(Previous entry — first entry)

Thursday, April 1
Morning

Going ahead with the third-base initiative. I’d like to be able to have a non-combat facility, to focus specifically on research and manufacturing projects.

Pricing things out, we can’t do better than to build in India, and there’s some excellent infrastructure available for our tech needs. We’re setting up a bit west of Hyderabad.

I’m calling the new base Kali Yuga. I’m honestly not sure if that’s me being pessimistic or optimistic or fatalistic or what. Three months ago I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me this is how I’d be spending April Fool’s Day.

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Late morning

Staffing up Bram. Ordering a second troop transport, building out the standing troops. They’ll be a secondary force only for now, at least until we can get enough armor fabricated to have them up to snuff for primary assaults. I don’t want to be caught with my pants down, and I have a feeling things are only going to get more hectic.

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Friday, April 9
11:33

Very small craft sighted. Canadian border, near Washington state. Scrambling Interceptor.

13:56

First test of the new Avalanche launcher a success, certainly: enemy craft not just disabled but destroyed outright.

That could be problematic, however, in the long run. The Avalanche may be a good short term answer to our need to hit their bigger ships hard, but if we can force down the small ships with less firepower we’ll be able to recover supplies. As it is there’s nothing left but a fine mist of alien guts north of Seattle.

I may need to keep one Interceptor armed with less powerful guns, for these smaller encounters.

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Saturday, April 10
Morning

Research just finished up on those heavy plasma rifles we’ve been salvaging. And man do these things look promising. Twice the firepower of our laser rifles, solid accuracy as well.

We’ve got a small cache of clips for them as well, so once we manage to figure out how THOSE work we’ll be good to go with these in live-fire situations immediately.

Bad news is that in the long run we’ll need to recover more clips from alien craft, or to produce ammunition ourselves which would likely require the use of recovered material in its own right. Whether that will be any kind of obstacle in practice, I don’t know.

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Sunday, April 18
Morning

Looks like we’ve got the ammo system for those heavy plasma rifles figured out, which means that (a) we can start shooting things with this stuff and (b) we can make more clips if we need them.

Otherwise, a quiet week. Building new facilities at Bram and HQ both, workshops in both cases. Kali Yuga will be our main fab plant but until it has time to get up and running properly I want to be able to build out needed materiel on-site for my active combat bases, and the workshop at HQ in particular doesn’t even have enough room for all my engineers to work at this point.

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Saturday, April 24
0:38

Small craft sighted near Cuba. Interceptor took it out over the water.

Splashdown leaves us with the same dilemma as vaporizing the things — good news is the threat is neutralized; bad news is we can’t go in for recovery.

The very idea of underwater anti-xenomorph operations is absurd on the face of it, needless to say.

So that’s an interesting tactical question: do I have my pilots try to kite these things along until they’re over land? May not have been an option in this case regardless, as the alien craft was headed out over the Atlantic, but something to consider.

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Tuesday, April 27
Morning

Interesting news from the lab geeks. I let them take a crack at what we believe to be the engines of the various craft we’ve salvaged. And it looks like these things are pretty amazing — the sort of high-efficiency engine we’ve been dreaming about for decades, and capable of generating goddam gravity fields no less.

And we can build them ourselves, if we need to.

Looks like the only viable power source is this foreign “elerium” mineral we’ve been recovering, though. That needs some researching itself. In any case, that’s an obvious barrier to widespread industrial use, but the techs tell me they’re bullish about us making small-scale use of it for our personal needs at X-Com.

More research to be done. Let’s see if we can’t find out a little more about this elerium stuff. Maybe it can be manufactured as well.

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May 1
0:16

That was a short budget meeting. Wish that was good news.

China and Japan are cutting funding. No other movement. Losing about 100 grand per month. Funny, we haven’t heard anything about alien activity over eastern Asia.

Maybe time to add another radar array at Bram.

—

0:18

This is news. Looks like we’ve spotted an actual base of operations for the aliens. Viti Levu, Fiji. The big island.

No idea what we’ll find in there, but we’re sure as hell going to find out.

(Next time: All Your Base…)