Why we are here?

Started by Bob Buddha, November 26, 2013, 10:32:33 PM

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Bob Buddha

I’m putting this together since the backstory presented along with the gameplay doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me.  I am a sci-fi fan like I assume most here are, and I prefer PLAUSIBLE sci-fi.  Tynan and crew are going to either hash out a storyline and perhaps hire/designate a lore-master to keep continuity and write some choice content.  Hopefully many of the ideas presented in these forums get noticed and can become part of the lore.  Perhaps this can be a starting thread for ongoing discussion.

  • How did we get here? Are we marooned castaways or colonists off to a bad start?  Would an endgame be escaping this world, or making a solid foundation for an ongoing civilization?
  • Who are all these wanderers and raiders?  The neighborhood seems a bit crowded for a ‘Rimworld’ colony.  Are we a pitstop on an intergalactic trade route? If the endgame were to escape, you'd think one of those ships might provide a ride, seeing as we tend to have cash.
  • What was our homeworld, why did we sign up and why did we get on that ship?  Is this planet our intended destination or was there another?
  • What kind of planet is our new home?  First impressions are that of a rocky desert biome much like the Sonoran desert, as indicated by the Saguaro like cacti.  We have no need for space suits. It rains quite a bit but there are no streams, rivers, washes (and no in-game mechanic for water supply).  No trees or any discernible source for wood, etc.  Was all this life, wind, and weather here on a naturally evolved world, or did humanity terraform it first and sow the seeds of life prior to our arrival? Is that a squirrel or something that reminds us of a squirrel?
You look at projects like Mars One which might be a publicity stunt/hoax/pipe dream but there are already plenty of people ready to say ‘¡adios amigos!’ and take a one-way trip to seek their fates and fortune on an off-world colony.  The future of mankind is undoubtedly a space-faring one and that process may indeed start during our lifetimes, albeit within the present solar system.

The model that the Mars One project follows is probably the right one for all such colonization efforts. The first voyagers to distant worlds will invariably be probes and robot landers, followed by self-assembling facilities to support colonists which will become operational before the first colonists land. Let’s assume that we won’t be terraforming Mars anytime soon.  Mars has no all-encompassing magnetic field and can’t support a thick atmosphere in the wake of the solar wind.  Mars colonists will be confined to space suits and pods, and then have to construct a larger modular community with locally mined resources. No chance of raiders and I think the biggest threat to mental health will be cabin fever.

The in-game planet is already a paradise relative to Mars and we know that Earth-like planets will be rare and precious. The next post will be my attempt at a backstory that answers these issues, and fits with the tale told in the game thus far. Enjoy.




I remember the sound of an explosion, though it was in that twilight sleep state of suspended animation, I can only say it was something loud enough to stir my mind to a wink of consciousness only long enough to register the memory.  My last memory before that was being loaded in the sarcophagus and being given the intravenous hookups and drifting off into a drug induced coma. Thankfully the catheters came after I passed out.

This looks like Tohono, and I’m breathing clean air which is a reward by itself.  The air is thick and gravity is high so this must be Tohono.  Where are the shelters?  Where is my group?

I sit up to look around the area and I see the flashing lights of two other sarcophagi within a click, hopefully with equally dazed, confused, and living people sitting up inside them.  There is a lot of debris strewn about and I’m beginning to suspect I’m not where I want to be.  Judging by the light in the sky, it is either dawn or dusk; … hopefully dawn.

I see movement in that pod nearest my own.  I make brief eye contact with the occupant and the look on her face was a mix of terror, confusion, and a glazed stupor due to the as-yet-to-wear-off narcotics. I then realize my face is likely equally stupid looking, if she can see it. The touchscreen on the sarcophagi lid is bleating out an alert so I detach the unit and get on with the status report and orientation video (cue cutscene).

Now the fun part; there is one green button on the touchscreen, “Initiate De-catheterization”. After pressing it, I feel the rush of the last drugs this medieval torture device will pump into me, and whoa there is some adrenaline in there!  I’ll spare you the gory details but whoever designed this procedure was a sadist and I felt violated.

