Purchases
1 Sea Dragon-RE
1 "Hephaestus" Orbital Construction Yard
1 Cloud Cutter II SSTO Space Plane
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Non-Action Launches
Sea Dragon-RE launches "Hephaestus" Orbital Construction Yard into Low Earth Orbit
Dragged out by a tugboat to a watery launch site, the Sea Dragon is pulled up to a vertical position, already loaded with its cargo as fuel is cracked on location and pumped into the vehicle.
With a spark of motion, a chemical inferno is birthed beneath the skyscraping motor. The noise blasts across the water in a tidal wave, shattering the waterline and rising on a pillar of fire. Shuddering through the atmosphere, the plasma sheath coats and cuts off communications before breaching into the vacuum and disgorging its portion of the Hephaestus station into the void.
Then again, then again. The launch of this titan makes a media sensation every time until the Hephaestus is assembled, proudly titanic in low earth orbit, awaiting materials and orders to construct.
Regular launches from a Cloud Cutter handle the resupply and maintenance of space-borne assets.
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Apotheosis Impactor Prediction
A small team of the best experts that can be trusted is assembled and given data and funding for massive computing arrays. Numbers are crunched, information is processed and slowly, answers begin to take form.
On the subject of the trajectory of the object when it will enter the system, and the bare few hours it will take to traverse it and impact. Based on the projected locations of bodies, it will plough straight through a few hundred comets, barely feeling their impact before arriving in the inner system. Its gravity will be felt for such a short period of time that its effect on the orbits of other bodies will be negligible.
The interesting aspect of its trajectory is something the scientists are somewhat unsure of. Its radiation belt is large enough that its exact position is somewhat uncertain. If the object is dead centre, the impact will be cataclysmic in the extreme. Violent enough that the shrapnel from the collision will tear the moon apart, likely scattershot Mars and other nearby bodies with hyper-velocity rocks. There's no reasonable way to survive this with current means beyond pure random chance.
Luckily, however, they place the odds of it being there as low and, more practically, if it is there, there's nothing to be done that isn't praying.
In better news, the object is likely not in the dead centre and is creating an uneven wave. If luck holds, it will be at the exterior of the projected possible area, and simply "skim" Earth, tearing half the world off and pushing its orbit in the direction of impulse. If we are still lucky but less so, it'll be a deflected impact, striking the Earth at an angle that transfers massive energy but ends in a violent billiard ball effect. This will violently alter its orbit, likely drag the Moon along with it into a, in all likelihood, decaying solar orbit.
This may sound bad, however, the timeline on this solar decay is at least several millenniums, if not orders of magnitude more time before it grows terribly detrimental, much less the planet enters the Sun's corona in a meaningful sense.
The radiation belt is powerful, but in all instances except a direct, head on and violent impact, it will not lethally sterilise Luna of life, and with hardening, its effects should be minimal. In the event of a direct impact, it will provide a peaceful and instant end to everyone.
In terms of the object, the initial theory is enemy action. It's the easiest explanation and would make the most sense, though what pokes holes in it is the usage of an entire planet where a smaller, slighter and altogether stealthier weapon could work just as well.
The second theory is a supernova or similar having launched this object many hundreds, thousands or even billions of years ago. By now it would have recollected itself and solidified into a solid form, this places a cosmic insignificance to the event that makes many of the scientists uncomfortable in the extreme and leads to a few suicides among the small team.
Either way, the reasoning as to why this happened is so far in the past that it likely just doesn't matter. The object has likely been floating for eternity, any species that would theoretically have launched it is either millennia in the dust or so far beyond us that it still doesn't matter. The scientist team that discovered this has, by and large, poor home lives and exceptionally unstable mental health in the years after this discovery, resulting in further suicides and, thankfully, an easy silencing of the majority of them after their discoveries have been recorded.
