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“Well captain, this is it,” a tinny voice reverberates out of a hastily installed speaker, “Godspeed to you and your crew.” The quality of craftsmanship, or lack thereof, is a strong reminder that it will probably never be used again. In a few moments you’ll begin the journey to a new planet and everything you know will be gone. There is no going back, only forward. Colony ship: Absolution. Your colony ship is full of settlers and equipment, hoping to strike out into the galaxy and somehow beat the odds, to find a new home for humanity. A new home that isn’t dying rapidly, ecosystems crushed by decades of war with an untiring foe. “Copy that, Command.” What else is there to say? Goodbye? Sorry you can’t come with us? ”Absolution out.” Where are you headed again? They presented so many choices to you, at some point they all started to run together. Orbital eccentricity this, axial tilt that, star type whatever... It was an agonizing decision. The data are the best they have, but the distances are vast and nothing is certain in this endeavor except the perilous odds you face. Some of the closer planets are well characterized but none of them are truly ideal. There could be better options out there but the farther away the planet the less sure the eggheads are about their information. Educated guess, best estimate. These are words you’ve heard a lot lately. They are not words that inspire a lot of confidence, especially as words that define the course of your future and the future of thousands of people under your command. Each of these planets is inside the habitable zone with regards to the star it orbits, they are rocky and should support liquid water. Each of them has an atmosphere of mostly known elemental composition. And as if just picking a planet on incomplete data wasn’t bad enough they have cautioned you about the dangers of space travel. The longer you spend in space the more time there is for something to go wrong. All of the options presented should be survivable with minimal issues, but you never know. They were even kind enough to give you artist renditions of the planets, that they cautioned are wildly inaccurate. A:  Tyson-664d: Larger than earth by a good margin this planet is also more massive and much colder. Surface gravity is probably pretty normal. The atmospheric data shows nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon with trace other gasses. It orbits the star Tyson-664, a blue/white A type star. It receives more light than earth does. It has one moon, smaller than Earth's moon. A 22 year journey. B:  Hawking-294b: This planet is larger than earth, and orbits an orange K type star. Gravity is probably a bit higher than earth normal. The atmospheric data shows neon, helium, and oxygen with trace other gasses. Planetary temperature is probably below earth, as is the amount of sunlight. It has two moons, one larger and one smaller than Earth's moon. A 30 year journey. C:  Herschel-332b: A big planet, one of the largest in this list. Not much is known about its mass and gravity is therefore a bit of a mystery. Atmospheric data shows oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen with trace other gasses. It orbits a white F type star. It probably gets more sunlight than earth but is still a bit cooler. There is no moon, but the system still has a disc of rocky material. A 40 year journey. D:  Messier-414f: This planet is larger than earth by a bit, and probably more massive? It orbits an orange K type star. Atmospheric data shows oxygen, carbon, and argon. No trace gasses have been detected. The planetary temperature is probably lower than that of earth, and sunlight is also probably lower. It has two moons, both smaller than Earth's moon. A 52 year journey. E:  Tyson-26d: This planet is probably larger than earth and certainly more massive. It orbits a red M type star. Atmospheric data shows nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon. No trace gasses have been detected. They are pretty sure it’s close to earth’s temperature and receives a similar amount of sunlight. It has no moon. A 62 year journey. F:  Tyson-959b: Much larger than earth this planet is probably much more massive as well. It orbits a yellow G type star, not too dissimilar from the sun. It probably gets less sunlight and is colder. Atmospheric data shows carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen with trace other gasses. It has one moon, larger than Earth's moon. A 65 year journey, this is the farthest planet that has enough data to give you a fighting chance at survival. Welcome to Kepler’s Island! You are the captain of a colony ship leaving a war ravaged earth, hoping to successfully colonize a new world on which humanity can thrive. As the captain you have the final call on any decision but can always ask members of your crew for their opinion. You may rank your choices when voting, if you want to, and we will go with the most favored of the choices (ralith is the man and has created a bot that will do the math, though I will probably count by hand). You can always write in another option, I will try to list what I think is the few most likely or most obvious options but you are by no means limited to them. This is your adventure. Please bold your votes. We’ll learn a bit more about the universe, our ship, our crew, and our self in the next few updates while I get all the details of the planet nailed down. Olothreutes fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Aug 23, 2016 |
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Aug 22, 2016 22:58
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dog kisser posted:B The elements are listed in order of abundance. Neon and helium are the two most common gasses in the atmosphere, so they probably aren't "contamination" at all.
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Aug 22, 2016 23:11
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Abyssal Squid posted:A or E. Do we know anything about the stars they're orbiting past spectral type? Life on E would be pretty rough if Tyson-26 turned out to be a flare star, but hard radiation from a white-hot star would suck too. All the stars have been screened to avoid having major issues. They're all main sequence stars, technically dwarfs, Tyson-664 is the largest of them. It will have the "hardest" emission spectrum, with more UV and high energy photons than the other stars. Herschel-332 has the next hardest emission spectrum, then Tyson-959 which is rather similar to Sol. Hawking-294 and Messier-414 are both slightly "softer" than Sol, and emissions will have lower amounts of UV and increased visible light and infrared. Tyson-26 has the softest spectrum and a bunch of it will be below visible energies so it may appear dimmer than what you would expect. They all show signs of being in the protium cycle, there is no indication of any of the stars having moved to the CNO cycle, and they should all be good to go for millions or billions of years. Flare stars tend to be dim red dwarfs, the only one that could potentially qualify is Tyson-26, but it is rather bright for a red star. The full class for it is M4V, if you are curious.
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Aug 23, 2016 03:24
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Diogines posted:Atmospheres can be changed. Planets which are too hot or too cold can be corrected with atmospheric engineering or orbital mirrors. Yet, unless our species has anti-grav technology (or the genetic engineering and trans-huminist ideals to cope with it) we will NEVER be able to "fix" a planet with the wrong gravity. You can't fix bad gravity. The untiring foe is finally defeated. A lot of that history is coming in the next update. You probably do not need to fear pursuit. Each of these stars is so far away from earth that hiding will be accomplished largely by distance if it ever becomes necessary. There are other colony vessels as well, they are all headed to similarly remote locations. It is very, very, very unlikely you will run into other humans or anything from Earth ever again. Also gravity should be close to Earth normal on each of these planets. They think. Anything that was obviously unlivable the scientists didn't present as an option to you. I promise I'm not trying to kill you all immediately like Outpost would do at times.
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Aug 23, 2016 04:01
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Mr. Nemo posted:A, based on a reasoning similar to Diogenes'. Sounds pretty similar to Earth, plus we can get a nice tan. I actually made a CYOA so that I can better avoid writing my thesis  . The preferential voting is just nice.Diogines posted:And more questions to make this even more complicated! The letter on the name indicates which planet they are in the system. Planet Tyson-664d is the fourth planet away from the star, Herschel-332b is the second planet away from the star, etc. Tyson-664d has one moon, it is smaller than Earth's moon. Tidal effects will be lower than on Earth. Hawking-294b has two moons, one seems to be larger than Earth's moon and the other smaller. They appear to orbit with the same frequency but are nearly opposite one another with regard to the planet. Tidal effects could be very pronounced. Herschel-332b has no moon. Messier-414f has 2 moons, both smaller than Earth's moon, they appear to orbit with a 2:1 frequency. For every orbit the outer moon makes, the inner moon makes two. Tyson-26d has no moon. Tyson-959b has one moon, larger than Earth's moon. Other planets will usually not be a concern, they are all far enough away to have negligible tidal effects and are well outside of even the "optimistic" habitable zone, let alone the more conservative habitable zone that these planets have been selected from. Herschel-332 does seem to be a relatively new star, there is still some garbage floating around it in a disc, but the planets have cleared their orbital paths rather well. The scientists estimate that the frequency of impact for substantial meteors is not so high that they are worried. It will be higher than on Earth. It may capture a moon.
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Aug 23, 2016 04:37
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The current standings: A- 5 (+2 partial) B- 2 C- 5 D- 1 E- 1 +2 partial F- 0 No love for the Sol like star? Harsh.
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Aug 24, 2016 01:06
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Alright, it looks like you guys have set course for Tyson-664d, which I suspect you will probably rename to something much less cumbersome when you get there. The journey will take you just over two decades subjective time at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. Some history, and a bit more about you: The world was at peace. Humanity had finally managed to set aside their many differences and become a unified global population. Basic services were available to all people of the world, bringing about and end to hunger and disease as we knew them. It was truly a golden era in human history. With more time and resources at our disposal we began to expand beyond the earth, building a few colonies on the moon or Mars. Some particularly ambitions people even built private labs in space, though both the colonies and labs were dependent on Earth. One such person was the brilliant and eccentric Dr. Jason Zobkawski.  Dr. Zobkawski was a genius without peer, a mind the likes of which the world had not seen in centuries. Some would say that he was an engineer, others a scientist, but most preferred the term inventor. He pushed the boundaries of human knowledge while also building things to improve the human condition based on his findings. New areas of human science were started based solely on his groundbreaking science. He was clearly unsatisfied with the state of being human. Much of his work centered around making humans better. Not only better living through science, but better life through science as well. From his advanced space lab his inventions flowed forth to the world. His advances to medical science would prolong the life of humans well beyond their earlier limitations. It was now considered totally normal to live beyond 200 years and in many cases 300 or 400 years. Bionic implants and cybernetics increased the capacity of the human form to levels unseen before. As time progressed Dr. Zobawski became more and more reclusive. Those who did see him said that he was rapidly becoming more machine than man, his experimental bionics accounting for most of his body. Several people described meeting him as “profoundly unsettling, like talking to a robot.” Eventually he stopped receiving visitors or granting interviews. He said he wished to focus on his work. His myriad advances in technology and science continued to flow forth from his space lab, and people gave no second thought to allowing the doctor his space. Then the advances began to slow. Less data was coming out of his laboratory in the sky. Had he reached the limits of his capability? How far had he brought the species? Clearly everyone has limits, thought the world. Maybe the doctor had finally reached his. Eventually there was no more communication from the doctor and his laboratory. It was a cold morning in February when the first landing ship left the doctor’s laboratory. It was a grand moment, though there had been no communication from him in years it was easy to see that the doctor was coming home to earth. He had ascended decades ago to pull mankind upward in his wake. Now he was coming home. A hasty press conference was set up at the landing site, awaiting the return of mankind’s greatest patron.  The doctor had not returned. The ship was laden with robot soldiers who caught the reporters totally by surprise. Even if they had been prepared for it they could not have survived the attack that came. Firepower of that magnitude hadn’t been seen or needed since before the unification, when national militaries postured at one another in tense cold wars, exerting influence over less fortunate parts of the world in an attempt to hamper their opponents capabilities and to counter their opponent’s attempts to do the same. It was all very foolish in hindsight, and humanity was glad to have moved beyond such issues. The robot marines cut through the assembled humans in short order as the world watched in terror. No one had thought to fear such an event, it was a totally alien concept. Especially coming from the doctor, the patron of mankind’s meteoric rise above the limitations of our biology.   Decades of war. The robots continuing their march across the globe. Humanity struggling to survive and to remember those machines of war they had left behind so long ago. There was no safe space on the planet, the enemy did not tire. Their metalline forms resistant to so many forms of attack, humanity was against a wall. Only by presenting a unified front against the robots did humanity stand a chance. Everyone was a soldier. Everyone fought. War was the only business with job openings, and there were infinite openings with no interviews. Pick up a gun, you’re hired. Come back alive and we’ll talk about promotion. Most did not get promoted.   Humanity would eventually “triumph” after nearly 40 years of war, finally ridding the world of the last of the robots. A twist of irony, most of the surviving humans were part robot anyway. People lost eyes, limbs, whole portions of their bodies and had them replaced by bionics, every wound healed bringing them closer to the form of their aggressor. As soon as the war had finished a special ops team was shuttled up to the doctor’s laboratory. He would be brought to justice or killed, there was no way he would escape the deeds of his creations.  