2038
Early Feb. – The JupSat team completes it’s survey of Callisto. They found a major Uridium deposit(2.53mt) but only 0.1 accessible. The team heads to Carpo next. No word yet from the Venus team.
Small asteroid deposits continue to be found, but nothing significant yet.
Feb 26th – Ignacio Bravo’s team completes work on Cryogenic Transport.
March 3rd – The final piece of the puzzle clicks into place as the CNT-25-4 engine prototype is approved for production. Soon afterward, the engineers come up with four new blueprints ...
Essex II - class Geological Survey Vessel
Speed: 1136 km/s(16.7 times faster than the current Essex)
Range: 35.9 billion km(5.8 times further, the entirety of the system is now within it’s reach)
Size: 2200 tons(40% smaller)
Cost: 185(8% cheaper)
Lexington II - class Shuttle Transport
Speed: 1388(17.8 times faster)
Range: 43.9 billion(6.2 times farther)
Size: 1800(43.8% smaller)
Cost: 64.2(6.1% cheaper)
Spruance - class Colony Ship
Twin CNT-25-4 Engines and capacity for 50,000 colonists in cryostasis.
Speed: 295 km/s – Saturn is a 5-6 week trip each way, approximately.
Range: 4.7 billion(there’s nothing habitable that far away, so more fuel would be redundant at this point).
Cost: 654.6, takes nearly two years to build
Size: 16,850
Fletcher-class Freighter
15,000 tons of cargo space for carrying ... whatever, twin engines
Speed: 257
Range: 2.7 bkm – enough to go to Saturn and back nearly twice.
Cost: 180.4
Size: 19,400
The Fletcher was the one that really got debated a lot here. It would be nice to design one that could reach the outer edges of the system but to do that in a reasonable time frame, even quad engines wasn't enough and the cost etc. really started going through the roof ... it was decided that a freighter going that far really needs to wait until the next generation. Crawl before we can walk.
They also wanted to call it the Enterprise. Really, a freighter? No. Just no.
March – Nothing found on Carpo or Sinope. Jupiter is pretty much a dead planet to us, resource-wise.
April – Tod & MacGregor has expanded to 20k capacity.
June – Boronide deposits are depleted on Earth. It’s not being used much right now, and with almost 10k in reserve, it’s not something to get concerned about. Yet.
MG Silvers decides not to rest on his laurels, and makes some important friends. Political reliability is up to 5%.
Late August – FT Victoria, first ship in the Fletcher class, completed. Retooling begins for the Spruance class(this would later turn out to be a miscalculation, more freighters should have been built first. I underestimated how much infrastrucure was needed for Venus. Apparently it's not 1 per colony cost per million, but 100 per. A rather, ahem, large miscalculation, but appropriate as infrastructure is darn cheap. The long and the short of it is that at the accessibility levels of duranium on venus and the colony cost, it will take 50 years for a million citizens working in a mine -- and only a fraction of them actually can -- to pay back the duranium the infrastructure to support them will cost. Hello automines -- though we can't afford many -- and of course they'll be mining a lot more than duranium there as well).
Oct. 20 – Ouellet Shipping lauches Ouellet small class 1 freighter ... Here's a new, and cool, Aurora feature to introduce. Your civilians produce shipping firms(on their own). You can subsidize or not(not in my case), but we do make money taxing their shipping routes. They will ship colonists and infrastructure(though you have to watch them, they may ship too many colonists and end up with some of them dying). They design and build their own ships based on your existing commercial tech. It is also possible for them to build their own mining complexes on uncolonized bodies, which you can either buy the output from or tax the profits. Here's our first shipping line and they've built a small freighter(faster than ours, as well
).
Meanwhile,
Erik Flamebeard graduates, and appears at first to be fairly unimpressive. 25 Crew Training, Fleet Movement Initiative 127, 15% Terraforming. Terraforming? For a naval officer? And conscientious. Indeed, it would seem that it would be impossible for him to be more contrary to his desired persona. Only at FOFC would a Flamebeard be good at terraforming, the tree-hugging git. Just sayin'
Nov –
ST Wayne sets course for Titan as the JupSat team will next complete work on the Saturn moons, hoping for a better result than was found in Jupiter. Incredibly, this journey is expected to last only 11 days. They arrive on the 22nd.
Mid-December – The Venus team completes it’s survey, and finds nothing new. This is disappointing, but rather expected. They are sent back to Earth, and from there they will work on surveying the several asteroid finds that the survey vessels have pinpointed so far.
As the year ends, P&A Group Shipyard reports it is ready for the Essex II vessels to begin to be built. Two will be constructed concurrently, the
Amerigo Vespucci and the
Lief Ericson.
** OOC: At this point the updates will slow down in pace a bit. Partly because the next week or so is heavy on work for me, partly because as more and more things are going on it will take a little longer and I need to be methodical and make sure all the ships and production orders are doing what they need to be doing. I'm also going to change the reporting a bit starting with the next one to make it easier to follow what all is happening on an annual basis.