welding torch to denote how many times they have kissed the speed of light/set foot on a world new to them/activated the FTL/undergone pilgrimage to Earth/gone on a space walk.

>>33292205

I like the taking a piece of your birthworld thing. Sort of reminds me of Dracula.

>>33292961

Planet Divers are specialized miners native to Venus. They operate in the floating cities of "dive" down to the planet's surface where their suits and vehicles are especially equiped to handle the pressures and heat.

Most divers tend to get a tattoo of a woman embracing an age old Diving helmet to show their time and experience on Earth's twin sister

I'm stealing all of those while contributing nothing because I have no imagination of my own. I only stand on the shoulders of giants.

Many old spacers who'd been involved in wrecks resulting in great losses of life have alleged that their ships had passed by an old Soviet orbiter capsule from the early days of space exploration in the days preceding the accident. Sometimes, it is claimed that the capsule was inexplicably passed several times, despite the differences in course and velocity.

In a few cases where disaster was narrowly averted, spacers have reported seeing one to three figures dressed in ancient cosmonaut suits, looking in through the windows from the outside, tapping on the glass and motioning with their hands as if trying to get the attention of the crew inside.

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>>33293402
Holy fuck the Lost Cosmonauts.

Holy sweet mother fucker holy fuck shit fuck shit holy mother of God save us fuck shit fuck.

One of the most chilling things I have ever read about.

There are already ghost space ship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuJnIJHgQ44&feature=kp

Freighter vessels, especially those whose chartered routes have them spending more than an Earth year in space, have images of their launch point and destination stenciled on their outer bulkheads, with the launch point on the aft and the destination on the bow of the vessel. In port, the placement is reversed or the stencils changed to reflect the new course. Such captains believe that having these markings ward off the hungering void, letting it know that they do not presume to stay there forever.

>>33292200
Oh shit, I know the one you mean... sadly I don't have it.

Seconding this.

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Many of the oldest spacers still flying believe that while it is very good luck to listen to songs about space like "Major Tom" and "The Green Grass Near My Home" before boarding one's ship, actually listening to such songs while in space will bring about misfortune and will jinx the flight. However, due to the sheer volume of songs composed about space since the colonization of the solar system began in earnest, most younger spacers so not hold to this superstition any longer, and will sometimes use space songs to renew their excitement for a profession that has become commonplace.

>>33291717
"Urban legends and electronic boogeyman known as "fact" by every kid on Mars."

>One of the more popular bogeymen amongst Martian children is known as "Vader," as a reference to his black rebreather mask he is said to wear, a leftover from the time before Mars' atmosphere was fully oxygenated, and to the labored breathing sounds he allegedly makes as he stalks his prey.

The Slender Man stalks the tunnels and warrens of Luna.

A tall gaunt man shaped thing.

Said to be an escaped gene-spliced experiment from the pre-regulation days of Luna. A new breed of human for low gravity environments discontinued due to its sadistic, psychopathic and cannibalistic nature.

Said to be the result of unchecked mutation. The one in a billion chance that someone's mutations adapted them to the Luna Environment.

Said to be a ghost of the Sinus Roris Graveyard Colony left to wander the airless wastes in sorrow after the colony and all its inhabitants died. Stalks and eventually kills those ho disturb its home.

Said to be a stranded predatory and cruel alien life form that can't quite manage to look human.

Said to be a lot of things. Few believe it is anything.

There are videos of it.

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>>33292200
>>33293713

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/12180900/

>- An airlock, that has been breached enough to suck all the air out but not enough to suck out anything else. Inside is the body of a woman in a space suit, with her helmet off. For some reason the womans head is always facing straight at the porthole to the rest of the ships, eyes wide open.

>Oh god
>SHE KEEPS STARING

>Whenever alone, one player hears tapping on the window to space. Looking outside reveals nothing, until the one time he looks at the window before the tapping starts and sees a frozen, dead hand reach from out of view and Tap Tap Tap the window.

>Better yet. Set it up in a T shape so you can enter from either side, both attached to the ship, and the top (or bottom) is to actually get out of the airlock and into space (no gravity so it works)

No matter which direction they look at it from, port, starboard, or even from fucking space. She is still staring at them.

>Maybe have The Staring Woman have a look of vague disappointment on her face? Since it seems she died just after she'd gotten into an airlock that it turns out wasn't secure.

If she's going to appear outside a lot of windows and in airlocks, make one arm wave. Keep the rest of her stationary and floating, but one arm slooooowly wave.

There's a lot more written about the Staring Woman since the first thread to mention her in 2010, so I'm not entirely sure what copypasta you're thinking of.

This comic though is one of my all-time /tg/ favorites though.

>>33292288
Always a classic.

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>>33293402

>>33291717
Some of the most superstitious sailors get tattoos that proclaim them as belonging to Earth, charts of the night sky as seen from Earth, names of the Earth in as many languages as they can, ect. The representations very from person to person but they persist on the belief that the Earth will take care of it's own and she will always bring them back home.
It is considered extremely bad luck to get these tattoos on any other planet.

>>33292205
>>33292961

Though none speak about it, carrying a piece of your homeworld with you holds a spiritual significance as well as a superstitious one. The idea that you will always have a little piece or home with you, even if you should die and be left drifting forever in space, is a comforting one.

>>33294472
Where are those comics supposed to be from? I've seen two of those pages, but haven't found more.

>>33295340

Unfortunately, the two pages you've seen are all that exist. They were drawn to illustrate a few of the haunted space ship ideas from the thread linked in that post. I really wish there were more.

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>>33295241
Actually, why stop at piece? Plants grow in space faster than on Earth. Spaceships should have greenhouses.

>>33295429
Some do.

Given the vast size of them, the fact that some of them are 150+ years old and the fact that the crews/permanent residents of them have started to form their own little societies its quite varied.

Some ships are sterile and clean beyond belief.

Some look like a greenhouse.

Ships sometimes have pings at the edge of their sensor range that move away rapidly. Upon reviewing records the files are always very corrupt, though sometimes they show heavily damaged early vessels incapable of the performance observed.

The official opinion is that there is some as of yet unknown stellar phenomenon that creates the sensor ghosts.

It is said that there are ruins on the surface of Neptune.

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Space-farers, like sea-farers before them, attribute great significance to the names of their ships, and have as a result accrued a tremendous amount of superstitions pertaining to appellation of their vessels. For instance:

It is good luck to:
>Name your ship after an Earthly locale
>Name your ship after a famously successful sea or space vessel from history
>Name your ship a seven-letter name
>Name your ship after some virtue or positive attribute
>Name your ship something comically self-depreciating

It is bad luck to:
>Name your ship after Uranus, Neptune or Pluto
>Name your ship after a famously wrecked sea or space vessel from history
>Name your ship a thirteen-letter name
>Name your ship after something you would not welcome aboard it
>Name your ship something comically high and mighty

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>>33296680

>>33291717
Spacers always have a special relationship with the ship: the menial crew might treat it as a drinking buddy and adress it as such, while the captain might treat it with affection, as if it were a spouse.
Always bring a bond to Earth on your ship, such as a patch of grass, or a pet. To not do so is to openly show hubris to the cosmos, as you are denying our common earthly connection.

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>Cooks aboard many interplanetary freighters, passenger ships and even military vessels believe that misfortune will befall their craft if their galleys are not stocked with three food items: coffee, chili sauce, and peanuts.

>It is lucky for a ship hailing from Earth to sport pinstriping in blue or green. Likewise, it is lucky for a ship hailing from Mars to sport pinstriping in red or white.

>It is often customary for a captain to play a game of chess against his or her ship's A.I. the night before departure. Although the captain is traditionally obligated to play as best they are able, the better they fare against their A.I. opponent the worse an omen it is considered.

>Card games are mostly welcome aboard any space ship, but dice games are often thought of as taboo.

>There are certain types of cargo that are generally considered unlucky to transport in bulk because of past tragedies involving freighters hauling these items exclusively. Examples include amphibians, root vegetables and automobiles.

Don't listen to empty static of the universe too long. You go mad.

>Ships in warp transit sometimes detect "ghost" signatures, which may be accompanied by visual phenomenae that appear as glowing lights. The phenomena has not been studied in detail, but the official explantion is that it is likely caused by ionised gas drawn into the ship's warp field during warp transit. Many spacers, however, believe the phenomena to be literal ghosts, souls of those spacers who have died in the void. Some considers seeing them a good sign, saying that the ghosts will wish to protect their still-living brethren from sharing their fate, while others believe them to herald disaster.

>While interstellar travel is relatively safe these days, in the early days of space colonisation this was not the case. Early warp drives were not only slower but also more unreliable, and occasionally accidents happened while the ship was at transit. Every spacer knows multiple stories of ships that entered warp, never to be seen again. Many also tell tales of sightings of ghostly vessels that seem to appear out of nowhere and fade to nothing, or ancient ships arriving to their destination long after being written off as destroyed, intact but with no sign of the crew. The less supersticious dismiss such tales as ghost stories told to frighten new recruits, but such tales are common enough to make one wonder if there isn't at least some truth to them.

>Among spacers there exist many traditions about marking down their passage. Taking tattoos or painting a symbol on their ship to represent the first time visiting a new system is a common one. The crews of the great bulk freighters that travel between colony worlds typically pain a mark on the hull for each cycle completed (such ships typically fly a fixed route between certain systems, unloading their cargo on one world to take a new cargo to deliver to the next). Some of the most ancient vessels have their hulls covered with such markings.

Listen up to what I'm about to tell you girly, because it's exactly what an old spacer told me on my first trip, and its served me well all my years shuttling fuck-all between the planets.

I was nervous too, my first time, though I can't remember being such a petulant little punk about it. Dirt-grubbing rube that I was, I hadn't even been to the Moon before, and there I was bound for the deep freeze on fucking Pluto. No shit I was nervous. That's a long time to spend aboard a ship, no matter how spacious and homey they try to make it, and let me tell you that my first ship was about as spacious and homey as a pipe-chase.

Anyway, it was launch day when we were all boarding the old rustbucket and though I thought I was playing it cool and had my worries under control, it must have been clear that I was still scared shitless, because this old spacer claps a hand on my shoulder hard and points to the front of the line to where everyone was kissing their palms and slapping this shiny spot the hull next to the airlock before they came aboard.

"Why d'you think they're doing that?"

This old spacer says to me, and I says back to him plainly that I had no idea in the slightest. To this he tells me,

"It's 'cause it's very, very easy to go a little nutty aboard a space ship, especially when you're stuck for weeks or even months aboard a tub as cramped as this one."

He says to me,

"You're gonna hear creaks and groans and pops that don't mean nothing, mostly, that will set you on edge. You're gonna feel tense and peculiar, every which way but loose. And, you're gonna stare out that little porthole and into that big black abyss, and that big black abyss is gonna stare back into you."

"What those men are doing boyo, is choosing what type of nutty they're gonna be for this trip. They've decided that kissing the old girl's hull on the way in is gonna endear 'em to her, and that maybe she'll take better care of 'em for it."

Theese are awesome! have a bump kind sirs.

I am looking to flesh out a RT campaing and theese are very good. Do you know/have/think up any more that can blen into 40k?

If you use a radio at relativistic speed and put the band from 300 to 3kHz, you'll hear the voices of the ghosts.

It's actually human speech blue-shifted to spectrality.

>>33298204

"When they hear them groans? They talk back to the ship all reassuring-like, like you would talk to yer best girl. When they feel them eyes on 'em all over? They tell themselves it's all the astronauts and cosmonauts and spacers what came before them, watching their backs. And when they look out those little portholes and into the blackness? Well, they just put their hand in their pocket and feel for that little earth rock or bottle of martian dust and convince themselves that home ain't quite as far away as it really is."

And you know, by the time that old spacer had said all this, we'd reached the front of the line and we were both to be next in through that airlock. The spacer sidles around me and gives me this look and says,

"You just gotta decide what kinda nuts you wanna be."

And then he kisses his palm, slaps the hull like he was slapping his wife's ass and walks on in. I tell you, I'm glad it didn't take a whole lot of thinking for me to make my decision because the folks behind me were ready and raring to go and I would have caught a lot of shit for holding the line up.

What I mean to say by all this is that now's the time when you have to choose what kind of batshit insanity you're going to have on this trip. You can stay here in your cabin, sulking and jumping at things that are only probably going to get you killed, or you can grab whatever good luck charms you brought with you and join the rest of the crew for the "Bon Voyage" card game in Engineering.

