The year is 2180. In its race to Mars, humanity has once again laid bare its darker side, with several factions launching competing pioneer spacecraft toward the red planet. The discovery and exploitation of Obtainium in the mid 21st century yielded vast wealth that was promptly funneled in to the Mars Terraforming Project, and Mars is no longer the frigid desert planet it once was. While successful in filling all of Mars’ low-lying terrain with water, these aren’t the azure seas of Terra, but turbid, rusty seas - at least until the iron oxides have time to settle to the seafloor. Faced with small amounts of remaining dry land, and a much more arable oceanic environment, settlers took to the seas to establish their footholds. Competition for scarce resources is a daily affair and, due to the aquatic nature of the new Mars, conflict stake place mostly at sea. Memories of colonial-era Earth are resurrected as inspiration for the prevailing faction cultures.
Task
Design and build a submarine, composed of a Tactical Ordained Range Potatoes with Extremely Disastrous Output station (TORPEDO station), a Console of Naval Navigation (CONN station), and a Sound Navigation And Ranging station (SONAR station), each constructed and operated by one of your crew members. All of the submarines navigate in the ocean. During games, each team, by coordinating their stations, attempt to control their submarine to locate, attack, and attempt to sink the other submarines, and win the battle for Mars naval supremacy.
Each submarine communicates its move to its own stations as well as other subs through audio signals routed through the internet. Equipped with a speaker to output and a microphone to receive messages, the system uses frequency modulation, with each of the four distinct frequencies mapped to a dibit, to transmit data packets. These audio packets are input into a computer and are sent to a Mumble voice channel. The communication protocol is based on a time-division structure for collision-management in which each station has a scheduled slot of time during which to send a message. Stations recalibrate their own timing based on each received transmission, so management of this schedule is effectively decentralized, much like an orchestra without a conductor.
To help test our stations, we created a web application that could simulate a game through pre-programmed audio transmissions. Try it out here!