Raid Earth: Why raid Earth?

[Gary "Grail" Condra]

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Instead of focusing on food retrieval, what about focusing on bringing back metal (following up on the recycling board idea) or maybe water to keep hydroponic farms on the stations going? Or the characters could be a group devoted to raiding ruined cities for artifacts and looking for scattered survivors of the zombie apocalypse.

I didn't latch onto this immediately, but I concur. Food-fetching is somewhat plausible as a reason, but they must have a significant source of energy, to make it cost-effective to boost captured food into orbit. Otherwise, you can be sure every raid on Earth begins with securing a refueling.

But, yeah, what Eric said. Give folks a laundry list of potential "raid reasons". You needn't actually write up modules for each, and I doubt your system will need to address those motives with elements or mechanics. Just a nice, chunky list of "Things That The Administrators Need From Earth All The Time". From banal (food) to super scarce (fuel sources for that alledged uber-power-system that lets us deorbit for a grocery run!).

Further, fetching resources is by no means the only reason to go down. Saving survivors is a GOOD one: re-population needs, you see. We need a large gene pool, or the human race is done anyway. Art and information retrieval: do these space monkeys have any desire to save human knowledge? To capture zombies to attempt treatment/experiments (that one's a bit ugly and dark, but you got a planet full of zombies and tin cans in orbit: it WOULD happen; people MUST want to land permanently someday, right?). Establish and maintain bases/landing areas. Setup emergency shelters and evac radios that survivors might discover.

You know... this would be a good thread subject: [Raid Earth] Why raid Earth?

This got me thinking so if you were living in a space station above a zombie infested earth why would you raid earth and what would you raid earth for?

[contracycle]

It would cost you more energy to land on earth and take off again than to go to Jupiter and come back, although admittedly it would be quicker.  So, any and all of your material needs can be more easily obtained from the planets.  The only reason to go to earth then is for things that are not just resources, and found only on earth: the detritus of the past civilisation.

[Thunder_God]

Fuck it, you want to kill the zombies and reclaim Earth!

Well, that's one thing that probably all would think of or have as a long term goal.

[David "Czar Fnord" Artman]

Well, that's one thing that probably all would think of or have as a long term goal.

Seems to me that the reasons to raid Earth map fairly directly into short term goals in service to The Main Long Term Goal of Humanity:
o  Fetch Resources -> Individual day-to-day survival -> Human species survival (HSS)
o  Saving survivors (& setting up emer&evac shelters) -> Genetic diversity -> HSS
o  Fetch zombies for experiments -> Reclaiming Earth -> HSS
   (Note: this one presumes low tech level; high tech level can survive indefinitely outside of a gravity well, and thus would only reclaim Earth after establishing significant diversity and sustainability on orbit)
o  Saving art & records -> Maintaining historical and cultural continuity -> Avoiding past mistakes -> HSS
o  Saving art -> hmmm.... Maintaining continuity of aesthetics? -> ...not survival critical...
   (Note: this one presumes someone in the Admins is a softie. It's a hard sell, if low tech enough to be really scrimping and saving.)
o  Establish and maintain bases/landing areas -> Enables all of the above -> HSS

Thus, it would behoove participants in this endeavor to consider how their particular suggestion leads to species survival. If resources are presumed to be at all limited (which means it's a fairly low tech level), then only those activities which increase them or very wisely expend them would be considered.
An Aside, folks: As this is an endeavor, it seems to me that repeating what someone else has already suggested, without addition or expansion, is just redundant noise. Gary, would you please confirm or deny this statement of mine?
New reasons:

o  Resupply groundside troops and bases: The orbital facilities can produce certain goods more efficiently than trying to restart, staff, and defend ground-based factories (never mind microgravity production advantages). Therefore, much specialist medical and combat equipment must be produced on orbit and sent down to the troops maintaining the beachheads (i.e. landing areas and bases of operations).

o  Saving animals: Just as genetic diversity is critical for humans, it is critical for any population of livestock. Thus, while the spacemen might not attempt a rescue of every animal they spot with telescopes, they would certainly send out periodic Noah's Ark missions to try to keep the gene pool diverse. And the scientists are fairly sure animals can't carry the cause of zombification up to orbit.... >:->
   (By the way: What is the cause of the worldwide zombification? That might help inspire more specific raid reasons.)

o  Luxury items:  Sure, the orbital factories can make a passable chocolate substitute. Yep, the recyclers and enzyme tanks can fake up whiskey. But Godiva chocolate... 12 year old Scotch... all sitting untouched since The Incident. Sometimes, you just gotta go for it, for the finer things in life.
   (Note: Again, either softie Admins OR some dodgy politics on orbit, the wheels of which are smoothed by luxurious bribes.)

More to come, I am sure....
David

[Gary "Grail" Condra]

An Aside, folks: As this is an endeavor, it seems to me that repeating what someone else has already suggested, without addition or expansion, is just redundant noise. Gary, would you please confirm or deny this statement of mine?

