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[Happerry]

Bioplastic Armor
Plastic isn't the toughest material out there, but it can still be pretty tough. It can also be made (assuming you have the right micro-organisms) literally out of shit if you need more raw materials, and is pretty light and has a low density for it's (decent) protective value. So eventually some smart soul said 'hey, lets take some hard plastics and form it into starship armor!' And then they made plastic armor for starships. Light, cheap, and protective. (As a bonus, slain enemies can be recycled into additional armor! Ignore the ghostly moaning and wailing, it's all in your head. Starships so equipped are definitely not haunted. We pinky swear.)

Here's a hopefully organics using armor design so we actually have some armor.

[Twinwolf]

Just a design for the future, if not neccesarily this turn.

Finder's Keepers Class Salvage/Tug Ship
A fairly simple ship, with a fairly clear purpose. The Finder's Keepers is a hull based on rifling through the debris of battle and taking whatever's useful from it, with facilities to break down salvage into usable pieces and a structure for hauling things around that something it's size has no business hauling. It has a gravity drive so it can actually, well, tug, and it has the storage space for it's hauls and facilities, as well as a small hangar for utility drones (or, if we're reaaaally scraping the bottom of the barrel for firepower, combat drones), but overall the idea is to keep costs down.

[10ebbor10]

Remora Repair Drone

Someone turned the engineering entertainment system yo the wrong channel. The results are peculiar but eorthwhile.

The Remora repair drone is a small, flat drone that can suction itself to the outside of ships to perform critical repairs in flight with it's build in toolset. It can also suction itself to interior walls, floors and ceiling to repair internal systems. In an emergency, it can even suction itself to an intrudor, where it'll rearrange their internal irgans untill they cease to be a threat.

Gravitational Metamaterials

Interference with drive technology is a serious concern to us. Hence, gravitational metamaterials. These materials take gravitational waves that could interfere with drive technology, and bend them around the drive generator. This dramatically reduces interference, allowing for easier calculations and more accurate results, as well as making it tremendousy harder to interfere with the drives.

[Kashyyk]

That went surprisingly well.

The low crew requirements of our ships area boon to our limited population, but poses a very real risk of being overwhelmed by hostile boarding operations. To handle this, our ships can be upgraded with a wide-range set of "countermeasures". It's a bespoke upgrade for each model of ship, but it will further extend their durability.

First, multiple sets of sensors are placed to allow observation of the entire interior from multiple angles, providing the crew with critical combat intelligence.

All doors & hatches are fitted with additional sliding blast covers, tripling the expected amount of time to force entry. In addition, any long corridors are also split by blast doors, further controlling movement of hostiles. These are automatically closed when on combat-alert, requiring either a palm-mounted id chip to unlock, or manual unlocking from either the bridge or the ship computer.

The main active countermeasures are the "Defensive Engagement And Trespasser Hunter" Marines, although most people call them DEATHbots. These are essentially the same as the droid infantry used by our GREAT regiments, with slight modifications to make them more suited to claustrophobic ship-combat. They are equipped with carbine versions of the various standard arms, and each have a powered id-chip in their palms for access to doors. If the chip ever loses power, it ceases to function. They carry the same combat AI as their ground-based brethren, but are typically coordinated by either the Ship Computer or one of the bridge crew.

Finally, all crew stations are also equipped with combat lockers, containing standard issue GREAT body armour and carbine weaponry as a final line of defence.

The Expedition can deploy a lot of drones, and that is good. But more is definitely better. To perform this effectively, we have turned to our age old friends: SciFi Movies, Boreholes and Automation.

The most obvious part of HOLI-COM is the central holographic display, where a three dimensional representation of near-space is presented, complete with cute little ship icons, velocity vectors & known firing arcs. All around the main hologram are smaller stations giving more detailed information about whatever the user needs. This is all collated and presented to the main command crew to allow them to make informed combat decisions.

This is only half of what the crew interacts with however, the other is HOLI, a artificial personality who responds to information requests, manages the many moving parts and transmits intership orders for the command crew. Any ship equipped with HOLI tends to have their ship computer personality replaced with HOLI as well, who is typically presented on any nearby screens as a disembodied, male head, middle-aged and balding.

The other, less exciting part of HOLI-COM is arguably much more important. A huge array of computing banks (building off our experience with Expedition AI and Quantum computing) powers the display and HOLI's personality, and is hooked up to a collection of pinhole bore drives. These drives are in constant use, transmitting information updates and orders to and from the various ships in the fleet.

