Alexander left the apartment a bit conflicted. While it was true he wanted to spend more time with his daughter, he wasn’t completely honest with her as to the reason.
If his plans came together and the Fury was completed on schedule, he knew he was going to be gone for an extended period of time. A month at least, maybe more. He would discuss his absence with her in the coming weeks, but considering how she reacted the last time he left, he wasn’t sure she would be all that happy he was going to do so again.
He wasn’t sure how the STO would react when he brought their people and ship back either. If they reacted negatively, Alexander was sure the new and improved Fury could hold its own, but it was still only one ship.
Alexander thought about simply dumping the crew in lifepods and turning around, but that really wasn’t an option considering he needed to have a safe route to and from STO space. So he needed to take a more diplomatic approach, and hope the people in Varlen were not trigger-happy.
As always when he entered his workshop, it was a riot of noise and motion. Alexander had no plans to start any new big projects in the coming weeks, but he did need to check on the progress of his current projects before Fury was finished.
The first thing he pulled up was the facility map to check on the progress of repairs. As areas were completed, the workers marked them off and the section turned green on his map. There was still less than forty percent of the facility marked green. Another third was yellow, denoting sections being worked on. And the rest was black.
He didn’t have the same capacity for repairs on the surface as he did in space so the repairs to the facility were lagging quite far behind. It was also much more difficult for his robots to reach certain areas. The main dome especially was an ongoing headache due to its enormous size.
The entire thing had to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch, which wasn’t easy. Alexander had been forced to build three construction cranes to facilitate the process, further slowing down work planetside. The dome also required a bunch of support while it was being constructed. Once it was complete, the single large central support would carry the load, but there was nothing to hold up the walls until then.
Alexander really wished he knew how the original builders got around that issue. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any information on the construction processes used when they built the facility.
The dome would have been finished by now if Alexander had prioritized the work. He didn’t do that for a few reasons. The first reason is that the workers needed experience before they tackled something so complicated. They were getting this by working on the smaller atriums and other areas of the facility that needed maintenance and repairs. The second reason is that he didn’t have enough manufacturing capacity for the main dome.
Unlike the other atriums, the main atrium was all glass. Well, technically that wasn’t true. It was a transparent ceramic material made from a combination of aluminum and magnesium that was pressed and heated, forming a transparent substance.
The resulting material was much stronger than glass but it was also impossible to print because of the pressing and heating requirements. That meant a specialized manufacturing line had to be built. There was no worry about sourcing the materials for the ceramic composite. They existed in high quantities on the surface. That just left producing the substance as the bottleneck.
With the help of the engineers, Alexander had gotten the manufacturing line set up a few weeks ago. It was in a different area from his workshop though, since the process produced a lot of heat and chemical vapors.
The workers running this manufacturing line were familiarizing themselves with the process and running test batches now. If the ceramic had the correct properties, they could begin producing massive sheets of transparent material in another few weeks. The upside to all this infrastructure is that the material could be used to replace any windows on shuttles or other spacecraft that may still use them, which were also made from the same substance.
It would allow them to repurpose a few more of the derelict shuttles but other than that, he wasn’t sure how much he would need this process going forward. If Alexander designed and built his own shuttle in the future, there would be no windows. It would simply have external cameras like larger spaceships.
Seeing as that process was going as quickly as it could, he turned to the next project.
The tunnels meant to connect his ground-based orbital defenses to the facility were slow going. Without a dedicated boring machine, they had to be dug by hand-operated mining equipment, with each section being reinforced by concrete before moving to the next section. With the grid of laser defense satellites complete, the tunnel project had been put on the back burner. That was unacceptable.
Alexander didn’t want to leave without these maintenance tunnels being completed. He put out a project request for more workers to hopefully speed it along. He also started designing a robot to assist with the process. He would have created an attachment for his other robots, but the work was so specialized it simply wouldn’t be possible. If the ground hadn’t consisted of a hard rock layer only a few inches below the surface of loose sand and dirt, he would have simply excavated the hole and dropped prefabricated concrete sections in place before covering it up again.
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The mining machines that were currently being used could dig through the hard material, but they weren’t designed for what he had in mind.
The robot quickly took shape in his program. It would consist of four sections that connected together to form a ten-foot-wide circle. Cutting heads on the inside would reduce the rock to gravel and the workers would haul it off. Alexander was essentially recreating a boring machine without all the fancy automation. He didn’t know why he had memories of boring machines, but he did. At least the rock that was mined out could be processed for useful materials.
The machine would take a few hours to print, then he would bring it to the first hole. Once he showed the workers how to operate it, they could easily move it to the next and lower it into place with the overhead cranes so it could be reassembled.
That should solve his tunnel dilemma.
