Aurora 4x
Fiction => Aurora => Topic started by: Bryan Swartz on August 18, 2015, 03:42:25 PM
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Q: What in the world is this nonsense?
A: My previously announced intention to do a 'realistic' Aurora tale is now in motion. Hence, the simplistic but I think descriptive title. As always, read at your own risk.
Q: What are you doing out here? You have a subforum, dude!
A: The last substantive update in The Galaxy Awaits http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=6355.0 was in March, nearly five months ago. I doubt many people are checking that on the off chance there's something new, and this part of the forum has visibility from the main view. This is not, at least primarily, going to be an interactive dynasty -- all feedback/ideas always desired of course though -- and will be self-contained within this one thread for the possibly infinite duration, so I thought this would be best.
Q: Why don't you wait for 6.5 like the rest of us are doing?
A: I originally planned on doing that, but the more I fleshed out the concept of what I wanted to do in this dynasty, the more I realized there was very little in 6.5 that would help, and that only marginally. For example, there will be no NPRs, a necessity due to the long startup timeline I'm using that would lead to them being extremely advanced. Therefore the sensor changes would be of no impact on this particular project. Etc.
Q: Why don't you just stop blathering on and get on with it already?
A: Because I enjoy wasting your time. It's a pathology, I know.
Backstory
This story begins with human history, just as it is, as the backdrop. Game start date is January 1, 2015, with real-world data as the base. To this I will be adding some speculative but hopefully at least semi-realistic outline of humanity's path for some generations to come, after which Aurora will take over and things will start happening(slowly). Before I get into that, there are some bits about the philosophy behind this project/AAR/whatever you want to call it that I should mention. Most science fiction, particularly of the Aurora variety, exists with some time of dystopian/post-apocalyptic near-future brought on by a catacysmic event of some kind. Some variants imagine a completely alternate universe or scenario not involving humanity as we know it at all, but most present some disaster in the form of asteroid impact(s), biological/climatological disaster, contact with a hostile alien race or at least discovery of evidence of one, a WWIII scenario involving nuclear war that renders Earth largely uninhabitable(as I did previously), or other situations of that nature. These provide a compelling setting requiring as a matter of survival that humanity focus itself much more intensely on matters of spaceflight and so on.
While these types of situations are possible as the eventual path of our species and can be quite interesting to contemplate, I don't think they are particularly likely. There will be a huge challenges for humanity in the backstory, but nothing that focuses the entire species' time, blood, and treasure in a single moment like a magic bullet. I'm choosing to focus instead on a path that in my opinion more realistic. There is, admittedly, a rather large degree of hubris in this attempt. History has always defied the efforts of even the most prescient and brilliant of us to predict it. There are some things we know about patterns of change and human behavior that can be used, in my opinion at least, to form a sort of 'educated guesstimate' about what might happen in the generations to come. For better or worse, that is the approach this project will take. Of course, Aurora itself involves a second major conceit in the handwaving away of newtonian physics vis a vis spaceflight. So I do not here claim anything close to 100% realism, it's just going to be as close as I can get within the confines of Aurora.
Next up, I'll present a brief overview of the theory of human history that I personally find most compelling, one that allows a good degree of 'educated guesstimation' in my view of what the future might hold. Thanks in advance for all who choose to follow along.
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Social Wave-Front Analysis
Your first thought here might be lolwut? This phrase certainly has all the appearance of a dense and esoteric word salad that may not mean all that much. It's just a fancy way of describing the ideas popularized by Alvin Toffler(The Third Wave, 1980). Toffler viewed history in a way that I think is very sensible, seeing it as consisting largely of waves of change brought on by various discoveries or advancements that were powerful enough to fundamentally reshape human society. So far there have been three, which I'll briefly summarize:
The First Wave: Agriculture -- Thousands of years ago, the cultivation of edible crops was at some point discovered. Humans moved from the hunter/gatherer model and a quite small population by necessity, one that had to balance itself against available food in the same way that other predator and prey do. Civilization had it's birth here as we moved into stable communities located near life-giving waterways. A higher population became beneficial up to a point as it meant more labor, allowing for more food to be grown. The economics were simple; land near a water source could be reliably cultivated and was of ultimate value. Almost everything people used was built by their own hands; homes, tools, furniture, occasionally there would be trade for such things but the vast majority was consumed and used by those who produced it. Growing enough food to survive, particularly in the weather/climate changed, dominated the efforts of mankind. Until approximately 350 years ago, in the late 18th century, this way of life remained essentially unchanged. Transportation was essentially the same; a fast horse was the fastest means of communication for thousands of years, and right up until the end of the Agricultural Age there was little expectation on the part of most that it would ever be any other way.
The Second Wave: Industry -- Often called the Industrial Revolution, the Second Wave can be dated to have begun anywhere from around 1760 to about 1850, depending on how one chooses to measure it. The first steam engine is generally believed to have been invented in 1712 by Thomas Newcomen, but would not be of much practical use for decades afterwards. By the end of the century, improvements by others, especially James Watt led to trains, boats, and various industrial machinery being powered by steam. The long-stagnant speed of transportation could be improved with the right circumstances and equipment, and the efficiency of manufacturing a variety of products multiplied. Efficiency of farming improved with machines such as the cottin gin(Eli Whitney, 1794), while communication was made much more rapid with the invention of the telegraph(Samuel Morse, 1844).
With these and many other lesser-known developments, the very structure of human society was indeed revolutionalized. As fewer and fewer people were required to grow enough food, more and more other possibilities became viable and the concept of specialization of labor introduced. Mass production in ever-growing cities became the foundation of the economy to a growing extent, in contrast to the preeminence of the farm for generations untold previously. Electricity, automobiles, aircraft, and a dizzying array of other advances would follow. The rate at which humanity expanded it's knowledge, scientifically and otherwhise, increased exponentially as eventually only a small fraction of the population in developed countries was required for agriculture. With new geological and biological knowledge applied to those efforts, the total effect increased at a quantam rate. Complex economic systems developed based on trade; in contrast to the Agricultural Wave, it became very common for people to use very little of what they produced and trade it for things produced by others. The rise of the nation-state as the dominant political entity was also fueled by these developments.
The Industrial Wave still holds much of the world in it's wake, and has not yet finished it's pass as there are still a number of primarily agricultural societies. It was doomed to a short lifetime both because of the rate of change in knowledge it made possible, and because it was reliant on non-renewable resources(i.e., coal, oil, etc.). By the early 1950s, with World War II's nearly-unfathomable destruction close by in the rear-view mirror, society was beginning the first stages of change again.
The Third Wave: Information -- Knowledge becomes the most basic and fundamental of resources, and it is inexhaustible, constantly reshaping the use of all other resources. Right now the emergence of the Information Wave, though it began a half-century ago in the earliest stages, is still just in the formative stages. With significant parts of the world still having not entered the Industrial Wave, there is significant overlap and complexity involved. Exactly how human societies will be impacted, and when, in what ways -- these are matters we can only guess at.
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2015: A Synopsis
Here I will take a look at the present human reality in a few important sectors, before moving on with the timeline. This is intended to highlight important realities and/or trends that are shaping our collective future.
Global Space Programs
At the present moment in history, global spending on space programs is in the vicinity of 40-45 billion annually; this is about 0.05% of the world's wealth. While projects such as the New Horizon probe and the International Space Station are still ongoing, the idea of space travel no longer captures the imagination of the public in general. There is still progress and exploration being made, new discoveries by orbital telescopes and so on, but relatively speaking these are quite marginal advances.
The Decline of the Nation-State
I do not here mean that the nation-state is in any sense in danger of imminently vanishing as the dominant political unit, but merely that it's importance is in decline. As the Second Wave recedes and the Third Wave advances, nationalism is gradually of less importance and other ideologies(religious, sociological, etc.) as well as local and regional allegiances are becoming more central. Ideas, not location, are more and more the driving force of geopolitical developments. Also gaining in power are megacorporations, which now control one-seventh of the world's economic influence(and rising).
Scarcity of Cheap Resources
It has always been inevitable that the Second Wave could last only so long, based as it was and is on cheap non-renewable resources. The pain of depleting such resources has just begun to be felt over the past couple of decades. Demand for oil, for example, continues to grow particularly in developing countries such as India. On the supply side, production continues to increase, but according to most industry experts it is nearing although not quite yet at it's apex(aka 'peak oil'). Solar, wind, and hydroelectric power is used more than ever before but is barely more than a drop in the bucket at this point though use is expanding, just not nearly fast enough. Hybrid vehicles are increasing their small share in the automobile market but again this is a slow change and one that only has a relatively minor impact on demand. Natural gas and other important resources are still some decades at least away from their peak of production, but the important factor here is that regardless of when the tipping point comes, it cannot be avoided completely, only delayed.