[Chiefwaffles]

Slavebore Drive

Yes, yes, "slave" sounds evil and intimidating and all that, but it's technically accurate, which is what we as engineers should strive for.
Well, not us. We don't care about that. But the couple of people remaining who still talk about the "delicate fabric of spacetime" do. And one of them got to the official documents before us so now the name's set unless we want to take a Saturday and go through a ton of paperwork. Not really worth it; so "Slavebore" it is!

The Slavebore Drive takes experience from our projects relating to smaller bores -- the Skip drive, the PEB, and more; While not tiny itself, it can only open bores up to the level of a large fighter.
This may not seem useful at first, but wait: the Slavebore can generate a lot of bores in a very short amount of time. By using the calculation power of the ship's main boredrive when not in use (and potentially that of any other Slavebore drives on the ship), it can keep its data constantly updated and predictive algorithms allow it to predictively compensate its dataset for new Slaveboreholes (meaning boreholes generated by it don't disrupt local spacetime enough to force it to generate a whole new set of calculations for the next one). This combined with a hefty set of capacitors and some other trinkets that apparently make it explode when you take them out all work together to make it what it is.

We expect this to be of tremendous use in deploying/retrieving drones right into/from action (and enabling activities such as saving a drone before it gets destroyed), as well as aiding weaponry -- the Slavebore Drive should be able to use its capabilities to add boring capabilities to any mundane weapon (increasing its range and decreasing its chance to get intercepted) and improve the boring capabilities of any weapon that already uses them.
Something considered in the design is allowing the Slavebore to receive continuous updates (potentially via microbores) from near its destination to allow for even faster boring times and the like; this isn't useful right now, but if we were to design a weaponized sensor drone...

TL;DR: Non-huge borehole drive that generates a lot of fighter-sized (or smaller) boreholes, useful for instantly deploying/retrieving drones right into/from action en masse, improving/giving boring capabilities of/to our weapons, and has potential compatibility to uplink with distant sensor drones for better boring capabilities.


Honey Drone
The Honey Drone is, well, named after the honey bee for its nest building and ability to adapt, using materials from the environment to make a new product.

It takes up hangar space like any other drone type, of course. It's equipped with small lasers, saws, and other tools that allow it to both cut up and repair hulls. It has a small internal cargo space that can be manipulated by the drone itself, allowing it to take things out to add to ships or to take things off of ships or other objects (such as asteroids) and put into cargo. It has a smell sensor array capable of providing and transmitting enough data to create a small borehole back to its mothership, though it's not equipped with a Boredrive itself -- this is to allow the possiblity of transmitting materials to/from the mothership.

The Honey Drone's best use is out of combat. This is when it can salvage ship wrecks and either save those materials, or use them (along with potential materials brought along with the drone's hangar) to repair our own ships. In cases of severe damage and material shortages, the drone is able to cannibalize non-essential parts of our own ships to repair essential parts. It can theoretically perform these operations in combat, though it most likely wouldn't have an insanely long lifespan.
In combat, if the Captain chooses so, the Honey Drones can be deployed en masse to cut strategic holes into hostile ships, disabling certain systems (we really hope that we get at least one report of a Honey Drone operating inside an enemy ship but we aren't exactly designing it for this) to help our own fleet. Alternatively, they can latch themselves to the armor and overheat/overload their generator (whatever's the most dangerous) to damage the enemy ship; we got this idea when somebody accidentally switched to a documentary on bees defending against wasps. Or something. Cool stuff. Why can't we be that cool?

Perhaps the most important part is the Honey Drone being painted yellow and black. This is nonnegotiable. We already had to remove the awesome wings, and we'll be damned if we're going to remove the paintjob too.

[Twinwolf]

Well, let's kick off voting, since we have a bunch of ideas now.

Drones
Reading Rainbow Sensor Drone (1): Twinwolf
Remora Repair Drone (0):
Honey Drone (1): Twinwolf

Bore-tech
Gravitational Metamaterials (0):
Slavebore Drive (0):

Ships
Finder's Keepers Salvage Ship/Tug (0):

Other
Bioplastic Armor (0):
Anti-Boarding Countermeasures (0):
HOLograms, Intelligence, & COMmunication (HOLI-COM) Module ( (0):

Speed-up dice
2 dice to Expedition-class (1): Twinwolf

Save for Revisions:
Save 2 Dice (1): Twinwolf

[Kashyyk]

Drones
Reading Rainbow Sensor Drone (1): Twinwolf
Remora Repair Drone (0):
Honey Drone (1): Twinwolf

Bore-tech
Gravitational Metamaterials (0):
Slavebore Drive (0):

Ships
Finder's Keepers Salvage Ship/Tug (0):

Other
Bioplastic Armor (1): Kashyyk
Anti-Boarding Countermeasures (0):
HOLograms, Intelligence, & COMmunication (HOLI-COM) Module (1): Kashyyk

Speed-up dice
2 dice (100T + 200O  + 600M + 200E) to Expedition-class (2): Twinwolf, Kashyyk

Save for Revisions:
Save 2 Dice (1): Twinwolf

[Chiefwaffles]

While I'm fine with the reference, I dislike how unwieldy the name of the Reading Rainbow Sensor Drone is.

