Finn
MacCool, or Fionn mac Cumhail, was a really big, really tough Irish
hero who did too many marvellous things to recount here, in Known
Space he is a bloody great Irish robot and he lives on the planet Nua
Domhan.
Nua Domhan
286 Aquila X 8B1 110 3
Ireland in
2313 is still part of the European Union, and Irish settlers can be
found all over Known Space wherever the EU has stuck its starry
circle flag. But for one Irish patriot and freelance star-scout, David Delaney, that wasn't
good enough, he wanted a bit of outer space that was forever Ireland,
and so the unclaimed world of Nua Domhan was officially colonised in
2278. This was rather against the Irish government's wishes. Nua
Domhan had gone a begging since it was one of the most useless hunks
of junk in Known Space, a large Venusian type world with boiling
temperatures, sulphuric atmosphere and more volcanoes than you could
shake a stick at. What attracted Delaney was its rather pretty
version of the Giant’s Causeway, a plain of hexagonal basalt
columns larger in land area than Ireland itself, lapped by an emerald
green sea of sulphuric acid and dissolved copper sulphate.
When the
Irish Navy took absolutely no interest in guarding the place, a popular
charity appeal raised enough money to by a second hand picket vessel
to be despatched to guard Ireland's new interstellar empire.
Colonisation
was a dead letter. Delaney's Irish Imperial Exploits company went
broke, but not before purchasing, at a knock down price, Fionn
MacCumhail, a giant construction robot. This was a failed project of
Nakamura Industries to create a passenger carrying walker that could
take tourists across the Pacific sea floor. Now it would stride across
Nua Domhan planting atmosphere reduction machines that in a mere
30,000 years (at the current work rate) would make the planet a
sizzlingly hot but just about inhabitable paradise!
This
quixotic project is currently funded by the son of a former Saudi
Prince who retired to his horse stud in Waterford county after the Arabian
revolution, an Irish-American software baron, a national lottery and the occasional grant from the ever complaining Irish Dail.
There are four personnel on the planet itself, living in extremely
cramped quarters in Fionn's torso and going quietly mad from cabin
fever and the stress caused by Fionn's frequent break downs and many
niggling malfunctions. Another two guys mind the orbital picket ship
and storage facility. They spend up to a year on duty at a time, with
next to no visitors. The current owners keep making vague promises
about buying another robot, or making a proper orbital station with
enough room to swing a cat, or finding a way round the communications
problems that mean Fionn can't be controlled from orbit, but nothing
ever seems to get done. The low TL does not reflect the technology of
Fionn (actually about TL10, TL11 for the self-repairing acid resistant smart material kilt), but the local capacity for manufacture,
ie pretty damn poor. They can bang out a few very crude machine parts
in the engineering section of the picket ship and that's it.
Adventure Hooks
- Fionn has had it. He fell into a crevasse and broke and the crew need rescuing.
- Nua Domhan has been invaded! Well, a gang of hard up belt miners took over the orbital station and stripped it for scrap metal. Quite how the Irish government will react no one knows, the speed of communication means they probably haven't even heard about it yet, but anyone in the area could defend Irish national honour and nab the varmints if they felt so inclined.
- The guys on the ground are going off the rails. They say there's a monster following them, but the whole system is only a billion years old, there's no way bacteria could have evolved on the planet, even if a living system could ever cope with the bitterly acidic atmosphere and boiling temperatures, which the planetologists doubt. Lay off the Jameson's guys.
- There's good money to earned on Nua Domhan for the right kind of people. The Fionn Mac Cumhail co want experienced spacers used to spending a long time in a cabin to run the robot. They go broke about a month into the PCs contract, and the picket ship is out of action.
- Fionn's got a new brain! PCs deliver and possibly install an up to date AI unit. Thing is the provenance is a bit dubious, it looks a bit second hand really, and you had to pick it up on Annabel's Grave…
- The new terraforming bot has arrived, CuCuhlainn, an updated version of Fionn. The old soldier has been stoically plodding the sulphurous wastes for years. He's an old bot with no true AI, but could he have actually got a bit territorial? Anyway he's not responding to commands and heading for the new bot in what might be interpreted as a menacing and deliberate air.
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