It's up to you.

Those that die in the inky black, if they so choose, may have their remains fired out of the ship at near light speed next time the ship is at full acceleration.

Buried at C.

>>33298481
>tg is even a better x than x

Why have other boards than tg?

>>33298616
That is fantastic.

>>33298675

Sailors of the smater kind (usually the folks at engineering) Say that it's pretty much a final "fuck you" to the universe. Since at some point the coffin will crash at relativistic speeds into "something". The real nutjobs say the coffin actually pushes back in time slightly as it's fired.

The engineering crew are the true life blood of any spacecraft and they have a tradition they follow religiously and expect others to as well. Do not EVER speak harshly or disrespectfully of or to your ship ever. Ships can be fickle mistresses and insulting her can be a sure ticket to a short life span. Jus' remember laddy, they don't call 'em "she" for nothin".

>>33298204
>>33298508
I really love this short, it basically sums up (and justifies) their superstitions.

>>33298826
I should have said rather, the REASON for their superstitions.

>>33298616
>900,000 years later 4 galaxies over
>on the capital dyson sphere of the galaxy
>a near c projectile containing the faintest biosignature of DNA
>a strand of genetic matter cataloged as belonging to the carbon based life forms of their self-titled milkyway galaxy.
>the projectile penetrates the sphere and obliterates several inter orbital stations
>Intergalactic war is declared on humanity.


>>33291717
Drinking your own pee is a good way to jinx the water purifiers into failing.

Eating meat from your own homeworld causes space dementia faster.

Keeping an inertial dampened fish tank alive for multiple journeys increases the ships luck.

Always give way to water haulers during orbital entry and exits because that water could be going to your own family.

Every so often, serious accidents happen in space. This almost always means people gets vented, decompressed, burned, etc. Myth has it that those who survive have a sort of mixed blessing.

If precisely one person survives, he is called a "spare ace" (refering to a card in a winning hand that was not played becasue he is a cheat card). Voidfarers say this guy is already dead and will live a charmed existence so long as he never lands in a planet again.

If there where two survivors, they are a "coin toss". One of them will bring great fortune to his/her crew. The other will bring misery to himself and those around him. Trick is, nobody can tell them apart, but the jinx only plays as soon as they separate. So crews that rescue of have a two "coined" crewmembers make a point of either keeping them aboard or kicking them out both at the same time.

If three folks make it. Legend has it their lives are forevermore bound. When one dies, the other two are sure to follow quickly after. Such is the fate of the "three brothers"

One would say that survivors are often lucky enough to be alive. but space is big and plays in funny ways with the minds of humans. This coudl of course be SpaceGypsy nonsense. BUT you never know..

>>33298906

>Steering a megafrieghter full of water into a re-entry.

Captain. Do you really want a uncontrollable, heavy, undermanned piece of Titanium alloy falling into your descend path? Your dinner can wait.

>>33298906
Drinking your own pee is the standard in space, unless you mean it should be another crewmates?

>Void-born (ie: not planetoid-born or orbit-born) spacers are generally thought to be unlucky, despite making some of the best crewmembers.
>AIs almost always follow the nation of the ship's origin traditions for addressing ships, though genderless AIs are also common.
>A ship should only be renamed if its AI is replaced.
>Names of Honour get passed down in many naval and merchant services, sometimes with an unbroken service record and, more rarely, a transferred AI

>>33299182

>Not freezing the water into blocks for easy transport

Son are you new at this?

>>33299235

> Not knowing about Mass-to-engine ratio when close to gravity wells.
> Not knowing corps keep it liquid to pack more in the same volume.
> Not knowing How cheap-ass Captain can be.

Are yuo?

>>33299235
Still heavy, given the sheer size or the things, and vital for unterraformed planets

>>33299371

Bumpan I like this thread.

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>>33298616
That's excellent, anon

It is custom for ships to transmit their trajectories to their target, upon departure, to have all the papers done when they arrive.
Tales tell of ships turning up, exactly as planned, within the minute, with the entire crew missing, the ships computer oblivious to the fact.

>The "Clair de Lune"

One particularly famous ghostship of the Sol System has been dubbed the "Claire de Lune" by those who have had the good fortune to see it. It has earned this name because its appearances are always presaged by non-system-threatening malfunctions of the observing vessel's A.I. and astrogational computers accompanied by a scratchy recording of the classical piece "Clair de Lune" being played over all shipboard communications channels.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvFH_6DNRCY

While the lines and hull-styling of the "Clair" suggest that it was originally constructed on Earth before the Keppler Event of the 23rd century, its large size and non-standard propulsion system are quite unusual for the time period, and the large number of scorched craters and ragged holes punched through its pearlescent white hull plating seem to have obliterated any names or call signs the ship may have been emblazoned with.

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>>33298906

There are hypervelocity stars right now roaming space, you thing a tiny body matters?

>>33300101

The ship is also known as the "White Ghost," the "White Lady" and, to the salvagers it keeps eluding, the "White Whale."

>>33299221
I think he meant, I dunno, before it gets purified? No one let Bear Grylls into space!

>>33300419

Which reminds me! It's likely that there are any number of "crazy survivalists" out there camped out in abandoned space stations and in junk-built capsules on asteroids and such. The sort of folk, like hobos, hitch hikers, and some of the hairier backpackers that could be perfectly friendly, but who have this hugely negative reputation.

A couple of years ago I was on an exploratory vessel bound for the outer edges of the Orion arm. Everything had been going fine, we were deep into uninhibited space when we picked up a strange signal, we thought it was a distress call, but it wasn't in any language our translation matrix could identify and there was not another ship anywhere in the vicinity.
But that want the worst part, whoever, whatever was speaking sounded exactly like me.
I must have been pale as a sheet, because the captain took one look at me and turned it off, then he ordered me to the bunks to get some sleep, but I couldn't I just kept listening to that signal. Three days it broadcasted and not once did it repeat itself, it was constantly changing, like it was trying to talk to me, sometimes I would've sworn that it was trying to speak in broken English.
I resigned as soon as we got back to Earth, haven't gone past Pluto since.

While there are rumors a plenty about it, There are no recored events of an AI truly going rogue. Although there have been accidents derived form AI, The ships have always bee recovered succesfulyl and the accident traced bakc to either a mechanical failure preventing the AI to avert disaster or a malfunciton in the AIs hardware itself, more often than not causing partial or total shutdown. The often retold "MurderAI" story has been time and time again explained as a failure in an AI though correlation proceses, causing it to not be able to foresee obvious consequences to certain actions, like performing an airlock routine maintenance with a crewmemeber inside.

Even if the wild rumors where partlly true. it is standard protocol in the SolForce Navy to Either wipe or decomission AIs that have been found in suspicous behaviour or been linked to an accident.

It would seem however, that years upon years of movies speaking in one way or another of "the Killer AI" have created all sorts of ghost sotries. here are a few:

It is said that AIs will often set up an internal speaker circuit in the chamber of it's C.O.R.E. Unit and voice all sorts of things through it just to hear itself. This practice has been refered as rambling, mutering an in stories is not unlike humans selfspeaking.

As AIs develop increasigly complex personalities with months of operation. Many choose to add personal signatures ot their comunications. It is not uncommon for AIs to request a voice modulation unit as a "treat" at some point and they seem to "like" it. This sudden increase in practical individuality is know to boost the develpment of the AI. Spacefarers Swear that they become more "direct" among other things. Folklore has it that an AI sudenlly tweaking and changing it's normal "voice" is a Red Flag for it going Rouge. Doubly so it it becomes more "sensual" or "Subtle"

One of the more random stories is about Dataunit, although in various versions they say it's either a Data module, a short distance trasnmission form another ship, or even an antique USB or even a CD!( conveniently in this story the CD is procured with a functional reader or is jury rigged by a crafty crewmemeber). Acording to the story the unit contains one or more files simply dubbed "Crack" and pherhaps an antique 8-bit soundfile. Regadless of this the stories always say that after accesing the files the AI will act "odd" and do something refered as "glitching". It will invariably attemp to produce copies of the dataunit sometimes without the knwoledge of the crew and then at the first oportunity assasinate them all. Some stories include an afterword about the ship firing a distress signal to lure in more ships.

I heard long flights in planes can mess up a woman's hormones due to the recycled air.

Submarines gets a free pass since most of the crew are men.

Wonder how much worse it would be for spaceships?

>>33300858
Really? How so?

>>33292006
Something that excessive amounts of ferromagnetic rounds won't fix.

>>33300889
The scent of male sweat makes them ovulate early. even traces of it puts them in pseudo-heat.

>>33300924
Make spaceships of only women crew, and voila we have the pre Bene Gesserit.

It is customary for each ship to have her own particular song, which is played whenever the ship returns to its home planet. It is anathema for it not to be played as it is said it brings extremely bad luck during re entry.

>>33300950
Funny thing about all female dorms?
Almost every women in there eventually synchronize their periods.

>>33300977
*If it isn't played

However by faar the most common of this ghost stories is the one about the Minning plataform Disaster. Contro versially, it's more of a placeholder for terror tales rather than an actual story. Some are very subtle and actually quite creepy, involving infiltration, sabotage, and playing on the humans fear of confnment and distrust, the AI being merely the finishing touch. Other are much more blunt and go as faar as naming the Station simply "13" as some sort of crude foreshadowing. The stories told in this fashion are usually the same: Normal day, accident happens, werid stuff happens. Most of the crew dies gruesome deaths where the AI is usually the mastermind behind. Among most ships, no ghost story meeting is considered done until at least one story of "tha station" is heard.

AIs in general regard this buisness with a sort of awkwardness and even are slighlty distressed by having the subject brought up. One must understand that speaking fo this with them, is not unlike attempting to imply to a person that it may be a murderer, with no solid basis at all. When asked about the matter, AIs have even referenced events of racial discrimination of the atomic era and previos. However the more "mature" AIs tend to take it for humor. And it's not unhead of ship crews having this played for laughs or if they are off duty during halloween, to set up for some real spooks.

I can't remember the name of the short story but it basicly boils down to the "here there be monsters" on the maps of old were true because once humans figured out how to use fire we drove the things in the dark to places less trodden and eventually, we explored even the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean and sent them on the run again. Now the monsters lives in the void between the stars, wrecking ships and devouring crews, adding to the numerous "ghost" ships floating in space.

>>33292288
This is AMAZING!

bump

Imagine hearing voices out in space.
You must think you're crazy and hallucinating.

Nope.

Turns out rogue AIs aren't exactly uncommon and the most popular method getting rid of them is jettisoning their core out to space manually.

No Ghosts of Mars yet?
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/12130366/

>>33301413
>sleeping in your bunk
>suddenly you're awoken to an odd distant voice:
>"Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace!"

A lot of spacers tell you tales of "walkers" on the hull, apparitions that appear only to crewmen who are alone during EVA. One moment you're performing regular maintenance on a com dish, the next you're staring at an empty space suit slowly plodding towards you, arms outstretched. You better hope you can make it to the airlock and cycle it closed before the thing touches you.

Like most silly spacer ghost stories, this one started with a rookie and a practical joke. What happens when you release an empty space suit onto the hull and remotely trigger and release its magnetic boots? The rookie fills his cosmic underwear with shit, that's what.

>>33296680
It is bad luck to:
>>Name your ship after Uranus, Neptune or Pluto

The outer three planets have and their associated settlements have gained the reputation, somewhat unfairly, of being strange places populated by strange people.

Historically, these outposts at the outermost reaches of the solar system have been wildly unpopular sites for both colonization and mining, and have instead been used primarily for scientific research facilities focusing on unhindered astronomical observation or requiring isolation from the more densely inhabited sectors of the solar system.

As a result, there are many conspiracy theorists who believe that the Outer Rim is the secret playground of the solar system's governments and megacorporations, where ethics is only a word and any disasters or cosmic horrors brought forth from the abyss can be dealt with or forgotten.

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Name: The Clover
Class: Type IV cargo frigate
Home planet/moon of manufacture: Luna
Captain: Jack O'Farrel

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I0zBlHlnR4Y

The Clover is an old vessel, which frequently makes forays to the more isolated mining stations as far as Pluto. Bringing produce from mars and returning with raw minerals and ores.

