Engineer’s Log Day 194
Work is moving along nicely. We managed to get the rebar all planted today and start prepping the concrete which actually puts us significantly ahead of schedule. Credit where credit is due, I completely underestimated the ability and work ethic of the Reshapers. Pending a bit of luck, I should be able to get the walls ready and shields up in seven or so days. Once that’s all done, it’ll be time to move onto the stationary defenses. I’ve been thinking about how I want to set those up and I’ve come to an unsatisfactory conclusion. Since I don’t really have any clue as to when or even if pirates will be showing, I need to have the base’s defenses well spaced out or I’ll just be introducing points of weakness that can be exploited. The downside to this is that I’ll have to move my point of work each time I finish and the walls are way larger than the ones back at my base. I can already feel pain starting in my lower back when I think about the amount of picking up and putting down I’m going to have to do. I suppose my turrets won’t have the most optimal positioning based on how I decide to space them out but that’s honestly a secondary concern Icy Hots I’ll be needing.
If things weren’t going great already, Pottem’s team managed to get the water running which means it’s actually starting to look like a civilized location over here. Me and some of the Reshapers partook in some of the newly aquired water after our nice long and hot day of work. The hydrologists were making sounds when we did it, something about “potential lead poisoning” and “unknown elements in the water supply”. I can’t imagine that ever coming back around to bite us provided we don’t just drink that.
On a less happy note, I’ve been giving some thought tonight as to how this situation is going to actually end. Right now I see it being resolved in a few different ways, with three of them I suspect to be the most likely. The one I most expect is if the pirates show up and decide to play it smart. I could see them trying to make a deal for my stuff in exchange for just fucking off afterward. Kill too many folks and you’ll have somebody’s navy breathing down your neck regardless of who you decide to harass. I could see this one being what we go with since the xythans don’t really have any combat-focused ships with them so contesting them in the air wouldn’t really be an option I don’t think if it’s really worth throwing any amount of lives to keep my stuff, no matter how nice my action figure collection may be. So long as I have my blueprints and a working printer, I’ll be fine. It’ll take forever to properly rebuild but I’ll be fine.
The second possibility I foresee is the pirates deciding to shoot first and loot later. Again, they’ll have aerial superiority so they may think they can get away with this. I feel like this is a possibility simply because our navies can’t hunt them down if the pirates have already burned any and all traces of themselves. All the anti-ballistic and anti-ship emplacements we’ve put up are basically there for this explicit reason, we want to make ourselves as unappealing of a target as possible and discourage them trying to annihilate us as we can. We cannot rely on the pirates showing any amount of goodwill towards us because if they are given enough time, they still may very well be able to execute on this plan. Our goal is to bleed them if they try and stall until help can arrive.
That actually brings us to the last and most ideal scenario where the xythan or human military show up and we don’t have to fight. The xythans have been blasting messages back towards their nearest colonies. On the xythan side of things, this planet is actually far from most of their inhabited space so reinforcements on that front are still pretty far out. Personally, I’m a lot more opportunistic about some of my folks showing up. The colony ships got about half of the way home when they sent the message back hear so it isn’t out of the question that they let someone back home know and I’d be willing to bet money they called them first. The problem is, even if they were on their way, we won’t know until they actually arrived because we never actually got the communication satellite up and running. The human satellite population matches the human population on the planet and is current sitting in orbit insulting the xythans. I don’t know what to about it because I certainly don’t know how communications work and I’m not going up there to fix that..
Odds are, Options One and Three are the most likely to happen with Option Two being an ominous if unlikely option. If it does end up being Option Two, there isn’t much to be done anyways so not much point in thinking on it.
Engineer’s Log Day 196
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
The last two days have just been a lot of theoretical waiting around and a lot of practical hard work for me. The Reshapers helped me with the concrete mixing and pouring and just like that all I’d have to do was wait. Theoretically of course. In practice, they made small snide comments and we got into a contest about who could prepare cement faster. Jokes on them though, the extra cement will go to the houses and the more of those there are, the greater my chances of getting my own room.
After a few hours of work, the concrete making up the walls is all poured and I can move onto more important things aka actually getting started adding in the shield generators. I’ve decided these suckers won’t be anything complex and will just have an off and on switch for the time being. Figure that way it’ll just be a matter of configuring everything and making sure they don’t combust the second they have any amount of power running through them. Once I have them all up and running, then I can start looking into getting the fancy stuff integrated but functionality first.
Once I start adding in the automated guns, I’ll be able to start adding in the extra complexity but for now this should do. They’ll be super inefficient but that’s fine for the time being. I did make a quick little testing program to flicker the shields and stress test them. Kinda hurts my eyes to watch but it was effective. Fun fact, if you run this test at night, you can throw on some electric music for an excellent rave.
Engineer’s Log Day 199
Shields added, eyes strobed, generator ready, HERE WE GOOOO!
I have been able to crank out the shield generators in record time and fortunately after a bit of testing nothing went up in smoke. I’ll still need to do another round of testing once I have the guns integrated but that’s an issue for later. It’s actually kind of funny how that sort of field testing works because it’s literally just me walking around the outside firing various projectile and energy weapons to make sure that the shields are actually stopping the bullets and can withstand a little bit of beating.
Engineer’s Log Day 200
Today went pretty well right up until it didn’t. One of my shields wasn’t working the way that it’s supposed to and I had to basically disassemble the whole thing and put it back together. The sucker was super delayed in its response to me activating the test and just wasn’t being responsive. What really annoys me is that when I took it apart to check what was broken, you want to know what I found? Absolute fuck all that’s what. Every part looked fine so I checked each segment in a different generator and they all worked perfectly fine. Plugged it all back in and it just works now. I didn’t even change anything so why does it work now like pities sakes. This might sound like a good thing but I really need to know why it was failing earlier so that I can prevent it from happening with any of the others and determine if I’m going to have to replace it. For now, I’ll just keep an eye on this glitchy one and see if it doesn’t begin having these issues again. Maybe I assembled it wrong the first time?.
Fortunately for me, all the rest were in working order or had relatively simple fixes. Provided Mr. Blinky here doesn’t have any additional problems, I can get started on the turrets. Currently, my plan is to put up 3 at a time spacing them out relatively evenly. I’m fairly confident in my ability to get down three in about a week’s time and any additional turrets I get down after that will just be icing on the cake. In so far as I’m concerned, I’m running right up against the clock here and anything more I get is mercy, not a given.
One good bit of news from today though Is that I’ve got a working prototype for my info gathering drones. They need to be manually piloted but are lightweight, cheap to make, and most importantly, they have red flames painted down the side. They don’t move especially fast and can be shot down pretty easily by just about any defense be they manual, automatic, or otherwise but they are still cheap and I’ve already been able to make a small fleet. The important iteration of this batch is that I’ll only need a few controllers to control the whole pack. I just need to sync the two parts up and then it’s off into the skies. This should help take the burden off anyone piloting them.
I’ve given some thought into actually weaponizing the suckers but I’ll need a few extra resources if I want to look extensively into that. The issue is that these things are lightweight and can’t really handle the amount of kickback projectile guns provide and the batteries for energy rifles aren’t exactly light. So, I’ve decided to go to the logical solution. Much like how I’ve attached cameras to the planes, I’ll just attach some small ordnance explosives. I don’t expect them to be super effective on their own but I was thinking if we use them in conjunction with the normal ones we might be able to slip on or two in every so often. The xythans have mastered getting the most bang for the least size so if I use some of that I should be able to make some good stuff.
The difficult bit of this plan is going to be getting the xythans to fork over some of their explosives for testing.