Adrift (or the Sleeping Children of Mast'yi Colony) - Claimed by Disco

[James Ramort]

Adrift, or the sleeping Children of Mast'yi Colony

General Information
Mission Title: Adrift
Synopsis: The Ship finds a large generational arche drifting in space. Everyone onboard seems to be dead but what killed them? Where were they headed and what was the true reason they set off into space leaving their old lives behind.

Starting Point: The Ship (can be any movable ship, not suitable for a station) picks up a faint anomalous reading, with no other current assignment the crew decides to investigate.
End Goal: The Crew escapes the planet having rescued the last surviving aliens. Alternatively, the tawed the aliens and helped them complete the planetary terraforming process.

Story points that must be passed?:
- Finding a way into the ship
- Accessing its cargo
- Uncovering what happened onboard
- Finding the Mast'yi colony Planet
- Locate the Colony
- Find the "Monsters"
- Escape // Taw them
- (Repair the process - optionally)

Full Story
Full Spoilers, in case this actually gets picked up one day, read each Act with the awareness of being told conclusions to storypoints!
Act I
Synopsis:The Crew finds the alien vessel and decides to investigate it.
Story: The Ship picks up a faint signal while warping towards a Deep Space outpost. It has just finished its last mission and now will return to pick up new supplies and crew. The signal can not be categorised but might be a distress signal. The ship changes course to investigate. They find a ship that is badly damaged and has been adrift for decades. It is not warp capable anymore and even in its prime time never exceeded Warp 2, its engines leak beta radiation.
It houses biocontainers but the thick shielding does not allow for it to be scanned. It does not answer hails. The Crew has to board it to investigate. The ship has no shuttle bay so the shuttles need to dock to airlocks, unlock them and get in. Inside they find a dead ship, finding their way to engineering they can restore emergency power.
Onboard they can find cryopods with unknown aliens inside them. They are all dead. The biocontainers are filled with seeds and genetic stock of hundreds of lifeforms. The ship seems to have been a bio arche at some point. It turns out its warp engines burned out shortly after starting, making the ship into a generational ship. The core crew lived inside it for decades taking care of the cryopods with their fellow species members.
Some parts of the ship are still locked down, including the drive assembly and the main computer access.
Departments:
- Flight: Shuttling complex manoeuvres to dock at air locks, Projecting the drifting vessels course.
- Engineering: Restoring emergency power, unsealing air locks, investigating the ship.
- Operations: Coordinating the Operations, making sure the Ship is safe from leaking radiation, assisting with restoring the drifting vessel.
- Security and tactical: Clearing blockades on the ship, guarding the teams in a potentially hostile environment.
- Medical: Inspecting the alien lifeforms in the body, examine the dead aliens(former core crew)
- Science: Inspect the bio containers, assist medical

Act II
Synopsis:The remaining parts of the ship are unlocked, the away teams get attacked. They unlock access to the computer and can find the origin of the craft.
Story:Engineering succeeds in opening the last parts of the ship, they find a group of strangely formed robots that attack the team on sight. After they are dispatched engineering can restore power and the computer comes back online. A crypt with infants of the alien Species is found.
After some time working on the computer the crew finds the origin planet of the craft. They also unlock the logs of the dead crew. They are corrupted but tell a story of an arduous journey. They were never planning on travelling for so long but something went wrong. Then they were attacked and had no choice but to seal the engines off. They were the last hope of their species and could only hope to one day be picked up and saved. The Ship arrived too late though.
Finally they can decipher the location of the origin planet and set course towards it. They take the ship with them.
Departments:
- Flight: Deciphering the location of the origin planet, taking Ship there, assisting with engine cleanup
- Engineering: Breaking the lockdown, restoring power
- Operations: Cleaning up the leak, work out a way to tow the drifting ship
- Security and tactical: Defend and defeat the alien robots, protecting against potential further attacks (maybe in multiple ways/holdouts)
- Medical: Ensuring safety of the cryopods for transport, examining the infants in the cryopods
- Science: assisting with finding the origin planet, cultural analysis of the aliens (first part)

