2038Early Feb. – The JupSat team completes it’s survey of Callisto. They found a major Uridium deposit(2.53mt) but only 0.1 accessible. The team heads to Carpo next. No word yet from the Venus team.
Small asteroid deposits continue to be found, but nothing significant yet.
Feb 26th – Ignacio Bravo’s team completes work on Cryogenic Transport.
March 3rd – The final piece of the puzzle clicks into place as the CNT-25-4 engine prototype is approved for production. Soon afterward, the engineers come up with four new blueprints ...
Essex II - class Geological Survey VesselSpeed: 1136 km/s(16.7 times faster than the current Essex)
Range: 35.9 billion km(5.8 times further, the entirety of the system is now within it’s reach)
Size: 2200 tons(40% smaller)
Cost: 185(8% cheaper)
Lexington II - class Shuttle TransportSpeed: 1388(17.8 times faster)
Range: 43.9 billion(6.2 times farther)
Size: 1800(43.8% smaller)
Cost: 64.2(6.1% cheaper)
Spruance - class Colony ShipTwin CNT-25-4 Engines and capacity for 50,000 colonists in cryostasis.
Speed: 295 km/s – Saturn is a 5-6 week trip each way, approximately.
Range: 4.7 billion(there’s nothing habitable that far away, so more fuel would be redundant at this point).
Cost: 654.6, takes nearly two years to build
Size: 16,850
Fletcher-class Freighter15,000 tons of cargo space for carrying ... whatever, twin engines
Speed: 257
Range: 2.7 bkm – enough to go to Saturn and back nearly twice.
Cost: 180.4
Size: 19,400
The Fletcher was the one that really got debated a lot here. It would be nice to design one that could reach the outer edges of the system but to do that in a reasonable time frame, even quad engines wasn't enough and the cost etc. really started going through the roof ... it was decided that a freighter going that far really needs to wait until the next generation. Crawl before we can walk.
They also wanted to call it the Enterprise. Really, a freighter? No. Just no.
March – Nothing found on Carpo or Sinope. Jupiter is pretty much a dead planet to us, resource-wise.
April – Tod & MacGregor has expanded to 20k capacity.
June – Boronide deposits are depleted on Earth. It’s not being used much right now, and with almost 10k in reserve, it’s not something to get concerned about. Yet.
LC Roger Wilco graduates – Fleet Movement Initative 210, 10% pol. reliability, 15% fighter combat, 20% mining, 10% figher operations, 10% intelligence, 20% logistics. The multi-talented Wilco is expected to do great things, astronomy geek, candid, good judge of character, motivated.
Sam Baker's crew training is now up to 100.
Late August – FT Victoria, first ship in the Fletcher class, completed. Retooling begins for the Spruance class(this would later turn out to be a miscalculation, more freighters should have been built first).
Oct. 20 – Ouellet Shipping lauches Ouellet small class 1 freighter ... it's nearly twice as fast as the Fletcher
.
Nov –
ST Wayne sets course for Titan as the JupSat team will next complete work on the Saturn moons, hoping for a better result than was found in Jupiter. Incredibly, this journey is expected to last only 11 days. They arrive on the 22nd.
Mid-December – The Venus team completes it’s survey, and finds nothing new. This is disappointing, but rather expected. They are sent back to Earth, and from there they will work on surveying the several asteroid finds that the survey vessels have pinpointed so far.
As the year ends, P&A Group Shipyard reports it is ready for the Essex II vessels to begin to be built. Two will be constructed concurrently, the
Amerigo Vespucci and the
Lief Ericson. Also, ?
Sam Baker improves his training again to 125, and
Ken McKay’s political reliability is now up to 10%
** OOC: At this point the updates will slow down in pace a fair bit. Partly because the next week or so is heavy on work for me, partly because as more and more things are going on it will take a little longer and I need to be methodical and make sure all the ships and production orders are doing what they need to be doing. I'm also going to change the reporting a bit starting with the next one to make it easier to follow what all is happening on an annual basis.