One scientist is recorded as emotionally distant from the discovery and is assumed to be atypical in psychology, but seems to re-enter the workforce peacefully and respect the NDAs they were made to sign.
Discoveries made.
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Sea Dragon Testing and Media Coverage
The Sea Dragon is spun as a nostalgic return of sixties Americana. An era that still receives much attention in media and culture, it works well, plastering the news for months before launch and then, with a space construction yard being launched, is featured in thousands of broadcasts. Structural inspections go well and the first few test flights reveal terrible flaws in its guidance system which are ironed out before the public can observe it, luckily to no massive explosive incident.
Its effect is noticeable as online forums of discussion detonate into argumentation about the validity and use of such a design. At the same time, more traditional media continues its focus, having regular secondary displays and tangents on the matter, especially with the launch of the Hephaestus station.
Sea Dragon stability assured before launch. Propaganda opportunity is taken, American and American sphere interest in space travel increased.
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Lunar Effort Revival
Old files, now nearly a decade in the past, are cracked open and observed. Long-shelved designs for small-scale habitation are brought out and modified to current needs. The designs of a "small-scale habitat" are quickly fabricated on-site by engineers whilst the more difficult task of lunar landers is slowly assembled from a variety of designs, weight and cargo capacity prioritized.
A reusable lander is made, taking in designs from current spaceplanes and designs from the previous centuries United States Air Force Lunex project to create something that can land via engine power on the moon and, if needed, return its entire crew to Earth and land via gliding into the atmosphere, loading itself fully and being launched on a rocket again. It does not contain the fuel or thrust capacity to do much beyond that insertion burn or relocation across the lunar surface.
The lander is manufactured, and the specifications for said manufacture are recorded and publicized to our own personal records. It is capable of a twenty-ton landing on the Lunar surface but is so heavy nothing short of a Sea Dragon can lift it to the moon. Weighing in at a heavy hundred tonnes fully loaded, it packs enough ISRU equipment to furnish its crew and low-scale industrial equipment with what it needs to create an amount of fuel for operating its engines in the event that already present fuel supplies expire.
Naming it the "Lunar Mobile Outpost", commonly abbreviated to LMO to satisfy the need for acronyms, this will support small manned missions for up to one year at a time before the vessel needs repair and refit. The effects of radiation on astronauts are still to be practically proven, but if properly situated in a lunar crater.
This theory is rapidly put into motion at a dangerous pace, leading to a near-disastrous lunar landing due to instruments malfunction that was only averted by expert piloting and an amazing feat of fuel venting to reduce mass whilst burning throttle which was manually directed to full for deceleration, landing solidly in an impressive, photogenic way that belies the utter terror the crew experienced.
"Lunar Mobile Outpost" LMO Lander
Construction Cost: 500,000,000, USD
Fuel Cost (Liquid Hydrogen/LOX): 3,000,000
Weight-80 dry tonnes, 20 tonnes Landing Capacity
1 LMO Lander constructed, lands in late turn, will have to be ordered to return next turn, or face possible parts failure.
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Lunar Training Efforts
Before the landing, the astronauts go through harsh exercise regimes to become extraordinarily fit, whilst also practising manoeuvring techniques in vacuum and low gravity situations. They train with a variety of industrial equipment and rigorously exercise analysis, processing and maintenance techniques for their soon-to-be year-long home.
The results are satisfactory that, when the time comes for the mission, proves its weight in gold. They put to use their skills and, by second-to-second piloting, manage a landing where otherwise it would have been an utter disaster.
Training saves your LMO.
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Lunar Industrial Equipment
Without much practical time on target, the designs formed from the dozen committees vying for funding. In Situ Resource Utilization is a burgeoning field, but one that is getting massive focus as of now. Drills, processors, manned and unmanned options, but eventually the issue comes down to one, simple and easy fact.
Durability. The toughness of a machine exposed to the harshest environment we are currently present in is the principal decision-making factor, how long it lasts without maintenance, how difficult and expensive said maintenance is.
