Use the Laptop, get updated on whatever orders we have.

getting that helmet will be a bit of a pain. but hard vacuum shouldn't be that bad.

Open Laptop, Get Helmet, and check outside.

Well, no time to begin like the present. You yawn, stretch out and pop the seal on the laptop. Field-grade laptop, what a wonder. On the outside, it's covered in rubber-like, black antiradar coating. Then there is the case built from a thin layer of composite armor. Capable of operating in vacuum and underwater, it also carries a capability to self-destruct its insides. And it even has a comfortable keyboard.
After inputting your ID number and password, the laptop decrypts orders.

Well, well.

"Lieutenant, your orders are to establish the preliminary underground base and above-ground observation post, and investigate the best ways for integrating the local population into our larger galactic civilization. Should your information and proposal be found acceptable, you will be promoted and put in charge of implementing said proposal. After you report to us about finishing the preliminary underground infrastructure, we will send a junior intelligence specialist, additional supplies, and possibly other personnel. New orders will follow."

Apparently, new orders will come via the same method as the aforementioned spy and equipment, because the equipment list in your laptop mentions an FTL transmitter, but it only has radio receivers. Intelligence has nothing about the planet that you can't see on the included map - one big continent, cut by mountains into four parts, with an inland sea right in the middle of the largest portion, and a smaller continent on the opposite side of the planet, without any distinct features.
However, there are huge clusters of unidentified mass in all Lagrange points, and the faint dots of some very hot engines en route to and from the local gas giant. To the south, on the same moon as you, is a relatively small fortification of some sort, which seems to be inhabited. There is also a huge deposit of polymetallic ore right under your location.

Nothing more can be expected from brief, long-range probing and ship's scans while you was deposited on the moon. No language files, too, so you should decrypt language yourself. You don your helmet and set your foot outside.

The airlock cycles and you are now outside the only available island of heat and air in two hundred kilometers. There is nothing before you, except landscape and a view of the planet. Behind you, on the other hand, is your tent. And a rather large pile of equipment, covered under one big sheet of masking plastic - antiradar, heat conductor and emblazened with an image of local surface. Inventory list in your laptop indicates that there is ten minions inside, five quite outdated recon hovers, some mining equipment and furniture for a small listening post.

What do?
Autoget if we start building (elaborate underground) base:
Cargo lift (500 ton)
Hangar, capacity medium(10)

Select order of expansion:
[]Armory
[]Command and Control
[]Generator room
[]Intelligence HQ (personnel expected)
[]Lab (no equipment available)(no personnel available)
[]Living area
[]Manufacturing (no equipment available)
[]Minion service alcove
[]Storage room

[]Other (specify)

Also, what should we do with excavated stone?

>>299368
Beginning Build Order: Generator Room, Minion Service Alcove, Storage Room.

The Generator Room should be built a fair distance down for safety's sake, Minion Service Alcove is so we can fix/improve our little friends as necessary, and storage is for when I assume we start mining out useful extra things from inside the moon? Or storing future supplies?

After that, we'll see what's happening and choose more places. Still, Generator Room is top priority since everything needs power.

And then I was stupid.

Also, can we get more in-depth info on the capabilities/uses for each expansion?

[OOC, because Lieutenant will not tnink about it:
In Armory we store personal weapons up to power armor. Currently we have only a pistol.
CnC is a room with big screen, smaller terminals and big computer with pattern analysis software and other things. It's purpose is to demonstrate where are forces on the battlefield - up to entire system - and to control our forces. Alsp work like briefing room.
In generator room there is cold fusion reactor. It's safest power source currently in use - it does not explode. And it can produce fuel for fusion bombs.
Intelligence HQ has computer desighned to breack codes and analyse data - like enemy Internet or TV. Or satellite images.
Lab can be equiped differently, most likely as medic lab, because we has no idea how much they changet in isolation.
Living area also includes Life Support by default.
Minion service alcove recharges our free, quasy-sentient, humatoid, non-biological overintusiastical workforce.
In Storage we will place everything from pile that we has no need to use for now.
OOC ends]

>>299375
In that case, let's go with Generator Room, Living Area, Minion Service Alcove for now.

>>299376
This.

you might want to put an @ or something in the subject to identify updates better.
Generator, then Command and Control.

