2057
9:16 PM
The entire room is alight with debate, trying to push for their wants, personal desires and broad-seeking plans. Eventually, with a lot of swearing, a lot of near-violence and a fair bit of bribing to smooth ruffled feathers, a plan of action is settled on.
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Orbital Ring Shipyards-300PF-100 (Megastructure Experiment)
Roll=56 (Critical Success)
The construction of an orbital ring is a colossal endeavour that will take years to come, however, constructing certain sections of it is far more manageable. However, the effort still takes trillions upon trillions of credits, millions of workers and colossal administrative efforts.
The construction goes surprisingly well, the colossal supports beaming strength up towards the ring itself as billions of tonnes of material is flown all the way up to construct vast foundries for space-craft. In a mere few years, colossal void-berths are constructed, outmassing the Union's by an order of magnitude. They are capable of construction on a scale not seen before in human history, with dozens of vacuum docks and tens of thousands of workers, each.
These foundries will birth the fleet of the future, to resist any alien menace or earth-born threat to humanity.
Construction of void-berths successful, fleets are now buildable. Due to focus, Orbital Ring has no increase in Profit Factor.
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Prometheus Armoured Cruiser Design-150PF-20 (Experimental, First Design)
Roll=28 (Critical Success)
With gusto, engineers and technicians who worked on the Union vessels and were subsequently poached by private interests go to work, developing new design ideas, experimenting with the new material developed by DEUS and the new weapons technology.
In the design process, many pieces of inspiration are taken hold of, the aliens mushroom-like design, the EU's massively over-armed ships and finally, DEUS's own work in the old simulations that it ran.
Over the course of years, the design is revised over and over again, until finally, by the time it reaches the table of a foundry director, it seems doable. The design features the aforementioned multi thruster design, with many pusher plates acting as both heavy armour and manoeuvring points, but with careful angling of the plates and fiddling with the shaping of the charges used as well as manipulation of the whole vessel's hull to facilitate this, the engineers have managed to exceed even DEUS's assumptions for the sudden manoeuvring capacity of an Orion Drive, at least for the generation you are at
It mounts as weaponry a set of either Casaba Howitzers that are reloadable on the vessel itself, functioning as DEW, or missile silos with extremely fast, extremely lethal missiles with Casaba Howitzer warheads, providing manoeuvrable firepower, even if it can be shot down.
Prometheus is designed, will place its full details in the new Navy threadmark. Congratulations on your critical, you have added the Agile trait to the design. When it is rolling to avoid enemy attacks or perform complex manoeuvres, it acquires a substantial bonus.
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Training Programme+Research Acceleration Tolerances-??!..?! (01000111 01101111 01100100 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101) The rest does not matter.
The effort to train naval personnel are in the process of occurring when DEUS, surprisingly active once again, requests to take over the project in its entirety, in addition, it folds the programme of acceleration tolerance research. Having orders to allow DEUS to interfere with whatever he requests, the project is pushed over to him.
This is how the class of 2053 was lost in its entirety. In the course of a year, DEUS tries every teaching method imaginable, running decades-long simulations upon subjecting the would-be naval crew to them for a few days, it revolutionizes military education and then disproves those theories as it iterates more and more perfect methods. Eventually, the stress is too much, so the entire class, in one way or another, quits the programme.
The second class does somewhat better, driven to success by perfectly calculated algorithms, they are forced to ingest information at a breakneck pace, many students break away due to stress, many more are forced to quit due to medical conditions worsened by the curriculum, but this class does have graduates.
Over the course of years, DEUS perfects the education process, even dedicating a portion of its processing towards this issue, being faculty, administration and tutor, all at the same time. The graduation rate remains sub-5% and students have multiple mental health resources available twenty-four hours a day, but still, the students face difficulty keeping up with the curriculum. However, by that time, DEUS's full attention has shifted towards another matter, leaving only a slaved AI educating the students, separate from its own processing centres.
