"The Astronomischen Rechen-Institut", © 1987, 1998-2005 by
Timothy B. Brown, originally
appeared in _Challenge_ #28 (pages 41-44), and is posted here
by permission.
Text-entry by: Chris
Snively.
HTML by: Steve C.
During the polititcal upheavals which followed the discovery of stuterwarp travel and the need for tantalum to achieve such travel, government began to see themselves as owning a chunk of the heavens - staking out a few planets for themselves, expanding their boundaries in spite of their Earth-bound geographic limitations. The world had already been through several oil shortages and had seen its metal reserves begin to disappear. The stars held the solution to the problem of depleted resources and space for a growing world population as well.
At the time, these conclusions were more or less valid. Little did anyone know that most of the nearby worlds were certainly not garden spots. Nor could they be expected to know that the local neighborhood harbored other intelligent and sometimes, as the current situation on the French Arm indicates, hostile races.
No, the stars were not the answer to man's biggest problems. Those answers can only be found within himself. However, the race for the stars was on and no man was allowed to stand in its way.
In Germany, at the University of Heidelburg, hundreds of professors and students, the greatest minds in the entire nation, were already assembled. Their minds were cultivated and allowed to grow by an unusually foresighted regime interested in expanding theoretical and hard knowledge, especiality in the sciences. Before the spread to the stars, these intellectuals had brought home to Germany the reputation for brilliance and ingenuity it had lost centuries before. Great minds, from around the world travelled to Heidelburg to study at what had become the largest, best equipped university/laboratory complex on the planet.
Naturally, as mankind moved to the stars, the Univesity and its scientists soon followed. In a joint venture with the Azanian government, endowed with a generous surplus of tantalum, the University of Heidelburg opened a specific department to deal with firsthand observations of stellar and planetary events - the Astronomischen Rechen-lnstitut. In actuality, the Rechen-lnstitut had been a mathematical and astronomical organization in existence for more than a hundred years, centered in Heidelburg and closely tied to the University. With German industrial money and Azanian tantalum, the Institut built a fleet of several scientific starships, each equipped to travel to and take measurement of astronomicai phenomenon. While France led the world to expioit the stars, Germany led the world to study and understand them.
The Institut's Early Years: The actual charter for the lnstitut was signed by the President or the University of Heidelburg and the German Prime Minister in 2144. The Azanians refrained from signing the charter, preferring to keep their involvement under-publicized. The first scientific craft for the Institut were at that time already under construction, contracts having been awarded to mostly German firms. However, at the time, though the technology for building a working stutterwarp drive was avaiiabie to everyone, only certain French industries were actually tooled to manufacture them. It was with as little fanfare as possible that the Germans sent across the border for engines for their new ships.
From its conception, Institut efforts have been split into two broad categories. One portion of the Institut would expand the knowledge of spacecraft and spaceflight, this partialiy at the request of a German government anxious to begin cashing in on the budding starship industry. The other portion wouid use that technology to obtain firsthand observational data - pure research of the stars and planets and all manner oi astronomical phenomenon.
Expanding the Technological Envelope: Early stutterwarp drives had enormous disadvantages, including extremely limited range and very complex computer navigation systems. The first French-built craft sent by ESA to Alpha Centauri had to carry three stutterwarp drives with it - each one had only range enough to get the ship halfway there. A drive unit reaching its range limit in deep space was ejected from the vessel in favor of a new drive. Two of these three drives have been preserved and are on display in the Musee Imperial Aerospatiale in Paris. The third drive was never recovered and is still somewhere in deep space between Alpha Centauri and Sol.
Institut engineers addressed themselves to these limitations quickly and efficiently. Their research yielded substantial results in a very short time. They devised methods of extending the range of the stutter drive to nearly double in their first three years of investigation, which brought use of faster-than-light travel into the realm of possibilities for commercial use. Institut engineers pioneered the construction of the tirst Hauptmann-Mbasso stutter unit, named for its co-discoverer/designers, which vented the gravimetric charge picked up during operations through a tantalum-ceramic coil, minimizing its effects enormously. The principles of the Hauptmann-Mbasso enhancement are still in use in ships today.
ESA soon took great advantage of advances made by the Institut. Of course, the member nations readily exchanged ideas and information, but the fact that France was the absolute leader in the organization had a tendency to create more than a little rivalry between itself and the other nations, especially Germany. When French industrialists made an attempt to buy into the Institut, German industrialists took specific actions to avoid this. More than any other, this single event led to the transformation of the Institut from a large university department to a selt-sufficient corporation, the first step on its road to becoming a foundation (see Transformation into a Foundation, below). In the century and a half since the conception of the Institut, relations have fallen off drastically between the two nations of France and Germany - present day exchanges of technical information are rare.
