The stars held something greater. They still do for those who can reach them.
This has been the subject of near-ancient myth and story, tales seemingly as old as the twin suns, eyes of yellow and blue, that rise and set on your world, the home you know as Menthelenis. In time, these traditions were eclipsed by science, but the feeling, deeply hidden though it may be, has always persisted throughout Menthelenis' sometimes tumultuous history, leading up to the current year of 1796 Post Resurgence.
But your people, your planet, have persevered, and the crowning achievement of nearly all the nation-states of your world, gathered into the United Confederation of Menthelenis, has been the culmination of your space program: the first completely orbital starship assembly station, the High Station Simberlein, named after a mythical blacksmith of the olden days.
You know the layout of your star system; besides the twin suns, S'Tal and Munthi, your largely temperate world, with its twin moons, is the 4th planet in a system of 10 split by two asteroid belts, 3 planets out of them considered habitable. There are even signs of advanced life on the furthest habitable planet from you, S'Tal-Munthi-6 in your records, though they've never decided to answer any signals you've sent their way. This little garden of worlds is walled in by 3 gas giants, one nearer to the suns and two past S'Tal-Munthi-6. The rest are largely uninhabitable due to various, usually extreme factors.
The achievement of activating High Station Simberlein has been a cause for celebration for weeks, and the Planetary Council caps off the merriment by decreeing that the collection of national space agencies and related branches of the military, having worked together to make the dream of space industry a breathtaking reality, be unified into a single organization that will take charge of Menthelenis' efforts in the solar system. The organization, however, needs one last thing before everybody fully gets to work.
It needs a name. It will be…
[ ] The Menthelenis Space Agency
[ ] The Menthelenis Space Force
[ ] The Menthelenis Star Command
[ ] The Menthelenis Confederacy Spacy
[ ] Write-in
With a name in mind, you will also need an emblem, a symbol to unite those scientists, soldiers, and engineers who come to work for your organization. (Feel free to submit a design for consideration! If none are submitted, a design will be created.)
As those are considered, the first vessel to be produced is discussed even before the ink dries on the paper declaration of your formation. Without the need to produce massive ascent vehicles to carry any payloads, the sky, theoretically speaking, seems to be the limit. There are many different directions your agency can decide to go in, exploiting resources, putting human explorers out to the furthest edges of your system or soldiers in force onto planets and moons near you, and many other suggestions besides.
At the end of the day, the discussion boils down to three possible missions a given starship can undertake: One is a scientific expedition to one of your moons, the further daughter of your world known as Husena. Those early expeditions that reached the moon noted the presence of what could be artificial structures peeking out of its surface. Another is looking at beginning to survey and mine the asteroid belt that lies suns-ward, the resources within likely very useful to your ongoing efforts and quite lucrative besides. The last is doing a survey (and potential contact) mission with your in-system neighbors, gauging their capabilities and temperament. Whichever mission you decide to pick, it will be your focus for the next few years.
[ ] Begin a new manned mission to the moon Husena
[ ] Begin resourcing the nearby asteroid belt
[ ] Begin scouting out S'Tal-Munthi-6
This game is based on a largely original system that takes inspiration from several different places. You may recognize some elements from systems such as Mongoose Traveller 2e and Stars Without Number (with elements from both its first and second editions).
The first mechanic you'll interact with is High Station Simberlein's Drydock Space. Your first truly large-scale building out of the bounds of your world's gravity, you have a rather humble amount of space, totalling 2,200 Displacement Tons, or dTons (due to Menthelenis' different measurement systems compared to ours, this number is more of an abstraction than anything). The yard will be expanded in time, but that will take time and the next mechanic you'll soon interact with: Budget.
With the current jubilant attitude over your recent achievements, your first project will not need to worry about it (within sensible limits, of course), but going forward, a unified budget for your projects and expenses will come into being when all's fully settled.
Your ships, going forward, will fall into a unified categorization structure that takes into account their size, in cubic meters, and their weight in Displacement Tons. At the moment, it's rather lighter than your 'big dreamer' co-workers would like, but there's no doubt that it'll get bigger as time and research goes on.
[X] The Menthelenis Star Command
[X] Begin a new manned mission to the moon Husena
2nd Quarter 1796 P.R.
