October - December 2085
Sirius Survey Report
ESF Bravo, October 8 2085
Survey Issues
Sirius itself was the main obstacle. The system is huge. It's the only system yet found where the jump point survey locations are more complex than those in Sol. Each Frontier took nearly a full month instead of less than ten days on station in most systems for each potential location. The pattern was huge as well. On the outer ring it was a month and a half travel, then a month for survey, etc.
The flotilla was also plagued by maintenance issues, far more than Alpha had in all their systems combined. Many began to consider the system cursed. Cmdr. Milo Rhoads, one of the Frontier COs, grew steadily worse and his junior officers had to pilot the craft back the long three-month journey from the final jump survey with him in sickbay. He's been honorably discharged from the service, and one of the other Frontier COs is rumored to be thinking about an early retirement after this tour as well. It just took a lot out of everybody. Crews were at the breaking point by the time it was finished, but they got the job done in the end.
Jump Points
Prolonging the fun was the fact that it was the very last location that yielded the second and last jump point in the system. This required a nearly three-month round trip by the Explorer while everyone waited the second half of that.
Geological Survey
After all that work, SPACE will benefit ... not much if at all. Sirius A I has massive quantities of inaccessible duranium and gallicite. The most habitable planet yet found, A II, has nothing and neither do it's moons. There are a handful of finds in the dense asteroid field, with the only one of real significance yielding 44 kt of mercassium at 0.9. Nice, but not worth coming here for.
Sirius-B, which orbits A at a distance of 3 billion km, was quite naturally almost completely on the other side of the Sol jump. It has a 45-year orbital period and at least 40 of those years would have been a better time to come visit. Go figure. The lone gas giant is barren, which shot all hope of a major insystem fuel source. The most habitable of it's moons, which could at least be put in the Mars/Luna range with some work, has 765 kt boronide(0.1), 9.9 mt sorium(0.1), and 2.06 mt neutronium(0.6). That last part is the only major mineral find in the system. This one moon is the only useful part of the Sirius-B system.
New System -- V577 Monocerri
Mid-range jump a little inside the middle ring, 1.78b away from the primary of two stars. Average pattern size and difficulty, just over half that of Sol.
A System: Two fairly habitable terrestrials, the first planet already has a breathable atomosphere. It's cold(-51 C), making it only a little easier to deal with than Luna/Mars. With a thicker atmosphere it could probably by Earth-like. One gas giant also with a dozen moons and two dozen asteroids. Overall pretty good.
B System: Orbiting at a little under 600 million km, this is a very accessible system. Two terrestrials, neither as habitable as the ones around the primary. Main feature is a close, thick asteroid belt with over 160 objects. Might be some interesting things in there.
An interesting, promising system that is also really far away. Average distance from earth is 10.1 billion, closer to 12 billion by the time you get to the planets around A. Time for the Spruance to make a round trip would be close to 10 months.
No wrecks, jump gates, or sensor evidence of alien presence of any kind.
Summary/Evaluation
It sucked, and there's little reason to go back at least in the near future. V577 Monocerri is just interesting enough to merit a closer look, but there's more interesting places closer. Neutronium is plentiful enough on the comets of Sol for a while to make building a colony to exploit that a little ridiculous. So far only one really good source has been found -- and that's in Epsilon Eridani. Heh.
There's time to find more though. Decades of time at this point. Eventually the extreme habitability of Sirius A-II will almost certainly see us expanding there. It's a ten-year terraforming job for one installation with a crappy governor. It's a dream to the right kind of pioneer. But there's nothing beckoning us there in the short-term.
Back in Sol, a week later on the 15th of October the terraformer on Mars officially went operational. An important moment in history, and one worth examining more fully. Mars has a very thin atmosphere, just 1% as thick as Earth's. It is also cold(-48 C, actually 5 degrees warmer than Luna due to the fact that there is significant CO2 here providing a small greenhouse affect). The biggest problem though is that the air isn't breathable, on account of their not being a hint of oxygen. The first goal then, is to add 0.1 atm, the minimum amount of oxygen to make it breathable. It will be far too high a concentration of oxygen at that point, requiring other gases for the right mix, but enough oxygen for human consumption.
250k is the right amount of population needed. The one will take over 42 years at this point at the current rate to reach the needed oxygen level. Nevertheless, it is a beginning. Things are underway.
On the 27th ESF Alpha returned from Teegardens Star. 318 kt of inaccessible duranium had been found, essentially leaving that report unchanged. Operation Renewal, the focus of SPACE's efforts since the early 60s and therefore lasting two and a half decades, was completed. Humanity had begun to become a spacefaring people, again.
Finishing one goal meant needing to find another. Until the last few years we had visited eight systems and fully surveyed only our own. We've doubled that first number now to sixteen, and have six fully explored. There are two no-fly-zone systems, those occupied by the aliens, and another that we must enter Lalande to reach. That leaves seven to expand our knowledge with.
CONCLUSIONS
** Humanity is extremely fortunate to have developed it's civilization in Sol. Had it happened somewhere like Barnard's Star we would have never reached this point. Sol is unique so far among the systems we've found both in mineral wealth and in being a strategic nexus of multiple jumps.
