PHANTOM SPACEMAN!

Anyone who goes through the Kremnir Gap without at least one woman on board will see their ship wrecked by the end of the month.

>>12366675
I HATE Phantom Spaceman

the flow must floooooow.

also have frowny faces turn up everywhere, and cause a loss of money. if they are fa/tg/uys they will get it.

>>12366728
Do you like pirates?

Tell a story about Space Station 13.

ANY story about Space Station 13.

>>12366675
This image makes me mentally picture those Spacemen from the Doctor Who episode in the Library.


Hell yes.

Colonizer fleets that went off course and became ghost fleets.

Rumors that the algae-based food is fed from corpses. And some live ones.

If you don't perform a hard reboot and cleaning of your suit's AI/processor it'll eventually become sentient. It saved so-and-so's life because the suit loved him, but what's-his-name was choked to death/his suit vented atmo because he "mistreated" it.

A race of super warriors who didn't developed FTL travel before their race self destructed but before they did 10,000 sleeper ships we launched out into space each with a million warriors. Despite not having FTL they had advanced tech (maybe they their home world lacked the necessary macguffin resource needed to discover it) and their ships have such low power signatures as a result they are undetectable to interstellar rages. Every few centuries one of their ships reaches an inhabited system and tires conquers it and because they cannot be detected until they are in the system their is little advanced warning of whats coming. They even succeeded a few times perhaps but no one knows, in the current galactic era no one has seen them, just found ruined worlds with dead civilizations attacked by them.

Bonus Points if the race is Humans.

When inserting your spaceship into orbit around a planet in preparation for eventual docking with the space station.

Do not make your roundevouz point with the space station your Apoapsis. Its bad luck

(actually this superstition comes to help remind young captains that space stations are usually pretty close to their planets having a Periapsis thats too close to the planet might make your ship drag across its atmosphere and if you're not careful you'll lose altitude. If you're careless enough the entire ship might end up falling into the atmosphere.

This book was an awesome source of creepy space ghost stories.

>>12366631
never wear red when taking a shuttle to a planet.

Any planet.

We hear nothing there. Even the Taiidan fear the Great Nebula. No one returns.

>>12367198
read that as "taliban" when I first saw it
lol'd

Take any seafaring superstition story. Examples:

Bermuda Triangle
Marie Celeste
Red sky morning, sailor's warning

Then adapt it for space.

A while back around Arcturus D, a container ship was bringing supplies to a far out research station nestled in amongst the moons. The ship bringing valuable research cargo was on high alert and navigating right to the research station.

at 21:00 earth standard time the ship initiated a handshake, it was received by the station at 21:30 and was answered to. A follow up from the ship followed at 22:20 indicating that all conditions were normal and that the ship would be arriving shortly, this was followed by a quick gamma ray burst from the Arcturus. at 22:24 a distress signal was received, the message barely relayed due to the background noise in the ship. With only two small shuttles on hand the research station could not do much, they proceeded to launch the craft despite this knowing that the speeds necessary to reach the ship in any reasonable time frame would require more fuel than the shuttles could carry they proceeded at a slower pace. meanwhile the research station oriented its sensitive monitoring equipment at the beleaguered ship.

To the amazement of all the staff at the research station the ship was now moving directly away from them and headed straight into deep space at a speed that should have been impossible for any sub light engines at the time, but the ship was not traveling at FTL either. The shuttles were immediately re-called as their rendezvous would be impossible and the station staff maintained a constant watch over the ship, a few days later the ship had gone silent and was only broadcasting silence.

>>12367301
In a few weeks a second ship resupplied the research base and a recovery operation was sent in to try and recover the derilict ship. using FTL to anticipate its position the recovery ship jumped ahead and tried make contact with the ship. The attempt to dock with the fast traveling ship failed horribly and the second ship was almost crippled, the captain realizing the difficulty of the mission abandoned the derelict to its fate. As they were about to jump back to proxima centauri. A single sound was heard over the static of the crippled ships broadcast beacon.

some now say that if you're in the Arcturus system and your ship has advanced enough sensor you can do a scanner sweep at 30° 56'45" N and 45° 34' 24" E from the galactic center you can hear the ships broadcast, growing fainter in the distance. sometimes some say (especially those who have worked at the research station) that you can sometimes hear sobbing or faint cries for help on the broadcast. others claim that the ships rapid acceleration was caused by top secret government military research program that was being transported and that it had somehow gone haywire (despite the research station being primarily run by a group of united universities). Still others say it was Arcturus itself the pushed the ship away (despite the fact that the ship was rated for sever gamma ray burst and that older ships had survived in much much worse, and that the rendezvous ship noted no exterior radiation damage)

Everyone agrees however that caution should be taken when traveling to the far reaches of Earth controlled space.

>>12366756
never take any crewmen onboard with the job title 'clown'. Before you know it, your entire crew will transform into bloodthirsty killers whose only purpose is the destruction of their vessel. The Curse of the Honk, its called.