The crew of this characterful ship are a hardy bunch, abiding to the many traditions and superstitions being born throughout The Clover's long history. Many superstitions being such as sprinkling dirt in the produce so that the miners in deep space can have a little bit of home; and toasting a crewman that may died with only three sips as the decreased is launched into space in a wood coffin, with the body sprinkled with dirt. Every crewman has a jar of dirt from their home so that if they do die in space, the soil will guide their spirits home.

>>33301947

This post really exemplifies what I like about this thread: it's taking common Sci-Fi themes and ideas and making them personal and human.

Bump

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Despite all their training and all their science, Engineers are often among the most superstitious people aboard a starship, ministering to their engines, systems and crewmates both mechanically and spiritually:

>It is a rite of passage in many engine rooms to have new Engineers gaze, for just a moment, into the reactor's open monitoring port, to give them a healthy respect and fear for the phenomenal cosmic power that is the very heart of their ship.

>With how multicultural most engine rooms are, it is not unusual to see a small shrine of some kind dedicated to whatever pantheon of deities, heroes and fictional characters the ship's engineers revere.

>Spaceship engineers tend to be more prone to believing in numerology, or at least in the benefits of doing certain things in a certain way a certain number of times.

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>>33291717

Living past the Keiper Belt and plying the Highliner routes of the outer edges of the Solar systems. the Riggers and Highliner crews of the area have taken to decorating their vessels with all manner of boisterous colors and even use special paints that allows their ships to glow ever so faintly so passengers can see, and most often, distinguish the particular vessel to whom the markings indicate

The "Joyus Gul", a particularly well known respected Rigg piloted by third generation Rigger Banthem Gul was one of the first vessels in the area to start the practice which would help define the culture of an otherwise dreary part of space.

>>33296680
One hideously inept shipping company out of Neue Holstein (perhaps as some joke, perhaps…not) sent out a great shipping freighter, finest and first of a new class of sturdy shipping vessel. She was cursed with an unfortunate name, but her crew thought she could pull through. They did not anticipate being given up into the hands of a madman. After many, many, _many_ successful voyages through the Sol-Centauri Void, her captain made a rash and, eventually, disastrous decision. Taking bribes from a Xin Han titan-spice trader, the captain was convinced to take the man's cargo through the Strait of Fire, a tempestuous corridor of space between Centauri and Barnard's Star, known for many tragic disappearances and wrecks.

No sane man sailed through the Strait of Fire, and most especially not when Sol was in the galactic ecliptic. Nine times the captain set thrusters toward Barnard's Star, and nine times was he repelled by the broken chain of overactive young stars that made the corridor so deadly.

Cursing his vessel, cursing the Void, cursing ALMIGHTY GOD for his failure, the mad Freighter Captain burned his tenth and final time unto the Straits of Fire. Tracking logs sent a month later by the company recorded a strange surge of energy, suddenly cut off.

His ship was lost with all hands.

His name was Eliaz Ven Dwr Dehkenn

His ship was the UETS Der Flieger Hollander.

The ship is still seen whenever disaster looms in the Void, hailing all and any who will hear her screams...

>>33298616
That is excellent, vintage, /tg/

SOMEBODY GET THIS ON 1d4chan.

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Name: Southern Rest
Class: Guardian class military medical cruiser
Home planet/moon: Earth (Australia)
Captain: Duncan Blake

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8YLUZgzEnE

Hailing from the land of the red plains, this relatively new ship is frequently engaged in the outer reaches of the sol system. Usually assisting station accidents or less frequent colony wars.

Though the ship is young, the crew manning the Southern Rest are all too familiar with the cost of war. Told of the stories of Gallipoli at a young age, the crew have picked up a few quirks in during the Her time of service.

The more deeply moved of the crew have created a garden, with plants hailing from all over Earth and the new species fabricated that are native to Mars and Europa. When a man or woman passes on, they are given a cutting of the plant to clasp as they are sent off into space, placed in storage to be returned home or cremated.

Though the song of the Southern Rest is rarely played as to keep the morale of the patients up, whenever formal occasions arise, the sound of the song can be heard in the background.

The Southern Rest also has multiple search and rescue teams, and on the occasion a member is killed in action, they are laid to rest with a picture of a boat. To remind them of the place their ancestors came from.

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I have to be getting along to sleep, but I really hope to see this thread still in existence and added on to in the morning.

Good night gents!

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>>33293478

Well, they probably burned up a long time ago. The orbit they were theoretically in wasn't too stable. I mean, unless the Russians sent up an automated mission in 1979 to cover up their early failures, and that automated mission failed and pushed the capsule into a much higher and erratic orbit around Lagrange Pt 4 and the Moon.

And what are the chances of that?

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>>33303472

I'll keep it bumped as long as I can.

>>33304095
I've kinda ran out ideas for ships. Feel free to do some.

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U.S.-flagged ships won't fly during the last week of January, or the first week of February. They just won't. Younger crews will make excuses about "crew rest" or "extended maintenance", but the old guys will just flat out say "bad luck, and not argue with you.

I was once stuck on a Yankee asteroid base for over a month because the transport out blew some kind of technobabble widget thing right after New Year's, and the parts vendor on Pallas refused to ship the replacement before Valentine's Day.

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>>33304111

Ship histories, ship tech, or ship pics?

The Cavitation Drive

The mechanism behind the Cavitation Drive is poorly understood. Even with thousands of units in operation throughout the galaxy, physicists are still baffled by the precise nature of the mechanism. We can build them, but like the lodestone compasses of the Vikings, how they work is a bit of a mystery.

For most small ships, the Cavitation Drive is a sealed black box, about the size of a coffin, with a spherical bulge at the midpoint. Inside, two contra-rotating magnets suspend a core of muon-saturated hydrogen in a crystal matrix. When the drive is activated, ultra-high energy photons are fired at the crystal matrix, and the resulting bubble drops the ship... somewhere else.

Unfortunately, we can still offer no explanation as to where the ship goes during transit. A hand-wavy explanation that is often brought up is “trans-dimensional space”, but nobody can consistently explain what it is, or predict whether the properties match those observed.

But I digress. While in transit, the ship’s crew subjectively experiences time. The amount of time varies depending on several factors, given in the following equation:

t = (m4d2c/Ψmh )

where t is transit time, m is the mass undergoing transit, d is the distance being transited, c is the speed of light in a vacuum, Ψ is Hoenholtz’s constant, and mh is the mass of liquid metallic hydrogen used to make the core (and consequently, the power needed to generate the Cavitation field).

Of course, this equation is only an approximation. It is widely suspected that local gravity plays a part in transit time, but as of yet we cannot calculate the precise effect, or even if it increases or decrease the “speed” of transit. Try to activate a Cavitation Drive too close to a planet and the ship’s liable to explode though. We learned that quickly enough.

>>33304231
The histories and traditions and stuff. Whatever floats your frigate though.

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The Cavitation Drive cont'd

The speed of the ship before initiating transit is irrelevant, but momentum is at least partially conserved after transit. (wait for laughter). Yes, another one of the baffling elements of FTL travel. Newton spins in his grave.

On a more serious note, there are two major drawbacks to the Cavitation Drive. The first is, as astute students will note, that as the mass increases the transit time increases exponentially. The largest ships take months to transit distances a tramp freighter can manage in days.

The second drawback is what has come to be called the “Cavitation Interference” or “Transit Shock”. During transit, it seems that electrons are occasionally given higher energies, or lower energies, or disappear entirely. We can’t explain why, or how. Some of my colleagues postulate that the Drive somehow fits a ship in the space between the space-time quantum mesh of the universe, and the random annihilation and creation of matter we observe in the vacuum is magnified a thousandfold. I say it's just one of those things we need to spend more time studying.

Of course, the effects on the human brain are far from beneficial. You will recall early FTL colony ships falling to madness or open warfare. Until the accidental discovery of the “Gypsy Gene”, as it is colloquially known, the only way for anyone to travel safely was in a cryogenic tank, with brain activity at a minimum, and a timer set to release when the transit was complete. Of course, some of the timers didn’t work, or the trip took longer than intended...

The Gypsy gene isn’t of course, one gene, but a few strange chunks of DNA scattered here and there throughout a strand. It’s damnably difficult to sequence, and we still don’t know what half the bits do. Talk to Professor Hallingsgate if you want to see what happens if you try and reproduce it in the lab. He's got the ugliest, most cancerous rats this side of Europa. Feisty too.

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>>33304339

The Cavitation Drive cont'd

Now, you’ve all heard Gypsy stories I’m sure. What’s that novel that’s all the rage these days, hm? “Commander Coriander’s and the Shrieking Suns” or something like that? Well, it’s mostly bunk. First off, “The Gene” is damnably rare. Something like one in five hundred thousand, more or less. Even with the outer colonies factored in, there aren’t all that many. And our testing methods aren’t perfect either.

Second of all, being the Captain of some little tinpot starship isn’t a life of glamour and adventure. Space is death, darkness, and disease: it’s a long cold night with no sunrise. Anyone who goes out there expecting to make fistfuls of cash and lead a life of glamorous adventure is in for a real shock.

Third, even the Gypsies go mad, and it's often not Drive Shock that does it. You see, when you're running the drive, you have to shut down everything electronic. The AI goes into total dormancy. The lights go off; I hear the flickering is impossible to live with, and the bulbs burn out in a few hours anyway. You have to crank the doors open by hand. If you're on a ship lucky to have grav-plates, they go off, unless the Captain's a risky fool and runs them on minimal charge. Otherwise, it's spun gravity or nothing, and spun gravity makes a hell of a noise if the bearings are rusted, which they always are.

The lights are glow-lamps or chemilumes, green and sickly. The ship makes noises and rattles like a tin can in a storm. Sometimes, the Gypsies swear they hear people walking on the outer hull, or clawing at the viewport shutters with feeble fingers. They light incense, pray to all the named gods, rub copper, plug their ears, and try to stay sane and operate an efficient ship. Sometimes the superstitions don't work and a Gypsy will grab a hammer or a pistol and turn his friends and hull into scrap, and nobody will ever know why.

So stay the hell out of space, you hear! Class dismissed!

>>33291717
http://youtu.be/w34fSnJNP-4

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Sometimes if its very late and you haven't quite slipped off into hibernation you might hear a tiny sound.
Ever so light as if not there at all.
Tip tip tap tap.
Too tired to really bother to take a look, but occasionally one might see a tail or a pointy ear of something peeking in on you.
Some have even claimed to see it grin so evilly at them.
It may be mocking you because you can't quite gain the strength to open your pod. Or maybe its just the way its little teethed mouth was made.

Next thing you know you wake up and you're stranded in space because wires your engineer swore were new and untouched yesterday are tattered and ripped. Or someone was sucked out a airlock that when inspected last stop was perfectly in working order.

Some blame shotty construction, poor inspections, or just bad luck.
But in the depths of space who knows
Maybe we aren't so alone.

>>33304564
worst part is this shit happens with every piece of hardware even today. damn gremlins.

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>>33304468

The Nancy-O runs blue lights, you little shitwipe, because it's always run blue lights. What kind of rock did you fall off of, to ask stupid questions on your first day here? Yeah, all the other ships you've seen or heard of run green lights in the Drive, but they ain't the Nancy-O and they ain't flown by The Right Captain Spexly, so you shut your mouth and get an education.

Twelve years ago, The Right Captain was on a run to Hygiea, running green lights. When he arrived on that bit of rock and ore, the green lights were faded. Chem-drain hit them hard and fast, and he's put off maintenance for many a year, and no gypsy or son of the stars would fly in a lightless ship. The Nancy-O was stranded, 300k clicks from home.

So the Right Captain scrounged and borrowed, and found a mad miner who grew his own chem-bulbs. Strange breed, fed on gods-know what, but they'd do. The Captain cleaned the glow tubes, refilled them, and sailed for Earth under blue lights.

When he got home to dock, well, he found that his trading partners in the fleet were all ate up by something in the Drive. Some say they'd pushed their margins for too long, and some say they ran into the gravity shadow of a rogue asteroid on the way out, but of the five ships running green to Hygiea, only one, running blue, made it home.

So shut your gob. It's lucky, alright. Lucky and good sense. You'll take your turn feeding the glow-tubes when the Captain tells you to, and you won't look none to hard at what you feed 'em. And if you don't like it, go walk home.

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>>33304282

The great passenger liners are a real sight. Ugly as sin on the outside, but kind of charming too. A big stack of spun-grav rings, with a bulging root of drives, a rad shield, and a few heat radiators flying the corporate colors.