Exploration and Ohservation: Using the technical knowhow being generated by their Earth-bound counterparts, Institut ships and crews set out from Earth by the hundreds in the latter half of the 22nd century. Some of the greatest missions oi discovery in that era were made by Institut personnel, including the initiai mapping of Beta Canum Venaticorum and Vogelheim and participation in the historic deep penetration races held by the member nations of ESA in 2188, 2198, and 2205.
Since that time, Institut ships and crews have visited hundreds of star systems, most of which are within thirty-five light years of Earth. However, deeper penetrations into the unknown have been undertaken by the Institut. Several expeditions are currently engaged in long-range exploratory missions.
The Encyclopedia: Das Nachschlagewerk der Sternen is the Institut's ongoing contribution to the knowledge of mankind. The Stellar Encyclopedia was originally published in 2189 and has been continuously updated since that time. As new information is gathered and returned to Earth, the institut's publishlng staff starts to work, cataloging the information and publishing it in its own magazine and in other sources. When sufficent material has been accumulated, the Institut republishes the encyclopedia in a new edition. New editions are published every five to ten years in paper, computer chip, and hologram chip form.
Information contained in das Nachschlagewerk der Sternen originally pertained only to scientific data on stars, their planets, and other stellar occurrences. However, now that man lives among the stars, there are volumes of social information included as well, including nationalities, patterns of colonization and development, histories of systems and their populations, and all matters of political and physical geographic information.
Institut expeditions have been to hundreds of systems, and mapped thousands of planets (from orbit at the very least). However, das Nachschlagewerk der Sternen benefits also from other sources including all ESA documentation, the archives of the Royal Society (more specifically the Foundation for Practical Knowledge), and an information exchange arranged with the various American and Australian star services.
The Pleiades: A manned mission to the Pleiades was planned for the year 2297 on the Bayern, a ship specially designed for the project. The expedition was forced to return prematurely because of technical difficulties, but plans to relaunch are in the works even now. The Pleiades cluster promises to reveal great amounts of information concerning the origins of stars and their creation. The cluster is approximateiy 350 light years distant. (The approximate coordinates of the center of the cluster are x = 200, y = 300, z = 150.)
The Core: In the 2250s, the head the Institut designed a plan for a robot mission to the galactic core using existing technology. The mission gained funding more from the Administrator's high prestige than from genuine interest by the board of directors, but was under way nonetheless. The mission, dubbed Entferntest (Ultimate); involved the construction of an expensive, completely automated ship with multiple backup and self repair systems built in. The plan for the mission was to visit the core and return with the information.
The core itself lies approximately 9000 parsecs distant, generally in the direction of the Z axis (its coordinates are very roughly x = -2000, y = -1000, z = -30,000). However, since stutter drives need to discharge in a gravity well every few light years, the ship must confine its travel to the arms, never to venture outside of them. This meant that a straight line journey to the core and back was out - the distance to travel along our arm of the galaxy is about triple the straight line distance.
The ship was completed after a decade of work and launched in the year 2261. If all goes well, the ship will reach the core in approximately 500 years. The return trip will take at least as long. Opponents of the Entferntest project point out that the ship will probably never reach its destination due to the propensity for life forms in the galaxy. However, the Institut holds that a mission to the core will yield great information for mankind and the expense and time factors should not enter into the picture.
Transformation into a Foundation: When French industrial interests made an attempt to economically take over the Institut just over a century ago, German backers did everything they could to avoid it. Since the Institut was billed as an organization open to all people interested in knowledge, the Germans had no legal right to keep the French from funding projects. They found their only means of keeping out French money was to endow the Institut itself with sufficent funds that it could direct its own operations without the guiding hand of industrial interest. This would in turn keep German interests at bay, but was at the time considered preferable to allowing French money to overwhelm the Institut and its principles.
The original endowments included large areas of land on Tirane and some on Earth, plus outright gifts of some industrial facilities, mostly of a technical nature. At the time, the Institut was short of administrators who could manage such facilites, but cooperation from other University departments soon solved that problem. Soon the endowments were making sufficent profits that the Institut could begin taking its own direction toward research. To this day, the Institut is landlord to many thousands of people on dozens of worlds.
