Rayfe:
Some of these I can answer right now via metagame, some will need to come out in story. This is a result of all of us making this up a we go along.
Sensor date from during the glitch. What the hell happened? Why did we lose power? Any information about the hallucinations and the ship's records for that time frame?
I'm retconning this to say that time-passed has been about three to five cycles for most of you... Time enough for local situations to have changed but not enormously...
Ptolomen station was a stopping point. Once sufficient number of cold-sleep prisoners had accumulated, they'd batch them off to Viziers Penal Colony. Until then, it just wasn't profitable to ship prisoners out one at a time. Meta-game wise, it allows things to have changed and people to react to your reappearance.
The power-out... I'm figuring that the fusing of Helium-3 and Deuterium in a conventional jump-engine takes an enormous amount of energy being funneled into a series of capacitors... While it's not known or proven in our specific case, it
would make logical sense that the power-out was a Pre-cursor to the jump itself.
Also, are we close enough now to get a proper link to the galactic net? Or am I still limited to local access, with the prison database and the ship's local database as only info sources?
I've been giving a fair bit of thought to ideas of the galactic network. Most intriguing to me is that dissemination of information isn't synchronous or uniform. Basically, it would be connections of system-wide networks connected to other system-wide or even just global-networks. There isn't a uniformity to it, though were certain mega-corporations go, their information networks would be uniform...
Direct results of that are that if a new system is discovered their network might be utterly incompatible with the existing infrastructure and communication there won't happen consistently until protocols are established to translate or a branch of an existing network is introduced. For Rayfe, this means that the systems skill becomes a huge key to being able to interface with alien systems, too...
There's a settlement in this system, so do they have access? If so, can I piggy back off that?
Deux does, indeed, have links to extra-solar systems.
Does figuring out how to get access interest you as a activity for your character?
If not, then we'll hand-wave a certain amount of it. A couple of rolls... If it does interest you, then we'll work some more hoops to jump through.
But ultimately, it's going to require discovering how to access a node, then handshaking with the appropriate node. I have very little interest in actually playing out a net-run (disliked it in Cyberpunjk 2020 and Shadowrun, too), so will abstract much of it to keep the story going...
Time will be a huge factor, as you'd be accessing local systems. There will be enormous amounts of data, of course. But finding out what's happening in
other systems will get increasingly harder as the information becomes more and more rare and thus more and more out-of-date. That seems to be a logical set-up, to my mind.
The other questions... those should come out in-story. But remind me. If you want to update your character entry in
Your Character's Back-Stories to reflect ongoing goals and objective & questions, that would help keep me from forgetting, too...