One of my employees on Platinum recently brought up an issue in your reports. A rather glaring issue that I wouldn’t expect you to make. Our records show that the planet at its coldest is about -110 degrees Celsius. Despite this, you claimed that there existed frozen Nitrogen and Oxygen, elements that don’t freeze until it gets over twice as cold. I don’t know what you tried to pull here, or it was just your teams getting lazy, but either way it throws every other claim you made into question.
USI is hereby terminating what will be its last contract with you, and once I bring this to the public, what will hopefully be your last contract in all of Liberty.
From: Jack Worth, Planetform Incorporated
Encryption: Twin Band Alphanumeric
Subject: Errors in Edmonton report
Dear Mr. Tomson,
I sincerely apologize for this delay in response. This situation got out of control, and I take full responsibility for this.
We spent several weeks trying to sort out what happened, involving our best scientists and engineers. It seems that the team lead responsible for work initially made several mistakes, and the one you quote is actually just a typo in incorrectly formulated phrase. The author of the report meant, of course, oxygen and hydrogen, not nitrogen. In context of melting glaciers, it apparently means just dihydrogen monoxide, i.e. ordinary water.
However, the rating of terraforming potential in this report was estimated incorrectly. We took original source data and new data we were able to collect during construction work on the surface, and recalculated the rating. Actual value we came up with is 4.2, which indicates terraforming of Edmonton as risky. The amount of energy the planet receives from the system's sun is still decreasing, thus it requires generation of additional energy flow just to sustain melting glaciers. This will not allow us to speed up the process. So, the initial estimation of 20-25 years to 75% thaw is incorrect. The actual time to make it inhabitable, confirmed by our new calculations, is approximately 175 years.
This is indeed another story than the original report tells. I apologize for this silly and unprofessional mistakes made by our employees and myself. The lead of the initial survey team was fired already, and all others involved were sanctioned. I will personally make sure that such situation will not happen again.
I propose to compensate your expenses caused by this report. I will understand if you refuse to continue investing in building of settlement, but I ask you to reconsider your decision. There is still potential for terraforming Edmonton and abundant resources to extract. Fortunately, the geological survey was made by another team and is much more accurate. This is confirmed by first drilling that we already made after installation of basic mining site.
Yours sincerely Jack Worth
PlanetForm Incorporated
A hundred and seventy-five years? Doing some basic calculations, I could beat your estimate by half just by repurposing the reactors running my fleet and letting them generate heat on the planet. I’ve already said this to you, but USI is done working with Planetform and we are taking our business elsewhere.