A few designs do not meet this standard, applying over-automatization and circuit work that does not withstand a pressure test in high orbit, being dusted with lunar regolith regularly until its circuitry rotted. Either a device with large amounts of automated operations based on an onboard computer must be completely sealed, or easy automation as a concept needs to be forgotten as any sort of long-term communication array is either expensive and difficult to construct, or too fragile to use.
This leads to the newest set of designs, equipment and toolkits which are, in contrast to the expected result of lunar colonisation, mainly mechanical with integrated power systems and substantial durability. Everything is built heavy, tough and thick and integrated with what is being referred to as a Standard Labour Vehicle, abbreviated to an SLV in common parlance.
It is large and heavy on Earth though just under of perceived mass on the lunar surface for its wearer. Supported by pneumatics that are kept sealed tight, most of the weight is unnoticeable and it is capable of significant feats of strength on the lunar surface. A few models are sent up to the base and used for months by the crew, establishing a theoretical lifespan of six months before the suit is, for a lack of a better term, shredded by the regolith.
It can mine, can haul, can crack small amounts of oxygen in situ and is largely unpowered, operating mostly via pneumatics and mechanical joints, having a dense storage battery which keeps the drills, scoops and environmental control systems operating to stop the suit from becoming a frozen stiff grave for its wearer.
Beyond that, the ISRU equipment developed by previous generations of scientists is still optimal to use, though, with the small data points of information gained, they can harden portions of it for the dangers of regolith.
Standard Labour Vehicle (SLV)
A very impressive exosuit that makes its wearer, on less than earth gravity, a one-man labour team. Drills, grinders, scoops and a dozen other pieces of useful machinery that can dig, channel, mine and lay the groundwork as well as modular attachment points for generators, more tools or anything we can invent when the need is presented.
Construction Cost: 20,000,000 USD
Maintenance Cost (If supplied from Earth): 150,000 USD
Weight: 500kg/SLV
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Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Practicalization
After the previous issues of researching this matter, a new, fresh start on the concept is begun. First off, the three possible options are looked into, solid, liquid and gas core reactors.
Solid core ones present the most reliably producible option, though they have lesser actual exhaust velocity than chemical rockets, the efficiency of said thrust is so much greater than fast and effective burns can be used that would drain the fuel from a traditional chemical rocket much too quickly.
Liquid cores are superior in performance, boasting increased exhaust velocity and, with appropriate engineering, increased fuel efficiency, but generally are more unstable, complicated to turn on and off as well as deeply disconcerting to anything behind them in a radioactive sense.
Gas core reactors are the peak of performance in this sense of raw projected numbers, but are generally infeasible due to the unfathomably complex engineering required. Its an infeasible technology barring a revolution in how we understand the physics of this interaction.
NTP technology practicalized. Two options are practically available.
Solid Core Fission Technology
Reliable, cheap by comparison and safe, it offers superior specific impulse and general efficiency at the cost of lacking true thrust capacity and needing long burns to perform velocity changes.
Liquid Core Fission Technology
Pushing at the cutting edge of science, these use liquid uranium in a chamber that is gyroscopically stabilized by rotation, through which fuel is pumped through and heated to extreme temperatures. It has a small loss of uranium fuel and is mechanically complex, but effective for its cost.
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Lunar Agricultural Revolution
Growing plants in the lunar soil is proven to be a doable task since the early twenty-twenties, but the practical application of this is harder, which is why we begin with the hardiest plant we currently have easy access to and which is a familiar foodstuff to us. Sending up a few dozen potato seed packets. The astronauts have a short-term greenhouse they set up outside of their habitat, rated to resist the regolith for a few months.
The potatoes do grow, but only after substantial fertilization and composting efforts on the behalf of the botanist that was sent along with the crew, they are weak and ill-grown, but with subsequent generations of potato growth and further treatment of lunar terrain, they get a few harvests out of the earth before containment is breached over a rest cycle for the botanist and terrifies the life out of the crew with atmospheric alarms, having done it a few hours early.