International Co-operation on Massive Ventures
The International Space Station, Large Hadron Collider, and ITER/JET reactors are prominent examples of a trend towards nations pooling their resources in the pursuit of important scientific advances and developments.
The Rise of Automation
As the popular YouTube video 'Humans Need Not Apply' examines, technological advancement is nearing the cusp of eliminating the need for humans in many fields. The ATM is a staple of modern society and not all that new, but in the service industry similar applications are on their way, some about to be deployed. Google and other companies are testing 'self-driven' vehicles, with a modest degree of success. In almost every imaginable industry, it is feasible if in most cases not yet practical than the coming decades will yield automated, computerized and/or robotic replacements for human labor.
Demands of Public Welfare
Compared to a century ago, the average work week in developed nations has declined by about a third, allowing for more leisure time. This in turn has fueled an increased demand for public assistance to support an ever-increasing standard of living. Different nations operating under varying political systems and philosophies have attacked this problem in different ways, but the pressure will both be alleviated and increased by increased automation and general technological advance. For example, medical technology allows increased lifespans greatly increasing medical costs, while increased use of robotics allows for many products to be made more inexpensively.
From a space and science standpoint, a key question is how much support and investment will be available for those pursuits with the free citizens of major nations continuing to require the lion's share of public funding?
Conceivably one could continue almost indefinitely with such observations, but I think these are sufficient to set the stage.
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As one last thing before I start advancing the timeline, I thought it would be useful to describe the setup for the game and how it differs from 'Aurora default', the implications of that, and so on.
Aurora default economic setup(conventional)
Population: 500 million
Wealth: 20 'credits' per million
Orbital Shipyards: 1
Research Labs: 5
I spent some time taking a look at the costs for various things in Aurora, and decided that the best conversion I could come up with is that 1 Aurora credit would be approximately equal to $20 million USD as of 2015. This results in some costs as follows:
1 Ton of Maintenance Supplies -- $5 million
1 Ton of Infrastructure -- $40 million
ICBM -- $100 million
Standard 250-ton conventional spacecraft engine -- $100 million
Major Installation(academy/research lab/etc) -- $48 billion
Major Research Project(unskilled scientist) -- $100 billion
I'm confident this is at least in the right 'general range' from a realism standpoint. The ICBM price was one that was pretty easy to research the cost of a modern one at. Based on that, Aurora's default is that every man, woman, and child on earth is taxed $400 annually for the specific subset of the industrial/space program that can be built. To pull that back down into a reasonable range, our primary faction has just under 3% wealth generation.
Population is another factor. By default Aurora is pretty well-balanced for a low population but it still creates some issues. One is that any new colonies that are founded quickly add a lot of financing. With a higher population, a couple of million new people, with a high growth rate on a new colony, means very little in the grand scheme of things. Any place that needs a significant amount of infrastructure at all will essentially have to be funded from more ideal locations, since it won't make enough money to turn a 'profit' on the venture. This will happen at a colony cost between 0.55 and 0.6 as the break-even point.
Another is that population growth, and therefore economic growth, is quite high(over 2.5% per year, as opposed to just over 1% real-world population growth). It does serve to make population quite important, for the purposes of manning all the various facilities and installations that are needed, but in the vision of the future I'm presenting here automation will continue to be more and more prevalent, the need for large amounts of human labor will continue to decline. Labor with the right education and technology is more to the point, which is more a function of infrastructure and economic investment than numbers of people.
As far as the other factors are concerned, the orbital shipyard is eliminated -- quite obviously there isn't one of those yet -- and research labs reduced to one. That term is a bit underwhelming for the amalgamation of various facilities, distributed computer networks, and so on that keep a million people employed in high-tech, cutting-edge scientific endeavors.
My Game Setup
I originally envisioned this as a multi-faction game, but the sheer economic reality made that impossible at this stage(there will be splinter groups after a fashion a long ways down the road however). When you combine the scale of the efforts required for space exploration with the other needs of human society, the economics dictate that the only way it happens is pooling of resources between nations over an extended period of time. Initially there are two factions to concern ourselves with:
** International Research Council(IRC). This august body is a representation of the joint internatinal ventures; as mentioned, the Large Hadron Collider, ISS, and JET/ITER reactors are examples of this. Large research ventures relevant to space technologies will be done by this faction. Most of the world's population(just shy of 7.2 billion as of the start of 2015) is here and it represents the 'official/governmental' human endeavors.
** Megacorporations. I define this as the 64 such entitites with annual revenue of at least $100 billion. The 'population' they have is defined by their direct employees, very small by comparison at only 18 million. They have a much larger wealth generation to mimic their economic power, and of course this faction will grow faster. This will replace Aurora's default civilian shipping operations, which while an excellent idea, doesn't work the way I need it to for this game. With this setup the economic power of the business sector will grow in relative strength up to a point, roughly mimicing what I would like the balance to be over time.
One each for the governmental and private sector, that suffices for the basic setup at this point. I should point out here that while I haven't decided how a lot of things will go, which will depend a lot on characters/personalities/events within the game and so on, one can consider our own Age of Exploration here on Earth as a sort of blueprint for many of the types of possibilities that could come up. This will not be a tale of uninterrupted, peaceful human cooperation as far as the eye can see -- but for a while it simply has to be so due to the immense costs involved. Those same costs will also make progress very slow; but humanity's curiosity essentially guarantees that progress will happen, eventually.
An Uninviting Galaxy
The final issue of setup was general habitability, or put another way, how easily the various bodies out there in our system and beyond might be colonized. Here are the Aurora defaults:
Gravity: +/- 90%
Temperature: +/- 24 degrees Celcius
Pressure: up to 4 Earth atmospheres(atm)
Oxygen: 10-30%
A lot of this is stuff that we don't really know yet scientifically. The general result though from what I attempted to research is that these ranges are all at least a bit too generous. Important to keep in mind is that it is not enough to simply have a situation where humans could eventually learn how to survive; we are talking about creating relatively comfortable conditions, conditions under which millions and billions of people would willingly choose to live. Anything overly oppressive doesn't fit. With that in mind, I ended up reducing the range of all four factors.
Oxygen(11-29%) -- A small difference, but at 10-11% brain death occurs, slightly above that and things are much better. This is often the easiest issue to get around via terraforming anyway, but there it its.
Pressure(3 atm) -- Another smallish reduction in the window
Temperature: +/- 15.5 degrees C, based on the best info I could find about how our physiology handles extremes the very cold temperatures in particular are too hostile
Gravity is a special case. It's harder to overcome, which is probably why Aurora(correctly, in my view) uses it as a yes/no mechanic for colonization, as opposed to just making it more difficult as in the case of the other three factors. Too high or too low gravity and it's just impossible. Experiments have shown the gravity on Mars(38% of Earth's) still causes problems for humans; weightlessness or microgravity conditions cause atrophy and bone loss, issues that can probably be mitigated but not eliminated with new research in my guesstimation. Based on the info I was able to find, the band was narrowed here to +/- 50%. This is a huge difference, because it basically eliminates all possible destinations in Sol except for Venus from standard colonization -- and with the green planet's crushing atmosphere and obscene heat, it might as well be eliminated too. So it's orbital habitats or interstellar travel pretty much on the expansion front, which will massively impact the early efforts of humanity to establish itself beyond our homeworld.
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This looks good so far, I can't wait to see what happens with this one since it is so different from normal Aurora Fictions.
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You can also use underground infrastructure for low/high gravity colonization
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Guh! Forgot about that, as it wasn't available in my last game(6.2). Thanks, I'll have to factor that in although right now of course it isn't a thing yet.
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Prologue, Part I
**This covers the major events of the 21st century which shaped the further emergence of the Third Wave Information Age. I rewrote this a few times and I'm still not thrilled with it -- I think it may be just too long/wordy -- but it should get the general trends across that I'm trying to describe.**
The Energy Crisis
It has been said, to a large degree perceptively, that necessity is the mother of invention. Unfortunately the 'birth' of new technology does not always arrive in time. In 2015 humanity was nearing what various theorists had labeled 'peak oil', the apex of production of petroleum beyond which other fuels would become necessary in order to keep the machinery of the world's economy running. To the man on the street it was well-known that this would mean much higher prices at the pump, but what was not as widely understood was that the cost of everything would go up due to rising fuel costs to produce various products and bring them to market. The recent discoveries of shale oil, increased offshore and Arctic drilling, and periodic other new sources as well as increased refinery capacities delayed the inevitable, but make no mistake the inevitable was coming. It was only a matter of time. New sources of power and fuel were badly needed, and they were not coming fast enough.
