Okay. I wasn't sure if this belonged in 'Plot Doctoring" or here, but since this is a rather Sci-fi specific question, I'm going to try this forum. Okay, so imagine it's the year 2062, right? And you've got this rocket, and it's been launched on a colonizing mission to Mars. There are six highly trained people on board, but they can't deal with everything. And I'd like to create some serious conflict for them on their way to the Red Planet.
My question to anyone with any idea is, exactly how much damage could this spaceship reasonably take before everyone on board dies? And what sort of damage could be rectified without resulting in either catastrophic meltdown or death?
A couple of ideas I've had are:
-The spaceship has been designed to spin to give a sense of artificial gravity; something (what?) interrupts the spinning, and they have to undertake a space walk to go fix it
-Space debris knocks out a communications satellite
-There's a solar flare, and the crew must hide in a very small enclosed space for a long duration of time to avoid radiation poisoning
-Say the rocket is nuclear powered (that *is* thought to be a more fuel efficient way to travel over long distances is space).. maybe something happens to threaten some kind of nuclear meltdown. Although as far as I can see, this very quickly devolves into something that no one is going to survive.
Anyway, does anyone have any more ideas of disasters my characters could face, but still reasonably survive? I would like to torture them as much as possible, but let all (or at least, most) of them live to reach their destination. Any help is greatly appreciated!
----------
34,573 / 50,000
Nov 3, 2009 - 07 07
Actually, radiation poisoning is an issue regardless. Ever looked at cosmic rays? They are considered one of the biggest threats to outer space travel for this purpose.
Systemic failures are pretty plausible, but good luck repairing them. You would practically have to tear the ship apart, and too little support in one area is going to result in a collapse of the ship.
Nuclear power? Makes me think of the Orion type rocket (look it up if you do not know it). I could see something going wrong there. It is possible that a nuclear reactor, if you go that route, would unexpectedly become too hot for the ship to handle, and they have to temporarily shut it down so that it does not melt down, thus losing power to other systems.
Space travel is not easy to begin. If you gave the ship some sort of limitation that made it a pain to use for long-distance travel, or some flaw that went undetected (or developed due to maybe a tiny meteor striking somewhere), it make it that much harder.
----------And to that end, there will be donuts.
39,437 / 50,000
Nov 3, 2009 - 07 12
Solar flares would likely be an issue and you'd want to get your crew into a space in the ship (ha!) that was shielded.
And running into something would knock out the spinning.
You could also have something horrible happen on earth. A terrorist attack on the "Nasa" (whatever your's is) headquarters could make it so that there is serious lack of communication.
And you want 6 highly trained people to have serious conflict? Get a woman pregnant. And if they aren't couples have someone's wife or husband break up with them from earth. These are very people centric issues but man could they cause a lot of drama.
There are lots of mental health questions that could cause a lot of conflict too. Dealing with the same person for (assuming your mission takes more than a couple of months) a long period will create it's own conflicts. You only have 6 people conflict is going to happen. Something that was actually damage to the ship would more likely bring them together. That's something they are prepared for.
Also someone could be in charge of some specific task but it would be simple enough for them to slack off and something to go wrong because of it. (Maybe that person is depressed because his wife dumped him from earth and is feeling very why does any of it matter and so a normally uber productive active person falls from his job and suddenly the water you are drinking isn't clean anymore. EW! And then people get sick because of it....)
Hope something there was helpful!
----------Does not read and follow label directions.
18,000 / 50,000
Nov 3, 2009 - 14 11
Thanks for your help, guys! I was planning to have one of the characters completely loose his marbles, but the pregnancy idea is a really good one. I'm not that great with technical descriptions, so it probably would be a lot better/easier to focus on social trauma, not to mention it's a great deal more survivable. Unless of course homicide/suicide starts looking like an option x3
39,437 / 50,000
Nov 3, 2009 - 14 51
But it's hard to kill someone if they are doing something crucial and everyone on that ship would be doing something very crucial or they wouldn't be there. So if that starts to look like it might happen other crew would get involved, put one under a lock down or whatever.
----------Does not read and follow label directions.