Portable Stereo System... just like the last 19 planets.

Actually that was declared to be 'In the truck': The rover vehicle these guys are using, along with the beer cooler, beach blankets etc.

We, at this point, would be able to set up a device like that tower and configure it wireless with a tablet. IT wouldn't make sense that in the future you'd need larger hardware with lower tech.

There'd be no need to drag out a giant crate full of electronics and plug an actual cable in, unless it was a battery, fuel cell, fuel tank or other storage device....

So what if it was an emergency cache - Tent, medical supplies, food and water synthesisers and purifiers, solar panels or a micro generator for heat and light and the screen and input hardware to connect to the survey beacons and send an SOS?

That'd make more sense.

It could also be part of the survey network's redundant storage and computational system.
Or a tool chest for containing and fixing drones and other bits of kit.

Essentially it's a prop to give one of the characters something to fuss with, with a small amount of world building attached.

All true with one caveat - speakers. Good reproduction at volume still takes speaker cones of size, made out of... whatever. Until you can virtualize those/create them from expanding materials or energy fields, you still need those cones.

however, I was yanking more on the NMS chain of how little changes from world to world, rather than the art, which is excellent. :P

Yeah. It's Universe of palette swaps

It's a Von Neumann tiki bar.

... I actually like that idea. Every habitable planet has Tiki bars on the beach, lying dormant, waiting for an intelligent species to serve a pineapple full of booze to.

Wingless dragons with mechanical wings attachment?

Yes. Ask them about it, because I don't have the details.

It's based on a picture that Zennith commissioned from Trunchbull that I particularly loved. I spent some quality time designing the cyborg dragons - they're prosthetic bodies - and ended up basing the wings off Warframe's archwing vehicle. In their case, the wings are built in, and not a strap-on harness, however.

It appears that the original post was taken down, which makes me sad, but I reposted it over on Inkbunny, with my original vignette.

Somewhere, relatively few light-years from Earth, lies an unusual "hot Jupiter" class planet. It's far enough from its star to be more of a "warm Jupiter"; it was detected by doppler-shift in the star's spectral lines suggesting a planet nearby. Later follow-ups with the Planet X telescope array confirmed a planet at an unusual distance from the star, very close to the predicted Goldilocks zone - which made sending a probe almost inevitable. After the probe's data was studied, the excitement was palpable - the data suggested the giant had moons, of a fairly comfortable size, and the spectral studies confirmed significant quantities of water on it.

A year and change later, the small starship streaked into the system, no drive torch burning; its magnetic field ripped into the solar wind like a parachute. Were any nearby life capable of seeing the infrared signature, it would have been an awesome sight to behold, far brighter and larger than any comet, and backwards. Perhaps a week later, massive engines channeled titanic energies to finish the deceleration, and plot a transfer orbit toward the system's second-largest body. It was with bated breath and wide eyes that the visitors read and re-read the spectral studies, and poured over the images collected by a multitude of small satellites - it was hard to believe, but the innermost moon, shielded from the sun's radiation by massive van Allen belts, seemed to have all of the water the precursor probes claimed - dividing the surface into a series of massive archipelagos. And, if they were reading it right - if their science hadn't failed them, if the satellites hadn't failed subtly while transiting the radiation belts, if some trick of the atmosphere wasn't changing the surface emittance - it was a shirtsleeves environment on the moon's surface.

The explorers were cyborgs, adapted to far harsher environments (but even so, they slipped past the radiation belts in a modified polar orbit), capable of handling anything the planetoid could throw at them with grace and ease. It was with no small amount of trepidation that they stood at the airlock door, having landed on a rise well above sea level, waiting for one last test for corrosives and oxygen levels as the lock cycled in front of them. There were two autonomous robotic "wagons" loaded with supplies waiting behind them; one was full of mapping and environmental sampling gear, everything needed by a first-in team to quickly assess the safety and habitability of a planet without putting a crew at (unnecessary) risk. The other, packed lovingly with supplies hastily assembled only once in-system, contained … other supplies. The sort of thing that mission control would have frowned upon, even though they were a freelance crew operating their own ship. If the supplies on the first wagon told them the right things, they might unpack the second wagon - loaded with coolers, beach towels, and deck chairs made from recycled hullmetal patches, and an umbrella that used to be a spare drogue 'chute a week ago.

But before they could think of any of that, they had to do their jobs. Ecological hazards, pathogens, environmental toxins, and a high-resolution map - orbital surveys were not good enough to rely on for guiding drones, unless they carried their own mapping-grade sensors - anything that would convince them to get back on the ship needed to be looked for first. Much of that could be handled by more drones, but they had to be checked and deployed individually. Autonomous vertical launch cells were available, but came at a steep mass and bulk penalty - the launch systems added consumables, and the launch system weighed as much as the drone itself did, at this scale. Smart money was on manual deployment, when every gram counts and every gram costs.

There was other work to be done, too - deploying laser relays, power banks for the drones, sample return sites, and flight control RADAR. These would let their eyes in the sky direct their attention where it was needed, and would let the discoveries come fast and thick. Without the drones, a planetary survey could drag out into years of lonely toil. Even with them, there was always something that needed doing, but at least it was always going to be something interesting.

They had scheduled the second half-day for teardown if they had to abandon their landing site for whatever reason. But if they didn't have to?

They had the second wagon for that contingency.

*giggles* Nice.Also cyborg dragons are cool :D