Though the eventual need had been apparent for decades, there is something about real economic pain that serves as a great motivator. By the late 2020s the tipping point had been reached, and by 2030 the rise in oil demand, particularly from developing nations, had surpassed the supply, and a sharp rise in worldwide prices almost across the board began. Ongoing research into alternatives, renewable or not, rose drastically as well; but some things cannot be rushed regardless the effort. Meanwhile, most other fields of research were left relatively neglected. Necessity was indeed the driver here; the money followed the need, and very little need was seen in space-based research while the world economy tumbled.
The alarmists had claimed that mankind's lack of foresight in energy issues might be fatal to the species, causing an economic and environmental cataclysm of apocaplyptic proportions. On the other end of the spectrum was the 'ostrich bridgade'-style naive assumption that society would adapt and find the right technologies and solutions when they were required. Both were wrong, and as it usually does, reality fell somewhere in the middle.
The power issue was the easier of the two to resolve. Wind, solar, and especially hydroelectric power had increased slowly over the previous decades, but enough to more than compensate for the increase in demand. Oil had never been a prominent source of electricity: coal, while environmentally damaging, was in somewhat greater supply, though decades only. More importantly, nuclear fission plants returned to prominence, the long-standing objections on environmental and safety grounds largely ignored as the economic necessity of them became more and more important. By the middle of the 21st century, the more plenteous and cleaner process of using thorium instead of uranium to fuel nuclear reactors had allayed most concerns. Nations such as France that had positioned themselves as major users of nuclear power found the transition easiest. Nuclear fusion research continued, and remained a top possibility for a sustainable energy future, but setbacks continued to outpace advances for decades.
Finding alternatives in terms of fuel and transportation proved more difficult. The biggest obstacle was not actually technology itself, but infrastructure. By the early 21st century the capability for hydrogen and solar/electric-powered vehicles was in place, among other possibilities, but the costs and logistics involved were staggering. Transforming entire industries based on over a century of readily available oil in terms of production, distribution, repair, maintenance, new designs and engineering challenges, etc. was a mammoth undertaking. It was here that progress simply did not come fast enough to meet the need, and none of the replacements were quite as convenient.
The hydrogen option was the easiest on the production end, with a combination of electrolysis and any number of power-generating options allowing for relatively inexpensive production of light-weight fuel cells for any number of applications. Unfortunately, infrastructure was another matter and distribution even more difficult, as it typically required 15 times the effort as with traditional oil-based fuels to transport the larger volumes required to market. The combined solar/electric vehicles had a different problem: weather and regular availability of recharging stations made them less viable in many areas, while those with a lot of clear weather and/or dense urban populations resulted in much more success. Various biofuels, derived from sources such as algae, made a small but gradual impact on the market, while propane and natural gas helped prop up the economy but only temporarily, as they accelerated the day when natural gas itself would reach it's peak production point.
The Great Recession, Chaos, & Recovery
The combination of various approaches eventually led the world's leading economies out of long recession, but they had it the easiest as there was enough capital for various tax incentives, research initiatives, and so on to ease the process. With the cost of transportation having risen to painful levels, there were great regional distinctions between what types of fuels were most used; in the majority of cases, it was whatever could be produced locally. Imports were simply priced out of the market by necessity. Many developing nations, having not reached that critical mass, were pushed back into near-Third World status, and the poorest countries in the world had little hope of progression towards a more modern footing under such circumstances. Full-blown regional conflicts erupted in many place; with hope for the future waning, some areas with particularly entrenched regional rivalries devolved into a state of near-constant war with local warlords the only source of real power.
Confidence in the status quo was also badly shaken. The general 'man on the street' opinion was that a major political change was needed: loose coalitions of the nations had proven themselves ineffective in forestalling the meltdown. Those in control of large energy reserves such as OPEC often blustered that they would withdraw from the world market and take care of the own, letting every one else fend for themselves. The very real possibility of another world war was on the table at a few tense moments, but in the end the very globalization that had brought about the rapid depletion of fossil fuel reserves also forestalled any such disaster. Rational heads eventually concluded, albeit narrowly in some instances, that they would lose more than they would ever gain from such actions; the world was interconnected and the energy producers needed the money and manufacturing that other regions of the world provided for them, and vice versa. So the saber was rattled, but always returned to it's sheath in the end.
By 2060, the picture had finally begun to brighten. The majority of the world now operated on at least partly renewable energy, a fact which allowed prices to slowly decline as they gained greater acceptance and market share, making use of efficiencies of scale. In turn, the poorer nations also benefited as what was left of fossil fuel resources such as oil, coal, and natural gas was increasing available to them at gradually more acceptable terms. On the whole, the world had largely weaned itself off from non-renewables, and in so doing entered more fully into the Third Wave.
It was far from a panacea, however. The process had been slow and costly, and would continue to be so for generations.
Fallout
Human society exited the Great Recession much different than it had entered it three decades prior. Some Third Wave trends were greatly accelerated by the economic pressure, others were mitigated or even reversed. Urbanization had been on the decline with more and more people working in a 'virtual office' out of their own home. The virtual office is alive, well, and flourishing, but most large cities grew, reshaped around massive 'arcologies' as large as a city block. These were mostly self-contained subcommunities, with underground manufacturing, various common commercial enterprises on the first few floors, and residential space on the rest of the structure rising above them. At the very top, hydroponic farms provided much of the needed sustenance. Most everyday staples could be produced, if not at the arcology where you live then at one nearby within walking distances. Anything that couldn't be had locally was shipped in via bulk transit; smaller orders were generally prohibitively expensive, so for many items the purchase would be delayed until a sufficiently large local delivery was required by the residents as a whole. Many online-only distributors diversified into more and more varied products in order to economically provide faster service in this environment. With 'technetronic', automated solutions replacing more and more professions that once required human labor, the need for travel was reduced still further and to considerable degree it became a luxury of the upper classes.
Politically speaking, the nation-state was merely a shadow of it's former self. The allegiance of some was to ideology, but to most it was the economic needs of it's immediate region that held sway. An entire generation had grown up in a world filled with uncertainty, rapid change, and ample evidence that the national boundaries no longer made sense. They weren't big enough to tackle the truly global problems that humanity faced, nor were they agile enough to be responsive to local needs. It was in this environment that the International Research Council(IRC) was formed, an agency independent of the UN or any other governing body that was tasked with finding scientific and technological answers to any existing or emerging issues of global importance. Though the IRC was formed with a quite modest annual operating budget and had no direct political authority, it was considered to have vital importance and it's pronouncements were heavily weighed. The advance of science has never been cheap, but increasingly more and more resources were required, and the importance of continued advance had never been more readily apparent.
Microgravity and other space-based research were not the primary driving force in these days, but it was in the late 60s that they began to be revisited as significant topics. Much advancement in areas such as physics, superconductivity, and the very nature of matter itself was either more difficult or completely impossible in a higher-gravity environment such as that on Earth. The various iterations of space stations had long been abandoned, and global spending on space-based efforts had been largely limited to small satellites for communications purposes during the recession. The best scientific minds on the planet had been dedicated to matters of environmental, power generation, fuel production, and economic theory for so long that little progress had been made in these fields -- but the IRC maintained they were a necessary part of mankind's future. Put in simple terms, space was what was next. There were few frontiers left on the Earth itself that were not explored, but every time a new probe was sent, whether to the Sun or Mars or the outer reaches of the solar system, new and surprising things were discovered.
The more that was learned, the more obvious it became that we knew nothing.
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Pre-IRC Research Efforts: First Cooperative Ventures(2015-2030)
There were some meager advances in the 2015-2070 timeframe that should be summarized. Again, we're talking about 'space technology' here as the lion's share of investment went to keeping the world's economies from crumbling to a halt.
The most notable scientist for most of this era was Callum Hayward. Somewhat skilled in matters of logistics, his work piggybacked off of much of what was being done to advance renewable fuels used in transportation on Earth, with an eye to applying these new or newly applied substances for use as propellants for spacecraft propulsion. Even more specifically, he was involved in more efficient and reliable types of fuel storage tanks for spacecraft.
His only real contemporary was Michael McLean, who began research into more fully understanding human genetics. Both due to moral and religious objections raised from various quarters, a general ban on genetic engineering practically, and the fact that his work was largely theoretical with no expected immediate application, he received very little funding. It is worth mentioning McLean here though because his dogged determination in pursuing genetic advances, despite the relatively oppositional environment towards his work in the early-mid 21st century, served to both lay a bit of groundwork and act as a catalyst in keeping the field alive as a viable pursuit in the minds of some.
