The feasibility of Mars One, - hard science

[askovdk]

Hello everyone

I have just joined this forum.

First of all to tell the people at Klei, that they have made some excellent games. Invisible Inc is probably the ‘best game’ ever in my book. Not just that I enjoy playing it (I enjoy many games), but in the fact that it captures what I consider the essence of gaming with decision making, risk/reward, short/long term investment. If I should show something to a coworker, who have never done games, then I would show Invisible Inc.

 

I saw Oxygen not included a few weeks ago, and it looks just great.

Then I stumbled on an interesting article about ‘the technical feasibility of the Mars One mission plan’.

 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576515004294

 It is somewhat high-tech (which shouldn’t scare the followers of a game supporting Kelvin temperatures).

Especially the resource flow looks like something we will see in Oxygen not included.

 

 

With respect to games I found the ‘replace and repair’ strategy interesting.

I.e. if something breaks down in a ‘hostile’ environment, do you then bring tools and resources to the machine and do the repair in hostile conditions, or do you bring a replacement for what was broken, do a switch, bring the broken machine back to a workshop, and store the repaired machine as a future replacement? It’s not a trivial choice (as preparing replacements and storing them is expensive compared to ‘fit it all tools and duct tape’), and that could make it interesting to simulate in this game.

 

Another thing I ‘learned’ was to have redundancy, redundancy, and more redundancy. I usually play city-builder games with a rather ‘lean’ approach so resources are invested at once, - and I can do this because most city-builder games allows to save-scum.

However, one of the things I like about Klei is their enforced iron-man, and I hope it will be so in Oxygen as well. This could make traditional city-builders angry, as investing 30 hours in a colony just to have it wiped it painful, but if the message ‘ensure redundancy’ is made clear, then it’s just part of the game. A middle ground could be a device that allows you to travel back in time, e.g. it requires a huge amount of energy to create a fix-point (= quick save), and a large amount of energy to maintain the fix. So it’s possible to secure a fix-point before doing something that could go very wrong, and large colonies could budget with having a fix running full time, but it would be part of the game.

 

Anyway, - it’s hard to wait ‘till it’s done’, but considering the excellent games Klei has made in the past, then they knows best when to go public.