» Sender - Jeremy Birch, Scientific Programs Administrator, All Worlds Enterprises & Securities
» Recipient - Deep Space Engineering, Technical staff
» Location - Salt Lake Station, New York system
» Subject - Assistance required with an Automation Project for Salt Lake Station
» ENCRYPTION LEVEL - Private communication - Maximum
Good day Deep Space Engineering technical staff,
This is Jeremy Birch from All Worlds Enterprises & Securities in the Scientific Programs section, based out of our HQ at Salt Lake Station in New York.
We've put a lot of work lately into improvements across the board at Salt Lake Station that have seen upgrades to our production equipment lines, optimization of our environmental and health systems, and general structure of the base itself into its present form.
However, we continue to look for ways to improve efficiencies, which leads me to my communication to your expert engineering teams today.
We seek to lessen the burden of our transport fleet that work towards the daily requirements of the general crew onboard - namely those space station specific necessities more easily found on life bearing planets - food, oxygen, and water. Currently this accounts for a high percentage of our local fleet flight times - times we know could be more profitably spent elsewhere.
While most stations seek to reduce this cost of time and credits by renewables on board (biodome projects, recycling projects etc), we have reviewed some data provided to us and don't believe that is necessarily the investment we wish to make for a station so deeply within House Space.
Our solution is actually a lot more basic, but still has its technological hurdles:
We seek to use smaller transports as unmanned shuttles between the short route of the trade lane between Baltimore Shipyard and Planet Manhattan.
These shuttles would then dock at Newark Station, where they would be loaded with the food, water, and oxygen supplies that we require daily at Salt Lake Station.
It is our hope that the smaller size of the transport and the relative close proximity of the route to our Interspace Commerce stations will allow remote control with some internal automation onboard to be used, in effect allowing limited crew to enact.
Our teams working on this idea wanted to send some preliminary data, to show some merit behind the theory itself.
Your engineers will find the following data attached:
sensor readings from both Salt Lake Station and Newark Station regarding the strength of signals emanating from both.
sensor readings from our own drone survey of the trade lane route to and from the station
visual data from the route via the drone telemetry
We look forward to hearing your perspective on the feasibility of our project and any concerns. We decided to approach DSE first given knowledge that automation was used in past mining projects such as the platinum operations on Planet Huron from Toronto Station in the Ontario system.
No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess,
Jeremy Birch
Scientific Programs Administrator All Worlds Enterprises & Securities
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Logan Davis, Captain & Manager
LOCATION: Susquehanna Station, Cortez
SUBJECT: Salt Lake Station Automation Project
Well howdy there Mr. Birch - or would you prefer "Dr."?
I guess I'm the closest DSE has right now to an expert on modular designs, seein' as I assisted with building and maintaining both of our refineries. I gotta tell you, this automation project has a lot of interestin' considerations for it under the hood. But I wonder if you seriously considered the incentive structure of your replenishment operations.
You see, by my conservative estimates, as much as 50% of the traffic to our refineries, especially Red Rock, is in the form of just the type of smaller vessels you discuss. Now you say that your fleet is necessary to maintain replenishment, but you may wanna ask yourself why those there vessels are unwilling to run some of that cargo. You're pretty well positioned, seein' as you're in the same system as all the manufacturing centers. Maybe all it will take for these folks is a few more credits per unit of cargo to decide to run some of it to Salt Lake on their way to the next contract.
After all, freein' up your vessels for the true high-value haulin' should be worth a few credits, eh?
Now if all that above has already been considered and discussed, we can focus on the drone business. As you know, Baltimore is always looking for more orders for the public waitlist, so if you folks wanna talk schematics, I'll forward this up to the boss. While we've focused primarily on the human assets we can leverage during our ops and replenishment contracts, there's much to be said for automation where it is feasible.
» Subject - Assistance required with an Automation Project for Salt Lake Station
» ENCRYPTION LEVEL - Private communication - Maximum
Good day Captain Logan Davis of Deep Space Engineering!
Mr. Birch will do just fine - I'm more of a project manager than knee deep in the research of any particular assignment.
It would make sense, from a true trading perspective, to just increase the prices to show our serious demand for the crew resources... however our Executive has decided longer term, and more economical, solutions should at least be explored that won't be broken due to labour interruptions or any issues with the various contractors that might be involved. They are willing to invest the credits towards this end, and my department, so I'm willing to entertain those solutions as well!
In our discussions of drones to accomplish this routine but continuous task, we weren't looking to equip large vessels for fewer hauls. Our focus groups seemed to agree with their brainstormed idea that more smaller, maneuverable craft making more regular trips could easily slip in and out of regular lane traffic without much impact to local flow around both endpoints. Whether that proves true in practice will remain to be seen.
I look forward to seeing what options DSE can suggest to produce solutions for our resource supply dilemma. Thank you for forwarding this onward to your technical staff!
No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess,
Jeremy Birch
Scientific Programs Administrator All Worlds Enterprises & Securities
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Logan Davis, Captain & Manager
LOCATION: Red Rock Refinery, Colorado
SUBJECT: Salt Lake Station Automation Project
Mr. Birch, it's been a while, eh?
As you can imagine, we've had our hands full rolling out the new modular dry-docks, as well as other R&D. But I've been crunchin' some numbers on the side, and I think you're gonna like this! I'm attachin' the whole report, but I figure you could use a little summary in this here message.
The way I see it, your puzzle is all about efficiency, but with an interestin' constraint - no big haulers. Now you'd think you have a lot of options here, since you see clouds of the small fry on every trip. Well, that's not quite right. You're specializing for cargo-haulin', not all those other things a ship is expected to do out there. That means you either maximize your size within' a threshold and stuff it full of cargo, or you go the other route, and make the hull as small as feasibly possible.
Based on the numbers, the smallest possible hull wins out. It's back to that question of redundancy, yeah? When you go small enough, you basically got a cargo pod with sensors on one end, and an engine on the other. No life support, no structural reinforcements. And the best part? The folks at Ageira already developed one - the M5-U48! You can get 12 of these manufactured for the price of 1 Rhino on Baltimore. And when you add up the capacity, it's almost equivalent, and like I mentioned - almost no overhead.
Pretty sweet, right? And that's before we talk about the power savings, which you can see in the simulation data. All in all, it seems to me that you've got your haulers.
But now you've gotta figure out efficient ways of moorin' them, and swapping out those cans. Issue is, I doubt many yards have external arms that small, but plenty of analogues to be found on shipyard conveyors. I can connect you with some folks at Baltimore, and I'm sure you'll figure somethin' out in the end!
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