[ ] Peak 66 Aerospace Plant (Phase 3) (C)
Cord-Hislop Aerospace are looking to begin a much larger operation than you had initially anticipated, laying out ambitious plans for a large aerospace production facility, equipped with multiple production lines, testing and maintenance bays, significant short-term on-site habitation blocks, and a dedicated cargo terminal so their manufacturing doesn't interfere with Port Hanshan's regular operations. It will require a significant and concentrated investment, but thanks to the scale of the project, it will be able to generate value before it is fully completed.
(Progress: 277/250 - 35 Resources per die) (-2 Power, -2 Cargo)
(Cord-Hislop Aerospace: +1P, +1F)
After last month's poor showing, with work efforts massively cut short due to poor weather, the majority of the necessary materials were produced and stored on site for when work could resume. As the winds died down and visibility returned, crews set to work with gusto, completing the third stage of construction with time to spare and taking some initial steps towards the fourth stage as well.
(Progress carried forward)
[ ] Southern Hanshan Spaceport Expansion Program (C)
The Southern Hanshan Spaceport may have only just gotten up and running, but you see no reason to not make contingencies for the eventual reality that it will become inadequate in the face of growing space traffic in future. Fortunately, that contingency isn't a particularly difficult one to plan - just build another spaceport, not far from the first one, extend some tram lines, and you've doubled Southern Hanshan's spacelift capacity.
(Progress: 582/500 - 25 Resources per die) (+16 Cargo, -2 Housing)
Without constant snowfall and freezing blizzards to slow their pace, work has also resumed on the expansion to the existing spaceport in Southern Hanshan. Unlike the original spaceport at Port Hanshan proper, and the first phase of the Southern Hanshan Spaceport, the cradles and loading bays here have been designed with the economic realities of Southern Hanshan in mind - meaning, they've been optimised for better loading and unloading of cargo from bulkier freighters and transports, as opposed to optimising for passenger offloading as past designs have.
Though it isn't likely to make a meaningful difference to the cargo volume that can pass through the spaceport, it should, you and your designers hope, help ensure that the actual manual work of unloading is easier and safer for all involved.
[ ] Ahial Munitions Plant Expansion (C)
The Ahial Syndicate, broadly speaking, can be divided into two feuding sects - those who believe the company should continue its current focus on bespoke and high-quality craftsmanship, and those who want to shift focus to bulk weapons manufacturing. For reasons somewhat opaque even to you, the former group appears to be rallying on Noveria, and accordingly, the company has put in a formal request for a significant expansion to their existing facilities to accommodate the influx of new workers.
(Progress: 198/300 - 15 Resources per die) (-2 Power, -1 Housing)
(Ahial Syndicate: +1P, +1F)
Ahial's planned plant expansion takes a lot of design notes from the work already performed on site, with the bulk of the work being a near exact mirror-flip of their existing facilities, with some office space given up for more workshops and recreational spaces.
Being a fairly straightforward construction, typical of the turian brutalist style Ahial embraces, construction work moved along at a relatively good pace, with crews working through initial foundations and the majority of the first two floors without issues. Though not yet complete, the building is well underway and expected to be relatively easy to finish.
[ ] Peak 52 Tech Park (Phase 3) (C)
Alit Ves intends to establish a large tech plant for the design, development, testing, and manufacturing of new devices and gadgets. They hope that by concentrating all development into a single location, they can both improve the efficiency of the product cycle and more reliably ensure the security of their staff and their property. A tech plant on their desired scale would necessarily be both large and expensive, but individual elements could be brought online and made to turn a profit before construction completes.
(Progress: 266/250 - 35 Resources per die) (-2 Power, -1 Cargo)
(Alit Ves: +1P, +1F)
The last few production machines and conveyor belts are shipped in and relocated to Peak 52 early in the month, and once your teams get the bulk of the heavy lifting, Alit Ves' own techs step in to wrap up the final bits of work themselves, leaving your teams free to move on to the final stage of construction.
(Progress carried forward)
[ ] Beckmann Financial Investment Office
Beckmann Financial is a minor human financial firm making big waves for their willingness to supply human money to alien firms, in a variety of fields. They want to establish an investment office on Noveria. Relying heavily on a particularly powerful suite of data analysis computers and connected by hardline to the Hanshan Stock Exchange to maximise potential trading values, fulfilling their request will require significant technical expertise.
(Progress: 147/150 - 15 Resources per die) (-2 Power, -2 Network)
(New Corporation: Beckmann Financial (+1P, +2F) )
When originally constructed, Port Hanshan was festooned with an abundance of highly modular office spaces designed such that any kind of research lab or office could be constructed with relative ease within Port Hanshan's walls. Only now, after years of expansion, are you beginning to feel the limits of the space set aside for this usage in decades prior.
