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Latest info regarding Tunguska


Basil

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Guest Major Tom

Re: Latest info regarding Tunguska

 

Marvel Comics had already used the Tunguska Event as a plot seed in one of

their comic lines around 25 years ago or more (an issue of Marvel Team-Up

featuring the Thing and Nighthawk), so the comics plot line angle is already

covered.

 

 

Major Tom :cool:

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Re: Latest info regarding Tunguska

 

Marvel Comics had already used the Tunguska Event as a plot seed in one of

their comic lines around 25 years ago or more (an issue of Marvel Team-Up

featuring the Thing and Nighthawk), so the comics plot line angle is already

covered.

 

 

Major Tom :cool:

They also used it as a plot in the Ultimate Line.

 

TB

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Re: Latest info regarding Tunguska

 

And two incarnations of the Champions Universe have incorporated it as well: as the crash-landing of the spacecraft containing Cancer of the Zodiac (Fourth Edition incarnation), and the impact of the Hellstone which killed Earth's last Archmage (Fifth Edition version). Very little in the way of comics concepts haven't been done before in one way or another, but that's no reason to avoid reinterpreting Tunguska to suit your own game world. Moreover, these latest discoveries add some evocative details to the mystery, which can enhance the verisimilitude of your own use of it.

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Re: Latest info regarding Tunguska

 

Someday I may use the idea that hit me (pun intended) last year - that the Tunguska was *not* something coming down from above, but from below! The molemen, refugees from Atlantis, I'm not sure what, but it could have been a weapon or a power-plant malfunction, or a teleport-to-surface experiment gone awry...

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Re: Latest info regarding Tunguska

 

Interesting news. The Tunguska Event does seem to have become less mysterious in recent times.

 

There is one aspect that still gives me cause to wonder. My understanding is that one of the Russian scientists who first examined the site also plotted the object's trajectory prior to the explosion, based on various eye-witness accounts.

 

SUPPOSEDLY, the object came in over Siberia on a course roughly due North. It appeared to suddenly switch course to approximately East-North-East for a couple of hundred miles, apparently towards Lake Baikal. It then switched course to approximately West-North-West for about the same distance before impacting / blowing up. This was one reason why the "nuclear-powered spaceship" hypothesis seemed to have some validity - it is mighty strange behaviour for a meteor, if correct.

 

If correct. It could be that some eyewitness accounts were mistaken, inaccurste, garbled or falsified. Maybe.

 

*****

 

Then again, there is the other suggestion that Tunguska was the result of Nicola Tesla testing his brand-new broadcast power station at Wardenclyffe (I think), and inadvertently creating a superweapon scary enough to make him quit that project and totally abandon his research.

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Re: Latest info regarding Tunguska

 

Of course, there's an alternate time-line where the Tunguska bolide enters Earth's atmosphere a couple of hours later, and instead of a 10-20 megaton blast over empty Siberia, there was a 10-20 megaton blast over ... St Petersburg.

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Re: Latest info regarding Tunguska

 

Interesting news. The Tunguska Event does seem to have become less mysterious in recent times.

 

There is one aspect that still gives me cause to wonder. My understanding is that one of the Russian scientists who first examined the site also plotted the object's trajectory prior to the explosion, based on various eye-witness accounts.

 

SUPPOSEDLY, the object came in over Siberia on a course roughly due North. It appeared to suddenly switch course to approximately East-North-East for a couple of hundred miles, apparently towards Lake Baikal. It then switched course to approximately West-North-West for about the same distance before impacting / blowing up. This was one reason why the "nuclear-powered spaceship" hypothesis seemed to have some validity - it is mighty strange behaviour for a meteor, if correct.

 

If correct. It could be that some eyewitness accounts were mistaken, inaccurste, garbled or falsified. Maybe.

 

*****

 

Then again, there is the other suggestion that Tunguska was the result of Nicola Tesla testing his brand-new broadcast power station at Wardenclyffe (I think), and inadvertently creating a superweapon scary enough to make him quit that project and totally abandon his research.

 

IIRC, possible alterations in vector are one of the supports to the "It was a comet theory" as large enough pockets of various frozen volatiles cooking off could create non-ballistic thrust during re-entry.

 

Or something like that, anyway....:nonp:

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Re: Latest info regarding Tunguska

 

There's an old Annual Review article titled Asteroid and Comet Bombardment of Earth ... it's from 1983 when we knew a lot less than we do now, but you can get to the paper. Figure 1 has a chart for cumulative probability of impact versus explosive yield of the impact blast. (The link is just for the abstract, but you can get te whole paper from there.) Tunguska was about a thousand-year event.

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Re: Latest info regarding Tunguska

 

Then again' date=' there is the other suggestion that Tunguska was the result of Nicola Tesla testing his brand-new broadcast power station at Wardenclyffe (I think), and inadvertently creating a superweapon scary enough to make him quit that project and totally abandon his research.[/quote']

 

Yeah, I've heard that one elsewhere. There was also the idea used in W.A. Harbinson's Projekt:Saucer series, in which the explosion was caused by an American-made flying ship when its atomic engine overloaded. Which caused the project to close down, so the creator looked all over the world for new backers, until he found Nazi Germany...

 

 

Of course' date=' there's an alternate time-line where the Tunguska bolide enters Earth's atmosphere a couple of hours later, and instead of a 10-20 megaton blast over empty Siberia, there was a 10-20 megaton blast over ... St Petersburg.[/quote']

 

Ken Hite wrote a whole article/campaign background using just that very idea in the first Suppressed Transmissions book, which is well worth hunting down.

 

Oh, yes: he also mentions that two other Tunguska-size objects hit the earth in the 1930's. Both came down in the Amazon, as I recall, and one may well have been bigger than the Tunguska object.

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Re: Latest info regarding Tunguska

 

A local City of Heroes player called her character "Tunguska Event."

 

I shudder to think of what the character could do if written up based just on the name.

 

Might as well rename that character Megascale.

 

We did have a character named Chicxulub in a game. :eek:

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Re: Latest info regarding Tunguska

 

IIRC, possible alterations in vector are one of the supports to the "It was a comet theory" as large enough pockets of various frozen volatiles cooking off could create non-ballistic thrust during re-entry.

 

Or something like that, anyway....:nonp:

 

Yair, I can buy those conditions causing a comet's trajectory to jog around significantly. But in this case, we are talking about what SEEMS like two very radical course changes in rapid succession - 70+ degrees the first time and then maybe 120+ degrees the second. Try as I might, this just seems more than can be reasonably explained by this hypothesis, expecially considering the speed and momentum the thing would have had in the first place.

 

Another possibility, I suppose, is that the object began breaking up at high altitude, and these differing observations about trajectory actually relate to various chunks flying off in different directions - just prior to impact and/or detonation of the largest portion.

 

Still like the nuclear-powered extraterrestrial space probe hypothesis best ;-)

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Re: Latest info regarding Tunguska

 

Someday I may use the idea that hit me (pun intended) last year - that the Tunguska was *not* something coming down from above' date=' but [i']from below![/i] The molemen, refugees from Atlantis, I'm not sure what, but it could have been a weapon or a power-plant malfunction, or a teleport-to-surface experiment gone awry...

 

See that's the way to run a pulp campaign! Give the players something they weren't thinking about. The way I would run it, you would go in having every reason to expect that it's some kind of spaceship crash, until you meet the locals. They're friendly and helpful (those that survived the explosion) but they have this disturbing habit of beginning and ending conversations with "That is not dead which can eternal lie." Then you find the tunnel.

 

Who wants to enter first?:eg:

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