2046
Colonizing Titan
Jan. 3rd – The first colonists arrive at Titan, which has enough infrastructure to support 70,000 now. 50,000 are unloaded from the Voliva colony ship within a couple days, and it’s official – humanity is no longer bound to earth alone! It’s taken 21 years for SPACE to establish a human colony, and so Titan enters the history books.
January – Jensrud and Voliva have already dispatched trade freighters to Titan, leaping into action to gain economically from the new colony. Interestingly, both of these are a bit slower than our freighters.
Research & Development
Jan. 10th – Exactly one week after the events at Titan, Dr. Ignacio Bravo’s team unveils the most important scientific pronouncement since TN technology nearly two decades ago, and among the most significant ever.
Bravo’s team sets to work on gravitational sensors, an instrument suite required to detect if a jump point actually exists at a potential location. Armed with the information from the previous study, this will actually be a much quicker project and is expected to complete in a year and a
half. Work on jump engines will need to follow this, but getting a vessel ready to survey the potential jump point locations is clearly the first priority.
Aug. 12th – Dr. Cedrick Wormack’s team completes research into Very Large Fuel Storage module. These hold a million litres each, and are useful only on extremely large vessels. One lab was reassigned to Everette Snuggs’ work on the other end of the scale, Tiny fuel
storage tanks. The second is freed up for the next new project, Pebble Bed Reactors. This is a gateway project that may eventually lead to the a new generation of more powerful engines beyond our current standard, nuclear thermal propulsion. Dr. Rosemary Urenda gets her first project lead for this endeavor.
Commissioned Officers
Early May – A bit of a shakeup in the army as Brig. Gen. Willis Hindley is forced to retire for medical reasons. Col. Leland Mesecher takes over his command on an interim basis.
Late June – Ken McKay’s survey skill is up a bit to 17%.
July – Another bump in Ken McKay’s survey skill(18%).
Late September – Captain Louis Meola has died of natural causes. He was Survey Officer at Fleet HQ for over a decade, and was 47 years old. At present, there is not an available Captain to replace him. Claudio Offutt is transferred from the presently virtually-useless post at Operations to serve as his successor.
October – Warren Clark is commissioned.
Fleet Movement Initiative: 162
Bonuses: Fighter Ops(25%).
Personality Traits: Dynamic, inflexible and dogmatic.
Late November – India Rakes, governor of Comas Sola, hilariously announced a breakthrough in improving industrial production. You’re on a mining rock, governor ... I think you’re working on the wrong thing.
Earth
Early March – Gallicite is the fourth mineral to be exhausted on earth. With almost 25kt in the stockpile, limited usage, and about 170 tons coming in from the comets each year, this is a non-issue. Sorium will be the next to be depleted, sometime in the next three years.
June – Prospects on Titan lead to a surge in population growth on earth, as public confidence in the future of humanity grows stronger with each passing shipment. (I.e., Herbert Duling now has a 10% pop. growth bonus). Meanwhile, the first mine arrives on Titan, and 50,000 of the 70,000 unemployed there now have something to do.
July – It has become clear that more freighters are needed to keep up with the demand of more colonists being constantly shipped to Titan. With duranium supplies relatively steady at a solid 6kt, it is deemed a worthwhile use and the FT Southampton, third of the Fletcher II-x class, begins construction at the Tod & MacGregor. There begins to be some concern now at Fleet HQ about the sustainability of our fuel reserves, but with Machholz and Comas Sola bringing in almost 400t of sorium per year and over 10kt on earth, it’s not an immediate issue.
Sep. 16th – The Spruance-B colony ship begins construction, which will take nearly two years at the P&A Group Shipyard. It is rapidly becoming obvious that this is more of a ‘proving we can do it’ thing than something actually needed, as the civilian lines are shipping more to
Titan than we can.
Sol Survey Efforts
March – The GEV Amerigo Vespucci completes the last survey for now, scanning the comet Ikeya-Zang some 14+b km out because they were ‘in the neighborhood’ at one of the more distant asteroids. Ikeya-Zang contains three minerals, the most significant is maximum-
accessible corundium in the amount of over 81kt! This single-handedly more than doubles known deposits, and ensures that as the available sources elsewhere dwindle, there will be a place to go for expansion. It’s likely to be somewhere around a decade or more until Ikeya-Zang
is close enough for convenient investment, but it is still quite welcome news.
It will be decades until the other three extremely distant comets is close enough to bother scanning. The top two ground survey teams are still expected to take some time to finish surveying the distant asteroids.
Mining
November – A civilian mining complex has been established on Sedna. I tell you, these corporations are ambitious! We now have the option to either buy what they produce, or tax the shipping of it. We choose to buy, as this is the richest duranium find in the system and we’re
going to take as much of it as we can get our hands on. This will cost us 250k credits per year, and net us an extra 90t duranium. As we are running an annual surplus of over 13m, this is not at all a problem.
Summary
Titan now has approximately 270,000 citizens at year’s end, and more mines than they can operate. With corporate shipping booming there and elsewhere(i.e., Sedna), there is the first glimmer of hope for the unemployed on Earth, now numbering over 102 million. The growth is slowing, but it’s still rising at 12.46%. Ground survey efforts continue, with 57 of 64 completed.
Mining Report
Earth(220S/31A) – 6.48 kt annual yield, 19.4 efficiency
Machholz(0S/27.6A) – 2.17 kt, 63 eff.
Comas Sola(0S/10.2A) – 827 t, 65 eff.
Wolf-Harrington(0S/9.8A) – 689 t, 67 eff.
Venus(0S/6A) – 172 t, 24 eff.
Sedna(1 CMC) – 90t, 9 eff.
Reinmuth(0S/1.8A) – 88 t, 47 eff.
Schaumasse(0S/1.8A) – 72 t, 36 eff.
Titan(5S/0A) – 16 t, 6 eff.
Duranium – 5.7 kt stockpiled, 2.089 kt annual yield
Neutronium – 2.85 kt, 480 t yield
Corundium – 604 t, 460 t yield
Sorium – 10.13 kt, 426 t yield
Earth’s fuel reserves are at 27.5 million litres and still growing a bit. Long-term sorium is a concern and the refineries consume 790t a year, so it’s definitely in our interest to keep growing the amount of that we produce. As for the others, we could use twice as much duranium as we
are currently producing, and 70% of what we are getting still comes from the dwindling deposits on earth. Neutronium is actually pretty decent for what we need, and we are still ‘catching up’ to the corundium reserves with only about six months supply for converting mines left now.
