gorgenmast

Deregulated: A space colonization roleplay

No, nobody else has any representatives joining them. I just have this secondary character that's going to hang out with Daniel for a while. Our current schedule is not conducive to making posts, but I'll get one together shortly. Don't feel like you have to wait for me, though.

Deregulated: A space colonization roleplay

I intentionally left the biomes that correspond to map colors fairly vague with the hope that people would have more creative license to describe their surroundings. I drew that map initially with four different colors that would correspond to the main biome classes on Ember, and from there modified the colors here and there to give the impression of multiple types of sub-biomes.

There are four major biome classes on Ember excluding the polar icecaps. The reddish-pink regions are known as the painted savannas - a class of environments dominated by a reddish moss/lichen-esque ground cover that serves as the producer base. There are occasional stands of larger plantlike organisms, things that look more like a giant coral growth than a proper tree. This biome dominates the lowlands of the south that were once the seabed of Ember's oceans which have long since disappeared, and as such is one of the wetter biomes. Alien are numerous and diverse here.

To the west of the cluster of lakes is a series of deserts that were once a shallow spot in Ember's oceans. Due to its higher elevation, water drains off this region into the lakes and underground aquifers of the painted savannas. These are a mix of your standard erg desert interspersed with salt deserts and salares. Extremophile aliens adapted to a very difficult environment here.

The previous two biome families can be considered lowland environments, whereas the next two are characteristic of Ember's northern uplands - which are simply the continental shelves of what were once Ember's two major landmasses. The southern, yellowish-brown areas are a semi-arid region dominated by dense scrub. What water exists here drains into a network of rivers and ephemeral arroyos that become deep canyons that flow outward to the low-lying regions. This region is inspired by the Brazilian Caatinga on Earth. The wildlife here are generally not vast herds of megafauna like those in the painted savannas, but rather smaller, solitary creatures that are better suited to negotiating the forests of thorny coral-cactus growth.

In the northern latitudes the upland regions are wetter, and the producer base lifeforms here have evolved into organisms more reminiscent of the trees of Earth. There is more rainfall in these latitudes due to the storm systems that slide southward from the tempestuous polar latitudes. Rainforest environments are likely to be found here.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive explanation of Ember's biomes, but an idea of what to expect based upon map coloration. These descriptions are not meant to be definitive, but to give the player something to build off of in describing their surroundings.

Deregulated: A space colonization roleplay

@gorgenmast
Is that per a person or does more equipment just up the Efficency?

@Dark Light

Both increase the efficiency.

Deregulated: A space colonization roleplay

So how exactly are "turns" going to be handled?

@Ascendant

Good question.

Essentially, any effort to find and mine baltuskite will be interpreted as a roll. The amount of baltuskite you actually mine is going to be dependant on where you start. Each part of the planet has a different amount of baltuskite, which is determined by a random roll

The formula is B=D[100E(LxR)]. B=baltuskite mined in kilograms. D=ingame days where you have been mining baltuskite. E= is the efficiency coefficient, which is determined based upon which pieces of mining gear you have, along with the quality of that gear. L=location coefficient, which is a multiplier I assign to you based on whether your area is rich or poor (each grid's mineral richness coefficient is generated randomly). R=roll coefficient, which is where I multiply how effective your mining efforts have been based on a roll. This is all being processed in an an excel file that I modify whenever players do certain things. Go a little west into a grid square rich in baltuskite? I'll bump up your location coefficient. Get a new piece of equipment that makes your mine more efficient? I'll bump up your efficiency coefficient.

An example of the formula in use.

Example Enterprises: 277.2 kg mined = 5[100(1.2)(0.66x.7)].

At the end of the turn (certain amount of IRL days - haven't decided how many yet) I will calculate how many kg you have mined and determine how much you sell your mined baltuskite for depending upon what baltuskite is trading for at the time the freighter returns. Say that baltuskite is trading for 68.5 FC per kilogram at the end of the turn. The 277.2 kg of baltuskite mined by Example Enterprises is worth 18,988 FC.

Deregulated: A space colonization roleplay

The IC is open! Go nuts!

