Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday: 4

Zooming across the universe.

An interesting comment thread on my last post explored the physics associated with both zero-gravity combat and maneuvering in space when, presumably, humans have invented faster-than-light travel.

We sometimes forget the vast sizes involved when talking about "just" the solar system. Episodes of the Star Trek franchise and other shows will clearly show starships cruising through the solar system at non-warp speed and still able to clear the distance from Jupiter to Earth in a few minutes, when in reality, the two planets are about 391 million miles apart at their closest and would take just shy of 35 minutes to traverse even at light speed. The New Horizons probe made the trip in 13 months in 2007. The distance from the Earth to Mars ranges from 34 million miles to 250 million miles, yet we don't see a scene in Total Recall where Quaid has to wait a few months until the orbits better align. Everyone seems capable of jumping off to Mars on a whim.

Notice that this statement isn't followed by "it'll take him 17 months to get there."

 
It's easy to forget that travel in space is fundamentally different than travel on the surface of the planet. On the Earth, the tendency is for gravity and friction to bring everything to a stop. To keep your car moving on the highway, you have to invest constant energy (via the gas pedal), or the pull of gravity and the resistance of the air will cause you to coast to a halt. In space, the opposite is true. With no friction and no primary gravity source, a craft will travel at its acceleration speed indefinitely and actually requires an energy investment equal to the initial acceleration to stop. (Before you decide to post a comment that begins with the word "actually," consider that I'm speaking in generalities and you're about to be a pedantic pest.) Two ships that decide to slow down, hail each other, and engage in combat are being unconscionably irresponsible with fuel.

I can't wrap my mind around what kinds of technological improvements would have to happen to create a civilization in which ships zoom around casually from planet to asteroid to planet, often stopping to engage in space combat. If not some ability to "bend" space or create wormholes or whatever, such travel, it seems to me, would require three things:

• An absurdly inexpensive and plentiful source of fuel, and a technology able to exploit that fuel
• Technology that counters or alters gravity
• Near-light-speed or faster-than-light-speed travel

All of these advancements are so far beyond current technologies that the physical consequences of them are essentially unimaginable. Hence, as Kenny points out in the thread, science fiction franchises that feature them get a free pass on physics. Why is fuel consumed every round instead of only during the initial thrust? Answer: the anti-gravity drive requires constant energy. Why are ships built with aerodynamic profiles when this makes no sense in space? Answer: such ships have to be capable of both atmospheric and space flight. How can ships communicate with their bases without the communications taking hours in between responses? Answer: the communications actually transmit in "sub-space," the same technology that makes rapid travel possible. I'm constantly reminded of a moment from the awesome film Thank You For Smoking:

• Sam Seaborn: Sony has a futuristic sci-fi movie they're looking to make.
• Harvey Dent: Cigarettes in space?
• Sam Seaborn: It's the final frontier, Nick.
• Harvey Dent: But wouldn't they blow up in an all-oxygen environment?
• Sam Seaborn: ....Probably. But it's an easy fix. One line of dialogue. "Thank god we invented the, you know...whatever...device."

The interesting thing about Buck Rogers, though, is that it doesn't bother to tell you whatever was invented to accomplish all of this space travel--at least, not beyond a vague reference to "nuclear engines." I wonder if the tabletop RPG gets any more specific.

In my last post, I had just arrived at a RAM asteroid base, which was in chaos. Some genetically-modified creatures had somehow escaped their cages and were massacring the base personnel. An evacuation had been ordered. As I arrived, military personnel assumed my party was part of the base staff.

The base consisted of two enormous levels, which put to rest any idea that the game would feature uniform 16 x 16 levels like Pool of Radiance and Champions of Krynn. The coordinates ranged to 62 on the x-axis and 47 on the y-axis, though of course not all of the space was used. It took several hours to map.

My map of the first level.

Most of the squares were empty, but occasionally they served up a special encounter or role-playing option. Like other Gold Box games, the special encounters, in which you have some sort of choice, are quite frequent. On one screen, I'm asked whether I want to try to save some poisoned RAM workers or leave them to die. On another, I have the option to maintain my ruse or reveal myself as an infiltrator (necessary to explore the eastern half of the base). A third gives me the option to console a woman frantically searching for her children or to "remain silent."

One of the game's many role-playing choices.

While I like the options, they don't seem to matter all that much. For instance, in the shot above, if I choose to heal the workers, they die anyway. A couple of times, I've explored both options--just for proper documentation of the game--and I've found that they were illusory--Morton's forks that led to the same conclusions. Other things that seem like options lead inevitably to death if you choose "wrong."

If Buck Rogers doesn't do a great job in this area, it does at least have an interesting approach to story-telling. The game doesn't spoon-feed the player the relevant plot points; the player, rather, must figure out what's going on from scattered encounters and clues. In my explorations, I found a group of hiding children and agreed to escort them to their escape vessel. It transpired that the genetic abominations were freed when one of the kids tried to help some rabbits escape (we eventually saved the bunnies). The kids, impressed with my bravery and not terribly loyal to RAM, fed me several bits of intelligence, such as the password to the base's computers and the location of RAM's secret base on Mars.

The more important revelation is that RAM is building some kind of giant laser to use against NEO. The base held a miniature version of the laser, and some papers indicated that the research team building the real thing had moved to Gradivus Mons, the Mars base. I think maybe the trope of an evil empire using a giant space laser to commit acts of terrorism against a rebel alliance comes from some other franchise, but I can't put my finger on it right now.