Next up was the station. And he wasn’t talking about the refueling station. They needed an actual station, one capable of docking ships and acting as a shipping hub.
It might seem a bit strange to think about building a shipping hub when he had no customers and nothing to ship, but an actual station would take far longer to construct than the little refueling depot. So he wanted it well underway before he needed to worry about it becoming an issue.
The first thing that would go into the design of a new station was a shipyard. As that was likely to be Alexander’s first need. As much as he would have liked to build a fully enclosed hangar large enough to host something like the Talon, that simply wasn’t going to happen, not anytime soon anyway. His initial design would be an exposed manufacturing yard, which wasn’t all that uncommon from what he knew.
It just needed a docking bay, a disembarkation area, and a hangar for a shuttle and material storage. Eventually, it would have a small hangar for ships to offload, rooms to stay in, and other amenities. Alexander was a decent engineer, but he wasn’t a structural engineer. Every time he tried to design such an orbital facility, the testing showed it would not hold up to the stresses involved. The closest he got to a working model was when he used the original design for the fuel depot and scaled it up. That wasn’t going to work for what he needed it to do.
After wasting a few hours and getting nowhere, he sighed and set that project aside. In time he was sure he could figure it out, but his time was in short supply. Instead of wasting his own time, he had the funds, he might be able to purchase a workable design when he went to STO space.
Last on his list was his ship project. Eden’s Fury was nearly complete. In a few more weeks the final layer of armor would be in place and system testing could begin. He was looking forward to that. After that came the shakedown test inside the system to look for any issues that might crop up. On the outside, the ship would look almost identical to what it was before, at least structurally. The only visible difference would be the weapons.
Inside it was a whole new beast. Everything other than the fusion reactor was replaced. With the new supercomputer core supplementing the other computerized systems, the ship could run on a crew of as few as five people. Alexander didn’t implement any of the stealth technology from the Dawn into the Fury. He didn’t want to ruffle the STO’s feathers just yet. Besides, he had no clue how to recreate the armor. The only technology he could have implemented was the jump dampening, which wasn’t all that useful without the stealth armor.
That didn’t mean he didn’t take anything from the stealth ship. Incorporating the improvements into the lasers made them slightly more powerful than the ones he had before. The weapons were far more accurate and less prone to overheating thanks to the improved design as well. Alexander did drop his power shunt idea, at least for now. It was simply too much of a risk. He would look into the idea later to see if the process could be improved and made more viable. It was clear from the fight that it did increase the energy output of the laser by quite a bit. Having something like that in your back pocket in case of an emergency might be a good idea. He would work on that when he had time.
While it wasn’t a major project, Alexander did need to check on the missiles. He was able to collect some of the explosive compounds from the pirate missiles that were shot down. What he found was that the substance was exactly the same as what was in the grenades, which made it easy since he was already producing that explosive compound.
With him being short on advanced computer chips, he couldn’t recreate the active avoidance and electronic countermeasure systems that the pirate and STO missiles had, but that was fine. His missiles might be dumb, but they were still capable of finding a target based on the optical tracking system that Lucas built. In some ways, that was even better since the missiles didn’t emit any active sensors, which is what the STO’s tracking software looked for first and foremost. They would show up as a heat signature once they fired their boosters, but that could be masked by adding simple decoy flares. So that’s what Alexander did. Would it work? Maybe. It wasn’t like he was eager to start shooting at STO ships to find out. If everything went to plan, the missiles would remain untested unless some pirate tried to waylay them on the way.
Finding nothing else on his project list to worry about, Alexander set about creating a supply list for Fury. Half of Na’s crew would be along for the maiden voyage and shakedown run. They would also be the crew piloting the ship back to STO space. Trying to convince Captain Na to accept had been a difficult conversation to have. In the end, Na only agreed because he would finally get to talk to his family in near real-time. Alexander assumed the other members of his crew agreed for similar reasons.
That meant he needed provisions for them. He also needed to include provisions for all of Captain Krieger’s people. Thankfully, the Dawn had plenty of supplies for that, so it was just a matter of moving it all over from the derelict vessel.
Alexander liked to give people the benefit of the doubt, but considering Krieger’s people would outnumber Na’s on the voyage back, he was going to take some precautions. Biolocked pulse rifles for all of Na’s crew, as well as biolocked bridge, engineering, and weapon spaces. The STO crew would also be monitored and kept in a certain section of the ship during the trip. That was overkill as far as security went, but it wasn’t enough for Alexander. He would also be monitoring the ship from Epsilon’s Dawn since he had to remain aboard the damaged vessel for the jumps.
That was about as safe as he could make the trip.
If Krieger was as smart as Alexander thought he was, he would ensure his people played nice. If not, the crew was prepared to handle any issues.