   (By the way: What is the cause of the worldwide zombification? That might help inspire more specific raid reasons.)

I don't mind ideas being repeated it puts them all in one place for me so it's easier to look at instea of re-reading the whole topic to find something... Cause of the worldwide zombification? Think along the lines of resident evil and your not far off. Over zealous scientists try to make a better soldier but it back fires, the installation gets infected in the space of 4 hours then two days later when the next shift arrives the zombies pour out of the installation infecting most of the new shift and spreading out across the country side. Soon all of Europe has fallen and all the survivors have fled to other countries, some of them are infected and spread the virus. Suddenly only military bases are left and they are filled to the brim with refugees, then one of the orbital stations radios down for supplies and the idea to escape to space is hatched.....

There's your background... Also where should I upload a taster for you lot? It's nothing to do with this but it's a combat system I made that shares some features with it's Raid Earth counter-part.

[Gary "Grail" Condra]

Fuck it, you want to kill the zombies and reclaim Earth!

Well, that's one thing that probably all would think of or have as a long term goal.

Looking back at this yes it is a long-term term goal but that's kind of something that would be considered as standard no matter what. So please try to be a little more helpful in future.

[joepub]

So please try to be a little more helpful in future.

Gary... I think Thunder_God was being helpful.

With everyone pointing out "humans need this" and "human species survival" there was a point that was almost overlooked:

The game is (i think) going to be about killing zombies.
I'm gunna put myself in a character's shoes for one second.

I'm on a mission.
In the administration's eyes, I'm there to retrieve art.
But on a personal level... I don't give a fuck about art.
I enlisted to kill zombies. I enlisted to bring a world of hurt to those undead.
The reason I am raiding earth, personally, is to kill some zombies.

[knicknevin]

Slight tangent.... there is a book (Silver Rain by Alistair Reynolds) where the opening portion deals with a group of 'space monkeys' scavenging an Earth ravaged by a nanotech disaster. No zombies but there is a real fear of infection. Unfortunately, the rest of the book has next to nothing to do with that (but it is a damn fine read anyway)

[Gary "Grail" Condra]

Slight tangent.... there is a book (Silver Rain by Alistair Reynolds) where the opening portion deals with a group of 'space monkeys' scavenging an Earth ravaged by a nanotech disaster. No zombies but there is a real fear of infection. Unfortunately, the rest of the book has next to nothing to do with that (but it is a damn fine read anyway)

Hmmmm I might just look into that.

So please try to be a little more helpful in future.

Gary... I think Thunder_God was being helpful.

With everyone pointing out "humans need this" and "human species survival" there was a point that was almost overlooked:

The game is (i think) going to be about killing zombies.
I'm gunna put myself in a character's shoes for one second.

I'm on a mission.
In the administration's eyes, I'm there to retrieve art.
But on a personal level... I don't give a fuck about art.
I enlisted to kill zombies. I enlisted to bring a world of hurt to those undead.
The reason I am raiding earth, personally, is to kill some zombies.

True but killing zombies is inavoidable when the planet is full of them.

[David "Czar Fnord" Artman]

New reason:
o  Entertainment - The space station's databases and memory are not infinite. During the rush to escape Earth, entertainment was not a priority. But now, years (?) later, everyone has seen every movie, beaten every video (VR?) game, and read every book. Twice. Sometimes, you'd rather be eaten by zombies than watch another I Love Lucy rerun.
   The Admins send raiders down to power-up and copy entertainment from former Internet repositories (i.e. server farms) or to scan hard copies from libraries. File sharing violators of copyright are posthumously lauded as visionaries and heroes of the future. Currently, "old school" Nintendo and Sega console games are in demand, though there's a strong push for more MMORPGs, because of their generally open play and huge variety of situations.
Fine, fine, of course, yes, sure... kill zombies. Let's move past the obvious and try to serve this thread's purpose....

[Gary "Grail" Condra]

Hmmm movies.... VR addicts! Lol please and thank you, I love those idea's more please! ^_^

[David "Czar Fnord" Artman]

Similar to those above:
DNA Library - Sure, they can't emulate Noah and bring up all animals two-by-two, but why not a blood and bone marrow sample from every animal they can spot and tranquilize? Some kind of trustworthy cryogenic storage—and hope for a future ability to replicate from gene samples—and we've got the next best thing to Noah's Ark.
   The Admins won't send them down that often, but "safari runs" to collect gene samples would be a smart start towards long-term restoration of the defiled Earth. Domesticated breeds are favored, as most of them can't sustain themselves for long in the wild.

