outpost_2:outpost_2_manual:detailed_unit_descriptions

Detailed Unit Descriptions

Here you will find detailed descriptions on all in game Buldings

A colony runs on its stomach, and the Agridome is the breadbasket that keeps your colony running. Using a variety of advanced agricultural techniques, including accelerated growth, hydroponics, genetically engineered plants, and efficient management that times harvest and replanting down to the minute, an Agridome can feed up to 40 Colonists. An Agridome not only produces enough food, but enough variety and a constant turnover of fresh products to keep your Colonists both healthy and happy.

Growth Equation

F=.15M+45 F is food, generated by M, morale

Side Notes

Note: Just like many other structures such as the Smelter and Spaceport, you can dock a cargo truck to load and unload food. This feature is useful for fulfilling objectives in Campaign games, and in multiplayer games for transferring food to another player. There is however no need to transfer food from one of your own Agridomes to another under any circumstances, as they all deposit and withdrawal food from the same pool, even if they are not physically connected.

The Command Center is your colony's heart and brain. Equipped with multiple Savant-series computers, communications hubs, a small power plant, and a flexible interior space that can be used for storage, governmental offices, public meetings, and even emergency shelter, it is the most self-contained of all structures and the most versatile. A Command Center is the first building constructed for any installation or colony site, and it is the last place where Colonists gather for evacuation.

Operational Notes: The Command Center distributes Workers and Scientists to structures and also generates 50 units of Power.

DIRT stands for Disaster Instant Response Team, and there is no greater comfort to the Colonists than to know that a nearby DIRT stands ready to handle any emergency. These dedicated professionals (active DIRT members are commonly known as “Grubs”) are highly skilled in the use of their high-technology equipment, which includes power-assist rescue armor, smart-foam fire suppression cannon, auto-med trauma-control systems, and rapid-response mag-lev tunnel trucks. DIRT teams can handle fires, explosions, haz-mat spills, radiation leaks, biohazards, medical emergencies, building depressurization, and other crises.

A colony adequately served by DIRT can minimize the effect of accidents, disasters, and combat damage. The DIRT houses all emergency equipment and provides on-duty housing for Grubs (who often sleep in their powered armor). A small shop/lab provides for maintenance and upgrades of DIRT equipment and production of expendables such as smart-foam, chemical absorbents, and some medical supplies. An integrated virtual-reality training system keeps the experienced Grubs in constant fighting trim and also allows for schooling of new recruits.

Operational Notes: The DIRT prevents up to 25 percent of damage (from disasters, attacks, or explosions) to connected structures. Each DIRT can fully protect up to 10 structures to which it is connected by Tubes. A lower ratio of DIRTs to structures reduces the percentage of damage prevention.

While both colonies make extensive use of small robots and drones in maintenance, construction, agriculture, medicine, and even child care, only Plymouth has taken the concept a step farther, creating the Arachnid series of heavy robots. The Arachnids combine basic robot technology with compact versions of vehicle power and drive-train components. The result is a large, versatile robot, with the speed, range, and independence of a much larger vehicle. The Spider was the first Arachnid design, and went through a number of prototypes. Initially intended for use in construction and in vehicle and building maintenance, it has since found use in combat situations as well. The Spider's multiple limbs are mobile and agile, and through the use of retractable tool and manipulator pods, can be used for lifting, holding, welding, assembly, disassembly, and computer interface attachment. While it is most mobile using all its legs, the Spider can continue to move and function even with several of them damaged or occupied with other work tasks.

The final production version of the Spider retained all its peacetime utility but added enhanced power and drive systems capable of carrying shielding against Plymouth's new EMP weapon without any loss of performance. In combat, the Spider is able to approach enemy units disabled by the EMP weapon, interface with the enemy unit's computer as it reboots, and effectively capture the unit for Plymouth use. The Scorpion uses a version of the Spider chassis, with even greater enhancement of power and drive. The increased payload is used to mount a Mark II beam rifle and enhanced conventional armor.

The Arachnid Factory is a highly automated production facility that handles primary part fabrication, assembly, testing, and programming, with a minimum of intervention by human Workers. It can produce both the Spider- and Scorpion-series Arachnids.

Operational Notes: The Arachnid Factory produces Spiders and Scorpions. NOTE: This structure is available only to Plymouth.

Deciding that Morale is as much a survival consideration as food, water, and air, Eden has designed a special factory for production of consumer goods. The factory is designed to produce small, short-lived, low-complexity items for consumer use. The factory is oriented toward producing a wide variety of items in short production runs, thus increasing the variety of products available, while at the same time increasing the rarity of individual items, and thus their perceived value.

