Among the Stars

Among the Stars is a Fallout 3 main quest and achievement in the Mothership Zeta add-on.

Destroy the generators
The quest is activated upon reaching the engineering core with the objective to destroy three of the ship's generators located in the hangar, cryo lab/cryo storage and robot assembly areas to gain access to the decompression chamber to proceed further.
 * You have the option to bring along Somah or one of the three abductees revived in the engineering core's southern portion to each of these three locations. See below for who will accompany you to which location; if you bring the wrong companion, they will tell you they are leaving once you enter.
 * The generators are destroyed like the one you blew up when freeing Sally in the holding cells area, i.e. using the control to bring the core up from the floor and then disabling the three cooling devices surrounding it.
 * An overheating generator will be surrounded by more and more visible heat radiation to blow up in roughly 30 second. While you might want to step back from it, the explosion is somewhat disappointing with a radius rather smaller than a plasma grenade and only dealing some 20 hp damage.
 * Apart from the above locations, there are three other new locations initially reachable from the engineering core. The cargo hold, engine room, and maintenance level are optional and unconnected to the quest, the latter contains one of the alien captive recorded logs, though. These will become inaccessible once you enter the space walk area from the decompression chamber opened after shutting down the last generator, so do visit them before that.
 * Toshiro Kago's samurai's sword disappears once you have destroyed all three generators, so if you want to collect it and/or return it to him, you should visit the maintenance level before that par of the quest done.
 * You can bring one of the three above companions to these optional areas, who will sometimes comment on what they discover there. Especially Paulson has a unique temporal perspective and is probably the best fighter.

Cryo lab/Cryo storage
Elliott Tercorien will assist in the cryo lab area if asked. Mind, that you cannot ask him to rejoin you if you drop him after having already visited the area. While of doubtful use as a follower, you need to bring him if you want access to cryo mines and cryo grenades.

Upon entering the labs, hostile aliens will attack from the right. The left room is accessible by passing over the glass floor. On the wall next to the door is a switch which will unlock the room below, containing alien and wasteland items.

Proceed back upstairs and turn to the right. Face north and proceed through the open door. There will be aliens and drones in the room the player will enter. The drones' sensors can be realigned (if the player has the drone control device from the robot assembly area, see below) to target anything hostile to the PC.

On both sides of the room there are switches activating one alien captive recorded log or thawing a ghoul and a raider. Upon leaving that room there is a similar room with the same cryo-storage pods. Activating them will release another ghoul and raider.

Entering the next room, the player will, through a window and an open door, observe an examination room with some aliens conducting experiments. If Elliott is accompanying the player, he will shout out the aliens were experimenting on the members of his former squad and hit a control under the window. This will seal the doors and release freezing gases into the room, killing all aliens inside who will be seen banging on the window pleading. The player can, too, hit that control quicker than Elliott, or if he is not present.

The room itself contains two pods with Elliott's former comrades Private Beckett and Sergeant Daniels. With Elliot present, the player has the options to leave, euthanize, or try and revive them. If they are revived before Elliott has checked on their status, they will both be instantly hostile and fight each other to the death before then attacking the player. Repeatedly engaging Elliott in dialogue will let him complete research to restore his squad members' memories, until he tells the player it is safe to trigger the release switch. The two former soldiers will then join the player within the cryo-lab and storage, until they die from damage or after a scripted time from the substances administered to them by the aliens in their experiments.

Afterwards the player will enter the main cryo-storage bay. There are several aliens and one automated turret each on the two upper level strips as well as on the area below. There are switches to release ghouls and raiders in cryo-pods on the upper level. On the lower level, there are two areas with two pods each containing super mutants (levelled right up to super mutant overlords) which are released by two switches on the far end of the upper level strips.

An alternative solution is to enter a control-room, close the door, and hit the switch to release all pods at once. The ensuing fights should usually only leave the turrets standing.

After all the enemies are destroyed, face north and head down one of the corridors on the upper level. At the end of the corridor will be the generator to destroy. You may find that it is impossible to exit the way you entered and it is easier to go right out of the generator room and then use the teleporter to go back to the beginning of the cryo-lab.

There are four alien captive recorded logs located in the cryo lab and two in the cryo storage.

Hangar Bay
Paulson will assist in the Hangar Bay area, if asked in the engineering core. However, he might not survive and his corpse might disappear in the battle, making it impossible to loot Paulson's revolver.

The generator is located at the top balcony in the hangar. Kill all of the aliens in the hangar area (balcony across from where you walk into the hangar, hangar floor and uppermost balcony). When you come to the balcony across from the one on which you first entered, push the switch to open up the sealed door and this will take you to the top balcony.

Walk all the way through corridors and up the stairs until you see the two drones. Go left and follow the wall around and there is another blocked door. Pushing the switch to open it sets off an alarm.