The soldiers stormed the lab and found only a few robots, early models, that they cut down with ease. The lab was otherwise empty. The doctor was not there, nor was his corpse. The computer logs showed no entries by the doctor since shortly after the war began. His final entries were disjointed and seemed mostly meaningless, he wrote often about being unable to fix the problem, that he would need to start over. It wasn’t clear what “the problem” was. The final log was short. “I cannot fix the problem here. I require a blank slate.” The station control computer showed many departures over the years, automated vessels laden with engines of destruction. All of them headed for earth. Except for one ship, with an unknown manifest and no destination listed. The station tracked the ship as far as the orbit of Mars before it was gone, continuing to accelerate. Had the doctor simply left while his creations ravaged the planet? Was he still out there somewhere? Would he return? To say that the victory had on earth was pyrrhic would be a gross overstatement. Most people agreed that humanity had not earned a victory at all, they had simply not lost. The world was devastated beyond repair, polluted by war machines that had no regard for life. The earth was dying. It was immediately clear that the only way for humanity to survive was to leave, to find a new planet that could support life. Every resource remaining was directed to this one goal. Ships were built, crews selected based on complicated algorithms that maximized capabilities and genetic variance, hoping to give each crew the best chance at founding a colony. A few old telescopes had not been destroyed in the war, and a new space telescope was hastily built and tasked to find exoplanets that could, maybe, support human life. This is where you come in! A veteran of the robot war, you have been selected by the algorithm as having the qualities necessary to captain one of humanity’s colony ships. Let’s learn a bit about you: What is your name? A: Richard Cannaday B: Piter Uvarov C: Tabitha Genovese D: Anna Sandgreen E: Write in What did you do during the war? G: Infantry. I was right on the front line. I destroyed a lot of robots, and probably watched a lot of men and women die. I have good hand to hand combat and small arms experience, and know a lot about working as a team to overcome adversity. H: Vehicle driver/gunner. I rode in one of the many war machines that humanity built. I’m familiar with most of the military vehicles and how to use a neural interface to control them. I worked closely with the other occupants as a team and also learned to help maintain my ride. I: Special Ops. I was one of the most daring soldiers. Often working alone I sabotaged robot installations and completed other high value missions. I have excellent hand to hand and small arms skills and know one or two other neat things, like demolitions or hacking. J: Electronic Warfare. I helped figure out how the robots communicate, and then aided in jamming their communication. This meant the robots couldn’t fight as a single cohesive unit and made them much less effective. I know a lot about EM signals and jamming, but didn’t do much fighting. K: Strategic Planning. I was one of the team responsible for coordinating a global army, simultaneously attacking and defending on hundreds of fronts. I know how to utilize resources well, even if that means having to take a loss in order to secure a bigger win elsewhere. I didn’t see much combat. L: Write in What bionics do you have, if any? (Choose up to three, each bionic draws power from your internal battery. The higher the power draw the less time you can operate them without recharging. Not all bionics are active 100% of the time.) 1: Enhanced Optics - EM broadband. This lets you see further into the EM spectrum, infrared, UV, x-ray, etc. This is a low power draw bionic. 2: Enhanced Optics - Telescopic. Lets you see things far away. Low power draw. 3: Enhanced Aural Sensors. Allows you to listen outside the range of human hearing, infrasound and ultrasonics and the like. Low power draw. 4: Enhanced Chemical Sensors. This bionic allows you to detect airborne chemical markers. Low power draw. 5: Enhanced Cognition. Basically a small computer, this allows you to do complex calculations and can store and recall a great deal of data. Low power draw. 6: Enhanced Vocal Chords. Modifications to your vocal chords that allow you to make sounds in both ultrasonic and subsonic frequencies. Low power draw when in use, otherwise zero. 7: Filtration Lungs. When exposed to inhaled pathogens or contaminants this bionic will attempt to filter them out. Low power draw. 8: Filtration Liver. Enhanced liver function speeds removal of toxins and contaminants, and expands what can be filtered. Low power draw. 9: Pain Shunt. Essentially an override for the pain receptors in your body, when active you feel very little pain. Moderate power draw when in use, otherwise zero. 10: Dermal Armor: A tough armor layer just beneath your skin, greatly increasing your physical resilience. No power draw. 11: Active Camouflage. When active this bionic scans the nearby surroundings and adapts to blend you into them. High power draw when in use, otherwise zero. 12: Electronic Communications Suite. An inbuilt transmitter/receiver that allows you to communicate with a base and with other similarly equipped people. Can be used to jam signals through electronic warfare. High power draw when jamming, moderate power draw when in active transmit mode, low power draw when listening only. Can be turned off. 13: Prosthetic Arm - Close combat. A bionic arm with extra strength and a built in close combat weapon. The weapon is modular and can be changed with little effort. Moderate power draw. 14: Prosthetic Arm - Ranged combat. A bionic arm with extra strength and a built in ranged weapon. The weapon is modular and can be changed with some difficulty. Moderate power draw. 15: Prosthetic Legs. Bionic legs with extra strength, these are also equipped to increase your running and jumping abilities. Very high power draw when in heavy use, moderate power draw otherwise. 16: Neural-Vehicular Interlink. A communications port that allows you to control an equipped vehicle directly with your mind. Most, but not all, vehicles come with NVI capabilities. No power draw, it pulls from the vehicle’s onboard power. 17: Reduced Nutritionary Requirements. Use battery power instead of food to keep going. Moderate power draw. 18: Secondary Battery. Doubles the length of time you can spend without getting a recharge while using your bionics. You can charge both batteries at once, so it won’t take twice as long to recharge. 19: Solar Recharging System. Built in solar absorbers help to power your bionics while you are exposed to electromagnetic radiation. Efficacy depends on the intensity of the radiation. At peak power it will provide enough power for a moderate power draw bionic. What did you do before the war? N: I was an artist (what sort?). O: I was a politician. P: I was a scientist/engineer. Q: I was an urban planner. R: I was a lawyer. S: I was a mechanic. T: Write in
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Aug 24, 2016 03:27
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Several folks have voted for doubling up on the cognitive enhancement. This is probably doable, it will increase your processing power and allow you to run more tasks in parallel. Storage space probably won't increase much, but it is already substantial. It's definitely more powerful than simply having a smartphone. It will allow you, among other things, to perform a bunch of physics calculations, look up various bits of data, recall maps of the general area, and also work on stuff like probability analysis through either predictive methods like Runge-Kutta or stochastic methods like monte carlo, depending on what data you have available. It will probably be able to run augmented reality stuff for you as well, projecting data onto your vision as necessary. I'm going out to dinner, but I plan to close voting and do an update later tonight.
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Aug 25, 2016 03:21
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Loel posted:For the brain augment, will it give us perfect memory/recall/attention to detail? After a fashion, for the first one. And it's very fast. Not instantaneous, but it works at least as quickly as you can think for most of the more mundane functions. It probably can't do detailed modelling regarding a complicated system super fast, but you could expect to have an answer in a few minutes if you pose the question properly. Also, voting is closed.
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Aug 25, 2016 05:34
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You are Tabitha Genovese, a military strategist turned starship captain. Before the war you were a genetic engineer, a healthy and well respected field. You are familiar with a number of technologies that relate to bionics as well as some of the more advanced medical technology that helps humans live for hundreds of years. You also have a strong background in math, biology, and chemistry. Your physics is a bit rusty, undergrad was a long time ago, but you can probably spend a bit of time to get back up to par if you want. If not you can simply ask one of your crew members, or just look the information up. You have a solid understanding of computer simulations for things like protein folding and understand the basics for things like deterministic and non-deterministic modeling. The war was hard on everyone, no doubt, but it was not quite so hard on you as it was on others. At least this is the opinion you suspect the majority of the soldiers have. You didn’t see a lot of combat, but you can use a gun if you need to. You are relatively good with a rifle, less so with a pistol, and you have no training with anything heavier than that. What you did see a lot of was just how badly humanity was doing in the war. You had a front row seat to many a discussion about how many people would have to die in order to secure a single victory, and how many others you would have to let die because you simply did not have the resources to save them. It was not easy, even as detached as the command system was from the war. Cognitive enhancement bionics were commonplace among strategists and leaders, and were not uncommon amongst regular soldiers either. Many people have communications bionics installed, it was necessary to be able to coordinate extremely well if we were to defeat the robots, who acted in virtually perfect unison. Cognitive enhancement/Transmitter combo bonus! Late in the war effort you volunteered for an upgrade to your bionics, developed by a friend of yours. You acted as one of the test beds for his newly developed model, which tied the communications module into the cognitive computer directly as a single module instead of two independent ones. The throughput on data transmission was increased, and you can now access most any computer on which you have a login remotely. Want to start that expensive simulation, but aren’t at your desk? No problem. He even managed to get the transmitter receiver to broadcast on specific parts of the EM spectrum and tuned your computer to interpret the results, giving you a personal radar system! What a guy. You also have a solar charging system that will allow you to charge your battery or power your bionics (the difference is murky, you aren’t an electrical engineer) while on the go. “Captain.” Behind you is your chief of security. You are always amazed that he manages to be as quiet as he does. It makes no sense. “My team and I have secured the cryo decks for the colonists. Nothing is amiss.” “Thank you, Vladimir.” ”Of course. My team and I will prepare for cryo, yes?” “Yes, that’s fine.” He turns and leaves without another word.  Vladimir Barkov is your chief of security on the ship. He was a decorated soldier during the war, rising to a command position but remaining on the front lines. He was well known for making some particularly daring attacks on robot holdings. Something less well known to the public, but very well known to command, his tactics were extremely unconventional. Vladimir wants to get results and he’s willing to come from some odd angles to do it. Some have gone so far as to even call him sneaky, an interesting adjective for a man who is nearly seven feet of heavily augmented human. Apparently during one fight he pulled a rotary cannon off of a downed VTOL and used that to great effect. He enjoys order, and is happy with his position in the ship.  You check in briefly with your naviga... astrodynamicist, Asta Lundgren. She hates being called a navigator, for reasons that are beyond you. For her part she is the most knowledgeable “All set to go, Asta?” “Yes ma’am, Vlad says everyone and everything is locked up down there so we can begin our acceleration as soon as you’d like. I’ve plotted a course that will swing us outside of Tyson-664d’s orbit by about a weeks travel. From there we’ll have to go more carefully, I don’t have the necessary data to put us any closer safely. The wardens will wake us up if anything goes wrong.” “Thank you.” Ah yes, the wardens. Strange group of people they are. The wardens are four (un)lucky people chosen for their particular traits who will remain awake through the entire journey to monitor vital ship functions and handle any minor emergencies. As the captain you’ll wake up once every four years to take a status update and to handle any issues that have cropped up in the previous four years, but the majority of it should be taken care of by the wardens. “Ok, Asta, take us out. Let’s go ‘home.’” The word feels odd in your mouth. Home. The place you’re leaving behind you right now. The ship doesn’t seem to move at all at first. Asta is clearly doing something and you can see that the ship is moving, but if you closed your eyes you wouldn’t know anything was happening at all. “Captain, we should get into cryo.”  Your first officer, Thomas Moulton. He was some sort of weapons researcher during the war but is tight lipped about it. He seems very eager to get away from all the mess now that the war is over. “Of course. Cryo. I just want to watch for a few minutes.” Thomas doesn’t say anything else, but he stands and watches with you as the Earth slowly shrinks away. You can feel the acceleration beginning to pick up, it’s time to go to sleep. You walk towards your cabins in silence, Thomas’ cabin is right next to yours. You nod at one another as you step through the door. You could almost swear you heard him say something, but it was probably your imagination. The cryo pod is upright, attached to the bulkhead of the ship. You step inside and slide the lid closed. It has a weighty feel to it and makes a satisfying click when the latch engages. Someone did a good job on designing these. Year 4 AD (after departure), colony ship Absolution Oh my god, this headache. They had said something about cryo sleep being hard on you, and that waking up would be rough. Ugh. You are pretty sure that the entire robot army was just marching around inside your forehead. Standing isn’t as easy as you recall. The ship seems like it’s facing the wrong direction, why did they put the floors down there? You reach for a container of water and some of the antioxidant pills they told you would help with the headaches and with the radiation issues. You fumble with them in a haze and manage to stagger to the bed and lay down for a few minutes. Surprisingly you aren’t cold. It does seem really hard to think right now, this headache is awful. After about 15 minutes of laying on the bed your head has returned to a relatively normal state. The headache isn’t gone but it’s no longer going to keep you from standing. You walk out of your cabin and find the hallway dark. The lights trip on as you move into the hall proper, the ship is nearly silent. You can hear a subtle thrumming noise, like someone firing an automatic weapon or operating a chipping hammer. As you move to the bridge the thrumming noise seems to get further away. The door to the bridge slides open with little fanfare. The bridge is largely dark, but there are four glowing consoles displaying tremendous amounts of data. In front of three of the consoles are people interfaced into the ship through their NVI systems. They seem completely oblivious to your presence on the bridge. You walk to one of them, you think his name is Cedric? You’re pretty sure that his name is Cedric. You met all of the wardens, but your headache is making it hard to remember the name of someone you met once... four years ago? It seems like both forever ago and yesterday. You can only imagine how everyone else is going to feel when they come out of cryo, when 22 years is gone overnight. You briefly wonder if the algorithms that chose the people going on the trip took into account how well someone would cope with a multi-decade gap in their life. Probably. Can’t have someone going nuts as soon as they step on to a new planet. The bridge door slides open behind you, the fourth warden walks onto the bridge directly towards her console. Bedia, you remember her name. It was the first time you’d heard that name. You asked her about it. It comes from the Arabic word for new, or novel. Well it was certainly a novel name. “Bedia.” She startles, dropping a datapad on the floor. “Captain! Oh my, we, uh. Wow.” She fumbles to get the datapad with one hand. Her other hand is a spiderweb of tiny manipulators and sensors, it looks like she can probably interface directly with a number of the various ship systems through it. “We, I mean, uh I, I didn’t expect you. Has it really been four years already? Wow.” “Tell me about it. It feels like a night.” “Yeah, I’ve been told that cryo is pretty rough. Headache?” “The worst.” “Well, you don’t seem to have thrown up, that’s good. Would you like to take a walk? I can give you your briefing while we walk, there are a few things you should probably see.” You nod and the two of you exit the bridge. The other wardens, if they noticed you or heard your short discussion with Bedia, have not reacted to it in any way. As you move through the ship the thrumming noise gets louder and then softer with no apparent pattern. “Bedia, what is that thrumming noise?” “What noise? I don’t hear anything.” She has a puzzled look on her face, “Oh! You mean the reactor. That’s probably the ship’s reactor that you’re picking up on your comlink. It can be a bit distracting at first.” “Why is the reactor showing up on my comlink?” “Well, the reactor emits some pretty strong magnetic fields that oscillate with a given frequency. Your comlink is probably just picking up some of those fields as they propogate through the ship. They supposedly insulated that stuff so the fields wouldn’t interfere with the ship. It’s not perfect, that’s actually one of the things we’re going to see. I’m surprised you can pick it up this far away, though.” Bedia leads you down to the reactor area. As you get closer the thrumming becomes a bit more intense but doesn’t seem to be too bad. You experiment with shutting your comlink off and the thrumming does indeed go away. The reactor is a monster. Conceived by a madman, it is thousands of cubic meters of molten metal swirling in a sphere. The metal is forced around the sphere by a series of magnetic pumps to open a central vortex. As if that wasn’t enough, an incredibly strong magnetic field compresses it at regular intervals, maybe five times a second, collapsing the vortex and crushing the fuel that was just injected into the vortex and initiating fusion. It is the literal beating heart of the ship. You are standing on the other side of several walls from the reactor. A readout is displayed on the door with the reactor status, everything is green, as well as several signs cautioning against entering the reactor room. Especially if you have bionics, apparently, as several signs indicate very clearly in both text and graphic that you will probably lose your bionics (and your life) to the magnetic fields within the room. Even here you can feel a subtle tug on your form, and you have only minor bionics as far as metal content is concerned. ”Feel that pull? That isn’t supposed to happen,” Bedia is clearly experiencing it as well, she has a number of bionics with more metal than yours, “We think there’s an issue with one of the magnetic seals in there. But we can’t go in to check, all of us are augged up and it would probably tear us apart.” “Is it dangerous?” “We don’t know. We want to send someone in to take a look, maybe one of the engineers. But it doesn't seem to be an emergency so we need your permission to wake one of them up.” “How long has it been like this?” “About two months,” she says. She starts again “Wait. More like a year, I guess. Time is hard sometimes. I don’t think it’s been getting any worse, though.” 