For a Moment, There Was Hope [Space Vehicle Design Quest]

It's June when you land in Kazakhstan for the practical demonstration, the only part of your hiring process that truly matters. You land in Astana, taking a train, a bus, and an extremely talkative taxi to the Musabayev office in Baikonur.

You're fortunate, and witness the day's launch as the city crests the horizon. The site of a rocket streaking into the atmosphere is enough to shut up your cab driver for a few minutes, and you get to enjoy the sight of the world's first true spaceport in operation.

Then you're there: The Musabayev Industrial Co-Op. A sprawling complex of repurposed Roscocosmos facilities, new office buildings, and state of the art manufacturing centers run by Kazakhstan's largest co-op..

As a newcomer, it is a child in the process of being born. Everything is half-formed, promising, shepherded along by expectant engineers and bureaucrats and test-crews as a collective midwife. You are guided into a warm conference room, the walls painted with Ahmedzai's Mars Ferdowsi, a now famous vision of a terraformed mars. There, a trio of interviewers and a pair of curious engineers watch as you attach a cybernetic limb to the stump of your left arm. Then you step out of the present and into history.


The Mark One Neuro-Rig represented fifteen years of your sweat and tears. Painstaking research, built upon a thousand dead-ends from the early twenty first century, with few resources and no test subject save yourself. It was a sea-change in user interface for mechanical devices, interfacing directly with the brainstem and cervical vertebrae to translate thought into action.

But more importantly: It was simple, reliable, and scalable.

While still in its infancy, the Neuro-rig could reduce enormous panels of displays and controls to a handful of selector levers. A properly trained pilot enjoyed an intuitive sense of their machine enjoyed by no other control scheme. The primary constraint, the reason no-one else had bought into the Rig, was that it worked best with limbed vehicles. Questionable on the ground, worthless in the air, but quite functional in space.

Musabayev's hiring team was enchanted. They hired you on the spot, and introduced you to your next surprise. You were not being assigned a team, but offered a choice of which to join.

Musabayev's project teams were ad-hoc groups who'd decided to tackle a contract or problem that interested them. Outside of core business functions, they were fairly anarchic and tended to have a core team of specialists most invented in the project while stealing other staff from each other based on needs (Or perceived needs). It was an anarchic, strange structure, doomed to collapse when the company came under real pressure.

But for now, it was a refreshing change of pace from strict corporate command.

There were three active project teams in Musabayev, each of which could make use of the Neuro-Rig.

First was Team Three. They were in the process of designing an Asteroid Mining Vehicle from scratch. The Asteroid Belt was the largest source of raw material in the solar system not bound by the terrors of a gravity well, and extant harvesting operations had proven woefully unprepared and cost-inefficient for the sheer scale of Solar System colonization. Team Three was aiming to create a vehicle that would be compatible with extant refinery station and cargo ships established at Vesta, potentially saving billions over more comprehensive overhaul packages. Unfortunately, this meant extremely strict constraints: The vehicle would need to be light, able to manage enormous ore payloads, and be as multi-function as possible due to the evolving situation in the Belt.

Second was Team A. They were in the process of designing a Near-Sun construction vehicle. Planned laser-propulsion and energy-transfer networks relied on an enormous amount of solar energy near Mercurian orbit, and the Quebecois government was now taking bids to refit their aging fleet of first generation construction shuttles. Unfortunately, Mercurian orbit is hot, irradiated, and isolated, necessitating a machine with expensive safety features, minimal maintenance load, and enough luxuries that the crews wouldn't go mad during ten month shifts.

Finally, Basilisk Team was working aiming to bid on a South Korean Low-Orbit Debris Sweeper that they could then sell as a general-purpose spaceborne debris cleaner. Construction at LAgrange 2 had already revealed that space construction was going to be embarrassingly messy, and a cost-effective, long-loiter platform capable of spotting microscopic debris clouds could be an extremely long tail product.

Which Team Do You Join?

[ ] Team A [Near-Sun construction vehicle. Criteria: Safety (+), Comfort (+), Maintenance (-) .]