Hayward proved to be a quick study, adept at making intuitive leaps rather than just linear progressions. It's a gift scientists either have, or they don't, and he clearly did. The skill to shortcut a process and produce faster, reliable results in this way is invaluable in a project lead, moreso because of the savings in cost than the time factor. In the early 2020s, he developed working blueprints for versatile fuel tank solutions of various sizes. The most outstanding feature of these was their versatility; they could be used on a variety of potential ship sizes and configurations, with a single-engine design or provide fuel to many simultaneously. It was a significant step towards the realization of larger manned spaceflight ventures, but only one of many that would be needed before it could become a reality. There were four tank designs in all, capable of carrying volumes of 5k, 10k, 50k, or 250k(all in liters) and ranging in size from 2.5 tons to around 250 tons for the largest of them. By the middle of the decade, with such matters of engineering sufficient to handle all needs for even the most remotely imaginable future, he turned his attention to another necessity: high-efficiency spacecraft engines. The principles involved would require a lower power output, but one of the biggest difficulties in space travel and the launching even of the few ongoing unmanned probes that were active beyond Earth's atmospheric reach was getting sufficient fuel into space. An engine that required less fuel would concurrently diminish these costs. Propulsion was not Hayward's field of expertise, but all the fuel tank engineering in the world was of little use with the present difficulty of getting it into orbit, and he agreed to take on the work.
At about the same time, McLean made some breakthroughs allowing him to speed up to pace of his work, which had just barely started despite a decade scraping support together and was at this point well under 1% complete. While Hayward still received the lion's share of resources from the world's space research budgets, McLean's meager piece of the pie grew significantly.
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This looks good so far, I can't wait to see what happens with this one since it is so different from normal Aurora Fictions.
Hopefully it will remain interesting!
Pre-IRC Research Efforts: The Great Recession: A Dark Age for Space(2030-2060)
Just a couple years later, in 2027, global funding began to decline as the energy crisis really began to hit the bottom line of various nations hard. By 2030, when the name Great Recession had begun to stick to describe the deepening slowdown, virtually all major research investment had been shifted to frantically pursuing any and all possibilities for alleviating the crunch in power sources and alternative fuels. Spending billions on what were deemed speculative ventures at best was neither practically nor politically viable, and space-based research ground to a near-complete halt.
By 2029, the world's population had reached just over 8 billion souls. Nobody felt much like celebrating this fact though under the circumstances -- it frankly just meant that much more stress on the global economy. In early 2030, Hayward reported his first concrete results in terms of advancing spacecraft engines. An increase of well over 40% in fuel efficiency could be achieved, at a cost of only 80% thrust compared to the previous standard of high-efficiency engine designs. Though he was recognized widely by now as a genius in matters of engineering and logistics, there simply wasn't the funding to continue any such work. The rest of his career would be devoted to helping find ways to dig out of the recession. As for McLean, he had finished maybe 2% of his work on the human genome at best, while the ideas of young kinetics researcher Aaron Swift never found any outlet. It was simply the wrong time for them.
There were a couple of proposals submitted in terms of using the existing microgravity research facilities to help in the current crisis. The most attractive of these was to use the distributed computer network(first used with the Large Hadron Collider and later was adapted for other uses) to analyze various data from around the world, particularly in terms of infrastructure and transportation improvements. At an estimated cost of 100 billion, and a decade a more required for the work with no promise of more immediate results, it was simply considered too costly to be practical. Despite the impossibility of actually achieving major changes in a short period of time, political expediency demanded solutions in as short a time frame as possible.
And so for more than three decades, the most advanced research facilities in the world and the brightest minds in many fields were almost completely wasted. The findings of Hayward and McLean were collated and recorded in solid-state storage, and they could only hope posterity would find some practical use for them ... eventually.
The Recession claimed Aaron Swift first, when in April 2038 he died of an accident. The next year Hayward's health took a turn for the worse, and five years after that, in 2044, he passed on as well. McLean survived, but by 2060 he was 66 years old and health had been failing for a while now. His contributions to mankind's immediate needs were significant, but also now complete. There was one bright young mind in the energy field looking for new challenges, Dr. Henry Clayton. Born in the early years of the downturn, Clayton was now in his mid-20s and had the desire to help ensure a better future.
By the middle of 2058, mankind had reached eleven figures -- 10 billion souls.
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Cautious Optimism: Forming the IRC
It was a hardy and jaded generation that began to emerge from the Great Recession in the late 2050s and early 2060s. They didn't trust anyone, most of all their forebears whom they blamed, rightly or wrongly, for the mess that would define most of their lives. Many had either not survived or, more commonly, been permanently damaged by the past few decades.
This skeptical outlook was made very apparent when the decision was made to form an exploratory committee to investigate the possibility of forming the IRC. It was little more than the formal codification of agreements that had been in force previously among the various more powerful nation-states, powers that long since had ceased to have the economic or diplomatic influence necessary to sustain, strengthen, and adapt as global changes required. A centralized structure of very little direct power was not only desired, but pretty much inevitable. All of the major research centers and the infrastructure supporting them had been co-opted, repurposed, and/or abandoned over the past thirty years. Infrastructure needed to be adapted and in some cases developed, personnel recruited and/or transferred, and a new vision significantly larger than the energy issues dominating recent times enacted.
Unfortunately, nobody could agree on how to do this, or who should take the lead. The only really well-known civic leaders were of the old generation and therefore not to be trusted. Henry Clayton was the obvious choice as a key researcher for the new organization, but administrative direction was still needed. It was a monumental task. Starting from virtually nothing, somebody needed to be found who would be willing and able to build the foundation for a focused effort to look beyond the needs of the moment and secure a stable, prosperous future for the species. 10.128 billion humans lived on Earth in 2060, a number that was growing by an estimated 275,000 every single day. The wrong person, making the wrong choices, might well sink the whole initiative; even if they did not, the consequences of their bungling would be almost too immense to fathom.
A case of 'analysis paralysis' set in. The easiest thing to do, almost always, is nothing. The demand for progress grew however as the recovery proceeded. The United Nations nearly turned to young Anna Fry to head up the new organization, at least temporarily, beginning in late 2063, but thought better of it; Fry had the skills but unfortunately not the right attitude as a rather transparent narcissist. A personality cult was not the idea here, and the search continued. After another three years, they finally found their man: Charlie Thomson. Aside from the inevitable 'Chairman Charlie' jokes, he has a very inspirational story to tell. Thomson came from nothing essentially, and is determined, innovative, with a varied skill set unusual in a young man. It took very little time to have him confirmed, a near-unanimous choice as it was abundantly clear he was the man for the job.
The corporate sector was heavily relied upon for the next 19-plus months, building and repurposing various facilities to serve as the IRC's initial headquarters in London as well as a few smaller compounds around the globe for computerized data analysis, much of it automated. By the beginning of 2068, they were officially 'open for business'.
Two immediate goals were paramount: the IRC needed a tangible success trumpet as proof of the organization's value as soon as possible, and new facilities and personnel also needed to be built up and recruited. To achieve the first end, Clayton was tasked with analyzing global economic data in an effort to improve the slow, ongoing recovery. Both would take a number of years under the most optimistic of scenarios.
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Any plans to continue this? I hope the lack of comments didn't put you off, it is very well written so far.
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Thanks. Comments are always nice but on a project the size of an Aurora game, if that's the motivation it will run out very fast. I wanted to do this for it's own sake, and still do.
I do plan to continue it, but as unfortunately always happens with Aurora stuff I do it seems, just as soon as I started this project another major work crisis intervened(almost resulted in me losing my job). Then I got distracted by other things since it wasn't on the front burner of my brain so to speak.
I have a light week this week, so there's a decent chance I'll have a new update in the next several days.
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Hey, great AAR, i´ve abandoned my last one due to technical difficulties with aurora (see "Humanity Last Hope" if you want), but im getting back to Aurora, your AAR inspired me to begin another project, im writing it right now.
So, thanks, and nice work.
I hope you do continue it soon.
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your AAR inspired me to begin another project, im writing it right now.
That is a very high compliment, thank you. I hope it goes well for you.
Some of my time evaporated last week, work has naturally decided to explode again, but that notwithstanding I am working on progressing the timeline again at this moment(well, I was before I came here to post this), so there is progress being made after a fashion at least.
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Very interesting premise! Will be keeping my eyes on this one.