** Of the five other systems we surveyed, we have found three, two, one(twice), and zero additional jump points in them. 'Hub' systems appear to be quite rare and are therefore to be considered strategically important.
** Mineral resources are not abundantly overflowing, but definitely TN materials are common, nigh-universal. The long-term prospects for expansion and sustaining a growing interstellar empire are good -- if we can keep the aliens either at bay or not actively hostile.
** We need survey teams up and running and we need them as soon as possible. It is obvious there will be more work than they can possibly keep up with. Several of them would be nice.
** The jump gates in the Van Maanen direction are still a mystery. Obviously they were built by somebody however, and the presence of one in the Lalande system suggests it could have been them or a similar race. who moved on. This also bears further investigating.
** The leading candidate by an enormous margin for our first extrasolar colony is Luyten 726-8. It has significant resources in itself, and also provides an excellent location for supporting further exploration with an eventual refueling, shore leave, and maintenance base for the ESFs. It is very likely that at least one of the bordering systems will give promising possibilities.
** SPACE is a very long ways off yet from having any kind of coherent colonization policy. We'll need answers to questions we haven't even thought of yet. At this point though it is necessary to define some things in terms of exploration. Two major points are decided. The first has to do with how far to explore. It is very possible that by continuing to extend humanity's knowledge of those systems in our galactic 'neighborhood' we may come into contact with a more aggressive enemy that will attempt to chase us back to Sol and invade, but that could happen from Epsilon Eridani or Lalande at any time ignorance is not considered bliss. It is still far better to know what is out there than not to. A one-year limit is established, meaning the goal of the ESFs will be to explore systems that are within one year's travel from the closest refueling and maintenance base. Right now this is Earth only, and a distance of 18.7 billion kilometers. Beyond that point, about half the mission time would be spent just traveling and the enterprise would become wasteful. Almost all of the systems we know of right now are less than half that, so we are not yet approaching this limit. When the refits to the new ion-powered Eagle engines are done, that distance will probably increase. Plenty of room yet for increased exploring.
The second issue was a matter of standard operating procedures for the ESFs. For Renewal after surveying a system the flotillas jumped back into Sol and confirmed new orders from Fleet HQ before heading to the next one. This will no longer be practical, as from now on new systems will be found at least two jumps away. The ESFs will be out of contact for longer, and will need to operate independently of Fleet HQ. The Commodore in charge of each will have greater responsibilities. For each voyage/tour they will be assigned a 'route', i.e. a particular system to push beyond. For example, Alpha's next journey will take it to the Luyten 726-8 route, during which they will be tasked with the three new systems it connects to, and the mission will be to push the frontier as far in those directions as possible before returning to Sol. Fuel and maintenance levels will need to be watched ever more closely.
NAVAL DEPLOYMENT
Renewal brought much-needed intelligence to the Navy, and the news was both good and bad. An incredibly advanced alien civilization in Lalande 21185 is not good, but the other systems revealed no new civilizations and no evidence of them other than the jump gates in the Van Maanen 'route'. Teegarden's Star is a dead-end but threats could approach from any of the other six jumps. Intelligence has decided to take the rather unoriginal step of naming the known alien civilizations by using the AI-assigned name of the first detected ship class and then reversing the spelling. Therefore the aliens from Epsilon Eridani will be known as the Ratamli, and those in Lalande as the Erustfiws.
The Navy believes that blockading the jump points is the best way to defend against any potential incursion. Once an alien force gains a foothold in Sol space, they may well be able to simply bombard our positions from distance if they outrange us which the Erustfiws would be very likely to given how advanced their technology obviously is. As a long-term strategic matter, Frozen Vengeance is considered very important since if there is any chance of securing Epsilon Eridani with current missile technology, forces would not have to be divided between the two jumps but could be focused on the Lalande 21185 point. If not, any effective combat fleet will have to be defensive since we won't be as fast as their ships and virtually all weapons development for the forseeable future is going to be in the energy weapons field.
INFRASTRUCTURE NEEDS
Although the beauracrats have put it off for far too long it has become painfully obvious that the Navy is going to need a lot more large(10kt) shipyards than it currently possesses. For Frozen Vengeance at least three will be needed(command ship, defense escort, anti-ship missile escort). It is clear that the Navy must get a blockade of the Lalande jump point up as well, the best chance of thwarting any enemy attack is to meet them when they come in. This would involve armed-to-the-teeth laser/meson ships at the point ready to fire as soon as anything emerged. That's a fourth yard, and then the Baltimore/Gearing survey carrier ships will require two more. Six.
Presently the Navy has four. International and Niehuis were immediately set to expand, a process that will take some years as has been discovered in the past. That leaves only KSEC which will the handle the Caldwell shuttles and Forrestal sensor ships. The Navy will still need a mid-range yard with 6+ kt capacity for the Tarawa colliers and Cleveland supply ships, plus a pair of small ones from the Ambassador, Prospector, Frontier, and Explorer. The current two ordered yards weren't enough, they'd need three and really a fourth should be built against future needs. .