Because of the emergency situation, Eden has never been able to adopt the true free-market capitalist economy that its founders intended, but Workers are paid in chits that can be traded for the few luxuries and privileges that the colony offers, including improved food rations, increased recreational privileges, longer showers, and of course, consumer goods. The Consumer Goods Factory incorporates a small retail shop where products are displayed and sold (Eden Scientists have discovered that shopping for goods has almost as much positive effect on Morale as buying and owning them). A catalog of goods can also be accessed through any colony computer terminal, goods ordered electronically, and delivery made by courier drone, or, in the case of smaller items, by transfer chute.

The factory produces batches of three different classes of consumer goods. The larger and more elaborate the goods, the greater the effect on Morale. The classes are:

Impulse: Small, usually pocket-sized objects, including personal care articles, toys, games, jewelry, clothing accessories, candy, snacks, and small decorative items. They are cheap and easy to produce, but provide only minor, short-lived, improvements in Morale.

Wares: Larger or more elaborate goods, including household items, larger decorations, larger toys and games, entertainment products, simple clothing items and accessories, luxury food items, and jewelry incorporating small natural stones and alloys containing Rare Metals.

Luxury Wares: The most expensive consumer goods, with the greatest impact on Morale. Luxury Wares include large and complex toys and games, natural-fiber clothing, Residence furnishings, larger and more elaborate decorative objects, luxury entertainment products, and jewelry made entirely from natural stones and Rare Metals. Happiness is transitory though. Statistics show that after an average of six months, even most Luxury Wares find their way to the GORF for recycling. But don't worry, the Colonists will already be in line to purchase more.

Operational Notes: The Consumer Goods Factory produces temporary Morale improvements. NOTE: This structure is available only to Eden.

Rather than attempting to fabricate structures piecemeal on site in a hostile environment, the colony designers determined that it would be quicker, safer, and more efficient to produce buildings in the form of prefabricated kits that could be assembled on-site by fully automated ConVecs. These kits are produced in the Structure Factory. Structures employ advanced smart-composites using millimeter-scale folding. Such materials arrive at the site in the form of compact blocks, but when an electric current is correctly applied, they self-deploy into their final forms, panels, girders, trusses, conduits, and ducts. The resulting structural elements are light and filled with billions of individually sealed pockets, having many of the desirable structural characteristics of natural materials such as shell and bone. The material is especially good at absorbing kinetic energy, and thicker hull panels act as effective micrometeor buffers.

Optical pathways and wave guides can be built into the structure, eliminating the need for conventional communication and control wiring. Some power wiring must still be manually installed and connected, but whenever possible, cables are anchored into the structural units at one end, and the rest of the cable coiled on reels. In this way, the deployment of the structural unit will automatically pull the cables through the conduits as the unit takes final shape. Once the unit is installed in the structure, hookups need only be made at each end, and the cable is ready to use.

The Structure Factory maintains several assembler vats for continuous production, folding, and storage of smart composites in any length, and widths of up to seven meters. Separate automated production machines produce cables, flexible piping, fixtures, life-support modules, storage tanks, trim-work, windows, doors, and armor plating. All of the Structure Factory's production lines are completely non-specialized, and it can, on command, immediately fabricate any structure kit for which it has a template stored in its master computer.

Complete kits are packed together like three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles according to the pattern included as part of the template, resulting in a compact module that is easily stored and transported, and that deploys in the order to be assembled with maximum efficiency.

Operational Notes: The Structure Factory produces structure kits required for most structures. It can store up to 6 kits. ConVecs can dock at the Structure Factory to load or unload structure kits.

The Vehicle Factory is responsible for fabrication and assembly of all colony vehicles. While Arachnid robots use much of the same basic technology, the Arachnid's miniature power components, bio-optic computers, and linear response actuators require the specialized fabrication systems and precision assembly provided by an Arachnid Factory, and they cannot be produced in a Vehicle Factory. The Vehicle Factory is designed for rapid one-off production of vehicles based on any template stored in its computer systems, starting with raw materials, continuing through parts fabrication, and on to final assembly, testing, and computer programming. While a wide variety of vehicle designs are used in the colonies, extensive use of standardized parts and technologies is used to simplify production, and also later maintenance and repair.

Operational Notes: The Vehicle Factory produces all vehicles (except Spiders and Scorpions).