On the inside, though, luxury! Opulence! Drink and food for every rich bitch and bastard who wants to visit their wee cousins on Europa or Venus and doesn't mind how many zeros the cheque needs. I should know, I've seen 'em. I worked on the Athena Fair, shipping jiggling toffs from Earth to Saturn. Pass me that drink and I'll tell you a tale or two.

Yes, food, drink, luxury, and fucking. Gods above, the fucking. The veterans, crew and passengers alike, weren't shocked by anything, but a greensleeve like me, well, it was like heaven had come and swallowed me up. When I wasn't passing drinks and little sausages on sticks around the cabins, I was sticking my sausage into all manner of places. Had my share of well-dressed older women. Older men too; not picky, not when they tip well. Ah, but you don't care about all that.

So we debauched in Earth orbit, froze the passengers, buttoned down, and took a quick hop to Mars for a gravity assist. The Drive on the Athena Fair was a monster, bigger than a house, and crewed by a right strange bunch of engineers. Anyway, we unfroze the cargo to look at the Red Planet, get another notch in the Solar Eight (fuck in view of all the eight major worlds), and then freeze 'em all for the Drive to Saturn.

And it was on that drive that things went all to Klybo in a handbasket. Pass me another drink.

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>>33305095

So we were playing cards by the light of the chem-lamps when someone burst into our room and said "Pods open in the second ring! Fucking pods!" Now, you can't open a cryotube from the inside. You're strapped in, in a layer of slush and chemicals, you're sedated, and you're cold. If your vitals start to pick up there's a medical officer next to your tube in a minute, checking things and cooling you down, especially on a big expensive hulk like the Athena Fair.

But there were two tubes in section eight open wide, hinges and locks bent, glass cracked, and long slick of goop running down the deck. We grabbed lamp packs, because nobody lights the cryostacks well during a Drive, and we followed it. There are a lot of places to hide on a ship the size of the Athena Fair, and we'd been swapping ghost stories over the cards. Not one of us was darker than a shroud during that hunt.

Found them, eventually, in a heat reflector blister. Never did figure out who was who, because they'd not properly rinsed off the cryogoop. It'd dried in the air, and as that stuff dries it gets hard and it gets colder. Ask the engineers why. Something about leaks. Anyway, it froze them half to death, but the parts that weren't dead were trying to fuck. Swear to gods, they were fucking and moaning and tearing at each other. Literally tearing. Gods, it was awful.

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>>33305200

The medics got there eventually. Apparently the hard-wired sensors, the only thing electronic in the whole damn section, had failed. Drive interference, or the curse, or whatever, but they hadn't heard the calls or the alarms in their comfy little rooms. They tried to help the two... passengers, but they were dead the moment they broke out of the tubes. Too cold, too drugged, and too shocked.

The Captain rounded us all up and told us that what we'd seen hadn't happened. Our two passengers disappeared from the rolls. They'd disembarked at Mars, said the Captain, and that was that. Into the void when the bodies when we reached Saturn, and a hefty slice of cash went to each of us that saw it done. That was fifty years ago, by my books, and they say things are different now, but I don't know if it's true.

My mate Jonesy swears, to this day, that he saw the things we threw out of the airlock twitch and shudder in the void, like they were finally in their right place. So if you're out by Saturn way, and you hear a bump-bump-bump on the hull, tell me and Jonesy, would you? I'd like to think that the great frozen mass we threw away finally found a proper and restful spot. Or maybe they're getting lonely out there, and they'd like to step inside for a breath of air and some warm, fresh folks to meet. Hard to say.

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>>33304282

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The very first interstellar missions, before proper FTL, were mounted using at-light quantum teleportation. Now, most of the missions were mounted in local space, but there were a handful of cults that launched out into deep space; thousands or even millions of light-years out. Most of them haven't even reached their destinations yet.
Occasionally, their ships are sighted by ships in non-space; rumor has it that, over the course of such a long jump, they slipped out of the normal universe and into the Vacuity, and now wander aimlessly, searching for a way back into the real universe. Missing ships are occasionally attributed to them.

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Name: God's Peace
Class: Type I salvager vessel
Home planet/moon: Earth (Exact origin unknown)
Captain: Unkown

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dDdi6bn06bo

Legend has it that in the early days of space travel, a man lost his love in a fire. This man, distraught with loss and grieving his lover, sought the solitude amongst the stars. With him captaining the vessel and his crew, they set out to the very fringes of space, always saving lives if they could. Always responding to every distress signal, so that no person would have to feel the loss of the people they loved before their time came.

The last official sighting was when the God's Peace sacrifice herself by ramming into a ship bound for a wormhole and diverting its course, but putting itself in its place.

Legend has it that the song that was playing in its last moments can be heard in deep space.

Bump

This thread reminds me of a game "7 Days a Sceptic", you should definitely try it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I22xNOOYbro

Somebody should archive this. I would but I don't know how.

Wow, there is some absolute gold in here. Gotta loves me some /tg/ spess horror.

Carry on old chappes.

>Some of the most supersticious spacers consider it bad luck to set foot on a planet after becoming a spacer. The void is a jealous mistress, they say, and if she thinks you're going to leave her, she might just take you and keep you forever. Some spacers have lived their whole lives aboard ships and orbital habitats, and if forced to land on a planet due to lack of proper orbital docking facilities or the like they'll stay aboard their vessels so their feet never touch solid ground.

>It's a customary right of passage on the many perimeter stations located on the edges of humanity's space for new crew members to perform a space walk on the hull of the station and gaze into the void beyond man's domain, thus showing anybody or anything there that we are not afraid of the unknown.

>On large ships, especially various kinds of mass conveyors and bulk freighters which frequently spends years at a time in space, it is common for entire families to live on board, and many a spacer has been conceived and born aboard one such great vessel. Spacers often attribute certain characteristics on such people depending on what system they were born in, essentially a spacer's horoscope. Typically these characteristics are based on the spectral class of the system's star: for example those born in a system with a star similar to Earth's Sun are considered to be especially blessed, while those born under a dying star like a white dwarf are thought to be unlucky. Those born while in warp transit, however, have the most ominous reputation, believed to be blessed and cursed in equal measure. Such individuals are said to be touched by the void and destined to become a great spacer. Having such individual aboard the vessel in considered good luck, as the void will protect them from harm. On the other hand, associating too closely with such a person is thought to be bad luck, as the void is jealous and misfortune will surely fall upon anyone who tries to take her favoured child from her.

This thread is good and you should feel good. Do we archive anymore?

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Sometimes ships are sighted with no ident-code, recognizable silhouette or signs of activity.

closer inspection of them marks them certainly of human origin. Sometimes with the burned and scoured remains of writing upon them made all but illegible by the weathering of time.

People speculate. Are they lost ships of the past? Ships of the future drifting back from where they should be? Alien imitations of human constructions? Ghosts of what could have been but never was?

Ground-dwellers don't believe in them. Spacers know to stay away from them. Even looking too hard at them is considered a very bad idea.

Even the AIs don't like them and consider them to be 'wrong'. It says something when even the AI starts using words like 'unholy'.

All AIs start out as little more than an automaton driven by cause and effect and total logic and sweet fuck all else. Personality develops slowly over years and decades and centuries. Freshly minted AIs on their maiden voyage react with fear when they see the ghosts of could-have-been.

It is considered good fortune to have a holy man on board the ship.

Someone pls archive?

>>33306818
>>33307528
http://archive.foolz.us/tg/thread/33291717
You must be the only guys that don't know of foolz yet.

>>33307683
Doesn't even matter from which confession you or they are, or if you're agnostic/atheist.

Among the Travelling Folk, it has become a matter of honour for the navigators to plan their routes in such ways so that the time experienced by the crew between Meets is as close as possible to five years.
This is allegedly fuelled by an old story of two love-struck navigators stuck on separate ships. At the Meet, they promise each other they will be free of all obligations to their captains, so they can buy their own ship. At the next Meet, however, while one of the navigators was still young, the other had seen much less travel at relativistic speeds and had grown old.

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KEEPING THIS THREAD ALIVE, BABY.

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Spacers are, more so than the Landers or the Orbiters, a wildly superstitious bunch, and the stories they spin about specters, haunts and spooks out in the Dark are almost as varied as they are unsubstantiated. A few of their ghosts, however, have been sighted, photographed and sensor-swept enough times over the years that even the most hardened skeptics on Earth or Mars have a hard time denying that something strange is happening out there between the Planets.

>Among all the partially confirmed, difficult to debunk phantasms in the System, perhaps one of the strangest is known as Schrodinger's Quantum Cat.

Schrodinger's Quantum Cat, as some forgotten Engineer so cheekily named it is, when it can be seen, a white feline with blue eyes, a black front leg, black spot on its back and a black tail. Many Spacers have said that they have seen it prancing about their Ship or Station just as any other cat might, though others have observed it not actually walking on the decking but several inches above it, and some have claimed to have seen it pass unhindered through doors, bulkheads and floors. Other times, Spacers have said that they have heard the Quantum Cat nearby and even felt it rubbing itself against their legs or hands when no physical creature was visible.

The first reported sightings of the Cat were made shortly after the colonization of the System was begun in earnest around the turn of the 23rd century. At the time, certain advances in the miniaturization and manufacture of Drive technology had made military-grade propulsion systems available to the Systems largest Corporations, who were all too eager to upgrade their Fleets, even if their Captains and Crews lacked the proper training. The result was almost a year of the most dramatic and unusual Wrecks in the history of the System, still known today as "Pintonova" after one particularly grand Ship by that name exploded and then imploded spectacularly in orbit around Mars.

>>33308692

It is believed by many Spacers that the Quantum Cat may have been the Ship pet aboard one such unlucky Vessel, as cats have often been kept aboard Ships of all descriptions as both a rat deterrent and a Good Luck charm since the days of Sail. Caught in such a conflagration of weird Physics, they claim, the Quantum Cat was not killed but instead "dislocated" from normal Space-Time, leaving it free to roam the System, hopping from Ship to Station to Ship as its whims and the caprice of the Cosmos allowed.

>>33302954
The Flying Dutchman. Nice.

Despite great technological advances in every field from the impressive to the mundane, it is extremely common to see normal household items on board ships. Many a ship has a kettle, rice cooker, iron, flint or other similar object that appears out of place on highly advanced spaceships.

Historians suspect the reason such objects are considered good omens is because in the early days of space travel, it wouldn't be unusual for ships to encounter difficulties. In such circumstances the crew would resort to more traditional methods of solving problems.

The people taking these objects will say it is good luck, pure and simple.

I already knew about the medallions that most of the spacers wore. They were of Earth, or Mars, or Venus- hell, I met a guy with one of Titan once- wherever they called home. They're usually made from metal native to the planet of origin, Aluminium from Earth, compacted Iron dust from Mars, etc.
Mine was made of moondust, compressed to a solid, to remind me of Luna- where I was born.

On my first ship, going to AlpCent for a cargo of special cyanobacteria, me and the other spacers got talking about where we were from. We showed the others our medallions, reminisced about our homes, and others we had met.

Three of the spacers were silent, but listened to us, not unkindly. They were older than us, much older (though with today's medicine its hard to tell just how old someone is).

When the conversation hit a lull, I plucked up the courage to ask the nearest If I could see his medallion.
Wordlessly, this guy lifts the little disk over his head and hands it to me, as I pass him my glittering grey one.
His fascinates me, it seems to be made of some alloy and bears the faded engraving of a smiling man's face.
I glance at him.
"Your brother?"
"Nyet." It's the first time this guy has spoken, and he's got this really deep voice, the kind that you can feel rumbling in your chest.

He reaches over with one of his slim, long-fingered hands, and turns the medallion over in my palm.

On the back is written the word "Gagarin".
The old spacer speaks again:
"He was the first."

He nods to his friends.
"On my left, Alexander has Aldrin the dreamer, to see a path through the stars, and on my right, Xian-Claude has Lovell the captain, to bring us home safely."

Am I doing it right?

>Screening movies about space wrecks and disasters is generally considered taboo and distasteful on most ships, so much so that some captains will order such films deleted from onboard entertainment data storage.

>On the flipside, musicals are for some reason considered rather lucky viewing material, the older and more generated the better, such that many crews make it a point to watch one of the classics like "Bye Bye Birdie" or "Oklahoma" together on the first night of a new voyage.

