I feel like McGyver but couldn’t the foil be used to stabilize the rod anyway?
I gave in and played a bit using the save game. If you examine Challenger you get a big hint.
There is also the question of the turn granularity. Is it 90 degrees or maybe 45?
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Good question! I assumed 90—if you only have a single RTURN and LTURN command, 90 degrees is a good default—but 45 would also make sense, since that’s the “angular resolution” of the map (you can go northeast but not northnortheast).
If the waldo was a bit fancier, maybe we’d put in degrees directly, but six bits isn’t enough to hold the angles that you’d want it to (at least 90, ideally 180). In terms of real-world design, I might expect it to be 6-degree units (so that numbers 0-60 mean 0-360 degrees), but that would be a royal pain to implement on a grid like this. How would you handle it turning 36 degrees off north?
Interesting thought! Since lifting the rod at all dooms us, I figured we couldn’t get the foil around it without the fracture widening to a lethal degree—plus that cable has to be important for something—but that’s a more reasonable idea than anything I’ve thought of.
Plus, that’s how the astronauts fixed anything on the moon. That broken fender was replaced with a spare map and some duct tape. Or in this case, a puzzle piece and some duct tape. Gotta work with what you have!
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For what it’s worth, the Waldo has a swivel socket, and there’s a cable, what would happen if you type in a program, attached the cable, and then stuck the rod inside when the door opens?
That seems like a good plan, but we can’t pick up the rod without dying. Maybe we could do it the other way around—we open the door, Waldo drops the rod in—but I suspect getting something into the reactor door is beyond its limited dexterity.
I mean, do you have to pick up the rod to fix it? you could try to stabilize it with the foil or something without picking it up first.
Let’s give this a shot!
>type forward 1
The screen reads:
* FORWARD 1 *[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
Aha! That was it!
* FORWARD 1 * RTURN 2 * FORWARD 1 *
Let’s try out a simple program in the safety of the lander.
Waldo, designed only for lunar soil, aborts its program.
They put in a sensor for that??
Let’s try out a simple program in the unsafety of the lunar surface.
>press hexagonal
You activate Waldo.Waldo trundles forward.
Waldo rotates 45 degrees right.
Waldo rotates 45 degrees right.
Waldo trundles forward.
Waldo comes to a full stop, program completed.
We’re learning three important things here! One, Waldo executes one command per turn (I’m just cutting out all the Z’s for brevity). Two, RTURN and LTURN turn 45 degrees. And three, Waldo doesn’t actually move between rooms, so hopefully we don’t have to worry about losing it.
Let’s head back on over to the real astronauts, and try this out! Here’s my first attempt at a program:
The screen reads:
* FORWARD 1 * RTURN 2 * FORWARD 1 * SAMPLE 1 * LTURN 4 * FORWARD 1 * LTURN 2 * FORWARD 1 *
and the “memory full” light is on.
In other words, go south, turn west, go west, grab the piece, turn east, go east, turn north, go north.
I accidentally trigger another quote while heading back:
We walk on the earth, but we live in the sky
– Pueblo Indian saying, quoted by
Dr H. H. “Jack” Schmitt (Apollo 17 astronaut)
And some nice environmental messages:
The astronauts and Houston go through a sampling procedure. There is much talk of Bag 7 and the Special Environmental Sample Collector.
Schmitt asks Houston if they want some of the orange soil. Yes, says an exasperated chorus of voices.
The astronauts adjust their suits to higher water-flow (for cooling) and settle into the hard work of taking a core sample, which will keep them quiet for a while.
And after several TURN WALDO commands to get it pointing south, we can try this out!
>press hexagonal
You activate Waldo.Waldo trundles along the crater rim, sheltered from the astronauts’ view.
Waldo is halfway along the east side of the crater, and facing south.
Uh oh. It seems X needs to be 2, not 1.
Waldo trundles out of the safety of the crater rim, and into view of the astronauts, who capture it at once and stow it in the LRV, exchanging amazed communications with Houston!
Time to restore.
The screen reads:
* FORWARD 2 * RTURN 2 * FORWARD 2 * SAMPLE 1 * LTURN 4 * FORWARD 2 * LTURN 2 * FORWARD 2 *
and the “memory full” light is on.
Let’s try this.
>push hexagonal
You activate Waldo.Waldo trundles along the crater rim, sheltered from the astronauts’ view.
Waldo is halfway along the east side of the crater, and facing south.Waldo trundles along the crater rim, sheltered from the astronauts’ view.
