Setting up Camp

It's been a couple of hours since I started building the first ever fabrication building, and progress has been … slower than I thought. Turns out, assembling a whole building that's around 9 square meters is much harder than putting together Legos. Who knew, a structure meant to build other small or large intricate parts contains many of its own small intricate parts that are difficult to manufacture and assemble. I mean, I did, as I have read the schematics for the building, but still, you get the point. Once this is complete, I shouldn't need to do any more difficult assembly process.

It's been 4 hours since I arrived to the planet and the sun is finally beginning to set. A couple more hours and I'm going to start needing to install lights to maintain maximum efficiency. I spent the next good part of the night and morning carefully assembling the manufacturing plant. Often taking a break to bang my metaphoric head on my metaphoric table as parts don't fit together due to slight errors in manufacturing. Turns out, the massive amount of vibration produced by my refining district severely decreases the quality of parts produced by my manufacturing district. As a result, I can only run my production facility or my mining and refining operations, slowing down the process even more.

By the time my first every structure finished building, I'm filled with a cargo hold full of rage towards the people who designed my body and the sun is peaking out the horizon. After connecting the last of the underground power cables and running a few tests, I can officially announce the grand opening of my first every homemade, handbuilt, and all natural production facility.

Seemingly to celebrate the grand opening, one of my drones I'm patrolling 10 km out spots a larger than usual flying shape. Due to the dense morning fog, the ranges on my camera is much shorter than usual. So I sent out one of the drones currently charging at base camp to replace the patrolling drone's place and begin flying it towards the UFO. As I approach the flying shape, the contour clears up bit by bit.

Is that …? A flying ship with wings?

It seems like someone took a stereotypical medieval ship out of the ocean, slapped a pair of wings on it and declared it a plane.

This is ridiculous, it's even got sails on its deck! What on god's earth is this design … on second thought, it does look kinda cool.

But the existence of this … boat? Plane? Revealed that there are definitely sentient beings on this earth, with a high likelihood of them being human and having some level of technology. After all, they did somehow manage to get a boat flying, but on the other hand, they made a flying boat instead of any other more efficient design ….

After a few minutes of flying, my drone is finally close enough to the ship to provide a high definition view of it. The craft, traveling at around 20 kph, has no one standing aboard its deck. It has a large viewport at its bow with a man standing and holding the controls, more people in the back are seated with monoculars held to their eyes looking out of smaller viewports.

Is this some sort of scouting ship? What are they looking for? Could they be surveying land? A million theories flew through my head and eventually only one was left. It was highly likely they were searching for me, based on their current flight path they will miss my landing spot by around 15 kilometers. Due to my persistent scouting, I know that there should be no human settlement within 100 km of me. So with a modest assumption that there is a human settlement 150-200 km away, and the fact that the scouting ship will miss me by 15 km. I can calculate that when they set off, they only miss my landing location by 4-6 degrees! With this level of accuracy and this coincidental timing, it's not a far stretched assumption to make. With this in mind, I immediately sent off a drone to back track the boat's flight path. Hoping to find the city of origin.

Back in base camp, I stopped production of my current project and immediately begin constructing fake trees. By constructing mostly empty pillars and attaching the leftover tree tops, I end up with convincing looking fake trees when view from a high position. With this, unless they decide to start searching by foot, it should be impossible for them to find me with their current means.

With this new discovery in mind, I have to start thinking about first contact. How should I make it? When should I make it? Where should I make it? What should I say? What attitude should I take? Should I try to be peaceful and hope they return the favor, or should I prepare for the worst case scenario? After a brief moment of thinking, I came to the conclusion that my survival should always be the number one priority. I was instructed to attempt to be friendly at first and only resort to violence as a last resort. However, no matter what stance I take, they are all meaningless without sufficient power to back them up.

With this in mind, I begin planning to shift my production and planning into the militaristic side. Originally, I planned to set a stable foundation to allow for rapid expansion, but now it seems like some dedicated military factories needs to be built.

But before any of that, I'm in a chronic lack of raw materials. My simple drill simply isn't going to cut it anymore. Thankfully though, I'm sitting on top of some common ore deposits, the second I can tap in to those resource veins my lack of basic heavy materials will be solved. But unfortunately, the ground near camp only contain a pitiful amount of titanium, so little in fact that it's not even worth the time trying to extract it. This means that producing some of the more advanced alloys will be impossible until a stable source of titanium is found.

As my manufacturing facility is busy creating the first of many deep drills necessary to access the ore deposits, and my drones are droning. With my free time, I begin thinking of what type of combat drone I should mass produce. Rovers or anything with tracks would be impractical due to the abundant trees. Anything flying is out of the question, as the materials needed always require some sort of titanium in order to be both durable and light. Actually, aluminum might be a good enough substitute, depending on how primitive these guys are.

After some internal debating, I eventually settled on three designs, a light low profile 6 legged walker, a heavier armed and armored version of the 6 legged walker, and a medium size flying drone to provide fire support. The light walker, now named the Ant, will be the backbone of my army, lightly armored on the sides and modest protection at the front. It is mounted with a small caliber gauss rifle, and about the size of a small desk when fully stood up. The heavy version of the Ant, adeptly named the Heavy Ant, is slightly larger than the Ant, heavily armored at the front and lightly armored everywhere else. They are mounted with a hard hitting gauss rifle on top and a light gauss machine gun below. The combat drone, named the Fly, is simply an upscaled version of my recon drones stripped of all of its sensory equipment. It has an underbelly hard point meant to hold either a bomb or a medium gauss rifle. Unfortunately, in order to simplify the logistics of my army and to keep cost down, I went with gauss weaponry on everything.

These three models should be sufficient for a basic defensive force, I can always design more in the future if the needs arise. Hopefully I can start diversifying my weapon choices soon, as although gauss rifle are cheap to produce and easy to supply. They aren't the most accurate or hard hitting weaponry, but they will have to suffice for now.

With that thought in mind, I begin putting all my attention into turning my plans into reality.