Engineer’s Log Day 166

Today I got a response back from Sarlunt’s survey team. I’m apparently a genius when it comes to choosing spots because none of them actually have water. What made my talents particularly apparent was when they showed me the water maps for the area and I managed to actually dodge every single concentration of water. Back to the drawing board on that front. They’ve given me a few different sites they’d recommend for getting water so we’ll have to check them out. I can’t help but feel I’ve put the horse before the cart but I guess things are moving now?

Engineer’s Log Day 167

Alright so I’ve taken a look at about half of the suggested sites and I have to say, most of them are just not ideal. A lot of the larger water reservoirs are located in valley areas which isn’t quite ideal concerning base defense. You don’t want to be parked on top of the side of a valley as you’ll be at risk of losing the ground under you to normal weapons or just getting washed away by water. It is afterall a valley. To circumvent these issues, you’ll need to either spend a pretty significant amount of time leveling by backfilling, digging into the surrounding hills, or worse, both. Either way, you’ll need to spend extra resources making it flat. Any ideal location also wants to be able to see the surrounding area which is another mark against valleys given the whole lower elevation dealio. We can definitely make what we have work but it might need a lot more effort than we can afford to give. I’ll still have to check the remaining half but I’m not super thrilled about the prospects.

I don’t think I have enough resources to get any of the areas I was looking at today set up so if I’m forced to make a choice of one of them, it’ll have to be the xythans that actually pay the price. Frankly, I’m probably going to make them pay regardless because this is for their benefit.

Engineer’s Log Day 168

I took a look at the remaining options today and I think I have my pick. While I did skip over it before, it's not a bad place per say and it won’t take as much work getting it into working order as a lot of the rest buuuut I’ll still need to do some pretty heavy work. The area itself is a former wetlands with a huge number of naturally forming pillars. Now typically, you don’t even want to consider these sorts of areas just due to the intrinsic threat of stone pillars just being there. A crafty enemy who doesn’t care about ecological destruction can just drop one of these pillars on your camp if they are feeling particularly spiteful.

That’s not to say there isn’t a way to circumvent these issues though. Unfortunately for any crafty enemies, they have to deal with a crafty engineer who also doesn’t particularly mind causing ecological destruction. You might even say said crafty engineer would enjoy it. I’m thinking I can detonate the pillars prematurely and clear out a nice little area which should give us a number of benefits including but not limited to; all the filling material we’ll ever need, potential watchtowers and emplacement platforms, and a nice supply of water. Additionally, I get to blow some shit up. This sort of scenario is every half decent engineer’s wet dream and I’m gonna get to live it out. I’m practically giddy.

Of course, I’ll give Sarlunt a heads up about my plans. It would hardly do to just go and start creating ominous and mysterious craters without letting someone know first. Plus, once I’m done blasting some pillars into kingdom come, I’ll still need some folks to actually drill down to the water. Technically speaking, I could drill for the water also but I strongly suspect they want their water drinkable so probably for the best I don’t.

Engineer’s Log Day 169

Sarlunt got the weirdest look on his face when I presented my ideas for getting the base location ready. He didn’t like it at first but this time I actually had a few allies on my side. Namely his entire engineering division. They wanna blow stuff up also. They say when you leave home things change but I’m not so sure, the engineers out here are still the same! I did get ordered to work with them on this which I’m not too troubled by? Like that's kinda expected and I can’t be denying my engineering homies the opportunity of a lifetime.

Between hanging out with the 4 lovebirds, Darana, and new buds in engineering, I feel like I’m really starting to settle into my role as the human diplomat. Hmm… since I’m doing my job so well I just might have to reward myself with a promotion. Let's see… what sounds better between ultra and supreme… but I don’t think that’s a real thing… hmmm… Supreme Human Interspecies Diplomat? Yeah that sounds cool and the acronym is funny if maybe a bit not professional… whatever I’ll workshop it later, just know I’m now promoted.

I also took the liberty of updating Sarlunt with my progress on the defense launchers. He kind of gave me a look when I told him the number I’d finished. Apparently, I’ve, and I quote, “Already passed the numbers expected and they would be more than fine to pick up the rest.” They were assuming I wasn’t going to complete my stuff in time. What a backhanded compliment! It’s so rude yet so nice to hear. I guess this means that I won’t have to deal with launchers any more which is so nice to hear. I’ve been quietly losing my mind to the minor inconveniences when setting those up so I’m kinda just glad it’s done. Like, if I had to handle any more screws after applying sunscreen, I’d sunscream.

Engineer’s Log Day 170.1

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Today was a little boring all things considering. Got up early in the morning and met up with the engineers outside of the xythan base. We exchanged greetings we couldn’t understand, fumbled with our translators until they worked, and then exchanged greetings we could understand. From there, we hitched a ride on one of their transport vehicles, which are really nice by the way, all the way out to the site. Me and the other engineers then took measurements, did a lot of math, wept tears of relief realizing both of us used a base 10 number system, and headed home to fact check ourselves. Overall, very productive day.