Waldo is at the southeast corner of the crater, and facing south.Waldo rotates 45 degrees right.
Waldo is at the southeast corner of the crater, and facing southwest.Waldo rotates 45 degrees right.
Waldo is at the southeast corner of the crater, and facing west.Waldo trundles along the crater rim, sheltered from the astronauts’ view.
Waldo is halfway along the south side of the crater, and facing west.Waldo trundles along the crater rim, sheltered from the astronauts’ view.
Waldo is at the opposite corner of the crater, and facing west.Waldo takes the fender off their LRV.
Waldo is at the opposite corner of the crater, and facing west. The manipulator arm holds the edge piece.
Success!
Some more anxious waiting, then…
Waldo trundles along the crater rim, sheltered from the astronauts’ view. It has returned to you.
>get waldo
Taken.Waldo, designed only for lunar soil, aborts its program.
>get edge piece
Taken.[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
Piece get!
Now let’s see what we can do about this tragic accident. First, here’s what happens if we leave without fixing it:
You shake your head, confused. What is this folly of a monument doing in the middle of a high-security aerodrome? Why did the Chief Ministers of the Allied Air Force Protectorate ever allow this party, anyway, after their decade of ever-growing military budgets and power? They have enough trouble keeping order as it is. Never mind: time to toast the new millennium with a G/P glucose ration.
So we definitely need to ensure history goes as planned.
Let’s give it a shot! Gold is good at stopping radiation, after all.
>x gold
You can’t see any such thing.
Huh? It’s not back at North Massif, and it’s not in our inventory…
After a lot of searching, it seems the game decided to take the chit signed by Lenin out of the rucksack while we were in the Lunar Module, and put the foil in to replace it. Let’s swap that back, and head back to the Silver Cairns.
>put foil on rod
With delicacy you wrap the gold foil around the middle of the rod, covering the hairline crack. Inexplicably, this reminds you of cooking a turkey.
So the immediate danger is past, hopefully. Can we pick up the rod now?
>take rod
The rod is still extremely fragile, and you would need both hands free to safely pick it up.
Aha. So in other words, I’m guessing we need someone to hold the door open while we put the rod into the reactor.
Just for fun, though, I want to take it back to Black and see how they react.
>u
(carefully putting the Pu238 core down first)
Aw.
You can also see a Pu238 core rod here.
You know, just your average Pu238 core rod.
Let’s solve this puzzle the proper way.
Which I’m guessing is this. We can’t hold the door open and pick up the rod at the same time, but Waldo can handle one of those tasks for us!
>plug cable into waldo
You plug the cable into Waldo’s socket.
And since we already have a program that amounts to “leave and then come back”…
>press hexagonal
You activate Waldo.Waldo trundles forward, taking up the slack in the cable.
>get rod
With exquisite care, you pick up the rod, which buckles slightly but doesn’t break. It is so radioactive as to be actually physically hot even through space-suit gloves.[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
Waldo trundles forward, and the taut cable pulls open the ALSEP reactor door.
>put rod in reactor
With extreme care you insert the Pu238 core into the reactor. Nothing as such happens, which is just as well considering that the door is still open.Waldo rotates 45 degrees right, the socket turning too to keep the cable from buckling.
Is this it? Have we done it?
Waldo trundles back, and the ALSEP reactor door closes.
Silently (of course) the ALSEP comes to life, its reactor active.
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
Success!
>x alsep
A temperature gauge reads 107 degrees centigrade: it’s mid-morning, the Sun’s at about 40 degrees in the sky. The seismographs, gravity wave detectors, atmosphere sensors and heat-flow core probes are harder to read.Waldo trundles back, leaving the cable slack.
And we’re doing science, too!
I’m not sure how the astronauts will react to their reactor fuelling itself and turning itself on, and also their sunshade experiment disappearing, but that’s a mystery for Houston to deal with, not us. Let’s head back to the Othello.
>turn off joystick
You switch the joystick off.
Don’t want to leave our rover turned on when we leave!
>tell black about rod
This provokes no reaction.
Stoic as ever.
The air here suddenly seems disturbed, and a kind of cloud gathers from light winds and currents.
“You take the time window,” Black says. “I’ve always wanted to walk on the Moon, so I’ll go for a walk first. Just a little way up Bear Mountain, I think, to look at the view.”
But you do get a quick, breathless hug before Black checks the second space-suit out of the engine-bell base and crawls through the airlock.
This seems to matter rather a lot to you.
Understandable! And hopefully you can get this back off the moon before it’s discovered.
