Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Mike,

> I gravitate more to "man against the elements" myself, but even that has
> challenges. The threats which most people find scary about space
> like radiation, explosive decompression, and meteoroids can be easil
> engineered for. You can't easily threaten protagonists with stuff like
> this without assuming the design engineers were incompetent idiots,
> which is a bit dishonest.

You could assume the design engineers were underfunded. Let's say the
financial backer (fatcat industrialist TM) has a luxurious interorbital ship
with full shielding and rotational gravity, while his prospecting crew go
out in a thin-walled plimsoller to fetch back a roid which is too
irregular to be hauled home by robotics. In the case of a CME headed
their way they must rely on turning their ship so that the engine comes
between them and the oncoming blast, but the mission profile and the
hardware to support it have been shaved so thin that only a few days
of coasting with an idle engine will endanger them.

Jon Lennart Beck.