Mobile Suit Gundam: Pax Iove (An Original Gundam AU Advisorquest)

[X] HIEDS wants to develop an experimental wake particle condenser.

The Toypurina headquarters of Hermes Integrated Energy, PCCS, could easily be a museum. Under Osmanoğlu, it nearly was, as she sought to buy the building and convert it to a more official monument to the rise and fall of Earth's colonial ambitions; in the end, she settled for the spaceport and surrounding infrastructure, and HIEDS paid her for the privilege.

Built to be as much an exhibit as an office building under the exacting eyes of AGH's "showcase engineers", the entire structure is patterned after a Penning trap, with the entrance hall taking the place of the safety locks. Instead of bolt threading, the golden ring around you is marked with an ornate depiction of the history of antimatter, with a disproportionate emphasis on HIE's role - though HIE's corporate leadership have been scoured from the engravings, and only the acid stains and the smiling face of Mayuga at the very top remain.

Glass-lined hallways wind through the building; before the Union, these would be where visiting dignitaries would be escorted to view "Quaoar's great minds at work"; perhaps at first they were, but as Kunwarismo started to rot from the top, the HIEDS Hall of Antimatter was mostly staffed by students taking petty wages to sit behind faux-wooden desks and act professorial, while all the real work was done with more privacy and less restrictive policies on visible stimulant use.

Today, those exhibition halls are still meant for "public outreach", serving as conference halls and sites for public demonstrations - or school trips, likely the reason you pass a the gaggle of children and their teacher, who hastily points you out to a chorus of... well, mostly children continuing to talk about everything but what their teacher wants them to. You smile and wave and continue down the glass halls towards the one hall with its blinds drawn and a small line of security staff outside.

Coffee-stained but surprisingly comfortable vinyl armchairs circle a ring of faux-marble tables, themselves surrounding a raised dais and a holographic display. The rest of the invitees are already assembled, and the HIEDS team are huddled at the centre of the room, whispering to each other just softly enough that you can't make them out. As more eyes swivel to track you across the room, you snatch a pair of scones from a passing tray, and find your seat at an empty table. The first speaker steps up a few seconds after you sit down, and as the lights darken, words and images take shape in the air over her head.

Keeping up with the presentation: Hypatia Learning, Breakpoints 20/50/80

To put it kindly, the presentation has some rough edges. The project lead - a scruffy woman who looks barely past thirty - trails off at several points in her introduction, needing a loud cough from one of the other team members to push her back on track. It's clear that many sections are taken almost verbatim from internal memos, and assume much more familiarity with the project's history and the details of impulse theory than you and your team can boast.

As the presentation moves to the underlying theory, the woman's face lights up and she leaps into an excruciating dive into theories of space-time structure that you only half remember from grad school. You're a scientist, but you're a captain first, and your understanding of impulse theory and wake fields is fundamentally rooted in the idea of making ships move. You can piece together what "intra-field interaction" means, but the presenters go through their equations far too quickly for you to make any detailed sense of them; and while you know intellectually that nothing HIEDS is doing is anywhere close to being at naval scale, you can't decouple their figures for field density from the echo of nav-hazard klaxons.

The theory discussion winds down with their experimental figures for the test unit. In terms of power output, it's... unremarkable. Nothing comes close to antimatter for power density, but for a prototype, it's surprisingly competitive with hot-fuel fusion cells without the need for conduits - which would be enough to pursue it in of itself, except that the alternative is bringing high-density wake particles on board your ships. A wake shield breach in the wrong place is already a mission-kill; from the deer-in-headlights look of the presenters when you ask about the effects of a shipboard condenser failure, plasma breaches might be the devil you know.

Reading between the lines: Hypatia Intrigue vs. HIEDS Diplomacy

Then they get to the implementation of the test unit, and you're both glad that you can follow along with the presenter, and concerned about the status of the project. The sometimes disjointed nature of the theoretical presentation is given new context with the discussion of the early prototypes - three speakers for three different models, emphasising different strengths and weaknesses. The disjointed theory is in part because they're trying to stitch together three different experiments as part of a single project; did the original team have a schism, or was the proposal consolidated from different internal efforts?

You suspect the latter, if only because of the haphazard stitching of the theoretical work. It's clear that they've each individually observed usable data, and developed a theoretical model for it, but fitting the models together is significantly more problematic. That's not really your office's concern, as much as finally unifying impulse theory would be a grand feather in your cap, but when those theoretical lines start blurring over into practice, you might need a sterner hand on the tiller.

The one light in the darkness is when the engineering representative steps up. A lot of the difficulties in the implementation, if he's to be believed, were from the original project's attempts to fit condensers to the existing power infrastructure of the Flechette. Expanding to a larger system - unspoken but clearly, a system that would be designed for their condenser, with their input - would eliminate much of the reliance on exotic materials that hamstrung their first prototypes. With the new specs, they've moved past bespoke test units to the production of eleven early production models. This run incorporates parts of each of the proposed models, and is put together surprisingly smoothly; the metaphorical fault lines of the early prototypes are still present, but thankfully don't translate to physical faults that would jeopardise operations.

Assessing a prototype: Hypatia Stewardship, breakpoints 20/40/70

The prototypes aren't perfect. They're not cheap, either, and you're sure that HIEDS will leave your office holding as much of that bill as you can. They didn't push the envelope; they probably couldn't even agree on what envelope to push, as a prediction from one of their disparate models might translate into a nasty corner case for the others. There's plenty of space to build on it, both literally and metaphorically, and you expect to see multiple proposals to do so before the prototypes even leave the building.

The prototypes aren't perfect, but they're not supposed to be. They're not perfect, but they're yours.

When you were just one of a number of persons of tertiary interest, you might have slipped out of the hall the back way, but now you'll be expected to stay for the public-facing part of the event. You shake a great deal of hands and agree to a great deal of nothing as it seems HIEDS parades all of their senior staff in front of you, until lunch is finally served and your sandwich wrap provides a socially acceptable conversation deterrent.

Of course, as HIEDS makes a show of your presence, that inevitably will invite people you need to talk with in more detail...

During the reception, you end up in conversation with...
[ ] A senior representative from Liberty-Opportunity-Autonomy.
[ ] Pomelo Veight, chair of Deneb-Veight and wearer of many other hats.
[ ] The director of the NTCOO, de facto ambassador of Pluto.
[ ] Rajesh Kreimhilding, your predecessor, now retired.
[ ] An elderly man in a faded dress uniform you can't quite recognise.

* * *

So here's our first technology. Research projects will produce technologies with various advantages and flaws. Intrinsic traits are essential to the system and can't be removed; further research or more practical experience from deployments can mitigate flaws or strengthen advantages as institutional knowledge improves. I'll probably do a separate Informational post on how I'm handling technologies as discrete conceptual Things; the big takeaway is that lower star ratings are more likely to malfunction and cause incidents, but higher stars mean that the technology is more developed and less your business.