1. Do you wake an engineer to look at the reactor? A – Yes, are you insane? You just said this is the beating heart of the ship, get an engineer now! B – No, it’s been this way for nearly a year, it’s nothing to worry about. It's not even the reactor, just one of the seals that insulates it from the ship. After letting Bedia know what you’d like to do about the magnetics issue at the reactor room, you move on to the next issue she has for you. As you exit the reactor area you turn your comlink back on and the thrumming resumes, steady as can be. This might actually be a way for you to check the frequency of the reactor from afar. You have your computer take some of the data, the pulses are of uniform intensity and come with a frequency of 5.2 hertz. That seems about in line with what you’ve been told the reactor should be doing. You make several turns and climb a few ladders before you arrive at your next destination. “This is one of the cryo controllers,” Bedia is pointing to a computer bank in what looks like a closet, “it’s been giving us some anomalous data. When I ask the computer here, everything reports ok. But when I’m on the bridge it tells me that some of the pods have been opened. I’ve come down to look, but I can’t see what’s wrong. I think the connection to the bridge might be faulty.” “Is it an issue?” “Well, no. I mean, I do have to come down here to make sure everything is ok instead of being able to do it from the bridge. It’s not so bad, I guess. The trip is good exercise.” 2. Would you like an engineer to look at the connection between the cryo controller and the bridge? If there is a fault it could be anywhere in what is probably miles of cabling. Bedia doesn’t seem to mind the walk. C – Yes, I voted to wake up the engineer for question 1, so have him look into this as well. D – Yes, but I voted no on question one, so I want to wake an engineer up for just this. E – No, this isn’t worth making someone dig through miles of conduit, Bedia can just keep making the trip. With that resolved the two of you return to the bridge. She shows you the display for the cryo controller. Everything looks fine. You talk to Bedia for a few more minutes about various issues with the ship that they have handled, fuel supply data, and other boring stuff. Behind her you watch the cryo controller register one of the pods open. Then closed. Just a flicker. 3. Do you want to stay awake while the engineer fixes the issues? F – Yes. G – No. Olothreutes fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Aug 25, 2016 |
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Aug 25, 2016 12:54
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There Bias Two posted:So I think we have a saboteur on board. He rigged the cryo pods to make him appear asleep (hence the glitch) and then weakened the magnetic fields surrounding the fusion reactor to fail over time, ultimately posing a major threat to anyone on board with bionic implants. That would be a very odd way to start a colony without "half-robots" considering it would kill everyone, probably. The reactor is pretty important to staying alive. The magnetic O-rings around it, maybe not so much? Several of them still work. Without them the reactor is dangerous to everyone, augmentations or not. And yes, two of the engineers have no bionics explicitly so they can work on the reactor without having to worry about having part of their head ripped out. They are quite talented and very smart. Olothreutes fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Aug 25, 2016 |
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Aug 25, 2016 13:18
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Nettle Soup posted:What do we know about the wardens? The "We, I mean uh, I!" thing and the fact 3 of them didn't notice us is slightly worrying. Not Alex posted:Four years deeply interfaced with a computer and no one but three other people socially profiled to not mind 22 years of extreme isolation. Basically this. You expect that the other three, assuming there are no other shorts in miles of cable, probably don't move unless it is 100% necessary for their job. Even Bedia would probably not do any walking if it weren't for the cryo-mystery. You did look at each of their screens in passing, Cedric's more closely, and it was clear that they were all awake and doing a bunch of things simultaneously. There Bias Two posted:During the war, were there any robots that closely approximated a human physically? Or are synthetics beyond current tech? No, the robots never bothered with any attempts at subterfuge, they were far more on the doctrine of overwhelming firepower. The early models were vaguely human shaped, though nearly 10 feet tall, and as the war progressed they became less and less human looking. Apparently the robots found the human form inefficient for combat. Not Alex posted:Do the cryopods have view ports? Can we spend a couple days doing an in-person head check? See if there are empty pods? They do. You can go check now if you'd like, or when you wake up someone who is handier with a weapon. You will probably just see a very still human. quote:Does the ship computer register which of the motion sensitive lights are on and when? Yes. Bedia pulls up the logs and there aren't any instances of the lights coming on other than when she goes down to check on the local status panel. quote:Do the pods that are "flickering" exclusively contain people with cognitive implants or is there some other linking factor? The prior one would be very bad. You'll have to check which ones are flickering. You've only seen it happen once, Bedia says it's pretty intermittent and she doesn't think that it's always the same pod. You get the impression that she looks at this as a minor annoyance in the sea of data that she usually manages. quote:On that note can we set up a log of the errors? You set up a quick monitoring program to look at the status lights and check to see what sort of signals are being sent from the local computer to the bridge. It will take some time to gather enough data to be super useful. You don't know the frequency of the error so it's hard to know how long it will take before you can be statistically confident in your analysis. quote:Could the mag seal anomaly on the reactor be a result of power being rerouted elsewhere on the ship? Maybe? You aren't an electrical engineer and the workings of the reactor isolation systems are not something you studied in great detail. You pull up the schematics but they are incredibly complicated and not something you are very familiar with. It is not much like the bionics schematics that you are used to reading, this is orders of magnitude more intricate. Olothreutes fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Aug 25, 2016 |
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Aug 25, 2016 22:14
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Loel posted:How many pods are there? Is it plausible to stretch our legs and do a walk-by of every pod? See if any are empty, dead, broken, things like that. Just a visual inspection. In total? Almost 8,000 of them. Just under the glitchy controller? 200.
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Aug 25, 2016 23:45
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Loel posted:Its not paranoia, its exercise! We're just stretching our legs A few people want to wake some of the security team and/or Vlad.
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Aug 26, 2016 00:06
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Slaan posted:I BEG you all to consider that these are extremely minor problems. The only reason they were noticed at all is because there was nothing else happening, anywhere. Its a quirk of the ship. If things get worse then Bedia et al will wake us up so we can fix whatever is happening. Slaan, voice of reason, Patron Saint of tired engineers. Never did I think I would call you the voice of reason. Also now I have to go watch Pandorum.
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Aug 26, 2016 00:21
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Arkanomen posted:If your engineers aren't tired then they aren't working. Order written reports on each anomaly before they go back to sleep and then wake them 2 hours later to ask a question about wording and then tell them never mind you got it. You are a monster. This is "Make wild claims about the nature of things based on innocuous statements made by Jael" levels of cruel. And less funny 
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Aug 26, 2016 00:43
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Diogines posted:Three questions: You have just shy of 8,000 colonists, a bunch of equipment, lots of corridor, and lots of sundry supplies in cargo bays that will hopefully keep you alive on your new homeworld. The total crew is 8,004, including the officers and the wardens. The colonists don't have cabins, they aren't important enough for that. They aren't supposed to be awake at all anyway for the vast majority of the trip. In the final week or so you'll wake them up and they have cots they can sleep on while they aren't busy prepping everything for planetfall. For the moment all the cryopods are in large rooms, 200 to a room, with individual controller systems for each one so that if you lose a controller you don't lose all your colonists. Every single pod would take you a while, but is doable. More so with a team. Checking a single bay would probably take you a few hours at most, depending on how thorough you want to be. It will involve a visual inspection of 200 occupied (?) cryopods and you will probably have to review all the specs first to know what you are looking at.
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Aug 26, 2016 00:49
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the_steve posted:Ask Bedia how she keeps track of time. You ask, and Bedia replies "Oh, we count reactor cycles, it's very consistent. So, I guess it's a bit like counting fifths of a second, but not quite, since the reactor is a bit faster than that." That makes sense, you guess? It might be easier to just count actual seconds, but whatever works. Can't get enough  ? Want more spaceships with danger lurking in all the dark places (and most of the not-dark places too)? Check out Loel's sort-of-40K inspired space hulk CYOA, Prometheus Cycle!
Olothreutes fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 03:26
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the_steve posted:Yeah, pretty sure losing the concept of time is part of what leads a person to cracking. You can wake up the ship's doctor, Dr. Dylan Nilsson, who you are confident would be willing to take a look at them. He's been trained in the usual stressors that long term space travel puts on a person and what sort of results that can have. Usually depression, anxiety, issues with command structure because of different cultures, that sort of thing. The wardens all went through a pretty rigorous selection criteria to weed out any predisposition to the more serious mental issues and in general to get the sort of mental fortitude that could hold off the anxiety induced by being one of four people awake in a ship as it glides through the near-nothingness of interstellar space. In some of the studies it was shown that having a high degree of autonomy (which the wardens clearly have) helped to increase crew happiness. It usually put more stress on the mission control staff, but they don't exist, so maybe the increased autonomy is good? Assuming that the reactor has been running well this entire time at a constant 5.2 hertz, which is what you calculated based on the EM pulses, there have been 6.557e8 reactor cycles in that 4 year period. Once you get into numbers that large it's rather easy to start rounding and actually chop off a non-trivial bit of time. Olothreutes fucked around with this message at 09:27 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 03:59
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Voting is not officially closed, feel free to continue to make suggestions, but I'm working on an update because it seems like team is winning this one handily.
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Aug 26, 2016 04:53
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the_steve posted:Well, before we go full tinfoil on the Wardens themselves Slice of life (maybe?) Bedia Nolet: Bedia seems fine, all things considered. "The trip has been pretty uneventful so far, really. Fuel consumption is right on target, and other than the few things we talked about earlier nothing has really happened. The stars are really pretty." She has a genuine smile on her face. "The warden instructions include a mandate to be up and about for an hour a day. The others aren't so particular about it but I've been trying to keep to it. The trips down to the cryobay have been helping, but I like to watch the stars too. There are so many of them out here." The atmosphere on Earth was pretty messed up, very few of the stars were visible by the time you set off on your journey. Your astrodynamicist would surely be able to tell you where you are right now without looking, but you pull the data from the computer over your comlink. You are a long way from home. And even further from your new home, but right on track for where you should be. Really everything seems to be going pretty smoothly. You point out a few stars with names to Bedia and she is thrilled. She's probably the most social of the wardens by far. You ask about the other wardens. "They're fine. Cedric likes to play cards with Otto, and I think he has a crush on me," she blushes at that, "but I'm probably wrong. Anneli, she likes to be called Ann, is very quiet. She's very detailed though. She spends most of her time looking over the reactor data and the astrodynamics, making sure that we're on course and that the reactor is doing well. She's the one that noticed the magnetic seal issues. You can ask her more about it if you want, but I imagine her logs have a good summary. She doesn't seem to think it's too big a deal." "How old are you, Bedia?" "Pardon, captain? Uh, 35. Why do you ask?" She was born during the war. You thought she seemed pretty young. She's only ever known war, and now for a scant few years she's seen the mad rush to evacuate a planet that she has no idea was ever beautiful. No wonder she loves the stars as much as she does. You take about an hour and just make small talk with her, tell her about Earth before the wars, when everything was blue and green and golden. She is enraptured by the tales. She especially enjoys the one where someone tried to make a device to communicate with dolphins, only to find that they were endlessly annoying. She doesn't have many concerns, in fact she's happy with how well things seem to be going. Olothreutes fucked around with this message at 09:24 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 07:00
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Ok, there are three votes to wake up the doctor to look at the wardens right now. Mini-vote! Do you want to wake up Dr. Nilsson to check on the wardens/engineers/whomever? 