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**So I've decided to jump back into this. I note that it's been over four months since I left this. Eeek. That tends to happen with me and Aurora, and I'm not completely sure why -- but what seems to be the main cause is I'll run into some point where I need to make a decision about something and it's not clear how I want to handle it. I'll think about it for a while and then Aurora sort of drifts to the back of my mind if I don't get clarity soon. In other words, Aurora is actually in some ways too good of a game for me; it makes me want to get the direction of the story or world that I've created in it 'right' -- as I see it, of course -- and I lose motivation to continue the story if I'm not reasonabley happy with a resolution. I don't have this relationship with other games, even stuff that's got it's own complexity as most things I play tend to have. Not blaming the game per se, but there it is.
I thought about doing a different kind of concept, or doing something in 7.x, or whatever, but chose not to. Mostly this is because this is really the idea/backstory/approach I want to use for a long-term game, and 7.x won't add enough to it for me to justify a re-start. So while I'd be a fool to guarantee how long this renaissance will be, over the last few days I've put together the next update. If the forum co-operates, it will follow here. If the forum doesn't co-operate, it will still follow here, just maybe in pieces as it's quite long.**
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A New Era Takes Shape(2068-2091)
Despite the best efforts of the best and brightest of the private sector, ramping up the necessary infrastructure took time. A lot of time. And as always happens, there were unforseen obstacles as well. The public as a whole took little notice of the IRC's activities, partly because they had more immediate problems, and partly because there were precious few activities to take notice of. Brief quarterly reports were published on various matters of concern, usually relating to unrest or open conflict in particular regions, or varying degrees of resource scarcity and changes in that dynamic. A rather thicker annual report was published by Director Charlie Thomson's office, on the same subjects, but he spent more time than any in carefully considered media appearances sandwhiched between liasing with various 'heads of state' -- a rather lofty term considering a large number of them involved nothing more than local warlords of dubious legitimitacy and less concern for those they ruled. Public relations, marketing the council as a independent, disinterested broker on the various, constantly-changing needs of the world economy, was job #1 and in reality, jobs #2 through 10 or more as well for Thomson.
The 60s ended with marginally more hope than any decade anyone could remember, but Clayton's work still advanced at a snail's pace. Integrating and trouble-shooting the resources that increased at a painfully slow rate took up the lion's share of the time, and his team was able to devote only several weeks a year to their primary research goals beyond the needs of making sure nothing got screwed up on the logistical end of things. Progress was made every year though, and more and more dedicated data analysis meant increased, if barely-noticeable, ability to identify trends and issues before they became crises.
In the early years of the 70s, a new shortage began to take shape even as global commerce continued to pick up steam. It was becoming clear that massive desalination effort would be needed to avert severe water shortages before the end of the century. It was the first real test of the IRC's clout; would humanity co-operate on this vital need, or would their recommendations be ignored?
Overall the response was disappointing. Smaller nations didn't have the resources to make such a major effort, landlocked nations didn't have the water access obviously, and most of the larger powers focused more on what they considered more vital concerns. But there were a few exceptions. Most of them were mid-sized nations who realized they could get frozen out of the water market eventually, but had enough financial clout that with a moderate amount of pain they could become a player and decided the long-term gain was worth it. Most of them were in what used to be known as Europe and Southeast Asia. Some of the less-developed countries were needing freshwater imports within a few years, and it soon became obvious that those who had taken the long-term view would make a king's ransom. That's when the biggest economies undertook a crash course to get in on the action.
As all this was hitting home, Thomson's Vice-Director, Mitchell Howarth, was killed by a terrorist bombing in July of 2074. Just 24, Howarth was the only certified administrator in line in the event Thomson had to step aside for whatever reason. The combination of this attack on a major, visible IRC figure and the water issue threw the spotlight on the Council more than ever before.
In 2078, the decision was made to allow young researcher Ewan Bryan to split time with Claytonallowing both to do PR duties and keep things humming. The change rankles the arrogant Clayton even though he recognizes the need for it. In truth, Bryant is even more productive as a head researcher though his specialty in detection electronics is not particularly more useful than Clayton's in focused energy applications in this particular case. By this time the first round of new desalination plants along the coasts were on-line, and so far the impact of shortages has been very minimal, limited almost completely to the poorer, more isolated regions.
2080 -- As a new decade dawns, the research teams are now able to work over half the year at a time on their economic studies, allowing for much more significant progress and that time considerably lengthens each year. It is estimated that the new networks are roughly one-sixth completed. Meanwhile, global populations are approaching 12 billion, a threshold that is expected to be reached sometime in the first half of 2081. That is the point at which it was estimated that even the most efficient distribution of the world's supply of renewable freshwater would not be enough to meet all needs. With a sufficiently massive desalination industry, it was expected that over 50 billion could be sustained indefinitely, but that would require constant construction of new large-scale plants in the right locations. It was also a boon economically in the sense of another growth industry providing plenty of employment for both construction and support staff, inspectors, those who operated the plants, and so forth. The ever-increasing need for fusion power fueled opportunities in that sector, a more robust global recovery made service-oriented industries more viable once again, and in general things looked up. The IRC's leadership on these matters gave it legitimacy, and most nations were more than willing to foot the relative pittance which comprised their share of the bill for the computerized analysis centers being developed in all regions of world. They were not without their detractors of course, but those voices were now the minority. The needed consensus of public support for the Council was now mostly in place, and the results soon showed it.
Bryan continues to improve and is now by far the better scientist, though Clayton still gets his share of time as he is the face of the IRC's development efforts. Although the need for them is presently zilch -- a replacement for the early-21st century space stations is little more than a long-range idea at this point -- applicants for astronaut training along with other not-yet-needed positions multiplied during the 80s.
Once again fate conspired to complicate things. In the late summer of 2083, Henry Clayton, the face of the IRC's research efforts, was killed in what would eventually be deemed an industrial accident. He was forty-seven. With Bryan as his backup, by this point his value was mostly as a figure-head. Of course, human life is fragile to a certain degree. The occasional worker or junior researcher dying, or quitting, or getting fired or whatever is expected and would cause little more than a blip in the local news if they were even important enough to warrant that. Over a billion man-hours every trip around the sun were by now devoted to IRC endeavors, and most of them would naturally go unnoticed.
This was different. Safety and public relations demands along with the ensuing investigation had to be done with unquestioned throughness and transparency, which sharply curtailed progress for a few years until recommendations on new protocols had been submitted and many implemented. This was the first real black eye for the IRC and it needed to be handled with maximum care. The ever-dedicated Bryan used his newfound free time to continue to study, and emerged from this period even better at his tasks than before, determined to make up for the slowdown.
It was a time of great anxiety for Charlie Thomson for another reason; at the moment, Bryan's brilliance was much appreciated and valued but all the eggs were in that one basket. There was no backup if something happened to him. Thankfully he had just turned 30 and was in outstanding health, but the IRC was still in great risk because the work could not proceed at all without a qualified project lead, and he was the only one available at the moment.
It was nearly the end of the decade, December 2089, before that issue was resolved. The new scientist was Katherine Warner. She's not not nearly as skilled, specializing in stealth aeronautics and similar concepts, but she does guarantee that the work will go on uninterrupted. The workload on Bryan could abate some now, though he will still handle the lion's share.
After another couple years of work, Director Thompson concluded that the time was right for a new phase. His requested time for extended remarks at the UN for his next annual report, setting the international diplomatic community abuzz with speculations ...
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**Yay for the forums being back and improved! On we go.**
UN General Assembly
Annual Meeting
January 14, 2091
Typically, Charlie Thomson's annual address to the UN was a dry summarization of the IRC's annual report. The main reason he came at all was for the diplomatic purpose of interacting with various heads of state and other dignitaries. They could read -- they didn't need him to present the report, anyone could do it. Given his request for extra time this year, it was clear something a little different was in store.
This was the 23rd such report he had made, annually at the beginning of each year as was tradition. There were the usual greetings and pleasantries, emphasis on what the IRC and humanity had achieved, stressing the need for peace and cooperation in the face of continuing turmoil and unrest in many parts of the globe, and so on. Good soundbyte-stuff. Soothing to the ears. This was much of his job as the face of the Council.
Then, at the point when he would normally have been wrapping up on other occasions, he warmed to his real subject matter.
"Today it is my priviledge to announce that the initial goal of the IRC Charter has been achieved. With the continued co-operation of most nations and the expertise of numerous multi-national corporations, both of which continue to earn humanity's sincere appreciation and gratitude, we have reached the point where a million personnel of various stripes, working in dozens of separate facilities in every region of the world, contribute full-time to the central goal of preserving and protecting humanity's future. Without such an unprecedented, global effort as the nations represented here today have put forward, these facilities and all of the support staff and infrastructure required to operate them could not have been accomplished."
