Spaceship

Publicly available ship records

Allure of the Space (named after a gigantic cruise ship of the early 21st century) is one of the long series of luxurious orbit-to-orbit cruise liners with significant cargo capacity that enables long space journeys or extra profit from trade. The ships are produced for 34 years now, one or two per year, depending on economic cycles. Quite an obvious design: a disc just large enough for comfortable artificial gravity, engines in the axle protruding from one plane, cargo bay acting as meteor shield covering the other. These are the largest passenger ships ever serially manufactured and the third largest including transport ships, but then, a lot of bigger ships is still produced ad-hoc, by wiring together cheap modules and primitive cargo hulls welded in space. This particular specimen is 23 years old and it was produced in a year and a half for long cruises to gas giants.. Had a serious structural damage in a docking accident on Jupiter's orbit after a couple of years of service. Bought by a millionaire and refurbished as his private mobile space island (affixing engines to a hollowed asteroid is more stylish, but rolling a big ship in asteroid rubble of various sizes is much cheaper and results in a faster unit). The ship is reported to have burned down in the Neptune atmosphere due to a navigation error 8 years ago. Only the millionaire and the ship\s captain were on board, watching the gigantic storms on the Blue Planet. Both escaped in a space shuttle, had trouble transmitting an S.O.S, but were finally picked up. The millionaire returned to Earth and never ventured into space again, which is quite understandable after what he's gone through.

The real story

TODO: Was there any shady motive in the millionaire's purchase of the ship? How was it refurbished? What extra, secret installations and vaults? Did the millionaire's invite the aliens? How soon was he aware of the alien infestation? Why didn't he alert authorities? Why did he want the aliens killed? Why did he fly to Earth?

See the alien backstory for what happened to the ship between they took control and had to temporarily relinquish control again to avoid detection.

Technology

TODO: airlocks are tricky on a rotating ship, where are the entraces? How to board it?

TODO: Ship's design. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gravity. Let's settle for a ship rotating at 2.5 rpm, assuming that good drugs and exercises will be known to counter the Coriolis effect, which starts being a problem above 2 rpm. Then, for 1g at the floor of the first level, it has to be 288m in diameter. That's above half the length of the Empire State Building and of the largest oil tanker ever built, and more than two thirds of the length of the longest passenger sea vessel. It gives 144m radius. If decks are 3 meter high, then it's potentially 48 decks. The first level is supplies and meteor shield buffer. The second is the navigation deck where most of the crew works and lives. Then comes the passenger area, still very close to 1g, but a bit less is more fun. Gravity as little as that on the Moon (0.165g) appears at 40 and the remaining 8 decks are taken by the engines and fuel tanks, both of which also protrude towards the stern. The game arena is from level 1 to 38, level 39, the place of the last battle has special geometry (height? protruding into the cargo area? anything else? TODO) and at 40 are the engine servicing rooms; entering them is victory. Fighting in a bit above Moon gravity might be strange, but judging by the Moon walking videos, it's not extreme. Especially that there is not much space for Moon jumps inside the 3m high decks. The longest decks will be 900m long, the 38th deck would be around 180m, which is 5 times shorter.

TODO: screen size: The game window, at 16:9 aspect ratio, would show the whole shortest level or one fifth of the longest. Unless the user insists by resizing the window, scrolling is only needed in the vertical line. Angband is 72x212, but most people don't view it all on screen at once. With standard X Window fixed 9x15 bold font, you can fit 65 x 235 on the 1920x1080 screen and it's quite readable on > 20' monitors and there is still a line above and below for messages and status. Let's make the size on the map on the screen 65 x 180, which is 5 times shorter than the longest level. With 1m by 1m tiles (this is a bit crowded on the battlefield, but 1m thick walls are already hard to explain, even with air ducts and various pipes inside), we have the size of our ship. The width is 65m, which is a bit below the width and height of the largest passenger sea ships, which gives our ship around 5 times the volume (including the engine area) of such ships. If we add the rear fuel and engine areas and the fore asteroid shield, behind it unpressurized buffer cargo bays and asteroid rubble all over the ship, we get 10 times the volume, which is still very reasonable, since it's one of the biggest space ships and sea ships have to be kept small to fit in ports and canals, be seaworthy, etc. The average with with the extra volume is much closer to the radius, especially visually with the non-square font. We might even think that the tiles have larger width than length for the purpose of realism, flavour and to match the visuals, but for game mechanics they are square to simplify coding and player's mental model of the world. So the shape of the ship is half a cube, rounded and with protruding fore and aft parts at the axle. Sponge sphere squashed to half the width. Can pass as a wannabe-asteroid, I suppose.