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Aug 26, 2016 12:07
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Bede posted:What is the expected psychological impact to waking someone from cyro? Is there a downside (aside from increased resource consumption) when folks get woken up and put back to sleep. No one is really 100% sure about the long term effects of cryo, or repeated cycles of it, because the tech has never really seen use until now. Based on your experience it's highly unpleasant to wake up from. It's possible that it can cause psychological problems as well but there just haven't been enough studies done. Best case is that everyone has to deal with years of backlogged hangover, worst case is that it drives them insane or causes organ failure as their body struggles to deal with repeat trips into suspended animation. Bedia seemed to think you were handling it well with only 15 minutes of laying on the bed unable to move and not vomiting, and the literature you've read agrees. I'm going to close the minivote, we won't wake the doctor this time. Perhaps in another 4 years? Olothreutes fucked around with this message at 12:57 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 12:53
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You inform Bedia that you want a few of the engineers woken up, both of the issues seem like they could use a little attention. Better safe than sorry, as they say. You are less than 20% of the way through you trip and while these items might be minor now if you don’t address them they could become a bigger issue later. You also indicate to Bedia that you’d like to wake Vladimir and maybe a few of his team. Just a routine check, of course, nothing to worry about. She doesn’t seem the least bit concerned at sets about getting everything lined up for waking up the people you’ve requested. You head over to Vladimir’s cabin once Bedia starts the wakeup sequence from the officer’s controller. It requires your authorization in order to allow her to wake one of them outside of emergency conditions, which you provide. Vladimir’s cryopod opens with a subtle hissing sound, there is no ice or frost, nothing to indicate the extreme temperatures within. Vladimir squints and places a hand on his head, then steps from the pod and looks around. “Captain, we do not seem to have arrived. The ship is still accelerating. An emergency?” “Not quite, Vladimir.” You fill him in on the details of what is happening, and that you’d like to have him and maybe a few of his team take a look at the cryobay with the malfunctioning controller, if that is indeed what is happening. “Prudent. Yes, I will wake three men. One of them has no augmentations, he will accompany the engineer into the magnetics.” You leave Vladimir to it, reminding him to take his meds. If he has a headache as bad as yours was he did not show it. You move on with Bedia and wake the engineers that you have selected. The unaugmented engineer, one of two on the ship, is named Wasan, pronounced “Wat-san.” Apparently he is of Thai descent. He does not handle waking up from cryo nearly as well as Vladimir did. Almost immediately he vomits, and it takes the better part of an hour to get him up and moving. You wait with him while he recovers, he is clearly having a rough go of it. “Are we there yet?” He manages to ask after about half an hour. “No, there’s an issue with one of the magnetic seals around the reactor that we need you to take a look at. It might not be a big issue now, but it could become one and we’d like to avoid that.” He nods, but doesn’t say anything. 45 minutes after he was awoken he is feeling well enough to head down to the reactor area and take a look, to see what he might need to bring in with him. You tell him that you’ll be down shortly to check in on him, but you have to wake another engineer to look at an issue with a cryo controller not agreeing with the display on the bridge. ”Oh, that’s probably a short in the cabling, or maybe just the display on the screen in the bridge. Man, I’m glad you aren’t making me crawl through miles of access tunnel for that.” He snickers a bit at the thought, shaking his head. At least he seems to be in good spirits. The other engineer, Audun, has a similarly hard time waking up, vomiting, extreme headache. He complains about having some really vivid hallucinations as well while he was under. You explain the issue to Audun and he looks a bit incredulous that this is worth the headache he has, but quickly gets to work. You show him to the bridge so you can both look at the panel there and see what sort of behavior it is exhibiting. It takes about 10 minutes for him to observe the flicker, during which time you talk to Ann in more detail about what is wrong with the magnetic seal around the reactor. ”It’s the second of four seals on the way in, coming from the outside. The engineer will have to disable the outer one to open the door and enter. I first noticed it on rounds 8 months ago, just a subtle tug on my augs. It took me a minute to figure out what was wrong, the magnetics report that everything is fine but it’s clear that one of them is offline. I narrowed it down by running a few simulations and comparing the intensity of the magnetic fields with those results. I’m 95% confident it’s the second seal. There’s a chance it’s the third seal, but it’s remote.” She certainly does seem to have a much firmer grasp on what is happening down there than Bedia does. As you finish talking with her Audun comes up to you. ”Yeah, there’s something wrong for sure. I saw at least two pods flicker. I’m going to peek under the panel here and see if it’s just a short and then I’ll head down to the cryobay if I can’t find anything. Hopefully it’s not a wiring issue...” He trails off on that last bit. You remind him that he’ll have a security escort, can’t be too careful, you know, buddy system and all that. They’ll be in the area anyway on a sweep. You pull the data from the quick program you set up to monitor the light flickering on the cryo display. There doesn’t appear to be a pattern at all, it’s certainly not regular. It’s not always the same pod either, you recorded 14 instances of a flicker and 11 pods were affected. All your analysis seems to indicate it’s random, pointing to a system error like a short in a cable somewhere. You note the 11 pods that were affected and pull the crew manifest data for them as you walk down to the reactor. None of them seem to stand out to you. Everyone has a military service record, except one child who is too young to have served. Only seven, she is one of the youngest passengers. Both of her parents were vehicle pilots, very good ones apparently, and so they got to bring their child along it seems. Good genetics, you guess. Neither of the parents’ pods are in the 11. You discount the child, leaving you with ten pods. As you approach the reactor you can tell that the outer layer of magnetic shielding is down, the interference on your comlink is far stronger than it had been previously, so you shut it off. You see a guard standing just inside the door to the magnetics area, weapon at sling ready. He is attentive of both the hallway into the reactor and you as you approach. He takes a few steps beyond the threshold of the reactor area.  This gun is a bit too big, but you get the idea. “Ma’am. Wasan is a bit further inside but I wouldn’t recommend going much further than the door. The magnetic fields beyond it are pretty strong. Those drawings on the door aren’t lying.” The door is open, but you recall the warning signs, they were quite explicit about how dangerous it was beyond the door. You ask if Wasan has made any progress. ”It’s pretty wild, he’s got a whole set of polymer tools in there, apparently they keep them just for working in this area. He opened everything up about fifteen minutes ago, I haven’t heard him say anything useful since then, just a lot of swearing and talking poo poo about whoever designed this thing.” He nods backwards at the reactor. ”I don’t envy him.” You stand and watch from around the corner, what little you can see, as Wasan is half buried in the wall through an access panel of some sort, the face of which is clearly marked “DANGER, DO NOT OPEN” and is covered with several warning symbols. He is swearing quite a bit, you half think that if you checked his file.... Yep, navy sailor. Got it in one. A few minutes pass, in which you learn several new ways to tell someone off, and Wasan emerges from the danger hole. He is holding a small piece of equipment and looking quite proud of himself. ”Fuckin’ finally, this little bastard was way in there. Whoever designed this thing was brilliant and also a total moron, maintenance access is awful. Anyway, this here is what’s wrong, it’s one of the superconducting modules for the magseal, it quenched and failed at some point. I can see some of the markings where the gas escaped and scored a few things. No other damage, but it’s clear what happened in there. I have several of these in storage, I’ll go grab one and install it, make a quick look around for anything else that seems out of place, and then I’ll start my diagnostics.” Wasan seems to have everything in order, so you head towards the cryobay. As you leave the reactor area you turn your comlink back on and can definitely tell that Wasan has not closed everything up yet.  The cryo controller is ahead and you can see another guard, clearly augmented, standing at the door with his weapon... ready? It’s hard to define positions for weapons that are also part of you. Inside Audun looks much like Wasan did a few minutes ago, buried up to his waist under a computer. You ask him how he’s doing under there. ”Honestly, captain, this headache is awful and to make matters worse, this thing looks fine under here. The panel in the bridge seemed to be fine as well,” he wriggles out from under the panel and stands up, brushing his hair out of the way, ”so if something is actually wrong it’s probably either actually happening to the pods, which I think is unlikely, or there’s a short in the cabling somewhere. I’m going to take a quick look at the connections on the pods in there, Vlad and one of his team are in there now poking around. If that doesn’t get results, well, I guess it’s into the tunnels.” He doesn’t seem like he wants to be in the tunnels at all. The tunnels are the maze of cramped crawlspace for getting to stuff like the miles of cabling that connect various parts of the ship. This could take a while, it seems, but both the bridge panel and the panel here have a clean bill of health. You step into the cryobay and it’s like a different ship. Huge. Cool and dark, the air dry and still. No need to run the heater while everyone is frozen. Catwalks stretch out into the distance, yellow painted safety rails marking the safe from the unsafe. Harsh blue lighting shines from the few lights scattered across the ceiling, somehow managing to be both hard to look at and entirely ineffective at lighting the room. You knew the ship was big, but this seems to go on forever. You walk to one of the rails and lean over, looking down on the floor below where the cryopods rest. Under your feet the cabling for all of them runs through open channels and out into the room, like some sort of copper fractal reaching for all the infinite ends of an elegant design. It is very still. It smells like ozone, brushed steel, and mineral oil. Above you an overhead crane is at rest, painted a brilliant purple and yellow, emblazoned with a hefty “500 TONS” in huge black letters. In the distance you can see some of the larger equipment that you have brought with you as it casts long shadows across the floor, leaving parts of the catwalk in darkness. The floor below you is darker than here, which hardly seems possible. Vlad and one of his officers are in here somewhere. You haven’t seen a flashlight at all, but that doesn’t surprise you, both of them are probably running enhanced EM augmentations. You head for the stairs, painfully aware of how much noise your shoes make on the steel grating that makes up the catwalk and the stairs. Down on the cryo floor everything is claustrophobic and huge. The pods make up walls that pin you in, long rows of them like a hedge to separate you from anywhere else in the ship. You pull up the names of the people in the potentially faulty cryopods and reference it with their pod locations. Your computer is kind enough to provide you with a map, making it much easier and far less ominous now that you know where to go. Tyko Tikkanen. Male, 112 years old. His pod shows no signs of tampering, the cabling looks solid, and it shows no signs of having been opened. Inside is a man of slightly above average height, asleep. You haven’t seen many people in cryosleep, but he seems to be a good example. He’s slumped against the side of the pod. You wonder if you slumped like that as well. Alicja Kusters. Female, 81 years old. Her pod seems fine, and she’s slumped in the same fashion that Tyko was. It looks like maybe the acceleration of the ship has shifted them slightly? You check a few more pods at random on the way to the next one and find that almost everyone is slumped that way. Corey Dildy. Male, 68. Pod checks out, and he’s got the characteristic slump towards the rear of the ship. Laczko Ozor. Mstislav Denisova. Salvör Stefánsdóttir. Bertram Jørgensen. Omar Nasih. Dominic Sutherland. Vanessa Müller. All the pods seem fine, and all with the slump. The pods show everyone’s vitals as steady. Whatever the error, it probably isn’t in here. For the sake of completeness you check on the girl as well, Johanna Klein. Her pod looks fine but you can’t see her through the port. She’s too short to be visible. You strain to look through at an angle and are pretty sure you see the top of her head down there. Just to make sure you double check the vitals on her pod and give it a look over to make sure it doesn’t show signs of having been opened. It seems fine. As you turn to leave you run nearly face first into Vladimir. You still have no idea how he is this quiet. “The bay appears to be free of any malfunctions or awake persons, ourselves aside.” His voice rumbles through the makeshift hallway of the cryopods. 1. Would you like Vlad and his team to check the other bays as well? A – Yes please. Just a cursory check. B – Yes, but a thorough check, much like what you just did. Visual inspection of the pods, matching the description provided with the occupant. C – Yes, but I’m coming with them. D – No, don’t worry about it. The rest of the bays are fine, this is the one with the faulty stuff but it checked out. E – No, I’ll do it myself. You exit the bay with Vlad and see the other officer has moved to stand by a hatch and is looking down. Audun is below him in an access tunnel. Looks like his least favorite option is the only one left. They are discussing if there is enough space for both of them, Audun does not seem convinced, the officer is pretty large though certainly not Vladimir sized. You leave them to it, Vlad leaves the officer he had with him in the bay with them and accompanies you back to the bridge. You find time to have a meal, there is nothing tasty about it but honestly you aren’t hungry, you are eating because you recognize that you need to eat to stay alive. Cryo is pretty rough on your appetite as well, it seems. Otto and Cedric are “playing cards” while you eat, which looks a lot like they each have several concurrent hands of poker on their screen and they are rapidly betting, calling, folding, and dealing simultaneously. They still don’t seem to have moved. Ann is up and about apparently, she isn’t on the bridge. You finish your meal and wait for Ann to return. A few minutes later you notice the intensity of the thrumming that you have become accustomed to drop, and then it vanishes all together. A few minutes after that Ann and Wasan return to the bridge. Ann plugs herself back into the ship without saying anything, but you see her console bring up a number of reactor diagrams and quite a bit of data. She’s clearly simulating something. Probably checking the seal strength based on her modeling and measurements she took at the door after Wasan was done. ”Everything is good to go down there. All the seals are up at 100% and you shouldn’t notice any physical pull or comlink interference.” You send Wasan back to sleep, his task is taken care of and he did a great job. Quick and thorough. He even sent you a quick report via the computer. On a hunch, or maybe just curiosity, you take a look at the cryo records for the officers. Looks like you and Thomas were the last two to go into cryo, and you and Vladimir are the only two officers to have woken up. Three hours later Audun returns to the bridge, looking quite disheveled, like he just crawled through a cramped space for a long ways, potentially with a rather large companion. ”I found the problem. Some lunkhead clipped a cable when they were closing up one of the tunnel access hatches, probably with the latch itself. Not anything big, but enough to let the cable short out to the bulkhead next to it. It was a nice clean scrape so I patched it back up and it should be fine. Is there anything else you need?” He looks exhausted. “No, that’s all, thank you.” You make sure that he gets a hot meal before he heads back to cryo. It seems like everything has worked out pretty well, they turned out to be minor fixes that didn’t take too long and should make life easier for the wardens. If there’s anything else you would like to do, pending the results of question 1, before you head back to cryo let me know.