"As today's report details, our continuing efforts to safeguard, develop, monitor, and analyze global supplies of all critical economic resources continue to advance. At this time the work is more than halfway completed, and by the end of the century everything should be in place to allow complete and continous monitoring with a minimum of oversight. As this process has unfolded, a new challenge has become clear; humanity cannot prosper indefinitely without continually seeking out, innovating, and inventing new resources as well as more efficient ways of using the ones we possess. This continued advance, more than ever, requires a low-gravity environment in which to proceed with cutting-edge research."
"In response to this need, I am requesting today approval of a new orbital space station for these scientific purposes. As with everything else in the Council's purview, it would be jointly owned and supervised by all signatories to the IRC Charter. The proposal I make her today is named the Phoenix, signifying our collective determination to rise from the chaos and suffering of the Great Recession to reach new heights. Several launch vehicles based on the reliable Soyuz rockets used in the pre-Repression era, with considerable modifications and enhancements based on developments over the past couple of decades, will be needed to assemble and maintain the Phoenix."
"The expense of this project will be significant of course, but as our resource projections continually show, the cost of failing to do what is necessary to advance our knowledge of the physical building-blocks of our universe is far higher. Fusion power and hadron colliders were once considered conjectures, overly-frivolous pursuits; now they are the foundation of our global recovery. The Phoenix project is every bit as vital to humanity's future."
"On behalf of not just the IRC, but all of our children, grandchildren, and the generations to come, I urge this body to consider and approve these recommendations."
Compared to the ISS, the Phoenix station was a little over twice the size(1,150 tons) and the price tag for the station itself was a hair under 38 billion, over 40 including the support craft. This was well within the IRC's operating budget. The proposal was well-considered, and the Council's role respected enough that there was not a great amount of debate. If Thomson was even half-right about the potential benefits, it would be a bargain at a thousand times the price. The support of numerous top scientists around the globe, both inside and outside the IRC's direct payroll, made it a slam-dunk.
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Phoenix Transition(2091-2103)
In the spring of 2098, the regional economic centers were completely set up and staffed, updated tracking models and equipment in place, and largely automated procedures for constant adjustment and refinement of those models in place. Early estimates were that the world economy would benefit from a prosperity boom within months of implementation, with the IRC benefiting to the tune of tens of billions a year. In less than a decade, the entirety of the Phoenix project would pay for itself.
By the end of the summer, the booster and launch apparatus for the new Soyuz were completed, with Holden-Lynch and Cameron Ltd holding most of the major patents. Just a couple weeks before Christmas of the same year, the testing phase was finished for the rocket itself. Unfortunately the celebration got a little out of hand. Well, more than a little. In the morning, Dr. Ewan Bryan was found dead. It was soon determined to be a drug overdose. He would never get to see the practical results of his work put to use.
Kane Sullivan, Adam Doherty, and Katherine Warner were the candidates to take his spot, but none of them have more than a small fraction of Bryan's ability. It seems IRC's most talented are doomed to early demises.
Sullivan, who has some skill in matters of propulsion, set to work designing more efficient maneuvering thrusters. This was really a sideshow and he wasn't expected to complete the work, just lay the foundation for it and make use of the existing personnel and facilities while the Soyuz rockets and their payloads, the components for the Phoenix space station, were constructed and assembled in orbit. Several of the rockets were built at thirty million each, and the modular sections of the Phoenix were quite a bit more expensive. It was mostly the sensitive, high-tech electronics, research equipment, and the massive amounts of fuel required to deliver them to orbit that raised the overall price of the station though. Even with every effort being made to get it done quickly, it would be a few years before the Phoenix was operational in the spring of 2103.
By that point Sullivan believed himself to be about two years away from practical results in improving thruster efficiency. That would be shelved, the project mothballed, it's protocols and data stored for some future time. Probably a long time into the future. All efforts would now go towards adding whatever equipment Phoenix needed, and analyzing the results relayed from the space station, designing new experiments, and so on. Initial goals were focused in areas like superconductivity, manipulation of subatomic particles, microgravity fabrication techniques, and so on that had proven to be promising growth fields in the past. Director Thomson focused on a flexible approach however, with engineers and factories standing by to implement any new ideas that might be found.
There was significant debate over which researcher should head up the project. Kane Sullivan and Adam Doherty were considered the better candidates, both having the level of intelligence, ambition, and 'outside-the-box' thinking desired to find new, non-obvious solutions to whatever obstacles presented themselves. Sullivan probably would have garnered the prestigious assignment were it not for his combative nature. Doherty's health is a question, but he's fairly young at 31 years of age and Thomson believed there would be less conflict with him. And so it was. While the regional centers on Earth continued to make their recommendations for best use of what humanity currently has, it was clear that much of the future of our race lay in Doherty's hands. Even with every possible resource at his disposal, it was not expected that he would achieve any major breakthroughs in time for many of those alive today to benefit from them. But every great effort must start somewhere.
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It's so nice to see this back, its really good!
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Thank you for saying so! Hope you continue to like it. Still editing up the next bit so I thought I'd post here just to fake people out and trick them into thinking I'd actually posted something substantive. Shouldn't be long though.
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Continuing Research(2103-2122)
As time passed, work aboard the Phoenix and back and on earth continued, and there were no major disruptions in the grand scheme of things. Doherty improved pretty consistently, demonstrating himself to be a good choice.
Then in 2114, Director Charlie Thomson retired. He's done a splendid job over the first 45 years of the IRC, but at 68 health is starting to catch up to him and leaves his post in late November. This leaves the question of who replaces him. Only one man can be first. From 2069 to 2114, 'Chairman Charlie' had a heck of a run. From this vantage point it seems unlikely that the job will provide quite as many challenges for his successor. Establishing the IRC in terms of credibility and diplomacy, Thomson showed good judgment and a steady hand.
Fortunately, stability and steady recruitment has the IRC in a position that there are plenty of choices. 18 of them, to be precise. It soon became clear that Alex Blake(29) had the ability to handle the public and the media that would move him to the head of the class, far above everyone else . Meanwhile most progress from the Phoenix was more of the theoretical than practical reality so far, but Doherty remained optimisitic that better developments were ahead.
Just a couple years later, in 2116, the team started to report unusual experiment results. Unusual being an understatement here. Microscopic samples trickled out, samples of materials with incredible properties. The first possessed tensile strength several orders of magnitude beyond any alloy that could be constructed on Earth. Then the next year there were a couple more, one that allowed for nearly-instantaneous transmission of information, allowing the possibility of obsoleting quantum computing which in comparison might become as relevant as the abacus in comparison. Another, when heated to the just shy of the melting point, possessed an energy density previously thought impossible and well beyond any known fuels. For a while new materials were discovered nearly every month. Top scientists, many of them Nobel winners, were brought in from around the globe to verify the experiments, which were repeated multiple times.
Finally, in late May of 2022, it was decided that there was no point in delaying any further. The findings had been proved valid a hundred times over. They were impossible, but valid nonetheless. A total of 11 distinct new materials had been discovered. Various heavy metals, some currently used and some combinations of existing materials, would be required for any kind of large-scale fabrication, but the methods for doing so, and the fundamental properties resulting from those combinations had been demonstrated beyond the point of contradiction.
Director Alex Blake, head researcher Adam Doherty, and scores of others were on hand for a press conference to announce the new results, and while it was a positively seismic revelation to the scientific community, to the average man on the street it made little difference. There were now 16.5 billion of them. This number grew constantly, and with it the stress on the global economy, even with new innovations to make life easier constantly being developed.
The IRC announced the Prospector Project, aimed at a complete scan of the Earth to determine exact locations and amounts of the required raw materials. This required a couple of new expenditures. The first was the Charlie Thompson Memorial Space Center, dedicated to the IRC's original director of course and with the purpose of launching the proposed Prospector satellite, using existing booster and other ICBM-related technologies as much as possible. The price tag was 2.24b US. And then there was the need to develop the scanning electronics suite itself, and work out any issues that might arise.
Addendum: New Materials Summary
** Official Note: These are listed in order of discovery, not necessarily importance **
Duranium -- An unorginally named, highly durable and relatively speaking nigh-indestructible alloy. Duranium allows for industrial equipment and machinery capable of surviving incredibly stressful loads without breaking or fracturing, hardening buildings of all types against massive forces such as earthquakes far more effectively than previously known materials, and many other applications we can only guess at.
Neutronium -- We know very little about how this one works, but experimentation has shown that controlled use of miniscule electrical currents allows it to reorganize and reshape itself on a molecular level, allowing it to reshape itself while remaining stronger than most known synthetic materials. Perhaps the most unbelievable material of them all, neutronium will certainly be the subject of intense study for the forseeable future.
