On Beam Weapon Availability
So, the obvious things to state. Wing and IBO are blatantly present, meaning nanolaminate coating, Gundanium, and mobile dolls.

But a Martian start means our more immediate concern is the Jovian Lizards, who in their native plot were responsible for purging humanity from the planet's surface. And with them come Distortion Fields.

Every potential enemy of note whose presence we can infer is possessed of excellent maneuverability or exceptional durability, with many possessing both. Any choice presented to us going forward regarding tactics or equipment should take that knowledge into account.
Adding on to this, the availability of things like beam weapons over solid ballistics increases as you move further away from Earth in the solar system. Gjallarhorn's mobile suits come with the beam-reflective nanolaminate as a standard feature, but this doesn't apply to machines used by OZ and other wings of the Alliance military, or machines used by other factions.
 
[X] Opportunity. You are a vessel in search of contents to fill itself. A person bereft of memories, seeking borders to define themselves against an unfamiliar world. Power is your birthright, your mark of distinction. But what is there to fight for? Find your own justice.

[X] Male
 
SRW quest?

Instant fuckin follow. Lets fuckin go

[X] Adventure. You yearn for something new, so you signed up for this field trip. So far it's only been a bore, though. Your wish for an unexpected change will be answered. Perhaps you'll find answers to the fuzzy memories and strange dreams plaguing you.
[X] Female

Falling into the cockpit is a time honoured tradition, and I will see it followed!

Anyway, series involved that we know of include:

Gundam - Iron Blooded Orphans and Wing
Martian Successor Nadesico.
And the Macross Franchise

Based on some of the stuff in the OP, I'm making a guess that Getter Robo is showing up as well (Radiation being getter rays, and time travel shenanigans have happened in the franchise before). Mars as a setting also opens up the potential for stuff like Blue Comet SPT Layzner. Might make a list as time goes on for people unfamiliar with the series that are crossing over here, though I doubt it'll really be needed.

Adding on to this, the availability of things like beam weapons over solid ballistics increases as you move further away from Earth in the solar system. Gjallarhorn's mobile suits come with the beam-reflective nanolaminate as a standard feature, but this doesn't apply to machines used by OZ and other wings of the Alliance military, or machines used by other factions.
Question, how powerful are we ruling IBO nanolaminate armour in this? 'Absolutely fucks beams up 100%, fite me properly coward', or 'Semi-useful, but But beam weaponry from comparable series would eventually overpower it with time'?
 
On Nanolaminate and Beam Weapons
Based on some of the stuff in the OP, I'm making a guess that Getter Robo is showing up as well (Radiation being getter rays, and time travel shenanigans have happened in the franchise before). Mars as a setting also opens up the potential for stuff like Blue Comet SPT Layzner. Might make a list as time goes on for people unfamiliar with the series that are crossing over here, though I doubt it'll really be needed.
There are plenty of different kinds of radiation that were thrown around in the Calamity War, but the lion's share of it was the usual Gundam fallout from nuclear fusion weapons and crashed space installations polluting the Earth.

Lazyner's been tossed around in the development process, but if it comes up that'll be later. Depends on how long we can keep this thing going.

The mention of Empire in the opening is another hint of things to come, but it's one that'll make more sense if you spend enough time on Mars.

Question, how powerful are we ruling IBO nanolaminate armour in this? 'Absolutely fucks beams up 100%, fite me properly coward', or 'Semi-useful, but But beam weaponry from comparable series would eventually overpower it with time'?
Handling it a bit closer to SRW-style barriers. Most of the damage from particle beams is reflected off, but a portion still has to splash against it to reflect, and nanolaminate is actually pretty thin. It's a bit sturdier than Universal Century anti-beam coating since it has higher heat tolerance and doesn't evaporate off after a few shots.

In theory enough sustained fire on a given spot can flake it off or start to crack it, but doing that with beams alone is a waste of time and effort when you can create faults in the coating with solid penetration and bank on beams to take out the weakened parts if you really need to conserve ammunition.
 
