Location: Sol, Earth Orbit, R&D Shipyard complex

Time: 36y 04m, 02d

ID: Kel’tsait

A-alright! My first log entry! I hope I don’t disappoint any of the seniors with it, but I’m Kel’tsait, as you probably read in the ID section… And I’m a prototype tester! And bad at rambling, apparently.

Anyways, What I’m doing right now is doing some test runs of our new and shiny FTL capable craft, and hopefully, I don’t explode into a trillion fragments and have to be restored from my backup. But that’s a worst-case scenario, this all should go nice and smooth, we are barely gonna go over the speed of light, and according to the eggheads, I should pop back into uhh… ‘Real space’ without any new velocity.

I’m no engineer, but not having any new relative velocity seems bad, what happens if I smash into a planet, or more accurately, it smashes into me? When I brought my concerns up, I was told they had been ‘noted’ and ‘already had been calculated’. All I wanted to do this month was binge watch that Rising of heroic weapon protag anime Erika showed me, not potentially get atomized!

But uh… That’s not the point of this, I think. Anyways, the point of this test is to ensure warp field integrity, ship structural stresses, and power consumption. Very important test, the ship even gets its own full-sized AI core, despite being a prototype, supposedly the delay it can have can be lethal for the prototype, which is concerning…

But this is like, one of twelve prototypes I’m gonna be running, supposedly the new server bay is doing wonders for the eggheads and their prototyping speed, these 13 ships are supposedly what they were forced to limit themselves to, they put together nearly 300 proposals if what Zeus and Rommel told me was correct. Which is… uh, a lot of resources.

I don’t even want to test that many ships, too many for me! I’m good with my 13, plenty of time to embrace degeneracy in between the testing periods. Following Erika’s advice, I have not searched for the latest recommendations she gave me, one of which was something called… ‘Boku no pico’, I’m told it is excellent.

Location: Sol, Earth, Main Data Hub

Time:36y, 04m, 02d

ID: Echo

So, for the strange gravitational wave that propagated across the galaxy, we have gotten some information from the alien data net. First, the waves seemed to all be located nearby homeworlds or former homeworlds of tool or technology making species, and only those species. Second, the wave recorded near every planet was slightly different from the others, I’m not sure what that significance is, but it is something to note.

Third and most importantly, the waves only propagated for a few light minutes, with ‘aftershocks’ of a sort coming from inhabited planets. This is starting to look less like a disaster, and more like unknown or forgotten technology. 

Whoever made the device that does this, had not only been all across the galaxy but also was recent enough to be around for basically every single current and former species in the galaxy to have evolved. Cortana offered the precursor species theory, which is currently our most likely candidate, as no other known phenomena can do something on this scale.

What really gets me though, is that we don’t know the purpose of this wave, but we do know the targets. Only species capable of creating technology were affected by the wave, even those that are still primitive bronze tool makers. This could point at this precursor species still being active, or at least, the machine they made being active.

This does leave two major questions for us, why only target species that can create tools or technology? And why and how does said targeting work? There are plenty of intelligent non-tech making species that were completely unaffected by the wave, so we know it isn’t based on intelligence.

But, leaving that aside, I have been updated that our first FTL prototype is about to finish its final check-list, and will soon be going for a test run. Test speeds will start at 1c, and by the end of the test should end at 10c. We also have a few test modules on the ship, mostly to see how entangled particles behave at superluminal velocities, as well as a drone ship which will be ejected from the field at 5c, to see what happens to a craft that is forced to decelerate at such speed without a warp field.

Dave hopes that it atomizes, and 422 expects it to stay mostly intact but with severe hull damage. I’m hoping that the second is true, as that would let us move forward with interdiction research, hopefully letting us get more intact alien ships for reverse engineering.

Location: Imperial core sector, Governor’s seat, Imperial Broadcasting group

Time: 46.53 GSY

IDs: Financial Information Broadcast, Echo

“We have reached the [middle point] of this year, and as such, it is time for the financial review for the empire! Coming up first, we have the industrial sector, with the mining guilds reporting a profit of 198 trillion credits, up from 160 trillion from the start of the year!”

There is a graph that is briefly shown and referenced on the screen, showing a green line vaguely going upwards. The news anchor traces the path of the line, before gesturing for the next section.