…hm. We do have time travel. Is there a Black from one hour in the future up in the Command Module, waiting for this Black to take off and dock? I like that idea.
So let’s head back to…
You have returned to the Land. Grim, monochrome steppes, wide and exposed beneath a brooding sky, the colour of boiled bruised potatoes. Bleak mountain crags surround a huge plain. The pyramid gleams gold like a beacon, like lamplight in the window of a farmhouse at night.
Ash River Culvert
To the north, the Ash River, sick with grey sludge, drains into a culvert in the sheer mountain wall which runs along the eastern border of the Land.
I’m making a save here if anyone wants to explore more, then we can head back to put our new piece into place.
>put edge at a3
It fits at a3, and suddenly lights up with a picture: a wall covered with graffiti.[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
And finally, let’s see what the footnote has to say!
[ Footnote c4: ]
Cernan and Schmitt were the last of the twelve men on the moon; their three-day survey was the most substantial manned space flight in history. The Russian robot missions ended in 1976, and the Moon was abandoned until 1990, when the tiny Japanese “Hagoromo” satellite made it to lunar orbit but died there. In April 1994, the US “Clementine” satellite re-mapped from a polar orbit, and looked down on the old landing sites.
The Taurus-Littrow valley is a real place, and the game’s topography is simplified from NASA geological maps, films, photographs, eye-witness reports and Eric Jones’s superbly annotated edition of the Apollo 17 Lunar Surface Journal, now available on the World Wide Web (and a surprisingly good read).
(The details are all true, but: the Rover fender was actually mended with a spare checklist; the ALSEP presented no special trouble on A17, unlike earlier flights; and the Lunar Module had no airlock in real life - it was simply evacuated when both astronauts were suited up. Indeed, it hardly even had a door, just a hatchway with a simple latch, held tight by air pressure.)
Apollo’s technology is lost now: the Moon is 1000 times higher than any Space Shuttle orbit (no launch vehicle of today, actual or planned, could take any manned spacecraft beyond low earth orbit). Yet the combined effort of over half a million people climbed it only 16 years after Everest. We seem to find this embarrassing now, like pop-art and flared trousers.
Every single moon flight nearly killed its crew at least once, but improvisation always won. The second spacecraft “Challenger” was not so lucky. I happened to see the tragedy live on television; it seems to me that between them, the two Challengers tell the story of twentieth-century space flight.
As always, save and transcript:
15d.txt (71.1 KB)
15.sav (6.7 KB)
tmpland3.sav (6.7 KB)
And once again, we need to decide: where to next?
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Here’s our new grid:
1 2 3 4
+----------------------------------------------------+
|.............ooooooooooooo.............ooooooooooooo|
a |. Mould oo Record oo Wall .. Park o|
|......o......ooooooooooooo......o......oooooo.oooooo|
|ooooooooooooo......o......ooooooooooooo.............|
b |o Invalid .. Dunes .. Plane oo Snow .|
|oooooo.oooooo.............oooooo.oooooo......o......|
|.............oooooo.oooooo.............ooooooooooooo|
c |. Glass .. Carriage oo Train .. Moon o|
|.............ooooooooooooo.............oooooo.oooooo|
| . o oooooo.oooooo.............|
d | oo Fields oo Barge .|
| ooooooooooooo.............|
+----------------------------------------------------+
Only two pieces missing! The found-but-unsolved pieces are A3 (“a wall covered with graffiti”), B3 (“a silver USAF-marked plane”), D3 (“fields of cabbages”), and D4 (“a shipping barge in a canal”).
Which of those are we headed to next?
- A3, a wall covered with graffiti
- B2, a silver USAF-marked plane
- D3, fields of cabbages
- D4, a shipping barge in a canal
0 voters
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Hey, nice work! Things have been a little hectic so I haven’t been able to comment on these last couple updates in detail, but the moon section seems like it combines very neat, specific detail and challenging but solvable puzzles – it’s been very fun to read, and hopefully it was to play as well.
Yay, I’m guessing another of my guesses on where we’re going is right (this has the be the Berlin Wall, right?).
Oof, quite the juxtaposition. This is probably the first historical event I personally remember - I would have just turned five, and I remember seeing the footage on the news though I didn’t watch it live.
(Actually, now that I think about it, I seem to have some dim memories of it being a big deal that Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro - a woman! - as his running mate, which would have been some half a year previous).
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I missed most of these “wrecked the course of history” endings when I played. I’m now replaying and trying to get all of them, and playing about with the order in which I play chapters to see which parts of the text are different.
