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[Demonic Spoon]

I think there is already an atmosphere, since there are winds?

[Naturegirl1999]

Oh whoops, in that case, cancel previous action and focus on finding water

[King Zultan]

Shouldn't we have some kind of equipment to find out weather there's a Magnetic field so we don't have to spend a bunch of time digging a massive hole.

[Xvareon]

(( Our planet Mars has no appreciable magnetic field; at least, not a self-generating one. But enough to sustain wind. ))

Your unit's prime directive is overall the same as any android's. You are to find a suitable candidate for terraforming, settle there, build up an infrastructure, harness energy and develop resources, and if possible, seed it with life. There are likely hundreds or thousands of you scattered around the galaxy right now, perhaps produced by a wandering mothership and sent out to repeat the process, or made by one another exponentially. Your specific mission is hardly different—only your coordinates are unique, as you believe you are the only one of you currently in this sector of space...

...or, perhaps, just the only one who's managed to make it this far.

At any rate, the planet you're on seems to fulfill most basic criteria. It's further than ideal from its parent Class G star, meaning that in addition to life being more unlikely, it also receives less solar radiation. However, the presence (or history thereof) of high volcanism is a dead giveaway for the generous presence of iron, nickel, and other heavy base metals. Several times, now, you've recorded temperatures several degrees higher than expected, given the general lack of sunlight; this is almost certainly a combination of geothermal activity and greenhouse gases forming a thick black shell over the sky, locking in what heat does accumulate here.

Throughout the night, production continues apace. You currently lack a more sophisticated infrastructure, but it's enough to make several new mining drones. And with them all tasked to the same general mode—dig deeper—the mountain you've burrowed into becomes a constant strip of moving lights and the tumbling avalanche of dropped-off rock and rubble.

What you are lacking in, however, is energy. You hardly need to make solar panels—your ship came with several backups—but gaining any appreciable power even during daylight cycles is a slow and daunting slog. You're also quite a bit further up off the ground than ideal to reach far enough down to tap geothermal energy, and even then, you will need a source of water or an equivalent medium to actually utilize the heat.

[Demonic Spoon]

Create heavy-bottomed tracked scout drones, sufficiently steady and large to not get blown around by the external wind conditions, and send them out to begin scouting around for potential open air deposits of uranium and water, they will likely need to stop frequently to slowly recharge if equipped with some solar panels, but should hopefully get the job done eventually.

Continue expanding our solar panel coverage and making more mining drones until such a time as we locate either of those.

[Naturegirl1999]

Let’s try making wind turbines, we know that winds are very powerful, let’s also make some drones to collect gasses from the atmosphere and look for and condense water vapor into liquid water

[King Zultan]

Let’s try making wind turbines, we know that winds are very powerful, let’s also make some drones to collect gasses from the atmosphere and look for and condense water vapor into liquid water

+1 Wind power sounds like it might be our best bet for right now.

[EuchreJack]

I sort of wonder if the wind might be TOO powerful for us to harness, but +1 to the attempt.

[Maximum Spin]

Controlled detonation of nukes in deep boreholes

Controlled detonation of nukes in deep boreholes

Those boreholes will have to number up in hundreds and will also have to be deep enough to go through the molten mantle.

Bu I guess this is the only viable option. I'd suggest we made a single borehole on a geographic pole used a concentrated sun laser to slowly heat up the core. But that'l take like, a millenia and that is too long.

I'm pretty sure that was a joke since it is the plot of the movie The Core and also would not really work. It's impossible to be precise because there's so much we don't know about planetary cores, but the amount of energy you would need to deliver would be on the order of billions of the most powerful nuclear weapon humans have ever designed. This would also destroy the planet's surface, kicking it back to the Hadean. If you're going to destroy the planet's surface anyway, bombarding it with meteors to significantly increase its mass and temperature until the core has enough internal energy is way more efficient. And also almost impossible, but a hell of a lot more feasible than the other thing.

Wind power is an interesting case study because it turns out, based on results observed on Earth, that the amount of energy you can extract from the wind before local wind patterns become too distorted to maintain that extraction (because airmasses get bogged down by the loss of kinetic energy, forcing incoming air to go a different way) isn't even that high. In other words, we very likely won't be able to run any substantial installation on wind power for long.

What do we have in terms of energy storage? It might be prudent to build something simple like flywheels so that we can use all our solar panels at once. (We aren't going to be able to make more any time soon, without extensive mining operations.)

[EuchreJack]

I'm pretty sure one of the more viable plans to add an magnetic field to Mars involves many cables stretching from pole to pole. I think they're electrically charged or something?
It's too late to do this:
https://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-wants-to-launch-a-giant-magnetic-shield-to-make-mars-habitable

[Maximum Spin]

I'm pretty sure one of the more viable plans to add an magnetic field to Mars involves many cables stretching from pole to pole. I think they're electrically charged or something?

My god, the resistive heating alone...

[Magmacube_tr]

Let’s try making wind turbines, we know that winds are very powerful, let’s also make some drones to collect gasses from the atmosphere and look for and condense water vapor into liquid water

+1 Wind power sounds like it might be our best bet for right now.

+1 Lets get that wind.

[EuchreJack]

I'm pretty sure one of the more viable plans to add an magnetic field to Mars involves many cables stretching from pole to pole. I think they're electrically charged or something?

My god, the resistive heating alone...

Ooh, so it's self-powered!

[King Zultan]

Do we actually need a magnetic field to live on the planet?

[Magmacube_tr]

Do we actually need a magnetic field to live on the planet?

Yes. How else will we able to keep the atmosphere we are gonna place.