It's a close discussion, but eventually, it's decided that the asteroid belt's resources will be better able to be harvested with more proper facilities in place. For now, the eyes of the newly minted Menthelenis Star Command turn to closer, more easily visible orbits.
Husena is the larger of Menthelenis' two moons, and old national rivalries drove the early modern nations into a space race that ended with multiple nations reaching both moons, unable to stay for any great length of time though they were. The missions to Lumer, the closer of the two moons, were uneventful even for their scientific import. Husena was another matter entirely.
The six pictures taken on Husena's surface nearly a century ago, digitally restored and blown up to clearly show the six small, pyramidal rock formations far placed too symmetrically to be natural, are everywhere in the temporary main command center of the MSC, a rather cramped space all told while an actual facility is in the process of being built, and the first ship constructed entirely in space becomes the main focus of discussion.
The mission such a vessel will prosecute boils down to a fairly simple through-line of objectives: have a ship carry scientific personnel and equipment to Husena, scan the area using ship-based sensors and launched probes, land the personnel on the surface, and extract them once they've gathered what data they can.
The first decision point is the size of the craft in question. Though there's an impressive amount of available building space, the main pressure point is how many ships such a mission would benefit from. There's certainly a case to be made that a line of do-it-all, generalist ship designs could carry out the mission perfectly well. Such a ship will most likely run into the Large or even Massive size category should you fit enough modules onto your design, but when the mission itself starts, you can be sure that it'll be completed in one go over the course of a few days to a week and a half.
However, multiple smaller ships, more specialized to their given tasks, could be planned and constructed in tandem, and potentially be more effective at their given duties. That choice being said, should you choose to build a number of smaller ships, there's also the matter of which kind of design you'll focus on. Your main design division is ready to go, and while the other designs will lag behind somewhat, the subsidiary divisions will be able to take the bones of the design you focus on and work it to fit the other needed mission profiles. The upshot to this is that while the mission itself will be drawn out, each part of the mission, from orbital recon to ingress to exploration, has much more time over the weeks it will take to gather what could be very, very valuable data.
[ ] Design a single, generalist ship to complete the mission all at once (Starting Size: Medium).
[ ] Design multiple, objective-focused ships to add redundancy to the mission (Starting Size: Small). Which objective gets focused on?
Now. I might be talking out my ass. And Strider just didn't mean to convey the impression that we're running late 90's space tech, but are working with 2090's production tech, and cracked the artificial gravity secret, with a working Helion type commercial fussor. IF so, then yes, you can down grade all paranoid panic sizes by one grade. (High large become high medium, etc.) But, even working with current era space tech, we'd still require those panic sizes as a starting point.
The current tech paradigm is largely near-future tech (compared to our day and age), and there is a level of miniaturization and automation that is in advance of our own. Menthelenis hasn't cracked artificial grav-tech, and fusion is still in its early stages of exploration. I'm also well aware that my current numbers in terms of ship sizes might need some adjustment, so any advice and guidance on that front so that we can get ahead of any resizing we need before we start laying down actual hulls would be much appreciated. This system hasn't been used for anything before, and ironing out any kinks so that we can progress smoothly is my highest priority after storytelling.
Also, allow me to share a portion of my Tech Level scale with you:
TL0
Ancient
Enough understanding to knap rocks and start fires. The higher levels of this TL go into roughly Bronze to Iron Age.
TL1
Medieval
This TL generally has a good grasp of metalworking and architecture, with sailing ships the most advanced form of transportation. The higher levels of this TL can claim some internal combustion tech.
TL2
Early Industrial
Industry begins to take advantage of fossil or sufficiently powerful biofuels. Rudimentary land vehicles begin to come into being.
TL3
Prime Industrial
Vehicles begin gaining complexity, with air vehicles making their appearance, and rudimentary computers become more prolific.
TL4
Modern
Computing power begins to increase and integrate into regular life, with fission power undergoing continuing refinement as rudimentary space programs begin to appear.
TL5
Near-Future
Space infrastructure becomes more developed, with rudimentary outposts on nearby planetary bodies. Fusion power begins to come into its own.
TL6
Fusion Era
Fusion power becomes prolific as rudimentary gravity manipulation starts to appear. Energy weapons become more refined, with more variants appearing.
