OOC

Four letter words fine by me.

Swear away, I have few lines or veils.

Thanks for bringing it up, I should have mentioned in the recruitment thread. DG is very heavily an R setting lol. They're will be much worse than bad words by the time it's over haha.

Another sanity check. Current year in game? I happened to notice in my googling of MMU that they were retired after the Challenger disaster. Perfectly fine if that's not the case but I figured if I'm writing about podcasts and video games I better make sure we're not in the late 80s or else Hamlet is a time traveler. :-) Wouldn't be surprising if NASA was like, here you have to use this thing we deemed to be unsafe under normal circumstances because it's the only system that will work. Probably even pulled it out of the display case at the museum.

Also holy shit those packs added 326 pounds. Not a concern in zero-g but lord have mercy.

Good question! The year is 2010, specifically July 10th.

Belton would ask why they're resorting to technology that was outdated decades ago, but if possible hazardsto their mission are above their clearance level the reason for resorting to old tech has to be. Lol

AFAIK the tech is not outdated in 2010 and is what NASA was actually using. But just going by what the adventure says lol.

Supposedly, NASA retired the MMUs in 1984 (and were part of the reevaluation of spacewalks done in 86, where it was determined they could stay retired). NASA realized the same work could largely be done with robotic arms and tethered walks.

They did introduce a smaller system, the SAFER unit, in like 94 for emergency use only.

Sorry, did some reading. Lol We go with whatever the module says. Maybe because it's so hush-hush, they had to bring the MMUs out of retirement since no one would notice? Or maybe in this world, MMUs were just never retired.

Ah it does say you can't use the robotic arm for the mission. I think you can't be tethered because the non-astronauts don't have the training for that and so Hamlet and Belton have to be strapped to them like tandem skydiving lol.

I would think the training for a tethered spacewalk would be easier than learning to pilot the bulky and difficult MMUs, but I'm not NASA so WTF do I know? Lol

nez, Could Spay roll (or something) to find out if he has any contacts that he could go visit? Perhaps a contact that he would rely on giving him some insight into the mission in an 'unofficial' way?

No worries if not. I am here and reading our posts even if Spay doesn't have anything to contribute at this time.

Spay is an astronaut and knows dozens of people at NASA to ask. The important thing isn't who can you ask, its what questions you ask. Tell me what you want to find out and I'll tell you who you can ask and the rolls.

"//...so know that you are alone."

OMG I actually laughed out loud when I saw this. I am sure it was a typo, but dammit if it wasn't accidentally appropo!

So did I once you pointed it out. I fixed it but I'm still giggling. 🤣

Apologies for the lack of posting the past few days, busy weekend, and busy day at work today that I had hoped to spend catching up but had to cover for an absent teammate. Thankfully it looks like my lack of availability didn't negatively impact the game.

No problem, real life has a way of hammering you sometimes.

Indeed. We're about to go into a six week shutdown at work which is glorious, but means you gotta cram in a lot of prep the week before.

I remember those days!

I'm back! And I am sorry!!

The past two weeks were an absolute cluster... I had double shifts with no cellphone signal, my "other mom" had multiple strokes and hospitalizations, pet euthenasia, almost had to shoot someone at 5am last Sunday, my mom's birthday, and a highschool graduation.

I'm hoping this week goes back to normal. I'm burned out on excitement.

Holy hell man lol. I would've given up on life after two weeks like that. Welcome back haha.