TODO: Perhaps engines would be at the center and extending towards the stern and the cargo bay at the bow. Think about the hollowed out asteroid model --- with a meteor shield at the front and a cargo bay and the engines and fuel at the back, is the ship round enough to looks like an asteroid? How will the Coriolis effect affect aiming and shooting? Calculate the more and more limited FOV towards the centre of the ship stemming from the curvature. Probably even carbines don't use their full effective range, forget about sniper rilfes. This is great.

Layout

Allure of the Space has 40 decks divided thematically into areas, each a few levels deep. The precise extent of areas is slightly randomized and some areas may even overlap a bit after the greenery, but the general order is fixed. Each level is divided into sectors, between 90 and 180 meters long, with fuzzy borders.

The lifts are dead and the lift shafts are inaccessible. There is only one set of aligned stairs from level 1 to level 40, starting close to the airlock on level 1. For security, even decks have the stairs aligned in one position and odd decks in a nearby position, so that closing doors is always enough to separate decks. Some other levels are connected by ad hoc stairs, too, with their respective walls and doors for security. For simplicity, the stairs can't be obstructed or destroyed, so to block or unblock them, doors and walls around have to be broken through/closed/built.

A tentative draft of areas:

• Level 1 contains airlock and nearby stairs to level 2. The level is a buffer against meteor hits, so there are human cabins and lots of strong doors; the ones around the airlock area closed and stuck, so most of level 1 will be explored after visiting level 2.

  • Sectors: water recycling basins, with plants and water-liking animals, water filters, some chemistry stuff; life support machinery rooms (for simplicity, breaking these does not disrupt life support, but it should), various supplies storage rooms
  • Weapons: fists and clubs.
  • Enemies: animals, most of the assassin type (low HP, high damage, attack from hiding). Most die if two players hit them at once or one hits them twice; they incapacitate a hero in two blows, but the medical bay is close and they can't open doors, so it's easy to avoid serious danger.

• Level 2 with navigation panels is where the space crew officers hang on

  • Sectors: navigation area with lots of open space and various other equipment for running the ship, captain's and owner's apartments, officer's studios, a common kitchen with no cutlery and an eating room, gym, medical bay.
  • Weapons: fists and clubs.
  • Enemies: animals, as on level 1, but much less, only in remote and closed rooms. One or two mildly deranged unarmed domestic robots.

• Levels 3--4.5: passenger area (the fraction means its randomly 3--4 or 3--5)

  • Sectors: cabins and apartments of various sizes, small restaurants, open lounges around lifts. Exceptionally, this area can be entered without a hard fight, using just the welding equipment found on level 1 and the counterattack wave is very weak.
  • Weapons: knives and other implements from the restaurants, TODO: more?
  • Enemies: less, but much stronger animals. Some reprogrammed human robots, some with weak weapons.

TODO: redo the rest

• Level 5.5--8.5: greenery, only one level, but thrice the height with forks, hatchets, mowing equipment; densely overgrown with plants, strong animals, a bit of deformed animals and animal-robot unarmed hybrids, swimming pools and ponds

• construction area (which means the area was either being refurbished or things were constructed there and moved to the other areas) with electric drills, pneumatic rivet setters and nail shooters, lots of rubble and empty spaces

• an area/time window with personal weapons, such as pistols, shotguns; hunting weapons?

• an area/time window with army weapons up to small grenades, without RPG or rocket launchers

• an area/time window with available, working alien weapons; this may coincide with alien-built structure and/or a chaos/fractal chaos of rubble; make 3 such areas, first mostly melee weapons and close quarters levels, then mostly various strange weapons and strange rooms, at last mostly ranged weapons and quite open levels --- it's just aliens choosing weapons according to the terrain

• a very tough alien area with varied terrain, where heroes at last can and at last want to smash whole level sections to pieces, very strong alien counterattacks, which push heroes back almost to the start of the ship, most of the ship gets smashed to pieces in the process, but the newly acquired potent ranged weapons work OK in open areas

• the endgame area, large mostly empty cargo bay for the final battle (in zero gravity? with some outside human help?)