Hone Drone is of obvious use, and the Boreslave drive helps a lot with our drone strategy.

Drones
Reading Rainbow Sensor Drone (1): Twinwolf
Remora Repair Drone (0):
Honey Drone (2): Twinwolf, Chiefwaffles

Bore-tech
Gravitational Metamaterials (0):
Slavebore Drive (1): Chiefwaffles

Ships
Finder's Keepers Salvage Ship/Tug (0):

Other
Bioplastic Armor (1): Kashyyk
Anti-Boarding Countermeasures (0):
HOLograms, Intelligence, & COMmunication (HOLI-COM) Module (1): Kashyyk

Speed-up dice
2 dice (100T + 200O  + 600M + 200E) to Expedition-class (3): Twinwolf, Kashyyk, Chiefwaffles

Save for Revisions:
Save 2 Dice (2): Twinwolf, Chiefwaffles

And C&C should wait until we get to 50% done for Expedition and can apply the delicious experience from its ship computer system.

[Twinwolf]

Another thing for consideration.

Messenger Torpedo System
The Messenger Torpedo System is meant to be a mainline "gun" of our ships, designed for medium hardpoints and using none of our very rare synthetics. Based on the anti-capital ship torpedoes used by our Hornets, but scaled up for ship batteries, the Messenger Torpedoes are nuclear missiles fired in salvos meant to, in cooperation with the Hornet-borne torpedoes, saturate point defense and break through. Ideally, a Messenger will make contact with an enemy ship and penetrate as deep as it can before detonating it's nuclear payload. The missiles are built fairly hardy in order to not detonate the instant it makes impact (and hopefully be a little resistant to weaker point defense or fighters).

[Happerry]

Drones
Reading Rainbow Sensor Drone (1): Twinwolf
Remora Repair Drone (0):
Honey Drone (3): Twinwolf, Chiefwaffles, Happerry

Bore-tech
Gravitational Metamaterials (0):
Slavebore Drive (2): Chiefwaffles, Happerry

Ships
Finder's Keepers Salvage Ship/Tug (0):

Other
Bioplastic Armor (2): Kashyyk, Happerry
Anti-Boarding Countermeasures (0):
HOLograms, Intelligence, & COMmunication (HOLI-COM) Module (1): Kashyyk

Speed-up dice
2 dice (100T + 200O  + 600M + 200E) to Expedition-class (3): Twinwolf, Kashyyk, Chiefwaffles

Save for Revisions:
Save 2 Dice (2): Twinwolf, Chiefwaffles

[Powder Miner]

Drones
Reading Rainbow Sensor Drone (2): Twinwolf, Powder Miner
Remora Repair Drone (0):
Honey Drone (3): Twinwolf, Chiefwaffles, Happerry

Bore-tech
Gravitational Metamaterials (0):
Slavebore Drive (2): Chiefwaffles, Happerry

Ships
Finder's Keepers Salvage Ship/Tug (0):

Other
Bioplastic Armor (3): Kashyyk, Happerry, Powder Miner
Anti-Boarding Countermeasures (0):
HOLograms, Intelligence, & COMmunication (HOLI-COM) Module (1): Kashyyk

Speed-up dice
2 dice (100T + 200O  + 600M + 200E) to Expedition-class (4): Twinwolf, Kashyyk, Chiefwaffles, Powder Miner

Save for Revisions:
Save 2 Dice (3): Twinwolf, Chiefwaffles, Powder Miner

I don’t think we should start the C&C until the expedition is at 50%, so we can draw some experience from it.

