Doomed Crew?
- Thread starter Stumondo
- Start date
At least on Das Boot they had a toilet, I doubt there are many of those in an airlock.Lemnoc said:
We are told all doors are airtight on a starship, which seem to imply the air circulation/supply system is independant for every room. The suggestion in the CRB is that life support systems are related to the staterooms. So I would assume that as long as air is able to come from these areas to the occupied areas of the ship then the crew would get the standard 'life support' duration of air. Food & water would be seperate considerations.
mr31337 said:
I would add only the caution of as normally engineered to your assumptions. In other words, when everything is sunny things work exactly as you say. In a very serious situation (I would hope!) systems can be rejiggered for lifeboat-style survival. You know, even a Rolls Royce limo has tires to burn for a signal and radiator water to drink... probably not what was originally intended for the occupants!
At any rate, I'd assume a ship would have the wiring and pumps and redundant engineering to accommodate just about any plausible, amazingly creative "Flight of the Phoenix" scramble for survival. And I'd give the PCs at least that much chance for survival... wouldn't kill them per the CRB :wink:
As noted, you can assume that 'emergency life support' lasts about two weeks.
'Basic' electrical power can be run of things like a sterling RTG (the nuclear battery F33D mentioned) and provided it's not anything needing the power levels of the main reactor, you can ignore it. It's not particularly powerful but it is inexhaustible in the scale of this game (precisely why they're used to power space probes today). Limited emergency comms, emergency lights, basic warmth, internal doors and (for the sake of simplicity) internal grav plates to about 0.6G fall into this category . How much of the computer systems you can run is for the GM to decide - I'd argue in favour of all of it if you're prepared to switch other things off for the duration.
Things you won't be able to run off that sort of thing - M-Drive, J-Drive, active sensors.
Things that don't just need power - water purifiers and air purifiers will need chemical reagents as well as electricity to work (although they won't need much of the latter). The two weak deadline is quite literally that because that's probably the point the CO2 scrubbers pack in and everybody suffocates.
Important priorities for the crew:
1) Staunch any leaks (power, air, water, radiation) - stay alive long enough to do anything else
2) Make sure you have enough food and water to make it to the air deadline
3) Try to find something nearby you can use for fuel
4) Try to figure out a way to extend the air deadline long enough to make it there on minimal engine power.
5) Fuel up
6) Jump to safety
7) Go to the pub for a very large drink
'Basic' electrical power can be run of things like a sterling RTG (the nuclear battery F33D mentioned) and provided it's not anything needing the power levels of the main reactor, you can ignore it. It's not particularly powerful but it is inexhaustible in the scale of this game (precisely why they're used to power space probes today). Limited emergency comms, emergency lights, basic warmth, internal doors and (for the sake of simplicity) internal grav plates to about 0.6G fall into this category . How much of the computer systems you can run is for the GM to decide - I'd argue in favour of all of it if you're prepared to switch other things off for the duration.
Things you won't be able to run off that sort of thing - M-Drive, J-Drive, active sensors.
Things that don't just need power - water purifiers and air purifiers will need chemical reagents as well as electricity to work (although they won't need much of the latter). The two weak deadline is quite literally that because that's probably the point the CO2 scrubbers pack in and everybody suffocates.
Important priorities for the crew:
1) Staunch any leaks (power, air, water, radiation) - stay alive long enough to do anything else
2) Make sure you have enough food and water to make it to the air deadline
3) Try to find something nearby you can use for fuel
4) Try to figure out a way to extend the air deadline long enough to make it there on minimal engine power.
5) Fuel up
6) Jump to safety
7) Go to the pub for a very large drink
I don't. I'm just assuming that the 'two weeks life support' must include self-powered scrubbers - i.e. ones not dependent on the main reactor or on outside resupply. I assume this represents the bottom-of-the-barrel reserves of the same system which normally cleans the air (which is part of what you buy with your monthly life support fee).
The only difference - if you want one - is that it may be possible that under power there is some ability to regenerate those reagents, which would want chemical processes like crucible-work and electrolysis not available from emergency power.