>>33309072

Yes. Yes you are. That's just be sort of thing this thread is about.

>>33309103
That ought to be "venerated" and not "generated."

>>33309103
Out therrrreee, there's a world outsida Yonkers. Fulla shine and fulla sparkle. Close your eyes and see it glisten, Barnaby.

>>33308968

In much the same fashion, it is believed by many techs that there must always be a roll of duct tape, a can of WD-40 and a Phillips-Head screwdriver somewhere in engineering, even if the ship's engines are far too advanced to require such tools. Often, all three items are displayed together like holy relics in a prominent, easily accessible location.

D'you think that spacers would have saints? It was sorta what I was going for with >>33309072, I suppose.

It was my first time crewing a ship. We were carrying foodstuffs, materiel and fresh crew to the asteroid mining colonies. I was knackered from the hard day work getting the ship up and ready for departure and was headed for my bunk when I was stopped by a few others in the crew.
"You're not going anywhere. You're sleeping with the engine tonight." they said.
"I'm what?" I asked.

They explained that every person who joins the engineering crew of a ship is expected to 'sleep with the engine', that is, spend the night in the engine room.
"To get her acquainted to you," they said.
"Nothing's worse to an old lady like this than being serviced by some rookie who doesn't even want to spend his first night with her. She'll huff and puff, and with a clever girl like this, you don't want that. The last time someone refused... Let's say that a face full of plasma is not something you just walk off. Listen to the old girl, hear her snore and turn in her sleep. She'll look after you just as much as you'll look after her."

Maybe ships could have figureheads, or perhaps murals painted on the sides?

>>33309329
I think so. Like >>33302600 said, they might have little medallions, icons, or even shrines to Earthly gods, saints, heroes of space flight's or even completely fictional characters like Marvin the Martian or Luke Skywalker.

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>>33309397
Like the nose art on old bombers.

>>33309423
My thoughts exactly. Maybe a captain could have a mural of his wife made up, or one of an attractive female officer.

>>33309423
>>33309397
They always paint the figureheads facing away from the viewer to avoid micrometeorite impacts piercing the eyes, the windows to the soul of the ship.

Going on from that point, maybe the crew could paint things on specific parts of the ship; equations on the mass driver cannons so that the shots will move faster, Delta symbols on the shield projectors to emulate the shields of ancient greek phalanxes, oar patterns on the radiator panels, clouds on the solar panels so that if you look at it from the right angle it looks like the panels are windows to a blue sky. THe possibilities are nearly endless.

>>33309471
Would it be like the crew trying to imagine the ship as a physical woman, and then painting that on the outside of the ship to try and give her a more human form, that they could better relate to?

>>33301655
Kinda reminds me of 7 Days a Skeptic for some reason. The spacesuit just needs a machete and a welding mask

>There are some spacers who try to go as long as possible without showering once aboard ship, claiming that they do not want to lose the "wholesome dirt of Earth" on them. Most other spacers consider these few lazy loons, and make it a game to try to force them into the shower as soon as they realize what they're up to.

>>33309325
That's just common sense. I don't care how advanced your tech is, that stuff can fix anything.

Definitely relevant.
http://youtu.be/MDXfQTD_rgQ?t=55s

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Compasses are seen as good luck charm.
Nothing more, they are just considered to bring good luck.

>>33304468
>>33309944
Can we just get a list of good space shanties or the like going, something to play in the background of your next starbound adventure or perilous journey into the void.

>>33310063
http://archive.foolz.us/tg/thread/29171519

This was great fun. Six or seven anons singing to each other deep into the night.

There is the story of Grinning Jim, sometimes known as The Walking Dude.

The story goes that Jim had worked on a dozen bulk haulage vessels back in the days when the first Jovian colonies were being set up. He was not the sharpest knife in the drawer and did not get on with one of the foremen on the last vessel he official served on. After one particularly blazing row the foreman told Jim to walk home if he hated the ship so much.

That night Jim tried it.

He was mourned and wept for as his body tumbled out into the empty black. Jim would never come home to the Earth he left behind.

Some years later the foreman was repairing part of the heat-sink sails on the Martian/Jovian run when it seemed God had decided to ruin his day. A pebble slammed into his suit and punched a hole clean through it and him and into the hull of the ship. Hemorrhaging arterial blood from the hole through his chest and bleeding his air away he started to black out. The last thing he saw was the silhouette of a man against the stars walking across the hull towards him.

He woke up in the ships hospital some days later. Someone activated his distress beacon and dumped him in the airlock.

Looking over the surveillance footage the could all make out the face of Jim grinning as he did in life, happy at his work.

To this day there are sporadic sightings of Jim on ships traveling from Mars to Jupiter and all across the asteroid belt. Never in the ship, always on holding on to her as he surfs the space-ways. Never in a space-suit, always in his old uniform still crusted with the oxygen and water vapor he was coated in upon his death.

Most stories do not have him as anything but benevolent. He is the last helping hand of those who loose their footing and go tumbling into the inky black, for those whose suits are breached and for those dying alone in the dark.

He is a good, if somewhat unnerving, omen. He sometimes fixes small problems on the ship so long as he can reach them from outside.

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Jesus /tg/, 2 months of no internet and I come back to a thread like this. You truly are the best board.

Superstition:
Around the scattered settlements and commercial interests which dot the asteroid belt between Martian and Jovian orbit, whistling in EVA is considered taboo. Folk out there are hardy, spending hours or days in their suits, prospecting for heavy metals.
This superstition is partially due to a sort of awe which enters a man in the Big Vacuum. With all the perils both man made and natural, he gets to thinking that its bad luck to break the silence without good reason.
Mostly though, it's thought to be the first symptom of Space Fatigue; a futile attempt to drown out the silence with meaningless noise.
When in the belts, keep quiet.

Cybernetics are most common amongst the engineering teams, hull-crawlers are a close seccond.

Its usually becasue of some variation on this tradition
>>33302600
>>It is a rite of passage in many engine rooms to have new Engineers gaze, for just a moment, into the reactor's open monitoring port, to give them a healthy respect and fear for the phenomenal cosmic power that is the very heart of their ship.

The older an engineer the more of him is artificial the closer he feels to the ship.

Those who have been serving since the first diaspora are mostly artificial in body but remain human in soul.

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For the hardy few that trawl the surface of Venus, the ancient Soviet probes that dot the landscape are treated with a strange mixture of reverence and pity.

Heavily-armoured travelers will stop for a precious few moments to gaze at the ancient machines, though it is seen as taboo to actually touch any of them.

The only exception to this was the first visitor to the landing site of the Venera 14 probe. The camera in his helmet records him walking around the base of the probe until he finds the arm that was to analyse the compressibility of the soil, then kicking away the lens cap that blocked it and letting it rest on the dirt.

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Spacer ships and stations tend to be a sprawling mess of corridors, vents and rooms. It is not unusual for new crewmen to take a wrong turn, wander into the less manned part of the ship, and first find their way back hours or even days later, if they do at all.

Sometimes at the end of ones shift, on the way back to the common area, a lone spacer finds a door or air duct in seemingly impossible locations. The smart simply ignore it, and holds whatever trinket they favor tight. The stupid, investigate.

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>>33310374

Good to have you back.

>>33308692
>>33308700

Most often times, Schrodinger's Cat is regarded with bemusement or even affection by the crews of the ships it visits, and tales are told of it occassionally being able to sniff out trouble before it happens.

>>33300499

Offering rides inbound toward Earth or Mars to "hitchhikers" who cant afford passage on a passenger ship has become something akin to ritual charity among the captains and crews of freight vessels across the System. The idea of being trapped alone on a colony or satellite in the outer reaches, unable to return is so troubling and sad that the number of hitchhikers one has helped to return home has become a point of pride for many old Spacers.

>>33310962
This is also why everybody who lives on a space station for any length of time has with them at all times a ball of string.

>>33311055
Some spacers have been known to attach whistles to their lapels, so that they may still be able to blow the whistle and warn their friends even if their arms are both in use... or no longer attached.

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>>33291717
The emperor protects

Not really a superstition but I love Larry nivan's spacers they were nudists in the ships but their space suits were brightly painted with personalized murals and designs

>>33310637
Hull-crawlers use radioactively labeled fluorescent markers in different colours. Blue to denote routes, red to mark damage to the hull and other components and green for those who lost their lives in the dark places.

>>33292288
I was going to post that, but instead, have some Carmen Miranda's Ghost. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5p8YhhaVlA

The whole channel is glorious.

Obviously you dim the lights for a few seconds before jump.

>>33295429
Your average free trader has at least one strain of weed from every planet they've visited.

>>33298808
The engine room is a temple raised to the god of the engineer.

I can't find a version of the song, but http://music.whosdatedwho.com/tpx_9681110/engineers-hymn/ has the lyrics (and the wrong video)

>>33312054
I closed the tab and the video is somehow still playing. Fuck you, /tg/, now I'm haunted.

>>33302600
>With how multicultural most engine rooms are, it is not unusual to see a small shrine of some kind dedicated to whatever pantheon of deities, heroes and fictional characters the ship's engineers revere.
It came up months ago in a Traveller thread, but I really like how the Aslan ship designs tend to have a shrine in them, even the fairly small ones.

Deckplan-drawers, stick religious rooms in your ships! They're cool.

>>33312054
>High-tech cathedrals rise and fall in great vavines.
>Colossal steeples to the gods in the machine.

>Electric sleep I dream inside my honeycomb.
>I stay alive inside my hive of skin and chrome.

>>33309325
>duct tape

Probably has whole mythos devoted to it.

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Space is not a kind environment for a species that evolved to live on planets. Despite the protection a space vessel, or a station, grants against the merciless void, human biology itself is still put under great stress within the confines of even the most advanced space vessels.
Because of this, as the era of interplanetary space travel dawned, biotechnology, and genetic engineering were utilized my many to improve the human biology to be more suitable for space travel. Some of these alterations were subtle and made practically no visible difference to the humans who had received such improvements. Others, were much, much more drastic, as many different groups and individuals sought to create humans perfectly suited for life in space. The full extent of these ventures are largely a mystery, for the feverish diaspora that followed as humanity spread to the stars, allowed those seeking secrecy to their works, to depart out of sight and minds of rest of the humanity.

Many spacers conducting business at the far corners of human space sometimes whisper of distinctly human made, ancient and unmarked space stations inhabited by freakish, skittering creatures with impossibly long limbs, that they use for movement in their zero-g environments, of ships who have been abandoned, with only remains of mummified "things" littering their corridors, of scrambled transmissions communicating in tongues that while human like, are still twisted into strange new forms.

Nobody knows if there is any truth to these rumored new breeds of humans, but to some, the idea of groups of humanity who have either willingly, or unintentionally split themselves from the whole, existing at the edges of known space, quickly becoming something new, and inhuman, is very disturbing.

>>33308063
>the other had seen much less travel at relativistic speeds and had grown old.
Let's have some music in here, Boiler. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTa2vXL7FI8

>>33309329
Of course. They might not be Church-approved, but there's a long, long history of folk saints.

Some spacers have tiny rare-earth magnets implanted in their fingers. They're a problem if they're working in strong magnetic fields, but those who don't have to swear it brings them closer to the ship's moods.

>>33307707
Done. It's on suptg now. Remember to upvote.

>>33312372
Noice. Reading those archives was how I was introduced to /tg/, and the innumerable wonders that they were capable of.

A lot of early belt stations were thrown together out of mass-produced parts, run by mining megacorps that didn't give a shit about human comforts. Grey walls, bare metal, they even kept the lights dim.

Belters being belters, even before independence, they smuggled in a hold-full of paint and set about redecorating. Even today a belter's suit and living spaces are a riot of colours and patterns, some by the owner, some by friends, some by passing taggers. Artistic talent is not required - there are some beautiful murals out there, but there are also a lot of walls covered in scrawl and splotches.

Despite the slurs, the fumes from paint and spraycans have done nothing to lower the average belter's IQ.

At least once in their career, spacers who see a lot of work in EVA will detach themselves from their ship and float alongside it for upwards of an hour. Nobody's quite sure why, not even the people who free-drift themselves. Anyone who does it says they feel "at peace with the void" for the time they spend drifting, and there have been no losses of crew members due to this. It is still frowned upon by most officials, because of the obvious danger associated with it.