At this point, a stream of some 30 aliens and drones will come from the two formerly blocked doors on the lower level, right an left of the well from your vantage point. Activating the six pylon controls will send nearby hostiles flying, damaging or obliterating them. More than likely, some will get through anyway and attack you in that control room or take firing position on the raised platforms left and right, so be prepared to fight conventionally as well. When you have finished the alien horde, the door in your back to the generator will become unblocked.

Conveniently, there are two healing archways forming a path between the generator room door and the balcony overlooking the hangar. Also of note: by the end of the battle, a hatch raises into place below the levitating alien craft (the Recon craft Theta), completing the floor beneath. Also, be sure check the rooms the aliens were streaming out of now that they are open. There are at least 2 supply containers in addition to other alien loot.

Robot Assembly
Somah will assist in the robot assembly area, if asked in the engineering core.

If you brought Somah, she will disappear through a teleporter, telling you she will try and fiddle with the teleporter controls. Anyway, head downstairs and to the right. Straight ahead is a corner shelf in an area abundant with alien epoxy. On one of those shelves and on the floor you'll find five units of alien power cells (2 x 12, 1 x 20, 2 x 50). Back down the main hall, there's a healing archway to the right.

Upon entering the second room, turn right. Behind the pillars and against the wall back there are several (4) biogels.

Follow the stream of partly assembled robots down to the end of the room. If present, Somah will suggest you blow a hole in the assembly line's casing to proceed to the next room. While shooting at the glass is ineffective, there is an access panel whre the assembly line exits into a wall, which can be activated to cause an overload. The resulting explosion is rather large and forceful, so back up.

Enter a new area through the resulting hole to be confronted by several guardian drones and support drones and a minimum of two aliens. One of the aliens has the useful drone control device. A healing archway will be under the second level. From there you proceed forward, down the stairs and on to the generator. For a quick exit after destroying the generator, follow the two hallways directly behind you to reach a teleportation pad that will send you to one of the inactive pads you saw when you first entered the robot assembly area.

Gain access to the upper level
Once all three generators have been destroyed, the decompression chamber becomes available. If you wish to complete the Alien Archivist achievement, now is the time to be sure that all the alien captive recorded logs thus far have been collected (those from the holding cells, engineering core, cryo lab, cryo storage, waste disposal, and research lab (you should have 19 of the of 25)), as most of these areas will be closed off and can not be re-entered once the space walk has been started. Also, if you want to get the MPLX Novasurge or other loot available in rooms off of the Engineering Core, now is your last chance.

Enter the chamber and put on the spacesuit looted from Colonel Hartigan. Then press the room's single control switch, which decompresses the airlock. Make your way through several doors to a new area, the space walk. Along the way you'll find several dead (apparently decompressed) aliens and an optional side room with two containers and several (4) alien biogels.

While in space, you'll find that you cannot access your Pip-Boy 3000, draw a weapon, change apparel, or rest. You will detect two alien enemies in the glass corridor below but you cannot harm them (and vice-versa).

During your space walk, you need to locate three exposed panels to activate the large teleporter in the middle. The first is just to the right of where you come out of the airlock. The second is all the way across the ship, almost opposite the first. The third is very close to the central teleporter itself.

Once all three panels are activated, step into the now-active transporter to end this quest and begin This Galaxy Ain't Big Enough...

Note that you cannot remove your space suit until you re-compress the atmosphere in the next chamber.

Reward

 * 300 XP

Bugs

 * Upon entering the room with the two soldiers in the Cryo Lab, the entrance doors may become locked and the teleporter is inoperative. This results in being stuck in this level. This only happens when you activate the revival process before Elliott is ready thus resulting in the death of his squad mates. When this happens Elliott will have a speech option asking him why the doors have locked. If you choose this option he tells you that "we probably just have to wait for the decontamination cycle to end." despite the fact that no matter how long you wait the doors will not open. There are two solutions. Solution 1: save, then power down the console/exit the game on the PC. Load that save and the teleporter should be operational again. If this occurs on the PS3 version, restarting the console has no effect. Solution 2: Sadly, killing Elliott Tercorian does fix the problem. This results in no negative Karma. Killing the revived soldiers also fixes the problem.
 * Due to the sheer number of attackers in the Hangar battle sequence, many corpses disappear after the dust settles. If Paulson dies in this battle, his might be one of those disappearing corpses, thus making it impossible to loot Paulson's revolver.
 * After the loading screen at the end of the space walk, it says the player is gaining rads for a split second, long enough to gain a single rad. The oxygen meter flashes on-screen as well. The reason for this is unknown.
 * The initial airlock is right at the edge of the artificial gravity border. The Pip-Boy direction marker incorrectly points to this airlock during the space walk. Returning to this airlock may count as crossing the border and the cinematic of your floating death will play.

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