Call it superstition, but none of us want to be around them.
Okay, long story short, we had to rebuild the ships computer before we could turn it on. The power core is basically junk, so it’s all on battery. Life support works, as well as the gravity generators. At least, after a bit of tinkering and wrench-time.
Yeah, just like anywhere else, if you gotta fix it, you have two options: 1) Beat it with a wrench or 2) Duct tape it.
Speaking of which, we do have quite a bit of what is basically spaceworthy duct tape. Some from the planet and whole crates of it that the bots found. Even in Universe Online, duct tape is a versatile piece of technology. You can do anything from patching holes in space suits (or bodies) to fixing computers and even life support units. Yep.
At least in the short term. It basically lasts a month, less if the conditions are really harsh, at least that’s what my repair aptitude is telling me. Yeah, forgetting to replace Duct tape is another thing to put on the Bad List. Heh.
Anyway! We stuff everything we can into the holds of the two tugs and then I haul the second one out of there. Which is harder than it sounds. There isn't a tractor beam installed, so it has to be handled manually with the tug's arms. Which takes all of my concentration and skill in order to prevent anything for getting damaged.
Once we’ve hauled it back Celes ended up having to jump out and talk me through setting it down; and we set it down where it’s easy to access. It’s basically going to end up as the foreman's office. In fact, we plan to strip out everything unnecessary and build it up into a sort of space barracks.
I actually set a couple of people to start work on that after we make sure that it’s good to go. We make sure to store the extra arms in my Tug.
That done, we move on to the next project.
“Okay, we're going to leave four of you here to work on this. The rest of us, including Celes and Luke are going to head to the asteroid belt. You can use the new home base radio if you need to get into contact with us or to receive new orders. Keep a bot up there with orders to let you guys know if we call.”
Checking my quest, it appears we’ve used up a fair sized chunk of the extra time I'd gained from the materials I'd dropped off on the planet, but it both ticks down and goes back up as more repair work is done on the planet. We have time, but not a whole lot. It’s a constant worry.
Back into the Tug, after making sure it’s full up on fuel and battery power, a quickly ran systems check, and we're rocketing out of the hold. This time heading in almost the opposite direction from Drune. Thankfully it is much closer, only taking thirty minutes to reach the field.
And let me tell you, it’s like seeing a beach from very close up. Like, with a magnifying glass close. The tumbling masses of rocks, chunks, bits and 'dust' are all over the place.
It is totally chaotic and a big ass mess. When I ask about it, Celes admits that they'd mined the asteroids from Archon Station; and when the Drex starting attacking, they'd laid actual mines in the asteroid field.
So what I'm seeing makes much more sense. Over the last five hundred years, the mines had gone off, and blasted everything to bits and pieces. The entire asteroid field is like a dust cloud now.
Thankfully none of it is really thick or even dangerous to us. The ship’s armor is more than up to dealing with that. It’s only larger things we have to be careful of. I have Celes at the console monitoring all of that with the radar. Or rather, the high-tech equivalent. Gravidar, gravity-based radar scanning technology.
Yeah, really handy. On a planet, size is more important; but in space mass is even more so. So being able to see information on both for any single object is a major advantage. More importantly, it can be used to make a rough estimate of what the asteroid is made of.
Heavier metals have more mass, after all. So the bigger ping on the returns can be compared and an estimate can be made.
The outer, smaller asteroids we skip right over. None of them are worth looking at right now.
We're after some of the lightest asteroids in the field. Those made up almost purely of ice. The system information had several potential ones marked out, but after 500 years that information is useless. Thankfully it’s fairly easy to tell which have lots of ice. and we promptly head on over to the closest ones.
That's when it starts getting finicky. I have Celes start using the arms to knock away the larger asteroids that cross our path, and have Luke standing behind me for another set of eyes while I concentrate on piloting.
Our speed reduces quite a bit as well. Down to only mere tens of feet per second instead of hundreds or thousands.
Finally though, we find what we're looking for. On the surface, it looks much like any of the other asteroids, if only slightly more shiny. Its surface is coated in rock dust, helping to hide it in plain view.
But the gravidar does its work nicely, and we're definitely reading water as we get close enough to hit it with a full scan.
Roughly 325000 tons of water ice and other mixed materials.
“Bingo, people. We've found our first haul. Luke, take over here. Celes, switch with me.”
I say, unstrapping myself and moving to take the mining controls. Luke moves into the pilot seat, and I give orders for us to close in while I use the two of the robotic arms to grab a hold of the chunk of ice itself.
We end up having to point our nose 'up', so that the ships belly is pointed flat at the asteroid in order to get the mining drill out properly. It’s a physical thing on a shaft, like a large bore router head... Or a terrestrial drill bit. It can extend and move side to side a bit.