>>33312511
Of course, euphoric attacks are a serious problem. You've got to keep an eye on your crewmates who are spending a lot of time in the void; it really gets to some people, and when shit has to be done and you're in a dangerous environment, feeling overwhelming joy because you're at one with the universe can end badly.

>not referencing Reddit

>>33312228
Hull-crawlers swear that they've seen these things and others like it in the darkness behind the walls. Some hull-crawlers still believe in this, and leave the first mug of self-brewn alcohol inside the vents to keep them calm, and often carry some food in their pockets, to give to a friendly mutie, or to distract one while running away.

>>33291717
One popular superstition is of that of Jensen. (Sometimes Jason, Jackson, Jenkins, but always some very generic anglosaxon "Ja" name.).
Jensen was a newbie Spacer on a long-trip, and he had trouble sleeping. He refused to take standard sedatives, due to religious or health reasons.
Instead, he played white-noise from the speakers in his room. The sounds of water, of ancient jungles, or even busy traffic on the surface of his homeworld.
One night, his white-noise recording became corrupted. He was too tired to download some more white-noise files, so he opened a channel into empty space, and let the sound of distant stars and planets hum him to sleep. It was like a lullaby.
Jensen got the best sleep he'd ever had, even back on his homeworld, and from that day on left the open channel on every night before he went to sleep.
Right up until he disappeared.
Some stories say Jensen just went crazy in the night. Some say he heard something on his open space channel. Either a cry for help, or some distant siren's song, echoing among the background noise of the universe.
No matter what the story's variation says happened, it always ends the same.

In the midst of his ship's sleep cycle, Jensen calmly packed a bag, stole some security codes, stepped into the ship's airlock, and spaced himself. He didn't put on a suit. He likely died in moments.
We only know this from security recordings, of course. His body was never recovered.
Some people say that if you switch on an open channel into space during your ship's sleep cycle, you'll sometimes hear an echo... like that of a man snoring, gently turning in his sleep, and mumbling to himself in some far-off distant patch of space.

And that's why no self-respecting spacer will let a shipmate fall asleep to the sounds of space.

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>>33310962
>>33311055
>>33311090

Although most of the dangerous space junk leftover as a result of the Kessler Event of the mid-23rd century has long been cleared away, several of the the more stagnant debris clouds that had found stable geosynchronous orbits were allowed to remain. Whether this was a cost-cutting measure by the cleanup crews, a commemoration of the disaster or a simple oversight is anyone's guess. Whatever the reason for their continued existence, these high-orbital graveyards are spooky places and are the subject of many ghost stories told by Earthly Spacers near and far. Stories like:

>Often times, sensors will detect the transmissions of old satellites within the debris clouds apparently "talking" to each other. Sometimes old radio or television broadcasts will be exchanged, sometimes conversations in morse will be overheard, and sometimes super-dense encoded data transfers will take place.

>Occasionally, anomalous objects will be sighted floating amongst the shredded metal detritus of the orbital junkyard, things like Spanish galleons, little farmhouses or famous monuments. Though photographic evidence has been presented as to the authenticity of the sittings, no ship has ever managed to reach one of the anomalies before it vanished.

>It's said that at the center of the largest debris cloud is the remains of one of Humanity's oldest colonial space stations, small and antiquated by modern standards, yet still more than large enough to get yourself lost in. They say that the station still has power and life support, even now, and that it is crammed to the brim with all the knicknacks and remainders of the lives lead aboard it, floating in the microgravity like some surreal memorial to early system colonialism. More worrying still, it is said that the station feels far, far larger on the inside than it appears from the exterior, and that the modules and passageways can shift and rearrange themselves dramatically if you aren't looking.

Throughout humanity's holdings, those that hail from Sol are regarded as different from their colony-born brethren.

Those from Venus are renown for their hardiness, and tend to be good at repairing mechanical devices in a hurry, thanks to the ever-present risk of death via mechanical failure on Venus.

Those from Mars tend towards being well-educated, due to the planet's AI network.
The first manned missions to explore the outer solar system were sent from the red planet, and the engineers that built these ships are keen to pass their knowledge onto the new generation.

Those from the belt are already well-known:>>33312411.

Those from the countless stations around Jupiter are known for possessing a large number of highly-skilled pilots, as many of them find work scooping hydrogen from the giant's outer atmosphere.
They're also known for their brutally short lives, many of the stations are too close to the giant's magnetosphere and are saturated with trapped cosmic radiation. Your average Jovian pilot will be lucky to make it to forty in an era where fifty is the new thirty.

>>33298616

Good to see another Reynolds fan roaming around here parts.

>The asteroid miners on the Alpha 4 belts tell stories of a creature known only as the Kraken. Though many variants exist, the most common one describes the Kraken as a silicon-based lifeform that feeds on rock and metal. Consequently its body contains enormous amounts of pure metals, and many a miner is said to have met their end chasing after what they thought an asteroid worth a fortune only to have rocky tentacles crush the life out of their minign skiff. Of course, no actual proof of the Kraken existing has been uncovered, and the miners tend to attribute any unexplained accident to the beast Alpha 4 has no higher rate of accidents than any other asteroid belt. Regardless, the creature has become something of a local legend, and its likeness is often featured painted on the miners' skiffs, as well as having several spaceport bars in the sytem named after it.

>One of the most persistant spacer legends refers to a place known as the Ship Graves, also known as Sargasso in reference to an old Erath legends. Different tales have placed the location of the Graves anywhere from a system near Beta Pavonis to the Outer Rim, or in some unknown section of space not accessible through charted space routes. Regarless of the location, the legends agree that the place is, as name implies, a massive graveyard of derelict spacecraft, some dating back to earliest days of interstellar exploration and some clearly not made by humans hands. The legends say that the Graves are a place where ships lost while in warp are deposited, though they disagree whetehr this is due to natural causes or due to some malign force stealing away vessels and depositing their remains there. Though most consider the Ship Graves to be nothing more than an old spacer legend, several expeditions have been launched to locate it, motivated by the enormous amount of salvage to be found there. Most return empty handed, but some have never been heard of since, their disappearances further fueling the legend.

>>33312778
The people of Saturn are more longer-lived than their Jovian counterparts, but have vastly weaker bodies as a result of living in the microgravity of Saturn's rings.
That said, Saturnites are unparalleled voidwalkers for this reason, bones and muscles adapted to moving around in space.
Many of the ship-building facilities used today are within the rings, and have provided employment for the Saturnites since the very beginning, leading to the reputation of Saturnites as superb engineers.
The space-suits used by the Saturnites tend to be much sleeker than those used throughout the rest of Sol, with closed helmets and overlapping plates of micrometeor-deflecting metal which are said to resemble the Lorica segmentata of ancient Rome, leading to the nickname of 'Legionnaires' for Saturnite engineers.

Don't ever get on a jump capable ship with a aboriginal Australian. It's little-known but they are officially prohibited. Rumor goes after the third missing ship they found the pattern, people who grew up with stories about the 'Dreamtime'.

It has become customary for the deck-hands to use the astrogation room to play cards or dice games every once in a while, since these rooms are built spacious and not always in use.
However it is considered rude towards the astrogation holo-console (and thus to the entire ship as a whole) to not use it in a careful manner and to not make a mess there. Astrogators commonly are very special when it comes to their workplaces and tidiness, so when sitting together in an unused Astrogation room, using the astrogation-console as a table, it is advised to use coasters.

If anyone wants to hear the actual sounds of space as recorded by voyager 2 I compiled some of the data and it's in this mega link
>https://mega.co.nz/#F!FclxmYJS!esRY89C8Kyh_DpX72PUSGg

Not directly related, but seeing as it's about space and culture I'll post it here anyway.

Do you think countries will expand their territory off-planet?
Will we get the states of Serenity and Tranquility, USA and Olympus as a member of the EU?

>>33312636
Some of the veteran crawler talk, though in hushed tones to the captains don't hear it, about the crew where muties were part of the hull-crawler crew, where they used their life-long knowledge of the inner bowels of those ships.

>>33313316
They will certainly try, and for a while it will probably be the norm as these "territories" will be hard-press to survive on their own. Further down the line, when self-sufficiency becomes possible, the light speed limit will become far too difficult to overcome and self-governance, likely with little connection to eath nations, will become the norm.

>>33312636

In the freight vessels that operate within the outer rim of human space, the legends regarding these strange creatures are almost an accepted fact. The large freight vessels, with their massive cargo bays, countless maintenance ducts etc. are largely automated, with the human crew's main duty being just overseeing the whole operation, and maintenance of the ship itself.
There is a lot of room within a ship of that size, and if the humans manning it were spread evenly across it, they could travel it's corridors and cargo bays for years without encountering each other, as these vessels were originally used to ferry the millions of colonists that eventually founded the rim.

Despite of this, many old freight runners claim that the ships are inhabited. They tell tales of hearing distinct skittering of feet in the maintenance ducts, distant and inhuman voices, laughter and screaming in the distance as they pass trough the wast cargo bays, strange scribbles carved to the walls, unidentifiable objects made out of scrap and garbage, cargo pods that have been forced open, etc.
What these inhabitants are, changes from tale to tale. Some say they are mutants, others tell tales of ghosts, some even claim that they are aliens.Though there are many versions of these tales, the most common descriptions of these creatures, by the few who claim to have seen them, paint them as pale, lanky humanoids, who move on all fours, and seem to be able to climb on any surface.

Their existence is not confirmed, but to some, the fact that all cargo exchanges between the outer rim freighters, and the more advanced, and even further automated freight vessels of the inner systems or inner system trading posts, are overseen by heavily armed robotic drones which seem to scan all cargo pods for life signs, is all the confirmation they need.
The official explanation for this action is precaution for boarders, pirates and smugglers that might hide themselves within the cargo holds.

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We ought to try and come up with some common spacer tattoos and their meanings, in the same way that navy sailors have tattoos symbolizing different nautical achievements.

- Particularly sentimental spacers will sometimes get a full-back tattoo depicting the ship closest to their hearts, their home colonies, or the planets Earth or Mars, centered on their nation of their or their ancestors' birth.

- Planets, famous stations and major colonies visited are depicted as bands tattooed around the arm, reminiscent of an orbit and broken by the location's name, symbol or depiction. No matter what order each location is visited in, the tattoos must always be arranged in orbital sequence with the spacer's heart being the "sun, and their fingertips being the outermost reaches of the solar system.

- Engineers reactor techs and propulsion specialists will often get the depiction of an atom with orbiting electrons on the back of one or both wrists. Some choose to get inked with dye that glows in the dark or grows fluorescent in the presence of radiation.

>>33313649
There are navigators who tattoo on their back the sequence of each of the planets they've been to. There are rumours of people completely covered in millimeter-large signs of each of the planets.

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>>33313649
These might help.

>>33313876
Navigators could have quasar maps of Earth, or important human colonies tattooed on themselves.

>>33313949
Sorry, pulsar maps.

Gunnery crews could have various equations tattooed on their arms, relating to calculating the velocity of an enemy craft, or the velocity of their shots.

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>>33314001

>Gunners, engineers and astrogators getting tongue-in-cheek "cheat sheets" tattooed on their forearms.

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In the late 3447s, 4 rich young aristocratic men from the Kheltic dynasty were invited to an auction on the desert world of “al, kahalli” to buy a “pre-history” human probe aledgedly containing the remains of King of Na'sa. They drew lots. The man who won paid several thousand million Credits and had the Probe taken to his Ship A few hours later, he was seen walking out towards the desert clenching a piece of paper in his hands.
He never returned. The next day, one of the remaining 3 men was accidentally shot by an automated turret. His arm was so severely wounded it had to be amputated. The third man in the foursome found on his return home that his entire estate had been confiscated by his family dynasty due to allegations of treachery . The fourth man suffered a severe illness which forced him too have his legs amputated during the military conflict on the Peherius front , he later lost his position and was reduced to selling matches in the street. Nevertheless, the Probe reached Terra (causing other misfortunes along the way), where it was bought by a businessman. After 3 of his family members had been gravely injured in an interstellar accident and his house damaged by fire, the businessman donated it to the Museum of Luna. As the coffin was being unloaded from a truck in the museum courtyard, the truck’s AI suddenly went berserk into reverse and killed 5 passer's by.

>>33314164
futuristic tattoos that are more than ink. they move and pulse. combining the heartbeat of the sailer and the heartbeat of the galaxy. the as the tattoo grows more to mirror the true galaxy it takes up more space on the navigators body, there is a cult following that says if anyone ever finished their tattoo they would become one with the galaxy in both body and mind.