[ ] Basilisk Team [Spaceborne Debris Sweeper. Criteria: Cost (-), Endurance (+), Sensors (+).][

[ ] Team Three [Asteroid mining vehicle. Criteria: Payload (+), Utility (+), Weight (-).]


Explanation: Criteria

Criteria are the factors on which a design's success will be judged. These will change between projects. If a Criteria has a + next to it, you want the final number to be high. If a Criteria has a - next to it, you want the final number to be low.

You assign yourself to Team Three almost immediately. It's a clear pick to show off the Neuro-Rig, and fits your specialty best besides.

Once onboarding is finished, you find yourself working beneath team leader Sholpan Nabiyev. Nabiyev is a tall Kazakh woman built like a powerlifter. She brings her two youngest children into work every day and has a magnetic personality. She slots you into her team like you were always there, swiftly integrating you into Team Three.

The technical details are easy, compared to the vastly different work culture. It's an almost joyfully inefficient approach, more concerned with keeping everyone in-the-loop and engaged than making efficient forward progress. There are votes often, and regular discussions about what best practices ought to be for future projects.

Meanwhile, the actual project is a cutting-edge spaceborne vehicle currently titled 'Abilkhan'. You've helped design nearly a dozen of those, and it's easy to slot in. Abilkhan is currently an ovoid, single-person pod designed to work in tandem with unmanned drones. The extant structure of equipment hardpoints and cargo scoop is currently being tossed as incompatible with neuro-rig design, and the team has opted to roll all the way back to power generation as to take full advantage of the new design.

Your prospective asteroid miner is too small for a proper reactor, and the belt is too remote for efficient solar power. That leaves you two reasonable, economical options for a power source and one deeply unreasonable option.

The first, and a favorite of your engineers, is a solid state battery. Modern solid states are efficient, long-lasting, and your crew are skilled at making them efficiently and at scale. Solid states also mean the vehicles don't need proper refueling as part of their maintenance cycle, letting even the smallest prospecting vessels carry a miner in their cargo bay.

Unfortunately, batteries are heavy as hell. Decoupling the vehicle's water cycle from its reactor means weight must be dedicated both to life support and power generation as separate systems. Batteries are also less weight efficient than fuel cells, resulting in a higher base mass.

While this would normally push you towards a fuel cell as the obvious solution, Musabayev didn't inherit Roscocosmos' fuel cell production lines when it was founded. As such, any fuel cells will either need to be imported, or have an extremely expensive production line built to task.

A traditional, regenerative water fuel cell would provide immense weight savings and standard performance. Importing fuel cells would be expensive and bump your per-unit cost, while starting a production line simply wouldn't be worth it. Traditional water fuel cells are near obsolete, and if you pick them this is likely to be the only project that uses them, ruling out creating an assembly line.

Modern regenerative fuel cells are a significant upgrade over the classic: Newer membrane assemblies and compressors greatly improve the efficiency and power output of fuel cells, allowing for more overall power generation at the same weights as older cells, which in turn allows for hauling larger loads and adding more power-intensive systems.

Unfortunately, modern fuel cells are in their infancy. They're expensive per unit, almost mandating you go through the expense of setting up an assembly line. While you'd normally be able to spread that cost between the other projects, Team A and Basilisk are both using solar power for their projects. As such, using modern fuel cells would nearly half of your project budget, though they'd be a company asset in the long term.

Power Supply

Current Budget: 20

[ ] Modern Fuel Cells [+1 Payload, +1 Weight. Establish fuel cell production line. 9 Budget.]

[ ] Classic Fuel Cells [+1 Weight. 4 Budget.]

[ ] Batteries [+1 Utility, +4 Weight. 1 Budget.]

Budget

Budget measures the funds you have for all stages of the development cycle. It does not necessarily reflect the final, per-unit cost of your design. You can spend a lot of money prototyping a very cheap end product.

Each project will have its own budget. As you are currently an erratically funded and governed semi-anarchic cooperative, funding will generally be tight, and even successful projects will see relatively modest budget growth.

You can go over your budget, but this will have significant consequences.