Symptoms on planet match a Known Threat. The Blight from Outpost 2 is a terraforming virus gone horribly wrong. It is designed for a low-oxygen planet and was intended as a method to give it a breatheable atmosphere, going deep into the planet's crust and freeing oxygen from the rocks inside and sending it to the surface. It proved to be indescriminate in its targeting, and freed the oxygen from anything it could find. Humans that entered an atmosphere with the blight were melted on the spot over a period of roughly a minute as it freed the oxygen from their body, including blood, muscle tissue, bones, etc. although contact with the blight was inevitably fatal, it did not kill instantly, and said subject generally died screaming as they felt it eating through them.
on of the side effects of the blight speading was that it began to reawaken the seismic activity of the planet, causing volcanos to erupt, eathquakes to occur, etc. additionally, the new, extremely unstable atmosphere caused thunderstorms and later tornados to occur as it attempted to balance itself.
The blight was aggressive, and able to eat through any known substance, but different ones slowed it down to different degrees. It was notably slow to eat through iron-rich minerals compared to others.
Additionally, robotic vehicles under the effects of the blight did not decay in the standard pattern. instead they were only mildly damaged, and their targeting software was changed to cause them to fire indescriminately on things near them (opening holes for the Blight and oxygen to flow through / releasing any oxygen built into the materials. this later changed to targeting non-blight controlled vehicles, and stopped firing at random upon their surroundings.
the possibility of the blight being intelligent was still under question at the time of the final evauation, however (depending on which faction's storyline you follow), it did slow its expansion when it neared the final evacuation point long enough for all the evac vehicles to escape, and although the colony's central computer was overrun by the blight before the evacuation was complete, it remained fuctional (in fact, its performance increased significantly after a short delay from it first being infected) throughout the evacuation process. It wasn't necessarily hostile, however early in the process of it spreading it lacked the brainpower to understand what it was doing properly. it needed a larger hive.
IF we are dealing with the blight or an analogue of it, then 1) our atmospheric sensors will read the the atmosphere is either breatheable or at least improved from expected. 2) anyone that removes their suit is going to melt after a delay, 3) the *atmosphere* will eat through our suits over time. if it is at the same speed as the OP2 blight, then it will be a matter of seconds, but I suspect that the Blight here will operate at a slower pace for the sake of gameplay. 4) ALL automated systems and computers that are in the infected area are potentally actively hostile, and any computers that we introduce to the area could become hostile after a delay... including our gunnerbots. 5) the Blight may form a hivemind, and may not be actively hostile to us at first, depends on what it wants, which was undecided by the time of the end of the OP2 storyline.
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Topic: Mission 22: Hero Killer (Read 33776 times)