You are currently straddling the line between Tech Levels 4 and 5, and there's plenty more beyond TL6 that lies in the theoretical at the moment.
[X] Design multiple, objective-focused ships to add redundancy to the mission (Starting Size: Small). Which objective gets focused on?
-[X] Scan/Probe Objective
3rd Quarter 1796 P.R.
The debate eventually settles on a cadre of specialized ships that, while not able to complete the mission as quickly as some would like, will act as a good testbed for the construction and design philosophies that will define your ships going forward into this new era of exploration. It is a methodology that also appeases the budget-conscious among both your cohort in the MSC and in the Planetary Council, as much leeway as you might have at the moment in that regard. The mission profile you decide to focus your main design team on is scanning and making sense of the initial surface, if not the internal construction, of the structures within Husena. With that data in hand, a plan can be made that best utilizes the ships that come after it, and the scientists and engineers that will be on the scene can plan out in advance a way to engage with, or even potentially enter, these structures.
With the mission profile and design ethos decided, Project Lunar Seer is christened, and the first files for the design programs created and primed for the latest spacefaring design.
Your first consideration is the main form factor of the ship. Without having to worry about aerodynamics in space, and with gravity only being of some slight concern when it comes to Husena, the need for a strict tube that can withstand the pressures necessary to claw itself off the ground and all the way out of the atmosphere it is confined in has been, if not eliminated, then significantly lessened by Simberlein's construction. However, a cylinder still has its upsides, as it's the most space-efficient of the shapes that you could create, and among the least expensive, cramped though it might be for those that crew it.
However, more unique form factors are also being seriously considered for a ship that's not meant to ever enter anything even closely resembling atmosphere, and that can truly take advantage of modern material sciences and engineering advances. Two designs in particular are at the forefront of discussion.
The first unique hull design is something of an elongated teardrop, with crew and equipment largely placed in the wider section of the ship. The cross-section, and the weight that comes with it, is commensurately bigger compared to a pure cylinder, but still offers a somewhat familiar profile with an expanded section that, as the designers championing it promise, will allow for a more extensive engine system, thus allowing for an also commensurately greater amount of power to draw for systems without bulking up the hull itself.
The other design is far more out there, more resembling a thick wheel than anything that has ever been previously conceived as a spacefaring vessel. It would clearly be the largest of the form factors by far, and there are no small amount of engineers on your staff that blanch at such an undertaking for a first outing, but with enough equipment and investment, its supporters insist that its shell could serve as a temporary station that might be able to remain in orbit over Husena and speed along any further efforts you make in terms of expanding into space.
The arguments for each of the three seriously considered designs are nothing if not convincing. However, there's only going to be so much space and effort able to be given to the project, and mixing and matching at this moment wastes valuable time. One design must be chosen.
[ ] A cylinder-shaped hull (Starting Weight: 350 dTons).
[ ] A teardrop-shaped hull (Starting Weight: 600 dTons).
[ ] A wheel-shaped hull (Starting Weight: 800 dTons).
Two Hour Moratorium Before Voting Begins
[Also, worry not, there will be a cultural brief ready (hopefully) by the end of the week (hopefully with some artistic spice to go along with it).]
[X] A teardrop-shaped hull (Starting weight: 600 dTons)
While the merits of each hull type are many and varied, a singular approach is, at last, championed. Though not as simple as the cylinder, a teardrop-shaped vessel will nonetheless remain a simple shape, but explore the bounds of spacefaring shapes for future vessels.
The shape that the designers lay in has a rounded face as the front of the ship, narrowing to a flat point on the back. The dimensions, along with the detailing for the necessary oxygen systems, vital electrical systems, thermal radiators, and vital armoring against micrometeorites and background radiation, bring the design very nearly to 600 dTons, exiting the Small weight category and breaking into the Medium. However, the dimensions make it a very compact in-between that only out-measures the largest cargo aircraft your world employs by a few meters in all three dimensions.
With the shape of the craft drawn out, the next step is the engine assembly that will drive the ship, both in power and propulsion. The assembly is split into two parts; the power plant and the propulsion systems, and while there are tried and tested methods for accomplishing both tasks, one company of engineers and scientists has come forward to you with intriguing propositions.
