The down-grade does not have to be a vampire-virus caused effect if the facility were abandoned because of an earlier on-going war it would be very likely that anything of value that could be packed up would have been and only remnants left behind ... the latter could range from the fittings and empty buildings (ex: the factories that Russia looted from Berlin at the end of WWII - nothing but the shell of the building left) to moth-balled systems and possibly even some ships to various facilities and ships that were simply left behind, being considered unusable, or unworthy of much effort to pack out or preserve due to time constrants and a possible urgent need to leave.
The reason for the departure could have been virus brought in by a ship or a full up vampire fleet - or perhaps the war you suggested or perhaps some combination... without active human intervention the things we build have a tendency to fall apart. A few power surges or brownouts can do significant damage to data networks, and from those the things that they're supposed to control. Automated systems are not normally designed to completely replace the human factor in the loop of things, but to supplement them.
Your idea of the genengineered race getting uplifted and returning to the wild has merit, for just because you give someone/something intelligence does not mean that they would want to live as we do, or that they would like us all that much. Looks interesting - have fun
T
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From: Carp
Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 4:20 PM
Subject: [Traveller_TNE] help with a dilemma please.
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>I am creating background material for a planned TNE campaign to Rimward of the Solomani sphere in the Hadji sector.
>an interesting place because there is very little canon material i can find on it, and i had some ideas i wanted to test out including an almost untouched pocket empire and some genassist lost colonies outside of the pocket empire. Also interesting because canon says most vampire fleets headed coreward in the long run. so I have ample excuse to have the two pocket empires within a sector of each other. (continuing a centuries long conflict of course!)
>Basically, i created a planetary UPP of A-775000-0 as a precollapse planet outside of the empires borders.
>How in Hades should I apply the collapse effects table to this when it requires a population to affect in the first place?
>The first thing that crossed my mind is that it was an abandoned Solomani outpost planet that was evacuated during the rebellion era. which in my mind makes sense, any useable assets would certainly have been pulled towards the front lines in order to support the war effort.
>Which means the base would have been put on lockdown. total radio silence except perhaps for a beacon at the most.
>HOW would virus be able to locate and destroy an unused, non broadcasting starport facility that had been by extrapolation, abandoned for perhaps more than a decade by the time the vampire fleets were roaming?
>Subsector L of the hadji sector puts it far out of the Solomani Spheres borders so I gotta ask the logical questions, would the solomani have put such a beatiful target out of there own control area?
>Could the population have been wiped out by natural sources like Plague?
>Or even MORE interesting, was it a genassist project gone horribly wrong? did the species to be elevated to full sentience succeed, only then to turn on the makers and slaughter them to a person and then "go native", abandoning the labs and bases for a more natural environment?
>I already have the Simians world fleshed out, so would genassist have had another project world running, Or was that a base world of central command in the area for genassist. Were pulled forward with their R&D products to the front lines?
>This UPP is almost an adventure in itself 8-)
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