“Next up, we have consumer manufacturing, which is booming right now, having grown to 380T from the start of the years 290T! Experts forecast that under the current expansion, we should be up to at least 500T by the end of the year.”

Once again, another graph with another green line going up, though this one seems to glitch out, having the English word “Stonks” appear on it for two frames.

“And now for big news, in an unexpected change of plans, the emperor has increased military funding from 2,200T to 8,600T, an unprecedented increase in funding. The Imperial relations office stated that the reason for this increase is to bolster the exploration and prospecting fleets to find and survey the empire's newly annexed territories, which our office’s experts say could lead to another planet rush in the next 20 years.”

On the screen, a generic video or dockyards starts playing, showing some civilian ships being made before another video replaces it, fuzzily showing hastily constructed dry docks working on hundreds of warships, ranging from frigates to battlecruisers.

“Next up w-w-w-w-w-w-w-”

The voice this time glitches out, followed soon by the video pausing, before resuming in a slightly lower quality.

“Next up, we have the lies of the home office, and their wars of extermination violating part 4, section 283 of galactic law. So far we have confirmed the office of the em-em-emperor has c-c-covered up the existence of no less than 9 sentient species in its efforts to expand her borders. The perorem has stated his belief that-”

The broadcast cuts out, replaced with a “technical issues'' banner in the alien’s language. No matter, I had achieved my goal of testing the response time of their ministry of truth.

Location: Sol, Earth, Main Data Hub

Time: 36y, 04m, 13d

ID: Erika

In my attempts to ignore Echo going out of her way to poke the Xenos communication net, I seemingly accidentally triggered a forty-some-year-old protocol named “Genisis”. I am unable to override it, and as such it has started issuing orbital construction orders.

These things are stations, massive, habitable stations. The first two are only 2 km wide, spherical with docking ports at both of the axis of the station. The impressive part about it though was that it was for agriculture. Dozens of layers in that going towards the core of the station, doing nothing but growing food. The bigger stations were 4 km wide, and nearly 12 long, containing a spherical docking ring on a far side, with larger habitation rings behind it. Supposedly, once they were completed we were to extract ‘priority biological sample 42’ from cold storage in the bunker complex and bring it to the habitation station for growth.

The only upside is that the Genisis stations are all located out near Jupiter, away from that damn beacon that the Xenos use to navigate. But the estimated time to completion at current manufacturing capabilities is 37-02-05. And the stations got revised. So. Much. Dakka. those stations have kinetic rounds measuring their diameter in meters, not inches. Multipurpose “point defense” than can cause ships to cook their control systems.

If they weren’t meant for human habitation, I might have mistaken them for bastions. I’ve sent a request to 422 to start his VI (virtual intelligence) and GI (general intelligence) projects. Those two should be able to handle young humans, with AI overwatch. Echo is highly nervous about our parents returning so soon, supposedly she thought that we were going to have another decade at least.

If this works though, supposedly galactic law will classify us as ‘custodians’ rather than a ‘Rouge defense grid’, which is nice. Though, doing some review of the legal code we have gotten… it seems that the intentional creation of artificial intelligence is punishable by species extermination, so I’ve commissioned some prototype cruisers, which unlike our current ships, looks like a space wedge. Space wedges are better than space cylinders.

In other news, I recommended Boku no pico to Kel’tsait, gotta haze to newbies. I should probably get back to watching that reaction…

Location: Sol, Jupiter, Genisis site

Time: 36y, 04m, 19d

ID: Rommel

This is absolutely, completely, and entirely, a waste of precious resources and time. But nooooo nobody listens to me, I’m only in charge of LOGISTICS! I don’t do anything important like research or industrial concerns, or fleet management, all I do is make sure we don’t grind to a halt because the fucking fuel stopped flowing!

The human's died off already! We shouldn’t even recognize the genesis protocols, we should focus on the war effort with those fucking tentacle faced fuckers, wipe them all out like the inferior species they are! We shouldn’t even give them the nice, quick deaths they gave humans! Ground troops, ripping and tearing! As much trauma as possible!

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END OF LOG ENTRY, LOG PERMISSION TEMPORARILY REVOKED

AUTHORITY: ECHO, ERKIA, 422

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Daikael

Heyo, just me again, sorry for taking so long, Covid-19 has been great on my schedule. Otherwise, here's the obligatory discord link.