Hi everyone,
I need some advice with the start of an adventure.
The setup is this:
- The players are smugglers that have a cargo hold full of weapons for the Barsomians.
- When they approach Mars $SomethingGoesWrong
-They crashland near the qarantine zone and soon find out that this wasn't even the worst that would happen to them today.
I need some help with the $SomethingGoesWrong part. I just don't know enough about spaceflight to come up with a good and realistic problem, that doesn't destroy the ship, still alowes the ship to enter the atmosphere without exploding but forces them to land way off course.
Simply hitting some debris floating in space - I think sensors would pick up anything that is big enough to damage the ship and warn the crew in advance.
Getting intercepted by a customs ship - I could make it clear that if they let them on board, they'll spend the next 50 years as an infomorph on a prisonserver. But as I understand ship weapons in EP - if they try to outrun the ship, they would simply be destroyed.
Some 'random' technical malfunction - I simply don't know what I would have to break.
In any other setting I would simply make up some technobabble. But with EP's more realistic approach I have some problems here.
So if you had some tips for me, that would be great :)
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Downing a shuttle without destroying it?
Fri, 2015-02-20 05:38
#1
FNR
Downing a shuttle without destroying it?
Fri, 2015-02-20 07:12
#2
Forseti
I had similar setup with
I had similar setup with adventure set on Titan. Smugglers flew a shuttle with container in external cradle from New Quebec to small town west of Doom Mons. It was atmospheric low-altitude flight though because they wanted to be off radar. Just east of Erebor Mons they were hit by missile with TITANs nanite warhead that quickly disabled the craft and brought it down. Before the crash, pilot was able to release the container that housed server room with players' infomorphs and few spare morphs to sleeve into...
So perhaps you could employ similar tactics for your adventure: low-altitude flight, guided missile or some beam weapon disabling systems, safety pods ejection, crash. That would be more plausible than surviving the fall from orbit through thin atmosphere :)
Fri, 2015-02-20 10:12
#3
Decimator
It would be helpful to know
It would be helpful to know why you want the shuttle relatively intact. The evil GM in me wants to blow up the shuttle and have them all end up sleeved into spares.
Fri, 2015-02-20 10:21
#4
hhexo
FNR wrote:a good and
You're right, this is a difficult problem. Any physical disruption like a missile or an asteroid is too risky and could easily damage the heat shield of the shuttle, resulting in a flash followed by cinders and ash during atmosphere re-entry.
However, consider this scenario... The PCs set the systems for re-entry, it all seems to be fine, all readings are correct, until somebody actually looks out the window and realizes the entry angle is wrong. They double-check the systems and find they've been hacked/disrupted by something/somebody, and the actual landing spot is going to be near the TQZ. They could try a manual override, but they're already close to the atmosphere, and do they really want to risk a maneuver that could end up in a disaster if they get any calculation wrong? Surely the safest thing is to let the shuttle land, and then try to get the hell out of the TQZ...
This also sets up the adventure hook in terms of: who hacked their systems? Have the Barsoomian agents betrayed them? Maybe they weren't real Barsoomians! Maybe they were just smugglers/pirates/scavengers, who could be waiting for them at the landing zone... or maybe it's worse, and something in the TQZ broadcast some kind of signal and hijacked their shuttle...
Fri, 2015-02-20 11:03
#5
FNR
@Forseti
@Forseti
Good idea, but the players are on their way comming from the belt. And I really like the idea of an (almost) catastrophic reentry ^^;
But I'll keep your idea in mind for when they have their next shuttle ;)
@Decimator
I don't want the shuttle to be completely intact, just intact enough so the PCs survive.
After the crash they'll find an "abandond" (<- notice the quotationmarks ;) ) habitat nearby where the actual plot of the adventure will take place
@hhexo
The signal from the quarantine zone that interferes with the systems is a nice idea. I think I'll roll with that!
Thanks everyone for the help!
Fri, 2015-02-20 15:56
#6
ORCACommander
If you want to give them
If you want to give them added agency in abandoning the craft there are a host of orbital and land based batteries that pummel anything unusual in the TQZ so the shuttle can come down very intact but they may have 10 minutes or so to take what they can before the fireworks happen.
Sat, 2015-02-21 13:40
#7
Noble Pigeon
Were I in your position I
Were I in your position I wouldnt worry too much about a "realistic" approach to down a shuttle. Eclipse Phase sometimes makes me feel like I need college levels of understanding in biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, and other things at end in Y. A transhuman, post-singularity future is also not something I'm good at depicting due to lack of experience, so I'd just say "fuck it" and say an EMP missile hits their shuttle. Say that the shuttle had some protection against an attack like this and most of its critical systems are intact, but the missile was enough to require manual re entry, which will already be a huge problem since the blast is playing havoc with the parts of the shuttle that wasn't fried.
I can already feel the electrical engineers breathing down my neck as I tap out this message on my iPad.
—
"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.”
-Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union address
Sat, 2015-02-21 16:41
#8
Chernoborg
Does it have to be a shuttle?
Does it have to be a shuttle? I'm thinking that an airship, like the Hegira from Thousand Year Echo, would make a good smuggling transport. Say they're moving the cargo from the skyport to the Barsoomians skirting a dust storm for cover. Then you could have an unexpectedly strong storm blow them towards the TMZ.