[X] Adventure. You yearn for something new, so you signed up for this field trip. So far it's only been a bore, though. Your wish for an unexpected change will be answered. Perhaps you'll find answers to the fuzzy memories and strange dreams plaguing you.
[X] Male
 
[X] Adventure. You yearn for something new, so you signed up for this field trip. So far it's only been a bore, though. Your wish for an unexpected change will be answered. Perhaps you'll find answers to the fuzzy memories and strange dreams plaguing you.
[X] Male
 
[X] Adventure. You yearn for something new, so you signed up for this field trip. So far it's only been a bore, though. Your wish for an unexpected change will be answered. Perhaps you'll find answers to the fuzzy memories and strange dreams plaguing you.
[X] Female
 
[X] Adversity. You hunger to prove yourself, to aspire to something more than a dead end posting in the middle of nowhere. Play your cards right and you'll be a big shot, a player at the table as history is made. But you'll have to draw your line in the sand, and make calls nobody should ever have to. People seldom remember those who shy from the call.

[X] Male
 
[X] Adventure. You yearn for something new, so you signed up for this field trip. So far it's only been a bore, though. Your wish for an unexpected change will be answered. Perhaps you'll find answers to the fuzzy memories and strange dreams plaguing you.
[X] Female

Be the waifu
 
Gonna go ahead and close voting now. Should have something up after the weekend.

Adhoc vote count started by The Out Of World on Dec 9, 2021 at 8:25 PM, finished with 35 posts and 26 votes.
 
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Gonna go ahead and close voting now. Should have something up after the weekend.

Adhoc vote count started by The Out Of World on Dec 9, 2021 at 8:25 PM, finished with 35 posts and 26 votes.
I Just Me or people REALLY Like Having the Main character as Woman in a Quest?
 
Update's finally almost ready. Between wrapping up the end of my graduate school program, the holidays, and fucking up my fingers on two new fighting games all in rapid succession, there's been a lot of shit coming back to back this month. Those of you still hanging on, thanks again for waiting it out. This thing will get moving again at last if I can manage it today; consider it a Christmas present.
 
2. Dust It Off
Quiet. Dull. Desolate.
Ancient. Sleeping. Hungry.
If you needed to sum up Mars in three words, these were your go-to.

It applied to more than just the desert. Despite all the turmoil in the colonies from the war to the protests, it still felt too quiet somehow. Even conflict found a way to become mundane and monotonous.

Or maybe this job was just that fucking boring. You sighed and resigned yourself to the dreary moan of the desert winds whipping outside the sample recovery tent as you picked your tools back up and resumed scraping and brushing the rust-colored dirt from a random hunk of plastic bullshit. Another piece of junk you were assigned to cleaning on the off chance the table scraps from the excavation might be remotely valuable. All in all, it felt like nothing more than busy work to keep you out of the way while the dig team got to hog all the fun at the dig site.

Mystery! Discovery! Adventure! Fucking anything! That's what you came here for, to get away from the monotony, not to drown deeper in it.

You supposed you had nobody to blame but yourself for that. How exotic did you expect Mars to be? The place has been colonized for centuries. It was wishful thinking, to believe that you could get away from the place called "home" where you felt like you didn't even exist, let alone belong, and still find something engaging at the ass end of inhabited space.

Whether it's Earth or Mars, it always felt like your very life was unused. Sitting around, gathering dust. Brown dust, red dust, it didn't matter.

A muffled crack in the distance, loud and booming like artillery fire, broke the desert's long, low wail. Not the real deal, but close enough as far as your ears were concerned.

Nothing better to do, you dropped the "artifact" and tools altogether, uncaring if they broke or not. There wasn't a damn thing in this tent worth keeping to begin with. You left the cheap metal folding chair you'd been sitting on behind and pulled back the flap that passed for the 'door' of the tent. You wiped the sweat from your brow, beaten by the sun, with the back of a thickly gloved hand and beheld the sight on the horizon.


A bright white gleam rose through the distant sky, like a star ascending from the ground to its rightful place in the heavens. A rumble of thunder followed in its wake as it soared overhead. Figurative thunder, anyway. There wasn't enough moisture this far out on the sands for any real rain. You were starting to feel like your entire life was the setup to a bad pun.

"Looks like the spaceport's having a grand old time. God, I wish I was there."

A ship had taken off from the mass driver at Chryse, the closest bastion of civilization to this canyon in the middle of nowhere. You missed Chryse already. Controlled climate behind the colony walls, plenty of water, all that good stuff. Some of the scientists commuted to the dig site here in the canyon from out in the city only when something new was found, or so you'd be told. Meanwhile, you had to settle for sticking in one of the tents and subjecting yourself to more silence and the wind trying to badly whistle a tune with only one note.