The second level produced numerous combats with the gennies, one of which was capable of poisoning my characters. Just as in the D&D games, poisoning means instant "death" until cured by an antidote post-combat. My post-combat medical screens ended up getting a lot more complicated.

One of my less-successful combats with the genetically-engineered creatures.

Combat itself has become much more tactical, with more grenade options and enemies exhibiting strengths and weaknesses to particular weapons. This means that I have each character carrying several weapon types. I've decided to arm my warrior, Austin, with melee weapons primarily. He's deadly with his "Martian mono-sword."

As I explored the base, the AI from my ship, Scot.DOS, kept communicating with me about events on the base and helping me find key items.

In the 25th century, it's apparently impossible to deactivate a missing keycard.

Ultimately, I saw the children, their grandfather, and the rabbits safely to their escape ship and then left the base myself. Some papers in the base indicated that RAM had allied temporarily with a pirate named Talon to help defend the base. Unfortunately, Talon intercepted my ship as I left the asteroid.

There are some nice visuals in this game.

In yet another false choice, I had the option to surrender to Talon or fight his boarding party. I was victorious in the battle, but I was captured by Talon anyway. He was upset that I'd destroyed his "meal ticket" and planned to mitigate his losses by selling my party to RAM.

How did I realize that. Was it the jolly roger flags?

But calling himself a "friendly guy," he offered to fight one of us, hand-to-hand, for our freedom. I chose to fight, but the resulting battle was so one-sided that I can't imagine it's possible to win. Maybe if I'd grinded my characters up to the max level before entering the asteroid base or something. As it was, he absolutely took Austin apart and we ended up in the same place we would have ended up if I'd declined the battle in the first place.

 
Locked in my cell, I was unsuccessful with my rogue's "bypass security" and "open lock" skills, but I was surprised to be freed by none other than Buck Rogers himself. In the resulting journal entry, he indicates that he was investigating the pirate's association with RAM, and my party tells him "about the spy ship and everything [we] know about the Doomsday Device," prompting him to exclaim, "We must get back to Earth and warn NEO of this threat!" Until this journal entry, I didn't know we were calling it the "Doomsday Device," but I guess the title of the game is now clear.

The entire pirate ship episode was indicative of moments in a game that I can't stand: when you really want to return "home" but the game is prolonging you for an uncertain amount of time. It happens often, and it always annoys me even though I understand why it might be attractive to some players for the tension it creates. You think you're in charge of your navigation, able to return to the comfort of shops and training whenever you need to, and suddenly you're spun off into an unknown environment and you lose your tether back to your home base.

In my case, all of my characters were ready to level up and I was overloaded with equipment to sell. It really would have helped to train and increase everyone's "maneuver in zero-G" skill to improve my odds in combat, which had become increasingly more difficult. On the ship, I faced random and fixed battles with space pirates, most of whom threw grenades every round, some of them capable of stunning. Only Buck Rogers' presence in my party saved me from certain death. Armed with something called simply a "gun," he dished out more death than all of my party members with their laser pistols and rocket guns combined.

Note that Buck Rogers has this glass helmet around his head. Why don't any of my characters need that?

Even with Buck Rogers, though, I ended up dying in about 25% of the battles. There were certain paths that seemed deliberately designed to be impossible, though Buck warned me in such cases by noting that we were trying to keep a low profile.

The message you get when your entire party dies. Since Buck Rogers was in my party, I guess I just screwed up the entire Buck Rogers franchise.

The pirate ship consisted of 15 small levels with mostly nothing in them but random combats. I was a bit annoyed when I logged into the ship's computer and Theta Sigma, in whom I had channeled a ridiculous amount of points for "library search," failed at library search. Nonetheless, Buck Rogers again jumped in and saved the day, producing a journal entry that had maps of all the ship's levels, saving me from having to draw them all individually.

Buck also figured out the best place to set explosives to damage the ship enough that I could escape. I'm glad he came along.

In the armory, entered through the only successful use of a skill in the game so far, I found a mother lode of grenades and other weapons:

There was an option to try to attack Talon on the bridge and take over the ship, but Buck considered it "suicide," and the one time I tried it, he ditched my party, leading to a battle against a horde of enemies. Like the one-on-one combat with Talon, I can't imagine it's possible to win it, but then again I said that about the beholder battle in Curse of the Azure Bonds and had to eat crow later. Thus, I'll simply say that I'd be very interested in hearing from anyone who has ever won the bridge battle and, if so, exactly how.

It was, indeed, suicide. There are an equal number of enemies off-screen to my left and right.

The successful solution was to set off an explosion on the galley level and, while the ship was in confusion, invade the engineering level and win a very difficult combat against numerous pirates and robots that took me about six tries.

Art imitates life.

With the battle won, I smashed up the ship's controls and made my escape. On the way out, Scot.DOS told me that Talon had stolen some gennie eggs and taken them back to his secret base, and that an ex-crew member named "Garrity" on Pallas might know where the base is.

I returned to the Salvation base and got my commander's congratulations. Buck Rogers left my party. I healed, leveled up, and sold my excess equipment. At this point, I have (I think) three options for my next voyage: the RAM base on Mars, the "manufacturing base" in the "Venusian lowlands," and following up on the lead for the pirates' base. The latter seems the least of the priorities, but as we know, in RPGs you often do the least important things first in case you otherwise don't get to do them at all.

In my next post, I should be able to cover combat and equipment. I'm on vacation for three weeks starting today, so I hope I can pick up the posts over the holiday break.