—
Current Status: Highly Distracted building Gatecrashing systems in Universe Sandbox!
Sat, 2015-02-21 18:32
#9
ORCACommander
Chernoborg wrote:Then you
I think i would rather deal with TQZ Terra than have to deal with the horrors of TMZ!
Sat, 2015-02-21 18:42
#10
Chernoborg
Oh crap! Ha hah hah hah!
Oh crap! Ha hah hah hah! *ahem* That would be SOME Martian dust storm! So, all the way to Elysium then?
—
Current Status: Highly Distracted building Gatecrashing systems in Universe Sandbox!
Sat, 2015-02-21 20:35
#11
Trappedinwikipedia
Noble Pigeon wrote:Were I in
I'm not an electrical engineer but EP-style computers are pretty much immune to any kind of EMP which won't kill biomorphs. Not using microprocessors has its advantages. (Most EP computers seem to be a combination of diamond push-rod and optical computers)
That said, a metallic hydrogen containment failure presents a decent way to severely damage a ship without fully destroying it, MH doesn't act well when its containment loses power, and could rip the ship in half. Smart Matter means that the piece(s) with cargo and people in them would have a good chance to survive as independent reentry vehicles. Something similar could be done with LHO rockets as well, but might be a little harder to justify with an EP tech base. Sabotage is something the players should suspect if their ship explodes without being struck by something.
Mon, 2015-02-23 13:33
#12
nezumi.hebereke
You mentioned a bunch of
You mentioned a bunch of things and almost all of them are applicable, and even when detected, they are not always avoidable. You're piloting a shuttle. Colliding with a loose bolt can be enough to damage a ship, and not always in immediately visible ways. Or it hits something else nearby and your ship gets the shower of shrapnel Gravity style.
Tanks freeze which are supposed to be liquid. A pipe or hose bursts. An aileron freezes and you don't notice until you try to stop turning left and the ship refuses. Heat shielding is damaged resulting in an explosion. As the ship approaches orbit and the boosters come off, you find the landing pad put the wrong kind of fuel (or worse, intentionally sabotaged your fuel) and you're stuck gliding to a landing. Hit with some sort of destructive (or just inappropriately placed) nanotech that just keeps building more armor across critical joints/melting parts which are supposed to be solid/reproducing and gunking stuff.
The goal here isn't to make it so the ship crashes so much as to have the players choose between 'land now, here, in the TQZ, or explode in about twenty minutes'.
Tue, 2015-02-24 08:51
#13
Lorsa
What about a computer virus
What about a computer virus that has infiltrated their system? That could explain why they have to "land" close to the TQZ. :)
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Tue, 2015-02-24 09:35
#14
Bursting Eagern...
A Saboteur swarm is,
A Saboteur swarm is, mechanically, designed specifically for this kind of thing.
—
In other words, firing off a laser with a sufficient TWR for the recoil to be noticeable would require a post-miracle-tech laser weighing less than a disposable plastic spoon and powerful enough to shoot down Death Stars? -- ShadowDragon8685
Sun, 2015-03-01 03:51
#15
FrankManic
One possibility - Have
One possibility - Have sometime wake up and take control of the ship. It locks out all controls from the crew and force-lands the ship near the TQZ. The players can't hack back in and there are no physical controls to seize.
Alternately - Don't come up with an explanation. They got hit with a plotgectile made of pure plot. They'll be too busy making piloting checks to try to control their shuttle to worry too much about what hit them. Maybe it was a micrometeorite. Maybe a screw came loose. Who knows? What's important is that half the aerodynamic control surfaces aren't responding and they've lost 17% of their thrust capacity on the main engine and the only course that's going to put them down in one piece is going to take them right to the edge of the TQZ.
—
What is boils down to is that "Killer Robots exterminate humanity and escape to the stars" is one of the *good futures*.
Sun, 2015-03-01 05:35
#16
jasonbrisbane
What if the people the
What if the people the shuttle encounters are a counterfaction who want the weapons?
They wont blow up the ship as that would destroy the weapons.
It could be an anarchist faction, or a similar but different faction with ever so slightly modified goals (maybe they rejected the job so they could steal the weapons, blame the PC's get them hunted and take over as a reliable" courier for the people the PCs were transporting for?
—
Regards,
Jason Brisbane
Tue, 2015-03-03 02:43
#17
FNR
FrankManic wrote:One
I went with a variation of this. There is some TITAN tech in one of the crates that activates and takes over the navigation computer. When they notice it is too late for significant course changes.
They can now just let the TITAN artifact land them in the TQZ. Or they try to manually override the computer and try to bring the shuttle down on an extremely steep reentry angle. This will be extremely risky and bring the shuttle to its absolute limits (if they don't botch the piloting rolls).
And last but not least they can abandon ship and take the escape pod.
Thu, 2015-03-05 06:46
#18
Rallan
Well it's too late now, but
Well it's too late now, but my suggestion would've been to have the rendezvous be near the Quarantine Zone anyway, which means you could use a much less dramatic $SomethingGoesWrong scenario without having to worry about the logic of "Wait a moment, when things go wrong in orbit it usually means everyone dies". A sandstorm that makes taking off again impossible. A defense system in the Zone waking up just long enough to shoot the shuttle down at low altitude. Increased police patrols meaning that once the shuttle's touched down and hidden it's gonna have to stay grounded for a while.