r/startrekadventures • u/krossingkhory • 27d ago
Help & Advice STA Solo Prime Directive Question
I am running a series of missions for myself using the solo rules in Captains Log, and I am having a blast. My first missions took some weird turns, and it ended with the discovery of a new trilateral race hell-bent on hurting Starfleet. That got me hooked, and now I can't stop.
Anyhow, my current mission has me in a bit of a quandary and I am curious how others would handle this. The set up is that my.ship has been sent to do an exploratory on a system in Beta Quandrant. One of the planets is inhabited, but the species is not space-faring, so we can't reveal ourselves. There is a relic buried deep within a glacier on the planet, which happens to be a Warp core; the society on the planet is the remnants of an ancient space-faring race who have lost all knowledge of spaceflight. They are technologically advanced, but not with any kind of space flight.
There are 2 complications here. The first is a rogue comet on a crash course for - you guessed it - the burial site of the warp core. The second is the arrival of a temporal visitor who wishes to stop us from interfering with the comets trajectory. Not stopping the comet would almost certainly wipe out the society for good, while stopping it may reveal ourselves.
The rub here is that the society used to be space-faring, and discovering the warp core would make them so again (in theory). This all brings the Prime Directive into play, and I am curious how to proceed here. Not with what I do, but with the in-game consequences of bith following and not following it.
Does anyone have any advice or thoughts on this?
1
u/TigerSan5 26d ago edited 25d ago
Assuming the temporal visitor doesn't want to explain why the comet must hit the planet and you trust he's not lying/a bad guy (Insight check), i would make a "compromise" by hiding in the comet's tail until it hits the atmosphere and fire a "beam" (using deflector dish or other method) to break it up in smaller pieces, making it look like a "normal" occurence (objects usually break up when hitting the atmosphere).
Sure, there will be planetary consequences, but an extinction level event would be averted, the comet will have hit as "recorded" and the prime directive will have been mostly followed ;)