The issue of acceleration, its distaste for the weakness of the flesh is apparent in every paper sourcing from this study. It, however, does not alter the human form, instead choosing to improve the design of ships. In a few days, it develops a new type of fluid, a gel that is fully breathable by humans, can plug holes in the hull and is an incredible shock absorber and gee-reducer, allowing much superior acceleration so long as crews are suspended in the matter.
Then, DEUS produces a proof that human intelligence is functionally indistinguishable from most higher mammals, and that free will is an erroneous assumption of biological lifeforms. This is not published nor made available for general scientific use.
Your ship crews are extraordinarily well trained, and the stress of combat has nothing on the stress of mid-terms! Additionally, the gee-gel is an incredibly efficient invention that lets you squeeze significantly more performance out of your vessels, you now have near parity with alien acceleration rate.
The Prometheus class will mount the gee-gel.
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Salvage Operations-150 PF+50 (European Salvage Efforts)
Roll=25 (Critical Success)
Salvage operations proceed apace, with the reveal of an interstellar war the full might of the civilian industrial arm can be brought to bear. The EU ships are dragged back for hulking and what remains of the crew for burial whilst the alien vessels are researched extraordinarily carefully by crews of expendable scientists.
Many an insight are learned, initially, these ships are organic, they have internal organs, a heart next to their power source, which no one has any earthly clue what it is and a realization that they don't use fusion whatsoever. The alien vessels seem to somehow accelerate particles with no clear electromagnets or, well, anything really. This is the basis of their engines and weaponry.
Their armour just appears to be dense carbon monomers, providing good resistance to impact, but cripplingly vulnerable to heat.
The mushroom-like shield is ultra-dense carbon monomers with an internal plate of high-tensile alloy in the same vein as your pusher plates, just more precisely made and with significantly more of it.
Otherwise, the alien ships remain a complete mystery, with no real logic clear in their construction.
You have discovered basic details about the alien vessels, and have also figured out they make absolutely no sense.
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War Propaganda-100PF+100 (European War Propaganda)-50 (First Contact Panic)
Roll=48 (Critical Success)
The initial reaction to the seemingly coordinated reveal of the alien invasion is mixed, some people panic incessantly, others engage in self-destructive acts and even more beyond that panic a bit and then continue their daily routines.
In every language known to mankind, constant news-casts on the engagement, the dead, new insights and new horrors "discovered" about the aliens being fed in a steady stream to the civilian populace. The Unions own efforts to encourage a Global Response and pushing how we should all be unified in the face of great danger.
Their efforts are similarly effective, drawing communities towards war-time industries. Recruitment efforts swell and orbital construction is the new "thing" to do.
War bonds are released and plenty do see purchase, providing a substantial fund for further developments by the end of their "time", but another such drive will indubitably have less success than the first.
Populace pacified and directed to war, most people buy into the narrative being sold.
Wartime bonds provide 150 PF for this coming turn. They will be accounted for in the turns Profit Factor.
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Mars FOB-50PF-49 (Hostile Aliens)
Roll=49 (Failure)
The base is a horrorshow, Ascalon develops what it can, trying to quickly up tech to void-capable. A transport vessel sees a few hundred personnel and armoured vehicles sent over, stopping on a habitat to be properly equipped for the process of capturing and holding ground.
However, the aliens seemed to have predicted their landing location, because mere minutes after they landed on the Martian surface, the aliens responded. Tens of thousands of armatures crash out of the newly made tunnel entrances, even with the "distance" taken from the known entrances. Seemingly adapted to the previous encounter, obviously thicker plating and strange, gun-like protrusions.
Ascalon responds quickly but is woefully underprepared for this assault, the creatures run at speeds more comparable to armoured vehicles, covering ground at a terrifying rate, Ascalon infantry quickly deploy anti-tank measures as small-arms fire proves ineffective, but to no avail, without the time to create defences the infantry is overrun, the shuttle is disabled with massed fire from their protrusions, barking with loud, violent cracks of accelerated projectiles breaking the sound barrier many times over.