The bright white gleam of the spaceship was answered by a smaller, dull grey ship descending toward an improvised landing site at the canyon's bottleneck. As one ship leaves for the heavens on a voyage, another returns to the earth. Earth? Mars? You weren't sure if the word still applied.

The descending Galba IV was an ugly, awkward thing, shaped like a cicada resting against the trunk of a tree with a cone sticking out of its ass pointed downward. You remember hearing once that it was a geological survey ship, made for drilling through rock both vertically and horizontally to retrieve rock samples for…something. You think it had to do with radiation, you didn't really pay attention to the rest of the explanation. Like you, it was on loan to the dig site from the University of Mars. You and the rest of the interns were just a bonus sprinkled on whatever deal your college worked out with the EOTI. You jumped at the chance to work in the field with the government's alien research organization, thinking you'd at least get to unearth (un-Mars?) a fossilized alien. Maybe something weird, like a whale skeleton with bat wings…

Wishful tangent aside, the Galba IV was a funky mess, but despite everything, it could fly smooth as a dream. Or at least, that was normally the case. As it approached the makeshift landing pad, its descent was every bit as awkward and unsteady as you'd expect from the first impression its body gave. Its huge, conical body seemed almost to wobble as it descended, piercing the horizon like a sort of demented snow cone, before everything began to go wrong.

Cones did not twist like a pretzel.

Even in the distance, you could hear the sound of screaming metal and grinding gears. The body of the Galba seemed to warp around the central drill, twisting and crumbling like paper, as it skipped over the landing pad entirely, skidding and grinding on the side of the pad as it continued it's terrible path.

It was not going to land.

It was going to crash.

Actually, you realized, calling it a crash was being generous. That would imply that the crash was particularly interesting, like a plane crash, a great fireball exploding from a twisted wreck of metal. No, the Galba IV just sort of… lurched, like an inverse mushroom that had found a blender and some brat was slowly pushing the stalk through a blade. The drill twisted and shredded and screeched and then, finally, tore asunder across the ground.

In a more awesome crash, the ship would have at least exploded!

You could hear the sounds of sirens. Alarms were ringing, people were shouting. Medics were being called for. It was probably not unlike the reaction to a Martian riot. The camp scrambled to life like a freshly stepped-on ant's nest, bodies moving to and fro with a dire sense of urgency.

And you were right in the center of it.

"All hands to the nearest vehicle! Rescue policies are in effect! All hands to the nearest vehicle!"

The monotone sound was almost enough to drive you insane. The intercom could at least have a more lively voice. Even in a state of emergency, they found a way to make the little details droll.

"You there! Who are you and what are you on?" A passing man in a uniform addressed you, a computer tablet held in his hand.

"Rain Hyades. They had me on sample recovery over there." You jabbed a thumb back at the tent you'd been in just a few minutes ago.

"Highades, Hiades…" He stroked his finger across the screen, no doubt scrolling through a register of names. "Got it. Hyades, Rain P. One of the interns?" You could see a flicker of doubt in his eyes. He wasn't sure whether you were a paper pushing student or someone who could be put somewhere helpful in the current emergency. Not that you could blame him. As far as anyone was concerned, you were just a trust fund baby from the Earth Sphere who hopped a ship to Mars in a rebellious phase.

"I'm good with machines and I don't give a shit about danger. Where do you need me?"

"Come with me. And double time it. I'll explain on the way."

The hum of the truck was almost music to your ears. The uniformed man just groaned as you looked about like a star struck fan. You got the feeling he saw such things a bit too often.

"First time seeing a ship crash?"

"Yeah. What's the plan?" The man, to his credit, didn't roll his eyes.

"Depends on how lucky we are. First order of business is divvying up into teams for tasks. That part's already done. One team will remove the heavy debris with mobile workers while another does smaller cleanup and checks the wreckage for survivors. We also need to disengage the ship's engines and disconnect the fuel lines to the thrusters before they set off another explosion."

"Another explosion?"

"The cloud from the crash was the first of many if this all goes to hell. That was the engine on the lower drill blowing out. There's an entire second drill on the upper ship to worry about, the fuel tanks for the thrusters can still ignite, and if the reactor goes the entire camp's going to be neck deep in radiation."