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Aug 26, 2016 13:23
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Diogines posted:What sort of animals did we bring with us, if any? Do we have any fetuses or bio samples? Do we have what we need to resurrect dead species? Are.... there ever going to be dolphins again? You have tissue samples and genetic data for a number of species native to Earth. You have no idea if any of them will be viable on Tyson-664d, there isn't enough data about what sort of environment you are heading too. Yes, dolphins are among those you have data for even if they are super annoying to talk to. cat_herder posted:As long as we aren't defrosting anyone early, especially kiddos, I don't see a problem with a quick visual and vitals check on the colonists, after that electrical problem. Was the affected wiring strictly for the warning light, or was it for more important use? The affected wiring was essentially shorting out on the bulkhead, causing a dip in the current as some of it went into the metal around it. This meant a lower signal at the bridge panel than the local panel was sending out, which the bridge panel was interpreting as random pods being opened. It may have caused other oddities in the data but the most visibly obvious sign of the issue was the flicker on the status panel. You spent enough time on the bridge that you are confident the flicker is gone. It was happening with a random interval, but you know the average interval and wait 10 of them, which gives you a very high statistical chance of seeing any defects if the rate remained the same. Even if the rate had been cut in half you would still probably have seen it, your computer estimates that you are 99.9% sure it is resolved with the same recurrence rate, and 96.9% sure at half the recurrence rate. Bedia will continue to monitor it, obviously. You are not the only colony ship that left, but you have essentially no way to know if the others have been successful in their efforts. You could very well be the last hope of humanity and it would probably behoove you to behave as such. Diogines posted:Are we actually fleeing the Cylons, the world government just didn't want us to know? FaustianQ has covered most of the other points quite well. Humanity had tried to colonize the moon and mars but neither of those colony efforts ever managed to be self sustaining, they depended upon Earth for resources and were abandoned during the war. A lucky few made it back to Earth to help fight, most died in space, for the moon (and Mars) is a harsh mistress. You are not aware of any cylons, the robots seemed to think the human form was weak and inefficient and over the course of the war became increasingly less human shaped. You are certain that they have been defeated. However the Doctor is missing, presumed to have fled into deep space after his creations went awry. His journal entries are disjointed and several leading psychologists believe he went insane, he talked of needing a tabula rasa, a blank slate on which to begin anew. It is possible, although rather unlikely, that he is still alive in deep space, his madness progressing and his robot warriors amassing an army to return to earth with his answer to whatever grand problem he thought he faced. It's boardgame night, so any update will be later, though this one will probably be shorter than the last two and will include a four year time skip again, moving you closer to "home." You are going to check out the remaining pods, a process that shouldn't take too long. Currently awake and available to participate in the check are you, Vladimir, three members of his security team, and Bedia. Bedia is nominally in charge of the cryogenics and crew health while in transit though the wardens all share duties to double check each other and to provide redundancy. Would you like to go as one big team, bringing everyone, split into pairs, or two trios, or send some people back to sleep and work with a smaller group? Obviously the more groups you have working independently the faster the work will go. If you want to split up, let me know who you would like to go with. Olothreutes fucked around with this message at 02:23 on Aug 27, 2016 |
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Aug 27, 2016 02:17
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Hexenritter posted:Great read so far. Ceramic Shot posted:Off to a great start, Olothreutes! Mexican Deathgasm posted:Also, this is genuinely excellent sci-fi Olothreutes, thanks for running it. Loel posted:ACF, and this is a really good start OP Nettle Soup posted:ACF and yep, this is good so far! Thank you guys. I'm glad you are enjoying it. This is my first venture into fiction writing, unless you count all the bullshitting I did in technical reports as fiction
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Aug 27, 2016 02:44
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vorebane posted:Agreeing with plan Diog and this. I'm not interpreting this as waking her up, just crawling around on top of the pod or whatever so we have visual confirmation she's in good shape. You are not too late! I haven't started to write anything so vote away!
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Aug 27, 2016 02:56
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You let the remaining security personnel and Bedia, who is the warden in charge of crew health and the cryo systems, know that you would like to do a quick walkthrough of the cryobays just to make sure that nothing else is going wrong. Emphasis on quick, we aren’t pulling out any millimeter wave scanners to try to observe people while they sleep. Just look the pods over to make sure there are no obvious issues. Between Vladimir, his officers, Bedia, and yourself there are six people available to do walkthroughs. In the interest of time you decide to split up into pairs to cover the most ground in the least time. Vladimir will be going with the unaugmented officer. Bedia will be going with the officer you saw accompanying Audun earlier. He’s quite large and seems rather friendly really, despite his all-business attitude to the matters at hand. The remaining officer, Victor, will be coming with you. He was with Vlad in the cryobay earlier so you have met before. He seems nice enough but like all of Vlad’s staff he clearly is business first and pleasure later, if there is time. Vlad did a very good job picking his staff, the three you have seen so far today have all been very competent. Each pair will have 13 bays to cover, each containing 200 cryopods and various gear that the colonists in that bay will be responsible for during the planetfall period. Jobs and responsibilities will differentiate further once you are down on the surface of Tyson-664d but that is many years, or a few days, in the future. Depends on how you want to view it. It is certainly many years for Bedia but that is arguably less true for the rest of you. Victor Espinosa was infantry during the war. He lost one of his arms and both of his legs in a robot attack on a convoy. Buried robots ambushed them as they drove, a more terrifying version of a landmine. Even during the tense pre-unification days the various nations of Earth had decided that landmines were unsavory, harming soldiers and civilians indiscriminately and if they weren’t found before the war was over they lingered, deadly specters of a conflict long past. The robots found the idea to be a good one and improved on it by turning the mine into a highly capable killing machine that could tear apart multiple armored vehicles instead of a simple explosive charge. Although explosions did the job pretty well and most of the robots were designed to detonate when they were disabled. Nasty things overall. Victor, despite this, is rather cheery. He thinks that being awoken is simply part of the job description and this beats a robot ambush any day. The exercise is good and he moves with a brisk stride that you have to put some effort into matching. He doesn’t ever outpace you, though, which you are certain is him being polite. Those legs of his could probably propel him the length of the cryobay in a matter of seconds and up to the catwalks above in a single leap. Apparently he also has the ability to scan for magnetic fields in the area around him, which enables him to find buried or hidden metal. Like a robot waiting in ambush. At the quick pace set by Victor the pair of you cover lots of ground and there do not appear to be any issues in the first cryobay. Victor’s magnetic sensors can apparently check the current applied to each pod so he is monitoring them for any fluctuation. ”Captain, if I may, what do you think we’ll find on Tyson?” His slight accent marks his as being from some portion of Central America. “Really, Victor, I have no idea. The scientists on Earth were confident that the data they gave us was solid, and that the planet is notionally habitable. I won’t claim special knowledge of anything there, but the planet is bigger than Earth and farther away from the star. The star is larger and brighter than Sol is, and it burns hotter. I’m told that the UV radiation could be much more intense than on Earth. Or maybe not if the atmosphere is thick enough. I’m not familiar with enough with the mechanics but they said that a decent atmosphere would help to protect us from higher energy photons through a process called Rayleigh scattering.” You pull up a quick briefing from your computer on the process. “According to my data, Rayleigh scattering is a process by which photons elastically collide with atoms. They don’t change energy, only direction. It’s apparently more effective the higher the photon energy until you reach the point where photons begin to collide inelastically. So a thick atmosphere will help to scatter the UV away from the surface of the planet. Apparently this is the same process that makes the sky on Earth blue.” ”Is that all we know?” He asks, a hint of concern in his voice. “No, we have a lot more data than just that, thankfully. We know that based on there being no atmosphere and perfect absorption of all the solar energy it should be colder than Earth, but this doesn’t tell us the actual temperature of the planet because the atmosphere will retain some heat. We can’t say how much. It should have pretty normal gravity, maybe a bit higher than Earth’s. Your legs could be pretty handy.” He looks a bit proud as you say that, finding benefit in his new life based on misfortune in his previous one. “And we know it has one moon, smaller than Earth’s. They don’t expect there to be much tidal influence from it, so sea level should be pretty constant around the planet. Beyond that we don’t know a huge amount, but that’s enough to make a pretty good decision. There’s oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere, it should be able to support liquid water if the temperatures are high enough. That was one of the big things I asked about, finding a maybe breathable atmosphere. If we get lucky maybe we won’t have to wear helmets. I’m keeping my fingers crossed on that one. We left a planet with a ruined atmosphere, arriving to a clean one should give everyone a good morale boost. We’re going to have to bust our asses to make this work, no doubt about it. But if we can bust our asses without a sweaty helmet on that would be pretty nice.” He seems pretty satisfied with your answer. You know a fair bit about the planet and you have realistic expectations of the crew and the planet, as well as having shown some good judgment about how you selected a planet. You even have some hopeful optimism for the comfort of your crew. He gives a good nod as you finish, looking confident. You feel pretty good about this discussion, coming away with the impression that he’s more than satisfied with your abilities as captain and the steward of so many lives. You move on to the fourth bay, making good time. A quick radio check-in with the other teams show that they are also making good time, and no one has found anything of concern. In the fifth bay you and Victor decide to check out some of the equipment at the far end of the bay. This bay appears to have some massive land crawlers, with wide tires that should be able to handle many types of terrain and high clearance to get over obstacles. They are impressive, quiet mammoths asleep in the dark of the bay. When you arrive they will wake and lumber across the land, carrying your colonists and supplies like the pack animals in old stories. The crawlers look fine, you aren’t sure that anything but the massive crane overhead could move them against their will. Fine pieces of engineering they are, and they should be able to weather any storm your new home can throw at you.  The rest of the survey goes pretty quick and after a few hours all three teams are done. You reconvene in the conference room attached to the bridge. No one found anything out of place, the ship appears to be safe and secure. You make sure that everyone has a meal and takes their meds before returning to cryo and thank Bedia for all her help today. She’s done a good job. You ask her to have a written report ready for next time if anything happens while you are asleep, that way you can read it while you guys go for a walk instead of her having to explain something she potentially isn’t as familiar with as the other wardens. Just a quick summary of everyone’s notes for the interesting things. She nods. And with that you tell everyone they did a great job today, you’ll see them in several years. Smiles all around, and Bedia wishes you all sweet dreams as you return to your cryo pods. Year 8 AD, colony ship Absolution: You are running on a new planet, howling winds and fierce storms chasing you across a blasted and barren plain. The white star in the sky is obscured by clouds of toxic gasses, your environment suit struggling to filter them from your air as you search for the crawler. You were sure it was around here somewhere, but all the static electricity is messing with your comlink and you can’t reach anyone. Lightning strikes near you, the sudden energy and heat causing parts of the atmosphere to react with others, a literal trail of fire into the sky. White vapor wafts from the pillar of flame, settling on and melting anything it touches. You start to run faster. The lightning continues to fall from the heavens as if you had angered some vengeful deity from ancient days. The hab is gone, the crawler is your only salvation from this hellscape. Where is it!? Your pod chamber hisses and clicks open. What the hell was that dream about? That was horrific, almost as horrific as this headache. Was it this bad last time as well? You recall it being pretty bad as you stumble towards your desk, where you placed a bottle of water and your meds before you went to sleep. You collapse into the chair and choke down the pills and the whole bottle of water. Your head is spinning and you reach for the waste basket you put here just in case. You retch, but manage to keep everything down. It helps that there isn’t much to keep down anyway, but the pills don’t taste great going down and you don’t want to try the other direction. It takes you nearly half an hour before you are ready to head for the bridge. You check your messages on the computer and find that Bedia has indeed compiled a report for you with the major events of the past four years. It seems like nothing major happened at all. Your fuel consumption is on target, maybe even a fraction better than expected. The magseals around the reactor are holding and the interference is nonexistent. The cryopanel hasn’t flickered at all in the past four years, Audun did a bang up job on the repair. You make a note to commend him when he wakes up, hopefully many years from now. In the absence of any major issues demanding your attention you decide to take a walk rather than head to the bridge immediately. You swing by the reactor area, as you get within 20 feet of the door your comlink begins to pick up the interference. 