Plano Outpost

[Culbrelai]

Plano Outpost Report #1

The new outward appearance of Plano Outpost, with its upgraded superstructure.

Classification: Confidential

From the Desk of Commander Julius A. Fox, Plano Outpost, Texas

Report to High Command on Progress of Stage 1 of the Plano Outpost Expansion Project

Esteemed Officers of Fleet Materiel Command,

Here I present to you the first report on the status, capabilities and needs of Plano Outpost after its fairly uneventful first upgraded reactor core installation.

Footage of a busy flight deck plays, Ageira construction workers wearing hard hats move with purpose across the deck carrying crates upon crates of equipment, before disappearing into a corridor. A Navy officer is overseeing them, studiously writing on his clipboard.

As you can see, work has been moving at a rapid pace aboard Plano. My new crew is enthusiastic, but a bit lacking in experience, something I expect will come with time and hard work. They joined the Navy, after all - they knew it wasn't going to be easy.

The footage transitions: Men in radiation suits carefully handle boxes with radioactive labels, Ageira technicians are setting up optronic computers, opening floor and wall panels and running cables and calibrating tolerances of the various control components in the reactor room.

Most of the work has been taking place here, in the reactor wing. The old reactor is not sufficient for a base that is planned to expand as quickly as Plano, we estimate the new design will increase power output fivefold. It is not a cheap or simple prospect to in-place upgrade station nuclear reactors. It requires safely letting the original reactor spin down and the rods to cool while they are temporarily held in a storage pool, while the old reactor is uprooted and replaced. Our team, consisting of nuclear physicists, technicians and support staff, many of whom hope to be Ageira employees after they leave the service, gain valuable experience working with Ageira reactors and their quirks. This project has, to date, not gone over on budget and is expected to be completed on time. I have been supervising this area closely, as the recent terrorist attack on Interspace's Roppongi Station has shown lack of security can lead to disastrous consequences when trying to establish a permanent installation in space. We don't want the Xenos trying anything similar to what happened on Roppongi, and with our proximity to LPI Sugarland, they remain the largest threat to Plano.

The Ageira deliveries, as a whole, have been steadily arriving, their reputation for punctuality seems to hold up, at least for now. I have made a worthwhile arrangement with Mr. Gordon Harper of the Ageria Innovations subsidiary, and I expect them to be a valuable partner in this endeavor for quite some time - as they have been for multiple Navy installations and projects. Below you will find a manifest of all deliveries and their costs along with the related construction orders, projects and functions they are designated for.

• Hull Panels: Used for reinforcing the superstructure of the station, performing repairs and adding new modules, particularly the upgraded and enlarged Reactor core room. The panels specifically earmarked for the reactor room are strengthened with special alloys for the purpose by the engineers at Norfolk. The panels for the secure signals room are hardened against all currently known scanning technologies - no doubt the soon-to-arrive Liberty Security Force contingent will appreciate their new workspace.
  
  
• Industrial Materials: This rather nebulous classification consists of a massive variety of tools, components, and supplies used in maintaining and upgrading modular stations. The Ageira contracted construction workers swear by their own apparently proprietary and difficult to use tools, our Navy technicians make do with whatever they are given - If there's a screw that needs tightening my men will use their bare teeth to turn if that was all they had.
  
  
• Nanocapacitors: These tiny storage vessels for energy are manufactured in the Colorado system, on Ageira's own Pueblo station. They are used, as the name suggests, in the tiny machines that repair and advance the inner workings of many industrial and military appliances. Nanobots that use these capacitors are of course well-known for on-the-fly emergency ship repair of snubcraft and gunboats, but they are also used in station maintenance in a similar fashion, crawling the outer shell of the station dislodging micro-meteorite impacts and repairing any damage to the tough outer shell of the station.
  
  
• Optronics: Optronics, and optical computers in general are used for the real-time intelligence gathering by both the Navy SIGINT units and the Security Force. They are an integral part of station and ship reactor control and monitoring. Our optronic computer deliveries were transferred in secure crates aboard an even more secure ship, a Stegodon class Ageira transport. Unfortunately, one of these convoys was intercepted by the Lane Hackers. No lives were lost, but an entire shipment of optronics was stolen. Luckily, no Armed Forces-sensitive data was onboard the computers at the time. No doubt the Hackers hoped they caught a shipment of obsolete optronic computers with information not yet securely wiped by one of our facilities.
  
  
• Robotics: These automatic machines are used everywhere in today's modular bases, or so the Ageira representative tells me. The Navy's purpose for them is much the same as in industrial applications, that is, doing work that is too dangerous, dirty or time-consuming for humans to do. These robots include optronic control computers in their total package cost, making purchases of extra optronic devices unnecessary. This saves on total operating costs and is a win for the taxpayer's pocketbook. We employ a large variety of robots on Plano. Large crane robots are used every day in the loading and unloading of cargo from ships that come to our loading dock. Sensitive materials handling units are used in the operation of the reactor to reduce the total-career radiation exposure of Navy personnel, thereby extending the time they can serve in these roles which require extensive training - saving us even more money. These examples only scratch the surface of what the robots operating on our station do.
  
  
• Super Alloy: As the name suggests, this is not any ordinary alloy, it is "Super". What makes it so super, you may ask? Super alloy is beryllium combined with aluminum, giving it the all of the benefits of both metals with none of the drawbacks. Super alloy is used to reinforce Plano Outpost's bulkheads and docking bay doors. It is used in reactor and general station shielding, as a component of the special type of lead-infused hull panels used to shield our crewmen from the harmful effects of radiation, both from the Texas star and the nuclear reactions required to power a station in the depths of space.
  
  
• Titanium: Mined from a number of sources primarily in the Newcastle system of Bretonia, Titanium is an extremely strong metal with obvious military and industrial uses. Titanium is a component of the aforementioned hull panels, by being a part of the basic alloys that are essential in the early stages of fabricating modern hull panels.
  
  

Future Plans:

In the immediate future, two prefabricated defense platforms also provided by Ageira will be placed both above and below Plano, as added security for prisoner transfer convoys which transit near the station. These platforms will be primarily focused on anti-snubcraft duties as the Xenos which frequently conduct hit-and-run raids on LPI Sugarland do not field anything larger. More bulk storage is also required for Plano, as the current status quo of overflow of goods onto the flight deck is becoming quite untenable. These modules are not complex to install and do not require any specialized knowledge, thus they will be installed by our own Navy Corps of Engineers at a significant discount to outsourcing.

In the Service of Liberty,

Cmdr. Julius A. Fox

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