Lets Play - Falcon 2: Mechanon

Stories about games that you run and/or have played in.

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Mr Shine
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Post by Mr Shine »

If we take the figures given, Falcon will have reached a top speed of 30m/s after 3 seconds, and so will have travelled much less than 90 metres. I think 9 seconds is the right answer, 21 seconds is obvious suicide.
Last edited by Mr Shine on Fri Oct 13, 2017 9:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Omegonthesane
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Post by Omegonthesane »

looks at notes again

blinks

Wow, my spreadsheet was out by like an order of magnitude.

Yeah, 9 seconds it is.
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.

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Post by Thaluikhain »

348

You have timed your fall perfectly. Falcon's Wing settles onto the rocky surface of Thrix with a crunch and a whine from its hydraulic legs. CAIN warns you that the soupy yellow atmosphere of Thrix is highly corrosive and you put on your environment suit. Whilst you are doing so, CAIN gives you some valuable information on the planet and its inhabitants. The flying girders which you passed in the atmosphere were a primitive form of starship powered by chemical rockets like those used on Earth in the 21st and 22nd centuries. The ships are slow but the pilot, a Thrix, has a lifespan of several millenia and being composed almost entirely of glass-like silica can exist in deep space. The rock-like Thrix are telepathic and can move objects by thought alone. They are dormant at deep space temperatures but regain the capacity for thought whenever their ship nears a sun. Less than two thousand remain on their home world - the reason for their decline is not known. Very little is known about their attitude to aliens in 3033 AD, let alone this time. They are not members of the Federation (they will not become members, that is). 'There is one other thing, Falcon - this timehole is deteriorating rapidly and will soon cease to exist. I estimate anything between one and six hours remaining before it fades away. Take care not to get trapped here!' You thank CAIN. The camera shows ghostly outcroppings of jagged rock, swimming in soupy gases. You leave Falcon's Wing without preparing a disguise (CAIN does not have the relevant information stored in his memory banks in any case) and set out to explore. Before you have gone twenty metres you see a shiny black boulder, faceted like a diamond, but three metres tall. It is a Thrix. Will you:

Ignore it and walk on?
Run and hide in a shallow trench nearby?
Try to communicate with it?
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Post by SGamerz »

Whoever designed CAIN had some screwed-up priorities when they programmed it to be capable of making snide comments but not of calculating navigation physics.

Try to communicate, because clearly the logical thing to do when we see a rock is to find out whether it can talk.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Agreed - talk to the rock.
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.

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Post by Thaluikhain »

360
You speak into your helmet mike and a stream of clicks is synthesised by your translator. A part of the alien's mind reaches out to touch yours and you realise that it fears that you are a killer - it wants urgently to find out whether this is true. Will you:

Use your translator again and tell it a harmless joke?
Try to control the alien using your Power of Will?
Risk putting your mind into full contact with the alien using your Psychic Awareness?
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Post by Darth Rabbitt »

They're telepathic so Power of Will probably won't do much, and we have no idea if they even have a sense of humor. Try Psychic Awareness.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

No killer would be stupid enough to enter full telepathic contact with Psychic Awareness. So do that.
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.

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Post by Thaluikhain »

As you open your mind to the alien you find yourself having to make a great effort to remain sane and regain your human sense of perspective. The Thrix live for millenia on a cold and lifeless world, barren of architecture - they have no need of building, and of almost everything else that you associate with civilisation. You realise that something terrible is happening on this long-peaceful planet and that it wants you to accompany is towards a mining complex which is as alien to the Thrix as it is to you. The Thrix's name translates as Carborundum. Suddenly it lurches and begins to roll across the rocky ground. You decide to follow warily.

53

The black Thrix tumbles onward through the yellow gases of its planet, glistening with condensation and reflective particles of dust. You pass the scattered remains of one of its species and you feel the hurt in the mind of the Thrix whom you are following, whose name translates as Carborundum. The grief of the loss of a two thousand-year friendship almost cripples you, but you steel yourself to hold on to your own identity, almost sobbing as you do so. The dead Thrix has been shorn in half by a terrible weapon. There are cavities within its crystal in which still smaller crystal trees grow. You communicate your surprise to Carborundum and he thinks his reaction to you. It seems that he finds your soft bendiness repulsive. 'You should see me without my suit,' you think. As you plod through the heavy gravity there is a slight movement in the heavy air and the fog lifts slightly to reveal the most enormous mechanical contraption, shaped like a long armadillo. Dust rises from its form and it rumbles slowly across the surface of the planet towards you on caterpillar tracks. Its body is composed of overlapping segments of metal like a woodlouse, which glow dully in the weak rays of the Thrixian sun, which barely penetrates the thick atmosphere. Thrix is cold.

