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[NUKE9.13]

I mean, yeah, but unless recycling those redundant systems yields, like, at least 100 steel and 50 electronics, we're never going to be able to get anything done. Hard is one thing, impossible is another.
...
Well, that aside. We should spend a revision increasing the number of solar panels, and increasing morale... maybe cleaning up the ship could help with that.

More Solar Panels: It's not a long-term solution to our power needs, but it is a quick and easy one. We should easily be able to rig up a few more solar panel arrays, and have some of our less vital citizens install them on the exterior of the ship.

Waste receptacles: This complex engineering project involves creating boxes, and giving them to people to put their [literal] shit into. We don't have the means to actually deal with the waste collected this way yet, but at least it won't be getting all over the place. We shall pick one of the sections by lottery, redistribute the people living there to other sections, and store full receptacles there, to be dealt with at some later date.

[Tack]

Hmm... I might've been unclear in the OP. This is a survival horror.

This is You, as you are now, when the world suddenly starts undergoing an extinction event.
You're not "Beijing 1", chock full of scientists and supersoldiers. You're "The Latvia", when the country began a space race at the same time as Estonia went underwater.
There isn't a surplus of 44 gallon drums. There is, however, a reasonable amount of spare equipment which particularly selfish refugees brought on-board because a radio was more important than someone's father.

This is the result of people like you and me deciding they needed to live, convincing a steel mill or power plant that you could help everyone get away from a planet turned hostile, or waiting on the outskirts of the project site because you know that if you could just get on board one of those rockets, they wouldn't have the time or muscle to make you leave.
You are not one of the hundreds of rockets which failed to exit atmosphere.
You are not one of the tens of rockets which had electrical faults, and weren't able to alter their course or had shoddy ameteur welding result in a hull failure.
You are one of the very few rockets which has some sort of a chance at life.
This game is incredibly hard, but if this was reality, you'd have already been insanely lucky many times over. (And frankly, with those 6's, you seem to still be)

As for the algae tanks.. how large of a barrel do you think you would require, in order to produce enough algae every day to feed one human?
If I can be convinced it's smaller, I'll happily bump up their production because that is a potential balance issue.

Lastly, not to be even more defeatist, but EVA suits...

[hops]

PTW

[VoidSlayer]

So there are two issues, we need more space but we also need more surface area.  With more surface area we can have more solar panels and have sun facing hydroponics.  We can also have reflected skylight like areas that provide light for our people so they do not need electric lights except for detailed tasks.

If we want to make a cylinder, I would recommend starting with a few ships placed in a box formation then scavenging stuff off the other ones to fill in the gaps.

For an engine, we need something with high specific impulse and low thrust, and we only really need one of them if our ships are hooked together and we have low thrust.  So we should be good recycling a lot of the engine parts.

[hops]

Do we really have to worry about thrusters? It's not even part of the win condition...

Barring FTL it's going to take a while before we get anywhere worth going, so the first order of business is actually making the ship livable.

[NUKE9.13]

Hmm... I might've been unclear in the OP. This is a survival horror.

I object to the horror part of that. Horror suggests that there is some external force (the titular horror) that has forced you into this survival situation. That is not the case here. This is survival your-own-stupidity.
I mean, if you are capable of constructing a ship you intend to live in for generations, why not build a boat instead. Surely building a self-sustaining system is a lot easier on earth than in space. Going into space only makes sense if you truly believe you have the slightest chance of reaching your destination. It doesn't even have to be a decent chance- if you want to gamble your life on a venture that only has 1% chance of success, well, it's your life. But if there is no chance, it makes no sense to do it. The people who do are really stretching my ability to care about their lives.

Alright. Whatever. Let's move on. We can't win, but we can see how far we can get. Next turn, we'll start disassembling parts of the ship. Shouldn't be too hard. Just need to move everybody out, seal the airlocks, and send some men out to take it apart. I mean, there's no way these idiots could've forgotten to include-

Lastly, not to be even more defeatist, but EVA suits...

...
Fuck it, these people deserve their fate. I realise it isn't the next design phase yet, but I already have an idea for what we should design:

Self-destruct button: Well, self-destruct is a generous term. It doesn't actually do anything so grandiose. It just opens all the airlocks on the ship, and fries their circuitry so they cannot be closed.
It's kinder this way.

