Sirius Business - a C# Aurora forum game. v2.5

[blue emu]

Commander Culise takes the helm of our first interstellar-capable survey ship, and starts searching the Sol system for jump points to other star systems.

You may name your ship... after a Scientist, please. You could call it the ESNS Wagonlitz!

Blaaat and Happycat have also been moved from their obsolete Beetle-class Survey Craft into interstellar-capable Scientist class Survey Vessels.

They are both joining Culise in his search for Jump Points.

 

[blue emu]

Working off the stack of ship components built by our factories, the shipyards have been popping out Scientist class Survey Vessels like candies out of a Pez dispenser. We now have four of them working on locating Jump Points, with two more under construction.

 

[Deleted user]

Commander Culise takes the helm of our first interstellar-capable survey ship, and starts searching the Sol system for jump points to other star systems.

View attachment 1075548

You may name your ship... after a Scientist, please. You could call it the ESNS Wagonlitz!

Blaaat and Happycat have also been moved from their obsolete Beetle-class Survey Craft into interstellar-capable Scientist class Survey Vessels.

They are both joining Culise in his search for Jump Points.

You did good little Stag Beetle. Now it's time for your retirement. Maybe you'll get to go to a museum for kids and help inspire the next generation of explorers. I guess I should name the new ship. I shall dub it the Charles Darwin. Maybe I'll get to name the new race of angry aliens I meet before they blast me to pieces.

 

[Blaaat]

RIP Dung Beetle you were a fine ship.

I like to name my new ship the ESNS Oppenheimer. Not original I know but I really enjoyed that movie.

 

[Culise]

Commander Culise takes the helm of our first interstellar-capable survey ship, and starts searching the Sol system for jump points to other star systems.

View attachment 1075548

You may name your ship... after a Scientist, please. You could call it the ESNS Wagonlitz!

I'm rather tempted, but ultimately, let's go with the ESNS Christiaan Huygens.

 

[blue emu]

Our fifth interstellar survey vessel has been launched, and an NPC has taken command of the ESNS Richard Feynmann.

 

[blue emu]

Our first exit from the Sol system!

Your maintenance clock is only at 1/6th, so we won't overhaul your ship before sending you to check it out.

... and only four days later, Culise discovers another one.

 

[blue emu]

Happycat has reached the Alpha Centauri system and begun exploring it!

Alpha Centauri is a binary star system about four light-years from Earth.

A G2-V primary just a touch more massive than Sol (1.02 Solar masses) with a K1-V Red Dwarf about 80% as massive (and 40% as luminous) as Sol, in an eccentric orbit. The primary star has six planets, fifteen moons (many of them as habitable as Mars) and ten comets, while the secondary star has two planets, four moons and 370 asteroids.

Nearly 200 of the asteroids (circling the secondary star) are within the habitable zone for temperatures.

We can't complain about the lack of colony sites in the Alpha Centauri system... there are 217 habitable points in the star system (nearly all of them airless rocks).

 

[blue emu]

Happycat finds an extensive and varied but low-value deposit in the Alpha Centauri system.

Meanwhile, Blue Emu (in ESNS Aristarchus) locates the binary star system of Luhman 16, a pair of dim Brown Dwarf stars just 6.5 light years from Earth. Each star is only 4% or 5% as bright as Sol. Their planets, moons and comets are of course far too cold for colonization, but might contain interesting minerals.

 

[blue emu]

Culise in the ESNS Christiaan Huygens has discovered the nearby star system of Proxima Centauri. An M5-V Red Dwarf only 1/5th the mass and less than 1% the luminosity of Sol, Proxima has no planets or moons... only a dusting of comets. Still, a few of the comets might be interesting.

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Does everyone agree that we can retire the three Beetles and donate them to spaceflight museums?

... every ship you have costs some minerals every month for maintenance. Also, those Beetles are Military so they count against our fleet cap.

Just sayin'.

 

[blue emu]

Blue Emu in ESNS Aristarchus has found a space-fuel source in the Luhman 16 system... a gas giant planet 24 times smaller than Jupiter, which has traces of Sorium in its atmosphere. Two and a half million tons, at 70% concentration (our only current source is Jupiter, half a million tons at 40% concentration).

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More mineral discoveries:

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Commander Blaaat in ESNS Charles Darwin has discovered the nearby star system of Psi Ceti.

A binary system composed of two Red Dwarves (M5 and M6), it contains four potential colony sites (three of them as good as Mars, one as good as Ganymede).

 

[Flockingbird]

Does everyone agree that we can retire the three Beetles and donate them to spaceflight museums?

... every ship you have costs some minerals every month for maintenance. Also, those Beetles are Military so they count against our fleet cap.

Are there any in-game benefits to having them in museums? What else can be done with them?

Not knowing the answer to that, my tentative suggestion would be to pick one (the first-made?) for a museum, for rp purposes if nothing else.

 

[blue emu]

Are there any in-game benefits to having them in museums? What else can be done with them?

