"Deadspace sounds good. So when does all the fuckery begin?"
Remember to have brought my spare robot bodies and suits from my locker in case I need them.
Explore the ship. Find out at least what the general layout is, and what sort of facilities it has. Is it more of a small shuttle or proper spaceship?
The ships are proper spaceships of reasonable size. Not great big cruisers or anything but they've got a small bedroom area, a kitchen, storage with lots of food and stuff, med bay with supplies, even a relaxation room with a computer and tv. No tinker though.
*Knife sharpening noise*
sit quietly and hope people with more experience know what they're doing.
Not a bad choice, but sometimes dangerous. Their big guns don't always mark them as people with great planning ability.
Sometimes the exact opposite in fact.
The reaction control system for the old spacesuit, the scavenging of which adds a small (relatively) maneuvering pack to my industrial suit.
Now that that's done, though, stare thoughtfully at various readouts the shuttle is producing while the others rise, shine and usher us toward inescapable doom.
Actually, is this shuttle bigger than a regular shuttle? Seems like it ought to be, but better make sure.
Alright.
The shuttle is reading all's well for now at least. You do note, however, that this thing has limited fuel. Hmm. You wonder how limited.
sit and pet draco while sketching up the internal components of a guass rifle and trying to see how to fit a force infuser into it. then find a way to make it so that the weapon can fold in two allowing one access to the force infuser to charge it and for the possibility of breach loading the guass rounds. To discharge the force infuser one can flip a switch then fire the trigger, adding the energy stored in the force infuser to the shot fired.
Force infuser huh? I'm not sure what you're trying to do here. Use the force infuser to fire harder or use the rifle to power the infuser?
((I have this sinking feeling we'll be doing a lot of planning which will quickly turn out not to be relevant for long once we set out.))
((Blackspace huh? If you listen carefully, hiphop can be heard as though from a great distance))
((Not even complete vacuum can inhibit these sweet tunes.))
1)Could you explain the movement system a little bit more? Can we only move in straight lines along the axis, or can we move 'diagonally'? Is moving 1 square diagonally equal to 2 grid units/spaces, or 1? And what about moving even more 'in between' actual round coordinates? Can we end up at eg. (2,565 ; 3,87 ; 3,99) or will that be rounded to (2,5 ; 4 ; 4)? Or can we move freely in the 3D plane, and just keep track of the number of gridspaces we moved?
2)Am I correct that we are limited to observing/scanning for things that are inside our grid, aka equal to our comms range?
3)How long is 1 unit of travel time about IC? An hour, a day, a week?
4)How far out does the danger zone of the planet reach, according to Steve/Doc? Even best guesses are fine.
5)About how many buoys do we have? Can we use them to communicate between grids, eg ship 1 sends message to buoy A, who sends it to buoy B, who relays it to ship 2 who is not in the same grid as ship 1? How many buoys do we need to drop per grid to allow communicating through that grid? Do the buoys have sensors?
6)What do we know about the specifications of M21's ship? How fast can it travel, etc. If we were to encounter them and tell them where to go, would they make it out in time on their own, or do we need to take them into one of our ships?
7)Once we try to go out again via the jump point, can we fly to the exit at max speed? Or is there a chance we'd 'overshoot'/miss our target (the ftl jump point)? Is exiting blackspace more slowly safer in terms of not missing our mark?
8)Our time limit is 70 movement turns. How many gridspaces will the anomaly have expanded by then? Or: how many gridspaces do the borders of blackspace expand per turn?
9)We have 70 turns of traveling. Will there be actual turns of just cruising around, or will we timeskip each time till something happens or input is required?
10)Oh, and do we really have to work out a schedule of when and where to burn and stuff, or can we just draw up a general plan and leave the computer to do the calculating for us? How deep down this mathemagical rabbit hole do you wanna go, piece?
"Ok, so apparently the planet was at about (350, -100), meaning we are about 364 gridspaces removed from it. Our ships have a maximum velocity of 10 gridunits, a delta-V of [1space/turn] and our time window is [70 turns of movement], meaning it'd take us over half our time limit, about 41 days, just to get to the planet. We don't actually wanna go that far, mind, because that region is apparently a no-go zone according to Steve, but still, that shows we'll be on a tight schedule. And since we don't actually know where they are exactly or how far out they got, and there's a lot of space to cover... Yeah, we have no time to spare. Hell, for a ship at full speed, it takes [10 turns] to come to a standstill, and it'll have moved 55 gridspaces more before it's standing still! So, we'll need to very carefully plan this out or we'll be hopelessly isolated.
Oh, and we also don't know how far out the danger zone of the planet reaches. Might just be 1, might be a dozen, I don't know.
So, current plan is we might first wanna quickly check if our ships can still exit blackspace, and if no bullshit like time going at different speeds in here and in realspace is going on. Cause I've had it up to here with xeno physics bullshit, and I don't wanna be blindsided again.
((And at about 3 mission updates a week average (if we're lucky), this mission will take 23 weeks to complete at maximum, or about 5 months. And that's without non-travel turns!
Sorry to anyone who finds this kinda stuff boring, we'll try to get going as soon as we can. But yeah, this seems kinda like a 'plan it well or suffer the consequences' kinda thing.
I put a lot of info on the wiki and made a travel time/speed/distance table if people wanna help plan things out.
Finally, I have a sort of more detailed plan in my head, but I'll wait till pw has answered these questions before really working it out to avoid doing unnecessary work.))
1.3d movement is a nightmare isn't it? Ok, assume that you can move to any adjacent square in any direction. So, imagine it like you have the little cube of space you're in, and then you have the ability to move to any of the other little spacial cubes touching its faces or its corners.
2.Yes.
3.Heh. Thats a bit of a thing. I'll say that normally it would take about a day. Instantly OOC of course, I'm not forcing you to wait unless you want to for some reason.
4. The Danger zone? You're already in it friend. High way to it ended back before you flew into Africanamericaspace.
5.If you daisy chain them, it might work. We'll assume you have 50 each.
6.Nothing solid really, but I can give you a path to the vague area we think they're probably in, if you want. Though thats a pretty big freaking guess on our part.
7.Well you're exiting back onto the sword. Your shuttles can't reach FTL speed. Don't worry about it, as long as you can get out, we'll count it as a success.
8. It expands outward by 1 space in all directions every movement turn.
9.By movement turns I mean movement from one place to another. So if you move 2 spaces and find nothing, thats a turn. If you move 5 and find something and then fuck around there for a while, thats still one. 70 moves, lets say.
10.No. Nothing so in depth. But a general plan of "Go out for 40 turns and then head back for these coordinates" is probably good.