Starship Corporation

=A company wants you to transport some sort of classified, dangerous living cargo. Everyone can see where this is going, basically you would need a really top notch crew and military team if you want the operation to go off without a problem. The catch is, you don't know what is in the container, you would have to be prepared for anything. What could be break loose from the container could be the following:

A man made super creature used for biological experiments, weapons and cybernetics testing It would be kind of like a Xenomorph in that it would be a quick, hard to kill hellish thing on two legs. The difference being it doesn't eat brains or build sticky nest chambers to impregnate victims and create more spawn.

The creature is sterile (being simply a manmade lifeform used for testing things on) but due to the tests and experiments it has undergone it has gained some intelligence and plenty of strength and endurance. It is fast and will take many guns firing on it to bring it down. After breaking from containment for whatever reason it will aimlessly roam the room until it comes in contact with a door, it will bash the door until it opens and enter the next room and begin wandering again. If there is a crew presence in the room it will run at them to melee range and kill them. Due to experiments it can detect life in a room next to it and instead of wandering the room the creature will instantly go to the door and begin bashing it to get to the room with the crew member in it. The creature can survive for a limited time without air and turning off gravity will not effect it as it can stick to floors and walls.

Mutant Virus Victim A victim of an experimental bio-weapons test gone wrong who is now being shipped aboard your ship to a research facility for further research.

Yes, it's basically a zombie. He will aimlessly wander rooms and halls and can open doors like a normal person would, he is highly aggressive and will charge anyone in sight. He has a weak attack and is easy to kill. The problem is though that any person he touches will catch the virus and have a 40% chance of either dying or a 60% chance of becoming a mutant zombie. Also every room he enters will be "contaminated" and if an unprotected crew member stays in the contaminated room long enough they will catch the virus as well. After killing the mutant you must dispose of the body since its corpse will still contaminate the room. It's best to have a robot take care of the mutant and dispose the body since it can't contract diseases.

Dangerously Invasive Organism A subgroup of its own, depending on the mission it could be a group of plants or aggressive animal life.

Depending on what it is, if the plant breaks from the container it will spread around the room and begin to invade surrounding rooms afterwards. The plant isn't harmful to humans directly but will damage and eventually destroy any components in rooms it spreads to. If the plants reach the bio-dome it will quickly choke out and kill all plants you have growing there and use the dome for itself. Aggressive animal life is almost the same but they will attack crew and marines and are of low to moderate strength but can and will attack in packs which is what will make them a threat. The animals will also damage and destroy components but at a slower rate than the plants. Animals will set up nests in some rooms which will spawn the animals in large numbers.

The cargo has a chance, depending on the skill of the crew, to break open on it's own, but can also be broken open due to damage to the container or a long term generator power outage. A successful mission (delivering the creature to the destination alive) will net you full payment. If you kill the cargo then you will only get 1/3 the payment. If the cargo is completely destroyed (ejected out of the airlock into space, disintegrated, blown up etc.) you will get nothing.

great ideas - that will be interesting missions!

I especially like "organism A" - the idea that your ship is slowly eaten up by some sort of "fungus". You could also easily implement, that the plants slowly devour walls, which leaves you with a lot of holes in the hull if you don´t do something about it...

That are really great ideas!

It would be nice if the "Problem" has some time of preparation before it is actually diagnosed by in-ship sensors.
Basically what that means is:
You never get a Message of something happened to the Container as long as there isn't a Crewmember actively watching it (not only has this crewmember to be in the room but it has to really guard this container) nonetheless there is a slight chance that even that would not help (like a damaged corner of the box, not easily detectable).

Then the "Problem" has also an slight chance to not be first detected in the "container hold" but in an nearby room (like it escaped through an ventilation shaft), the "Organism" has a chance to silently infect any room as long as there isn't crew inside. So what could happen is that the "Greenhouse" of your sheep that normally does not need much maintenance suddenly goes blank, as if it wasn't maintained. And as soon as you send your mechanics in there (because normally you would think you forgot to repair it) you find yourself in the middle of a giant outbreak. Then your mechanics get eaten and you can not be sure how big the infection is

Also - you have to disinfect every room (by flamethrower possibly or evacuating the rooms atmosphere to space) if you don't want to have a nice present again.
There should also be an minimal possibility (0.5%) that the "problem" wasn't eradicated at first. Fun for the whole family!