Carborundum leads you down into a natural cavern which opens out below the gaping mouth of the mining droid. Two smaller excavation droids are clearing slag from a great conveyor belt which leads back into the belly of the armadillo-like droid. They do not react to you and you notice that their effectiveness is severely impaired by the corrosive gas of this world. They will soon break down completely. As you move towards the conveyor belt you notice another shattered Thrix nearby. Then a hovering wardroid with twin laser cannon sights you. Carborundum begins a high-pitched whining as you blast the wardroid to smithereens. You jump into the mining droid and Carborundum rolls up behind you. Inside the droid is a huge refining plant and in its belly you come to the central processor which controls it. Will you:

Continue your exploration?
Destroy the mining droid's electronic brain?
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Destroy the mining droid's brain. We're on a clock here.
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.

Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath, Justin Bieber, shitmuffin
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Post by SGamerz »

DESTROY!
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Post by Darth Rabbitt »

Do to the robot what that PSA said drugs do to your brain.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

118
The central processor is cocooned in a web of soft polystyrene and cooled by a steady flow of near-freezing air. You play your blaster's beam across the free-floating oil-discs which you guess control the working memory of the mining droid's electronic brain. The mining operation shuts down immediately. You carry on past the processor into another cavernous space lit dimly by the light of a furnace. It is a refining plant and the Polybdenum ore is being fed in at one end and the lumps of reddish rock emerge at the other in the form of sleek rods, usable in the Variac Drive of a Time Machine. Beyond the refinery is the back end of the armadillo-like mining droid, where a conveyor belt moves the rods onto a plasteel rack Swooping towards you up the ramp at the back are two wardroids. Carborundum lurches forward, colliding with one. The twenty tons of rock which is the Thrix severely dents the droid. It stops and sinks to the ground but is about to launch a missile at Carborundum. The second droid is targeting its laser cannon at you. Will you:

Blast the wardroid that is aiming at you
Try to save Carborundum's life?
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Post by Omegonthesane »

If we don't save ourselves we can't save anyone else. In the absence of any feedback indicating this is a "take a wound" sized cannon instead of a "die instantly" sized cannon, kill the wardroid that's aiming at us.
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.

Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath, Justin Bieber, shitmuffin
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Post by SGamerz »

Save the rock because he'll probably turn out to be the ancestor to some important historical figure of Thrix and his death would severely change history.
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Post by Darth Rabbitt »

SGamerz wrote:Save the rock because he'll probably turn out to be the ancestor to some important historical figure of Thrix and his death would severely change history.
This.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

You roll behind the furnace.and open fire at the wardroid which threatens the Thrix. You blast just in time, hitting the power plant of the wardroid. Your faceplate reacts instantly, cutting in the flash damper, and it darkens as a bright explosion lights up the interior of the machinery of the refining plant. The second droid shoots across the refinery bay to bring its laser cannon to hear against you. You try to dive under the massive conveyor belt, hoping that it is dense enough to stop the laser. Make an Evasion Roll.

If you score 6-12...got 6 and 5, so even with a -1 Falcon easily made it

The conveyor belt absorbs the beam for a second, but it slices through the plasteel as if it were tender flesh. It is boring through to you when Carborundum causes the door of the furnace to fly open and a river of molten slag engulfs both it and the droid. The wardroid's melting point is below that of the lava and it subsides into a molten mass. The Thrix is untroubled by this extreme temperature - is Carborundum indestructible, you wonder?

You move quickly out to the back of the mining droid, where the conveyor belt has delivered about a hundred rods of pure Polybdenum onto a plasteel rack. There are no more wardroids to be seen. Three badly corroded loading droids stand motionless, ignoring you. You play your blaster across the rods and they glow red and begin to react with the chlorine in the Thrixian atmosphere, becoming a useless crumbling compound Carborundum thinks into your mind, thanking you for saving its life. He tells you that he was named after a form of carbon because he is considered unusual by the silicon Thrix, but that he is privileged to have contacted so unusual a being as you. He asks if you will become his silica-clone, and as this is apparently a great honour, you accept. Before you ask what a silica-clone is a machine shaped like a flying beetle appears in the yellow mist before you. A red light shines on its belly and a form glides to the ground on a disc of metal. With a shock you realise that it is a huge Time Machine and the form is that of the arch villain Agidy Yelov. A field of orange energy crackles around him. It seems he has stolen the force-field technology of the Creche. He is able to stand unprotected on Thrix, inside the defensive shield. Seeing you and the destroyed Polybdenum he screams with rage. The half of his face which you can see twists in a spasm and his robot arm twitches. In the wisps of yellow fog he looks like a foul demon from the blackest hell. He. shouts, 'I thought I had erased you from existence at the battle of Crecy. Falcon. You've meddled with my plans once again, but you cannot stop me this time, I have the most deadly arsenal the universe will ever know ready to obey my every command. I shall re-program every droid, Falcon, so that your death which is imminent will be as slow and painful as the technology of Mechanon can devise.' Just then two wardroids appear above the mining complex and, as you look up, Yelov draws his blaster. Carborundum sets up a keening wail which seems to disturb Yelov's force shield. He starts to choke as the deadly gas reaches his lungs and, stepping onto the disc, is sucked back up into the Time Machine, which winks out seconds later.