5.2 hertz, same as last time. Good. You silently thank whomever designed that magnetic monster, it is powering you through the inky blackness of space with a reassuring level of constancy. That little bit of curiosity sated you decide to go look at the stars. You saw them last time with Bedia and it was truly magnificent. A view that no one other than you and she will ever have, the only humans ever to look at the stars from that point in space. And you suspect that no human ever will again. The same will be true this time, where you stand is a unique point in an infinite universe and you want to make sure at least someone remembers what it looks like. As you approach the viewport you hear a giggle. What the hell? You slow your pace and try to do your best to imitate Vladimir’s incomprehensible stealth. You edge around the corner and see Bedia and Cedric, sitting and looking at the stars, holding hands. You decide to head to the bridge, a smile on your face. Bedia wasn’t so wrong about Cedric after all. Otto and Ann are on the bridge as usual, both plugged into their stations and ship diagnostics running. Data flies past the screen at a rate you could not hope to read, but there are no red lights and no sirens so you are pretty sure everything is fine. You ask Otto how things are going, he startles a bit but not too badly. ”Very well captain. The last cryo interval has been quiet. We have had no major issues. Minor issues have all been easily corrected.” He is polite, but succinct. Rather than discuss the minor issues with you he forwards a copy of a log to you, a list of the minor issues. Radiation spike in an unoccupied part of the ship, external sensors show it was a small burst of HZE particles. Spikes like this are expected, you simply can’t shield against them 100% of the time and they are a known issue in space travel. They are one reason you take the meds that you do, to help repair any damage that these radiation events might cause. Early astronauts used to see them as flashes in their eyes as the particle traversed their retina. The damage they caused wasn’t known at the time. There is a list of minor events like this, routine things that scientists projected would happen in interstellar space. The wardens have responded by the book and thankfully everything has gone by the book as well. You are about halfway through the list when Bedia and Cedric return to the bridge. You turn to look at them and out of the corner of your eye you think you see a bit of... jealousy cross Otto’s face? Amusement maybe? It’s gone as fast as it appeared and the data continues to flow past on his screen. ”Oh, Captain! How are you? Did you have a better time waking up?” Bedia is all smiles and seems very chipper. Cedric seems to be avoiding eye contact with you as he heads to his station but you can see that he has a barely repressed smile as well. You tell Bedia that waking up was about the same, a small lie but you don’t want to put a damper on her enthusiasm. You do tell her that you had some vivid dreams this time. Very strange ones, or maybe not so strange considering that in a few days subjective time you will be setting foot on a new planet. You hope that your dream is not a portent of things to come. You spend a few hours on the bridge and hold a quick informal meeting with the wardens just to get their general impression of the trip so far and the ship integrity. They are all in agreement that the trip is going well, and that the issues you addressed last time have not cropped back up, for which they are thankful. The ship is holding up well, you have encountered less radiation than was feared, but the projections included some error bars and you are within them, so basically right on target? Well this was pretty easy, which is encouraging. Your headache hasn’t even faded all the way as you head back to cryo. You hope that you won’t wake up with an extra bad headache because of this. You remember to put out your meds and a few bottles of water for next time, within easy stumbling distance. After a bit of deep breathing you step into the pod, another four years set to fly by in a blink. Year 12 AD, colony ship Absolution: Your platform groans under the colossal force of the tides, the giant pylons gripping the ocean floor far below. They are built of the same materials as the space elevator you used to bring everything down here and you hope that they are enough. When you arrived to find no usable land, indeed no land at all on this world, you needed to make a decision. Surface, or ocean floor? You had considered the ocean floor first, as it provided you with a measure of safety from the tides and the hurricanes. But the gravity here is too high, and the pressures too great to safely construct anything down there. You lost more material than you wanted down below to the crushing depths. And more men than you could really afford. Your surface platforms are robust but the tides here are unlike anything you’ve ever even dreamed of. You lost two of them in the first year as the pylons that supported them gave way, the strong gravity pulling the platforms and their occupants swiftly below. You toyed with the idea of ROVs to try and recover the materials but decided against it as throwing good material after bad, the ocean depths swallowed nearly everything you put down there. Only the space elevator materials had survived so far, and even those groaned as you lived atop them. You evacuated the water from the central pylon so you could begin to dig and replace the resources you had lost. The bottom was just ice, frozen by the crushing pressures, solid even at room temperature. There was no metal to be recovered down there, and in the cold your hopes froze as solid as the water beneath you. Your head feels like it is in a vice. The cryopod hasn’t even opened yet and you can tell this is going to be worse than the last time. You trip as you step out of the pod, crumbling to the floor. In the haze of the worst migraine you have ever experienced you wish you had gotten a pain shunt installed. Maybe you could live with this then. You feel your diaphragm spasm and you vomit, but you skipped having a meal last time so there is nothing there. A small part of you is happy that you are not going to choke and die on your own vomit, laying on the floor of your cabin. 45 minutes later you are up and about, having drunk both bottles of water. You hold off taking the meds until you are sure they will stay down. Your head in your hands you pull some data from the computer about the long term effects of cryocycling. There is essentially no data. You write a few journal entries for the sake of science, you are a pioneer. You smile grimly at the thought, hopefully no one else would ever need to experience this. You read about how things are metabolized while in cryo, or not metabolized. Before you go back to bed this time you are going to take some painkillers and anti-nausea meds. They should still be in your system when you wake and you hope that they will help. If this continues to get worse you think you might die one of these times, this much pain can’t be good for a person. Ok that bit about dying is probably hyperbolic, but it might be worth talking to the doctor about, although waking him might mean that his next time is even worse as well. First order of business, you head for the medbay. You rummage about and find some painkillers and anti-nausea pills, you take some of the painkillers and pocket the rest. You sit down and take your vitals, making a note in your personal file of your experiences and the data your vitals provide. The meds begin to take effect as you do this, so you finish up and head for the bridge. Your blood pressure is higher than normal, as is your heart rate. You enter the bridge and all four of the wardens are at their stations. There is an air of tension that wasn’t present the last time you were here. You note that Cedric and Ann have traded stations, putting Cedric as far from Bedia as possible. ”Captain. Hello.” Bedia smiles, but it looks a bit forced. You check and find that you have a report waiting for you, you hadn’t read it while you struggled with the headache. ”Let’s go on a quick walk.” She rises and heads for the door before you can respond. The pair of you walk silently towards the reactor. You pass the mag seals and head a bit further into some of the other machinery that helps to make the power from the reactor usable for the ship. It is a large room, not so large as the cryobays, but substantially more occupied. There are massive metal pipes and other devices you don’t recognize running all over the place, it is a warren of noise and heat. Bedia shouts to be heard over the noise, ”Something is wrong in here, but we don’t know what. Our fuel use is on target, so the reactor is working normally, but we’re getting some power fluctuations. We would have woken you early but it only started 8 hours ago.” poo poo. This is not what you wanted to deal with right now. The noise is not helping your headache at all, which is barely being held at bay by the painkillers you took. You check your comlink and the reactor is continuing to pulse away at 5.2 hertz. Good. One less thing to worry about. How did you notice it? ”The power dipped to the drives a bit. Not enough to affect our speed or acceleration, but enough to trip an alarm. It hasn’t happened again, but we figured that you would want to check it out. Otto came down to check with me and see if it was something simple, but we couldn’t find anything.” 1. Well gently caress. Time to wake some people up. Who? A – Your head engineer, Tubal Abeyta. B – Vladimir. C – Your head science officer, Dr. Silvia Pagnotto D – Your first officer, Thomas. E – Audun, the poor engineer you woke to deal with the cryo problem. F – Wasan, the poor engineer you woke to deal with the magseal problem. G – Another engineer or engineers. Chances are Tubal will wake several if you wake him, he will probably want a team on this. H – No one, it's fine. Everything is fine. This is fine. I – Someone else. Specify. Olothreutes fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Aug 28, 2016 |
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Aug 28, 2016 03:35
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Tagichatn posted:I vote A. Presumably the head engineer will know who to wake to deal with the problem. Also we avoid waking the two previous engineers, sounds like they wouldn't want this headache. Given the recovery time of both of the engineers, they may have already had it. garland336 posted:Nice CYOA you have here. My kind of speed. I have no idea what the Berserker books are, so you might be off the hook there? I'm working on the update, slowly, voting is not yet closed but there is a pretty solid trend shaping up. This week is insane, I've had E: Ok, the cover of the first Berserker novel is super 70's sci-fi and I love that stuff. Boris Vallejo is legit awesome, although GIS for his name is decidedly 
Olothreutes fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Sep 1, 2016 |
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Sep 1, 2016 02:27
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FaustianQ posted:I don't know of anything that has moving parts that's meant to run continuously for 22+ years without significant maintenance, and the engine is clearly a moving parts bonanza based on the description. It's a mechanical wonder it hasn't just exploded yet when a bearing or something blew. The actual reactor itself has no moving "parts." The whole thing is mostly self contained and is just a swirling pool of molten metal, stirred by magnetic fields and compressed by the same. The plasma injectors are also magnetic because otherwise it's hard to do anything with plasma at all. There are some lasers for preheating the plasma, but those don't really have moving parts either. Now, the systems that convert reactor energy to a usable form probably have moving parts, there are ways to get a direct conversion cycle going so that you can beat the Carnot efficiency of a steam cycle, but that requires you to have most/all of your fusion products be charged (not neutrons). This is doable, aneutronic fusion is a thing that we are aware of and can do right now, we just can't get energy out of it. But assuming that you can, you could direct your fusion products out the weak end of a magnetic mirror/bottle and pass them through an induced magnetic field where they would curve and dump their energy into your collector as electric energy. It's been a few years since I took my fusion class but I recall the upper limits on the efficiency of a setup like this being ~85%, theoretically 100%, where steam cycles are super happy if they can get to 40%. It just takes A) some form of aneutronic fusion that actually works, and B) a huge area in which to have your collector. Seriously, it would need to be several hundred meters long and have an arc of something like 20 degrees, which means an the end it is also several hundred meters across. It is definitely not a compact system when you place it within the constraints of reality. Olothreutes fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Sep 2, 2016 |
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Sep 2, 2016 01:33
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FaustianQ posted:Originally sounded like there was moving parts, sorry about that. In this instance the heat is going into a few different places. One is to keep the metal molten, while you can get some metals to be liquid at room temperatures (mercury) the metals in the reactor would probably solidify if things went too badly. The nice thing is that metals have a lot of thermal inertia so it would remain liquid for a while. You can also dump waste heat into keeping the ship interior at livable temperatures, because the wardens are awake the whole time and probably don't want to wander around the ship to do checks on things if they have to wear a space suit to do it. Also the ship is legitimately huge, and has correspondingly huge surface area for radiating heat into space. Yes, radiative heat transfer is bad but you have lots of area to radiate from. The background temperature of space is something like 2.55 kelvin, I think. This might not be quite accurate but I think that's the temperature of the cosmic microwave background. Not Alex posted:Maybe http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Laser_Heat_Sink? Those are the best. Of course the Falcons made them.