The Forum is Plymouth's low-tech solution to colony Morale problems. The Forum is simply a theater/auditorium. Commonly configured as a theater in the round, it can also be easily converted into several different seating configurations, and into a gymnasium for cooperative, non-competitive, sporting-challenges. The Forum serves as a social gathering place, a town square, a cultural hub, and a community center for Plymouth. Colonists can be found gathered there any hour of the day or night, in small informal groups, or for larger and more organized activities. On any given day, at least one major event is planned, be it a play, a debate, a musical performance, a dance, or a spirited poetry reading (a Plymouth favorite).

Note: The Forum improves Morale. It is designed to serve up to 75 Colonists. This structure is available only to Plymouth.

The Garage is the primary repair facility for vehicles. Most of the interior is a single open space subdivided with retractable partitions into individual work-bays. The entire vehicle bay can be pressurized, or individual bays can be sealed and pressurized as needed. Each bay is equipped with overhead hoists, multiple floor lifts, a heavy-duty robotics lifting arm, and two Robot Assist Mechanic (RAM) units. A RAM consists of a long, flexible, mechanical arm attached to the ceiling at one end, and terminating in a fan of special-purpose tool-arms, cameras, and sensors. The RAM is capable of most routine assembly and disassembly tasks, allowing a single human mechanic to oversee the repair of several vehicles at once. The Garage also incorporates several small offices, a storeroom where common parts are stored, a miniature parts fabrication plant, a machine shop, and a computer bay for checkout, repair, and programming of vehicle and robot “brains.”

Notes: The Garage repairs and stores up to 6 vehicles. Any kind of vehicle can dock at the Garage, except Spiders and Scorpions. Vehicles stored at a Garage are protected from damage, even if the Garage itself is damaged. However, any vehicles inside a Garage when it is destroyed are lost.

Eden has developed a variation of Robo-Miner technology that allows cheap, nearly unlimited energy to be extracted from the crust of New Terra itself. The Geothermal Plant, like the various mines, starts life as a transforming vehicle, the Geothermal Constructor (GeoCon), a self-deploying structure kit with its own power-plant and drive train. The GeoCon is able to move itself to an appropriate geothermal site, such as a fumarole, where it converts into a fixed Geothermal Plant. While geothermal power generation was common on old Earth, a new technology had to be developed on New Terra, where natural ground water does not occur (the outflow from fumaroles on New Terra consists of inert gasses and molten salts). The GeoCon uses a fusion drill to open a shaft into the hot rock of the upper crust, where it fans out into an array of energy collection shafts. Each of these shafts is equipped with a molten salt heat pipe (exploiting the natural liquid salts), which transfers the heat back to the surface, where it is used for Power generation.

Notes: The Geothermal Plant generates 500 units of Power. It does not require a structure kit; it is deployed over a fumarole by a GeoCon. This structure is available only to Eden. It explodes when destroyed, and may spontaneously explode if damaged.

While New Terra is rich in mineral resources, refined materials are still precious and must be recycled as much as possible. The Garbage and Ore Recycling Facility is an advanced facility for converting waste, garbage, building rubble, and unused structures into usable raw materials. While residential and industrial wastes are processed through the GORF, their contribution to its output is statistically minimal. Its real importance is in recycling buildings, and other large items such as starship components. While the GORF is capable of dealing with chunks of material of fair size, structure kits must first be disassembled by the Structure Factory for further processing (high-value parts are also stripped out and used for spares), starship components and satellites are disassembled at the Spaceport storage facility, and buildings must be demolished using a ConVec. Most building rubble is small enough for direct recycling. Larger rubble can generally be broken into manageable chunks by the Cargo Truck's loader-manipulators as it is placed in the truck. The GORF incorporates a fusion/electric smelter and an advanced hot-cracking column for separation and condensation of Rare and Common Metals. This is the same process used in Magma Wells, and thus is not without its risks; however, the flow from the smelter is much more constant and pure than that of a Magma Well, and thus much easier to manage. Multiple safeguards have been put in place to provide a safe shutdown in case of process instability. In addition, several Workers man the facility at all times to monitor GORF systems and carry out a constantly ongoing series of safety inspections. As a result, there has never been a major accident in a GORF facility.

Notes: The GORF recycles structures, structure kits, starship components, satellites, and rubble into usable Common and Rare Metals. Cargo Trucks carrying Common or Rare Rubble can dock at GORFs to unload; other materials to be recycled are sent through the Tube system.