After that and the nutrition data gathered from it, fertilizer mixes are prepared, in situ composting methods researched and a hardened design is, taken advantage of solar replica lighting and controlled environments to grow mass quantities of food to feed large populations thanks to multilevel farming.
This, however, leads to one real issue. THere is a substantial lack of full animal protein in any diet. Fishes die in days, animals are infeasible to keep. There needs to be a drive to successful protein acquisition in space before any long-term survival becomes viable.
Lunar Farm Habitat
Temperature control, hydroponics and other solutions to perform agriculture on the lunar surface and eventually integrate lunar regolith into its process to vastly expand farming capacity. It produces a negligible amount of life support, but does process carbon dioxide well, allowing it to be reused rather than simply vented.
Cost: 55,000,000
Weight-20 Tonnes
Growth Capacity: Food for 100 individuals
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Lunar Runway Design
The Lunar Runway is remarkably simple. It's functionally a wire on a patch of steel that can decelerate a vehicle from several hundred meters per second to a stop over a few hundred meters without the fuel costs of doing that without an atmosphere to aerobrake.
The design is relatively simple, the issue is that it is cumbersome and heavy. Weighing in at a total of one hundred tonnes per two hundred tonnes halted, it needs to be collapsed in its fairing and would need to be landed precisely so as to be usable for resupply. However, if it were done so, we could save much of our Delta V, as it takes just as much energy to slow something down as it too to speed it up.
However, practically it's simple and rather quickly a heavy wire catch system is designed.
Lunar Runway
A collapsable metal runway that comes pre-fitted with a high-strength alloy wire which can withstand the immense strain and drag a vessel to a stop, given the tonnage to do so.
Cost/Ton: 40,000 USD
Weight/Catch Capacity: 1 Ton of weight per 2 Tonnes caught
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Metallic Hydrogen Metastability Attempts
The laboratory detonated, is the first word you get on the matter. Whilst the data of their research is electronically stored, the loss of high-energy chemistry expertise is mourned. They did indeed create metallic hydrogen. Using a diamond anvil and extremely high pressure, they were even making notable amounts of it, a few grams an hour.
However, the issue is that they could never contain it for an extended period of time. Cryogenic solutions did nothing. Keeping pressure just resulted in eventual detonation as the pressure became uneven due to mechanical stress at the sheer pressure needed. Electromagnetic solutions seemed to do nothing as well, with detonations happening.
Eventually, they decided to test a large pressure chamber, relying on multiple mechanical stress points which could be replaced independently of each other, but a bump by a foot to the bottom of the chamber by a janitor set off a few grams of it, which then reacted into the rest of the matter and detonated with a few dozen tonnes of force, vaporizing the entire laboratory and its staff.
Metallic Hydrogen proved to exist, wildly unstable.
Metallic Hydrogen
It is an incredible fuel source, and we even know how to make it. It detonates at the slightest provocation. The last large-scale experiment of it proved its viability of it. And also killed thirty people. It could produce results far beyond anything we currently have in practice, but scientists are unsure if it's even containable.
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Human Hibernation Experiment
With some amount of uncomfortableness, geneticists put to work CRISPR on a variety of human subjects which were acquired or volunteered depending on the area. Initially, there is a large number of deaths as bodies go into too deep a hibernation and expire, however, over the course of a year or two and perfecting it on those who are unlikely to be missed.
Eventually, by focusing on a secondary trigger rather than fasting, hibernation is started in individuals via exposure to a chemical substance, specifically, the artificially produced scent of Orris, a very rare scent that is tremendously uncommon and most people have never smelled it. With some very complex CRISPR interventions and a few more crippling genetic illnesses being sparked, a new generation of humans is created.