I stagger to my feet and lift the mattress pad to reveal my cargo. I cast off my medical gown and I put on my uniform, nicely preserved like it was laundered yesterday. Like the video stated, the zipper pouch between my legs had a ration bar generically labeled as ‘probiotic intestinal tract restart ration’ and a water pouch.  Not bad, much like the thousands of MRE energy bars I’ve grown up with. The water felt so good washing it down, like I hadn't had a drink for years, which I haven’t, other than down the nasal catheter.

Nothing much else needed just this moment but I grab my sidearm, another ration bar and water pouch. I close the lid and key in the security sequence to lock it down.  Not likely to have anyone or anything mess with it but for now, this is my footlocker and I ALWAYS LOCK IT.  I then disembark to make my way over to the nearest neighboring sarcophagi, and the girl inside is just finishing up with her video, her face lit up by the pad which is clearly on her lap now.  I’m a little on edge now and I see assorted furry creatures darting about in the grasses.  I can’t believe it, but all I can think about when looking at them is meat.

I’m near her now but I keep back a few meters and wait for her process to complete.  I clear my throat just to let her know I’m there.  I try to introduce myself but my voice is a rattle and the ration is burning in my stomach.  There’s a drawn out silence and I turn my head toward the horizon to greet the rising sun just as it starts to crack light over the terrain. She smiles, rattles and rasps, “Well, we’re here.”

I help get her to her feet and stow the mattress pad, grabbing her ration pouch, opening it and handing it to her.  She takes a bite of the bar and gets a sour expression.  She tears open the water pouch and pours it quickly down her throat.  “You need to eat the whole thing,” I say and I hand her another water pouch from her stores.

“I’m Mille and I’m guessing you’d be management.  Where are all the others?”

“I’m Commissar William Maldonado, but you can call me Maldonado and you are Mille Bautista.  The only other visible pod’s occupant is making his way over here, about half a click to the east, and by his silhouette I’d guess he’s a scientist or engineer.  And he may be hurt so let’s go get him.”

“How can you tell all that from here?” She inquires.

“Firstly I have a telescopic implant set and I’m trained to read visual details and generate quick profiles from those.  Prejudice 101” I respond along with my devilish smile.

“Where are all the others?” she asks again as she pulls on her clothes.  I turn my back to her as she finishes gathering herself.

“I memorized the dossiers of my group and you’re not one of them.  That guy over there is hopefully going to be one of mine because I’m a little short on clues to what’s going on.   This is not the planned sequence of events.”

We make our way towards him and can soon see that he has a pretty nasty cut to his leg.  “Not right, Not right!” he says excitedly as we near him. “Something has gone terribly wrong with the deployment.”

“Firstly, what is your medical status?  And did you happen to notice the date?  It’s like five years later than the scheduled deployment date! File under 'no-duh the deployment went wrong'”.  Ms. Bautista was visibly shocked by my statement.

“Call me Michael, Doctor Michael Smith, systems engineer.  A piece of shrapnel has shot through the sarcophagus lid and through my leg, another centimeter to the right and I would have bled out before I woke.”

I make our introductions.  I recognize him and my pad pops up his dossier after reading his RFID.  I grin because he is from my group, he is an engineer, and gosh there are a lot of Smiths on this voyage. He seats himself on a rock, stares down at his computer pad and starts tapping away and scrolling through barely human readable logs and Ms. Bautista wasted no time tending to the Doc’s leg, pulling a first aid kit from a pouch on her vest.

“OK, so the ship collided with something while adjusting orbit and I’m guessing all the modules broke apart and many are still scattered in orbit and we’re a lucky bunch that had a deorbit trajectory. The logs end abruptly, I assume the pods lost data communication very quickly, just a lot of packet loss errors at the end.  There is no log for a deorbit tug engaging with my pod.  The only thing that could have caused such a massive failure would be total compute cloud shutdown.  Something destroyed the bridge section or the reactors.  The computers didn’t register elevated radiation levels and the pods wouldn't have opened if they were contaminated. So we’ve got that going for us.