In terms of power plants, one could traditionally install either a conventional fuel cell system or a fission generator that would slim down the fuel supply needed, but carry with it the risk, small though it might be with the automatic safety measures that are required to be put in place, of dangerous radioactivity. However, scientists and engineers, representing a private company known as Maesanthi Fusion Dynamics, propose installing a well-tested, but still largely prototype fusion reactor. It's bulkier, certainly, but it also seems to deliver half again as much power as a tried and true fission pile of the same scale, and a field test like this would allow for potential scaledown of the setup in the future. At least, so the engineers pitching the idea tell you.
In other news, it would be a trivial task to put on a series of typical bell-shaped main thrusters to accompany your RCS thruster array. Such thrusters have been the main method of propulsion into and through space for the better part of a century. However, the chance at a new spacecraft design with no small amount of funding thrown at it has also encouraged the engineers at MFD to dig up drafts and begin seriously testing a thruster that utilizes a somewhat smaller fusion generator, if not connected to the larger main generator, to ignite hydrogen in order to achieve direct thrust through an aerospike assembly. It shares its bulkiness with its power plant cousin, but thrust tests have been remarkably promising thus far, and the cost might be worth it to shave time off of what is currently a 5-and-a-half-day trip, one way, to Husena.
Finally, there comes the question of solar arrays. Being able to passively generate energy from background solar radiation has been floated since the beginning for ships that do not intend to stray far from their main sources of this energy. However, the bulk that they add to the ship, and thus the time they add to construction, may not fully be worth the amount of power that they would generate. As it stands, proposals for two solar arrays placed abeam on either side of the ship compete with slightly more extensive plans for adding two more, one on the ventral hull and one on the dorsal, to the mix. Though, with power generation being what it could be, it's not an unpopular idea to nix solar arrays entirely and simply depend on the power plant. The extra power from the solar arrays, however, might allow you to have just enough for an extra module.
[X] 0: Fusion Reactor (Test Phase [Roll for Efficiency])
[X] 1: Fusion Powered Aerospike Array (Prototype [Rolls for Efficiency, Thrust Power])
[X] 2: 2 Solar Arrays
4th Quarter 1796 P.R.
In daring to take the leap with fusion power as your preferred energy system, you not only intend to power this mission with what is most likely the energy of the future, but also demonstrate the viability of MFD's fusion systems in what could generously be considered everyday operation (an incomparable boon for their marketing department you have been well aware of since the proposal was made). However, old hands wisely suggest and get approval for the new generation of solar panel arrays, the most recent iteration of the kind that have graced the satellites and probes your world has thus far created, to be fitted onto the ship as well. The solar arrays are inset into recessed spaces on the port and starboard of the widest part of the ship, to be better protected from any stray astral debris, and the fact that they're almost wing-like when extended lends a strange sort of grace to the design.
In terms of rigorous experimentation and testing in space and on the ground, with Confederacy resources at your disposal, your findings show that the Fusion Reactor, with the right combination of alloys and parts that only a power connected to the military could procure, has a somewhat higher output than the scientists at MFD had expected. Their thrusters, on the other hand, fall somewhat short of their creators' expectations, but still manage, especially with their linkage to the reactor, to surpass even the best standard fuel mixes in terms of thrust.
[Roll Results: 11 [out of possible 12] for Fusion Reactor (Provides listed power +2). Fusion Thruster, 7 on Thrust Power (top speed of 14.5 kps), and 6 (thoroughly standard in performance)]
Now, however, the time has come to move on to the internal modules that are going to be the backbone of Project Lunar Seer's mission. There are no small number of potential toys that the ship design could take Husena to consider, mostly separated into two rough categories: scanning and processing.
In terms of scanning, you have three options. The first is an advanced ground-penetrating radar sourced from some of the most advanced geology and volcanology labs on Menthelenis. While usually used as part of a ground installation, it can be easily modified for use in orbital scanning. But, while it won't disturb the surface of the moon or the structures underneath it, it is a remarkable power hog, and having it installed will draw away power that might be needed from other systems. As well, the mission will likely need more time for the radar to fully sweep the area around the structures.