You put three of the minions to work together with a multi-purpose excavator/tunneler device and they begun to dig in in designated spot. A thirty-meters-deep shaft will take less than twenty minutes. Meanwhile, you set orders for other three. To put themselves into Bugeyes and start to patrol within visual distance with radio silence and other simple rules of behavior. Because someone decided not to add the standard order set, and your minions are multipurpose, you spent a little more that ten minutes carefully writing orders - with explanations of the meaning behind said orders. You hope that it will be enough.

Unlike people, minions are not alive. They can be cheaply constructed using materials available almost everywhere, such as metal, sand or coal. They can be implanted with the knowledge needed for their work. They can learn and they are absolutely loyal.
They even have initiative. One should never leave more than one minion to do some complicated work without supervision. They have no common sense; absolutely none. And they aren't smart.
While obsessively loyal, minions are very limited by the amount of skills they've learned, and will become bored after some time. Then they will try to do their work better, which usually means "do it differently".

And that often has disastrous consequences.

Multi-purpose minions are prone to mixing up different tasks, because all modern minions are made from legacy, or old, technology. While the science behind them is understandable, there is nothing that can be done to upgrade the technology..
Thankfully, they do not get tired until their charge has run out. In Bugeyes, it's till the hover's fusion fuel runs dry. They work pretty fast with modern equipment, you think as they start to reinforce the glassed rock walls and put wall panels in your first hangar and carve a corridor to what will be the heart of this base.

What do?
[There is a pair of minions furnishing, three are mining, three are patrolling and two are free. Also, there are two unused Bugeye recon all-environment hovers. Building orders are set. We can supervise minions while doing preliminary report, hop into Bugeye and spy on relatively nearby location, we can timeskip a little and start to collect data or we can timeskip three days and welcome new personnel

>Important world data: Our second and length of time that the Lieutenant calls second are one and the same. Minutes and hours share only names, but there is nine hours in the day]

set last two drones to building a storage area. those miners will probably keep digging until told to stop or they can't figure out what else to do.

Assuming Bugeyes have the range to comfortably reach that fortification and observe for a while, lets go meet the neighbors. And by meet, I mean observe from a distance while trying not to be noticed yourself. Just send one.

Update [1/2] NHOrus!MG5iN2C.S. 2011/04/28(Thu)09:32 No. 299857 ID: 4dae29
File 130400834384.png - (35.67KB , 855x342 , bugeye1b.png )

Your suit's life support is good for at least four hours, so you decide to spend a little time studying your neighbors. Those heat signatures are just 57 klicks away, so for your Bugeyes, with their recoilless engines rated with 5-gee cruise acceleration, with standard eight second buffer for RL engine thrust inertia, an optimal trajectory will take exactly three-fourths of a minute to reach them. This will be insane and almost guaranteed to uncloak your base.
What is worse, you cannot just put a minion inside and command him to scout. And you cannot leave, also because of the minions. Fortunately, remote control is possible for Bugeyes, especially through laser links. Its still an interesting prospect, involving a lot of keyboard abuse. Well, there is no other choice, then? You and two minions quickly set up communication hub outside, near the lift entry, and you set the patrolling Bugeyes to work as retranslators before you dive down, correcting the minions before they can screw up too much and finally put your fingers to work.

Update [2/2] NHOrus!MG5iN2C.S. 2011/04/28(Thu)09:33 No. 299858 ID: 4dae29
File 130400839081.png - (19.66KB , 473x506 , ob-S1.png )

The autopilot was set to make a non-direct approach at speeds sufficiently slower than one and a half kilometer per second before deceleration. In ten minutes said approach should put the Bugeye high above and to the east of the Local's base. A visible position, but the really only possible one with only line of sight controls. More likely than not, they will miss the Bugeye. It will be cold on the side directed toward possible eyes, so any IR detector will find nothing. No one likes waste heat in his systems, but everyone like it when the enemy shines from overheating.
Time flies. Minions are finished with digging the hangar and it's almost completely covered in airtight panels. A pile of extracted stone bricks is growing outside, and the main tunnel is lengthier, and its defensive turns already in place and everything else is proceeding well, for now. The Bugeye is almost in place, now. In ten seconds you will assume direct controls. You really want bigger keyboard now. Or at least a joystick.

[roll 1d100 for detection. Higher - better for us]

rolled 76 = 76

---

Roll rules: My roll is default if there is no other rolls. Else average in low-impact situations and most epic (good or bad) in high-impact situations.

Roll table:
1-10 - seen, reinforcements are coming
31-35, 51-55, 81-85 - seen, higher readiness status, external monitoring.

Prepare to immediately pull our little spy back once we've got a decent look.