All "problems" should have abilities randomly generated. So you could have all sorts of fun "problems". Zombi plants that walk on legs or gas clouds that eat metal


What would be also very nice is if you could force your crew to equip space suits so you could blow out the atmosphere of you ship
Generally it would be nice if you could control the environment of you ship. Have a giant beast from an hot planet rampaging on your ship? No Problem! Stop the Atmospheric Heaters on your ship and let it freeze to death.
Have a enormous chinchilla infestation? Flood your whole ship with fresh cold water

EDIT
Another Idea I just had is: How about non threatening "problems". I though like something like the "Tribbles" from StarTrek. Little hairy animals that - if not strictly seperated - keep reproducing and fill up the ship
Also maybe unique "problems" that - if controlled - deliver an advantage for the ship. You could "infect" your farms with an symbiotic plant that - as long as you can keep it out of the rest of the ship will generate much more oxygen and food as every other normal plant can

I love the ideas. I especially like the virus one, being a big 'The Thing' fan that really grabs my attention.

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Thank you all for the replies, and yes a lot of the movies like Alien, The Thing, and various zombie movies.

Another idea I just thought up for the same type of scenario comes from an old, obscure comic called "Virus" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus_%28comic%29, SHODAN from System Shock, and the Re-Imagined Battlestar Galactica Cylon infiltrators.

Basically this would be another really hard mission that would probably only appear when your company is well established. Basically a hostile sentient computer virus beams itself into the ships computers where it will hide in dormant until a crew member or multiple crew are put under surgery (I assume the surgery will be done by some sort of futuristic automated machine?) in the medical bay where it will then activate, slaughter and turn the medical bay patients and turning them into cyborgs under the virus's control. Worst of all the cyborgs can't be detected by just looking at them, you'll never know they're cyborgs unless you have special scanning devices set up on the ship (something like a metal detector that would detect hidden or implanted objects on a person)

The cyborgs will then go straight for the ship's AI core, where they will attempt to hack and bring the ship under the Virus's control. If successful the ship defense systems will turn hostile on your crew: defense turrets will fire on crew, doors will lock and have to be overridden by engineers (who can override the locks) or marines (who can weld off locks or blow the doors open). If you have chemical gasses aboard for defense purposes it will pump those into all areas that it can be routed to. Also after the AI core is infected by the virus a countdown will start, your crew and marines will have a certain amount of time before the virus bypasses firewalls and is able to shutdown life support, food, water supplies, and destroy the engines. All the while the cyborgs will roam the halls and attempt to kill any crew member or marine they come across, then take their corpse back to the medical bay and convert them into cyborgs as well.

The way to prevent this is to not fall behind on medical-bay maintenance, doing often, routine checks on the medical-bay equipment will find and eliminate the virus before it activates. Plus have scanning devices (if those are added) in certain areas of the ship which can detect the cyborgs (or any infiltrator for that matter) and alert the marine garrison and activate all defense turrets on the cyborg before it gets to the AI core. Of course the scanning devices would have to be maintained as well.

Basically this would be an intense mission that would turn your ship against you if it gets out of hand, which it can really quick; but it can also be easily prevented with the right precautions.
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Another thing I think would be great is if your ship is lost to a disaster that didn't destroy it (like one of these sci-fi thriller like disasters I have in this topic), it will leave a marker on the galaxy map showing the location of the wreck. You can later attempt to send another ship to the wreck to salvage. Though this would be hard as by the time you will reach the derelict ship, it would be completely overwhelmed and riddled with whatever took it over (unless it's the sterile man made creature I listed above, then there would still just be one of it roaming the ship).

In most cases boarding the ship would be easy. Basically this would be something of a sci-fi survival horror mission. You would basically board the ship like you would an enemy ship, and you're left up with what to do from there with your assault force. You could attempt to repair and restore power and air if feasible which would allow you to see what is going on throughout the entire ship as well as it's status and hostile life on board. But this would be double edged if you're up against a virus infected AI core as restoring power would give it more control (reactivating defense turrets, infected medical bay and the like) and allow it to see you too and start sending all it's forces in your boarding team's direction.