Your second option takes 'ground-penetrating' far more literally, being a burrowing probe-launcher. While you run the risk of potentially damaging the structures with a misplaced shot, the probes will likely get a far clearer picture of the area surrounding them, potentially speeding along the process with a well-placed probe 'net', at a much cheaper power cost. However, such probes are bulky (needing to survive the rigors of being shot from orbit and burrowing to a sufficient depth requires such, after all), and once the probe storage runs empty, that is that.
The final option is to take a mixture of both technologies, a few dozen mid-line probes supplementing a less powerful, but still useful GPR. This option cuts in the middle in terms of both bulk and power budget, but the compromise comes at the cost of individual components' power, and the setup will likely need its fair share of help in the next department that it is connected to: processing.
There are two methods that are in the running for the ship's processing of the vast amounts of raw data that will no doubt be gathered on this mission. The first is conducting your own processing with a built-in dedicated computer system and beaming it home after on-site analysis. While the ship would have to contend with the space and power draw such a system would take up, the potential exists for multiple computer systems to link up with each other, speeding the process along potentially exponentially. The second is installing a powerful transmitter that will send the data, in a still mostly raw form, back to Menthenelis. While only a single ship would need to use the transmitter at any given moment, the lag between transmission, an understanding of the data received, and any necessary information being relayed back to the ships over Husena is notable, and may make any response to potential sudden events (of which countless kinds have been proposed concerning the structures, from the realistic to the utterly outlandish) slower than it needs to be.
Finally, the discussion comes up about armoring and weaponizing such a vessel. Though as far as you can tell, your little corner of the stellar neighborhood is as quiet as can be, S'Tal-Munthi-6 has made every probe you've sent their way for the past 90 years disappear, with no way to make sense of what little data you've managed to keep from probes that have flown far enough away to not get drawn into what seems like a whirlpool of interference and loss of control. For as focused as your expedition may be on Husena, tactically-minded souls have counseled that it might be prudent to put, if not outright weaponry, then at least some armor in critical locations of the ship, just in case S'tal-Munthi-6's reach extends beyond its current orbit. However, with an entire other planet between you, there's more than enough reason to forego weaponry and armor at the moment, it would seem.
[ ] 0: Advanced Ground-Penetrating Radar
[ ] 0: Burrowing Probe Launcher Unit
[ ] 0: Mixed Probe/Radar Unit
[X] 0: Advanced Ground-Penetrating Radar
[X] 1: Integrated Computer System
[X] 2: Armor the Ship
1st Quarter 1797 P.R.
As the new year is celebrated in, the decisions of how to discern what lies beneath the surface of Husena are finalized. You decide to take the non-invasive route, with a ship-based phased array radar being fitted 'beneath' the craft (as much as such distinctions in a 3D space hold any meaning) to point at the surface of the moon, a long array panel of off-gray squares breaking up the flow of the design still more. As well, the most advanced computer system you can fit into a somewhat small space with the necessary crew quarters takes no small amount of building out, but it will likely be quite capable of processing and making legible the terabytes of info that will come from such powerful sensors. As expected, the fusion reactor takes the powerload in stride seemingly without blinking, and your technicians are brainstorming potential ways to take advantage of that excess power in other designs that build on Lunar Seer's skeleton.
As well, continued observation of Husena by MSC-tasked satellites, and the structures that poke out from their surface, has caught remarkably subtle, but strange energy emissions readings emanating from the structures. This new evidence has sent a fresh wave of speculation washing through the MSC, with a focus on potential alien life. Alive, asleep, dead? Who's to say at the moment, but with Lunar Seer nearing completion, your're sure you're likely to find out.
Before you send the design off to the eagerly waiting construction engineers though, due to the potential concerns raised by the military members of the Star Command of what might occur to potentially dole out damage the craft, both originating from the surface of the moon and from beyond its orbit, your next big consideration is increasing the armoring of the Lunar Seer project.
There are a few options, all of which largely sate the desires of those seeking to armor up the vessel. The first is to reinforce only the most crucial portions of the ship with a dense alloy: reactor, drive area, and crew spaces. The next option is to also cover the rest of the ship in an extra layer of radiation shielding, utilizing a newly developed and tested graphene-based metamaterial. Finally, you could expand the alloy armor plating to encompass the rest of the ship. This last measure seems a little extreme to most, but you can be assured that whatever might happen, the chances of your astronauts coming home safe and sound are remarkably high.