The Beckmann Financial office suite takens up a large chunk of the free space in the Upper Corporate District, with several floors dedicated to the Earth-based group. The furnishings and equipment they have requested, whilst not standout in price, rarity, or quality, do prove somewhat frustrating due to a number of shipment delays, but they ultimately arrive and are installed with ease.
Though the offices are largely set up and ready for use, Beckmann themselves have had some issues in arranging relocations for their staff, and expect it to be some time before they're ready to open their doors.
(Action will auto-complete next turn)
[ ] Kantor Robotics Plant Expansion (C)
Though the galactic stigma against batarian operations within Citadel Space is less intense than that against the quarians, it is undeniable that legitimate batarian groups often struggle to achieve footholds in Citadel Space compared to their peers. Despite their prestige, Kantor Robotics are evidently no exception, as they have requested an expansion of their Noveria facilities in order to facilitate a higher level of on-site construction, in response to breakdowns in contract negotiation within Citadel space.
(Progress: 204/300 - 15 Resources per die) (-2 Power, -1 Housing, -1 Cargo)
(Kantor Robotics: +2P, +1F)
Like the Ahial Plant, the expansion work performed for Kantor Robotics is more an extension of their existing facilities than anything new or groundbreaking - taking cues from the work done to improve their prototyping labs, the new facility has been deliberately subdivided into a multitude of smaller workshops with removable walls that allow workers to relocate and reconfigure their workspaces as required or preferred.
Fortunately, with the enhancements to Noveria's own manufacturing capabilities, many of the more basic machining tools you once would have needed to have delivered can now be produced on-world. Though you'll still need to ship in a few of the more specialised tools, and those deliveries will take some time, it's certainly made things much easier.
[ ] FPC Consultancy Office
Fedali Professional Consultants are a recruitment and contracting firm whose entire business model revolves around snapping up university graduates, giving them cursory training to ensure they're up to some nebulous 'standard', and contracting them out to other firms at graduate rates whilst paying the graduate themself far less, pocketing the difference. Fedali wants to open an office on Noveria, no doubt to make the most of the increasing spread of corporations on world to increase their clientele.
(Progress: 165/150 - 15 Resources per die) (-1 Power, -1 Network, -1 Housing)
(New Corporation: Fedali Professional Consultants (+1P, +2F)
Fortunately for your bottom line, the other projects underway in the Corporate District are equally simple for your staff to complete, with new office furniture and computer workstations being rolled out through much of what free space remains in the office-filled district, and whilst Beckmann's office is prevented from opening anytime soon due to staffing issues, Fedali and Nashan are both all too happy to move on world straight away.
Fedali's office staff is positively miniscule at the moment, but they've a long string of visa requests and property lease applications in hand when they arrive, with hundreds of freshly-graduated university students from across the galaxy set to arrive in the coming weeks.
[ ] Nashan Stellar Dynamics Design Office
Nashan Stellar Dynamics is a human corporation specialising in designing starship grade components - though, interestingly enough, not starships themselves. They market higher-quality parts to replace the stock parts provided by starship manufacturers, advertising their wares as a way to fully customise a ship to the desired needs of the operators. They have likely relocated in hopes of forming closer ties with Itavan and Cord-Hislop, both of whom they have mutually beneficial business relationships with already.
(Progress: 174/150 - 15 Resources per die) (-1 Power, -1 Network, -1 Housing)
(New Corporation: Nashan Stellar Dynamics (+1P, +2F)
Nashan Stellar Dynamics run a somewhat unique operation in that, unlike most of Noveria's businesses, they don't halt operations overnight, or even just slow them down as groups like Jaeto and Astra do. Instead, their workforce undergoes constant churn, with workers trading off six-hour shifts to keep the office fully staffed at all times.
You worry from experience that that decision may come back to bite them in the ass later, and will probably cause some minor issues with balancing infrastructural workloads, so you assign a couple of your newer staff members to keep an eye on their office's average power draw and network usage. After all, if they're going to be running at full capacity at all hours, you're damn well going to charge them fully for it.
[ ] Southern Hanshan Ground-Orbit Uplink Site (C)
Though one GOUS already exists in Southern Hanshan, a significant portion of network traffic is already rerouted to the more robust section of the network in Port Hanshan. A second transmission tower and accompanying infrastructure being built in Southern Hanshan would further decrease reliance on the infrastructure highway and allow for reduced latency for corporations and residents across Southern Hanshan.
(Progress: 354/300 - 20 Resources per die) (-2 Power, +16 Network)
By now, the process of constructing new Ground-Orbit Uplinks is well known to your Communications Infrastructure teams, and with Nomi'Laasal and her handpicked team of quarian experts on hand to assist with the fiddlier parts of the construction, such as crawling through wire ducts and calibrating the relay nodes, construction moves at a rapid pace.