But the main part isn't to mine and suck up the material itself. No, it’s used to smash whatever it drills into chunks large enough to collect with the arms and stuff in the storage hold.
Actually starting the thing is a thrill, and with Celes watching over my shoulder and giving me hits, I go to work with it.
Much like piloting the ship, the mining controls use two sticks; but also two pedals on the floor. One stick is to control the drill's position, and allows me to twist the stick in order to pull it forward and backwards. The pedals are used to increase speed or decrease it (brake). That's required because drilling into most things generates a whole hell lot of fiction, and thus heat. Too much, and the drill bit can melt or break.
We don't want that to happen.
Thankfully ice is perfect to train in space mining, being both soft and a natural coolant.
The other stick controls the arms. They are partially automated, so simply use the stick to move them around and target a good chunk and it'll grab, put it in the open hold and then return all by itself. It only takes seconds.
And this time we get lucky, too. The drill starts into the asteroid, and almost instantly it starts to crack. I apply more pressure and speed; watching the RPS (rotation per second) and the heat go up; even as chunks start being spit from it.
Hell yeah!
I grab it, and it’s in the hold. .2 tons of water ice! Hell yeah!
We all whoop at that, and the guys on the station send their congrats only moments later.
Now we are in business!
It only takes thirty minutes or so to fill up the 8 ton capacity of the cargo hold, and I let Luke fly us back to the station.
We are going to store it and return for as much as we can get. We still have a long way to go, and a lot of people are depending on us getting this done.
This is only a start. A good start, but still only a start. There is still far too much to do!
We need more people! More space! More power! More materials!
We need it to survive, and to let the other survives.
There is no time to waste, and I'm all but kicking myself in my mind for being unable to go faster. To do more.
That's the whole weight of an entire race of people on my shoulders. A big burden.
So why am I grinning?
-|- -|- -|-
Fun Fact #9: Asteroid Mining, also called
Minor Planetary Body Mining, is thought to be the third most efficient means of resource gathering ever conceived. The second is full planetary mining, e.i. Dead Space ‘planet cracker’ style. The first on the list is Solar Mining, ala Star Forge… but more about that later, ‘kay?
Chapter 9 – Interplanetary Shipping
It has been two days since we gathered our first successful haul from mining a large icy asteroid. Things have been progressing smoothly on the Station.
First up, the living quarters. We stripped down the unusable tug. We removed its storage hold, engines, power core, fuel tanks along with its mining drill and the tug 'arms'. All that is really left of it is the hull, life support, and a Bub. We even pulled out the scrapped computer and control console on the second floor, and set about expanding its interior space by removing the walls that were part of the storage.
Putting in new flooring by using our stock of metal plates and making sure everything is air tight was fairly easy. With that, we now have enough space for another set of bunk beds on the bottom floor, and three of them on the top.
We actually had to raid some of the single rooms on the station for them.
The only thing from the pilot console we left in the thing was basically the radio. Everything else is run from the small computer terminal we rebuilt on the outside, just to one side of the airlock. The scrapped tug has been turned into a barracks capable of housing a maximum of ten people working on various shifts.
An increase of space by eight beds. It’s a pretty big achievement.
Too bad it’s dwarfed by what we used the systems from the tug for. Heh. It’s a crazy thing, but I'm hoping it'll provide us with something we desperately need.
An efficient way of going back and forth from the station to Drune.
Hahaha. I call it the Hauler.
Okay, so it’s basically a box, with the stripped down engine on the back. It has a rough but ready cockpit, with seating for one, with minimum life support and gravity. And one of the tug's arms mounted in such a way that it’s used as a trailer hitch.
That's right people, I built a freakin' SPACE TRAIN!!!
It isn't able to fly as far or as fast as the Tug is, but it is able to haul a whole lot more. Because we've welded several empty crates together to create large sized containers. Link them together, have the Hauler grab on to the leading container, and it's able to pull them all out into space.
Current hauling capacity is just under 240 tons! That's a huge amount of materials that dwarfs anything else we currently have access too. The downside is that it’s not really an atmospheric craft. If it were going to a regular planet, it wouldn't have the engine power to survive reentry.
Thankfully Drune has almost no atmosphere to speak of. All it needs to do is slow down enough to land in Site Prime's hangar.
And it already has. I drove it my damned self to make sure.
I got the Small Ship Piloting Aptitude for my troubles, along with a handful of Aspects usable with it. It was a big boost, and the increase in skill allows me to go further, faster and with less fuel.
The Piloting Aspect deals directly with my ability to fly the ship. Boosted with other linked 'sub-Aspects', I'm more deft at drawing out maneuverability and other engine abilities.