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Sep 2, 2016 22:59
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The power conversion system might be having a problem, the power issue at the drives as an indicator is pretty strong. Maybe the drives are broken, though? Whatever the case is there, you most assuredly have a problem on the bridge. You inform Bedia that you’re going to wake an engineer, not one of the same ones that you woke last time though. If your experiences are any sort of measure repeated cryocycles get progressively harder for the body to deal with. You briefly toy with the idea of passing the next shift off to Thomas or Vladimir. The computer provides the records of the engineers to you and you select one that has some experience with systems similar to the power conversion system onboard the ship. While you walk to the cryobay that contains your chosen engineer, August Jensen, you talk with Bedia. “So, how have things been, this power issue aside?” ”Oh, things have been fine. The ship has been running great, this issue only showed up today.” “And how are you guys holding up? 12 years is a long time to spend with just three other people, and a fourth that wakes up once every four years with a really bad headache.” You try to make the last bit humorous, but she doesn’t seem to be in the mood for humor. ”We’re doing fine, I guess. We all get our work done.” She does not sound particularly enthused, but the report you looked at briefly does seem to be complete and includes input from all four wardens. Whoever wrote it clearly talked to the others or at least read their notes. “Look, there isn’t a way to say this that isn’t awkward, but I can’t have you guys throwing things at one another. The four of you are here to watch over the rest of us, all 8,000 of us, and make sure that nothing goes too wrong. Some of that might mean working together closely. We’ve been lucky so far in that nothing major has gone wrong with the ship. I’m confident in the skill of the people that built this ship, but skill doesn’t mean that a thing can work for decades without needing some help. You four are that help in most cases.” ”I know, Captain. We’re fine, really. Cedric and I, well, we dated for a bit but it didn’t work out. We knew that was a possibility. Hell, it’s probably certain it would have happened. I’ve never dated anyone before,” you do recall her being rather young, “during the war everyone was too busy fighting to stay alive to really worry about some kid. I promise it won’t affect the ship. None of us would let that happen.” You are about to thank Bedia for being open with you about the issue, and suggest that you can have someone with professional skills for this sort of thing woken up to help them, when the lights go out. You walked around the corner, as usual the lights came on as you were detected in the hallway, and then they all just turned off. It’s oddly silent. You can hear Bedia next to you, breathing, but you can’t see her. Your comlink hasn’t been able to check on the reactor since the magseal was repaired eight years ago or you would check for it. ”Captain?” Bedia sounds very nervous, and seems to be fumbling with something. Her datapad, maybe? You coerce your comlink into spitting a burst of low energy EM radiation into the area. The returning signals are picked up by your receiver as they scatter back towards you. Your computer analyzes the timing on the various waves and their directionality and draws you a simple but effective picture of the area. Everything “looks” normal through the radar, but something clearly is going wrong. A beam of light lances forward from the flashlight that Bedia was apparently just fumbling for. You tell Bedia to wake the engineer, August, and hand her a bunch of the pain killers and anti-nausea meds you had in your pocket. You need him up and running ASAP. And then you run. The lights are still off as you make for the reactor area. Navigating by radar isn’t so hard once you get used to it and you are drat glad that you volunteered for this experimental upgrade. On the way you start querying the computer for the status of various systems. The reactor is reported at 100% function. Cryo is still at 100%. Some of the various minor systems, like the lighting, are offline. The drives are at 71% power, which is not great but also they aren’t off. This far into the journey they aren’t running that much anyway. There’s basically no drag in space so you just keep going at whatever velocity you have. You reach the reactor area and find that everything is fine, at least with the reactor, but the lights remain off. Stepping into the room that houses the conversion system you don’t register any immediately apparent issues. If you were hoping for a big sparking mess to tip you off it isn’t here. ”Captain!” You recognize the voice on your comlink as Ann, the warden in charge of the reactor systems. ”Where are you?” You tell her that you are in the conversion system area, looking for any problems that might be apparent. In the dark, with only radar to guide you. Your background in genetic engineering isn't likely to be much help here. ”Is the reactor ok?” She sounds genuinely worried. You tell her it is fine, and that Bedia is waking an engineer to come work on this. Would you like to wake anyone else? Given the new info I figured you guys would have some input.
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Sep 2, 2016 23:34
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Outrail posted:Why can't we save transit time and use an aerobraking manoeuvre to decelerate from 0.4c after we hit atmosphere? Probably because you would die. Cannon_Fodder posted:Can we get readings of the planet/system/nebula etc we're approaching? Do we have those instruments? You aren't quite close enough yet to get better readings than the scientists did from earth. You are closer, yes, but they had more time and better equipment. The Tyson telescope was constructed specifically for planet finding for your mission (and the other colony ships). You did account for known gravity issues on the way. Asta is quite good at her job. Despite what modern Sci-Fi tells us, micro meteorites are quite rare in reality and the ship is not expected to have any issues with them. There have been no changes to internal ship pressure and you don't expect any. Radiation IS an issue in interstellar space (just outer space in general, even close to Earth) and one that the ship is designed to help mitigate. The hull is complicated layer of many materials, both heavy and light, dense and really dense. If you want I can describe it, but for the most part you can just assume that it is designed to stop high energy photons and charged particles like electrons and protons, or at least mitigate them. Because of the statistical nature of radiation interaction and the energies involved there is no way to shield you from 100% of the radiation. This is being partially mitigated by medication for the crew, anti-oxidants that will help to absorb free electrons (radicals, if you want to use hippy-speak) that are produced by radiation interactions in the body. They aren't 100% sure that this will solve the issue, and there may be cognitive effects like reduced critical thinking and reasoning abilities (both seem pretty vital when landing on a new planet), but they should be minor. I'm not dead, just wedding junk. I'm going to try and get an update out tonight but it might have to wait until tomorrow. Olothreutes fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Sep 6, 2016 |
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Sep 6, 2016 23:50
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You head for the officer’s quarters. This seems like a serious enough issue that you should get your head engineer, Tubal Abeyta, out of cryo to handle it. On the way up you grab a flashlight and swing by the medbay and grab some more pain killers and anti-nausea meds for yourself and for Tubal. You get the cryopod in his cabin open and he steps out, almost immediately talking. ”Holy hell captain, this headache is truly awful. Is it this bad for everyone?” He’s sitting on his bed now, having gratefully accepted your gifts of water and meds. He turns down the anti-nausea meds, apparently he isn’t having any nausea issues. You tell him that it seems to get worse the more often you do it. ”Huh. Well then. I don’t envy you, I have to say. That sounds like a rough deal. So, uh, I can’t help but notice that we’re in the dark and you have a flashlight. Which is probably why I’m awake, yeah?” He doesn’t seem to be up for moving, but he’s clearly ready to handle some business. You fill him in on the issue, where you think it is, and the timeline that the wardens gave you. You are certain that he’s pulling diagnostic data as well, you have the distinct impression that you are one of several sources he’s getting information from right now. You tell him that Bedia is waking August Jensen as well. ”Good, good. He’s a solid engineer. Did some neat work on direct conversion stuff before the war even if they never got the space requirements below a football field. Have him meet me in the conversion area, I’m going to go grab some tools and get to work. No sense waiting for this headache to go away fully, I guess. Does it go away fully?” If you could see his eyes you suspect he’d be raising his eyebrows at you. You tell him it does fade with time, although you did go back to cryo with the lingering portions of it last time. Maybe that was why you woke up so much worse for wear this time? Tubal heads off into the darkness, apparently not needing a flashlight to navigate. You head down to check in on August and Bedia. August is not doing fantastic, but is up and about. The meds you sent with Bedia were a good idea, she says that he seemed to be in pretty rough shape. You let them know that Tubal is up and he’s headed to work. August looks happy to know that someone else is awake to work on the issue as well, and mumbles something about getting to work as he leaves the room. You briefly think about waking Vladimir but decide against it, this doesn’t seem like his sort of emergency and you’d rather have him fresh (or fresh as can be) if you do need him for something. You swing by the bridge quickly to let the other wardens in on the plan. That done, you head for the reactor area to see how the engineers are doing. As you enter the conversion system area you can see that they are on opposite ends of the room, August with a flashlight that he is swinging around to look at various equipment. Tubal notices you and beckons you over, ”Hey captain! So a bunch of the systems that are down are linked, they get power from the same part of the distribution system. August is taking a look to see if there are any issues with it but that wouldn’t explain the drives so I’m going to keep looking. If I find something that I can’t just fix I’ll let you know.” You manage to track down Bedia, and although she looks nervous at first, you talk to her about your issues with cryo. As the warden who is in charge of crew welfare you think it’s only fair to inform her that it would seem repeated waking cycles of cryosleep get progressively harder to deal with. ”Wow. That doesn’t sound like fun. You did really well the first time so I hoped that it wasn’t as bad as the literature said it would be. I guess the others have been exhibiting the expected response, though. It’s interesting that it gets worse. I wonder what could be causing that?” She has a look of deep thought on her face. This seems like a real puzzle, and one that she has an interest in. ”Well, I’m not a medical doctor, or a cryo scientist, but I do think the whole process is fascinating. I’ll do some research on the mechanics of it and see if I can figure out what might be happening.” You let her know about your plan to go back into cryo with some anti-nausea and analgesic drugs in your system, and some of your other ideas. You have considered letting Thomas take the next wakeup cycle, or staying awake for several days this time to see if you can “reset” the whole process. ”Those could all help. Or not. I’ll do some research and let you know what I find.” She looks quite serious, you are her responsibility after all. It’s about three hours later when you get a message from Tubal, asking you to come down to the reactor area. As you arrive you see both him and August looking at something on a datapad. ”Oh, thanks for coming down captain,” Tubal raises his head briefly as he notices you, ”So we think we’ve found the problem, and we can fix it, but it comes with a bit of a catch.” You don’t like the sound of that. ”In order to get things into a safe configuration so that we can replace stuff, we have a few options, and I’d want your permission do to any of them. We’ll need to either shut down the transfer system entirely, basically leaving us dead in the water until the repair is complete, or we’ll have to try and route the power for the whole ship through the cryo system distributor. That should work, but the cryo distributor isn’t rated to handle the sort of load that the drives need. The repair should take about 20 minutes if we shut everything down, or probably closer to an hour if we decide to try and push power through the cryo system.” Do you let Tubal: A: Cut power to the whole ship for about 20 minutes. B: Route power through the cryo system for about an hour. This keeps the ship running, but is beyond the design load of the cryo distribution system. C: Something else.
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Sep 8, 2016 11:04
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I'm going to try and get to all the questions, if I miss yours let me know. Option A means turning off power to the ship from the reactor. The primary output would be isolated so they can work on it, and a few of the minor systems attached. The cryopods themselves have internal batteries and will go into "emergency mode" where they self regulate. The cryo controllers will be offline, along with diagnostics, drives, sensors, etc. You won't be waking 7,997 people up for this one. Assuming that everything goes smoothly Tubal and August will restore power in about 20 minutes. Option B means trying to push power to vital systems, the non-vital ones won't be powered to reduce load, through a bypass into the cryo distributor, and then back to the rest of the ship through another bypass. Setting the bypass up will take some time. The cryo distributor isn't designed to handle this sort of load, it's only rated to handle the cryo units. The cryo units are the second largest draw on the reactor, though, after the engines. As an engineer you know that systems are often rated below what they are actually capable of, it's common practice to engineer in a safety margin. You don't know how large the safety margin of the cryo distributor is, though. Once the bypass is set up the work should take about the same amount of time, and then they have to switch the load back over, the whole process should include about an hour where the cryo system is handling extra load. Worst case scenarios? The repairs take longer than expected and either the ship is without power for longer than 20 minutes, or the cryo distributor fails under the load, which will mean additional repairs and possible damage to things downstream of the cryo distributor, though that's unlikely. You can probably bypass power for just the cryo units through the cryo system, leaving the controllers powered, while doing the work. This is hybrid A/B, which I'll edit in as C. Really the only difference between this and option A is that the cryo units won't go to battery power, and the controllers will stay on line. Sorry, it was late when I posted the update. As an unrelated aside: If you get a wedding invite, please RSVP as soon as you can. It isn't hard, and it makes life far less difficult for the couple. Also, if you get an invite and someone else isn't named on it, do not take it upon yourself to invite them. Anyone over 18 will get their own invite, if they don't they aren't invited, sorry. Do not, under any circumstances, think that your invite includes your adult children and their spouses and children. That is not how invites work.  
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Sep 8, 2016 22:59
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John Lee posted:I'm from the southern USA, and invites don't work like that down here. All formal invitations are at least assumed to be "and also another person if'n ya feel like it." I mean, except for exceedingly private functions, like an orgy, I guess. But every time I've thought that a function was limited to only the people/person on the invitation, I've been wrong. Usually it will be clearly indicated if you can bring another person, you'll get something addressed to Mr. Forums User John Lee and Guest. If that bit about the guest isn't there, they aren't invited. Depending on how formal you want to be when sending invites you can address the outer envelope well enough to get it there, like Mr. Forums User John Lee, and then have an inner envelope that details the invitees, something like "John Lee, Mrs Lee, and family" if you have young children. If you have two boys that are between 16 and 18 (yes this gets crazy specific) it would be "John Lee, Mrs Lee, and the Messrs Lee." Few people go that far, and even inner envelopes are falling out of practice these days. Usually a +1 for a wedding is reserved for someone that won't know anyone else at the reception so they can have someone to socialize with, or a significant other that you don't know very well but they've been together for more than a year. Holy poo poo why do I know all this? The cryopod batteries will last for about a day, maybe two. They are all topped off, this is one of the things that your cryo controllers keep track of. The developers probably thought the ship being without power for longer than a day or two was a death sentence anyway. Tubal says "Yeah, I'm confident that we can get everything back up and running quickly if we just shut it off at the reactor. I'd prefer this option out of the two of them, but honestly I don't like either of them very much. I like both of them better than just doing nothing and letting things continue to fail, though."
