Things continue to go well as France expands into space. We've finished adding Oxygen to Luna, and have begun to pump out water, which is the final step to make that body fully habitable. Steps have also been taken to alleviate the upcoming mineral shortages by establishing an automated mining colony on Gonggong in the outer solar system. We have new armor tech available, although it probably won't be rolled out for a few years to operational ships, and we've ordered development of an improved version of the Dogmatix AMM, which we'll put into production to boost our missile stocks.
Our biggest concern at this point is that Earth's stocks of minerals are starting to run low. In most cases, our already-mined stockpile is quite large, but we do need to start finding other sources. Ophiuchus Primere and the new colony on Gliese 892 are both rich in minerals, but availability in most cases is quite low, limiting output. We're also finding ourselves short on long-range transport. As a result, two additional AKXs were ordered and delivered last year, and we've just laid down two more. The last issue is that we seem to have overtaxed our maintenance base, and I've ordered more facilities, and research to make our existing facilities more efficient.
Database is here.
1972 has been played, and the maintenance issue has been resolved. I threw an extra lab at the relevant researcher, and we now have capacity for all our ships, and a bit to spare. Still building maintenance facilities to give us some margin, though. More AKXs finished, and I'm moving more equipment out to our colonies, focusing mostly on mines right now. We've also cut the colony cost on Luna by about 15% thanks to the water the terraforming system has been pouring out.
Database is here.
Comments
Again with the distractions before we can really discuss this in the meetup, but with distractions that interesting I can't complain.
Things in the game look pretty much on track for me, so not much to add. On the subject of freighters, a bit of BOTE math suggests we're going to want maybe one AKX-equivalent per hundred BP/year we're going to spend developing offworld colonies, to deliver a mix of infrastructure, mines, automines, and factories to our existing colonies and remote mining sites without running into scheduling conflicts. That will increase if we start developing systems more distant than Gliese 892.
And maybe one CSX-equivalent per three AKX-equivalent in the long run, though for now we've got plenty of surplus workers in our offworld colonies.
I wouldn't worry too much about colony ships right now. We have a big pool of civilian colony ships, and unlike civilian cargo ships, we aren't faced with a choice between having them do what we want and giving us money. We get both, although that does mean periods when they do in-system runs to boost both our budget and that of the freight company.
1973 database update is up.