>>12366631
There is a story told to children in the Viridian Line colonies. When the Viridian Colonial Fleet was making their way out into space, leaving ships along the path they carved through the galaxy, there was one ship that had a bad accident and crashed on the world it was supposed to be settling. Every colonist died, the intended colony site was utterly ruined. But the Fleet had to move on; they left a broadcaster satellite in orbit around the world, and named it "Memorium".

Years later, when the Line was settled, a scout ship was dispatched to the Memorium system because it appeared that the satellite had gone offline. When they arrived, they expected to be looking at the scar-like impact crater on Memorium, but there was nothing there. They checked their readings, and sure enough, the geography matched exactly, but it seemed untouched, as if there had been no crash at all. The scout ship's sensors detected a vessel that had landed on the planet; image scans showed a colony ship of the same make as that of the crashed vessel.

>>12369603
Perplexed and suspicious, they sent a signal to the ship, to ascertain what was going on. They got back an automated text reply: "SECOND CHANCES DO NOT COME OFTEN, BUT INNOCENCE DESERVES IT. DO NOT WASTE THIS."

It followed that there was suddenly yells and screams coming over the comms: "Everyone, immediate evac! Get to the shuttles, children and the eld- ", and then, suddenly, there was silence. Then, the scout crew could hear sobs, laughter, obscenities, until someone said "Sir? Sir...there's a line open...a scout ship..."

The next thing the scout ship knew, they were being welcomed down to the immaculate surface of the old colony site, with an uncrashed ship, and a living, breathing group of over a thousand settlers who had all died decades past. The entire crew and all the civilians reported that they remembered the accident occurring, the ship was going down, and then suddenly, they were there.

This has since become known as "The Memorium Miracle", and is something of a fairy tale among Viridians. Some argue that it was the act of a deity or deities. Others think that a race of beings, advanced beyond modern understanding, reversed time in a localized area to essentially bring back the dead and avert the disaster. Whatever happened, Memorium has become one of the most peaceful, beautiful colonies there is in the Viridian Line.

So here's this story from a guy one of my friends knows. Apparently, he basically works on a cargo ship, hauling raw ore from the asteroid belt straight to the foundries on Mars. Well, with a relatively short distance like that, FTL just isn't cost effective, so their company just goes sublight, which can take weeks.

Well, on one such run, their ship picks up a distress signal, which is weird we haven't got any reports of missing ships in the area. So, they swing by to check it out, and find a lone lifepod floating out there. They reel it in, crack it open, and see there's nothing inside. They're not sure what to think, so they lock the pod up in a cargo hold until they can reach the next port.

But as the weeks go by, one of the crew, I think the assistant navigator, starts acting weird. He starts mumbling to himself about how they never should have opened the pod, that they let "it" out. The third week in, the assistant navigator sneaks out while most of the crew is asleep, steals one of the lifepods, and ejects. The crew only realizes this at least a day later, at which point it's too late to turn back for him, so the captain decides to cover it up, to avoid the company slapping huge fines on us. They replace the missing lifepod with the one they recovered and fudge the records so the assistant navigator was never on the ship.

It's said that the missing lifepod is still out there, floating along the Mars inbound trade route waiting for the next ship to pass by.

mermaids in space! they sing in radio waves so that their song can play over your intercom. they lure the ship too close to an asteroid or some other space hazard. if you ever see a space mermaid shoot her before she opens her purdy mouth!

*There is a belief that pilots and navigators go crazy after so many years of staring into the black oblivion of space day after day and crash their ships on purpose. It may or may not be true, but you don't see many old pilots around the ranks.

*There is a sector of space where unusual things have been reported among freelance crew. Strange voices in the halls, odd prophetic dreams, unexplained equipment malfunctions and random disappearances of items and cargo.

*Crew of ships in long term FTL sometimes reporting having contact with the deceased, be it friends, family or strangers and always with a warning message about the turn their lives have taken them. Most who claim to experience this quit their spacer career and go planetside.

>>12367309

Jayme Dawson was the Captain of the Christian and her crew,
And he flew and fought the Christian in the War of '82.
Now the Christian was the tightest ship 'tween here and Charlemagne,
And the crew of Jayme Dawson was the same.

On patrol in sector seven, keeping watch on Barber's sun,
They were jumped by three light cruisers though they wern't a match for one.
As they came to general quarters and they sent out the alarm,
Dawson's crew was sure they'd finally bought the farm.

No one living saw that battle though the fleet was quick to leave.
When they reached the site they found a scene no sane man could believe.
Dead in space lay three light cruisers, cut to ribbons all around,
But no sign of Dawson's Christian could be found.

There are stories of the Dutchman, the Celeste and Barnham's Pride,
There are stories of the Horseman and the Lady at his side,
But the tale that chills my spirit, more because I know it's true,
Is the tale of Jayme Dawson and his crew,
Yes, the tale of Dawson's Christian and her crew.

(instrumental interlude)

I was second mate on Hera's Dream, a freighter of the line.
We were shipping precious metals to the colony on Nine.
It was on the second watch of that most uneventful flight,
When the pirate ships appeared out of the night.

Now to me there was no question, for they had us four to one,
And you can't fight dirty pirates when your freighter has no gun.
So we stood by to be boarded by a party yet unseen,
When another ship appeared upon our screen.

First we thought it just a pirate, but the vector was all wrong.
Then we thought it might be rescue, but the signal wasn't strong.
When she didn't answer hailing, we all felt an unknown dread,
For we saw her shields were up and glowing red.

>>12371401
Now the courage of that single ship is shown by very few,
But we never knew a ship could fly the way the stranger flew.
Never fearing guns or numbers, like a tiger to its meat,
The stranger then attacked the pirate fleet.

And the strangers beams burned brighter than all beams I'd seen before.
And the strangers shields were harder than the heart of any whore.
As the battle rent the eather, while we watched and shook our heads,
The pirate ships were cut to bloody shreds.
The pirate ships were cut to bloody shreds.

Just as quickly as it started then the fighting was all done.
For the pirate fleet was shattered and the stranger's ship had won.
Though we tried to call and thank her, not an answer could we draw,
Then she dropped her shields and this is what we saw.

There were thirty holes clear through her and a gash along one side,
And we knew that when it happened, that no crew were left alive.
For the markings all said Christian, deep inside us each one knew,
'Twas the tomb of Jayme Dawson and his crew.

Now instead of flying off, the stranger then began to fade,
First the hull, and then the bulkheads as we cowered there afraid,
For as the Christian disappeared, the last to slip from view,
Were the bones of Jayme Dawson and his crew.
Yes, the bones of Jayme Dawson and his crew.

There are stories of the Dutchman, the Celeste and Barnham's Pride,
There are stories of the Horseman and the Lady at his side,
But the tale that chills my spirit, and I swear to God it's true,
Is the tale of Jayme Dawson and his crew,
Yes, the tale of Dawson's Christian and her crew.

In Mass Effect 2 there are kids who grow up on the Citadel who play in the ventilation ducts and sometimes wind up getting sucked out into space or just go missing.

Maybe a little more mundane than you're going for but meh.

Never, EVER, go on any space station named 13. Seriously.

>>12371420
Why is that exactly?

Writefaggotry inbound.

"sol's an old system. Birthplace of humanity, or so they say, though no one's really sure anymore. Either way, lots of battles been fought there, couple thousand big ones, easy. that's not counting all the little skirmishes, police actions, that kind of thing. No one really know how many derelict war wrecks and dead sailors are floating around out there- probably a couplea thousand ships, few million corpses, at any rate.

One of the one's that's certain is the Jovian polar colonies. They were early ones- tours type, way smaller than we have now, the tech just wasn't there to make 'em the size we do. Most of 'em got burnt up in some war somewhere along the line- they've been floating as a memorial since before the war of 12, and that's saying something, since that's just post FTL for us. and I.... I was getting to that."

>>12371530

They've never been repaired or salvaged cos they're haunted. the southern one, it's kind of benign. You try and fix it, and shit just keeps breaking. As for salvaging it, not cost effective, the stuff in there's been outdated for hundreds of years. Besides, no point anymore, really. the equatorial colonies and high-atmosphere centers are just fine, no need for the polar space anymore.

The northern one, though, now that's a different story. They say that, in the war, the southern colony was taken out just by accident, more or less. Fleet battle swept around it, no one was really aiming at it, but, hey, you miss with just about anything out there and it keeps going. The northern one, that was boarded, supposedly by these vicious shock troops. Murder, rape, the whole dirty ball of wax. then, when it was all done, they opted to jam open the cargo lock doors and let the air all out. Musta set off more than a few scuttling charges too, given the damage.

On that one, though, you try and repair it, and not only does shit keep breaking, but it breaks in catastrophic, wrong ways. Down south, a fusion torch'll just go out. Up north? it'll go nova, and fry some people. There've been 14 misjumps for tugs- only 2 have ever re-emerged, and one of those is the infamous crimson horror. Salvage teams that DO make it report the interior of the dead colony is... wrong. Hallucinations, half-glimpsed shadows, the works.

Take it from me, sonny, don't send a crew there. You'll just end up losing them"

Deep space science stations. Those things are cursed, every last single one of them. They are designed to be self contained to the fullest, only needing to call in supply shuttles for material they can't make on hand. Some company designed a long series of cookie cutter stations. The 13th in the series, the crew refers to them all as SS13, regardless of the stations proper name.

Mind you, there are hundreds of these stations dotting deep space, drifting alone in the void between stars, or the space between planets.

And every single one of them is cursed.

The company wasn't the brightest, and they hired everyone and anyone who wanted to go work there. Hundreds of company agents made their way in, intent to destroy/steal/kill whoever, revolutionists who sought to create a utopia in deep space, strange xenomorphs, and bizarre beings, who seem to be wizards of old human lore.

Seriously. With the beards, hat, robe, sandals, and magic missles. Shits crazy.

And lets not forget to mention their crappy lines of AI systems. Half the time they are faulty, the other half down right malicious

Or, the rival companies just try and blow the fuckers up. A nuke costs less then a mass fabricated space station.

Plus, we all know what happens when you are stuck in artifical gravity, lighting, recycled air and water, and the same fucking people for months on end. People go crazy, quick. First maniac starts loosing his marbles, the rest will shortly follow.

Kill the scientists first. They know how to make bombs out of bio toxins.

Not to mention that if the engineering crew don't know what the fuck they are doing, they will spawn a microblack hole with enough mass to propel itself through the station for quite a while. Good way to make power. Or kill everyone.

So, all and all folks, SS13 brand stations are death traps waiting to happen.

Stay the fuck off them.

Call me Ratchetson. It was back in the time of the Terran Collective, back when the President still ruled, that I first met Übel. Aye, the great slug Übel which, the legends say, awaits unwary spacefarers.

Know you the story of Rogar Danbury and the starship Sunfire? Know you not? Then listen, and I shall tell.

Rogar Danbury was a dangerous man, a spacer who, like many others, sometimes resorted to dishonest ways of keeping body and soul together. In the year I recount, he had come to the end of his tether, and repo agents were hot on his tail.

His crew bore him no great love, for Danbury was a captain who ruled by force and not by affection. So when he told them how he planned to recoup his fortune, they abandoned him, every one.

(cont'd)

>>12371603

And this was his plan: a space worm is worth 1,000 credits per kilo, to the right corporation. And Übel, why, it must have been a million kilos if it was a gram.

Übel lives in the Xenia belt. No one enters Xenia, that strip of frozen rock and shattered debris: no one, for no one ever returned. Save me.

The Xenia asteroids are a rolling morass of stone and iron, flinders of a broken planet flung through the void. More ships have come to grief on those harsh rocks than mortals can count. And if that were not enough to deter the bold, there are the legends of Übel, a monstrous worm of uncanny cunning, a hater of men and an eater of ships.

Solar flare soon, fellow COSMONAUT.

>>12371621
A legend only, you may scoff, but consider the choice of those spacemen. If it were a lie, they would brave the terrors of Xenia for naught; if it were true, they would face the destroyer of a thousand ships. No wonder they refused.

But I, foolish I, signed on to Danbury's starship. For I was young and full of the spirit of adventure, and more important, was flat broke and pursued by loansharks. Better the sharks of space than those of men.

>>12371637

Bamp cause I hope for more ghost stories in space.

http://www.mediafire.com/?sirpr1tziwyz67l

>>12374252
not all of us.

>>12374152
You killed the thread

Lost Cosmonauts. They're still out there, and sometimes, you can hear them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Sgc1I9sjfc

Read "Tales of Pirx the Pilot".

>>12371401
>>12371406

Amazing.

I just wanted to let you know ahead of time I will be plagiarizing this should I ever find myself playing/running a Space Sci-Fi RPG game.

Decommissioning and wrecking of old, sturdy spaceships built to last can be creepy too. After 100+ years of service and countless accidents and incidents, armors and lead castles of these old ships are covered in reinforced concrete scars where breaches and leaks were mended. It's not uncommon for breakers to find bodies of former crewmen trapped in sealed reactor compartments (K-19 style), or in sections flooded with concrete in desperate action to contain the contamination.

>Space Madness

Don't forget Space Rudenss

>>12370088
>>12370088
>>12370088
This picture.

This picture is horrifying.

The souls of men who perish aboard the vssesl of the Navy will haunt the ships forever, lest their bodies are not submitted to the great beyond.

Those men of the navy who die not aboard their vessels must have their bodies or what can be gathered, gathered and brought aboard to be buried in their home-world, lest their spirits haunt the black and empty space.

>>12376981
Once, a pirate did not heed eiother of thses superstitions, burning the bodeis aboard and abandoning those outside his vessel. One day, the restless spirits seized the vessel, and they now travel through the black emptiness, slaying all they see and impressing the escaped souls freshly slain into their service.

>>12377011
Spacey Jones?

Space Madness? This. Is. SPACE SPARTA!

>>12376981
Navy ghosts, eh?
As long as they were still on my team, I guess that'd be fucking awesome.

ok , so heres the story there was this experiamental spaceship trying to bend light or exploit wormholes or something i don't know , and they ripped a hole in this dimension ,and ship traveled some say into hell itself , or some people say into a dimension where there where mind blowing cosmic horrors , i don't know ,i didn't catch it all , anyway , the crew and ship come back mad from the strain ,and kill themselves ,and to this day that ship is out there floating somewhere.

Listen, young ones, and listen well. I have a tale to tell. It tells of a ship. A ship that the old records will not have in the archives. A ship that any historian will deny, will denounce, will say never existed. This, younglings, is the tale of the Augustus Ceaser and its damned crew.

>>12377096
They can be on your team, if you help them find what's left of their bodies, or their belongings.

the ones who died outside the ship form into a giant seething blob of restless souls, kind of like a giant gelatinous cube, insane and sapient, with dozens or hundreds of souls and personalities writhing in agony.

>>12377050
In a way, but traveling randomly. Kind of a "rocks fall, everybody dies" device, forcing players to flee through hyper-drive or something, or blasting it to all hell with anti-matter.

Or psykers or something similar.

>>12377139
It existed many a year ago, when your father's grandfather's grandfather was just a boy. It was a ship o' the line, a grand cruiser which put all those that came before it to shame. Now, you know of the Gates? Of course you do. Without them, there would be no Galactic Federation. Now, this happened when the Gates were new. A few jumps had been made, aye, but none like the ones we make now, every day. This ship, this Caesar, was to make a jump that had never been attempted before. It was to jump to the edge of the galaxy, to plant a new gate there, and to make colonization possible. But, that never happened.

( I realize I misspelled Caesar in the last post)

>>12377243
Something went wrong. A heading, a heading of just a fraction of a degree off, sent the Caesar off course hundreds of light years. They went off into the void, past the possible range of any communication. Now, they had planned for this possibility. They were prepared. On the ship they had an experimental FTL drive. This drive made the ship pass into another dimension, one where time had no meaning. Then, they would show up a nanosecond after the ship left. No time will have passed for the crew, nor for the rest of the universe. So, the scientists and politicians and the wives and husbands of the crew waited. And waited. And waited.

Space Insanity

>>12377320
Years passed. Decades. No word from the ship. The mission was dismissed as a failure, the drive inoperable. The tragedy was mourned across the system, but the inexorable wheel of progress kept on turnin'. We made leaps and bounds with navigation, so that something like that would never happen. As more and more of the galaxy was colonized, more and more ships traversing the Abyss received mysterious messages. They weren't encoded, weren't time-stamped, and weren't even logical. Most were in a crude language from Terra's past, known as "Latin". It took the scholars years to decode the messages, but when they did, what they uncovered was nothing short of horrific.

Jayne, the man they call Jayne

He robbed from the rich
And he gave to the poor
Stood up to the man
And gave him what for
Our love for him now
Ain't hard to explain
The hero of Canton
The man they call Jayne

Our Jayne saw the mudders' backs breakin'
He saw the mudders' lament
And he saw the magistrate takin'
Every dollar and leavin' five cents
So he said "you can't do that to my people"
He said "you can't crush them under your heel"
So Jayne strapped on his hat
And in 5 seconds flat
Stole everythin' Boss Higgins had to steal

He robbed from the rich
And he gave to the poor
Stood up to the man
And gave him what for
Our love for him now
Ain't hard to explain
The hero of Canton
The man they call Jayne

Now here is what separates heroes
From common folk like you and I
The man they call Jayne
He turned 'round his plane
And let that money hit sky
He dropped it onto our houses
He dropped it into our yards
The man they called Jayne
He stole away our pain
And headed out for the stars

He robbed from the rich
And he gave to the poor
Stood up to the man
And gave him what for
Our love for him now
Ain't hard to explain
The hero of Canton
The man they call Jayne.

>>12377383
It was an audio log from the captain of the Augustus Caesar. He spoke in disjointed, rambling paragraphs, talking of the folly of mankind to try and spread the gene of humanity across the stars. He spoke of how his crew had been driven insane when the FTL drive had been initiated. He spoke of the atrocities they had committed, of the disgusting practices initiated by the under-deck crews. They murdered, raped, debauched as they would, devouring the already-rotting flesh of their slaughtered comrades. They strung up those who did not deserve a quick and painless death, slitting their stomachs from navel to breastbone, and then sewing their guts to the inside of the torsos so that they wouldn't fall out. He talked of the horrors beyond the stars, the things that made Navigation claw their eyes out and Engineering weld lead plates to all the windows.

>>12371406
>>12371401
Yes!

>>12377449
The captain said that they had entered another realm, a realm where the lords of madness reigned. A realm from which there was no escape. The final recording ended with maddening gibbering overpowering the voice, with a loud gunshot rising above the din. The project was re-classified, indefinitely, and no attempt was made to ever duplicate the forbidden technology contained on the Caesar. They say that the Caesar and the damned inhabitants of its cold steel bowels still floats among the stars, aimless and purposeless. They say that you may be hailed by them, and if you are, it is a terrible and powerful omen of bad luck. And God help you if you respond to the transmission.

[Prologue:]
In the constellation of Cygnus, there lurks a mysterious, invisible force: the black hole
of Cygnus X-1...

Six Stars of the Northern Cross
In mourning for their sister's loss
In a final flash of glory
Nevermore to grace the night...

[1]
Invisible to telescopic eye
Infinity, the star that would not die

All who dare to cross her course
Are swallowed by her fearsome force

Through the void
To be destroyed
Or is there something more?
Atomized...at the core?
Or through the Astral Door?
To soar...

