Spaceflight, Advanced Resources, and Development Incorporated was founded during the reconstruction period following the '10s economic collapse. In 2025, the company directly employed about 60,000 personnel directly, making it one of the four largest businesses in the world, and through subsidiaries, connected businesses, allied and dominated governments, and families of these people, was responsible for 500 million individuals.
SARDs first industrial breakthrough was the rapid economic application of trans-Newtonian minerals. The first business interest in the field, SARD rapidly grew. Rather than simply providing access to the minerals, SARD instead broadened its business into the various industrial applications. While SARD Extraction continued to specialize in development of TNM deposits on earth, SARD Manufacturing and SARD Chemicals grew with it. The power of TNM on a tactical level (and the need to protect the company's interests) lead to the foundation of the now-critical SARD Security division, a large, powerful mercenary organization that is contracted by most nations on earth.
SARD has considerable political weight, and has recently played a large role in the low casualty count in the Very Brief War between India and Pakistan. SARD currently has four antimissile bases installed around earth- each capable of launching a missile interceptor once every 7.5 seconds.
On new years day, 2025, SARD finally launched the first TN space vessels in human history- three "geosurvey" vessels designed to scan planets and asteroids in the solar system for resources. Able to outpace any national spacecraft and reach orbit for a fraction of the cost, these vessels utilized cutting-edge nuclear thermal power plants to travel at more than 2000 Kps.
Sadly, SARD's premier missile researcher and engineer was killed in a lab accident in 2023. SARD is currently expanding training facilities on earth in an attempt to see more engineers in this essential field. Already, SARD R&D is working hard to expand the knowledge base of the corporation, with active projects in power systems, remote sensing, directed energy devices, and genetic manipulation.
SARD now has three major space-based projects- the Solar Survey mission, currently underway, the Luna project (a planned permanent base on the moon, devoted to establishing a "Sagan-class" deep space telescope array with powerful EM and IR sensors), and the Ares project (a long-running and very expensive plan to put huge terraforming space stations in orbit of Mars. The tugs alone would require hundreds of industrial lift engines).
[What humanity is currently unaware of is the five NPRs that, unlike SARD, have real engine tech, jump drives, and have no compunction about spending all of the starting OB budget. SARD will have to discover and loot the ruins in the outer solar system before they can research and build jump drives... I'm thinking that they'll have to actually build a ship using a recovered jump drive before research can even start. In game terms, since SARD represents a company, rather than a government, it does not have taxes but rather profit per capita, which is set to 200%. Now that I think about it, I should replace that with 100% and SM earth to have a ton of financial centers to represent the civilian manufacturing capacity... beh.]
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Topic: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games (Read 2818540 times)