[TheFantasticMsFox]

Wayfarer IFV
Downward sloping wedge shaped IFV, propelled by 6 actuated legs with magnetic clamps on the feet, and wheels integrated into the lower structure for use on open road or when speed is required. Armor is comprised mainly of a mix of Titanium, Ceramics and Aluminium, with air gaps as well. It is armed with a rear mounted, automated turret featuring a 25mm coilgun, a twin coaxial infantry coilgun, and 2 rocket pods able to load 20 55mm rockets each. The coilgun can be swapped out with a Shattergun. It draws power from both a distributed bank of capacitors and a borehole generator. It has 3 operators, a Driver, Commander, and Gunner. In the rear of the vehicle a troop compartment can hold up to 8 men/drones, who can exit/enter from a  ramp in the rear of the vehicle. The outside of the vehicle also features mount points for either handholds for infantry, added slat armor or external storage containers.

[Twinwolf]

Kashyyk asked in discord to move a vote.

Drones
Reading Rainbow Sensor Drone (2): Twinwolf, Powder Miner
Remora Repair Drone (0):
Honey Drone (4): Twinwolf, Chiefwaffles, Happerry, Kashyyk

Bore-tech
Gravitational Metamaterials (0):
Slavebore Drive (2): Chiefwaffles, Happerry

Ships
Finder's Keepers Salvage Ship/Tug (0):

Other
Bioplastic Armor (3): Kashyyk, Happerry, Powder Miner
Anti-Boarding Countermeasures (0):
HOLograms, Intelligence, & COMmunication (HOLI-COM) Module (0):

Speed-up dice
2 dice (100T + 200O  + 600M + 200E) to Expedition-class (4): Twinwolf, Kashyyk, Chiefwaffles, Powder Miner

Save for Revisions:
Save 2 Dice (3): Twinwolf, Chiefwaffles, Powder Miner

Incidentally, we should probably design a better base bore-drive. Our current one for cruisers is slow and expensive - if we're going to have an expensive bore drive, may as well have a fast expensive one.

[Draignean]

Honey Drone
[Time: 5 Progress: 4 Cost: 3]
Work is quick on the Honey Drone, but it's unknown whether that's because all of engineering is enthusiastic about the project or because the part of engineering REALLY dislikes 24/7 documentaries of buzzing/stinging insects and would like to please not have to watch that ever again.

Honey Drone: 0/8 [3] |  10T + 35O  + 120M + 120E | Rushed 0 Times | Nothing Invested

Prototype
[Efficacy: 5]
The Honey Drone is a piece of machinery that's destined to get its own children's show. The first prototype, affectionately nicknamed Bee Nye, booted up, analyzed the situation around it, and took its first tentative action in the world by repairing a Gaian engineer's cracked coffee mug. Adorable. As. Fuck.

Granted, it did this with a high-powered laser designed to weld spaceship hulls, so some recalibration is in order- but hey, that's science for you. Always gotta recalibrate something.

Industrial laser accidents aside; the Honey drone. Its yellow-and-black pattern is cute as a button, accentuated by a slightly 'pudgy' appearance due to the internal resource bays for the drone to store working materials. Its toolset is varied and, given time, it can actually do a pretty good job reconstructed severe structural and armor damage to vessels. It's no dockyard, and the more sensitive components (coolant lines, life support, primary power, etc) will likely be beyond its abilities- but she's capable of making good repairs to armor, hull, and simulations show her as being able to stabilize wounded vessels with good success rate.

While it's not recommended, she can also be deployed as a melee drone, latching on to enemy hull, burrowing inside, and intentionally aiming to 'salvage' particularly valuable looking components. However, she's optimized for helping friendly vessels- not to appease the sadistic pleasures of engineers who fantasize about bees burrowing into the skin of their enemies. Granted, that is a thing that she can do, but it kinda undercuts the adorable part.

Honey Drone: Wing Size 6/20/65 | Wing Cost: (2T+5O+10M+10E)*Wing Size | Capacity -6/-20/-65 | An unmanned repair drone, designed to be loaded into a hangar bay and deployed at need. Each yellow and black drone is equipped with a tiny cargo pod, a series of welding and cutting instruments, and a few finer repair tools. She's primarily capable of doing light salvage work and structural repairs to friendly ships, she can be sent into a deconstruction mode to aggressively salvage opposing vessels.


Bioplastic Armor
[Time: 2 Progress: 1 Cost: 1]
Okay, see this is the problem. Everybody is working with the Honey Bee project, getting its systems tuned, making adjustments to the repair protocols, riding on it as it flies through the lab, and nobody wants to pay attention to a project about boring plastics. So, naturally, the industrious engineering souls who got retasked with the Bioplastic project decide their time is probably better spent advising on the Honey Bee project, and they delegate the Bioplastic project to a third part subcontractor who works heavily with plastics.

They happen to be a toy company, and they're not exactly doing a bang-up job with this project from a financial standpoint, but the engineers assure us that this will add hybrid vigor to the project via super-interdisciplinary cooperation.

