Piper doesn't seem to be putting much energy into the task of objecting to the Captain.

Also, yes, Arkady's +1 Drive skill is the best the party has at the moment. Might be a good thing that there's not likely to be a car chase in this world.

I swear, next skill point I get...

Dunno what you're talking about with the EVA brackets, but if you mean you want to put more solar panels on the surface of the ship, we'd be kind of hard pressed to do that seeing as I think the entire surface of the ship is covered in them.

Yeah, that's giving almost enough power to keep the remaining cryopods humming along.

I would have thought they'd have been destroyed during the trip if they were externally mounted at that time. Erosion from dust and micro-meteors, don't you know.

If they were destroyed before we landed then everyone would have long since perished in cryo sleep before we landed. Our nuclear reactor ran out of power centuries ago. Possibly millenia. The solar power was the only thing keeping us going for a long time, there.

We could probably stand to give them a once over and some general maintenance, but it'd take a long time and the power gain might not be that much compared to the time we'd put into it.

I suppose that makes some sense, yes; but I got the impression the nuclear power just faded out recently. If not, how the did the ship land? Chemical rockets and/or solar power wouldn't cut it, and if the ship has an Orion drive there'd be a hell of a mess in the immediate neighborhood. Besides, if it came down by some nice quiet magical effect, then the Baron wouldn't be here for another week. Nobody in the capital would have noticed the landing.

That's the thing. Not even the closest villiage noticed the landing. As far as everyone is concerned, a city sized starship just materialized out of thin air six nights ago. Mysteeerious.... *wiggles fingers.*

We don't really know how the ship landed, to be honest. No one was awake when it did. I'm assuming that when the ship was in space the amount of power it was getting from the sun was far superior to what we're getting now without atmospheric interference and uninterrupted 24 hour access. Presumably there was more than enough left to land the ship because of that.

Though I don't get why chemical rockets wouldn't suffice for a landing.

Also, half the ship is now burried underground, and the solar panels that cover it as well.

Chemical rockets might have done the trick, but powered decent like the ship must have used would have needed alot of fuel. So much fuel, in fact, that most of the ship would be nothing but massive empty tanks, and thats after jettisoning at least four times that amount to save weight on the way down. It also would have been VERY noticable. Like, noticable on a planetary scale. We also would have burned away pretty much everything for miles around, rather then having trees so close to the ship they block the garage door.

Safe to say our ships wouldn't have empty massive fuel tanks on the journey here. They'd have been jettisoned back on Earth or even during the journey as we used fuel. Whatever fuel we had left would have been the bare minimum necessary to successfully land a ship on a planet with Earth-like gravity. Our descent would have been controlled and our landing would have been... harsh, but survivable. Especially safe inside our sturdy cocoons. Everything on the ship is built so sturdily and battened down so hard we could probably make it through a severe crash landing without suffering too awful much.

All those jettisoned fuel tanks are what would have been used for the powered decent. It takes just as much fuel to do a powered decent as it does to launch, especialy since there was no promise made of the planet having an atmosphere we could have used to break and slow down. Even if there was, it would still take a massive amount of fuel. At least as much as the ship itself masses, and thats if we went with a controlled crash. Judging by the lack of crater around the ship, we landed pretty softly.

Now, we could get away with using less fuel and/or reaction mass if we increased the efficiency of the engines, but chemical thrusters just don't have it in them. We could go nuclear, an open gas core nuclear rocket would pack enough punch to do a single stage powered decent, easy. Same with a nuclear salt water rocket, or an orion drive, as Weremensh said, but seeing as how our faces didn't melt off from crazystupid amounts of radiation when we steped outside, I'm inclined to say that the ship didn't use any of those recently.

Which leaves ua back at square one: We don't know how we got here.

So this 'turret' is currently a coaxial pintle mount with an LMG and a light grenade launcher?

I'd assumed from the complexity involved that it was a ring mount with a GPMG. We'll have to check with Kajin and CCC though. They're the ones running that particular show.

I'd assumed a big gun, on a... spinning... thingy... that can be spun to point in any direction.