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Sep 9, 2016 02:22
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Ok, I'm closing voting. Hopefully an update tonight. Maybe early tomorrow morning, depending on time zones.
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Sep 13, 2016 01:29
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You let Tubal know that you think shutting the power down to the ship is a better idea. The cryopods have internal batteries that will carry them through the down time in a self-regulating “emergency mode.” You much prefer this to overloading the cryo distributor and potentially damaging it or some of the downline components. You let the wardens know what is going to happen, the repairs and the ship being without power for about 20 minutes. Tubal and August spend about an hour getting everything lined up, the spare parts they need to make the repairs and all the tools are laid out on the ground. Tubal has a big white sheet of plastic he’s laid everything down on in a very orderly fashion, and has traced the tools and parts with a big marker and labeled all of them. He’s also drawn extra boxes for all of the parts that he expects to remove. August has a similar sheet, his own tools and parts traced and labeled and areas marked out for removed parts. The two of them go over the procedure in detail a few times. They are clearly pretty well prepared. Tubal talks to August about a few things he thinks they might encounter that are “off the script” as it were. When he is satisfied that both of them are clear on the procedure and can handle any surprises he turns to you. ”Alright captain. While the power is off we’ll basically be dead in the water. Well, not water, but you get what I mean. Ready?” You nod, ready as you can be. ”Here we go.” And with that, Tubal cuts power to the ship. It is quiet. Extremely quiet. The ship itself is pretty silent under normal circumstances, or at least you thought so. With the power off all manner of systems that would normally be operating are not. You weren’t aware of the extent that you had habituated to all those noises but their sudden absence is jarring. If you hadn’t just approved this very scenario it would probably be your worst fear outside of a major hull breech. Your ship is floating through interstellar space at an incredible speed, completely dark. With the drives unpowered there is no acceleration, and all apparent gravity disappears. There hadn’t been much gravity before, but it was enough that you are noticing its absence. The only sound is the subtle pulsing of the reactor on the other side of the wall and its many buffering layers. Almost immediately you hear both Tubal and August get to work. ”Ok, August, remove the main coupling housing.” ”Removing main coupling housing, Aye.” August replies. The next 23 minutes are the tensest you’ve had in... well in about 15 years. 12 years aboard the ship, mostly asleep, and the years prior after the war ended. You stand and watch as Tubal and August move through the repair, seemingly flawlessly. They move quickly but never seem rushed, the call and response of steps is regular, the tools taken and replaced on their outlines. ”All set,” Tubal says as he prepares to restore power to the ship, ”Here we go.” Power returns to the ship, each system rebooting itself. You catch yourself holding your breath as you wait. The gravity slowly returns as the drives power on, a comforting physical confirmation that they are working. You exhale slowly, relaxing a bit. This seems to have gone pretty well. The lights come on a few moments later, and a bit later you hear the air handlers come online. All this noise, the subtlety of it and how it reminds you the ship is working well is a stark contrast to the eerie silence of the past third of an hour. ”Captain,” Ana’s voice over your comlink is suddenly booming, drowning out all the other noises you had just become aware of, ”The computers up here are back online. I’m going to start with astrodynamics, make sure we didn’t drift off course during the outage.” ”I’m starting a walkthrough of the cryo controllers now.” Bedia adds, your comlink layering the two of them on top of one another. Your connection to the ship computer is back up, and you check the status of the various ship systems. Everything is showing green, and power seems to be restored to all the systems that had previously been unpowered. Tubal and August are packing everything up, tracking down the few bits and tools that floated away while you were in zero G. ”Well, I don’t think that could have gone better than it did. Let’s hope we never have to do that again.” Tubal looks pretty satisfied with himself, and he claps August on the back in a friendly sort of way, ”Fantastic work, Jensen. We’re fortunate to have you aboard with us.” August looks similarly pleased with himself, and you compliment the both of them on their performance today. This could have gone a lot worse, but they were thoughtful and thorough during the whole process and handled it like true professionals. You think about it for a moment and then tell each of them they can have a meal if they’d like, but you’d prefer if they stayed awake until their headache is fully gone before they return to cryosleep. They can do whatever they’d like, take a walk, read. You are going to go look at the stars, because they will never look this way to another human ever again. You also recommend taking some painkillers before going into cryo, because it should help based on your reading. Bedia is working on getting more info about the effects of cryosleep compiled, but the literature available isn’t much and she hasn’t had more than a few hours yet since she decided she’d do a literature review for you. August says he’s going to go for a good long walk. He appreciates good engineering and the ship is a fine example. Tubal looks thoughtful for a moment and then says ”I think I’ll join you for a bit, Captain. A unique opportunity is one well taken.” He looks satisfied with today in full. It’s been a pretty wild few hours that he’s been awake, things are finally calm enough for him to not be 100% focused on the job at hand. You both head for the observation area. Along the way you pass Bedia as she scurries from one controller to the next. You’ve never seen her when she isn’t strolling through the ship beside you, she really does move pretty quickly when she’s on her own. Combined with how she seems to bounce from ladder to ladder she does really seem to scurry. The observation area is quiet, but not too quiet, and the stars are noticeably different from the last time you were here. There are bright stars that you don’t remember ever having seen. Pulling the astronomical data you find that these stars weren’t ever visible to the eye from Earth, they were just too faint and too far away. Out here in deep space they are quite bright. Several of them are a hard white light, reminding you of your destination star, but the majority are red stars. Red stars, M type, are the most numerous stars in the galaxy but they are so dim that you don’t really ever see them from Earth, and so all these are new to you. Human eyes have never gazed directly upon these stars and likely never will again. You certainly might pick them up with telescopes in the future if you choose to look back towards Earth, but for now you can simply stare at them. Tubal stands with you for a while, the longest you’ve ever seen him be silent. It doesn’t last forever, though, he turns his head toward you eventually, ”Hey, Captain,” It’s odd to hear him use your title instead of your name, you two are old friends from the war, but he’s always been one for technicality, ”This planet we’re headed to, Tyson-664d. What do we know about it?” Tubal was busy in the final days making sure the ship was ready to go, so he didn’t have much of a chance to sit in on the planet selection stuff. You tell him about the star, Tyson-664, a large ‘A’ type star. Blue white, it burns hotter than sol by a large margin and has a harder emission spectrum.  ”Blue/white, huh? That’s going to be a hell of a thing to live with. I mean, I understand that the solar flux might be nearly the same as on earth, but with lower infrared and higher UV we could be looking at someplace cold with nasty sunburns. Solar panels should do pretty well, though, more energy per photon to pick up. I’m not sure than any of our flora or fauna will survive unprotected though, maybe with some ‘help.’” He nods at you, knowing about your work as a genetic engineer. ”What’s the atmosphere like?” You tell him about the planet itself, larger than Earth, more massive, gravity should be pretty close to Earth normal. The atmospheric data shows nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon with trace other gasses. It has a small moon. ”Huh. Well, Earth normal gravity is pretty nice. That atmospheric data, though, that’s interesting. Gaseous elemental carbon isn’t really a thing, so it must be bound to stuff. No hydrogen in the data?” You shake your head, no hydrogen, ”Well, that rules out methane. Probably CO2, then, or CO. Nitrogen is pretty stable by itself, I don’t expect it’ll be bound to much in the atmosphere. The absence of hydrogen makes ammonia unlikely as well and that’s about all I can think of. Do you know the abundances?” Again, you shake your head no. ”That’s too bad. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for some O2 in the atmo.” You spend a few more minutes looking at the stars, even at these speeds they don’t really seem to move at all. The vastness of space, and just how empty it really is, is staggering. It’s easy to read about a thing. Being out here, in between all the something, it’s suddenly more apparent than ever. How small your ship is and how unfathomable the emptiness is that you are hurtling through. ”A good atmosphere could be a huge boon to us,” Tubal rests his hands on the observation pane in front of you, leaning forward. ”Hopefully the stellar flux hasn’t stripped it away. Thick enough, with some CO2 in it, and it could have a nice little greenhouse effect. Might be downright pleasant, even,” he chuckles a bit, ”It could also help filter out a bunch of the UV too. Scattering is more likely at those energies so a thick atmo could keep a lot of the more damaging stuff from reaching the surface.” Physics was never your strongest subject, but you reached the same conclusion about the scattering. If the atmosphere is heavy like it seems, full of O2, N2, and CO2, the planet could be pretty habitable. After a while you and Tubal wander down to one of the cryobays to take a look around. Everything is the same as it was last time, monolithic structures in what barely counts as not total darkness, swallowing both sound and light with ease. The smell of ozone is omnipresent, with slight whiffs of steel or aluminum here and there. Tubal is clearly excited about the arrival, wondering aloud what should go down to the surface first, making plans and then contingencies based on a number of scenarios. Eventually you both make your way back up to the bridge, where the wardens are working quickly to verify everything made it through the blackout without incident. So far everything seems to have come through fine. Ana sent you a report about the astrodynamics. You are still on course, there wasn’t any errant drifting during the blackout, and the shot period without the drives on will only impact your arrival by a few days at most. It’s good that this happened while you were still accelerating, and even then only slightly. If this had happened during the deceleration phase it could have had a much bigger effect. Everything seems to have been handled, Tubal and August are ready to head back to cryo. You send them both with some painkillers. You also let them know it would probably be good to put some water within easy reach of the cryopod, they’ll be thankful for it in the future. Bedia is still working on the crew issues, but she’s eventually going to put together a report for you about cryo science. 1. How long would you like to stay awake? A: Head back to cryo right now. B: Stay awake long enough for your headache to fully clear. C: Stay awake for a few days to a week, maybe two, to try and “reset” your issues with cryo. D: Some other amount of time. 2. Would you like to have another officer take the next “shift” for waking up? E: No, I’ll handle it. The crew is familiar with me. F: Yes. I’d like Thomas, my first officer, to handle it. G: Yes. I’d like Vladimir, the head of security, to handle it. H: Yes. I’d like Tubal, the head of engineering, to handle it. I: Yes, but someone else. Please specify who. Olothreutes fucked around with this message at 10:37 on Sep 13, 2016 |
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Sep 13, 2016 10:30
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There's plenty of food on board, you have 8,000 colonists that you'll need to feed and it's not like they expect you to find freshly tilled fields when you arrive.
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Sep 13, 2016 19:48
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Outrail posted:Cool, how many months/years of food do we have without rationing the rations? Plan A? Put things on the ground and start living. "Decent" is a pretty wide margin for planets, surprisingly, so maybe if you give me more criteria? You expect a pretty inert atmosphere, nothing like a bunch of ammonia and chlorine hanging around that react to make HCl and N2. The stellar radiation could be an issue, but maybe not? Chances are that even with a thicker than Earth atmosphere there will be a lot more UV and high energy photons making it to the surface of the planet. Sunburn will take on a new meaning, and it's a good thing your cancer screening technology is way better than modern methods because you will probably have to monitor that pretty closely. Depending on what exactly happens in the upper atmosphere you might encounter other particles as well, muons and the like, with a higher incidence than on Earth. You have about a years worth of supplies, in case something weird happens like you arrive and find out that there's no land to build anything on. Command wants you to be able to have the time to get a solid colony started and your hydroponics and whatnot established. Various factors could influence how long that will take and how successful it will be, so you have a decent buffer. You being awake for a bit longer is not going to starve anyone. The ship itself does not have an active hydroponics setup, though you could easily set up one of the modules inside a cryo bay if you remove the cryopods from it. The ship itself is modular and is designed to be dismantled in orbit and brought to the surface piecemeal to provide resources for you. The reactor and some critical functions will either have to be the last things down, or you can leave them in orbit. For the crew thawing plan, the general idea is to enter the system about a weeks travel from the planet and begin thawing out the colonists (how you do this and how quickly is up to you as the captain) to begin preparing the equipment for planetfall. If you want to spend some time in orbit to look for the best spots, by all means, you are the captain. It's your job to make this work as best you can. You are very well equipped by modern standards, and even by future standards. You will be moving most of your material to the planet via  SPACE ELEVATOR so you don't have to worry about landing craft. You have a great many pieces of equipment, including agricultural machines, but they are not drones. Humans are intensely distrustful of autonomous machines so everything is going to need a human to make it go. As it should be, because robots are evil . Atmospheric adjustments could take a minute, but you have the capacity if you want. It's up to you guys to figure out what you can do. If you can think of a good way to scrub something from the atmosphere that you don't want there, tell the engineers to get on it. If you'd rather let your scientists handle that, well, it might take them a bit to figure it out. They'll have a lot of things to be worrying about. Your prefab habitat modules are designed to handle a number of various conditions, which includes maintaining a proper atmosphere.Telsa Cola posted:Seconded, If possible can we get an itemized list of what we have in storage? It is not possible at this time. In general, you have surface vehicles, VTOLs for planetary survey work, heavy VTOLs for moving stuff around if needed, lots of prefab/modular units for building stuff, food, water (which incidentally is a good shield, the majority of it is stored in the outer hull to help protect you), and lots of other things.
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Sep 14, 2016 01:45
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