Found a mostly intact horrizant!

[The Artist Formerly]

But it's a little better then five thousand feet below the surface of the ocean...

The intel we have on it is that it was a supply ship bring goodies to the REF troops on the ground.

We sent Robo-duck (our unmaned camera sub) to scope it out. Aside from crushed in nose section, bent neck and the wing segments being totally missing, it's in good shape. Gvien the few Invid Mecha odds and ends around, we think they must have killed the crew but the ships automated systems got in down in more or less one peice.

Now the question is, how do we get at the cargo and other salvageables?

[glitterboy2098]

you got contact with the zentreadi?

if you can get a few recovery pods you can lift the whole thing up (perhaps a bunker at a time. )

most mecha can tolerate those depths, though you're looking at decompression time later.

[The Artist Formerly]

you got contact with the zentreadi?

if you can get a few recovery pods you can lift the whole thing up (perhaps a bunker at a time. )

most mecha can tolerate those depths, though you're looking at decompression time later.

Functional recovery pods? The only people with those I think would be the Masters.

The Invid sympathizers at Port Victoria (the Macao/Hong Kong area) have several heavy transports. We might see about *borrowing one from them and seeing if we can't raise some of it. The bunkers look to be intact, and we don't want to open them underwater if they haven't already been popped from the landing. Some of our Mecha is tested for that kind of depth, so we can get some craft down there, but we'd like to avoid it if possible, you can hear the armored plates and frames groaning from the load at around 4000 feet. And our Mecha aren't exactly fresh off the assembly line.

We're also seriously concidering refitting that GMP battloid we recovered as a deep diver unit. Now that we have the micro-processing technology needed to get it's reactor back online it may be a viable unit for this kind of operation. This isn't our first off shore effort, and having a unit that specializes in the under sea enviroment would be of benifit.

*Did I say borrow? I meant steal.

[Jefffar]

You should be warned, salavging the wreck will require a surface craft to be onstation for several days. There will be a large portion of that time that your salvage craft will be directly attached to the horizont and won't be able to move without risking destroying the horizont and or the salvage equipment.

If you try to salvage the horizont in sections, you at least have the capability to leave and come back more often with less risk of lost, but it will mean you will have to spend more time doing the job.


So basically you'll be a sitting duck for an Invid or Pirate or other attack for a long time.

[Lt. Holmes]

Decompression won't be a problem unless you pressurize the inside of the mecha, which probably won't happen. The armoured hull of the mecha will quite happily stand up to the pressure it's raited for without needing any extra pressurizing steps on the inside of the mecha.

Of course, it's a whole different ball of wax if you want to leave your mecha and go walking around on the ocean floor outside of mecha. Heck, I don't think Cyclones would survive at that depth without major structural reinforcement.

[Comrade Corsarius]

Two words for you: Glomar Explorer.

[glitterboy2098]

depending on how intact the cargo sections are, you can go down there with prepped mecha, sever the cargo pods, and attach propulsion units/flotation devices onto the cargo containers. From there, you have to somehow direct the cargo containers to wherever you need them to be.

i considered that, but the amount of compressed gas needed to float something that size and weight would be hard to get.

but, on the offchance...


the first thing you'd need is limpet mines (preferable the old WW2-ish style thats large and has lots of magnets.), lots of them.
remove the warhead, leaving just the magnetic attachment system [if you can't get mines of the type, then just manufacture them yourself. of course if you can devise a way to skip the limpets entirely.....]. weld a tank of compressed gas attached to a uninflated balloon to them.

a team of mecha can attach these, and when inflated alltogether, enough of them will float a cargopod. (from the description, i'd say the main ships totalled.)

once on the surface, you can either lift them into a ship (but you'd need a big ship with a big crane) or use a propulsion system to sail it to shore.

[Jefffar]

Still takes probably a couple of weeks of activity on site.

