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May 21st, 2033 – Another historic day for humanity as the orbital shipyard P&A Group is completed. It can build vessels of up to 10,000 tons, well over twice the size of the Essex and Lexington class ships. The slipway is prepped and construction begins on the GEV Marc Aaronson immediately, to be completed sometime in late February of 2034.
Some of the newly-freed-up factory capacity is used to begin a Ground Forces Training Facility, some goes to speed up work on the research lab.
March 1st, 2034 – The GEV Marc Aaronson is another first for mankind, a vessel built in an orbital shipyard and intended for extended manned missions in space. The honor of the first command goes to Commander Leota Schnepel who is something of a prodigy. Schnepel was commissioned just over two years ago in Dec. 2031, and her innovative approaches to training have seen her rise through the ranks quickly.
Her orders are to take the Marc Aaronson on something of a shakedown cruise, testing the geosensor suites on the dozen known asteroids in the inner system(Mars orbit or closer to the Sun). If all goes well there, the moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars will be the next phase.
The closest target was Itokawa, a very typical ball of rock 2km wide, and the Marc Aaronson soon set a course for it. Meanwhile, the P&A Group shipyard began retooling to build a pair of Lexington-class shuttle transports. It would take almost two months.
The journey to Itokawa was about 53m km, and the Marc Aaronson arrived on station just after midnight on the 10th of March – it had taken a week and a half. Finding nothing there, they moved on to Apollo, and on the 6th of April reached Apollo and reported back – minerals found!
It was a small deposit, a few hundred tons of Corbomite and Tritanium, both easily accessible.
There wasn’t anything we could do with this information – we don’t have the technology to mine asteroids yet, which requires a specialized ship and module designed just for that purpose. But this was evidence that the Marc Aaronson’s sensors were working. On it continued its mission to the other ten asteroids.
April 20 – Retooling at the P&A Group yard is complete and the first Lexington-class is begun. It is expected to take just over three months.
June – Dr. Ignacio Bravo’s team has completed work on a lower-power, higher-fuel efficiency technology for engines. He begins work on a new project for Cryogenic Transport. Clearly it will be necessary at some point to exploit whatever resources we find with off-world colonies, and we need some way to effectively transport significant number of colonists over extended
distances.
July – Dr. Grimmett’s team has completed maintenance storage research. They move on to the equal boring cargo handling systems. Later in the month, Dr. Palmer’s team completes work on construction techniques, and finds an impressive 20% increase in speed of production! He gets back to work immediately, this time working on Shipyard Operations.
July 28th – The ST Valencia, first of the Lexington class, is completed. A second Lexington is begun, and Commander Claudio Offutt is assigned to the Valencia.
Sep. 9th – The asteroid survey is complete. The Marc Aaronson has been in operation for six months, and used up only about a sixth of it’s fuel. Cmdr. Schnepel also reports a 3% increase in crew operating efficiency in that time. Only the small deposits on Apollo were found, which is not encouraging – but there is no reason to believe that the sensors are malfunctioning at all.
Now it is time for the acid test. Governor-Director Willie makes a personal appeal to Cmdr. Schnepel, making it clear that she WILL find significant deposits on the moon or the inner planets ... or else. Off to Luna first.
From roughly Mars orbit it was almost a two-week journey if the earth stood still, which in fact it was already moving away from them. The asteroids had taken hours at most to scan, but none of them were larger than 6km diameter – the moon is hundreds of times that size, and took over a week for the Marc Aaronson to get complete readouts.
In the middle of the afternoon on September 30th came the news – Luna was barren. SPACE was not amused. They had to begin considering the fact that perhaps the Earth was nearly unique. What if they couldn’t find significant deposits of TN minerals anywhere else? Humanity could be stuck on a ravaged world with no real future, the technology to advance into space but not the supplies to do it with. Such a thing was terrifying – but very possible.
Venus was up next. The Marc Aaronson arrived on station on October 12th, and the sensors churned out an estimate of over three weeks to survey the planet which is nearly the size of earth itself(though much less inviting to humans). On the morning of the 25th came back the full report:
Several TN minerals present!
This was received to much rejoicing. Director Willie congratulated the Marc Aaronson and her commander on their fine work – though he swallowed hard when he saw some of the details.
The size of the finds were simply astonishing ... millions of tons each! But approximately 2 million tons of sorium, similar amounts of corundium, 13 million neutronium, and an obscene nearly thirty million tons of vendarite were extremely inaccessible and extracting significant amounts of them from such an inhospitable world would be virtually impossible. It wasn’t all bad news though – 50% accessible Duranium was available to the tune of nearly 15
million tons ... that alone made it worth the effort as Earth held just over 40k. Almost 22m of boronide, which by now would be completely gone in three years on earth, was a darn nice kicker as well.
Back at SPACE HQ, Director-Governor Willie and his assistants pondered what to do next ...
** OOC: The next post will be a technical briefing on how colonization works, the precise mineral situation on earth, etc. Any game concept/mechanics questions will of course be welcome and encouraged to clarify the briefing **
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