Crash Landing

Ally: Crash Landing is a side quest

Background
It is 2103 and people are coming back to Appalachia. Some arrive by foot, some by other means. A USSA astronaut has crash-landed somewhere in the northeast and is desperate for help.

Walkthrough
The quest starts automatically when in the Mire or the Savage Divide. Commander Sofia Daguerre's radio beacon is picked up by the player character's Pip-Boy, playing a pre-recorded distress signal. The signal originates from the abandoned bunker, where one finds the commander down on the lower level, wounded against a defunct fusion generator. She will ask for aid (a single stimpak) to recover. After she recovers sufficiently, the player character has to break to her the bad news of the Great War. One must inform her that the America she knows and remembers is gone and explain the nuclear devastation caused by the United States and China's conflict.

She will ask for the player character to help find out what happened to her three fellow astronauts. This requires recovering the flight recorder from her crash site southwest of the bunker, directly west of the gulper lagoon. Activating the flight recorder inside the cabin will prompt a two-minute countdown and an ambush by a war party of super mutants, including suicide bombers. The script does not require one to physically eliminate the super mutants, simply hiding and waiting for the download will suffice.

Once the player character collects the recorders and returns to Daguerre, she will ask for retrieving the decryption key from the ship's robot, an Assaultron. With Intelligence 8+, one can point out that basic robot behavior would interpret attempts to take the key as hostile. The commander will realize her mistake and reveal the emergency code for collecting the key: Blue Sunset. The robot, PANDORA, is found making its way southwest through the Mire. Its destination, if not followed, is the Sugar Grove facility, where it will stand guard outside the door leading into the main facility, but won't be attacked by the robots that normally guard the lobby. Killing or using the phrase will make it return the encryption keys. If the phrase was used, PANDORA will then set about patrolling the outside of Sugar Grove, due to the facility being a military outpost it was programmed to return to until picked up by USSA technicians.

Upon return, the player character can ask for a reward with Charisma 6+ (which yields 50 pre-War money stack). Daguerre will be up and about and explain that in order to decrypt the downloaded data, they need to construct a special USSA console. This is a CAMP-specific item that will make the follower appear at the camp. Completing this task will complete the quest and start the next, with Sofia spawning at the player character's C.A.M.P. She will become an ally and remain at the C.A.M.P. as long as her console remains there. Completing the rest of her quests unlocks the achievement for finishing her story.

Bugs
It is possible for this quest to start upon fast traveling to your C.A.M.P. after completing the third stage of The Missing Link, without ever having set foot in the Mire. This may have to do with the fact that completing this stage marks the location of Abbie's bunker on your map.