Deregulated: A space colonization roleplay

"Sometimes you gotta be an S.O.B.
If you want to make a dream reality
Competition? Send 'em south
If they're gonna drown
Put a hose in their mouth
Do not pass 'go', go straight to hell
I smell that meat hook smell"

-Mark Knopfler - Boom, Like That

---

Daniel's stomach jumped up into his chest when his dropship was jettisoned from the yawning belly of the Crucis, the freighter starship that had transported him across nearly 50 light years of space to the very edge of human-explored space. He could not see it through the vessel's thick hull, but another four dropships had jettisoned from the Crucis immediately after. Those four vessels tracked over and joined with Daniel's dropship to form a pentagon formation.

Daniel, already fair-skinned, felt his face go cold and pale as he dry heaved from the initial lurch out of the freighter. The dropship pilot heard Daniel gagging and turned around in his seat to see what the vessel's lone passenger was doing.

"Do not even think about throwing up in my dropship," the pilot remarked unsympathetically. "There's nothing messier than vomit in zero-gee. Wait 'til we get on the surface to toss your cookies."

"Fock off," Daniel snarled in his Afrikaner accent. "I'm paying you lot good money to ride in this shitcan and I'll puke where I damn well please."

The dropship pilot rolled his eyes and returned his attention to the crowded console splayed out before him in the dropship's cockpit. He flipped a few switches and took the vessel's joystick in his hand to make minor adjustment's the dropship's orientation in space.

Daniel took a few deep breaths to settle his stomach before turning his attention to the cockpit windshield. He unstrapped himself from the hull-mounted seat and pushed himself over to the cockpit. He braced himself against the back of the co-pilot's seat and gazed out on the otherworldly panorama through the dropship's scratched polycomposite windshield. For the first time, Daniel laid eyes upon his new home: SEVI-T3 -- Ember.

The dropship was in low orbit above the shaded half of the planet, moving rapidly toward Ember's sunlit hemisphere. The planet's orange-yellow sun was rising above the vast curved horizon, setting the hazy atmosphere ablaze with orange light. Directly below the dropship on the planet's surface, the peaks of giant hoodoos and mesas glowed vermilion against the darkness of the low-lying country that had not yet seen the first light of day. In the warm light of this alien dawn, everything on the surface looked to be on fire. Ember's first explorers had named this planet well.

"For the love of God, don't throw up in the cockpit," the pilot demanded upon noticing Daniel out of the corner of his eye. "Aerobraking is stressful enough without a bunch of vomit splattered against the windshield."

"Give it a rest with the puke. But what's this aerobraking about? What's so bad about that?"

"Aerobraking just means using air drag to slow us down to a halfway reasonable speed. We've slowed down quite a bit from interstellar transit, but we still have gobs of momentum to shave off before we can even think about landing," the dropship's co-pilot explained.

"We're about a minute away from hitting this planet's atmosphere at 26,000 miles an hour," the pilot chimed in. "You do the math."

"Relax," the co-pilot cooed mainly for Daniel's benefit. "We've done this about a hundred times before. Nothing we can't handle."

At that moment, Daniel's attention was captured by a flickering blue light to his left. Down below in Ember's skies, a monstrous thunderhead billowed high into the planet's atmosphere. The stormcloud's roiling contours flashed with bright, blue sparks of violent lightning within, giving proof to the ferocity of the storm.

"Unless we hit one of those," the co-pilot added as he watched the massive storm drift past.

A pair of dropships had passed over Daniel's vessel; two of the five that comprised Daniel's flotilla. These were larger than the one in which Daniel rode; cargo-variant dropships designed to carry heavy freight to and from a planet's surface. Reaction jets on the outer hulls of these dropships pulling ahead of Daniel's flashed here and there with small jets of blue fire - fine adjustments to the angle and orientation of the dropships in preparation for aerocapture. Daniel could only hope that the pilots of these vessels knew what they were doing, for each of those dropships contained a sizeable portion of his remaining fortune. All it would take is a load shift inside the hull of any of those cargo dropships to potentially ruin him.

//Barosensors indicate we're 30 seconds from the upper atmosphere. Making final adjustments, over,// the staticky voice of another dropship came in over the radio. The pilot of Daniel's vessel delicately thumbed the joystick in response.

