Archived GM Notes: This page is unsealed GM-notes pertaining to BTW. It is not canonical to BTW. It main contain contradictions (even with itself), and preliminary ideas that were merely written down as I thought of them, for later consideration. The absence of something mentioned here from the canon does not necessarily mean that the party "missed" it, it could have been mooted for other reasons or simply discarded by me.

Simon Ione was blackmailed into funding the bribe (40 RBU, 'arbs') to Teflonia Waldo to let the rival pirate Whiskers Bok (a cat-eared woman) steal the missile parts from RFY. Ione and Whiskers have a history. In 2499, Ione paid Whiskers to sabotage RFY, putting a chunk of debris into a fusion drive of an AWSF ship docked at RFY's orbital facility. Ione's plan was to bolster the business of his consulting interest, Ione Nucleonic Safety Consultants, which RFY had just terminated the year before. (Ione will deny any knowledge of the specifics of what Whiskers was hired to do.) Unfortunately the plan rather badly backfired for him. Whiskers got paid, though, so she was happy, and Ione had diversified his holdings. Whiskers was recently hired by Dirac Empire anti-alliance terrorists to do this job, and thought to save some money by blackmailing Ione for the bribe money instead of spending some of her advance. Ione, greedy bastard that he is, thought to make some money on it by doing a spot of insider trading.

The terrorists, "Haukten Clade," are trying to destroy the Alliance's Helium-3 Production and reserves to cripple their warfighting ability.

Teflonia is making preparations to leave. Teflonia plans to move to Helica by way of Heidelberg Prime Station.

Whiskers and a paid stooge/petty criminal Cogan Megabar set up the missile in the tidal flats. (Cogan has already taken his money and left for Damara after he realized what he was mixed up in.) Whiskers launched the missile from Wanabe's Pleasure Dome, and paid off the attendant (Greattoe Watanabe, no relation to Feelgood Wanabe) to say he saw nothing.

Whiskers is hiding out in Ione's subbasement / mechanical level. There's another cargo of separator membranes going up, and the terrorists have offered her double the pay of the first job to blow that ship up too. She stole two missile cores; the other one is stashed in a warehouse. Asking around about the cat-eared woman in the right places will find the warehouse. (the missiles were assembled there. The warehouse is owned by Ione so leads back to him. "Ione Industrial Gases."

A loaded drone freighter in Rosmertine orbit, having undocked from Stallone Orbital Complex

CANT HAVE SPACE ELEVATOR TO SYNCHRONOUS ORBIT ON TIDALLY LOCKED BODY. LAGRANGE POINTS OR SPACE FOUNTAIN>

Somebody blew up a couple of drone chemical freighters leaving Rosmerta with loads of helium separator resins (check) for the AWSF. Pirates had made a threat but had been paid off by the shipping company and now deny responsibility. Figure out what happened. Also, the attacker had military-grade chemical engines made by the now-defunct rosmertine fleet yards.

People on Rosmerta are bitter about that, still.

Environmental equipment for outdoor work is widely used, consisting of airtight insulating suits with layers impermeable to organic chemicals. The suits can be quite lightweight because they are not pressure suits. Habitats on Rosmerta are kept at slightly above atmospheric pressure (1.7 bar) to exclude the poisonous atmosphere in case of leaks; visiting standard-pressure human spacecraft must be either able to withstand +1.7 bar and pressurize before landing, or be able to withstand -0.62 bar and pressurize occupants using a spaceport airlock. The former is more common; most landing craft are somewhat overbuilt anyhow, but it is something for which they must be certified and which must be logged for pressure hull fatigue life reasons.

The sky is a hazy brown, with clouds of butane and other organics. New Europa is visible as a bright spot in the haze. The extensively-ringed gas planet Carlisle is visible from the surface only under certain lighting conditions, under which it appears as a diffuse bright region in the sky. (i.e. New Europa is shining on Carlisle and it is star-night at the observer's location on Rosmerta, in which case the reflected light from Carlisle is the primary light source.) The other major moons of New Europa VII may be similarly faintly visible to careful observers, but never as a sharp image, just as brighter areas of the always-'overcast' night sky. Light pollution prevents anything but New Europa and Carlisle from being seen with the naked eye near urban centers.

Rosmertine Fleet Yards is a complex of structures in orbit. Large ship structures were often built on the surface from graphite-reenforced composites and lofted with big thermal fusion space planes (due to the thick atmosphere and low gravity, they are a huge win, esp since space elevators were unavailable due to tidal locking); polymers being produced by the huge indigenous chemical industry. (They were of course built up thrustwise, between that, the lower gravity, and the fact that they were not supporting heavy equipment just their own weight, it was not a problem.)

The space planes would take off from the tidal flats when the tide was out. The huge space planes remain, sitting idle, some touched by the occasional high tide. Unrusting, of course, bathed in oils, and being mostly made of polymer matrix composites anyway.

There are big 3D printers here, basically, though they are 5-axis to lay re-enforced filament in a variety of directions. Their printing area is about 20m x 10m x 100m tall, and there are several. There are some tanks and pump houses nearby that supply them with the matrix materials, and some spools of unused graphitic fiber. Skeletal towers rise a hundred meters into the air. There's one of the print heads nearby, about a cubic meter in size, derelict. (It contains the rotational axes.)

There are lots of warehouses, mainly light cylindrical composite structures. They're pretty huge, and built of large sections that would be crushed easily under their own weight on a planet. Most people still live in the imperial-era worldhouse, which extends nearly to the shores of Hesselland not far from RFY's ground complex. The worldhouse is a lightly pressurized tensile structure with transparent ceiling domes and is an earth-sheltered construction. Radiation levels on Rosmerta are modest given its atmosphere and magnetic field, but sleeping areas are always customarily low in the structure.

The ceilings are two-layered, for insulation purposes. Power is mostly by fusion reactors, as elsewhere.

Ramses Stallone, "BUT WE CAN MOVE DIRT, CAN'T WE?"

Cargo Manifest: