Weird Space Encounters

Benevolent but very spooky ghost ships.

While investigating an electrical fault, you discovered a little toy spaceship drawing power from one of the switchboards. It seemed to be quite unhappy when you disconnected it.

>find a derilect ship with still running recording equipment, all videos are of your ship.

>An ancient, highly advanced living spaceship, seemingly abandoned. She's a little disoriented from sleeping for so long, but turns out to be quite friendly after fully waking up.

>electrical fault, you discovered a little toy spaceship drawing power from one of the switchboards. It seemed to be quite unhappy when you disconnected it.

Animorph storyline, nice.

>HESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESU
Loved the atmosphere of that game

...

>A gigantic explosion in system with ship emerging from it backward. It seems to be a space battle in reverse.

Seelee Ship, I think it was? I have that book around, somewhere.

I just made it up. I've never read that, but now I want too.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seetee_Ship

Misremembered a letter. Was a neat story.

>en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seetee_Ship
thanks!

An alien merchant asks if you have 'gremlins' on your ship, and offers to sell you a creature which he claims was bred to hunt them.

>A massive slowboat colony ship. Its inhabitants are no longer aware they're on a ship and are living like primitives in the biodomes.
>An ancient style long range space ship in the middle of nowhere belonging to a once famous genius inventor that vanished centuries ago. Somehow he's still alive and his ancient looking ship is giving off readings that are beyond your sensors ability to identify.
>An old AI drone battleship that's left its mothballed fleetyard to wander around, missing the old days and lonely.
>A lifeless, undamaged ship. Its interior looks like the crew just up and vanished seconds before your arrival down to plates of food on the mess tables. Closer inspection shows the food to be made of wax and all the ship logs all have the same creation date, like someone wants you to think it's a mystery ghost ship.
>A lone bottle of wine, dated thousands of years ago, just floating alone in the black with a small, low powered beacon tied to it. It has a card taped to it addressed "To my one and only Love".
>A WW2 era British submarine, floating adrift. No sign as to how it got there and no bodies or personal effects inside. Research shows that this ship was presumed lost at sea in some sea battle lost to time.

That was a fucking great storyline.

...

While investigation an ancient starbeast corpse something adheres itself to the ship and seems to be growing.

>"To my one and only love"

>ship floating with no power in space, party boards out of curiosity
>spoopy noises throughout ship, corpses make it look like an epic battle took place here
>party finds two skeletons grasping for something hidden in the wall, noises get louder
>party takes the item, noises stop

> A mined out asteroid hides an old smuggler base, corpses spread out like there was a mexican standoff.
>A brief wormhole opes, A ship is detected on the other side. It is your ship and it is on fire.

>A abandoned ship, perfectly, cleanly sheared in half.
I see we've found the 'Forward Unto Dawn'.

>An old AI drone battleship that's left its mothballed fleetyard to wander around, missing the old days and lonely.
Honorable ship.

>A private cruise yacht owned by a famous band or movie star. The ship has been taken over by rather friendly pirates who are willing to sell celebrity personal effects or some of the tremendous amount of space cocaine they've found on board. The kidnapped celebratory, meanwhile, is a tremendous cocknozzle about the whole thing.
>A lone asteroid drifting through space. On it sits an ornate metal throne holding one long dead and decayed humanoid holding a sword and staring forward with patient determination.
>Mysterious radio signals, they seem to be coming from the sector but from no identifiable source. The signals are badly distorted and sound like desperate pleas for help mixed in with audio bits of the crew logs talking about trying to track down a mysterious moving radio signal.
>An escape pod full of candy, like someone just poured a dumptruck load of candies into this pod and shot it off.
>An unmanned alien space station. Upon approach, it tractors your ship into its docking bay and begins making alterations in a confused attempt at repairing a configuration it doesn't recognize. Your ship is locked down and can't leave until either it finishes or it shuts down.
>A massive ship designed to be able to rebuild itself and manufacture whatever it might need and armed enough to defend itself. It's piloted by an ancient intelligence that used to be a living being and digitized itself and built this "body" to explore the galaxy with. It wants copies of your cultures complete knowledge, art, history and technology to add to its ever growing database and it is willing to trade knowledge for this, however it's a very unfair trade.
>An alien tomb world, where the original inhabitants realized they were dying out for reasons and spent their last generation turning their planet into a massive galleria of their culture so they wouldn't be forgotten.

>A moonbase parked on a moon of an alien world. The station used to be a scientific base monitoring the primitive aliens but now it's a black market hotspot with enough traffic for the primitive locals below to have noticed and found several religions off of.

Bouncing radio signals - random occassional snippets of other poeples conversations

Asteroids that seem to changeor adjust velocity to match the ship

Looped radio signals caught in a quantum something, forever replaying the same transmission

Random transmissions received of ancient tv shows, both human and xeno

Awesome thunderbolts, kilometres long from static in dust clouds

It's not entirely related, but one of the empires in my game is all about absolute acceptance of the laws via transhumanism. My Referee says he'll take us deeper into their stuff eventually, but so far:
They all have psycho-surgery or brain washing and worse (this is presented as one of the horror stories of our fellow soldiers) and are indoctrinated into this labyrinth system of laws. The higher in power you go, the more heavily modified your mind becomes, same with those who commit crimes. One of the greatest punishments pretty much turns you into a voodoo zombie, unable to resist the compulsions of your handlers. Of course, the greatest crimes often involve opposing the Empire, so we've fought and shot erstwhile allies.

They have this really creepy demeanour when he presents the few we've conversed with. Like fanatical, animated Communist Dolls.

A near perfectly smooth planet in orbit around a dead star, with variance of height no more than a meter across its surface.
The rest of the solar system is completely empty; there is no asteroid belt, no kuiper belt, no oort cloud, and the amount of space dust is negligible.
The planet has no tilt to its rotation, and its orbit is perfectly circular by all reasonable measure.
There is a single structure on the planet, a black cube on its north pole. It is smooth, and has no surface or sub-surface features.

What game?

>get cornered by a dozen of these weird tiny combat drones
>one of them lands at your feet
>you can see it has a note attached
>cautiously reach down to pick it up
>its friends keep their guns pointed at you, but don't do anything to stop you
>the note is a photograph, showing hundreds of aliens standing in front of a gigantic ship
>it takes you a moment to connect the machine in the picture with the one in your hand, but apart from scale they look identical

That's a good one

>the players are ambushed by a rogue AI battleship
>despite initial appearances, the ship is barely functioning and desperately needs repairs

Thoughts on Xeelee?

>A massive slowboat colony ship. Its inhabitants are no longer aware they're on a ship and are living like primitives in the biodomes.
There's a Xeelee verse story with this
The primitives mating rituals involve maintaining the ship

bump

Power signals coming from a previously thought to be dead or uninhabited planet prove worth investigating. Arrival reveals the entire planet covered with a layer of ash, not a single organic life form to be seen, sans the very rare, beautiful, almost glowing flowers that sprout delectable fruit.

Investigation of the power sources reveal a single life form, one that limps and looks crippled, belonging to the race that once inhabited this planet.

The race was fairly primitive, only just dabbling in space exploration, and this lone life form was the first astronaut of their kind. They recount the tale of watching from space as their world turned to ash from whatever weapon or war was ongoing planetside.

My idea was the kind of worst-case-scenario where detonating the atom bomb was thought to have the possibility of igniting the atmosphere, only this turned all organic life to ash.

I originally had the idea that the player would find this life form by following the singing it would make. Totally not inspired by the STALKER OST Dirge for the Planet.

Followups of the planet could reveal that it is recolonized by enterprising traders looking to make a profit on the rare, highly potent and incredibly valuable "soul fruit" that grows there, which is what the life form that inhabited the planet subsisted on for however long.

Mogo. Nuff said.

Sunless Sea, a game wherein Her Majesty sold London to some space bats, who moved the city to the shores of a vast underground sea infested with places and things that Man was Not Meant to Know. A renegade faction of the British Navy, yearning to feel the light on their skin again, begins construction of the Dawn Machine, a device so compelling and beautiful that when you look upon it, you almost believe it to be the sun. The Sun. The Sun. The SUN. THE SUN THE SUN THE SUNTHESUNTHESUNTHE

You meet a cosmonaut from ages past who has touched some unknowable secret of the universe and now is like unto a god.

That's a No More Heroes boss.

Ah, good to know. I figured it was just some generic magical astronaut pic

>A fleet of bioships that have gone feral. Shipyards are offering large rewards if you capture any.

I absolutely adore wonky scaleshit like this.

Due to a an NPC clue, or sheer luck, the players come across an uninhabited planet or planetoid that sparks their interest. Namely, scorch marks on the surface.

Turns out, people used to live there. There's burned rubble with clear signs of explosive force. Among the debris, the players find pieces of charred bone. Human bone.

Exploring the destroyed town, the players discover a vague trail leading to a mountain range that has had better days. Rubble and landslides cover the thing. Further investigation of the vague trail points the players to the biggest landslide. Which is highly radioactive, consistent with what you'd expect with exploding a nuke deep in a mineshaft.

The players will begin to theorize that the nuked mine and the destroyed colony are linked.

And that is exactly the moment when a huge explosion rocks the scene, as the shuttle of the players parked at the destroyed village blows up due to mysterious (black ops space soldier) reasons.

TIME FOR ADVENTURE!

He doesn't socialize, though

He's probably quite active on imageboards.

> You clear a locker, and mark it out with landing pad and loading bay markings
> Having worked out what they like (bbq sauce, sugary cereals, thin sheets of raw materials), you work out a system of trade
> They clean your quarters, help maintain the ship, and help with tricky tasks like your hobby of collecting antique sci-fi spaceship models
> Assembling tricky models is SO much easier when there's a tiny heavy-lift ship to hold joints in place while glue dries
> Or a construction ship to laser-weld things together
> You leave them empty drinks cans, bbq sauce sachets taken from stations, and small portions of cereal
> One day, you find one of their ships adorned with your brushwork. Examining it, you realise it was the ship you don't remember buying, and could never find after that one late-night painting session
> After a while, you discover that if you shut off water flow for them, they can clean out blockages from pipes far better than a plumber's snake
> A few more of their ships nose into your painting queue sometimes; you presume it's now a mark of the 'big people liason service' or somesuch.
> One day, panic. Meteor! Hull breach!
> Hole is patched swiftly, meteor never found
> Go out on inspection detail a while later, and the patch has a small airlock built into it, camouflaged against the hull.

Thanks! I have another one
>flying around normally between planets
>suddenly get hit by undetected missile like object
>no matter the counter measures, the object drills into your hull and spews out... Lead.
>later analysis show that the object is millions of years old, and that the lead was once plutonium
>the object was a nuclear weapon that missed the mark and travelled light years to hit your ship.

>A city-sized antimatter refinery, suspended by aerostats in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant

Not his choice. People have decided to colonize him and won't take no for an answer. He could kill them, but he's too ethical to do so. He's hired the party to drive them off.

I loved fallen london, can't wait to see sunless skies!

Why the FUCK would you retrieve that

for SCIENCE!

Because you were ordered to.

...

Elizabeth Bear? Or Bolander?

>An old AI drone battleship that's left its mothballed fleetyard to wander around, missing the old days and lonely.
Player of Games?

a strange spheroid structure, highly reflective surface, except the planets and stars reflecting off its surface don't match the stars and planets around it.

One of the xeno threads on /d/.

What's the catch?

-You're ordered to steal a statue. Problem: it's alive, like a person. Born, grew up,etc. Not Pinocchio. But does he bleed?
-You're sent to find the person on a colony who's sending messages to your entire network. Like you're getting spammed with morgue reports. The people featured in those reports really want this stopped.
-You are in a race against time. Yes, exactly what I said.
-You are sent to find a device that reportedly can use dimensional resonance to subtract a dimension from the universe. The 5-th dimensional alien who sent you really wants the device.
-People are drowning in spacesuits. Not limited to one spacesuit. May be happening in space. Or a planetside amusement park. Either way, the live fish are causing the investigator some worry.
-Your players are streaming shows from space Netflix. They somehow copy an ai that's themselves after they watched the shows. Not a Ring or It knockoff, question if watching the show was necessary for it to happen and what happened to the body.
-The party finds medical reports that the population of the planet is turning into bug people. Have you had an x-ray lately? Could doing so get you disappeared by a frightened medical industry? If they're wrong, how far does your tested population sample extend?
-Haunted Zentradi Battlepod. Ghost giants with massive guns and booming shouting makes midnight pretty lively.

One of the weirdest things about Sidonia and the motivations of the main villain was Tsumugi's reception by the ship's people.

They're wary at first, but the general opinion after she's been around for awhile is "She fights with our brave men and women so she's cool." Consensus seems to be that most of the crew, including her creators, view her as an individual rather than a piece of military hardware.

If this was intended, why would Ochiai go through all the trouble of growing and cultivating a new chimera if he was just going to body swap into it anyways? Wouldn't it have been best to jump in right at the start once it was proven to be viable, and just pretend to be childlike and innocent until the body had finished growing? Tsumugi had enough leeway and goodwill earned that he probably would have had enough freedom of movement to bail in the middle of a mission or something.

>seeing your models must have given the aliens some ideas, judging from the parts laid out on your desk
>an engineering ship hovers above the unfinished hull. It looks like one that you painted
>without any instructions, you do your best to follow the little ship as it guides each part into place, occasionally nudging your fingers when you hold something the wrong way
>you hold each part as still as possible and watch them connect it to the main body
>with everything assembled, the smaller ship guides you to a spot at the back of the desk, then settles down to dock with it
>apparently they need smaller hands for the next step
>a few days later, you watch the larger ship take off from the desk
>after flying a few circuits around the room, the ship hovers in front of your face
>it does a slow turn to show itself off, then flies back to the desk and lands neatly next to your paint set

I know the show's generally pretty shit now, but there's one Doctor Who episode that stands out - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impossible_Planet

>planet is orbiting black hole but not being pulled in
>human team is there mining and trying to figure out why the fuck it's happening
>people start blacking out and waking up in different places
>an ancient door is found in the caverns below the base, sealed and unopenable
>odd symbols in a language no-one's ever seen before start turning up painted everywhere
>slave-race being used to keep the base running stop obeying instructions
>shit devolves from here

Nah, the show's even better now. It's just using the old style Who style instead of throwing in foot races to cover for the lack of story.
I've always liked the Cybermen. Robots using organic parts to cover for their own lack of robot parts. I know the "robots are killing people" idea's been done so much, but building a robot and using a human to fill in the gaps-literal? Stripping a human down like a car? There's often more that can be done with that.

Apart from having to buy extra supplies, they often want help with things like opening drawers and moving moderately-sized objects.

Some things just need visual aides.
"And you say... it's getting nearer?"
"And this is what we found in his bloodstream."
And what would you do if you woke up one morning to find out that someone went and summoned the devil? a- while you're still on the ship. b- and it's nothing like what you thought it would be. c- and you can see the same thing from east and west windows. d- good news, it's not happening in your country. bad news, continental drift is now happening in one direction. e- That is now orbiting Earth. A very cargo-covered Luna is now headed towards Neptune with all the rich people on it. You're in (your home country location.)

>the good news is they don't have a shrink ray
>the bad news is they do have half a gram of antimatter

Because you're rad as fuck. I mean, it isn't like it might come alive and initiate Second Impact or something, right?

Also they have a bolt gun which means either bolters have infiltrated British popular consciousness enough you can just have one, or that means Doctor Who is set in some kind of alternate 40k universe.

Or that the real life machine that puts bolts through steel girders is numerous enough and powerful enough to be used as a weapon for a significant chunk of the future.

But why was it locked up? I remember it had a glass case thing going on with only the guy in charge of the operation being allowed to get it. That whole situation was weird to me.

That's standard procedure. Only the trusted manager guy gets the keys to the gun cabinet. Do you want some sir-crazy nutter, or the guy who's figured out how to brew alcohol using an oil drum and some dirty laundry to just walk into a room and pic up a weapon capable of killing people? No. Unlocked gun cases, not even an armory mind you, still costs lives. Heck, they might just steal the gun to take apart. Quality military grade metal, not cheap lead and iron. Remember the old saying about things being nailed down. If it wasn't, it's not there anymore.

Aaaah Stellaris

>Strange radio signals emanate from the even horizon of a black hole
>You see a massive Dyson sphere, with strange signals, and distortions from the star.

>A ship in space that can only be viewed from one angle. Remote viewing robes give off static and people always see the same side.

Holy shit, that's nostalgic. I remember someone first bringing that up in a thread like this back in November 2010.

The station is filled with specimens from every race that has up to this point, existed, and could be considered a paradise: there is now plague, no war, and clean water and power flow freely, as does food. However, there is only 1 from each species. Furthermore, each of the species is suspiciously attractive looking, based on humanity's standards of beauty. Not that any of those that land on the planet mind.

The secret is that the station actually a giant trap for male humans. They come there to get their dick wet, but if they stay too long in the drug laced atmosphere, they are kidnapped and forcefully hyrbidilized in bodacious space babes, based on the aliens they have come into contact with. The station itself is a experiment from the Space Government, as a way to implant the genetic material of humanity into as many species as possible, so if Humanity is eradicated, there is the possibility that they will still pass on their genetics. Further more, they only use males, since they wish to pass on both the X and Y chromosomes,

Psychic ducks it is!
You don't with them.

A gigantic space creature tries to force the ship to destroy a parasite inside its body.

>sensors pick up a distress beacon
>for some reason, its position never seems to change
>launching a probe reveals that the signal is coming from inside the ship
>using a handheld scanner reveals a tiny ship trapped in an old spider web behind the sensor console

Sure, there's the biological angle, but then there's "what if you take 'star' literally?"
Time to break out the particle physics books, because that "just burning space debris" is going to cost you. They should have to cut the local hull area off from the inside, while heavy gravity effects their chances. Possibly while building a new engine inside the ship to have some way to push away from the tiny star, only to realize (or DM lets it slip) that they have to attach the engine to the removed hull, let the gravity pull it out of the ship, then rotate it so that it's facing the inside of your ship, then turning it on so that it pushes the star away from your ship. All your food is cooked, there's only one remaining sealed sleeping quarters, your space suits are now standard wear, etc. If you want spooky perhaps the huge crater in the middle of your ship won't cool down. The structural damage reports should be hilarious.

> You now have a second job as a constructor of Borrower ships
> In exchange, your quarters have never been cleaner.
> All the spare change from your space-couch is stacked neatly on your desk, as is that USB drive you lost.
> The meteor scarring and scorchmarks from aerobraking are starting to vanish from the outside of the hull
> Wake up in the middle of the night to find a tiny ship collecting flakes of dead skin from your bed
> They get bolder, and build a small fuel refinery on your desk

>Small desk fuel refinery
>The Borrowers are harvesting your skin oils to fuel their ships while you sleep
>Never have to deal with acne again
>Start finding weird porn on your personal terminal along with a silk handkerchief
>They want your seed..for reasons

>the city was subjected to orbital bombardment at some point, half the city was glassed
>literally, the city now borders a giant field of glass sheets, some hundreds of meters in diameter
>while visually stunning, the reflected sunlight makes the surrounding area unbearably hot at certain times of day
>the light can be seen from space

> Go to take a shower out of the usual hours
> Find them mining the mat of hair in the drain
> And lasering the scum off the floor

You land on an overgrown world, primarily consisting of marshlands. filter feeders fly at head height, posing a serious danger for the unaware explorer. The swampland extends as far as the eye can see, interrupted only by the occasional hill of dirt, on which nothing grows. Initially suspected to be barrows, upon excavation they are drop pods. The occupants never left their seats, but seem to have been drawn by some spoofed signal.

I've used this setting for my Traveller campaign, as well as a one-shot and it gets very good mileage

>The swampland extends as far as the eye can see
We've landed in florida.
I get back on the shuttle and return to the ship; nothing of value here.

lmao goddamn, i even had a primitive tribe that drink moonshine and live in shitty huts

We'll trade them some plascrete boards for all the moonshine they have, because cheap fuel.

They strip the drop pods and wear the sheet metal as armour, houses, everything. you gotta drink the moonshine

Actually, I was going to write a story with this in it somewhere.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum#Vacuum_metastability_event

tldr,

basically, the universe could, at one point, just suddenly delete itself and remake the entirety of reality, complete with different sets of cosmic laws and physics.

Scary.

A race of giant waifus invade a colony.

Wat do?