Concerning the math, we gotta make sure we are using the correct tonnage for our blasting gear or we may very well cause an unwanted chain reaction and possibly render the area entirely unusable. We need to skirt that fine line of just enough to blast off the parts we want broken and not such an excessive amount that we lose control of where the stone pillars are going and get some collateral damage. I mean in theory we could just bomb the area into an actual crater but that would very likely render the water basin unusable. Better that we stick to fun-sized payloads rather than using excessive and unnecessary force.

Regardless of its boring status, once we have triple and quadruple checked the measurements, we can get started on the construction of the base itself. If we do this intelligently, we should be able to take advantage of some of the pillars we knock down and use the bases as good starting points for the walls. Depending on how much explosives we have access to, I could very well see the base ending up as a multi-layer sort of deal which sounds kinda cool when I visualize it in my head. It'd kinda give the whole base a fantasy dwarf style vibe if we did do that I think.

I’m also working on making a temporary generator and potentially a new 3D printing machine. The generator itself will be a pain to set up but shouldn’t be anything unusual and I already have a backup for the 3D printing machine. I say back up loosely here since I’ve got it in a bunch of carefully stored pieces. It’d probably be a good idea to go ahead and check each of the parts and maybe run a quick diagnostic on both machines before I move one. I don’t foresee there being any issues but I’d rather be safe than sorry since the catastrophic worst-case scenario here is I somehow break the replacement machine while it’s en route and then the one back home explodes.

While the xythans technically have a 3D printer as well, theirs is much lower quality than mine and furthermore is programmed in a language that I am completely unable to read. Getting parts from them would have me feeling real nervous. I think I’ve said that I could make a new 3D printer but I still really don’t like that idea. Universal 3D printers like these are notoriously touchy to being replicated and their failsafes are quite extreme. While I was trained on how to repair everything in the base at a basic level, I was the shield and defense engineer and really only had in-depth training for those areas. To really drive home my nervousness here, we had 2 full engineers that were both there specifically to build and repair the 3D printers.

I don’t think moving will ever be quite ideal but I guess that’s just how the cookie crumbles when dealing with back up parts... Wait a minute. Actually, wait a minute. Darana put a lock on Oreos on the main food machine. Could I swap out the computing bits and circumvent the lock like that?

Engineer’s Log Day 170.2

Yes I can. Oreos are back on the menu baby!

Audio Log Day 171

Dear Audio Log, last night I had a heart attack. I went into the kitchen and saw eyes glowing in the dark just staring at me. I screamed a little, jumped a little, and choked on an Oreo a little. Not quite my proudest moment I must say.

I had just gone out for a midnight snack when the incident occurred you see. If I went during the day, Darana might have had to go out of her way to do things like reprogram the machine and whatnot and since I’m a gentleman and would never wish extra work on her, I had to sneak around. Now, while it will never be said I’m the stealthiest cat in the litter, I’d still like to think my sneaking skills are rather passable in no small part thanks to my rather formative teenage years but thats neither here nor there. That said, I forgot one very important aspect of my guests. They are descendants of ambush predators. They walk a lot more quietly than I do, can hear better than I do, and can still see in lower light than I do. Oh, and it means their eyes glow in the dark because holy shit that’s spooky.

Fortunately, it was Bayfur who caught me and not his mom otherwise I’d never hear the end of it. To that end, I consider myself both very lucky and unlucky to have been eating at that time as it muffled my startled sound with the downside being the crumbs that decided to mosey their way into my windpipe.

After I finished choking and generally dying, I split what remained of my midnight snack with Bayfur. Technically, he can eat chocolate but it’s worse for his body to eat that stuff than mine so the little man got some of my beef jerky instead. He seemed to enjoy the spicy stuff so I’ll make sure to set some aside for him in the future. I’m more of a hickory smoke sort of guy myself so he’s free to have it as I don’t really care one way or the other if he eats all that.

Since I’m going to be sharing with the xythans the thought occurred to check how much I actually have and, as it turns out, we have an absolutely obscene quantity and variety of beef jerky just sitting in food storage, like way more so than we properly should have. It kind of makes sense that we would have some, after all, it stores well and doesn’t taste half bad but a disproportionate amount of my food supplies are just jerky. I kinda suspect we had a fan of the stuff onboard though I do wonder how he or she slipped that past Command. I don’t mind personally but man that’s still a lotta jerky.

Jerky numbers aside, the engineer squad has been making some good progress today on the new base. With our calculations completed, the other engineers and I were able to start carving out locations for the explosives and create our guiding wedges. The theory is to create a path of least resistance for each part of the pillars as they take their middle bits leave existence in an effort to prevent chunks from being thrown in every which direction.

Decided to spend a bit of time tuning up the HARP suit today as it’s probably the safest way for us to be interacting with these explosives between the long robot arms and shield generator inside. One of the worst-case scenarios is that we have one of our payloads detonate while working on planting it in the rock and subsequently having the rock collapse on us. The HARP has personal shields that should be able to withstand blasts exceeding the level we intend to be working with so the only really scary part should just be the avalanche portion. The HARP suit should still be able to handle the weight of the rocks provided we take the blasting in smaller chunks which is what we have planned. Once we finish with the drilling tomorrow, we’ll be setting up a few supports and then getting into the nitty gritty of rock removal.