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[TheDarkStar]

Actually, wouldn't a red sun be more helpful for "red photosynthesis"?

The youth of the planet now is making me think this is the first species which got here, unless it actually is a red sun which, I think (but am pretty astronomically ignorant) requires an old sun, which might be mutually exclusive with a young world...

No, blue sun -> red plants. The color you see in photosynthesizing organisms is the light that they don't absorb. On Earth, the sun doesn't emit much light in the green part of the spectrum so plants focus on other wavelengths like red and blue.

[Tack]

Oh yeah. Managed to get that backwards somehow.
So, young sun, young world, somehow spacefaring race.
But that can be lampshaded with "The world anemone told them how"

Edit: Oh god I only just found out it's aNeMoNe no aNeNoMe. I'm having to re-learn how to say a word like a five-year-old this is incredible and also sucks.

[Fniff]

So, in a thing I'm working on, the world is polluted beyond hope. A project is created to ferry a breeding population to colonize Mars. However, the ship's construction was rushed due to the desperate circumstances and an unreliable outsource company. The mission fails due to a mundane fault, leaving the ship stranded thousands of miles from rescue.

I've looked up spaceship accidents but most of those were during re-entry or wouldn't result in a stranding. I don't know much about rockets, but I know someone who does... Hi, Bay12!

So, what would be a stupidly simple way for such an important operation to fail? The more ironic the better.

[Amperzand]

Honestly? Just have the engine break partway through the burn to mars. With part of an interplanetary trajectory already gained, you'd be trapped on a meandering path among the worlds. Not a lot you can do about a catastrophic failure in most major types of engine. Refer to this page for interesting failure modes.

Lots of powerful near term engines have the ability to fail badly with comparatively minor faults in construction. A single flaw in production of massively expensive fused quartz glass while building a nuclear lightbulb, leaving a less-than-perfectly transparent section of reaction chamber housing to rapidly build up massive amounts of heat and melt, for instance.

[Tack]

As long as you're not then trapped in a flying nuclear coffin.

[Amperzand]

Well that's all but unavoidable if a bigass engine goes out. :V

[Egan_BW]

Before launch, the ship's computer gets infected by a botnet. Shortly after the interplanetary burn starts, but before earth is out of view, all the computer systems go out.
Now everyone is trapped on a fully-functional spaceship, but no idea where they are, as they watch earth slowly recede...

[Grimlocke]

'After numerous delays, budget deficits and complains about terrible coffee, we finally launched successfully! We could see the blue sky turn black, and started our burn to leave Earth's gravity and put us on course to out new home.
It was near the end of that burn however that our luck ran out and the worst happened. Our board computer, which was running a dated version of Microsoft Windows, rebooted for updates. It did not shut down the engine, no that would have been something we could recover from. It kept the engine burning. Way longer than it should have.
We are now on a course way past Mars. There is just enough fuel to correct our course back to Mars but not enough to actually decelerate and land in way that doesn't leave a crater. Currently the crew, mission control and our shareholders are debating whether or not we can sue Microsoft into funding a rescue mission, or whether we should just go with becoming a crater on Mars.'

[Dirst]

Maybe something about the challenges of getting right bitness for your compiler?

That, or a variation on the classic Imperial/metric conversion bug.

A significant contributor to the Apollo 13 disaster was a sensor that could detect that an oxygen bottle was too hot but didn't differentiate between too hot (80F) and way too hot (1000F).  There was a point in prep that it was expected to get "too hot" but it actually got "way too hot" and damaged the wiring.  Compromised wire insulation in a 100% oxygen environment, you do the math.

Of course, don't copy the Apollo issue directly, that would look lazy.  But smart people can overlook simple things.  Maximum irony would be a failure type that had been obsessed over in past missions but was never an actual issue.

[Fniff]

Thanks for your contributions, guys! They are all wonderful and that blog in particular looks very handy. The idea of a fully functional spaceship being unusable by the crew is very intriguing, but the antimatter engine problems sound fun... Ooh, the choices.

[GiglameshDespair]

In XCOM 2, are the plasma weapons really laser weapons, with the plasma explosions caused by the lasers making it called plasma? Or is it just SCIENCEY PLASMA!

(wasn't sure where to put this)

In EU the description given is

This modified assault rifle fires a jet of ionized gas through a focused magnetic field — an extremely effective plasma-based weapon.

And I somehow doubt they changed it for xcom 2.

[Egan_BW]

In XCOM2 laser is replaced with Gauss weapons, and plasma with "beam", which looks similar to a mix between EU laser and plasma, being a beam of green, plasma-ish stuff, rather than globs, like EU.

[Amperzand]

AFAIK, beam-plasma is actually somewhat more likely to work than glob-plasma. Basically just make an electromagnetic tunnel for a fraction of a second, and release a burst of high-energy plasma along it during that time. Globs, on the other hand, need some kind of complicated self-sustaining containment field as they fly, which while theoretically possible, is pretty weird.

[NullForceOmega]

They may be using an electromagnetic lens to 'lase' the plasma, not using the plasma as a weapon on its own, but turning it into a high intensity plasma-based laser.

[Rolepgeek]

It's called beam, not plasma or plasma-beam. So it's a bit silly to complain about the speed the plasma goes when we don't even know if it involves plasma at all, ain't it?