New Year

The journey of the Deepnight Revelation continues. Whilst most of the away teams are collecting food supplies from the surface of the planet, the bridge crew (well, the players) discuss where they are going next. They were following the route that the Droyne supply ships were taking, but there were some issues that the players weren’t happy with.

Firstly, the next jump would be five parsecs – and the ship was only capable of four. This would mean the need to build a fuel cache one parsec out, and use that for the trip to the next world.

The route to the Droyne colony of Draytsirv would then required a second 5 parsec jump. This would mean arriving at Draytsirv with no easy exit route. If there were Biologicals there as expected, then this could be more risk than they were willing to take.

A parsec from Draytsirv was the system of Bayedis, which had an outer belt which was probably ice. This would allow refuelling, with enough fuel to get back out quickly. But the astronomers weren’t 100% certain that the outer belt was icy.

It was decided that there were too many unknowns, and there wasn’t a desperate reason to visit Draytsirv. The Droyne there might know more about the region, but that wasn’t guaranteed. So it was decided to avoid the world.

The route Rimward was still going to be tricky, and the players were very concerned about the risks involved, so the discussion about how to continue went on for quite some time. The players also seemed to be coming to the idea that they wanted to avoid the Biologicals, and that there wasn’t any reason to try and visit the Biological homeworld at Gisa Prime.

To distract things, I interrupted the discussion with one of the planned events I had. One of the small craft pilots tried some stupid and dangerous manoeuvres down near the surface, trying to race down a canyon as fast as possible. When ordered up, he disabled the comms and remote interface so that the Deepnight couldn’t take over control of his craft.

He didn’t die, or lose a boat, but was ordered back up afterwards where he was relieved of active duty. He did have a history of being a bit rash, but not to this extent. Expecting that he had been mind controlled, all the crew were ordered off the planet whilst an investigation was done.

In the end, it was decided he was just stressed or bored, so the resupply process was resumed. The pilot, Kip Magers, was put on light duties and was told to take psychological testing. It was also decided to roll out testing across the entire crew.

Returning to the original discussion, it’s clear that as GM I really need to provide real incentive for the players to take risks. What they do is up to them, and whether they investigate things doesn’t matter that much. But I do worry that it means that nothing interesting happens if they just take the safe route all the way to their destination. At that point, there is a risk that they reach their destination, decide things are too dangerous to investigate, and then turn around and go home.

That’s something I really want to avoid, so I need to be really careful at balancing the perceived risks and rewards. However, I’m not sure where the extreme paranoia has come from, since the ship has never really been in serious danger, and I don’t think I’ve given indication that I’m likely to screw them over without warning.

In the end, they take the risk with setting up a fuel depot, and make the 5 parsec crossing from Eboyse 0521 to Itotakir 0325. It goes without incident. However, they do detect what is possible a Bioship in the inner system. That’s 28 AU away though, since they decided to aim for one of the outer ice giants.

The next jump will take them to Misilubuy 0329, and during the trip they will get to celebrate in the new year for 1120. The trip has been going 13 years at this point, and the whole campaign started back in 1105, so that’s almost 15 years of in-game time.

During the Jump, two of the engineering crew – Valentian Labriola (a technician) and Tala Ofsten (one of the newcomers from the Commonwealth, who had turned out to be a spy) go to see Siona, the lead of the Engineering department,

They raise the issue that engineering is overworked. Quite badly overworked. There have been a lot of initiatives over the last few years to check and double check all the ship’s systems. This takes time, and when something needs replacing, it takes more time. Replacements and fixes have increased in frequency, which means the amount of work being done has increased. It hasn’t been a fast increase, but it has been a gradual increase that has started to cause problems.

Engineering are running at full capacity. Whenever someone is off sick, then someone has to cover their shift, which has meant more overwork, which leads to more people off sick. Everyone is dedicated to the mission, but they are getting tired. It doesn’t help that other departments aren’t seeing the same levels of stress. The Flight team (it is perceived) spend most of their time sitting around, and even have time for fooling around in stupid races down on planets. The mission team rarely have times of stress, and the gunnery and bridge teams have it quite light.

Valentian has a whole set of spreadsheets and data charts demonstrating the numbers.

I’ve just realised, whilst writing this, that this is paralleling a plot in the Battlestar Galactica reboot. That wasn’t deliberate, but given both ships are in similar states, it’s not too surprising.

The complaints are taken on board, and a plan is put together to try and get the other departments to help out Engineering. There have been processes for people to move around between departments, but few have been choosing Engineering recently. Probably because people see that they are overworked.

So the ship officers need to push people into helping out Engineering, by encouraging them with bonuses (not that this will help until they get home), training and maybe better perks.

A couple of days later, there is a big party to celebrate New Year.

The Deepnight comes out of jump at Misilubuy 0329. The system seems safe enough, and they begin their usual deep scanning. Something they note is that they are starting to pick up some strange EM emissions from the system of Hagavo 0633, which is on their planned route. It seems to be coming from the three gas giants there, but it isn’t clear what is causing it.