The System Aspect allows me to have a much greater, and much finer control of the ship's systems. Tied with efficiency and boosting sub-Aspects, I can go faster and use less fuel or energy; as well as reducing the power consumption of life support and other ship systems.
Ah, I'll explain that real quick, since I've only given a rough description of how the Aspects work.
The term 'Aspect Web' describes a group of chained together Aspects. It starts with the primary, usually an Action, like Piloting. From there, you link up what I've coined as 'sub-Aspects'. These Aspects aren't actions in and of themselves, and instead provide boosts to the primary. They increase either its ability with boosting Aspects, or reduce its rate of consumption through the use of efficiency Aspects.
Example:
[Primary] Piloting Aspect ← [Sub-Aspects] Flying Aspect ← Control Aspect ← Boost Aspect
From there, you add more groups of linked sub-Aspects. Like so:
[Primary] Piloting Aspect ← [Sub-Aspects] Control Aspect ← Boost Aspect
← [Subs] Hauling Capacity ← Expand Aspect ← Maximize Aspect
Now, each group of sub-Aspects can influence a single thing. In the previous example, Hauling Capacity is tied to the Piloting Aspect, but the Expand and Maximize boosting aspects after it only affect the Hauling Capacity Aspect, and not the Piloting Aspect directly. The same holds true to the Control Aspect and its Boost Aspect. Only the Control Aspect is 'Boosted', which provides a bigger bonus to Control, which is carried over to the Piloting Aspect.
My Web actually looks more like this currently:
[Primary] Piloting Aspect ← [Sub-Aspects] Control Aspect ← Concentration ← Boost Aspect
← [Subs] Hauling Capacity ← Expand Aspect ← Maximize Aspect
← Learning ← Fast
← Understanding ← Grow
← Thinking ← Processing
← Efficiency ← Maximize ← Boost ← Stability
The end result is several different boosts. With my piloting skill I can haul more cargo, while learning the job faster. And finally there's the directly linked Efficiency Aspect and its associated boosts. That reduces the mental stress, and thus the costs on my Psi and Stamina while I fly.
You will also note that a few of those sub-Aspects were used more than once. An Aspect can be used a number of times in a single web equal to their level +1. So a Level 1 Aspect can be used twice. A Level 2 can be used 3 times, and so on.
The System Aspect Web follows the same line as the Primary. It has different bonuses and boosts and efficiency aspects tied to it following different lines in the web. Then both the Piloting and System Aspects are tied to the Small Ship Piloting Aptitude in its two size slots.
As of yet I haven't found a way to connect Primary Aspects together, even though I have tried to do so. Either something or missing or the system keeps it from being so to rule out abuse.
In truth, the Aspect Web could be even more complex. If you have enough levels for your Aspects, you can create Secondary Aspects in the web and then both boost and make them more efficient. I'm not at that point yet, although I have experimented with it.
And so on and so forth. I love this system.
The last thing to keep in mind is that you can reuse the Aspects in other webs. They aren't used up in a single web, and there's no real limit to the number of webs you can create based around the actions you can do. Even if you don't have the Aptitude for them, you can still create the skills, basically.
Anyway!
Andrix was rather surprised when I radioed down that I was on my way, and while it was still a long bout of flying by myself, it was a real joy seeing Andrix's face as I flew the Space Train into the hangar.
Along with its long train of enlarged cargo containers.
Hundreds of tons worth of materials! Hundreds of thousands of e-creds worth of stuff. Including over 50 tons of ice for them to process.
We still weren't able to do that up on the station. At least in these large quantities.
I actually still have Luke and Celes out in the field right now, mining some more.
I spent a couple of hours planetside, walking through the shelter site with Andrix again. The first hydroponics tanks are up and running. Silene was kind enough to open one of them for me to take a look.
The smell was almost unbearable, but the blue-green algae growing in thick mats under the water more than made up for it. So far it’s only about 1% of their oxygen needs for the life support; but it is already helping.
The greenhouses were likewise in a fit. The new crops were already coming up, and everyone was really happy with what was being grown.
One of the greenhouses had been converted into a nursery for flowers an
d trees. Purely for enjoyment. And grasses. The thing is like a large enclosed garden. Some buds are already coming out as well, in all sorts of colors.
There's a definite change in the mood. Most people are smiling readily now, and everyone seems more relaxed.
Getting the Hauler unloaded takes longer, but there are more hands to do the work. I also tell Andrix that we can take a few more people up to the Station.
Once again, it’s a fight to figure out who to take. Techs vs. Miners vs. Manufacturers.
While we could take about another 8, I decide only on six new guys, including another guard. With Luke currently flying, we need someone who can actually use a gun on the station. Just in case.
Universe Online - Enter the Game: Complete Edition Page 21
