Star Smuggler - e005 Expansion Suggestions

In my last post, I looked at a double entry under event e005 and suggested that two of these events could be rewritten to direct the player elsewhere. 

In e005, you discover a 2-7 robot caravan. The robots are carrying stuff. The table gives the following results: life support, fuel or repair units, food, refined ore. Additionally, they have a controller which causes the robots to follow a predesignated path. You can capture it and use it on your own bots. 

The effects of seizing this device are a trap, a police sting, something causes all of your communications devices to breakdown or nothing at all. The police sting and the breakdown appear twice, so you would want to change these two. Both of these events can played through other events: e117 is an entry event on Cubro and e017 is also linked to e003 and an entry event into a scientific area on any planet. 

But how does one come to e005? What were you doing when this happened? This event occurs twice, via the entry and contact table. Once for rural areas and once for mining. Each of these events occur on a flat 1 in 6 every time you are detected entering these areas. This would indicate that you don't want to make the changes too special. 

The first thing that popped into my head would be a robotic orbital shuttle lands to recover the robots. Since it's robotic, you can steal it with no fuss. But what to do with it? 

The orbital shuttle as spelled out in r215 has a capacity of 50 cubic units. As a general rule, the amount of cargo space necessary to carry a vehicle is 1.6 times the vehicle's carrying capacity. So you would need at least 80 CU of storage space bring this ship on board the Antelope. The boat bay is 40 CU and the cargo bay is 60 CU. You'd need to remove the wall between the hopper bay and the cargo bay to make it fit inside the ship. The alternative would be to cache it on the planet. 

Another simple idea is that another Antelope class ship lands, with a crew that mirrors your own. By removing the cargo from the robots, you can attempt to storm this ship and take it over from inside after the bots are recovered. 

The rules are not clear as to what happens when you have two ships. And that option is offered in e036, so this is not entirely out of bounds. You need 120,000 secs to purchase a new ship, so the barrier isn't how many ships you have but how much money you have. 

If you are using this as a guide for another RPG or allowing many people to play this solo game, you could have fun by switching e017 or e117 to e005. Another robot caravan shows up! The characters would be stuck in a case where they have gotten a lot of great loot, but have to pick and choose what they take because of cargo space. 

Other possibilities are that someone comes along to see what is delaying the robots. These people will either be from rural areas or from mining. You could "warp" this event into any of the encounters in those regions. Some of them are very interesting. It's all up to you. 

I shall be looking to see if I can find another "wedge scenario" in the rule and events booklets. I don't think I missed one, but we shall see.