So the premise would be that the Foundation (or possible someone else, who is later discovered by the Foundation) detects that something is exerting gravity on the outer planets in the Solar System. From its effects they determine its mass and location, and the Foundation sends a probe to it. However, once the probe gets close enough to possibly view it, the object is gone, along with its influence on the other planets. A few months later, the Foundation discovers something with the exact same mass exerting gravity somewhere else in the solar system, they send a probe to look at it, the object once again disappears, only to reappear a few months later in another spot. Thoughts?
I don't really see how this could be interesting at present. Unless you are going to add something more to the concept, it doesn't seem enough to provoke any sort of intelligent speculation. It's basically a gravity well that doesn't want to be looked at, for reasons.
Sorry if this sounds harsh, I don't mean it to be. If you add something more to the concept, it might actually turn out pretty well done. But as is, it would work better as a story element than the story itself (at least from my point of view.)
Please take everything I just said with a grain of salt until a senior staff member comes along.
Hmmm… I was banking on the Nothing Is Scarier trope to make it interesting. What if periodically it teleported on its own without the motivation of hiding from probes, but always closer to the inner planets and the Sun? The Foundation would have to assume that it was coming for Earth, or at the very least that it would at some point appear in an orbit that would pull Earth out of its current orbit and cause enormous damage, so they would constantly send probes to the object to force it to teleport farther out into the solar system to keep it at bay. That adds a bit of a threat to it.
So it's a probe that affects a chunk of space, that's a cool idea. Just elaborate some more
This post consists of approval for the idea and a vague suggestion to elaborate. Elaborate what? The properties of the SCP? How it's contained? How it was discovered? How would someone know where to fix something if you just say "fix it"?
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This sounds a bit OTT, even for an extraterrestrial SCP. It can relocate itself in an instant, and affects the planets from outside of the solar system. I can't imagine how dense it would need to be to show a noticeable pull on something like Neptune, and we wouldn't even know for sure if this was even a planet.
I don't know how much information you would present in the description, but what's here seems pretty sparse, and the containment procedures boiling down to "we can't contain this, disinformation campaigns"". Sounds pretty difficult to write up as a first, without people.
It would be within the solar system. I could have the Foundation initially detect it by how it affects Pluto's orbit, so it could be around the mass of a gas giant, which is what I initially had planned anyway. The containment procedures would be sending probes with cameras towards it with rotating D-Class watching the feeds from the cameras to force it to teleport to positions farther out in the solar system to counteract its gradual approach towards the inner planets. I also thought that there could be an incident where an asteroid gets trapped in the object's orbit and crashes into it, knocking off a chunk which the Foundation sends a probe to study.
Also, you make a good point about it not being known to be a planet. I'll change the working title to "Unseen Object".
This… Actually sounds quite familiar.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but is there not an existing scip about a normally unseen second Moon that causes whoever sees it to observe the world as if it had two moons (for example, the tides are a lot higher and they could drown in the perceived water)? If my memory does not fail me, I would suggest reading said article for both inspiration and to make sure you don't accidentally plagiarize anything.
I've read that SCP before, this seems different enough. They don't have that much in common besides being unseen (one because it only exists once people tell you about it, the other because it disappears whenever anything is close enough to look at it) and being celestial bodies.