-=AE=-|Ganesha has finally finished working up. I have all of my hardware in place and am ready to resume gathering data.
The only thing I am still waiting on at the moment is approval from Bretonia to move the ship through. Like Rheinland, they have laws about hyperspace survey. I'd like to get an approval to just announce myself as I move from system to system, but the laws require that any ship not belonging to the Empire must be escorted, and even that requires registration and approval first.
Eventually, I will need to get in contact with the various Outlands polities, probably the Red Hessians and the Corsairs first. I won't have any suspect equipment on board, but it would be good to ensure that they are willing to have me about. The balancing game will get more complicated as time goes on since I also intend, if at all possible, to get scanning done up in Malta.
After waiting the better part of two weeks for a response from Bretonia, I decided to make my way over to Koeln by way of Liberty. I am debating on whether to file a law suit for damages on the basis of failure to provide due process and loss of income, but haven't decided as of this time.
In any case, I got Ganesha over to Heisenberg without any particular problems, although the nav data I bought from a Freelancer at Barrier Gate was completely fictional. Ah, well, what is the purpose of an research vessel if not to explore. I never cared for cartography missions in the Navy, but updating my records for the ship will definitely be beneficial later. Oh, and speaking of Heisenberg, here is our approach.
The place is huge, and I had no problem with getting space, especially since I wanted labs as far from everything else as possible. I don't Think I am going to blow anything up, but having a fusion plant get away from you isn't something to play around with, especially when you are thinking of plants big enough to power a station.
I am thinking that I'll shake down on actual research with the Brown Dwarf in the Koeln system. I am not expecting any great insights, but it should allow me to determine if there are any system faults that need correcting. I have to say that it feels good to be getting back into Research.
For a rather slow start, this has been a productive week.
I got transit permission from Bretonia, same deal as Rheinland; I can carry the hardware, I just cannot use it for the traditional purpose. Given that I am not planning on advertising services, this shouldn't be a problem.
I have started my lab project at Heisenberg by getting reinforcing materials delivered to the station. It will take me a while to make the needed changes, but it is not anything I have not done before. In fact, Heisenberg is loaning me some of their folks to make certain that it gets done according to their standards. Since mine are more restrictive than theirs, I am looking at it as unexpected assistance.
My next phase will be to actually bring in lab equipment. That won't be for a while, though, given the amount of work I have to do to the environment.
I also started a dialog with the Sol Project. It seems very ambitious to be planning a hypergate when you don't have a target, but I'll leave the astrogation to someone else. Given my own experiences, I think I have a lot to contribute so let's see where this heads.
It felt odd being inside of a pressure suit inside the station, but with the servo enhancements and the contained environment, it was a lot easier to handle the placement of the rad shielding and the structural reinforcement. The Gadolinium was being bonded to the existing station structures using a catalyst welder, but it was slow work and the element had a tendency to flake if handled roughly, resulting in dust in the air. The catalyst welder had also been programmed to chelate the Gadolinium to make it markedly less toxic. The Super Alloy would go up after the Gadolinium bonding was completed.
Chuck had made sure that his processes were well documented, especially after how Ingenuus hadn't even known about the dark matter lab spaces on Ames. He didn't want to be responsible for anyone getting poisoned because they weren't cautious about pulling down the walls to refit the space.
It looked like another two weeks of work before the place would be ready for habitation, but he might be able to knock that down some if he could get the Robotics for the lab in earlier than originally planned; another contract would seem to be in order.
The reinforcement and installation of safety measures is going a lot faster after the delivery of the Robotics and Industrial Hardware. It took a little while to get the programming down, but the newly installed units are doing all of the bonding and fitting I mentioned in my previous entry.
I did end up in a moderately heated debate with the station managers about configuring a "blow out" in one of the outer walls, but I got the okay once I pointed out that, with the hull reinforcing in place, the lab entrance would be the weakest structure, directing any possible reaction INTO the station, whereas a specifically weakened hull portion would allow it to vent to space. I still think it is unlikely to be needed, but both the naval officer and the engineer in me agree that it is a prudent step and weakened is not the same as weak in any case. That section will just be half as well reinforced as the next most likely failure point.
In other news, I got approval from the Red Hessians to conduct scans in Omega 41. I am still waiting on a response from Crete, but at least they haven't denied me. Since the ship is fitted more effectively for this type of work than my previous one, I don't expect the work to take more than two weeks once I get started.
21 months of information down the tubes because of a power surge and a fried backup system!
It turns out that, somewhere early on, I never got the private network switched over from station power to my own plant.
The entire lab is on an internal dual parallel fusion plant of my own design. As part of the lease, I have been buying H-Fuel from the station with a, multiply redundant one way valve, line running in from the public utility feed. As a result, nothing in the lab space even noticed that there was a power problem. My computing lab, on the other hand, was a total write off, which is incredibly frustrating, given that it Should have been the most protected element of the facility. I am back to initial load for the facility super cluster because that was in storage aboard Ganesha. I have no idea why the system wasn't updating the onboard backups.
Heisenberg paid to get everything replaced, so the system is back in place. The power plant elements both run on their own clusters, so losing the net didn't take down the plant. It did cost me all of the monitoring software, though, since those programs ran through the facility super cluster specifically to be separate from the power plant's computers in case there was a failure.
In sum, I still know exactly where I am, but documenting the fine details of how I got there is gone.
In other news, it turns out that I now own property in a war zone. I don't really have a huge interest in Gran Canaria; in fact, I'd been renting it out through a property management company. I hadn't even been paying attention to the conflict until I got an alert from the 'Net notifying me that the monthly deposit hadn't come in. Since Bretonia is invading, umm, forcibly inducting the system into the Empire, they've cut financial transactions to and from the system.
Probably just as well that I am not a politician; in spite of the twisty thinking involved in particle physics, I don't have the right mind for it...
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