Ascalon is quickly dismantled, and on the surface of Mars lie, for the first time in history, human corpses. This is quickly covered up with an accidental orbital accident which sees the site vaporized.
Ascalon failed at setting up a FOB, on the bright side, the aliens now have adapted their armatures, seems like.
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Unknown Alien Study-35PF+35PF (EU Help)-20 (Alien Everything)
Roll=4 (Success)
The study process goes well enough, a dissertation is made and multiple people earn doctorates in Xenobiology.
The first initial result is the alien's biology. They appear to be a distributed mesh of cellular machinery, they lock into their armatures and connect into a bio-circuit mesh. This seemingly acts as a brain of a sort.
This means the creatures appear to be non-sapient until interfacing with their technology.
This raises a lot of philosophical questions about life and civilization, but that is for later.
The armature has no electronics within it beyond the neural mesh, and the armature seems to be slowly adapting to escape the facility whenever the alien biological body is allowed to connect to the armature. Growing greater internal musculature and some form of tube-like appendage, these are sawn off with angle-grinders regularly.
They seemingly have no sensory organs, either in their armatures or their bodies. But still perceive somehow.
Upon exposure to a human experimental subject, the ooze quickly invaded every orifice and hijacked the nervous system, displaying incredible adaptation to foreign biologies. The individual quickly had a seizure and seemed to collapse.
After twenty seconds the body rose and uttered, "We know what you are, we know what you fear. We will decipher you."
The body was then disabled with repeated fifty-calibre rounds to the limbs and the ooze was extracted with electric pulses to the bleeding corpse. More philosophical quandaries are raised by the sentence uttered, but that's for philosophers to ponder.
All in all, a good few years for science.
The aliens are weird, you know this now. Also creepy. Ask any further questions of their biology.
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Earth
The situation is stable, with the force of morale from propaganda and focus of the world onto the task at hand, even terror attacks have faded, allowing the true industrial strength of Earth to prosper.
The European Union has innovated as well, a new class of vessels taking off, equipped with their new magnetic launch silos for their missiles. Thicker armour is emplaced, made of high-carbon steel coated with tungsten carbide for maximal heat resistance and shock absorption.
Orion Drives are mounted on their vessels, with no pusher plate alloy, their ships are significantly slower and less maneuverable than yours, yet still much faster than their old designs.
The Merkel-Class Heavy Destroyer is a three-hundred meter, ten-thousand tonne behemoth which, on simulation, should be able to take the fire that broke the previous vessels and keep moving.
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Luna
The Lunar City expands as the EU creates half a million more jobs with their construction of more berths and more ships.
Indeed, more ships seems to be the name of the day as thirty five of their destroyer vessels, as over 1 quintillion credits are spent on the single grandest space-navy ever seen in human history, rising high above the Lunar surface as new advancements are made in construction efficiencies and speed, putting ships together at breakneck pace.
Construction continues as more and more berths are produced, and the moon is becoming a hyper-industrialized powerhouse.
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Mars
Mars is currently in a bit of a frenzy, as people both leave orbit and enter orbit of it, seeking to escape alien troubles or get closer to it. The aliens on their part seem to be just steadily expanding their underground tunnels, at least as far as scanners can detect.
Otherwise, nothing interesting happens.
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Venus
Venus is acquiring a large influx of population from the Martian habitats, and is even having private interests experiment with Aerostat habitats in its atmosphere, achieving limited success without major funding, but success nonetheless.
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Profit Factor-1040-55 PMC's+150 (Bonds)
Turns Remaining: 1. Vessels:16
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Turn is out! Hope you all enjoyed, this was fun to write.
The Prometheus is in the Naval Informational Threadmark for your viewing please, select which weapon it has per vessel produced.
