Sure. How do you plan on moving 700kg of very flexible robot and hanging it in its cradle?

As for repairing it you kick it several times. It doesn't respond. Yup. Its dead, Jim.  (A part of me wants to channel a bored tech-help operator asking if you tried turning it on first, but that would be silly! It doesn't have a switch.)

As far as I know you've been playing backgammon, Cooper(Ras) has been sorting computer data and the two military types have been drinking and searching for porn... without much luck with either endeavor.

I'm an intelegent person from a technology advanced society, I was born and grew up in an artificial environment.  I have 2 tours in space.  I'll use the tools provided for moving 700 kilo loads and drag it over. Or if those tools aren't moving I'll get an extension cord and plug it in.  

I'll push some buttons.  Maybe I can't get it running but I can get it plugged in.

I'm not meaning to imply you are incompetent, but a repair drone has more in common with industrial equipment than, say, your probe drone. The repair bay is more like the ammo bays, something meant only to access for maintenance, than the workshop on the other deck.  

Without any good technical skills trying to figure out what is wrong with the drone, or the standard procedure for a disabled drone, is outside your area.

Still, you can scrounge up some cargo moving equipment and spend most of the day hauling it and shoving it into place.

Unfortunately that doesn't do anything that you can see, it doesn't seem to reactivate the repair drone, there are indicator lights but they don't change.

Fimion will sit patiently with his rifle, waiting for the jump to end and options beyond a 'perfect dead-end for clues' ship opens up. He's used to the military's "hurry up and wait!" pacing. He goes eerily calm, staring off into space, waiting for that surprise of mortal terror to break the silence.

So we are very small right.  And space is very big.  Seems like we ought to be undeceted. But anything that breaks Enstienien space might be noisy.  

Can we hide?

Jump is very 'noisy' as a general rule. Your ship is sort of midsized if you exclude ships of the line (capital ships). There are a number of things you can do to 'hide' in space, though at the moment you are in the middle of a big spot of growing exotic radiation.  In the future you can, if absolute paranoia is a must, plan your jumps so you land out in the Oort cloud, trading potentially weeks of motoring in system for the privilege of being almost impossible to detect by in-system sensors.

Reasonably speaking anyone who looks 'at' you can see you (warm against the cold of space), but the farther away they are, the less likely they are to be looking 'at' you.  Detection outside roughly 50,000 kilometers can be reasonably avoided... though, honestly, I'm tempted to borrow the expanded ranges from a traveller author's blog... but we'll stick with the book for the nonce.

Hmm...



Looks... thoughtful...



Oh, and before i forget, we don't have any FTL comms, so any chatter will generally have lag. Anyone with the Comms skill can easily determine how much lag if they have a reasonable amount of data, which is 'most of the time'. *



*Please don't overuse this... I try to stick to ball parks, looking up radio wave 'speed' vs light speed, and then determining how many light seconds/hours/days you might be, and THEN calculating on point lag times isn't somethign I want to do every time the phone rings!

Regarding fuel:

Normally you'd have a reserve of 'weeks' of operational fuel, in which case getting anywhere doesn't burn fuel in the traditional sense, no. You generate power.

That fuel was exhausted before you 'woke up' at the start of the game and you were tapping the Jump Fuel to power the reactor, and then you had to make a jump, which burned through pretty much all the remaining fuel. It isn't that you don't have 'fuel' to get in system, its that you don't have 'time'.   Your ship runs through approximately 1.75 tons of fuel Per Day at full power, and you've got 'dregs' which we can assume runs around 1% of the fuel capacity, or 2.5 tons tops.

Sure, you can point yourself at a planet and go full burn until the lights turn off. You'll arrive (inertia is a helluva drug!), eventually. Unable to manuever, and probably unable to breath!  You can gamble that you've got more than 2.5 tons... at full thrust you are roughly 3 days from the inner system. You can play funny games with the power plant (as had been done before you woke up...) to extend fuel. You do have options here. Heck The Jenny carries a ton of fuel (which lasts a week), and can get you into the inner system if you abandon ship.

Ah, right.

Another option to consider, if we don't have enough fuel to reach the gas giant is to set the ship on a course for the gas giant and then take the jenny the rest of the way there, use it to pick up fuel, and then run back to the ship and transfer fuel so we can get it the rest of the way to the gas giant. I.e. use some fuel to accelerate towards the gas giant, ideally leaving enough fuel to not have run dry when we rondezvous back to it in the jenny. We then transfer fuel, possible do more acceleration, and rinse and repeat until we are in orbit of the gas giant with full tanks...

You guys should probably work out some basic crew duties. Who pilots, who handles sensors and/or comms, who is down in the engine compartment, so I won't have to ask for more details.

So its very likely someone knows something jumped into the system.

Are there any other expanding spheres of exotic particles?  Do they have much jump traffic in this system?

I'm the medic! Called it!

Gunned and astrogation.

Who the fuck is the poilet?

Ah. You are alone in the Universe. Roll against Angst or suffer an existential crisis....  


Wait, wrong system...

You do not detect any jumps nor other signs of other ships at the moment.

Also (having done the Google)... using the Comm's board you are able to determine that the 'Radio Lag' is a little over two hours, coming from the Fourth Planet in system as it is (Radio DOES move at lightspeed! WHo knew???), and you being 'out there' some ways.


Fueling: You can reach orbit of the nearest Gas Giant in a handful of hours. The Jenny can be used to scoop unrefined fuel (hydrogen rich gasses from somewhat deeper in the atmosphere) in roughly 20 trips, each taking about an hour, and it takes four days to refine the gasses into liquid hydrogen (which can be done at the same time you are using the Jenny). We've got an abstract gloss here, where there is no loss of volume for refining, and you can manuever etc while refining. In fact, you can use unrefined fuel, but it will penalize many ship operations as the power output fluctuations will cause difficulties.

Unfortunately you only have one pilot at all, Cooper/Ras Algethi, and after 8 hours of continuous flying he'll start suffering fatigue penalities, making an incident more likely.  This isn't an issue on a straight burn (flying in-system), where he can rest in the pilot seat while the ship just plows forward, but for scooping/docking/undocking type operations is an issue.

Your GM has the sads because no one is posting...  what is not working for you guys?  Should I assume more?

I think maybe we are waiting for resolution? Maybe I'm confused, are you waiting for some input?

What tends to be most helpful is for anyone who thinks things have stalled is to post who they think needs to provide input before the game can proceed.