“Mr. Commissar here and I were supposed to land at EQC-2.  Assuming the clock is correct, we are experiencing sunrise at about the same longitude as EQC-3.”  His face wrenches as Mille squirts some liquid bandage material onto his wounds.

He holds his pad up to the sky and towards the mountains on the horizon. “The computer can do to terrain match and star fix.  We will soon know precisely where we are.”

Michael pauses again and exclaims “And now it says that is doesn’t have enough information for a geographical location! Perhaps I can try again at night.” His voice is strained with pain as the liquid bandage dries. He pinches his brow with his right hand and continues speaking.  “We can assume there are other landed pods, debris, equipment all scattered over the surface of this planet, but mostly in a band, plus or minus a few degrees from the equator.  Our pods must have been in the same section and only separated during de-orbit.  We are very lucky to be together”. He pauses for a long while with the pained ‘we’re doomed’ look on his face.

“So let’s get on with it. We need to get that gear out of our pods and get to constructing shelter.  We can sleep in the sarcophagi tonight but I think I might just camp out here on the ground, since the weather is so nice right now and there is no way I’m walking back to my pod.  Welcome to bloody Tohono!”  He bunches up a jacket he had tied around his waist and deposits himself on the ground, the jacket serving as his pillow.

I had a thought and put the question to him.  “I have to believe there were other survivors, perhaps hundreds of us.  If we are five years past our scheduled landing date, then we’ve been spinning in orbit for most of that time. Do you think other survivors could have landed and established the colonies, perhaps years ago?”

“We are north of the equator, at least 2 to 3 degrees placing us about 500 kilometers from where Equatorial Colony 3 or EQC-3 was supposed to be.  The computer says there are no navigation or communication satellites up in the sky, so again, something has gone very wrong. We have no com-sats which should be in geo-synchronous orbit and the nav-sats would have deployed much closer in inclined semi-synchronous orbits.  The radios in these computers are weak, and without a com-station and a dish, the only information we have is what was stored in memory before the ship broke apart.  If somebody set up a com-station within a few hundred kilometers, then the computer would pick it up.  EQC-3 might be there but we’re not about to embark on a 500k walk.  The ship was modular and we had a safe landing here because each and every stacked module and cargo container has the ability to re-enter and land on its own. However, they do not have the ability to de-orbit on their own, though a secondary collision could have sent us on our path.

“We would have landed at the precise location we were assigned to if the nav-sats were up, so I assume that these bumped, deorbited, and landed randomly due to the emergency condition.  The deorbit tugs are likely non-operational because of the nav-sat issue.  I have no direct knowledge of the emergency landing programs but perhaps they do synchronize with nearby pods if they are available within short range communication.  This planet is larger than Earth and there could be literally thousands of kilometers between us and the next survivors if there are any.

“But yes, it is safe to assume there are other survivors and yes there can be people still up there in orbit.  The sarcophagi can sustain a person without any other connected power for decades.  One thing is certain:  the cavalry isn’t coming and we need to set up shelter and get to work building a com-station so we can figure out what the hell happened.”  Another long pause.

“There is no reason to do anything else right now except to set up our little colony, which is what we came here for in the first place.  That cliff right there is a volcanic flow and there are likely hollow lava tubes within. The tunnels you cut and these tubes can serve as our shelter.  Your mining lances should cut through this material easily.  Expect to find lots of iron, nickel, and silica in there as well.

“There are likely rogue traders, asteroid miners, and other ships flying through this system, perhaps they can help, but none of them are going to possess the ability to land and take off again. The best they can do is shoot supplies down to us or send in drones to take stuff back up.  They might be willing to relay messages but I doubt any of them are too friendly with the company. Tohono wasn’t the most desirable rock for settlement and ‘you knew the job was dangerous when you took it.’

“This is a class-M planet with all its water in subterranean aquifers, and the surface lakes and streams are few and far between.  What it does have is a molten core and lots of volcanism.  That combined with the aquifers makes the surface strewn with geothermal vents and geysers.  That drives the rain cycle here almost entirely. The company wanted to set up this place as a civilized industrial and mining outpost and the government wants research of the indigenous life forms.  This place is paradise if you like the desert.