Guard Post

Guard Posts are simple unmanned defense-sentry installations. The offensive element of the Guard Post is any one of the available combat vehicle turrets, with that turret's normal capabilities and limitations. Lacking the vehicle's computers, sensors, and power system, the Guard Post incorporates a power receiver, allowing it to operate from the colony's power plants, a targeting sensor array, and a simple electro-optical targeting and fire tasking (TAFT) computer. The TAFT is not as sophisticated as the primary computers used in vehicles and arachnids, and in fact, is derived from an emergency-backup computer commonly used in such units. While the electro-optical logic unit handles most of the TAFT's functions, a protein-based pattern recognition unit is used to identity hostile and friendly units, and to select an appropriate threat response. The TAFT's effectiveness can be improved by connecting the Guard Post to the Command Center through the Tube system, which provides a secure data channel to the Savant computers. This allows for pinpoint targeting, increasing the effective damage from most weapons by 50 percent. While Guard Posts normally operate independently, they can be directed at individual targets in response to commands from the Command Center.

Notes: If a guard post is left in a damaged state for too long it has a chance to spontaneously explode that could cause splash damage to nearby units.

This simple laboratory structure was designed on Earth, and first deployed in the first days of the Eden colony. While this lab is very flexible and does a number of things, it does none of them especially well. Designed to support several research projects in different disciplines, in practice it has been found that these projects tend to interfere with one another, limiting the utility of the laboratory. It was quickly replaced by the Standard Laboratory, a structure with less versatility but more robust support for any given lab configuration. After the disasters at the Eden and Plymouth colonies, the Basic Lab design was pressed into service to support essential survival-related research, and to aid in deciphering scrambled starship scientific databases.

The Standard Laboratory structure was designed to replace the flawed Basic Laboratory design. The new design philosophy calls for a lab that can be converted for dedicated use in one field of study, making it ideal for “crash” programs where large amounts of resources are thrown at a single task. While the Standard Laboratory can easily be reconfigured for use by a different discipline, this requires a total shutdown while changes are made, a cold restart of the lab's systems, and several days of down-time in the process. The Standard Laboratory also includes improved built-in hazard containment facilities designed to deal with bio-hazards, toxins, and radiation hazards. This makes the Standard Lab safer for long-term use in the colony, and allows it to work on more advanced projects.

The Advanced Laboratory, often known as the “Hot Lab,” is an outgrowth of the Standard Laboratory, and maintains the same philosophy of task-dedicated design. The Advanced Lab has been completely redesigned specifically to handle difficult and dangerous technologies, such as those used in weapons research, high-energy physics, and space technologies. All building doors are protected by a triple airlock system, each with a self-contained decontamination system and hazard-sensor interlocks. Other than power, the Advanced Lab is completely self-contained, with no water, air, or other connections to the colony. The internal pressure of the structure is kept slightly lower than the rest of the colony, so that in the event of any leak, air will tend to flow into the structure, rather than out. The shell of the Advanced Lab is belted with special wound composite shielding to help contain explosions within the structure, and a triple-walled, self-sealing liner helps prevent leaks into the environment or the rest of the colony. Despite all these precautions, things do go wrong and lab accidents aren't unknown. Still, Eden leaders were satisfied with the Advanced Laboratory's record, and were confident that at least its biological containment systems were foolproof. The disaster that followed proved them wrong.

Light Towers provide illumination for nighttime colony activity. The strategic advantage of light towers comes from the fact that enemy units that enter their radius will always be visible on the mini-map, even if their lights are off.

The Magma Well begins its life as a specialized transforming vehicle, a Robo-Miner. Like the off-shore oil-platforms on old Earth, colony mining structures are designed to be built in one location, then moved to a promising site to put down roots and fulfill their main function. The Robo-Miner is also capable of being deployed in a conventional mine configuration used for both Common Ore and Rare Ore Mines. These are described elsewhere. The Magma Well process is an exotic and dangerous method of extracting Rare Metals directly from the planet's molten mantle. Magma Wells take advantage of naturally occurring magma vents in New Terra's crust. More important than the vent itself is the thin spot in the crust that it represents. Dutch miners, crab-like mining heads connected to the magma tap by long umbilicals, open the upper parts of the vent to allow for free flow of molten material, while nuclear drill charges liquefy rock in the deeper crust, providing the initial flow. This begins a siphon effect that, in ideal conditions, provides a constant and uniform flow of mineral-rich molten rock. The process is imperfect, however. The molten flow can go out of control or become blocked, causing an explosive pressure buildup. The hot-cracking process used to purify ore is subject to various kinds of instabilities and reaction run-aways. Though there are many failure modes, they have one thing in common. They are all violent.


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  • Last modified: 2015/11/28 21:25
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