//Ten seconds.//

"Hold on!" The co-pilot barked. Daniel's fingers dug into the back of the seat with white-knuckle force.

The dropship rattled slightly after ten seconds had passed, and then began to tremble. Within a few more seconds, the trembling had increased into vigorous vibration punctuated with several violent jolts. The panoramic view of Ember's horizon was engulfed in a sheet of fire roiling off the dropship's underside. Nothing but white and yellow fire could be seen beyond the windshield for what might have been the longest five minutes of Daniel's life. But when the flames of atmospheric entry eventually subsided, Daniel was presented with a view of a planet no human had seen in thirty years.

The dropships soared above an utterly alien landscape. Hills and plains covered in bright pink-red vegetation rolled for hundreds of miles, much of which crawled with teeming herds of alien wildlife. Swarms of bipedal grazers scattered across the landscape as the dropship formation screamed overhead, while lumbering browsers as large as a train car simply looked up to the human craft with disinterest. The vast array of alien life passing underneath reminded Daniel of the wildlife preserves in South Africa where he had taken girls on lavish excursions. After hundreds of years of development, hunting, poaching, and habitat degredation, the animal populations in those African preserves had been so decimated that a safari tour group was lucky to see even a single zebra or buffalo. But even from a few thousand feet in the air, stampeding throngs of alien life coursed across Ember's surface.

The ruddy savannas gave way to a series of towering rock spires that surrounded a massive rise marked by a cliff face several hundred feet high stretching as far as the eye could see. Sinuous canyons wound through these uplands before ending abruptly at the cliff face where they discharged their water in waterfalls so tall that the water only reached the low country below as clouds of fine mist.

"We're approaching the designated L-Z," the dropship pilot declared. "Prepare to touch-down."

The thruster pods on the dropships gradually swiveled down into a vertical take off and landing configuration, slowing the aircraft to a hover above the landscape. Gradually the dropships descended toward the surface with powerful downdrafts of their thrusters buffeting the alien vegetation below. As the dropships lowered onto the surface, stocky landing gear unstowed from the underside of the vessels to meet the ground. With a brief jolt, Daniel's dropship had touched down in the first human landing on Ember in thirty years. But there was no pause or pageantry to savor this historic moment. Without fanfare, the dropships opened their cargo bays to the alien atmosphere with a hiss-puff of pressurized being released. With the door open, Daniel left his pilots without so much as a farewell and set foot on Ember for the first time.

Already, cargo crews were at work. Stevedores strapped into freight exosuits lifted hundreds of pounds of cargo off of the dropships. Much to Daniel's relief, all of the cargo seemed to have survived the landing.

"Mister Weyrich," greeted a dark-skinned fellow of Polynesian descent - perhaps Maori - wearing pressed khaki trousers with a short-sleeve polo bearing a corporate logo. "I am Spencer Arahanga, here to represent Comtois Logistics. I trust you had a comfortable arrival. Now, our crew is ready to begin, but I'd like to first confirm with you that this site satisfies your needs."

"Here," Daniel declared, pointing down to the spongy vegetation under his feet. "We build here."

Deregulated: A space colonization roleplay

Getting through the first post right now. Just remembered that I made this and never uploaded it. Could be useful in showing where you are located without having to mark a spot on the map in paint.

Were marksman rifles/sniper rifles ruled out for the catalogue? And we won't be worrying about buying food/medicine?

@Ascendant

Sniper rifles have not been ruled out.

Sniper rifle: 140
An older semiautomatic sniper rifle with excellent range and accuracy. Fires a standard kinetic round of large caliber. Skilled marksmen issued this particular firearm in combat report the ability to score a hit on a person at a range of 1,000 feet/305 meters. Comes with a telescoping scope with a passive infrared mode.

As for food and medicine, I have decided we will not be having to buy that. I don't want to get this RP bogged down with such small purchases. Tracking the .05 credits it costs for a banana is really worth the trouble.

Deregulated: A space colonization roleplay

Hello all, thank you for being patient with us while we get everything ironed out. We are just about ready to start. I am going to kick us off with the first IC post sometime tomorrow. For the time being, feel free to write up your first post if you are accepted and just hang onto it until ready to post. I figure we'll start off entering the atmosphere on our dropships, but if you want to start right when your boots hit the ground or a bit before for some characterization on board the starship, that's fine too.