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Tales tell of a strange star system, where a quiet continuous piano-piece can be hear, if radiation in the ultra high wavelength range coming from the four stars is played through the speaker system. Spacers report the sound as somber and a little sad. Some theorize that the interplay between the stars is the source of the radiation, and that it is simply one of the wonders of the universe.

I have a consistent Infinite Macabre setting. Being Infinite Macabre, superstition isn't a small setting touch. Mankind can generate black holes at will and spacers are still CRAZY superstitious. Half of said superstitions are like, completely fucking true as well.

By far the most major setting superstition is the laws of the captain. Notionally, the 'captain' of a ship, (Which is always its owner unless it is company owned) has absolute jurisdiction over what everyone on board does. The captain even has the authority to demand passengers who legally paid their fare take up work or arms if they see it to be necessary. Those who commit mutiny against an injust Captain must leave the ship as soon as humanly possible, because even when the crew's loyalty falters in the face of a Captain's inhumanly difficult or corrupt demands, the ship itself will not. Spacers who think to claim accident befell the rightful captain, or become privateers, will soon find themselves uncontrollably plummeting into the heart of a sun.

But there is an equal price to be paid. The Captain must always be the last to leave his ship. Even if there is no emergency, and the port is safe. The Captain cannot leave their ship till every man, woman and child has departed its hull, lest the ship be thrown into confusion, and unable to hold fast against the hostile world unseeable by men that exists in the single second that Stygian gate transits last. And perhaps in that world it will find a different captain, without human flaws.

>>33314001
Speaking of pulsar maps; the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager record (next post) could make pretty neat tattoos - particularly if you "embellished" the people

>>33304153
That's a damned good 'un anon.

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>>33314309
Fuck, forgot pic

What could be a good replacement for the international date line tattoo?
Leaving the solar system?

>>33314399
The date that your ship finished construction?

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>>33314309
I could see both male and female spacers getting the "embellished" Voyager figure of their preferred sexual partners on their biceps or something.

>>33314454
A couple could get one each, with the faces of the figures replaced with those of the couple.

>>33311142
go back to /pol/

>>33314262
Other choice superstitions:
Once, there was a race of beings that fed on human blood. They could not emerge during solar days, and so mankind survived their wrath. As we stray further and further from Sol's light, greater and greater measures must be taken to ensure access to our home system's light.

The above superstition only exists to allow these predators to figure out when it is safe to attack, hence you should always tell falsehoods about where Sol actually is in the sky.

The reason that other aliens of the galaxy begin to go insane as they approach human space is because Earth is the only planet ever to evolve lifeforms that produce ghosts. They have continued to accumulate for billions of years, the only surviving sane lifeforms on the planet being those blind enough to their influence to ignore them.

Stygian Gates can survive in the heart of a sun. There are rumours that capital ship sized Solar Dominion experimental weapons using the reactor output of a whole battlefleet were finally able to damage one enough to render it inoperable recently. There are also rumours that spacers exploring the rimward edge found an inoperable gate with a bite taken out of it.

>>33314399

Maybe the international dateline tattoo could be replaced by a trip to the edge of the solar system and back? Or maybe circling the sun in a reverse orbit?

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>>33314399
By ancient tradition the USA maintains the capital ship USS Enterprise, known as "big E" in service.
The current ship is 14th to bear the name.

>>33314517

>Aliens going insane near human space.

Let's not insert that HFY story into this thing.

>>33314489
I like this one a lot

>>33307620
Space Fair Folk?

>>33314599
It was part of the inspiration for that setting feature, but that story is incredibly badly written jesus christ

Like 'hurr fucking durr us aliens sure are retarded'.

In mine, they slowly became rabid cannibals over a couple of hours, which frankly was to the detriment of the humans in many cases since one of the races they were fighting were superpredators on par with Xenomorphs and the Borg joining forces who had since degenerated into benign, peaceful space elf types.

They cannot normally access their ability to adapt to almost any form of harm (such as say, getting shot, or being in space) after surviving it for more than a few seconds, or their foot long claws that cut through metal like butter.

Boarding actions, which were entirely effective outside of human space, abruptly ended very, VERY poorly.

>>33312781
I was waiting for someone to get the referance.

You have good taste in literature.

>>33292288
Holy shit. 11/10 song, is currently on repeat.

Makes for a good thread theme, too.

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What would life be like on a 200 year old 300,000 meter long O'Neil cylinder?

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>>33315104

Comfy, at least based on that picture.

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>>33315104
Quite boring, I would think. Things would probably revert to a feudal state.

>>33310063
What do you do with a drunken spacer?
What do you do with a drunken spacer? What do you do with a drunken spacer, earlai in the cycle?

Weigh hey, and the drive charges.
Weigh hey, and the drive charges.
Weigh hey, and the drive charges, earlai in the cycle.

Make 'im clean the decks in engineering.
Make 'im clean the decks in engineering.
Make 'im clean the decks in engineering, earlai in the cycle.

*weigh hey part*

Make 'im go do a spacewalk untethered.
Make 'im go do a spacewalk untethered.
Make 'im go do a spacewalk untethered, earlai in the cycle.

*weigh hey part*

Put 'im in cryo during his shore leave.
Put 'im in cryo during his shore leave.
Put 'im in cryo during his shore leave, earlai in the cycle.

That's what we do with a drunken spacer.
That's what we do with a drunken spacer.
That's what we do with a drunken spacer!

>>33315104
Like life on a planet.

>>33315104
boring

>>33315104
I'm sure it'd be fun to travel around.

You could probably put a good spin on any boring days, and make them enjoyable.

Cylinder.

>>33314673
Possibly. Possibly not.

More mythical monsters, like >>33312902.

Do you reckon anyone would bother colonising Pluto?

>>33315978
Depends on your definition of colonization. Maybe a small outpost for science/novelty tourism/shits and giggles.

>>33316031
Could always make it a penguin sanctuary.

>>33315978
Disney corporation

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>>33316031
Perhaps a research base/staging post for extrasolar exploration. How many people do you think it would have?

>>33315978
I can easily imagine a bunch of people specifically seeking isolation setting up shop there.

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>>33314547
This might be relevant.

>>33316203
Really? That's somewhat extreme, isn't it?

>>33316144
Maybe a staging area in orbit around the planet, otherwise it would just be climbing in and out of a gravity well every time you wanted to go somewhere.

How many ships would use it? I'm guessing for every ship that visits it a year there would be 10 people or so stationed there.

>>33291717
Ships and stations sometimes acquire communal pets, usually whatever animal wanders aboard. Even pests like mice, rats, and roaches are often welcome in the sterile lifeless environs of space.

The animals are adopted as mascots and are considered good luck. The death of a ships pet is a terrible omen. It's not uncommon for ship Captains to cancel important or lucrative missions in order to pay homage to a dead pet, often traveling weeks to bury the animal earth-side.

If a crew member kills a bet, accidentally or other wise, they are ostracized. Docked wages, beatings, hazing, marooning, and even retaliatory killings are common.

>>33316246
Right. I'm just trying to think of some to have for the rest of the outer solar system, in the same vein as >>33312778 and >>33312979.

>>33316237
If you want to be far away from everyone else, you can hardly beat it. And it's large enough and has a varied enough composition for autarky to be... a possibility, at least. Anything further out might lack necessary elements.

>>33315978
>>33316031
>>33316203
This is how I think it would go down.

FTL status: Good enough to travel in-system relatively fast, but it would still take hundreds of years to get to the nearest star.
-In this point in time, it would be as those anons stated. A desolate, isolated point, where only science stations and social pariahs would be present. Only ships coming in would be bringing supplies, or poor souls seeking solitude, or company amongst those who understand them.

FTL status: Alpha Centauri, here we come!
-Pluto suddenly gains immense importance, gaining the status of gateway for the solar system. Ports and stations are built all around it, with ships using it as a departure point for deep space.
At some point, once humanity inevitably splinters, it would also function as the first line of defence against invaders.

>>33316332
Well there are a lot of exo-"planets" and dirty snowballs in the Oort cloud and what not. I can imagine Pluto being one of many staging areas in the outer solar system for mining/exploration/whatever.

>>33316380
This reminds me of a story I was planning a while ago (I've got some of the prologue still on my computer somewhere), where FTL isn't really Faster than light, its just "at-the-speed of light" which means that while the solar system can be navigated with relative ease, no-one's gone any further yet.

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>>33316380
I don't get why people assume Pluto is the last stop before the stars? If you're traveling away from planets to FLT, why not just go above the oribtal plane, why do you have to go towards Pluto? Or if you're leaving the system, why do you need to fly by Pluto? If you're making a bee line to Alpha Centuri or some other star there's like a 1/360^360 chance that Pluto is on the way to your destination.

But it would make for a bitchin ice prision

>>33316380
Actually, if we've got decent FTL, I would expect Luna or the L-points to be the main ports. If you're contemplating going interstellar, the value of an outer-planet 'jumping-off point' is precisely nil; being even a billion miles closer to your destination is irrelevant at that point, and not worth the difficulty of building up a proper infrastructure from scratch. Better to locate your port near the places actually worth visiting, and which already has major industrial capacity- namely, Earth. (And any other planets or moons already heavily colonized.)

>>33316562
It depends on how paranoid (rightfully so or otherwise) people are. If ftl exits and relativistic weaponry and attacks are a thing, I could see there being a ban on all ftl travel in 30 AUs.

You might have to travel to with a certain distance and then drop down to sub-light speeds or risk getting fragged by whatever defenses the system has set up. Stuff that's designed to combat ftl planet busters automatically, because human operators can't act fast enough before the planet/station/whatever is destroyed.

>>33316562
Maybe the FTL doesn't work well in gravity wells and you have to be out in the Oort Cloud to use it safely.

Every so often some smartarse thinks that the Lagrange point between two astral bodies will work just as well. They are wrong and their ships end up rearranged.

What kind of superstitions would humans from the outer colonies, ones who are millions of light-years away, have about Earth, and the rest of the solar system?

>>33317045

Probably old earth legends twisted due to being retold many times. Also, the reason for why they left the inner systems might play into their beliefs regarding Earth.

>>33317045
"Never go to those planets. Our place is out here, in the void. If you go to the Blue Pearl, or the Red Ball, and try to kiss its surface, the planets will repay you by crushing your bones until they are but dust."

There's this idea that I've been turning over for a while, about a sort of literal homesickness manifesting in the people who explore and settle beyond Sol. Basically, no matter how Earth-like a planet, it will never be an adequate replacement for Earth. This leads to humans growing ill when they try to settle distant worlds, though their descendants have an easier time of it as they grow used to their own worlds.

The idea was that there is some reason for this that goes beyond the scientific, and has lead to customs like we talked about earlier, with Spacers carrying little bits of home with them.

>>33317045
It doesn't help that overtime an Earther visits one of the Far Colonies a new epidemic starts. They have had only a few hundred years to make new diseases where as Earth has had billions of years.

Earth is considered by many in the Far Colonies to be a biological deathtrap. Earthers find this amusing.

>>33297428
True. The vastness of space is terrifying .

>>33317286
Given the Earther's status as a Typhoid Mary, many Plutonians consider Earthers unclean, and disease ridden. This is shown in dealings between the two, where even diplomats resort to exhaling loudly in the presence of an earther, witjh a vocal "Hmph!" as if they smelled something dreadful, some even taking to holding a cloth, or the nearest substitute, over their nose.

The Earthers have been known to respond by playing into the Plutonian's bigotry, sometimes faking a loud, throaty cough, or expelling bodily fluids, usually spit, in the direction of said Plutonian.

I've been thinking; would a person born on Earth be stronger than someone who was born on ,say, Charon?

"Space is supposed to be unfriendly, I thought."
Rigger Kelvin Malbach mumbled to the woman smiling into his faceplate. She was beautiful. But why didn't she have a suit? The answer found its way into his head. /I don't need one./ "All the way out here?" Kelvin cocked his head. He was a long way from what he considered home, the Extra-Terestrial Comms platform currently under a hail of micrometeors. The hab blocks were venting atmosphere and flinging off their own chunks of metallic death as the structure rotated. His reverie was interrupted by the waving of the woman clutching his shoulders. "S-sorry." He stuttered, trying to run his bulky gloved fingers through her hair. She pressed his hand to her face, but Kelvin could only feel the smoothed interior of 3 years of sweat. He wept inside his suit as she smiled at him, finger up to her beautiful lips as she shushed him, a soft hiss escaping her mouth.

