The Global Monthly - MAR 2206
MISCOMMUNICATION ON THE AMERIPOL LUNAR BASE!
A disastrous miscommunication from the new military fixtures led to weapons testing during so-called 'black-out' hours, a report from the Ameripol executive claims. "This was a disastrous error, which could have had truly catastrophic consequences. If armor was downrange while the weapons were firing, they could have been destroyed. Luckily, nothing of value was lost - but steps will be taken to prevent such a miscommunication between divisions from occurring again in the future." In a press conference with a representative from the lunar division, colonel Enrique Ocampo's answers were indirect, focusing on their new attack VTOL. "The preliminary successes our Luna Attack Vehicle put the hearts and minds of our 51st state at ease." The destruction of incoming material from the New Ottoman Empire and lunar probes from the SRA and the Punjabi Space program, while expensive had no loss of life, were reported to be "unfortunate but acceptable losses."
RUST BELT PIONEERS NEW NUCLEAR MOBILE ATTACK BASE!
What was not long ago simply a theoretical design was made manifest by engineers in the Rust Belt, boasting what they claim is the single largest piece of armor in human history. The project was spearheaded by historical researcher Oliver McKinney, who found old blueprints for a theoretical design in the archives of a local library, left there by an eccentric inventor over fifty years ago. Working with Rust Belt engineers to make some minor modifications to make it more plausible, the final design was agreed upon almost a week later, and construction is in progress now. McKinney couldn't be found to answer questions, but Chief Engineer Robert Barton had this to say: "Obviously, it's an incredible undertaking. Just collecting the materials to build such a thing was a huge task - but bigger was creating a design that everyone from nuclear engineers to material suppliers to military generals agreed was doable." The project is set to be completed and ready for use by the end of April, alongside the completion of their 'Iron Bridge'.
TOSHIRO SUPERCOMPUTER MAKES SLOW PROGRESS!
The new Toshiro Supercomputer, the pride of the Nagano Prefecture Campus of the IETC, has been running non-stop in an attempt to solve math problems posed by what they claim are alien communications intercepted by their sensor array. The set of problems, called pseudo-Gaussian transforms, are currently the only way that space noise could be converter to signal in any amount of time. By their own admission, progress had been slower than they expected with more bugs and glitches than previously expected. Umeda Tokutomi had this to say "After the benchmarking, we believed that most of the delays would come from processing results, not troubleshooting - but with a computer of this scale, it's very hard to anticipate delays. In either case, we are undoubtably making progress and we should see this problem completed by this time next month." While skeptics still argue about whether or not these really are alien signals, the fact of the matter is we will soon know for sure.
JOINT VENTURE LOCATES EXTRATERRESTRIAL SIGNAL SOURCE!
A statement released by a joint team of IETC and Bifrost T&C, using their new Global Array, claims that the source of alien noise in the solar system is coming from various moons of Saturn, particularly Titan, but also Rhea, Dione, Enceladus, Mimas, and Phoebe. Further conjecture states that the comets that have similar signals may actually be alien ships - although there is yet no evidence that supports this. While the nature of the signals are still unknown, the fact that they could be detected at all implies that some significant portion of them are directed towards Earth, meaning the aliens have human accomplices with a capacity to decode their signals or, even more impossibly, that aliens themselves have landed on Earth. Most of the signals appear to be between the moons themselves, or sent to other celestial bodies, but the Global Array has no capacity to intercept those.
'QUICK COLONIZATION KITS' RUNS INTO SHORTAGES!
Bifrost's newest innovation - the Quick Colonization Kit - ran into a pitfall as shortages for a rare alloy meant the kits could not meet their own strict standards. Tungsteel, a carbon-Tungsten alloy theorized in 2186 and first manufactured in 2199, requires rare isotopes of Tungsten as well as a very difficult and costly manufacturing procedure. "Ironically," said project lead Kolbjørn Lunden, "this is exactly the sort of material we would be looking for on other worlds, and its necessary for the project that, as of now, is most likely to find them." However, Margit Fehn, another representative from Bifrost's research division, disagreed. "The fact that we are likely to find Tungsteel on alien worlds, and we have a lack of it here, is merely coincidental and not necessarily ironic." There hasn't been a market for Tungsteel alloys since its discovery, so extraction on an industrial scale of the delicate material has not yet been rolled out. It is unknown where the largest supplies are.
It is now April 2206.
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Topic: Reach for the Skies, a nation game of diplomacy, research, and aliens (Read 3829 times)