However, this source of income has dwindled by comparison to the patents awarded to the Institut and its scientists. Scarcely a ship is built in the modern era which does not owe some royalty to the Institut for design features which improve its performance.All Institut activities are originated and closely monitored by its headquarters on Earth. The very top echelon of the organization is the Economic Administrator. He, in association with a board of directors and the heads of the major departments (industries, endowments management, space services, and each branch of research), makes policy decisions on large research projects and the allocation of all resources. Sometimes these decisions can concern a single project or the overall direction of an entire arm of research which will affect policy and progress for decades to come.
The current Administrator and board of directors are hardliners - their unwavering dedication to pure research regardless of outside input is renowned throughout human space. The Institut traditionally remains neutral in times of war, and has even become impartial with respect to nationality in times of peace. The original bias toward German points of view has virtually disappeared.
Cooperation with Nations: Nations wishing to join with the Institut in certain projects may do so by petitioning the Administrator for cooperation. There are three rules applied by the upper echelon of the Institut to all such cooperative ventures. First, the Institut will conduct no research that it feels will be valuable in a military situation. Second, the Institut retains partial rights to all information and methods discovered as a result of the research in question. Finally, the Institut has the right to take over the research at any time by paying back the original investment to the nation in question.
This final condition has kept many potential cooperative nations away from the Institut. The Institut promises only to enforce this condition if research yields knowledge which could be of danger to mankind for whatever reason. To this date, no such cooperative effort has called for implementation of the final condition.
Lower Level Organization: The Institut retains many of its university department roots, especially in its organization of individual research projects. A reputable doctor in a given area who is successfull in getting funding for a project will assemble around himself a core of assistants from his particular department (biology, physics, etc.) Newcomers to the organization must serve time with small projects, performing the menial tasks such as digging, rote research, and the like.
Also, like a university, continuous effort is appreciated, but continuous results are not strictly necessary. Provided all information is published regularly for inclusion in das Nachschlagewerk der Sternen, the Institut is content to keep projects running.
The Institut is mainly confined to work within the French and American Arms of human space. Overall they employ over 500,000 people, over half of whom are dedicated scientists who operate at the headquarters of the foundation on Earth.
Ships: Nearly all Institut ships are specially designed and built by their own facilities. Exceptions are restricted to courier and cargo ships. These are necessary to foundation operations, but virtually any ship will perform these tasks equally well from the point of view of the upper echelons.
Specific installations are also built to order. For example, the Institut maintains and operates a stellar observation station in orbit around Vega. The strange flare activity of Vega is providing volumes of research data, all gathered by an energy-sufficient station tailored to the energy output of the star.
Overall, the Institut owns approximately two hundred vessels and operates over twenty research outposts. In cooperation with a sovereign nation, however, the Institut can call upon considerably greater resources for some of its projects.
The Institut is often in search of persons with space service skills and/or academicians. Recruiting teams are active in all nations of Earth and most human inhabited worlds, attempting to draw the cream of humanity into their fold. Admission into the ranks of the Institut is an impressive achievement for a person's life - they can afford to be very particular since they have all of humanity to choose from.
In fact, there is a small contingent of aliens within the ranks of the Institut. As one of its few contacts with the Chinese Arm, the Institut maintains an outpost on Beta Hydri which is studying the Ebers there. The outpost virtually employs several dozen Ebers in its operation as full-time objects of study and as workers and guides. Several Ebers have been sent back to Earth from there and now reside as extraterrestrial citizens of the foundation in Heidelburg.
Being Admitted to the Institut: Should the players be interested in joining the Institut, it should be made clear to them that they will need to be the best at what they do. Finding a recruiting team to which they can apply will be easy - being qualified in their eyes will be difficult.
In short, any character with a space crew skill or academic skill of 5 or better will be admitted. Any other skills are less in demand by the foundation, but a character with some other skills of level 6 or better might be admitted.
The Klaxun: Following the events in Energy Curve, the Institut may be introduced to an entirely new alien race - the Klaxun. If this is the case, the players may become part of an Institut research team sent to DM+17 2611 II. They will be charged with continuing contact with the aliens, learning about their habits and culture from the comfort of an orbiting ship.
The Kafers: To date there have been no Kafers taken alive for study. The Institut would be very interested in obtaining live specimens for in-depth research. The player characters need not be accepted into the foundation for this mission. They need only offer their services to hunt down and capture some Kafers and return them to Earth. For details on the Kafers, consult the adventure module Kafer Dawn.
Research: While the chief aim of the Institut is to conduct pure research, pure research is not a very interesting game topic. The referee is encouraged to use this research to introduce the players to a more adventurous situation. After all, research can take the players to many exotic environments and to meet many interesting people throughout human space.
-Timothy B. Brown