Exploring the moon, a breif story illustrating my thoughts about hostile environments

It's time to look to the stars. Your starting planet is a nice place, you built a huge base, explored the entire surface, and much of whats below. You made your first spaceship, it's inefficient with fuel, scanning capabilities are rudimentary, and the only way up and down are via launch/descent pods which take fuel as well. Lacking fancy things like FTL or the ability to scan for minerals you decide that exploring the moon would be a logical first step. It's the nearest thing after all and wont cost much fuel to get there, and should you want to leave the low gravity makes that easy.

You build a couple space suits, bring along enough power cells, oxygen, and building materials to make and run good size moon base. You start with a small room with the essentials (you need a means of resupplying your spacesuit with oxygen afterall since unfinished rooms will not have oxygen). You finish the base, get the main generator online, hook up some small solar panels you brought as well. Your base looks awesome and has everything you need. Many rooms, computers, lights, nice oxygen system, and some manufacturing oriented rooms as well. Home sweet home, time to go explore.

First things first, surface exploration. Mostly flat and little but dust, but before long you find a chasm, which then leads into a cave system. There's a drop downwards, you toss a glowstick down and cannot see the bottom, but hey, your on the moon how bad can it be? You jump off. Big mistake, absent an atmosphere, low acceleration from gravity doesn't mean you wont reach a dangerous speed. You hit the ground and damage your suit. You are now leaking oxygen and must get back to base soon. Fortunately climbing back up is not too difficult thanks to the low gravity and make it back swapping your suit for your spare.

After several days of exploration you have found some new materials and are screwing around in your base seeing what they might be used for. Suddenly an alarm goes off, you totally forgot to check at what rate your awesome base was consuming oxygen and power, and now your low on both! You quickly switch off oxygen supply and power to all rooms except the control room. The couple small solar panels you brought turn out to only be sufficient for lighting, certainly not enough to keep anything important running. With the majority of the base turned off you have enough power for another week, but only enough oxygen for a day.

You decide to explore the surface some more with the remaining time you have. In a crater you find some ice, exactly what you needed! You bring it back to base, separate the oxygen and hydrogen out of it, at the expense of a couple days of power giving you roughly five days of energy and oxygen remaining. Now that your resources have been better balanced out you turn back on a couple other parts of the base.

A few more days of productive mining pass and without finding an additional fuel source you decide to make the return trip to your homeworld, leaving your new base dark and without oxygen. Regardless, a successful expedition. Next time you'll bring more solar panels other resources to lengthen the time your able to run the base.

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I've always found survival aspects entertaining, and that can come in forms additional to just killing endless swarms of monsters.

 

That was a good read, I've always liked the journal/personal log style writing style.

 

Hmm you know what, I like that it really makes hostile environments seem hostile.
It would also add quite a bit of difficulty to the game, I don't think they'd make it so your suit could break...
but if they did.. ah ha ha ha... it's a good idea! Should be hard to smash though, break a bone when you rip the suit.

 

interesting need someway to prevent your self from asphyxiating in a truly established base(maybe a plant terrarium would do the trick?) but nice idea let the environment become your worst opponent. Good job sir!

 

I'd assume if suit damage were a factor that there would be a variety of generated suits with different properties, mobility, robustness, etc. I wouldn't put it past them with tiy talking about acid planets and stuff. It sounds like some environmental survival aspects will be a factor in gameplay in some way at least.

 

your little story brings to light an interesting aspect.
how will atmosphere inside buildings be maintained. do you have to wear your suit even inside ? will a door simply mark a stop to the deadly atmosphere and mark the entrance of your base ? will some sort of special airlock item be needed ?
etc

 

Really good story. I felt like that is something that actually would/could happen in game. Kudos

 

This is a question I had as well. I plan to make an underwater base with an airlock to drain the water, so I was wondering if I could make an airlock for a planet without oxygen. They already stated somewhere that temperature is going to be different inside an out, if it's cold outside, being indoors would be warmer. So they might be doing similar with oxygen. You put plants in your house and you'd get oxygen inside and none outside or something.