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Now that the moon section is done, I found this to be a very nice hint:
x challenger
The landing craft of the largest and most complex machine ever built, over 100 meters tall and with 12 million working parts: the Saturn V rocket. On Earth it was the second loudest work of man, after the atomic bomb, but here it’s silent, wrapped in absolutely still gold foil.
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From an interesting retirement interview with the Apollo 10 and 16 astronaut John Young, whom space fans tend to idolise, but whose peers sometimes felt he exaggerated safety issues (so, read this with due awareness of that):
In those days, no one at NASA knew the odds of success for the moon landings. As Young was training to command his own 1972 landing mission, his new wife told him something disturbing. She had learned about a formal risk analysis that put the chance of survival on future moon missions as low as 20 percent. Young claims it didn’t affect his thinking, but it was upsetting to his wife, and apparently to NASA. “George Low never let anybody see those numbers,” Young says today. Low was the space agency’s deputy director at the time. “I really believe that’s why the big guys wanted to knock off [Apollo] 18, 19, and 20 [the later missions that were canceled in 1970]."
I’ve not seen that 20% figure anywhere else. I assume it’s a calculation of the chance that they could fly three more missions without casualties, which would suggest that they assessed the risk of a fatal accident on a single Apollo J-mission like A17 as being something like 40%. Given that, in fact, no Apollo astronaut died in space, that sounds too high, but Harry W. Jones’s paper “NASA’s Understanding of Risk in Apollo and Shuttle” says that earlier risk assessments were far worse, and that one analysis of A11 gave it only a 5% probability of success. Jones’s thesis is that because of this NASA dropped formal risk analysis completely except when required to perform it by law, as they had to when planning to launch a plutonium RTG on the Shuttle in the early 1980s. They then arbitrarily decided that the solid rocket boosters had a 1 in 1000 failure rate in order to make the numbers look good; and the next year, the Challenger’s boosters exploded. Formal risk analysis was apparently only re-adopted by NASA after the Columbia was lost as well, in the early 2000s.
Googling now suggests that NASA people do seem to be making Monte Carlo simulations of how Artemis 3 might go, but not so much on accident probabilities as on working out how likely the tech stack is to work on the day. (Of course, those are related, but the language used is carefully neutral, and the word “death” does not seem to appear in the paperwork.)
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Richard Feynman mentioned the Challenger disaster in his autobiograhy. He wrote that the engineers calculated the risk of failure at 1:300, while the managers calculated it at 1:300,000.
I have been skeptical at official numbers ever since.
Going back a little ways, since I just came across the thread recently and read through it over the past couple days, I noticed this part of the discussion about the deliberately gender-neutral characters. I didn’t see anyone mention the other big game I know of to do something similar: Aaron Reed’s Blue Lacuna. I can’t remember off-hand if the game makes you choose for the PC at the beginning, but either it’s never specified or you do get a choice of gender, which makes it easy to inhabit the PC. But the partner/companion at the beginning of the game, Rume, is as far as I know never specified. That allows for any kind of partner relationship one prefers to imagine here.
In Jigsaw, which I never played myself after bouncing off Curses, from what I’ve seen here, I think the characterization is sharper than in Blue Lacuna, so the lack of specification is even more pronounced. Since Graham Nelson is male, and given all the high-stakes meddling everyone gets up to, I would tend to default to both White and Black being male, in the absence of anything more definite saying otherwise. However, the implied romance in my mind tends to default to male/female, and so the characters actually exist in my mind in this sort of Schroedinger’s box, where I assume one is male and one is female, but I don’t actually know which is which, nor do I have to decide. It is a very neat trick that I have not experienced from any other piece. Blue Lacuna doesn’t exist in that kind of balance for me because Rume doesn’t do very much and because the PC is more of a blank slate to be inhabited by the player, so there’s no tension in the expectations.
I’m looking forward to following along with the thread in real time now that I’m caught up!
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Bl does specify rume’s gender
It does? When? What is it? I honestly thought “Rume” was a deliberately androgynous name for exactly this purpose.
Right after you pick your own gender
Yeah, my recollection is that it asks something like “is it a [man] or a [woman] who sleeps next to you?”, but it’s been ages since I played BL.
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Okay, my mistake then. I haven’t played it in a long time. It’s just the game that came to mind immediately on reading that section about Jigsaw. I thought the text was still written such that either could apply, like with the name. I mean, it is Rume whichever you choose, right?