"The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot eternally live within a cradle."
- -Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky-Kaluga
So what’s this all about?
I’m so glad you asked, voice in my head! This is a roleplay where you play an astronaut on a mission to mars in the mid-2030s. There is, however a twist. Each astronaut may or may not be assigned a secret agenda which they need to pursue during the mission. Maybe they need to kill another astronaut, maybe they need to leave the ship stranded in Mars orbit. Whatever it is, you must accomplish your objective at all costs.
What’s the mission’s plan?
This is complex, but don’t get scared by that. The general concept is fairly simple once you see how it all fits together. Note that M means the time that Manned vehicles arrive at Mars.
Okay, so you’ve mentioned a lot of vehicles here; what are they?
What can I do?
Here is the list of personnel needed:
Orbital Crew:
-Commander/Pilot (Congreveopia)
-Satellite Control Expert/Mission Coordinator (Llamaopia)
-Robotics Control Expert (unclaimed)
-Computer Engineer (GAmeTopia)
-Propulsion Systems Expert (Legatia)
-Systems Repair Technician (unclaimed)
Ground Team:
-Pilot (Exantos)
-Geologist (Lenciland)
-Meteorologist (Aigeantir)
-Rover Systems Expert (Caltenoth)
-Mars Infrastructure Tower Expert (unclaimed)
-Mars Resource Production Silo Expert (unclaimed)
How do I apply?
- Code: Select all
[box][b]Astronaut Name:[/b]
[b]What role you want:[/b]
[b]Appearance (optional, I don’t like doing this, but if you want to go ahead):[/b]
[b]Age:[/b]
[b]Physique:[/b]
[b]Brief description of country of origin (include involvement in the Mars program):[/b]
[b]Brief description of character (include religion):[/b]
[b]Other:[/b][/box]
So what’s up with these secret agendas?
Me and my co-op Llamaopia will be giving you secret goals to accomplish during the mission, and a reason for doing it. For example: “You want to strand the ship in orbit around Mars, it’s been your dream to orbit Mars for eternity” or “Your government wants you to make sure the astronaut from Congreveopia never makes it back.” or “You feel that the mission to Mars is against the ideals of your God, and you wish to totally destroy it.” It is up to you how to execute this goal. The goal may or may not be more important to you than your life (a person working for the government might not be willing to die in service of them, but a religious zealot may be fine with dying as long as their goal is accomplished); you can choose how much you value your goal. You must however, value the goal more than the success of the mission (unless the goal is for the mission to succeed), and you cannot be resentful of your goal (for example, you cannot say that your government tasked you to blow up the ship but you don’t want to). This is a thing that is more important to your character than the first manned mission to Mars; you really want to succeed in this.
You might also get some secret advantage, like your government hiding a knife or explosives for you somewhere in a module they built. We will tell you about this, you do not get to pick it for yourself, and you are welcome to telegram us with a suggestion for what you’d like your secret goal to be or what secret advantage you'd like. We’ll try to oblige you, but we make the final call.
How realistic do we have to be?
Typically I’m quite strict about this, but I’m going to be more relaxed in this. Don’t worry if you don’t know the difference between prograde and retrograde or whatever. Just ask if you’re wondering about something and we’ll help as best we can. Nobody is going to scoff dismissively at your questions. If you make some catastrophic realism mistake, like walking around outside without a spacesuit, then you’ll need to edit it, but unless I think you’re being deliberately annoying we won’t kick you or anything like that. Basically, you can work at NASA or you can have no idea which way space even is, and you should still feel free to apply. We'll help you if we encounter any tricky stuff.
What events can we dictate?
You obviously have control over your character, and you don’t need our permission to do things like take a walk outside. As for random events like equipment malfunctions and weather, those are set my me and Llamaopia. I handle events pertaining to our systems, like reactors malfunctioning. Llamaopia handles natural events like solar flares. We can talk about events or surprise each other. For example, we might conspire to jam the solar panels open as a dust storm approaches. Or one of us might surprise the other, like Llamaopia causing a solar flare while my guy is performing EVA.
What’s up with mission control?
There’s a delay ranging from 4 minutes to 24 minutes for a message to travel from Earth to Mars, so they won’t be able to operate the robots there in real time or anything, but they are still an important factor. Most of you should at least pretend to take orders from them.I’m going to give someone control of the head of Mission Control, and everyone else has advisors there that can talk with him/her and other advisors.
What other abilities can my character have?
Whatever you want, within reason. You can pick to be trained to fill in someone else’s role in an emergency, although your character will never be as good in a secondary ability as the character with it as their primary (a Geologist with emergency Pilot training will not be as good at flying as the designated pilot). Or you can have some entirely separate skill, like being medically trained. Bear in mind that you may be given a secret skill too, like training in hand to hand combat by me or Llamaopia.
Where are we landing?
Where's the IC thread?
Here