After that we just need to continue building according to the queue.

rolled 49 = 49

---

I am roll dice to facilitate the questings!

rolled 35 = 35

---

ROLLAN'

>>299873
76 is a good roll. There is only a 1 in 4 chance to improve on it, and it also was outside of the "seen" traps.

As such, these people:
>>299883
>>299925
are idiots.
I'm voting to ignore their rolls.

>>299927
Rolling for the success of the ignorance of their rolls.. Just kidding.

Intelligent roll incoming.

rolled 12 = 12

---

>>299932
Hahaha I failed. Let's just try and ignore that.

>>299927
With all due respect, fuck you Seven, you arrogant prat.

did quick calculations and that 12 dropped us under the 51-55 seen trap.
anyway, while seven has a point, he could of NOT called people idiots.

rolled 44 = 44

---

Yeah, sure, let's keep rolling!

rolled 3, 3 = 6

---

>Average (without default roll) is 35. Bugeye has been detected!
Rolling for country of origin of enemy forces and command officer to determine their response.
Roll table: [REDACTED]

Update NHOrus!MG5iN2C.S. 2011/04/29(Fri)11:58 No. 300184 ID: 3d6a04
File 130410350803.jpg - (33.23KB , 505x400 , img3.jpg )

Well, the abundance of stone blocks gives you an advantage - there is no need to unpack chairs yet, and their glassy surface works well enough as a table or as a seat. Hard of course, but smooth and warm after plasma torches separated them from the rock mass.
You look at the image from Bugeye, and while not perfect, it's good enough to see basic layout of the base, the enemy's hot fusion reactor and cooling farm are identified easily. Bunkers mark the perimeter of the base, but you have no idea about weapons. You play with zoom a little more, logging more images of the base, but you'd really prefer to take a closer look by yourself, or using a probe with a standard retranslator, instead of this dumb remote control.
Still, by your estimates there can't be more that a hundred people inside. Their reactor should not be able to support more. Two additional heat sources appear, their mechs. Now you know where the base's hangar is. The first hostile is a ground unit - possibly an artillery type, bristling with missles and holding a big gun in its hands. Or he is a sniper, because of disproportionally big optics. The second lifts off - it's a fission-powered vacuum flier, with decent acceleration. Its multiple thrusters should give it good maneuverability, but also a high fuel consumption rate.
Following your commands, the Bugeye swiftly accelerates skyward - with both the Recoiless engine and the thrusters you're confident that it will be able to outfly the second mech. The enemy shows a good understanding of tactics - the ground unit can track you at longer ranges that the flier, while the flier has a better chance to corner your hover. You cannot let them track it back to your base.
You set an interesting trajectory for the Bugeye, making it fly high above the moon, looping around the enemy's base to confuse and shake the sniper. Then it will descend a hundred kilometers to the south, likely losing any possible tail, and run as close to the ground as possible, heading west-northwest until it is equidistand from your base and theirs. Then it will lie on the ground, waiting for recovery. In a month it will self-destruct. If someone will come close without proper codes, it will self-destruct. Shit.
It's gone worse that you expected.

What do?

Advise command that taking this system just became a priority because these primitives aren't quite so stupid and primitive; attach recording of your royally botched recon and spend effort on engineering active and passive defenses for your base. Making additional bots may be advisable since your building timetable has moved up and you just lost one as well.

(GOD DAMMIT!!!! you could of told us that the default doesn't count entirely when other rolls are made, i would of rolled to try and get a different number)
just.. inform command that they seem to have very good detection systems because they were able to detect bugeye at range.

Really not much we can do at this point, other than continue with the earlier building plan. Unfortunately due to CERTAIN PEOPLE we now have an enemy force on alert, so we're gonna need to make sure we get dug in as fast as possible. What are the odds that the enemy will be able to detect our camo'd junk on the surface?

>>300226
Pretty darn high, they just need allies on the planet itself with a telescope watching the moon with image-rec (or physical people) analyzing it I'd figure. If they're sending permanent missions beyond the reach of their biosphere they probably have several things doing that automatically right now.
Analysis: Right now we need to understand politics amongst the beings on that planet to make sense of how many different groups are performing such analysis and their relationships to the various space-capable organizations. Consider that we may be sent to enforce dominion over forces that vastly exceed our local power; intelligence and the ability to perform divide and conquer against the individual factions is very, very, VERY important.