With the completion of Renewal it was also clear that the first need for colonization was to confirm the findings with ground survey teams. It was proposed that the Ambassador diplomatic shuttle would double nicely for this purpose, but it would need larger fuel tanks so a new ship was designed. With the Navy's needs for the shipyards, nothing could be done right away.
Mine production was reduced further to accomodate. In the process it was determined that for decades now SPACE has been building new regular mines, then converting them to automated, a process which costs an eighth more than just building automated mines directly, in both time and treaure. An estimated three kilotons each of duranium and corundium had been wasted this way, along with countless billions of man-hours. Stonerock did a massive double-facepalm when he discovered this idiocy, and loudly corrected it. This sparked a new round of yelling and screaming but nothing much came of it. Sort of like the boy who cried wolf.
With the increasing pressure on Earth's factories Awad decided a strict prioritizing was in order. Research labs would continue to occupy a quarter, replication(mines/factories) another quarter, with the remaining half going to whatever else was needed. Some projects would go with minimal funding but that was just the nature of the beast. Continually expanding research and industrial capability simply had to be a priority. With that in place over time the capability of the 'discretionary half' would also rise. Ordnance factory and commercial yard allocations were both reduced a fifth(10 to 8% each) to allow faster construction of the vitally needed naval shipyards. It would still take until past the end of the decade for the recommended amount to be finished.
On November 10, the first naval shipyard, which had been almost finished, is ready for 'business'. Named C. Mitchell & Co., here after referred to simply as the Mitchell SY, it was planned to expand immediately for the Mitchell and Cleveland classes. After discussions with engineering it was determined a new jump drive was needed for a jump shuttle, whether to carry VIPs or geology teams. The ones used on the Explorers were not big enough for a ship that would end up being well over a kiloton in size. Irving Steinmeyer was tapped for a quick testing job on a new, slightly larger one-ship drive for that purpose, and the Mitchell yard expanded as initially planned.
For the moment that meant five yards expanding at the same time, though that won't last long, a few retooling projects going on, a slipway being added, along with the eight or nine ships being built -- new workers added to shipyards all the time, and the mineral drain was fairly massive.
As December began, a close look at the supplies for the incoming ESFs reveals that they will consume over 1300 tons of maintenance supplies when they dock, over 90% of Earth's current stockpile. Almost all of that goes to Bravo which had all kinds of trouble in Sirius. Nevertheless, it's one more priority that has to be added to the factory workload. SPACE orders a strategic reserve of five thousand tons to be built up. On the 21st, retooling is finished and engineering analyzes the costs for refitting to the new Long Beach 84i. This time the news was better. For a little over half the cost of a new ship the existing harvesters could be refit. With 41 ships in service, the overall savings to the Navy is expected to exceed 32 million credits, and of course the minerals saved are an even bigger deal. The decision was made to bring two groups in at a time, reorganizing the ten groups of four plus a spare into four groups of eight each.
The only real question then was whether to expand from six to eight slipways or increase the size of the yard, which would eventually be needed. It was decided the size increase was more pressing, with a goal of eventually reaching the 160-170 kt range, effectively doubling. The effect on the refits would be minimal anyway, given that it would take three years or so to expand for two more slipways, by which time a sizable portion of the refitting will be completed.
On Christmas Day, a nice present for the crew, ESF Alpha returns to Earth. It was four in the morning, so that they had the day and quite a bit longer to enjoy. It was expected that sometime in early February of next year all would be ready again for a prolonged voyage to the systems beyond Luyten 726-8. There would be a bit of an overlap here as Bravo will probably arrive a couple weeks before Alpha departs. They've got a longer stay ahead of them, of course.
EARTH
October 10 -- 4x Caldwell 84i finished, another four begun.
October 27 -- The third Ticonderoga 82 base departs, in sections of course, for Mercury. The initial run(500) of the new Interceptor missiles is completed. For now the ordnance factories go quiet waiting for Frozen Vengeance to proceed further with more specific details.
October 29 -- The first Fletcher 84i is finished, and another begun.
November 10 -- C. Mitchell & Co. naval SY opens.
December 11 -- First two South Carolina 84i ships are finished. For the most part two is all that has been needed, occasionally a third. The Navy wants at least six, to provide more capability for colonization.
December 26 -- Commercial SY Kaverner-Massa is christened. It was tasked to handle the Portland and Gato classes. The new Gatos were deemed a higher priority.
December 28 -- The first of the new Iowa tankers is ready and heads to Callisto.
COLONIAL DEVELOPMENTS
November 5 -- Construction of the third of eight Ticonderoga 82 sensor bases, this one on Mercury is begun.
RESEARCH
** November 23 -- Testing of the new large power plant, the GEI GCF 5400, is completed by Norris Gunterman.
PERSONNEL
December 30 -- Gov. Yadira Desousa has become an accomplished terraformer, obviously a private study matter campagining for a post on Mars or Luna as he's currently on the mining outpost at Halley's Comet.