“Let’s spend this day scanning the terrain for metal debris and edible plants, the computers can guide you to which plants are edible, I know there are agave-like succulents and berry bushes.  I will set up a solar still and start collecting water.  The MREs and water rations should be used only when we can’t find anything else.  Find me a geyser nearby.  If we can haul my sarcophagi over to it, I can repurpose the cooling system to distill water out of the geyser vapor.  Given a little more time it will clean the water too, when I adapt the bodily waste recyclers to that task.  Shelter, Food, Water; Priorities one two and three!  Later I can even get the onboard turbines to produce electricity through the Organic Rankine Cycle.  These sarcophagi were designed with modularity and reusable components for just these types of situations.  There are no less than fifty reprogrammable MCUs inside each of those.  These are valuable equipment so protect them!  Come to think of it, the refrigerant inside those is more precious than gold.  We can’t afford to lose a gram of it without a chemical plant to replace it.”

Bautista had been quiet for most of Dr. Smith’s speech.  She pipes up and says “My pod has a seed culture kit for GMO potatoes.  These are engineered to grow on THIS PLANET.  I can get a crop germinating in a few hours and in a few days we’ll have small edible potatoes that provide protein as well. On my computer, and on yours too, are plans, schematics, and code for every piece of equipment on that ship, given time and resources, me and the Doc can build just about anything, though semiconductors might be a bit of a challenge without a mini-fab.  The first thing we want to build, after the shelter, is a paste dispenser, which will give us complete nutrition from the potatoes as a feed stock, though indigenous feed stock should work as well.”

Michael lights up, happy to know there is someone else who is going to help make a plan “I have a compact micro-fab in my sarcophagus, it can’t build complex ICs but small metal parts and circuit boards are no problem.  What it can do is help us construct a larger mini-fab but that will take a lot of time and specific resources. It can make polycrystalline solar cells and the components of a paste dispenser, not to mention hand tools and fasteners we’ll need to assemble them.”

My life as a military commissar has taught me to read people well enough to know that Dr. Smith isn’t telling us everything that he’s figured out.  He’s frightened, worried, and he’s been real bossy.  He knows what he’s talking about and perhaps this is just his way of coping with the situation, or perhaps he’s mourning someone who might be among the dead. His dossier doesn’t list any familial connections with other passengers and everyone on the voyage was required to be single. I’m not going to pull rank just yet because I know he and Bautista have our lives in their capable hands.  Survival here will be the first challenge, building an outpost of civilization seems a bit of a long shot.

There were nearly ten thousand people on that ship, all of them in sarcophagi pods. The computers were supposed to insert us into orbit, deploy a network of satellites, and drop each pod out of orbit in an orderly manner.  Habitats, greenhouses, modular factory shops, all probably still up there or landed who knows where.  If the majority of passengers are still alive, then most are still sleeping and spinning in orbit.  Those that landed were probably alone and isolated and many probably never got out of their sarcophagi alive.  The company was supposed to send a support ship here, at the ten year mark.  Since the comms never went up, I doubt that ship is on its way. Even if we get the message out that we’re here, they’re gonna tell us what we already know.  “Make yourselves at home.”

We all volunteered for a one-way trip.  A lot of the people on that ship were penal relocations, but these people tend not to be the most violent and dangerous sort.  They get a semblance of freedom in exchange for their hard work and sacrifice. Many were refugees from failed colonization missions, and many of them too old for this kind of endeavor, perhaps they thought this was a good place to retire. A few were wealthy and paid a great deal for a luxurious life adventure or to become industrial magnates, they are gonna be pissed.

The weather is pretty amazing and the sky is beautiful. This was supposed to be a new home for us and generations of our successors.  Up in that ship were the seeds of great cities, now here we are picking up scraps.

CodyRex123

well, i am pretty much guessing that your people were like tourist, or something like that, good chance that it was a new colony being settle if you have a settler with you, but unlucky hit a strong solar wind that tore apart your ship,
Dragons!