Corbomite -- This is one of the most nebulous of the group. It was almost overlooked during testing. All we can say is that it seems like small amounts of it add stability to some of the others in certain configurations. Much more information is needed.
Tritanium -- Appears to be useful mostly in containing and shaping explosions. To that end, it may see the most use in providing demolitons-related applications.
Boronide -- All we really know here is that it reacts with many organic materials in unusual ways. Potentially very useful, and also potentially very dangerous. Misuses in the realm of bioweapons make it vital to keep this substance out of the hands of subversive elements, terrorists, and the like.
Mercassium -- Silicon on crack basically. It's the foundation of future supercomputers, though other uses may yet come to light.
Vendarite -- Even the scientists couldn't tell us much here. It's definitely a distinctive composite, but as for what it does, nobody really knows.
Sorium -- Funny how they tell you not to run after they say things like 'think plasma at room temperature'. It appears that this will be most applicable as a fuel, with the potential of making the astronomical costs of escaping Earth's gravity trivial.
Uridium -- Spectacular conductive properties have electronics experts salivating here.
Corundium -- They used to say nothing was harder than diamonds. They don't say that anymore. This unique metal can only be formed at incredibly high temperatures, but slices through most known substances like a knife through hot butter. It's sort of a twin of duranium, the flip side of the coin in that rather than tensile strength, corundium is incredibly resistant to any change in shape or size. It can be broken more easily, but it will not stretch to any measurable degree before it does.
Gallicite -- An incredibly high tolerance for heat and pressure makes this a prime candidate for development as a material in rocketry, propulsion, and reactor advancement.
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The Prospector Era; Initial Sol Survey Efforts(2123-2030)
Within 18 months of the Prospector being announced, in March 2124, it was announced that a suitable sensor suite for orbital scans had been completed thanks to the work of the IRC grunts led by Adam Doherty. More than the scanner itself would be required however, and Kane Sullivan, as the leading specialist in matters of power, took the reins to work on a sufficiently miniaturized PWR(fission-based Pressurized Water Reactor) to power a satellite using the new developments. Sullivan did not appear to learn a blasted thing over the more than four years he spent designing the reactor, finishing no more skilled than when he started. If nothing else this confirmed the choice of Doherty as the default top researcher for the IRC. The only real hiccup was a relatively minor scare just before Christmas in 2026, when a couple of low-level administrators died in apparent terrorist bombings in as many weeks. Security services managed to protect all of the top officials successfully however, and no real panic set in.
It was November 2028 when the reactor was finished, and the Prospector satellite prototype phase was handed over to brilliant, industrial Dr. Alexander Donelly. The work took him only a month, and on the first of the new year, the 60th anniversary of the IRC's founding, a successful test launch was conducted. The geosensor suite worked, but did not have enough power for a full scan of the earth. A fully successful mission would require a larger engine and power plant. Young 23-year-old Zoe Fry was the most skilled, but had just about every negative personality trait and attitude aspect you can imagine, so Sullivan got the job once again. By October the new booster was ready, and the day after Christmas the Prospector finally launched. At just under 60 tons, half of the weight went to each of three booster engines, almost 20 tons for the sensor, 3 tons for the reactor and nearly as much for the required 275 liters of refined sorium fuel. Everyone waited, even the researchers. the IRC labs went silent. The next step would depend on the readout from the satellite.
It took almost a year to complete the survey, and while a ground team was formed to confirm them and investigate any anomalies, a debate raged about how to handle the new resources. While that was going on, Sullivan worked on completing more fuel-efficient thruster research, research that was begun nearly a century ago and then mothballed. The data is still there however, and it didn't take long to resurrect the project.
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** Author's Note: This update is a bit haphazard, I will try to get things a little more structured going forward, but the history is a little 'uneven' right now and seems to defy attempts at easy organization.**
Continued Inner-System Surveys(2130-2137)
As far as the Prospector was concerned, going beyond the moon meant taking into more consideration the fuel needed for an extended journey in space. Even with a maximum-efficiency thruster going at a minimal velocity of about 100 km/s, considerable space inside the probe would be needed. Luna itself was pretty easy; it could be reached in just over an hour. Best estimates on travel time to the other major bodies in the system were as follows:
Venus -- almost 5 days
Mars -- A little over 9 days
Mercury -- 10.6 days
Jupiter -- 73 days
Saturn -- 148 days
Uranus -- 316 days
Neptune -- 503 days
The longer a trip was, the more sacrifice would need to be made in terms of the size of geosurvey sensors onboard -- and therefore, more fuel required for a longer operational duration. The initial readout of Earth's mineral reserves, as completed in November 2030, reported the following:
Duranium -- 1.27 mt, 100%
Neutronium -- 866 kt, 60%
Corbomite -- 1.06 mt, 60%
Tritanium -- 1.42 mt, 40%
Boronide -- 447 kt, 60%
Mercassium -- 1.44 mt, 40%
Vendarite -- 504 kt, 60%
Sorium -- 989 kt, 100%
Uridium -- 496 kt, 50%
Corundium -- 1.39 mt, 100%
Gallicite -- 417 kt, 90%
It is estimated that, at current techniques each manhour involved in mining operations might eventually produce as much as a little over a 40th a pound of refined ore per year. Clearly a massive effort would be required. This fact only intensified the debate about who would control these resources. The IRC, the UN, various nations and regional authorities around the world, and multinational corporations all naturally chose 'us' as their preferred solution. There was considerable concern voiced about the IRC gaining too much power if they were given a monopoly; nobody wanted an autocratic, single body effectively forming their own global government. Their technical expertise would be required, however.
While the back-and-forth on these issues raged, Sullivan was at work using the 'dead time' to finish research on more fuel-efficient thrusters, research that was begun nearly a century ago and then mothballed. The data is still there however, and it didn't take long to resurrect it. This was merely to make use of the time though. Two things were obvious to all sides; an agreement needed to be reached quickly, since further progress in use of the TN minerals could not happen without it and the public would not tolerate such inaction. Secondly, no one faction had the necessary resources. Only the corporate sector had the necessary investment capital for large-scale mining, refining, and fabrication operations, which would require a massive initial outlay and large-scale investment for the forseeable future. At the same time, only the IRC had the technical expertise. Resulting from this was an arrangement which hearkened back to the concept of eminent domain. The IRC was given the authority to purchase, subject to UN approval, whatever amounts of refined ore their needs required at fair market value up to 70% of available stockpiles. In exchange, they would provide technical, consulting assistance to multi-national corporations in developing these resources, including any related scientific advances that may come about in the future. Any nation or corporation that refused such an accomodation would be cut off from the IRC's support, which all of them needed desperately and they knew it. With the UN acting as a theoretically impartial observer and broker of these terms, in 2031 initial efforts to harvest significant quantities of the ores was begun. At first, the rate of employment in the new high-tech industrial industries(mining only at this point) was about two hundred thousand new jobs a year, which isn't even a grain of sand compared to the beach. Compared to a population of about 17.7 billion worldwide, it would take nearly a thousand years to employ just 1%.
In 2132, late November, new improved efficiency thruster concepts completed by Sullivan. On the industrial side, despite the efforts of now nearly a half a million full-time workers, the testing and equipment/facility design phase was still underway. Director Blake was becoming increasingly disturbed at the delays, but there were signs the first tangible results would become viable by spring of the next year. The researchers were thrown into a sort of limbo for the time being. By April of 2133 the first tangible results finally appeared. It was only a few tons, but it was something. The engineers reported that for the most important immediate application, the design of new, more efficient Prospector probes that could visit other bodies in the solar system, they would need more time to study the sorium and refinery techniques. And so the waiting continued. The next year, Kane Sullivan passed on, a bit early but he was in his early 60s. It appears his lasting contribution will be in the development of the reactors and propulsion systems, but he did not see the Prospector project come to full intended fruition.
Just a couple months after Sulllivan's passing, in June of 2134, the first-ever sorium refinery operations got underway, with an annual capacity estimated at twenty thousand liters initially. By early July, there was more than plenty to spare and initial testing showed it to be of good enough quality to begin testing a new engine combining the improved fuel with the latest in propulsion efficiency understanding. Unfortunately the power required mandated some sacrifice in terms of fuel consumption. Attitude issues or not, Zoe Fry was the only candidate for the job, having improved herself markedly. A full million were now employed in TN-related activities, with a mineral stockpile of over 100 tons and an extraction rate over 150 tons annually. Of the current proven deposits, gallicite possessed has the lowest exhaustion timer, over 22 thousand years' supply at current extraction rates, most of which was being stored, not used. There was no need to worry about a lack of raw material for the forseeable future.