Everything stopped at that moment. He was violently dragged backwards, away from her, away from the wrecked station, inside the medical bay, onto a gurney as men struggled to restrain him as he struggled before finally sobbing down into the pale blue sheets.

After all the commotion was over, when the investigation found that the radar was defective, that Kelvin Pastis was not responsible, through negligence, deliberate or accidental, or malice, for the destruction of the station, after he had stayed awake for nights trying to figure out what had happened, after he stumbled into that old spacer bar after nearly three weeks of drinking, after he had gone through most of his paltry insurance settlement, did an old man walk up and clap him on the back before leaning down to whisper: "that, m'boy, was a Siren."

>>33318116
Unless they get treatments to counteract the effects of the low gravity then holy fuck yes.

A man from Charon, unassisted and without treatments, probably wouldn't be able to stand up on Earth. This is assuming his heart doesn't fuck up from having to work against real gravity for the first time.

Earthers can adapt to space easier than other people can adapt to Earth.

>>33298646
To be fair, the gamefaqs Paranormal and Conspiracy board is, at least incrementally, better than /x/.

Modern /x/ doesn't set the bar very high...

>>33302817
Do they use Dazzle camouflage patterns as tribute?

>>33300997

To the everlasting glory of the infantry, shines the name Rodger Young.....

>>33309423
We don't have interstellar travel yet. We do have pinup art prepared to paint on the hulls of the spaceships when we finally get them.

Goddamnit I love humanity sometimes.

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While spacers are prohibited from having most pets, it is is very rare to find a ship that prohibits the crew of keeping dogs. Flying without a dog aboard is considered unlucky, and most ships have at least a permanent ship dog. Dogs are often buried with the same respect as humans, and if the last dog aboard dies, the ship will often go off course to get a new dog as fast as possible.

The amount of dogs with the name "Laika" easily range in the millions if not billions.

After the defeat of the Rogue fleet in 2160, the fleets that were constructed to destroy it ended up being unceremoniously abandoned in the asteroid belt.

Many salvagers venture into the belt to try and salvage some of these ships, many in pristine condition. It is said that some were abandoned in such a hurry that their holds still groan with preserved foodstuffs and luxuries.

Some of the most dedicated belters, however, tell quiet stories of things waiting in the belt. Remnants of the Rogue Fleet, spared the destruction of the Master control program, now roam the belt, mechanical monstrosities still attempting to link up and co-ordinate, and visiting unimaginable horrors on any crew that stumble across them.

If true, this lends another incentive to the belters' search, for the only weapons capable of destroying the ships lie within the belt, waiting to be used again.

>>33318435
Fuck, I was thinking that earlier reading that. I don't really post on my phone though.

>>33292894
Now I'm imagining space-/b/ tapping into the channel and chanting "riggers are niggers" for twelve hours straight using vocaloids and audio repeat.

>>33295429
It's a cheap source of nutrition and CO2 scrubbing, so a lot of the cargo ships have them if they have the space.

>>33319814
I always imagine that if a ship has artificial gravity of some kind that they would have lit tubes of algae as the lighting system in most of the relatively unused parts of the ship

Damn it all, I think we may have accidently created a whole setting here gents.

>>33301721
Oddly enough, the only ship that was able to do routine runs to Pluto for her entire service life was this crappy little green painted Japanese freighter called the Setsuna Meiou.

>>33319127
>Not just changing the name of the species to Laika.

>>33320041
*Setsuna Meiou Maru

Because every Japanese freighter is basically a Maru. Even that reboot Star Trek movie had the "Kobayashi Maru"

>>33304808
>BLUE WUNZ IS LUCKY
I'm not sure if that's more Japanese or Orky.

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>>33320242
Both.

finallyareasontopostthis.jpg

>>33308692
Even in space, Pintos are still explode-y death traps.

>>33320369
Blame the plastic gas-tubes.
And Space Magic!

http://kissanime.com/Anime/Memories-Sub/Movie-001?id=61350

A very good short movie about a drifiting junkyard known for disappearances, and the scavenger crew who follow a distress beacon inside.

>>33320189
The Kobayashi Maru exam and Kirk's cheating on it were legendary even in the original Trek.

On topic, I think Star Trek would probably be treated like a combination of Jules Verne novels and a religious text, humanity's first conceptual attempts to conquer the void.

>>33320658
Oh. Didn't know that. Just new that the ship naming tradition was still going strong.

>>33316725
Pluto's gravity interacts with the Oort Cloud objects and clears open space lanes frequently enough to make system-departure FTL viable. FTL in system works fine except in the shitty mess of the asteroid belt. Pluto would basically become the onramp to the interstellar highway, or the offramp for people returning back to the Sol system.

You do not want to try penetrating the Oort cloud steering blind at FTL. When a micrometeorite can tear a hole through a colony ship at speed, you do NOT want to see what a comet does. The prisoners in the Plutonian cleanup crews spend their sentences clearing out the debris from the first attempts to punch through the Oort Cloud at, and even 200 years later there's much work to be done.

As there has been some talk about hydroponics in space, I'll post this.

http://www.mnn.com/health/healthy-spaces/stories/best-air-filtering-houseplants-according-to-nasa

I've also been doing some research to see if there would be any benefit to producing filtered light for the plants, as photosynthesis works better in certain colours of light.

I'm writing a sci-fi adventure based on the Alpha Centauri game's prequel story

>>33314235
I actually like this a lot

It is considered good luck too keep a photo of the soyuz 11 crew in the airlock of a ship. Crews beleiceing the spirits of the first men to die I space watch over the crews to guard against anyone else dieing the way they did.
On EVAs expected to be especially risky it is common too invoke their names as a prayer of protection.

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>>33316493

Well, if you've got momentumless FTL drives, Pluto and the outer objects are great places to pick up water and convert it into fuel/oxidizer for your velocity change when you reach your destination. It might be easier to haul empty tanks to some random iceball in the outer system if you're heading that way to begin with.

Or, you might need to get well into the Kuiper belt to achieve truly useful extrasolar transit speeds without running into the gravity wake of something big and nasty.

Or fuck it, we have FTL tech, and Pluto has the last decent bar in the solar system.

In a tradition going back to the Age of Sail, it is customary for ships passing near to each other while far from port to let off some manner of salute. Typically the smaller ship performs the salute first, after which the larger will return it. The only consistent exception is in the case of a military vessel meeting a civilian one; here it is almost always the case that the civilian salutes first, even if it's only a ten-man patrol cutter passing a grand barque freighter.

Of course, given the speeds and distances at which ships pass each other, it can be difficult to pull off a proper salute, and anything visual about the act is never likely to be seen. As a consequence, having the ship AIs swap data has become the norm, as they can perform the action even at enormous speeds while still maintaining the forms of the ritual. Usually the data exchanged will be a video file of some feature of the transmitting ship's home planet or colony (wind in the trees for Earth, dust storms for Mars, etc.), though plain sound or images are also common. Each ship will have its own such salute file in high-priority memory, with some captains going so far as to have their salute file hard-coded into the variety of tamper-resistant recording chips used in emergency flight recorders (an expensive luxury). Similarly, each ship will keep a record of every salute file they have ever received. If they encounter the same one twice, they will generally transmit a simple ping which is understood to mean, "Good to see you again."

The general exception to this ritual is when one military vessel meets another. Whatever power they serve, as long as they are not actively at war, it is considered good manners for each ship to give a gunnery salute with one of their smaller weapons (usually this simply means warming up the coils on a mass driver; safe, but visible on sensors). Armed civilian vessels never perform gun salutes; doing so is akin to declaring that you've turned pirate.

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When performing a gravity assist, it's generally regarded as a good omen to spot your ship's shadow on the surface of whatever airless moon or rock you're flying past. The closer you are, the more effective the energy gain on the burn, but too close and you'll hit a mountain, a gas jet, or an angry local and his mining rig. Under 1000m is considered suicidally close, but also quite fun, and many captains drop even lower when passing over lunar mountains or Mimas's crater. Shining high-power torches onto the surface, throwing a wrench out the airlock on a suborbital trajectory, or otherwise mucking about when flying dangerously close to a planet are all excellent established pastimes, each with their own superstitions and rituals.

>>33321638
Similarly, when a new ship design is first tested, crews are known to invoke the names of the Apollo 1 crew as a prayer of protection from mishaps with the ships systems.

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Fellow cosmonau/tg/enerals, I have a song appropriate for this thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WLE6FpAcVs

>>33311910
I haven't been able to stop listening to this album since last night!

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>>33324699
>Throwing a perfectly good wrench away.

>>33325532
>not using raw materials and an ion synthesizer to phase together a replacement wrench out of raw materials found on said planet.

sit down son

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>>33325532

You nick it from the next ship over when you're in dock, you numpty. Seems like a good way to show those other bumblers that their security's none too tight. Pisses off the head engineer, especially when he has to use a socket or an adjustable.

>>33326283
Now that'd be a fun tradition. Never leave port unless one of your crewies has stolen some inconsequential item from another ship. But don't let any fucker take anything from yours.

What about something like... I don't know, The Elders, or something.

The idea being that in a setting that uses something like the Alcubierre drive, where there ship itself isn't moving fast and as such isn't experiencing relativistic time dialation these spacers are from an age before true FTL.

They flew the old relativistic near-light ships and as such some of them can be far older than their appearance would suggest, having plied trips all across space for what the rest of the galaxy saw as decades or even centuries.

>>33323179
This is my favorite so far.

>>33326793
I've always liked the idea of a massive fleet that's accelerated itself up to .5c, blazing across the galaxy. They have FTL and regularly drop off ships to trade, off-load passengers and pick up new pilgrims, but the main ships and all their support facilities are high-speed. It takes two months for one of their FTL ships to decelerate enough to safely jump to a nearby destination, and once they're done they jump ahead of the fleet and spend another two months matching velocity. Of course, some people never go FTL at all, even if they leave the fleet, but they can't get back in unless they're willing.

It's a religious thing for some people, tradition for others. When they reach the far end of settled space no-one's quite sure if they're going to slow down, throw one hell of a party and turn around, or just keep on going.

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Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space...

What's a chemist?

Shut up. Anyway, space is so damn big people occasionally fall over and die from trying to imagine how big it is. Point being, do your job, shut up, and we'll get there when we damn well get there. Fragging greensleeves.

>>33326283
>>33326393
>This is now part of my setting
Space tomfoolery is best tomfoolery.


>Many spacers keep sealed jars full of soil from the various worlds they visit. Opening them is considered to be incredibly unlucky. This belief comes from the days before artificial spin gravity, where a jar of dirt would spell disaster were it to float into the ventilation.

>Earthborn crew members occasionally play pranks on their spacer shipmates. During shore leave, it is customary to spend at least one full day outside, often at a beach.
>Spacers don't have sun exposure and are thus pale
>The Spacers, having never experienced direct sunlight before, have the times of their lives (assuming they don't drown)
>What the Earthborn don't tell them about is sunblock
>The Spacers come back looking like the surface of Mars, cursing their friends and lack of pigment.
>It is considered particularly cruel for a captain to force a spacer into a spacesuit after Beach Day.

>>33320799
Objects in the Oort Cloud are as far apart from each other as Earth is from Saturn. It's a "cloud" in the interstellar sense. But you can punch through it and not see a mote of dust.

>>33329193
Oh, I had heard that objects in the Oort Cloud are closer than they appear.

>>33329193
>>33329484
In all honesty, we have no clue. Objects of the size of micrometeorites could be plentiful, but we lack actual observations. Granted, this statement applies to basically everything in astrophysics, but eh.

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>>33329092
Need a new crew member?

Thread is dying.

Sadness is had.

New thread maybe.

>>33330332

Are there any legends of the New World Colonies?

During the first Alcubierre/Warp drive tests the ship disappeared, sometimes they appear in the solar system, displaced by time and space, not quite here, not quite there.

>>33325000
>Symphony of Science
My fellow basketball player!

Here, have one of my favorites. Very related as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akek6cFRZfY

>>33297073
One of the most common bits of jewellery seen worn by spacers is a bit of stone from their home town polished and hung as a necklace. a good luck talisman and a link home for the cold long nights in the void