Warlord of Mars should be required reading to participate!
I really need to read to some Mars related stuff. Pop cultural osmosis will only take me so far.
Since no one has mentioned it yet, I'm pretty sure we have a few observation satellites doing loops around Mars, so survivors could probably get good data off of those if they know how. Just lurking here, and I think the progression is pretty good.
Kinda odd how nothing has more than a specialized selection of stuff, though. As far as I know, multiple redundancy is pretty much standard for spacecraft with more than one room. Patching materials would likely be easy to find in any dedicated portion of the ship. In addition, the theoretical description of the original mission plan (IE: modular building) suggests that all dedicated modules would have some kind of pressure lock. Then again, the dice decide all, and NASA does sometimes make slip-ups, which is why this ship blew up anyways.
Just giving a minor contrivance alert there. Peace, all.
A lot of the logically obvious stuff (observation satellites, etc.) might around, I'm just not mentioning such things because I don't want to come off as driving people to conclusions. Mind you, some of those systems were deployed or to be deployed by the orbital half of the ship itself, parts of which are now on the ground, so take from that what you will. Other stuff was either already waiting around, or is due to arrive soon enough via the long route across space. When I get off my ass and design the ship, you'll know what you have to work with.
However, the base modules are another matter. The way I'm playing it, NASA designed a lot of failsafes into the ship, to make it as far as the landing. Then, probably to save a little room and cash, some managers figured, "well, if everything is going to survive landing anyway, why do the ground modules need redundant parts?" The modules themselves were supposed to be arranged into one big building right after touchdown, so there were very few airlocks built into the rooms. The connecting hallway bits may or may not be laying around somewhere (along with the habitation modules, which not a single person wanted to start in). Needless to say, the failsafes failed, because hey, if you fix everything that can go wrong, then by definition something that can't go wrong will.
Basically, when trying to decide whether a part exists and survived the fall, try to put yourself first in the state of mind of a paranoid engineer (surely they'll need
this on Mars, so it has to make it) then a bureaucrat (look, this thing isn't paid for with candycanes) then a overconfident engineer (there's already guaranteed failsafes for all the prerequisite steps in this process, so why bother everything-proofing the later steps?).
Also, now is as good a time to mention this as any. It is possible that in the near future I will be ejected from the Internet. A bit unlikely, but entirely possible - which I know is just what you all want to hear from a GM while waiting for the fourth fucking turn of a game. In the event that I go completely inactive for several days, consider me lost and choose a new GM to carry on if you will.
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Topic: Angry Red Planet - Totally And Completely Dead (Read 48196 times)