"Sounds peachy."

"If we can get those out of the way, then we get any equipment and materials off the ship for the nerds."

-​

"Something's off." The man in the uniform leaned over the side of the truck bed and peered ahead at the crash. Curious, you followed suit.

"See that?" He pointed at the remains of the collapsed drill. Squinting, you could make out a red glow emanating from under the slab of metal that used to be the cone of the lower ship.

"Fire?"

He shook his head. "Thrusters burn blue. If the fuel ignited it'd all pop off at once. Color tone would be changing if it was an electrical fire onboard…"

"Fuck."

"What?"

He looked back at you with eyes filled with recognition and horror.

"Get your head down and hold on! Now!"

His tone brooked no argument. You complied without comment, ducking down and grabbing whatever handhold you could just in time to watch an eye-searing crimson light lance through a mobile worker at the head of the truck convoy with a deafening shriek and erupt the machine into a fireball.

Everything went to hell in short order after that. You felt the truck swerve as the convoy struggled to avoid the newest of a growing list of flaming wreckages, while the scream of ignited plasma and scarlet flashes made clear even from back here that the convoy was under attack.

You felt the truck lurch on its side, and a barrage of unwelcome new stimuli hit you faster than you can process them all. Your vision blurred, your body slammed against what you hoped was only the side of the truck bed, your ears rang from the shriek of ignited particles flying overhead, and all of your senses felt at once as if they'd been muffled by a fistful of cotton.

When you came to, your entire body ached and your head felt like it was beaten with a hammer. At your side, you saw the guy in the uniform had fared worse, unmoving and unresponsive. You hoped he was only unconscious.

Your attention was brought to the overturned truck that loomed over you as it clanged from heavy impacts and groaned in protest. A haunting gold figure peered over the side, leaving you face to face with a set of four glowing red eyes from a giant mechanical insect.


The creature's eyes swiveled around in its head, rapidly darting between you and the man who may very well have saved your life with a warning. It raised a gunmetal grey leg as if to take a step forward, and-

You didn't want to describe the sound it made as it came down. You didn't want to even think about it. The man's head, shoulders, everything were now buried under the beast's mechanical foot. A growing pool of blood quenched the wailing desert's thirst, clotting the dust with a new shade of red.

Another leg raised, and you only barely rolled aside in time to avoid sharing his fate. To your surprise, the machine didn't bother to confirm the kill, the giant bug that you weren't sure was supposed to be a grasshopper or a beetle instead crawling off the truck and past you on grey legs, soon joined by more of its kind flanking around the truck.

The gravity of the situation finally dawned on you.

The Jovian Lizards are attacking.

You asked for excitement and your wish was granted by a monkey's paw that all at once clenched into a fist, curling every finger except the middle. This wasn't the excitement you were hoping for. Not by a long shot.

"What the hell do I do now?"

[ ] This wasn't your fight. You're just a civilian, not a soldier. Find somewhere to hide, play dead in the rubble if you have to, but don't get killed in someone else's war. You remember someone who once said, "I mustn't run away."
[ ] Get one of the mobile workers online and try to catch the drones by surprise. They're only shooting in one direction, so ramming them from the side is better than sitting here and waiting to die. You can't guarantee you'll last long, but it's a promising alternative to nothing. Being a nobody can work to your advantage here.

[ ] Retreat further back into the camp. You're no mobile suit pilot and the Heavyguns are unarmed, but they offer better odds than trying to take it on with a piece of construction equipment. A white knight and black phantom take up arms.
[ ] The mountain cycle was a military bunker from the Calamity War, one with impenetrable walls and a stockpile of weapons. As far as you're aware, that's the safest place to be in a firefight. Round up whoever you can and take shelter inside. Three giants stir in their slumber, deep in the earth.
 
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[X] The mountain cycle was a military bunker from the Calamity War, one with impenetrable walls and a stockpile of weapons. As far as you're aware, that's the safest place to be in a firefight. Round up whoever you can and take shelter inside. Three giants stir in their slumber, deep in the earth.
 
[X] This wasn't your fight. You're just a civilian, not a soldier. Find somewhere to hide, play dead in the rubble if you have to, but don't get killed in someone else's war. You remember someone who once said, "I mustn't run away."
 
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