Not knowing the answer to that, my tentative suggestion would be to pick one (the first-made?) for a museum, for rp purposes if nothing else.

There isn't actually any "donate to museum" button. That's role-play. In-game, I would just send them to the breakers.

That saves both mineral and money maintenance, and frees up that tonnage for my fleet cap... and even returns 25% of the minerals that I spent on them.

The alternative is to keep them and use them. Even though they have no jump drives, they can make "assisted jumps" if they travel together with a jump-capable vessel of appropriate mass. So we could use them for checking out that asteroid belt in Alpha Centauri, for example. They're just a bit of a headache because that requires some baby-sitting.

 

[blue emu]

Nice one!

... and again!

Alpha Centauri seems to be a "happening" place.

 

[blue emu]

Happycat continues to make BIG BIG strikes in Alpha Centauri. Another eight million tons of Corundium (to build more mines!) at 100% purity.

OK, hold the phone... I'm gonna go get one of the Beetles. Or maybe ALL of them. They're still in Reserve.

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April 30th 1964

All three Beetles have received orders to head for the Alpha Centauri jump point and wait for a Jump Tender. I've interrupted Scientist 005 (led by an NPC)... they were continuing the jump point search in the Sol system... and sent it to the Alpha Centauri jump point, to sit at the Sol end of the jump link and act as Jump Tender for the Beetles. Of course, a Jump Tender can only set up assisted jumps for vessels that meet certain criteria: it has to be a matching type of vessel (both of them Civilian, or both Military), and the tender cannot assist any vessel that is larger than itself.

But that should be no problem. Anyone carrying a Geo-Sensor is Military, and the Scientists are nearly twice the mass of a Beetle. We should be fine.

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Commander Culise in ESNS Christiaan Huygens has finished prospecting all the bodies in the Proxima Centauri system. The star was bare except for some comets, half of which are barren of minerals. The Duranium strike is important, and one or two others... but no comparison with the bonanza found in Alpha Centauri.

Culise will return to Earth for overhaul and shore leave before checking out one of the two remaining unexplored jump points.

 

[blue emu]

The jump tender, the ESNS Richard Feynmann (our fifth interstellar survey ship) arrives at the jump point and sets up a jump field for the three Beetles to use.

... and it works!

Note that the "Orders completed" messages referring to each of the Beetles originates from the Alpha Centauri system, not from Sol. Feynmann remain at Sol.

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Our current Naval strength (none of it Warships):

Colony Ships 01 is two New Hope Class.
Freighters 01 and 02 are five ships each.
The rest of the Freighters are single ships.
Mines are up to four OMPs each (84 mine-equivalents).
Six Refineries. One Terraformer.

 

[blue emu]

The mineral strikes at Alpha Centauri continue.

... and I haven't even opened ALL of the reports that have 90%+ concentrations. Just the large ones.

Does Alpha Centauri B-1 have them ALL? All of the TN minerals at home-world concentrations? (EDIT: no Sorium. It has all the others)

Two of them are just a few thousand tons, of course.

 

[Flockingbird]

All that searching, all those valuable discoveries, and still no catnip for Commander Happycat. Is there no justice in Alpha Centauri?

I need to become a botanist and help terraform one of those worlds so as to provide a regular supply of catnip!

 

[blue emu]

All that searching, all those valuable discoveries, and still no catnip for Commander Happycat. Is there no justice in Alpha Centauri?

I need to become a botanist and help terraform one of those worlds so as to provide a regular supply of catnip!

We still haven't received a Biologist... about fifteen years into the game. I could always repurpose one of my Logistics scientists, of course. We've got about eight.

August 31st 1964

ESNS Christiaan Huygens comes out of overhaul, and Culise takes it up into space and heads for the still-unexplored Jump Poinr #2.

It leads to the virtually empty system of 61 Hydrae. Like the earlier Proxima Centauri system, the bare star is accompanied only by a scattering of comets.

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Are there any "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" fans here?

Scientist Wagonlitz has completed research on the Ark module, a space station component that will house 200,000 people... awake and active, not in cold-sleep hibernation. So a space station with five Ark modules could house a million people, and they could work on some project like research or finance.

 

[blue emu]

After exploring two star systems and finding nothing but comets... no planets at all... Culise jumps through to the Sirius system and finds... one planet.

But it's as good as Mars for colonists!... err... except that it's a low-gravity world, requiring special infrastructure.

Does it have any minerals?

EDIT: No. But there's always the comets...

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The Sol system and its environs:

The number in brackets indicates the real-space distance (eg: Sirius is 8.6 light years away). Cyan dots are the number of potential Mars-like colony locations. Dark grey dots are potential Ganymede-like colony locations. Light grey (10) dots are no-planets-here-just-comets.

The red rims indicate "not fully checked for jump points". The survey at Sol is nearly done.

... so the Alpha Centauri system is FULL of potential colony sites, and is also highly mineralized.