[2]
I set a course just east of Lyra
And northwest of Pegasus
Flew into the light of Deneb
Sailed across the Milky Way
On my ship, the 'Rocinante'
Wheeling through the galaxies
Headed for the heart of Cygnus
Headlong into mystery

The x-ray is her siren song
My ship cannot resist her long
Nearer to my deadly goal
Until the black hole
Gains control...

[3]
Spinning, whirling
Still descending
Like a spiral sea
Unending...

Sound and fury
Drown my heart
Every nerve
Is torn apart...

>>123666614

Brilliant, but I don't know if I have the nuts or the computer to handle Dwarf Fortress in four spatial dimensions.

>>12366631
What kind of space station, OP?

Is it a stop-off for shipping? Processing? A penal colony? Diplomatic outpost? Research base? How old is it? What shape is it in? How big?

>>12377530

Sadly, I think OP abandoned the thread late last night before I bumped it this morning for more space ghost stories.

SPACE GHOST COAST TO COAST

So... What to do.

Thread related:
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/6312668/

Descriptions of new life and new civilizations, all of which inexplicably committed suicide.

It's considered bad luck for people to enter certain sensitive rooms unless it's related to their specialty. Only mechanics go near the engine room, pilots near the nav computer, et cetera.

It's considered bad luck to either shave or bath on a ship. As for space stations, shaving is a no go, but bathing is acceptable.

Certain foods are viewed as being bad / good luck to eat before a FTL jump. Similarly, it's considered bad luck to leave the ship on an empty stomach.

"Son, bear close and heed my words for I will tell you the tale of the Phantom Spaceman!

Oh you heard that one? Which one? Because I've got the really old Russian cosmonaut.

No, I get you. It's a slice of life, anthropology thing you are looking for. Phantom Spaceman still works, there's like a thousand of those and each one tries to top the others. Having a good Phantom Spaceman story can get you a round of drinks. I'd say only newbs actually believe it, but it can get scary out in the dark.

Superstitions? Every ship has them. A lot won't go to port on an empty stomach, but that's because they are going to booze. Red is an unlucky color. That's pretty common. Bathing? Depends on the ship, some of the older hulks aren't so good with water management. It's ridiculous. Humid as hell, heck you have drips so bad it practically rains on the lower decks and a crew that can barely shower because their life-support system is a piece of crap.

Oh! I've got one for you. Meat Loaf Day! Oh man, you could do a thesis on the superstitions surrounding meat loaf showing up on the menu."

So you want a story huh? Well I just might have one for ya. Now bear with me cuz its old, and I mean really old. Dates back to just when we were leaving the cradle.

Now the history books say they finally got FTL down pat around 2160, some major breakthrough with negative mass or something like that. I don't know it much better than you. What I do know is that they tried it twenty years earlier but with a whole different idea behind it. See they weren't trying to reduce the time it takes to get to point B. No they were trying to bring point B to point A. folding space so they could just walk along like it was a bridge.

The first ship they tested it on, the Horizon, disappeared. Didn't hear jack about it for after it got near Neptune. One day it sent back it's scheduled report and the next, nothing. Everyone just wrote it off as some kinda accident, it happens.

About six years later a salvage team picked up a distress beacon from out past Saturn. They must've figured it was some dumbass joy rider who had run out of fuel and drifted into the outer system. It happened sometimes back then, still does. But what they found was something completely different, they found the Horizon. No one knows what they found in there, dead men and lunatics tell no tales after all. But whatever they found it messed them up. The salvage team went in with seven guys, but they only found two in the lifepod, their eyes gouged out and their mouths sewn shut.

Wouldn't have even know where the came from if it weren't for the pod having the words "Horizon Project" stamped over the hatch. They never did find the Horizon after that. It'd be near impossible finding it again out there in the void. Just thinking about that ship, just drifting out there waiting for some other ship to stumble upon it, or even worse thinking about where it could have gone is enough to give men nightmares. Nothing could possibly describe it, they're only words and the reality is far worse.

Humans have a superstition that children conceived in FTL won't be healthy or lucky, but on rare occasions may have psionic ability.

The Hanura system was once densely populated, it had tremendous numbers of navy ships lost abroad in other systems. Since then, it has been unusually difficult to jump into the system, ships are lost, misjump, jump far inside the limit and crash into the star. An urban legend states that the souls of the dead are drifting back home and are responsible. Accidents happen most frequently on routes between worlds Hanura fought.

Earth's original colonization effort consisted of two fleets, the idea being that each would scout one world, and if they found that world to be uninhabitable, would continue on to the other, and if both worlds were uninhabitable they would return to Earth. The first fleet founded Earth's first colony, but the second world would be reached only a few years before the FTL revolution came, before the second colony's first messages would reach Earth. An FTL ship was dispatched to meet the new colony. The world was uninhabited, but pristine. There was a satellite of indeterminate origin in orbit broadcasting in numerous human languages "WE WERE HERE."

Do continue.

Stories of ships that suffered FTL drive breakdown in the middle of nothing, and were forced to continue their journey on sub light engines. Decades later autopilot brings such ghost ship to its port of destination, its crew long dead, or gone.

