Project Overworld - Volume 3

Once the room was filled with oxygen and pressurizing gas, the door opposite to where they came from opened, revealing the rest of their friends standing there waiting for us. Tyler was still not connected into the game, but he was now perfectly safe inside the EOSS.

– “We’re finally here.” Keith proclaimed while getting rid of his space suit. Leyla decided to go around with Xena to do a complete tour of the base while Jim and Michael both emptied their inventory of everything they stuffed for the journey. It mostly consisted of various board games and pack of cards, but they also brought along their own remote controled car they designed a few months ago.

– “You can deposit it all into the storage modules. There’s also two new modules for bedroom purposes, so don’t forget to set your spawnpoint in there.” Keith explained.

The two of them nodded in acknowledgement and quickly floated away in the meanders of the station. As for Keith, after putting the avatar of Tyler on one of the bed they had at their disposal, he put his space suit back on and went to repair the various parts of the EOSS that have been damaged while he was away.

Three modules have been totally sealed off, and many more suffered impacts from micrometeorites. Leyla followed him several minutes later and the both of them spent the rest of the evening fixing the asperities in the hull of their base. During this time, the three other members of Spacol arranged the decoration in their own way so their stay in space would be more confortable.

Tyler joined them by the end of the day and discovered with disbelief the greatness of the EOSS.

– “I’ll let you take your marks within this unfamiliar environnement for now, but we’ll get to serious matters this week-end.” Keith proclaimed. They were currently on a thurday evening around midnight, so it meant they would have a day off to do wathever they wanted within the station.

Keith had already planned their next projects and wanted to wait until the day after tomorrow to announce them to his friends. They would start speeding things up a bit by working on revolutionary builds which would be helping them with space exploration.

First, Keith had yet to experiment his idea of gathering some resources off of meteorites. He did not know if they were actually loaded with a lot of metal but they would at least have a various stones to work with. The more resources they would be able to get directly from up there, the more valuable resources their ‘Rocket assembler’ could be packing up for them.

Afterwards, they could really start establishing everywhere across space, espacially on the Moon which was around eight hundred times farther away from Earth than the EOSS did. Building their base on this natural satellite would essentially be their next major goal. Not only would they have essentially infinite resources to work with in there, since there were various rock formations such as basalt situated on the Moon, but the satellite’s poles also contained a lot of ice. Water was essential for any industrial activity and could also be separated into oxygen and hydrogen, used for various types of fuel . Finally, there was also a large quantity of helium 3 present on the Moon which could be exploited to produce energy for their own needs.

As an added benefit, lauching a rocket from the Moon would be a lot easier than doing it from the Earth. Obviously, they could be doing it all of it from the EOSS and make use of the gravitational force of the Earth to fling towards their destination. However, they could also reach a similar result by launching from the Moon and either take advantage its own gravitation force or go back onto a really high orbit around the Earth before flinging away at full force.

In any case, establishing on this natural satellite would certainly be a lot more efficient than living on the EOSS while waiting for materials to be launched up there by their land base.

For that purpose, Keith needed to plan the perfect base disposition and think of a way to exploit the various resources they could find there. It would be taking a lot of time and that was why he planned for several other projects beforehand.

Thus, after a break day for everyone, Keith took the lead by explaining the various projects they would be doing.

– “Okay, I think the way we organized in binomes has been really efficient and we’ve all learned to work with each other quite well. However, it would be quite a difficult way to handle things from now on.” He took a brief pause and resumed his explanations.

– “First, we’ll get a rocket full of resources every few weeks or so and we’ll need one person to take care of routing those resources to the EOSS. I don’t really know if you want to take turns doing that, but that’ll certainly be a constraint. Then, we’ll need a constant maintenance over the EOSS and every spacecrafts we’ve parked around it. It shouldn’t be taking too long relatively to a complete week of work, but it’ll certainly limit our repartition as well.”

Basically, Keith was saying that since they needed a lot more maintenance comparatively to their land base, there would almost always be a person taking care of these matters instead on working on a full-time project. An organization in binomes would already compromised because of this.

– “As for our current needs… First, we’ll have to take care of the space shuttle so it could be holding several hundred tons of materials in its vault. It should also be equipped with various types of drones to gather resources from nearby meteorites. Though, this is not really necessary as of now because there aren’t a lot of meteorites nearby. However, we’ll need to find a way to boost its engine so it could travel about twice as fast as it currently does.”

Keith let his ideas sink in before continuing.

– “We should also be taking care of expanding the EOSS according to our needs, especially in terms of automatic crafting process. We don’t have a lot of space to work with as of now, so we should be building new modules, new machines and such things. Finally, I plan to establish on the Moon in the future, and I’ll need another person to plan things out with me. For this project, we’ll have to think of ways to exploit helium 3, build sturdy building thanks to the materials we could find on the Moon and finally exploit the ice present there.”

To the rest of Spacol members, it seemed like the difficulty of this game suddenly jumped to ten levels higher.

Keith laughed upon seeing their incredulous faces : “Haha! I told you we were going to work harder from now on. Anyways, be it the project regarding our space shuttle or the one regarding the expansion of our base, those should be kind of easy to work on. You’ve already built an automated rocket assembler, why are you so surprised?”

Motivating his troups before the huge projects they were about to start, Keith divided everyone based on their strengths. Jim should be taking care of the space shuttle, while Tyler, Michael and Xena will be working on the EOSS for the time being. Finally, Leyla and him will be developing various models and thinking of solutions for their future Moon base.

– “Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. This disposition won’t be fixated. According to our needs, I may be attributing you to another project or not. Also, we must keep in mind that we need to fix any meteorite impact in the hull of the EOSS while gathering the resources our land base launched for us. Finally, as we may need a lot of technological improvement, I will be organizing some brainstorming seminars every week so we may get a proper idea on what we should be doing. If you ever get an idea outside of one these meetings, write down everything on my computer or on a white board I will be installing in a room designated to brainstorming.” Keith turned towards the group assigned to expanding the EOSS. “That’s all for now, let’s get to work!”

With that being said, only Jim started putting on a space suit as the space shuttle was obviously waiting outside of their base.

‘We should be building a docking area to the station.‘ Keith realized. Instead of going out of the base everytime, Jim could be working on the space shuttle while having access to oxygen. ‘Well, that may be possible. I should be notifying Michael and the others to focus on building such a module before anything else.‘

The three of them already started taking tools out of the storage room while planning for a few automated machines which would be producing essential parts. After introducing his idea to them, Michael and Tyler decided that they would be building a module at the eastern side of the EOSS where spacecrafts could be coupled to the station. During this time, Xena would be building a few machines to automate some crafting processes.

Afterwards, Keith and Leyla both went inside the brainstorming room to discuss the matters of building a Moon base.

– “So, where should we start?” He pondered.