(Previous entry — first entry)

Friday, March 26
Afternoon

Craft assault on French/Spanish border went well, but that only tempers the loss of the Interceptor trying to take it down in the first place. Will have to order another one for Bram, not a budget outlay I had planned for.

Aliens clearly have significant, if not outright superior, firepower on the larger aircraft. I wonder if I can get the lab guys to take apart their weapon systems on the crafts we’ve recovered.

Wish in one hand, shit in the other, though. Right now I’m ordering an Avalanche missle launcher for Bram’s new Interceptor.

The cannons we have can do the job on the smaller craft well enough, but the Avalanche has great range according to the specs and I’d love to be able to hit them before they can hit us. Maybe end these firefights decisively before the xenomorph gunners can get a shot off at all.

And with that I’m damn near broke for the month. Time to review our stores, maybe have a little garage sale.

—

Evening

A lot of corpses stacking up. And we’ve got five recovered plasma weapons for every soldier X-Com employs, and we don’t even know how to fire any of them. Especially large surplus of what seem to be rifle-class weapons. And I’m doubtful we’ll want more pistols, of any sort, in the field than we already have, so I’m clearing out most of those as well.

I also don’t see this alien foodstuff or the surgery rooms we’ve recovered proving to have much material usefulness. I’ll keep a sample of each around for the lab guys to take a look at if there’s a lull, but the rest is just taking up space.

Selling all of that off will net nearly five million in ready cash. Looks like I can do some spending after all. Expand Bram some more, and hire up my lab at HQ to capacity, perhaps. And order another Interceptor for HQ, while I’m at it.

—

Evening, later

I’ve just gone over the hiring contracts for X-Com staff. This is bizarre. Any new hire receives a full month pay from date of hire. Period. Which means if I hire more labcoats today, I’m paying them a full month for four or five days work? Yeah, that can wait.

My employers can swing no-notice, no-questions-asked airspace with the entire world, apparently, but they can’t manage to negotiate a hiring contract that pro-rates pay.

—

Saturday, March 27
Morning

Went to bed with money on the brain, woke up with an idea. I checked with the engineers about the profit ratio on the new medi-kits they’re producing.

I like what I heard.

It costs about $23K in materials to build a medi-kit. Handler is offering us $46.5K for ‘em. That’s a clean $23.5K net on each unit.

Takes a bit more than half an engineer’s month worth of time to chuck one out. Which means each fab guy can turn out somewhere on the order of $40K in net medi-kit profit each month.

And the contract says I pay ‘em $25K. So every engineer I have working full-time on medi-kit production is making me $15K a month.

Fifty guys in a lab, churning these out? That’s three quarters of a million dollars in profit. Every month. That’s almost as much as I’m getting from the US government. From one workshop.

Economics are a little more complicated than all that. Maintenance costs, initial outlay to build the workshops, support facilities — lots of details to consider. But the idea is good. The idea is very, very good.

I need to hire an accountant.

—

Promoting new recruits Beagle, Labrador, and Rottweiler to active duty.

—

Tuesday, March 30

First production run of medi-kits done. Enough to keep us supplied on the ground for now; I need to fabricate some spare suits of armor, and then it may be back to medi-kits for revenue purposes.

—

Wednesday, March 31

New general stores warehouse finally completed at HQ. We’ve been over capacity for a while now, things stacked too high and not enough room to even run a forklift in a lot of places.

We pulled some gear out of storage the other day to load on the troop transport; when the guys doing the loading changed their mind about some of it, the warehouse foreman flat-out refused to let them bring it back.

A fire marshal would have had a field day in there. Assuming he wasn’t shot trying breach the premises.

But now we’re in much better shape. HQ is getting pretty crowded, though.

—

Thursday, April 1

Budget meeting. Good news in general, another half million in the budget.

But France? Cutting our funding? Is this a response to the Interceptor we lost back on the 25th? Maybe it dropped some chaff on a diplomat’s house. God knows. Fucking Jerry Lewis fanboys.

Bringing in more scientists. That’ll top off our ability to do research in the current lab facilities at HQ; either I build another lab here or we start looking at a secondary lab, at Bram or possible at a dedicated research-and-engineering base. Which I’m not sure is such a bad idea.

(Next up: Recession…)