Bioplastic Armor: 0/8 [1] | 150O + 150E | Rushed 0 Times | Nothing Invested

Prototype
[Efficacy: 6]
We now have a definitive answer on why Legos hurt so fucking much when you step on them. It's because Legos are apparently indistinguishable from military grade starship armor. The toy company assures us that it made a number of changes to their plastic blend to make it resistant to heat, deformation, electromagnetic radiation, corrosion, wearing, cold, etc, etc, but it looks and feels exactly like the kind of plastic that you'd expect to dig out of your foot at 3am.

It's still just plastic, and you can't expect too much of it, but it makes shockingly good armor for what it is. The engineers who turfed it to the third party contractor are now insufferably smug.

Bioplastic Armor: | 0T 50O 0M 10E 0S | Capacity: -5 | Power: 0 | Sheets of plastic armor, arranged in an open buttress rather than solid sheets. Low density, shockingly high strength for plastic, and cheap as hell. Highly modular and available in many festive colors.


Expedition-Class
Progress: 10/21 (4+2)
Work on the Expedition continues at a fine pace, likely slowed down somewhat by everyone getting caught up in utterly adorable Bee Nye is.


Revision Phase of Year -2

Resources
Dice: 2
T: 9650 + 2500
O: 29800 + 7500
M: 29350 + 7500
E: 19800 + 5000
S: 1855 + 500

Spoiler: Active Projects (click to show/hide)

Pacemaster: 12/15 [3] | 150 Organic + 300 Metals + 150 Energetics | Rushed 0 Times | Nothing Invested
BOSS-E: 15/22 [3] |  150 Transplutonics + 120 Synthetic | Rushed 0 Times | 150 Transplutonics + 120 Synthetic Invested
"Death Ray" LPBA: 4/7 [2] |  75 Transplutonics + 100 Metal + 50 Energetics + 10 Synthetic | Rushed 0 Times | Nothing Invested
Bore Shield: 6/11 [3] |  135 Transplutonics + 120 Metal + 20 Synthetic | Rushed 0 Times | Nothing Invested
Gravity Drive: 4/18 [2] |  155 Transplutonics + 225 Metal + 35 Synthetic | Rushed 0 Times | Nothing Invested
"Foray" Class Escort Frigate: 2/9 [2] |  50O  + 175M + 175E | Rushed 0 Times | Nothing Invested
Mk Ib Parasite Drone "Hornet": 3/13 [3] |  35O  + 150M + 150E | Rushed 0 Times | Nothing Invested
Expedition-Class Battlestar Cuiser: 10/21 [4] |  50T + 100O  + 300M + 100E | Rushed 0 Times | Nothing Invested
Bioplastic Armor: 0/8 [1] | 150O + 150E | Rushed 0 Times | Nothing Invested
Honey Drone: 0/8 [3] |  10T + 35O  + 120M + 120E | Rushed 0 Times | Nothing Invested

[Twinwolf]

Man we're lucky sometimes.

Revision: DEATH Marines
Our ships are rather great, yes. However, they do have a glaring weakness - should an enemy manage to board, our best defense is locking the door and hoping they go away. While effective for ex-lovers, not so much for ravening alien hordes. In the distant past, ships had security teams or marines who fought to keep their ships safe. It seems only natural that we shall do the same, but unlike them we don't have the men to spare from the crew. Enter our GREAT units. Or rather, our Defensive Engagement And Trespasser Hunter Marines (DEATH Marines, for short).

These are essentially our standard G.R.E.A.T regiments, adjusted for the conditions of in-ship combat. They can either be entirely controlled by the ship, given sufficient AI capabilities, or by human operators on future ships that are less strong in that regard. They have strong arms in order to assist in heavy work on the ship in their "downtime" and use heavy weaponry, as well as a smaller pair of arms for more delicate tasks and holding smaller arms that are less damaging to the ship when boarders arrive. Human operators have armored suits with the same functions and are indistinguishable at a glance.

They tend to have a single, circular "eye" (mostly to make the enemy aim somewhere nonessential - they have sensors in several places on the body) that changes color depending on threat status, from passive green to cautious yellow to aggressive red. Someone advocated that they be painted red, "To strike fear into our enemies, as if they are covered in blood!". Given we have no confirmation that alien attackers will have red blood, we assume it's a reference. That's why we allowed it.

When not in use, the drones are stored in alcoves in the wall. They slide out of them when needed. This allows them to ambush intruders, coming from areas thought to be cleared.

Suggestions for edits are welcomed and encouraged