Having already anticipated the work, both the Kaskadan Syndicate and Sannovi Industrial had already taken care to begin initial preparations for the work, and those preparations paid off, dramatically reducing downtime as needed supplies were not produced on demand but rather wheeled out from storeyards where they had been placed not a month before.
The tower is completed several days before the month is up, and though still undergoing final testing, should be fully operational soon.
[ ] Gazagar Autocannons
After some terse negotiations between ERCS and Kantor Robotics, the batarian firm has agreed to pass along the blueprints they dubiously acquired from their contacts within the Hegemony. The Gazagar Autocannon features little in the way of novel technologies, and is far from revolutionary in its design, but small, consistent improvements have been made to basically every component, in comparison to other autocannon models currently on the market, including those that make up Port Hanshan's current, admittedly minor, ground-to-air defence network. ERCS believes that a new weapon deployment such as this would help ease tensions, with the current string of colonial attacks in the Traverse and Terminus.
(Progress: 190/100 - 10 Resources per die) (Increased Port Hanshan Security)
The rollout of the Gazagar Autocannons, once it gets started, is blisteringly fast, with ERCS engineers ripping up old weapon emplacements across Greater Hanshan and often replacing them on the same day.
The new autocannon batteries should have a faster firing rate and greater payload than older models, providing a more consistent and reliable defence against aircraft that are able to bypass the orbital GARDIAN satellites.
Of course, Port Hanshan's guns have never been fired outside of the munitions tests, the hypothetical Terminus raids that justified their existence never materialising, but ERCS seem nonetheless satisfied with their new toys.
(ERCS: +1F)
[ ] Peak 15 Security Overhaul
Since returning to Noveria, Binary Helix has been maintaining a low profile and working to understand the full scope and scale of the disaster that unfolded early in 2183, and, more importantly, what of the ruined project can be salvaged and recycled for new uses. However, before they feel comfortable working on some of the presented opportunities, manager Quentus Urvan has requested a number of security enhancements be made to their facilities to prevent any other violent outbreaks.
(Progress: 164/200 - 15 Resources per die)
(Binary Helix: +1P, +2F)
Security overhaul operations at Binary Helix prove a relatively tame affair, with ERCS consultancy teams wasting very little time to produce a number of suggested improvements and design considerations. Apparently, the rachni outbreak was a popular training exercise for their teams, and both the quality and quantity of their suggestions seem to reinforce this.
Once the plans are finalised, work begins with little fanfare. Walls are removed, ventilation ducts are remodelled and reinforced, some corridors are restructured, and decades-old automated turret emplacements are replaced with top-of-the-line modern weapons with vastly improved firepower and target-acquisition protocols.
Binary Helix are quick to assure you that they don't
intend to let their future research projects devolve to the point that these measures will be necessary, but nonetheless appreciate the swift start.
[ ] Recruitment Drive
By tapping into the vast corporate network the NDC has access to and making it known that opportunities exist, a number of skilled workers, white and blue collar both, can be brought to Noveria and slotted into the workforce. Additional hands will increase the amount of work a given department can do at one time, and with luck (and a big enough recruitment budget), you may be able to headhunt some of the best workers from around the galaxy to fill the ranks.
UPDATE: By leveraging his own reputation and contacts within the Migrant Fleet, Nil'Zannis may be able to attract quarian workers, allowing the NDC to benefit from their technical skills just as they benefit from the NDC's wealth and prestige.
-[ ] Quarians (35 Resources per die) (-10 Resources per turn) (-25 ES) (Chance for new trait)
The latest wave of recruitment, like the last, turns out a fairly healthy body of quarian workers, primarily Pilgrims but with a few more veteran workers amongst them. Most seem to be integrating into your existing teams nicely, probably in large part due to the number of quarians already in the organisation having normalised their presence around the office.
Of particular benefit is how much the expansion allows you to break up existing work formations and fill in gaps with new blood - you take the opportunity to section off some of your more senior administrative staff for direct project oversight roles, which you hope will allow you some additional flexibility in how you complete your tasks.
Unfortunately, the surge in recruitment is swiftly followed by a notice from Admiral Rael'Zorah, indicating that there may ot be many opportunities to tap the Migrant Fleet for additional workers in future. Though the note doesn't go into too much detail, it seems to imply that the Admiralty Board or Conclave are preparing for some kind of major conflict, and are being more specific in how they allow young members of the fleet to pursue their Pilgrimage. Unprecedented as the choice may be, you have little ability to argue it. It seems the quarians you have will be all the quarians you get, for the time being.
(Trait Upgraded:
Pilgrims -
+2 +4 +6 Bonus to Heavy Industry, Advanced Industry, and Infrastructure)
(+1 Free Die)
===
All righty. Let's see if we can't get back into the swing of things. I will be updating the Corporations and Current Status posts imminently.