Act III
Synopsis: The Ship arrives at an K-Class planet to find a dead colony with lots of terraforming gear in its early stage of development. They also find more of the robots and uncover further parts of a tragic past.
Story: When the Ship arrives at the origin planet it is devoid of all higher life. The crew has to work on cutting slowly speed, stopping the drift ship in orbit and then find a way to stabilize it.
Only highly adapted life forms live on this rock. It had been classified as non-important by long range scans. Further scans reveal an abandoned colony. There they find an entire city's worth of buildings with many workshops and labs. The city is housed within a broken down pressure dome. Strangely it seems the dome seems to be reinforced to keep something inside and not something out. It is lined in strange mineral and biological readings.
When exploring the city they find more robots. It is necessary to set up a safe perimeter to continue the mission. While exploring and finding tech hinting at early attempts at large scale terraforming with fairly low tech tools they continue to find more logs. Hinting at a religious society that arrived from far away to build a home here. They tell stories of monsters and a song of the great vacuum.
After hard work they discover what looks like a shrine filled with cryopods with dead aliens. They discover that towing the adult aliens will probably kill them as well. Meanwhile the infant's pods nearly fail.
Departments:
- Flight: Searching for a geostationary spot and securing the drifting ship there, assisting operations with stabilising it
- Engineering: Examining and reverse engineering the terraforming equipment
- Operations: Stabilising the adrift ship in orbit, finding a way for the transporter to cut through the reinforced dome structure
- Security and tactical: Securing the colony, setting up a secure perimeter with all necessary tools
- Medical: Examining the dead, trying to save the infants
- Science: Cultural analysis, cryopod analysis

Act IV
Synopsis: The truth behind the colony is revealed. Hard choices have to be made.
Story: Further exploration manages to find the colony's computer centre. There the secret behind the misbehaving robots is revealed. After getting around some clever sentries and force fields they can disable the primary program and examine it. It is revealed to be a central part of the Terraforming process. The Aliens were trying to terraform the planet and used the robots to clean it off all present lifeforms. It turns out they weren't trying to terraform the planet to M Class status but rather Class Y.
The program malfunctioned because it was set to restore life functions. It recognised the primitive lifeforms on the planet as valid life and tried to save them from terraforming. To that end it began turning against the aliens. At this point they sent off the ship that brought them there, carrying their colonies' hope (not knowing that some robots got onboard). They then lost control of the computer and thus access to most of their equipment. First the robots cut off their ability to use the terraforming equipment, then they trapped them in the colony causing the inherent cultural parts of the alien culture to adopt them causing them to be seen as mythical monsters that followed them here.
The Robots eventually began to reclaim the colony making it necessary for all aliens to retreat to the central shelter. From the last parts they finished their cryopods to form their tomb and await eternity in silence, hoping for their lost cousins in space to return one day.
Meanwhile in orbit the drifting ship is destabilising. The proximity of multiple sources of gravity nearby tears the ship apart. The crew in orbit has to rush to secure as many cryopods as possible. Focus has to be laid on the infants' pods.
Departments:
- Flight: Carrying out a rescue operation in orbit
- Engineering: Either assisting in orbit or working on the colony computer
- Operations: Carrying out the rescue in orbit, preparing the Ship to keep the cryopods stable
- Security and tactical: Disable the security of the Computer Center, assisting science in uncovering the colonies truth
- Medical: Saving the Infants, preparing to thaw them
- Science: figuring out what happened at the colony

Act V
Synopsis: A choice has to be made. Either life is taken or given back anew.
Story: The ship found adrift is falling down the atmosphere. The infants' cryopods are saved on Ship. Down on the colony it seems that the robots have been brought under control. Engineering thinks they can repair the terraforming equipment and finish the process, with a little help from Ship from orbit the planet can be transformed into an Y Class world.
The Pods could be thawed and under the care of the robots a new generation of aliens could rise on the planet. Alternatively the last wishes of the colony's inhabitants could be honored and their tomb left undisturbed. It will be up to Command Staff to gather their Staff and  make a decision. They will instruct the crew for the final act.
All departments will either work towards restoring the terraforming equipment, tawing the infants and configuring the robots to take care of them. Some might argue it's a moral obligation to return them to life but the Prime Directive would be violated.
Or they could break down the Terraforming Gear, take the infants to the nearest Starbase for them to maybe one day be returned to their species, if they are ever to be found. Will they be damned to the long sleep, possibly without waking, but respecting the Prime Directive.

Note:
This mission is meant to drive secondary engagement besides SIMM itself with the possibility of holding a poll(maybe in the Discord), the end will enable character growth as each PC will have to grapple with the consequences of what happened in the colony and their part in a possible solution.
It also opens the great possibility of Players proposing alternative solutions this adventure might not include in this sketch. These can be followed if chosen so by the Command Staff. This enables an element of surprise making for increased participation fun also for Command Staff since there is a possibility for an unknown ending still valid within the restrictions of the game.

One of the strange Robots

[Rayek trLhoell]

Claimed for Discovery.