Likewise, this would be a good time to contact fellow players for a collaboration post if you like doing those. Just be sure not to let it drag on like collaborative posts can easily do.

Deregulated: A space colonization roleplay

Name: Daniel Weyrich
Age: 29
Biography: Daniel Weyrich was born in the African nation of Kangama to South African parents. Daniel's father was of the entrepreneurial sort, and had become wealthy by employing the native Kangamese to mine heavy metals used in the burgeoning starship construction industry. From a very early age, Daniel was exposed to the day-to-day affairs of running a business, and his father would devote much of what little free time he had in showing young Daniel around his mining operation.

As Daniel grew older, he would venture out into the Kangamese towns and cities and encountered the crushing poverty that most of that nation's people endured. Daniel once expressed his dismay at the squalor in which most Kangamese lived and expressed his concern that it was not right to use such a destitute people for cheap labor. But Daniel's father insisted that his mining operation was in fact helping these people, for the wages he paid his mine operators were several times higher than the yearly earnings of the average Kangamese citizen. Additionally, the taxes he paid to the national and local governments helped keep this impoverished nation afloat. More entrepreneurs, Daniel's father argued, would make Kangama a wealthy nation.

When Daniel was 16, unrest came to Kangama as it did to so many Subsaharan African nations. A minority ethnic group initiated a bloody civil war against the majority-ruled government that they claimed had disenfranchised them. When the rebels stormed the capital city and executed the president along with any pro-government supporters, Daniel's father immediately arranged for the evacuation of his wife and son. His father promised to meet up with him once he had arranged to ship much of his valuable mining equipment to neighboring Angola. Daniel and his mother safely arrived in Windhoek, Namibia, but his father never left Kangama. Less than 24 hours after their helicopter evacuation, the rebels had arrived at the mine and executed Daniel's father.

Daniel was distraught by the death of his father. He fell into a depressive state and, with the large inheritance left by his father, attempted to find joy in hedonistic pleasures and vices. For the next ten years, Daniel drank and womanized around Johannesburg, South Africa. He frittered away the wealth left to his family in a futile attempt to find some meaning in life. His mother eventually disowned wayward Daniel, and cut him off from what was left of the inheritance. Daniel now had only stock portfolios left to him by his father. When the Federation's putsch occurred, those stock portfolios tanked with the rest of the market. With what remained of his father's fortune quickly becoming worthless, Daniel downed a bottle of painkillers, washed it down with a few swigs of cheap vodka, and went to sleep with no intention of ever waking up.

Daniel did wake though, in a hospital bed after a three month-long coma. Upon discharge from the hospital, he discovered that his stock portfolios had spiked in value. With a new lease on life and a fair amount of money to his name, Daniel sold his stocks and with that last remainder of his father's fortune set off to find a real purpose for his life. When he contacted his father's old mining colleagues, Daniel was tipped off about the planet SEVI-T3, and the wild rumors of that planet's minerals being a gold mine.

Knowing this, Daniel purchased for himself a one-way ticket to the planet Ember with the aim to become a successful entrepreneur like his father was. This time, however, Daniel will not let some high-minded sense of responsibility and civic duty get in the way of his success. Daniel's father tried to be fair to the Kangamese, and he saw how they repaid his father's kindness. Daniel knows now to be ruthless, and to give his clients and rivals alike no quarter.

Starting location:

Deregulated: A space colonization roleplay

So, who needs a little extra hired defense or prehaps use of a hovercraft.

@Dark Light

My character will likely want your services.

@Pepperm1nts

So what would be the price for some traps, a cage and maybe some heavy duty chains.

Gonna catch me an alien dog.
(And food) :)

@Dark Light

From the updated catalog:

Electrosnare: 30
A spring-loaded trap used by naturalists on Earth to capture large animals without causing harm. Once triggered, a clamp snaps firmly onto the animal's leg. Once secured, the trap pulses with an electric current that relaxes the animal's muscles, effectively paralyzing it until released. Sends an alert to a smart tablet once triggered.

Cage-large: 60
A cage of thick aluminum bars welded onto a cube frame. Designed for transporting circus and show animals such as lions and tigers.