The rules really don't go into much depth as far as the engineering options go. But many ships today have auxillary generators, and its quite possible that larger ships (500tons or more) can have auxillary power generators (even small nuclear reactors, MHD's, or some other machinery).
Jak Nazryth
Mongoose
Stumondo...
This is a perfect time to GM your way out of the situation.
IMTU my players sub-contracted themselves to a Mercenary group in an attempt to hit a crime syndicate way station. (The syndicate had double-crossed the mercenary group, so they were out for revenge)
Basically the crime syndicate had discovered a rogue comet (about 20 km in diameter) in an empty hex in ages past. They converted an old (and stolen) 400 ton fat merchant into an makeshift fuel depot. The fat merchant converted the ice into fuel and refueled the criminal ships so they could sneak through the system.
As the GM, you can invent anything you want. Or you could simply say the players die and roll up other characters. Somehow I think you can GM your way around this.
Here are a couple of options.
Illicit way station as mentioned above.
Long lost space hulk with enough spare parts and remaining fuel for the players to repair their ship... but the space hulk is full of space zombies... or haywire robots which killed the original crew and have been drifting for hundreds of years..
Or you have another ship with another crew in the similar situation... The other ship may have fuel, but no operating jump drive. The two crews must work together to figure out how to best scrap a working ship together and get back to civilization.
One last idea is a pre-jump-tech colony ship drifting through deep space towards a planet in the next closest hex. The colony ship would have been launched so long ago, that the crew in "hypersleep" would have left before their planet discovered jump drive and needed to escape their planet for what ever reason. Your crew could get aboard (and yes you would have to suspend some facts that the colony ship would be moving at 10% the speed of light or there abouts while your players ship would be relatively stationary in comparison) and they could hitch a ride (waking up 500 years later) or find a way to take fuel off of the colony ship, repair theirs, and get out.
Just some ideas
This is a perfect time to GM your way out of the situation.
IMTU my players sub-contracted themselves to a Mercenary group in an attempt to hit a crime syndicate way station. (The syndicate had double-crossed the mercenary group, so they were out for revenge)
Basically the crime syndicate had discovered a rogue comet (about 20 km in diameter) in an empty hex in ages past. They converted an old (and stolen) 400 ton fat merchant into an makeshift fuel depot. The fat merchant converted the ice into fuel and refueled the criminal ships so they could sneak through the system.
As the GM, you can invent anything you want. Or you could simply say the players die and roll up other characters. Somehow I think you can GM your way around this.
Here are a couple of options.
Illicit way station as mentioned above.
Long lost space hulk with enough spare parts and remaining fuel for the players to repair their ship... but the space hulk is full of space zombies... or haywire robots which killed the original crew and have been drifting for hundreds of years..
Or you have another ship with another crew in the similar situation... The other ship may have fuel, but no operating jump drive. The two crews must work together to figure out how to best scrap a working ship together and get back to civilization.
One last idea is a pre-jump-tech colony ship drifting through deep space towards a planet in the next closest hex. The colony ship would have been launched so long ago, that the crew in "hypersleep" would have left before their planet discovered jump drive and needed to escape their planet for what ever reason. Your crew could get aboard (and yes you would have to suspend some facts that the colony ship would be moving at 10% the speed of light or there abouts while your players ship would be relatively stationary in comparison) and they could hitch a ride (waking up 500 years later) or find a way to take fuel off of the colony ship, repair theirs, and get out.
Just some ideas
Generally a jump in atmosphere is an automatic destruction of the ship and surrounding area, mong may have changed that though I don't see why they would have. Now that being said, that it's already to the point where they have mis-jumped into an empty hex, it seems a perfect time to introduce them to a rogue planet drifting in deep space. Coincidences are irrelevant, maybe roll some dice to think it's random, but fiat is good enough, they are already on the hook. Now savor the moment of their approach to a dark and mysterious planet, desperate for fuel and to repair their ship, what ancient evil could await ... ?
F33D said:
iirc something somewhere about "jump weapons" that stated certain effects, it seemed due to mass reflection, and how the ancients destroyed planets. However, if the GM has already just gone with the misjump, rather than telling the players that your ship will instantly be destroyed, then they should go with what is done and keep rolling.