>>12381878
"Hey, Iosef, we got a Drifter."

"Gotcha. Five ten-man Marine teams to scour it for nasties, then bring it into bay for dismantling. Inform next of kin, et al."

>practical emacess

"Most stories and superstitions have a rational purpose behind them. Conserve water. Don't pay for expensive port food or drink on an empty stomach. That sort of thing.

Engine failure stories, especially the Horizon variants, reinforce the need to keep up regular maintenance.

Bad luck to enter a polar orbit heading south? Deconflicts traffic in areas without port control. Meat loaf night? Well if you are doing loaves of any kind the stores are running low.

The odd ones are the ones that don't have a benefit. Even the ballad of Jayme Dawson and his crew serves as a stress reducer. But why do spacers keep trading scary stories about The Ship That Never Was or the Dark Fleet Wars?

I suppose they serve as metaphors for the dangers of the void, but unlike the Phantom Spaceman tales they are remarkably consistent."

>>12381878
>>its crew long dead, or gone.
Or worse

>>12367273
This is the best advice of the thread.

Sea stories may be a infinite source of insparation for space superstitions / urban legends, because sea and space have the same meaning for mankind.
They are about freedom, exploration, trading, but also unknown dangers, wrackage, loneliness, death.

Take any people who live -or used to live- near the sea: western, ancient greek, viking, japan..

I've got another 'suicide world' idea.
Extremely numerous civilization suffering a power production crisis tries to invent a perfect power source. They succeed, but the device as a side effect produces this sound, and it can be heard anywhere on the world:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfJa3IC1txI

>>12382458
Or worse, this sound.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nESdpH5eO8c

...What? Just trying to inject a little levity.

I don't suppose you good people are familiar with...PREDATOR?

>>12382553
If you mean the one with the spidery critters with hypertech and Der Governator running about with a minigun, yes.

In fact, we used to have regular porn threads full of She-Preds.

many of the ships built when man first stepped out into the stars are still around. yep, they dont make 'em like that anymore. and thats probably for the best. see, they were too complex for manual controls so everything crew member had a neural interface implant to just interact with the ship. of course this is before we perfected them...

it is said that no one ever truly died on those ships. when your mind is one with the ship, it stays there even when you body stopped working. most were lost to the ships system, lost in the data. but some, some people with enough willpower pulled thier mind back together. the loss of their pysical form drove most mad. they became ghosts in the system, the stuff of myths. a flicker of a hologram here, a door opening on its own there. terrorizing, even slaughtering the crews.

yet some of these pioneering spacers had the willpower and the knowledge to pull thier minds back together completely. they continued serving without bodies, like nothing had even happened.

every now and again you will hear stories of ships who continue to do thier jobs to this this day, completely automated, after something wiped out thier crew

Staring into space drives you mad.
Bad things befall those who stop in deep space.
Never use metal from meteors, for it will bend and break when it is least opportune.
If there's only one survivor, never pick them up.

>>12382603
>Silence in the library

My fuck, that was the second most horrifying episode of the Doctor I've ever seen.

>"Hey - who turned out the lights?"
>"Hey - who turned out the lights?"
>"Hey - who turned out the lights?"

>My face

But yeah, that episode was filled to the brim with good pen and paper plots. Spacesuit-zombies, a library with all knowledge ever with faces on stones for librarians and sentient darkness that kills fucking everything.

>>12382553
>>12382568

20th century science fiction/science fiction-horror movies are now the inspiration for future space superstition.

Alien, Predator, The Borg from Star Trek, Virus, Legion, The Forbidden Planet...

>>12382698
>dont blink....

Urban legend: Vacuum Kills You Instantly

>>12382698
>>12382716

Let's not forget Midnight, shall we? Freaky life where no life should exist? It's super freaky.

Thank god we have the Scanners to keep thee up-and-out safe.

>>12382748
Scanners you say?

>>12382735
before i decided on the WHO TURNED OUT THE LIGHTS one, i was going to do one about a crew who harvested stars for fuel, until one star fought back

This thread has offcialy made me too scared to get off my bed in fear of what could be under it just waiting to drag me in.

Im a pussy, i know.

>>12382779
Holy shit, you're an astronaut?

>>12382779

Oh, come on! It's just a wee bit of spooky ooky, what's the harm in that? Unle~ss. . .the ooky is being spooky where ooky's shouldn't be spooky, eh? That's brilliant, that is. And you read this in my voice, didn't you?

>>12382844
i could barely see the thumbnail and i still did

>>12382844
Prehaps I would of if I knew who it was.

>>12382865
>he doesn't know the Doctor

>>12382865

He's these guys.

>>12382868
That doctor was the only one i had the joy of watching, havent been able to watch any of the others im afraid.

>>12382883
well, that would be the same doctor wearing sunglasses and a tie around his head. as you do...

>>12382883

Tom Baker is best doctor.

>>12382901
Well I guess that wasnt one of the 5 episodes that i've been able to watch.

>>12382904

Maybe so, but John Simm is the best Master.