Prospector Designs
With the new thrusters available and more than sufficient sorium fuel being produced, the Prospector Project was finally fully underway. The new probe design was essentially a balance between the fuel needed to ensure it would have power long enough to complete it's mission, and also report back it's findings before shutting down, and having as large a scanner possible in order to provide enough power to complete the surveying itself.
Two versions were actually designed. The standard one was intended to survey the larger bodies of the inner system: Luna, Mercury, Venus, and Mars primarily. Like the original that did the initial scan of Earth, it was a maximum-size, 60-ton rocket. The second version, known as the 'M' variant -- the M representing it's minaturized size, some took to calling it simply the 'mini' -- would have just a single booster instead of three, and handle much smaller targets like the moons of Mars, asteroids, or any local comets. The Prospector M was, as a result, a fraction of the cost and size at under 20 tons.
A more long-term goal was a package capable of getting past the asteroid belt and reaching the many moons of Jupiter and Saturn as well as the gas giants themselves, and perhaps even Neptune and Uranus. But first things first. Getting results from all the major inner-system bodies and a representative cross-section of the smaller ones would give the IRC a much better idea of how common mineral deposits were beyond Earth, and what, if any, future survey activities were justified.
Lacking any real rocketry specialists as of yet, Blake again turned to the man who has become his premier researcher, 43-year-old Alexander Donnelly, in order to hammer out the prototypes. The standard Prospector would come first, and it took only months to complete them. Five standard probes were begun, at a total cost of 230 million; a dozen of the mini-Prospectors would mean another 156 million. A miniscule cost in the grand scheme of things. And then the question was, what to do with the research department? A break of some years was expected, but not long enough to do any kind of major economics research yet. Adam Doherty was back in the mix for some uridium-based work on the possibility of detecting uncharted gravitational disturbances in space. Near-earth collison and other similar needs made this a field that interested a fairly broad spectrum of interests.
In July, after confirmation of sufficient fuel quantity and purity was made, the first Prospector was ready to go, and as it happens, Mars was in nearly the perfect position, something that happens only once every few years. It was an easy decision, and the launch occurred on the morning of July 6. In less than two weeks it was on station, and all that remained was to wait for results, which would take months.
Mars was not the only iron in the fire though. By mid-September a second Prospector was finished and sent on it's way to Mercury. This was the longest journey at around 100 million miles, but the real resource hog was still the scanning operation.
About a week later, a stupid error by Flight Control at CTMSS, and the Mars Prospector was sent off course, out of orbit, aborting it's scan. It could not be salvaged, and a new probe would be needed. Good thing a spare was built! The planets were no longer in alignment though, so it would have to wait some while.
**In actuality, I messed up and deleted the wrong waypoint, causing the probe to just hang out well behind Mars in it's orbit. It's still there :(**
In December, the third Prospector was launched, this one headed on the trip to the moon which would take just over an hour for the transit. This ought to be child's play ... if the beauracrats could manage to send the right telemetry data, that is. Up through year's end all appeared to be going well ... but there was still no completion messages from either Mercury or Luna, so nobody could be certain.
As 2136 began, there were now two million employed in the mining and refining operations, 357 tons of minerals and almost 28k liters of fuel in storage and production increasing all the time. The third side of the triangle, manufacturing, has been silent but now gets into gear working on adding capacity for building the probes faster. It'll take three years at the current rate to see any real increase, but there will be need for similar projects down the road almost certainly. By mid-January, the Mercury Prospector reported back, the first to complete it's assigned mission! And not only that, but it confirms Earth is not the only source of suitable deposits.
** 1.22 mt duranium(0.5)
** 193 kt mercassium(0.5)
** 263 kt vendarite(0.4)
** 688 kt uridium(0.1)
** 3.62 mt gallicite(0.7)
So, just under half of the relevant ores are present here. Combined, mining here would be between a third and a quarter as productive as on Earth. The big news here is the amount of gallicite -- not quite as accessible as that found on Earth, but almost nine times the amount. Of course, such considerations make the rather large leap that it would even be possible. If Director Blake immediately ordered a mission to do so, it couldn't be carried out. There'd be no way to either transport the necessary equipment and manpower, nor house those needed to operate it. A ground team would need to be sent first for more specifics and confirmation. There is in fact no guarantee it will ever be possible. The presence of minerals both on Earth and Mercury suggests that such deposits may be common. If so, there is a chance that more developed space travel may be profitable, with a whole host of implications. But definitely the biggest news here is the scientific aspect, and the fact that the probe worked. The Prospector program will definitely continue in light of this success.
The fourth Prospector was finished in late February. It will be some time before Mars is in position, but Venus is nearly so, and the Mars replacement enters production. Activity resumes at CTMSS as a launch is expected within weeks. Within days, the Luna probe reports back that the moon is barren. This is a considerable disappointment, since this would obviously be the easiest test destination for off-world mining due to it's proximity. Less than weeks later, the Venus Prospector launches. This is the most challenging survey of the group, as Venus requires almost as much effort and time as the Earth to complete. Minimizing travel time, and therefore fuel, was critical. The trip itself takes less than week and is completed successfully, but pretty much the rest of the year will be required for the survey.
In May, the final standard Prospector finished was completed. With Earth now basically directly opposite the Sun from Mars, about as bad of a launching position as it is possible to get. Therefore it would be some time before the second attempt at scanning the red planet commences. The first of a dozen mini-Prospectors were begun, and those would be sent at the closest targets of opportunity as they were completed.
The first such launch happened a month later, with the closest asteroid, Apollo, chosen as the target. Apollo is just two kilometers wide, making a survey of it nearly instantaneous.
The goal of this stage is to do a cross-section of the smaller bodies that are closest to Earth, in order to gain an inkling of the relationship between size and mineral value. A dozen data points is far too few to be conclusive of course, but it is a dozen more than we currently possess. It's just a small sample, a starting point. And Apollo is first. By the end of June, the report came back that Apollo was barren as well. In late September, another tiny asteroid, 'ahead' of Earth in it's orbital path, 2010 TK7, was found to be barren also.
Incoming comet Faye is the next target in October, although the 'M' Prospector probes are being built faster than they are being used at the moment. This proved to be more difficult than expected. The probe overshot the comet and then turned to catch it, but didn't appear to be fast enough to do so. After a few more weeks of pointless chasing, it was clear that a faster probe would be needed to reliably intercept such objects.
2137 started with a bang; the Venus probe returned massive deposits, but most of them highly inaccessible. The total amounts were as follows:
** 30 mt duranium(20%)
** 33.8 mt neutronium(90%)
** 20.1 mt tritanium(10%)
** 26.5 mt mercassium(10%)
** 28.4 mt gallicite(10%)
Massive amounts of all of these compared to Earth, but only neutronium is accessible -- to say nothing of the general inhospitability of Venus as well.
In February, Director Blake decided to sample a couple of 'M' class missions to some of the larger asteroids. The first to be targeted was Cybele, which is near the outside of the asteroid belt at some 515m km from the Sun and was now near closest approach, some 365m or so. Even a 'large' asteroid such as this is only 274 km across, and would require only days for an orbital scan. Before the end of the month, a similarly located, slightly smaller asteroid, Euphrosyne, was targeted as well. This pair of launches figured to be the last until the Earth caught up enough to Mars to give a second attempt at a scan of the red planet. By early March, the last of the current run of Prospector probes was finished. No more are intended for the immediate future.
By the end of March the Cybele probe was on station, and the one headed for Euphrosyne was just a few days out. They still had over half their fuel remaining, no question about the ability to complete their missions. Additionally, Adam Doherty's team had finished theoretical research into gravitational sensors. Time to find a new direction in terms of research. Commercial application of new construction techniques became the focus once again.
Another week, and the Prospector 'M' chasing the comet Faye ran out of fuel and self-destructed. By the middle of the month, both Cybele and Euprhosyne reported negative results from their scans. Not good news for the prospects of finding deposits of heavy metals on asteroids, as all of the few that have surveyed so far have come up completely empty. Meanwhile, limited supplies of Tritanium are slowing down expansion of the rocket-producing facilities.
A quiet few months later, Earth caught Mars in the orbital alignment, and the final standard Prospector was launched to finish that survey. It arrived on station in Mid-August, and weeks before year's end reported that Mars is barren. This effectively concluded this phase of the Prospector's exploration. Journeying to the outer system and searching additional asteroids closer in is not deemed cost-effective at the present time, given that whatever might be found can't be developed at this point in time anyway, and so far the asteroid results are not encouraging. The IRC's focus is now firmly on coordinating and cooperating with the corporate sector in mining and refining the TN minerals, and any research that might be necessary related to that endeavor.