Nope, you never actually tested it. You just charged it. With an impressive roll of 9 (2d10 high + d8 vs. a lowly 5 on a d12), Max would probably be embarrassed to tell you that basically you've just dialed your own phone number. The code you have must represent Whiirr, while Earth must have a (as-yet undiscovered) code.

At least errant codes don't use a charge, else you'd only be able to attempt a pattern once every 3 hours.

That makes a startling amount of sense.

Would Max be able to look at the writing on this gate and examine it for differences from the Earth gate?

Gatac

As Dr. Tupolev mentioned while he was poking about the crash site, the two gates are identical.

The good news: You have every combination tried in the last, oh, 10 years on your Toughbooks.

The bad news: Any one of those could have been Earth's code, and you wouldn't have known it because the Gateway wouldn't have appeared to work.

More good news: At least you have the full reports on them - which ones were full patterns at least, which ones resulted in the useless glowing, etc. It is possible that you could cryptography and number-crunch your way to the answer.

More bad news: That could take a while. Certainly not the years it took to get them in the first place, but "weeks" is a distinct possibility.

In game terms, this is a mammoth extended conflict. Decoding an alien gate as quickly as possible is a difficulty of d12. Max, and whoever wishes to help, must get a total of 10 points of advantage over the Gate - that's like a lead of 10 in Spycraft. Two rolls per day, morning and night. I'll allow a third roll for the time you should be sleeping if you want to Jack Bauer it, but if you don't beat it by the end of the second day you'll have a penalty until you skip a roll (or have someone else take over for one).

The fastest timeframe for this would be one day, OR it could drag on forever. If the Gateway gets 10 lead over you guys, you've exhausted all the possibilities in your records and will have to think of something else.

Alright, so we're basically running a dictionary attack.

We should settle in a bit more. Call in heavy camping gear when Earth has their next activation. Don't Jack Bauer it, slow & steady. We'll be here for some time, so we should get comfortable. Find a better source of water than the river. (Unless we want to get bigass containers carted in through the gate.)

Who'd be the right candidate to help Max? I assume it's Stanhill (Tech!) or Tupolev (Army Intelligence, eh?).

Gatac

They can both attempt to help. How helping works is, you pick a difficulty die. If you roll your trait and beat that difficulty, Max gets that die as a bonus. If you fail, the Gate gets that die as a bonus. Risk vs. reward. To be honest, you probably want to reduce the chances of flubbing rather than scoring high results, so a d6 or d8 difficulty should be fine.

Andy'll go for a d6, and beats it with his d8 in Think (8 vs. 3).

I know you're not too keen on help from E.T., but they obviously have some sort of records as well if they knew this gate was problematic or different somehow.

Hugh's right - you'll pretty much have carte blanche on luxury items and equipment. The only variable is how long it'll take to get it and get it to you.

Tangentially, it looks like the hard drive on wifey's PC got messed up. Luckily she has heeded my warnings well and has generally kept her personal documents and pictures and whatnot on a second hard drive that doesn't have Windows on it. I'll be formatting and reinstalling and crap today, plus getting fitted for a tux for my brother's wedding so updates will probably be slim to nil.