Expulsions - The ultimate punishment of a liberal people with a LOT of spare land. Why have capital punishment muddy up your fine, high-orbit ideals when there's a billion zombies who'll do the dirty work? Also, there's not much good reason to de-orbit totally empty, when you plan to re-orbit with some haul; might as well take down some trash. Thus, the Admins will sentence the worst criminal offenders—folks who aren't worth their labor or their genes—to expulsion from the station. The guilty party catches a ride down to Earth under self-releasing time-locked restraints, is deposited somewhere at random rather far away from common landing locations, and is left to God's mercy.
   Of course, the station culture is not a perfect one, and the innocent can be wrongly convicted, even on a space station which, surely, has plenty of monitoring equipment throughout. And it isn't unheard of for difficult political opposition to be, well, "characterized" as committing heinous crimes (i.e. framed). The threat of the zombie's cruel hospitality can go a long way towards silencing revolutionaries and rabble-rousers, too.
By the way... do the zombies have to eat? Do they eat animals other than humans (can they CATCH any?)? I presume "no," "yes," and "not usually" otherwise there's no need to fight them, just wait: they'll starve or be bear and wolf food before long.

[contracycle]

I think a great deal of this will be determined by how big and extensive your space-based society is.  Or at least they have to be decided together and integrated.

The simplest idea from the description you have given, and which seems most thematically appropriate for zombies, is the idea of the perilous tin can.  If the history includes something like an emergency evacuation of earth, then they will likely have no spare parts and no manufacturing capacity.  What they have is an orbital barracks and that's it.  Everything they need will have to be retrieved from earth.  Plans, machines, parts, clothes, material samples, everything.  And unless their perilous can is in an extraordinarily stable orbit, sooner or later it will fall.  And that means that humanity has not, in fact survived the disaster at all, yet - it has gained a breathing space, but if they don't come up with a Plan before the doomsday clock runs down, the species will burn up on reentry.

That would move the focus away from killing zombies as a goal and towards killing zombies as an expedient.  It also makes every object retrieved, no matter how mundane, vital.  Another reason to go down would be books, because boosting wood pulp to orbit is inherently absurd.  And your survivors cannot possibly include every skill known to humanity, and may not know some things that are critical.  So landing to raid university labs and libraries might be quite important.

It would also seem pointless to me to boost weapons, and especially ammunition, to orbit.  Zombies are usually very stupid; if they can safely lock weapons up on vaults on earth, and retrieve them at the start of the mission, they will.  This also allows you to add tension to the early parts of the mission, and give the mission some structure.

[contracycle]

I just had another thought.  There seems to be this pattern of people graphing their highschools like a dungeon; you could take advantage of this.  With the idea that books are to heavy to boost, you can have a mission in which a force lands, draws a perimeter, and holds it against the ravening hordes while the techies scan every text they can find and beam it to orbit.  So now your players can run around their very own highschool with guns, shooting zombies, in what would likely be a quite Romero-esque scene.

[David "Czar Fnord" Artman]

It would also seem pointless to me to boost weapons, and especially ammunition, to orbit.

This only makes sense for the smallest, best managed societies. As soon as you have a large enough group for it to be possible to go unrecognized in regions of the station, then you will need weapons. Particularly given the inherent scarcity issues (and perceived relative deprivation that accompanies scarcity).

Zombies are usually very stupid; if they can safely lock weapons up on vaults on earth, and retrieve them at the start of the mission, they will.  This also allows you to add tension to the early parts of the mission, and give the mission some structure.

I like this for two reasons: first, it makes sense that heavy munitions would be maintained (recell from my listings above that I propose whole forward bases on Earth); second, because of the dramatic tension it offers at mission start. Unless they can land the space plane pretty much right on top of the weapons caches, there's a certain need to sneak to start a mission, rather than just drop and pop.

BUT... there's assumptions, here. First, that there are no expelled humans or, generally, no smart humans who would use the weapons to their advantage against other humans. Sure, you could hand-wave a locking method that guarantees safety of the cache, but any sort of "realistic" lock would be circumvented eventually by a dedicated human. Second, you assume zombies are stupid. Are they, Gary?

[Aside: I'd like to see a smart zombies treatement, if only to be unconventional. Sure, they can be slow--or fast, or both, depending upon how decomposed their bodies are--but they should also be smart or dumb based on how much brains they have left. Otherwise, just how much fun is mowing them down going to be? I keep imagining the Day of the Dead scene (?) with the good ol' boys kicked back, drinking beers, saying, "There's another 'un, Cletus!" *BOOM* *wet thud* But a conniving race of zombies--say, with wolf-like intellect and cooperation--now THAT's a scary adversary.

Plus, if you get conniving zombies, you get some pretty horrible scenarios: the sweet, little girl crying in the street who tries to take a bite out of her rescuers. The emergency shelter beacons going off... but no humans visible in the immediate area on telescope: evac too late to save the caller, or a zombie trick?]

In general, it looks like the more we try to come up with reasons to raid, the more the reasons seem to depend upon specifics of these elements:
o  Zombie physiology
o  Zombie psychology
o  How long since the Incident
o  Size of station
o  Facilities in the station
o  Number of survivors on orbit
o  Number of survivors still stuck on Earth
o  Survivors stationed on Earth (or not?)
o  Number of zombies

David