Obsidian Zoetic - Internal Channel

[Psymple]

Hello...

*A small man appears on the Monitors huddled under a fur coat.
His hands clasp around a small leather book as he addresses the monitor.*

Hello... This is our first live update from the planet surface on this channel.
I only just received access to upload on this frequency, I hope you are receiving this.

My name is Mark Shieldson, I am the lead engineer for the colonisation
of Murilo. I hope you are able to see the live feed I have uploaded from the
outdoor camera, it is our weather cam on the surface and also allows
us to remotely check the status of the MCT. (Murilo Communication Transmitter)

Anyway, I am sending this broadcast because of a few issues I discussed
earlier yesterday morning with Mrs O'hanna, having explained to her
she decided that I should broadcast my thoughts to Mikrosh and...
the... erm, Council? via this channel...

Anyway, ...
Firstly I would just like to say that as asked I have made a few alterations
to the MCT an it is now set to pick up a much wide range of communications
and will automatically retransmit garbaldy-gook on the same frequency of
any non-authorised communications it picks up.

I am not sure why you wanted this, but... It should stop all non-authorised
communication to and from the planet...
I also did a few recalibrations of the receivers and emitters, and
tightened some of the wind breakers for good measure.

As well as this I would like to announce the complete reconstruction of the
Transylvania station material planet side and if you care to know the details
I have my notes so I can show you how things are arranged.

*The man shuffles through his book finding a piece of lined paper*

Look here,

This is a small sketch of a the facility from the front,
the MCT sits on the surface of the planet and then underneath
we have a elevator shaft stretching down into the planet surface.

Around the bottom of the elevator shaft we have reinforced the
ceiling and hollowed out a small cave so that we could reconstruct
the Transylvania pieces.

On the right you can see what we have done with the Transylvania
pieces we received, who ever thought of using them by the way was
a genius... They were built for insulating from the vacuum of space
they are doing a superb job down here. Although who ever was
responsible for their deconstruction must have no been a qualified
engineer... They looked to have been deconstructed with explosives...

Anyway... We used two of the pods A and C to create the sleeping quarters,
splitting them into two floors and salvaging the converging walls for building
materials elsewhere.
Together they hold enough room for 232 beds with enough room to move
and thus we have two teams working on opposing day/night cycles,
whilst half the population sleeps the other half work...



The bottom half of the picture shows the facility from the top down...
This more clearly shows how the station remains have been positioned.
It also shows where we have positioned the MOX powered generator
we use for heating and electricity.

Finally you can see the area that our mining team have been digging out
and now are underway using the materials provided to build a large cargo
hold within the underground facility.

Anyway... This is where it gets interesting...

We have been doing alot of digging down here... but...
we have yet to discover anything but snow and ice...
You see the thing is we originally drilled to a specific depth
because we believed it would be the depth at which we hit
dirt... Bedrock... ground... mud... You know...

But we have yet to even find a lump of the stuff whist digging
around down here... I am not a geologist but, we only setup on
the equator because we knew the ice would be thinnest here...
Either we are right on top of an anomaly or... well... the ice crust
on Murilo might just be damn thicker than we thought...

And that could mean some interesting things for us...
I mean, if the Ice is thicker than we thought that means
there is alot more water than we thought...
Not only that but...
Well... look here...


*The man seems to get excited at this point quickly flicking
to another page in his grubby book and showing the screen*



If you look at the middle picture on the left you will see a
representation of the depth of ice we expected, and thus...
by releasing this ice into the air the amount we could increase
the atmosphere.

However.... if the ice is thicker, that means that when we
heat the planet up and more of the ice is melted, more
gasses will be released into the atmosphere...

This lead me to a theory about the planet its self...
Now I am no Geologist but... The planet has very small
amounts of Methane and CO2 in the atmosphere...
So I did some tests on the ice and found that it has quite
a bit of CO2 within it...

I believe this planet might have been kept warm by the
greenhouse effect caused by the huge amounts of water
vapour in its atmosphere... however if something dramatic
happened to affect the planet temperature for even a short
period of time with would affect the water vapour in the
atmosphere and thus reduce this greenhouse gas heating
effect...

Because of this, it would be a degenerative cycle...
The less water vapour in the air, the less greenhouse
effect, the colder it got and thus the less water vapour
in the air...

... Anyway this is a tangent...

A more concerning matter is what this increase in ice means
for the planet once we colonise it further... by my estimates,
and again I am not a Geologist!... we are looking at a minimum
of 70% of the planet surface covered in water... and maybe
as much as 90%!!!

I believe Murilo was a ruddy water world!!!

Infact...

Water doesn'€™t freeze at certain pressure points...
We might have a problem...
Bugger!!!
We could be sat on a damn ice pond with a bloody
ocean underneath us!!!
...

Hold on a second...
We cant dig down any further unless we know what'€™s
bloody below us... We need some scanning equipment
pronto... Otherwise we might just drill ourselves down
into a watery grave...

Sorry ... I have to cut this short!...
I will call a halt to all drilling operations in search
of ground... We will attempt to do our best to strengthen
our ties to the elevator shaft... It can probably take our
weight... it iss that is securely connected to
several million tons of ice with miles of supporting beams
that run horizontally out from it... so... well...

*A quick pause*

It should hold the weight of our currently quite small base
even if the layer of snow and ice below us was to drop into
the abyss... Securing it will be an issue though, but I will
do my best...

*the man turns and quickly turns of the screen
grabbing his paper and fur hat as he does so.*

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