There is a picture here

You duck back inside the mining droid and run back through the length of it and down into the cave at its mouth once more Carborundum guides you back through the miasmal fog to Falcon's Wing. It thinks of you as a mere space traveller and you do nothing to let it realise that you have come from the far future. You tell it that the droids remaining on Thrix will soon be disabled by the corrosive atmosphere, and that if you are successful it and its kind will never be troubled by them again When it realises you are leaving it becomes sad, and its mind touches yours once more. It is hoping that you will meet again one day and it says that it will travel a thousand years to find you if you tell it which star your planet circles. You shake your head, its sadness is infectious, and say that you cannot tell it. Indeed you have to tell it never to try to find out. CAIN radios you to say that the timehole on Thrix is closing and you allow yourself to be sucked up into Falcon's Wing.

The air recycler flushes the air in Falcon's Wing and you climb out of your suit and stretch, checking any hurts you may have. CAIN reminds you that the timehole on Thrix is closing up, and you decide to set coordinates for Mechanon in 1986 AD.

As you have just spent an hour of your life in null-space you may restore up to 12 points of lost Endurance points through the use of your Autodoc. You rematerialise on Mechanon at the same instant that you left Thrix in real time, but as your camera surveys the horizon there is no sign of Yelov or his newly manufactured Time Machine. Mechanon is a gleaming orb of polished metals Robo-factories stretch as far as the eye can see, covering every inch of the planet's surface, almost without light in the sombre red of Mechanon's sky. You have landed on the sloping roof of a refinery and a motionless mining droid overshadows Falcon's Wing. At three mile intervals around you are what must be planetary defence points: bronze domes bristling with some sort of surface-to-space artillery. Between two of these bases is the yawning entrance of a building which is clearly more than a factory. As the camera zooms in, a large flying droid disappears into it, trailing a greenish line of vapour. Your scanners indicate that nothing lives on this dead world, not even grass, but it is alive with bizarrely-shaped droids which fly and scuttle across its face like insects. The sky is laced with power-lines which stretch from pylons atop the factories, and on the towering peak of one of these a radar dish is sweeping in a slow arc towards Falcon's Wing. CAIN tells you Mechanon's atmosphere is harmful to human life and you decide to get into your environment suit again. It also used the molecular converter to create a Universal Interface, saying: 'Insert the Interface into any Central Computer Communications access point and it will extract as much information as it can from Mechanon's Central Computer memory banks about the wardroid's plans, Falcon Good luck!' Will you:

Prepare your Flyer?
Leap onto the access disc and leave Falcon's Wing immediately?
Check the functions of your environment suit carefully before stepping onto the access disc?

There is a picture here
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Check envirosuit, because this is the least bad possible time to find out that it doesn't work on Mechanon Fumes.
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.

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Post by Darth Rabbitt »

Check our suit before going any further.
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Post by SGamerz »

Look in the mirror to check if we look stylish in our suit.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

353
As you step onto the disc CAIN tells you that the radar beacon has detected Falcon's Wing and is relaying a message beyond the range of the Time Machine's scanners. Will you:

Leave Falcon's Wing and run towards the large building into which a droid flew?
Change your mind and get into your Flyer?
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Post by Omegonthesane »

??? That was three votes to check envirosuit. Does it have no impact?
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.

Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath, Justin Bieber, shitmuffin
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Post by Mr Shine »

Omegonthesane wrote:??? That was three votes to check envirosuit. Does it have no impact?
I'm guessing the extra time we spent making sure we were looking pretty enabled the radar to detect us.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

Looking at the other options, it seems you are given much the same two choices, but they take you to different sections depending on what you chose before.

There are some choices which don't seem to make any difference in this series, though.
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Post by Darth Rabbitt »

Head towards the building, I guess.
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