>>12382883
>>12382904
Tom Baker was fine, but here's the true winner.

>>12382911

Haven't seen any other masters, so I'll have to agree.

>>12382915

The Girl in the Fireplace. Check it out, it's pretty good.

if you study the historical archives carefully you will discovr something disturbing. 13 different men who would apear in the recordings in times of great crisis or great change. but somehow, spread across all of time and space.

all we know is that if one of these 13 ever show up, better hold on to your hat because some serious shit is about to go down

More OC, less tv.

>>12381878

You sir, what is that picture from?

I remember there was a book in primary school's library, about ghost ships and the like (pretty damn scary at the time, and rather well written) and I know that picture was in it.

Help with some nostalgia good sir.

Long ago, in the year 2880, a cargo freighter discovered a chunk of metal floating though space, large enough to risk damaging the ship if it collided with a fragile component. As per protocol, they performed a routine scan on the object before they were going to destroy it with their lasers. The results of the scan made them hesitate.

The debris was covered in centuries old writing, and it was hollow. The captain new that old artefacts made big money, so he gave the order to bring it in, for sale at a later date.

Within twenty minutes of the object being brought on board, the workers in the cargo hold were screaming down the intercom, begging for help. They were getting decimated by something that had been inside the artefact.

The captain was scared, and decided to lock down and drain the oxygen from the cargo hold, in the hope that the lack of air would kill the creature. It didn't.

For the rest of the twelve day journey, there was routine knocking on every single door in the ship. There was no source for this and no way the crew could get it to stop, other than waiting. If anyone ever opened a door while something was knocking on it, their screams would be heard throughout the ship, and they would be found, ripped to pieces, shortly afterwards.

When the ship got close enough to a colonised planet, it sent a transmission explaining it's situation and requesting a quarantined docking area. The worried shipyard controllers granted this request.

When the ship entered the planet's atmosphere, it was flaming and coming down far too fast. It crashed into a large section of city, decimating the population and killing, the crew hoped, every living thing aboard the ship.

Years later, a different ship was found, after being lost for months. It was full of corpses, ripped to pieces. The walls were covered in graffiti, warning whoever read it not to open the doors, and to beware the knocking. A shocked exploration team abandoned the ship and detonated it with their ship's weapons. It was too late, the monster had already found new prey.

So, whenever you hear knocking on your ship's doors, don't answer if you want to live...

>>12383056
>So, whenever you hear knocking on your ship's doors, don't answer if you want to live...

But what if you're knocking on the door because you know the monsters in there, and you're trying to warn the crew that are sealed in the room with it?

>>12383096

That's why this monster is scary!

>>12383110


Not really.
Just get a ship without doors, or deaf crew, and it's fucked.

>>12383037
The artist is Bob Layzell. About that bok, I don't know.

>>12383037
I think I've found it: "Spacewreck: Ghostships and Derelicts of Space"

This needs archiving or something.

>>12383182
Possibly.

I remember one of the stories was about plant life that took over the ship, and i think it was the cover as well; a black ship, with green plants growing out of all the massive portholes.

>>12383182
Found a torrent. I'll upload it if it's good.

>money. baninews
Uhhh.... One time there was this crew that needed to get off this station before their ship started getting overtime fines. Well, they couldn't afford to pay their bill for service on their ship, so they needed an advance on their contract to ship some bulk electronics. Well, their contract falls through at the last minute, and they're stuck holding the bin. So they're thinking they might have to disband and put the ship up as collateral, when this guy comes up to the bo'sun and offers them a huge clip of credits to take on these crates. But they gotta move fast, because it's perishables, and the crates aren't zero-entropy, just regular plastic crates.

Fourteen weeks later a salvage ship returning from the Golan ring comes across a drifting free trader. Everybody in it's dead, and the walls are covered with the dried remains of this black mold.

Moral of the story: don't take on unsealed produce, because you never know what kind of horrible parasites are living in them. Also, if your captain is incompetent with money you need to jump ship or else you might get screwed.

>>12383498
Scan looks good, uploading now.

This book is pretty sweet.

>bacteria, acatele
Some kinda... lab experiment gone wrong? Never play with matches in space.

>>12383565
http://www.mediafire.com/?22afrbac6ab2po7

OK, here it is. Spacewreck: Ghostships and Derelicts of Space, scanned in .cbr format.

>>12383714

Awesome.

>>12383565
This picture reminds me of the Stephen King short story "Beachworld" about a planet of living sand that exacts constrol over you and tries to get you to sit out in the sun to die of exposure.

http://rapidshare.com/#!download|171|292583091|Beachworld.rar|31

>>12383902

>>12383714

I've reposted the link in /m/ and the ano here >>5698395 says there's virii on the file. Confirm/deny?

>>12384571
>I've reposted the link in /m/ and the ano here >>5698395 says there's virii on the file. Confirm/deny?

.cbr and .cbz files often trigger virus alarms because of a little metadata that the encoder uses to keep track of all the images.

tl;dr it's just a .rar of images with a different extension.