[The Artist Formerly]

Beijing has several heavy transport ships that make the various runs between it and it's supporting cities and other installations. The guy running the Port Victoria operation, a man we've labeled "the Leopard", has control over one of them, a ship with it's own crane. They've been using it for their salvage operations around Hong Kong. Next time it leaves port, we're going to swipe it.

The League already owns the ship's XO and three of the security guys. Two of them have serious gambling problems and the XO and other guard just really like money.

We thought we'd maybe trade some missiles and other resources to the Free Australia movement. They have alot of experience in off shore salvage work.

[Jefffar]

There's a difference between salvage work near hong kong (which is continental shelf, relatively shallow water) and something 5000 feet down in the abayssal.

Don't expect the crane to have a mile of cable.

[Ice Dragon]

Lots of time and fire power to defend your price.

Look for some SC Seatrooper armour and subs.

Maybe there is an old SC Navy Basein the area?

[The Artist Formerly]

There's a difference between salvage work near hong kong (which is continental shelf, relatively shallow water) and something 5000 feet down in the abayssal.

Don't expect the crane to have a mile of cable.

We thought we'd try and float salvage sections up in a series of stages. We need the ship so we have something to work from.

[The Artist Formerly]

On a side note, the rear of the ship looks like it's intact, we might try docking via the Legios port and seeing if it won't lift up under it's own power. That kind of protoculture signature is going to pull the Invid in, but concidering how remote we are, we think we might be able to get up off the floor to a depth we can work with more easily. But that means going to Overwatch for help. Don't have a clue how to get the thing moving, even with a fully functional bridge and all control surfaces intact.

There's a old deep oil rig out in the south china sea we thought we might rig as our salvage station. It's pretty remote and the Invid don't patrol the area very well at all.

Purely speculation mind you.

[The Artist Formerly]

I'd have an engineer character go gonzo on the robo duck and fit it with a mechanism to attach float bags to either sections of the Horizant, or desirable material from within.

You've got to figure that a character that's able to repair and modify Mecha would probably be able to fashion some type of manipulator arm, increase the power on the roboduck's propulsion, and attach a good sized air tank to it.

Then you send the modified robo-duck down, attach float bags and fill them with air. It'd probably take a lot of trips to get large sections of the Horizant up...which is why i'd opt for setting it up to cut into the horizant, and extract weapons/ammo/equipment that aren't going to require 600 tanks of oxygen to raise to the surface.

The benefit of the ROV doing all the work is that you don't have to worry about decompression. Though, on the other hand modifying it may require materials you don't have access to, or skills that the party doesn't have.

That's why we call him Robo-DUCK! The mightest creature in the oceans! Three manipulator arms, a heavy clamp arm fourteen cameras, four cutting lasers, a TC recon's sensor pack and a mighty tethering cable. Powered by six e-clips and optional tether powerfeed.

[Wildfire]

Sorry this might be a dumb suggestion but if you have access to a VF 1D why dond't you take an enginneer down with you and use the tiny manipulator arms to fix and hols and then have and leigos link up and attempt to raise it under is own power once your pump water out and air in.

sorry I am also not sure how many feet are in a mile as I use metric up here.

[Drakenred®™©]

Sorry this might be a dumb suggestion but if you have access to a VF 1D why dond't you take an enginneer down with you and use the tiny manipulator arms to fix and hols and then have and leigos link up and attempt to raise it under is own power once your pump water out and air in.

sorry I am also not sure how many feet are in a mile as I use metric up here.

short version

3 Ft is roughly 1 meter

so its just under a mile or roughly 1 2/3 meters

[Novastar]

1 mile = 1.6 kilometer

I'd advise against trying to "power" it up. In addition to creating a giant protoculture signature, it's gonna cause a lot of noise underwater; bad if you have high-tech pirates in the area (sonar'll pick up that much noise half an ocean away...).

I'd recommend air bladders if you want to be the only game in town picking up the horizont. You don't even need pressurized tanks, just a heat source that can turn the water into steam, pumping steam into the air bladders (not the most elegant solution, but it works).