[VoidSlayer]

Do we really have to worry about thrusters? It's not even part of the win condition...

Barring FTL it's going to take a while before we get anywhere worth going, so the first order of business is actually making the ship livable.

No we do not need to worry about propulsion, really, at this point.  That is why we can disassemble some of the engines.

So, for water, how about we start with progressive filtration, we can turn most of our water into grey water and then use that in hydroponics.  Put hydroponics and our algae tanks in the sunlight side of the ship and we can kill three birds with one stone.

[Nirur Torir]

How many oxygen creation units do we need?

Do we really have to worry about thrusters? It's not even part of the win condition...

We need those to get closer to the Elysium so we can give them seeds, or to the asteroids so we can mine. Alternatively, we can railgun people out an airlock for propulsion.

[Tack]

Oxygen is also dispensed as "Human Use Units", but the starting level is appreciably huge enough that it's better to just show it as an "air quality" percentage.
26 humans-worth of oxygen production might seem miniscule, but it'll put a good dent in the rate of decay.
I mean, I think. Realism vs balance is hard.

-snip-

Earth is rapidly going Venus.
You don't want to build a boat.
Or you do. We can play That game after you convince everyone to opt-out this one.

[NUKE9.13]

-snip-

Earth is rapidly going Venus.
You don't want to build a boat.
Or you do. We can play That game after you convince everyone to opt-out this one.

Ah, no, I've no desire to convince anyone to quit. It's just not my cup of tea- if others enjoy it, more power to 'em.
...I realise I may have been a bit harsh with my earlier post. My apologies.

[Tack]

I am curious though. If the world started going "2012" like this, what would you do?
Build a boat? Hug your wife?

[helmacon]

Ugggg... I had this whole thing typed up that I thought I posted yesterday, but apparently I didn't. I just spent like, an hour re typing the whole thing on my phone, double tapped the button to close the keyboard, and it bumped me back to the main page....

Just... Assume I posted some really good designs here and saved the whole mission.

[Draignean]

Plan Helmacon: (1), Draignean

[Nirur Torir]

Engine Disassembly - We don't need all these engines, and most of their components should be internal. Leave one fully functional - We can later refine water into fuel, if we get desperate.

Medistation - Medical supplies are lacking, but Dr. Vernor warns that these conditions are ripe for diseases, and one outbreak now would quickly spread and cripple the mission. She would like to set up a rudimentary hospital ward, including mats for the sick, to keep them away from the general populace. Having someone to talk to when they get sick instead of having to completely fend for themselves will be good for morale.

[RAM]

This is a survival horror.

I object to the horror part of that. Horror suggests that there is some external force (the titular horror) that has forced you into this survival situation. That is not the case here. This is survival your-own-stupidity.

I feel that horror-as-a-discreet-unit is language abuse. It is basically "a thing that evokes horror" rather than "the emotion(or sense, or whatever...) of horror" which would be horror-as-a-substance. I think that having to deal with humanity's very real and active stupidity in a desperate situation is extremely horrifying. We could achieve self-sufficiency with rationing and find the rationing system breaking down to feed the black market, or people find out that soylent green is people and refuse to eat the only viable food-source, or build a high-efficiency low-footprint workforce and have them destroyed by people who don't want to lose their jobs... Not to mention that in space, encountering things is extremely unlikely, but anything that you DO encounter is likely to kill you, purely on the basis that it was capable of encountering you and thus moving at devastating velocities and there is no atmosphere to act as padding. I imagine that just convincing the population that there is a stable and valid government and that we can easily destroy any incoming objects would do wonders for morale, and the ship's performance, even if it were all lies. The "titular horror" is human-nature, and it is mostly external and hostile to the things that are going to keep us alive...

This all reminds me of a game called Lemmings. It was about trying to get a horde of survival-challenged critters to the escape point using limited resources. It even had a self-destruct button to make them all explode into pretty fireworks!

System regulation
We link the ships' systems together more fully and hook them into centralised terminals. This allows whoever is in charge at the time to implement controlled resource rationing.

Finish the algae tanks
We rolled a 1 on time, does this mean that we need to spend more dice on it? Is a 1 actually good for time?