Ones that can be, with but a simple smell, induced into a coma within minutes that reduces nutrient intake needed to a bare minimum, arrests much cell division and generally is barely distinguishable from death in any real way. The procedure is incredibly cheap, being replicable easily and injected by syringe, it is going to be applied to any large movement of astronauts into space so as to make them easy to store and manoeuvre.
The vehicle invented to transport these people is fairly variable, designed in a modular way to suit needs as they come up, can contain cryptobiotic individuals in a tight space and feed them a nutrient and hydration mix through an intravenous injection site and be hermetically sealed with days of oxygen for easy transport in a vacuum.
Cryptobiotic Lunar Transport Module
A coffin made for one which can be mounted to any number of other ones to create a larger vehicle can fit one individual but needs a vehicle to transport itself beyond earth and land it. Any people transported with this option have the cryptobiotic gene and will, likely, transmit it to their descendants.
Cost: 2,500,000 USD/Unit
Weight: 1 Ton/Person
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Hemacrete Practicality Tests
Hemacrete is an old concept developed independently by many space programs, the peculiar mixture of human blood, lunar regolith and urine can produce an extremely tough substance that can be used to bolster lunar habitats easily and reduce the material cost for them significantly, or, more usefully, expand what can be done with already present materials.
However, the issue lies in producing this substance outside of the human body, as astronauts cannot afford the loss of focus and awareness blood loss would force upon them. As such, protein synthesis is looked into to replicate the serum albumin required for hemacrete production. Whilst traditional methods are unsuccessful, a young startup in biotechnology offers a solution.
By relying on biotechnology, they replicated the entire liver which produced minute amounts of it. By intaking knowledge developed for CRISPR on otherwise unrelated fields, they managed to institute genes for gigantism in the liver, causing it to grow in size immensely and produce more such substance before breaking down due to a lack of stability and easily produced growth mechanisms.
By replicating even more of the needed infrastructure, bone marrow, a bit of bone to contain it, a simple cardiovascular system over the course of a few years of massive funding and revolutions in biotechnology which has transferred old "organoid" technology into proper organs and then further beyond, a horrific monstrosity of an invention is created. Plated in crisp, clean high-grade polymer, there is a set of human lungs, a human heart, and a pile of bone marrow in a bone base that produce twelve litres of albumin an hour, each litre can be used to make a hundred kilogram of hemacrete, a useful amount.
Some describe this as a crime against all decency, but the single example sent up to the astronauts is used to create an entire home in less than a month as well as practically protect the LMO from lunar regolith by raising walls for it.
Coming prepackaged, we could ship hundreds of examples up to the moon if needed and land them easily with the LMO.
Helios Solutions Serum Albumin Production Unit
A clean white polymer exterior belies an interior of flesh, bone and gristle, all grown by science to furnish the needs of a burgeoning lunar colony. It hosts an engorged liver grown to inhuman proportions, fuelled by a set of lungs and a human heart working at extreme force, supplied by a pile of bone marrow in a misshaped bone base that all this rests on whilst in a "nutrient fluid" that keeps it fed.
Cost: 1,500,000 USD/Unit
Weight: 0.5 Tonnes/Unit
Production: 12L Serum Albumin/Unit/Hour
Food Cost: 5 individuals worth.
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Standard Void Cargo Container
A standard container unit is a reasonable idea and generally accepted as a good one. The process of making such a thing takes mere weeks and then simply devolves into years of jockeying until one is settled on, conveniently for the production of the LMO. It is a eight-metre long box that can be fit into the cargo bay of the LMO easily with room for quite a few more and lock readily, keeping its content still and unmoving to maintain their structural integrity in flight.
There's not much more to it, this increases the efficacy of space-borne transports by more efficiently using space, and is adopted and will be by all future designs unless something else is developed.
LMO Cargo capacity increased. Design maintained
Turn 3 will comes soon TM
AAA ITS DONE FUCK AAAA, this one fought me like a wild bull. Its out tho.