NHOrus!MG5iN2C.S. 2011/05/01(Sun)10:48 No. 300616 ID: 3a9b73
File 130427209551.jpg - (33.12KB , 1075x515 , ob-S2.jpg )

The situation is less than perfect. You have been here for less than two hours and already botched things up. But everything is salvageable, for now. You will do the rational thing: Build up your base, send a message to Command when you start the reactor, wait until reinforcements come and do things more carefully starting from this point.
You think this encounter over. There is some useful data gathered from it. First, intelligence was mostly right - they are four generations behind the current army tech and two generations behind any weapon technology you will use here. Second, they did not send any challenge. They decided to engage directly. Black ops, terrorists, or some other paranoid kind of military people. Which means there is some conflict down there. Wide-scale, shooting conflict. Wonderful. One in your position can use conflict. Or can be swept off in it's tide without gathering any useful information.
Third, most importantly, the Bugeye was seen. Despite it's thermal, visual and radar stealth. They should not be able to see it from the ground. Even a modern system, two generations ahead of a Bugeye, has some problems with it's detection, at five kilometers distance with space as background. After one found out that it's here, one shall have less problem with tracking, but detection is definitely problematic. Especially when there are almost no visible skyward cameras in this base.
There are some different possible ways to detect a Bugeye for this base. Either satellite from behind, where the Bugeye's dump thier waste heat. Luck for standard monitoring systems. Gravity wave location, so they was able to detect RL engines - but they should not have technology to do so, or, possible but even less probable, they detected the secondary macroscopic quantum effects manifestation. It's only possible in lab conditions back home, but who knows what remains of Old Civ the locals had discovered. Definitely not starships or FTL engines, through.
You sigh and go back to base building. You really need to send a report back home. And shower. Definitely shower.

[Timeskip to reinforcements (three days) or some description of base building with background explanation? If second, ask questions. If Lieutenant will be able to answer to them without going out of character and as inner monologue, you can get said answers]

Status of base, projected facilities, resources and bots over the period would be good; how much base can we build over that time and can we manage to have an intel post done within that time or are we already proceeding at max safe/stealthy speed with the maximum number of bots we are confident of keeping out of trouble?

>>300628
that covers everything.

>>300616
Hmm, they're falling behind in tech, yet managed to get a piece of modern or even more advanced parts. Something must have happened in the past, probably a crashed spaceship. We'll need to investigate that later. But for now, this >>300628

All modern mecha weaponry is divided into a few broad categories. Kinetic: Railguns, coilguns, propellant-based. Energy weapon: Lasers, plasma, particle beamers. Magnetohydrodynamic streamers as something in between, to cut heavy armor with 10+ km/s fast stream of molten metal. Missiles. Active Cutting Edge close-combat weaponry. Nothing more.

The main example of plasma weaponry is the fusion lance. It's one of the best choices for melting everything in short to close range (including oneself). Fusion lances work best in low-density mediums like earth-type atmosphere. In the core there is an assisted fusion reactor - Mesh platinoid alloy wires with high melting point, in the form of a cylindrical block, heated near melting point, encased in ceramic armor at the sides. Before the core lies the injecting system - before and around that, air intake and compressor. After the core lies a series of shielded superconducting coils to produce a magnetic de Laval nozzle and to shape the resulting plasma from hot and wild expanding clouds into a supersonic stream of overheated death.
To prevent melting itself, the Fusion Lance only fires in short pulses, no longer than a second, and flushes liquid nitrogen through reactor core after each shot. The coils are protected with reflective armor and air from the compressor.
Main fusion fuel is a helium-3 and deuterium mix. All damage is delivered by the means of a supersonic jet of 6000 Kelvin hot fusion products, mostly alpha particles and protons. The weapon is bulky and possesses unholy recoil, and it has relatively short range - about a hundred meters, shorter in space. It's not your weapon of choice for close support of your infantry. It fries people nicely, good against fortification and sufficiently damaging against armor. Sadly, it has low endurance.

Right, if we get a choice about it we need a number of mecha for surface, sub-surface and space-interdiction defense roles. At this point we do not know who is currently our enemy or which targets to set--if any. Therefore we must build forces, build infrastructure and gather intel.

send all minions but to build the base. that one minion should go retrieve the crashed one in a buggy. then the two of them should come back and also help build.

Having minions scouting right now is an unnecessary risk.

>>303857
We can't take that risk. We must prevent salvage of the remains and prevent them from tracking where we are by salvaging it. We have thorough self-destruct to prevent enemy salvage right?