CHAPTER XI: TOUPEES AND TERRIBLE ACTORS

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The third Excalibur-class Light Cruiser is well on its way, and is named…wait for it…the USS Enterprise.

I’m going to send the Enterprise north, but further than the small fleet I have built up around the Excalibur. The Enterprise will help project Federation interests to the new colony worlds out there.

Food breakthrough! My bread and butter scientists, all of whom could stand a little Jenny Craig in their lives as I can hear them coming from well down the hall, shout excitedly. “Genetic Architecture! It allows biologists to create living organisms whose function is generally predictable, designing DNA essentially from scratch. These bacteria can make alien soil suitable for the growth of edible plants!”

I yawned about three times during this little impassioned speech, but did look concerned as these guys were out of breath. A corner of my mind finds it morally reprehensible that we’re creating living organisms to do our bidding, but the other corners of my mind gang up on it and tell it to shut up, that this is totally awesome. Type 3 Automated Farms means more food all around and more population freed up to do other things, like build more ships.

Next, I send the bio-stained scientists away and call my Propulsion team to the stand, telling them to work on the next generation of drives for our ships. As the distance from Sol to our outer territories expands, we are going to need the range as well as ship speed to answer any problems quickly. Of course, that’s assuming there’s some insane alien races out there that like to send huge ships to destroy whole planets. I laugh out loud at this – it’s kind of funny. Then again I am something of a sociopath. Just the thing the Federation needs at the helm.

Well, we found the system of Gothos out in the Galactic West, thanks to some new Outposts. I forgot about Benecia. Great. This is not the game, nor job, for minds distracted by shiny things. I admit the exploration part of Birth of the Federation is fascinating to me. The infrastructure build-up, not so much. Especially when you sit for hours and hours crafting a near-perfect empire, only to have the Crystalline Entity show up (or worse, the Borg) and blow everything up in seconds, then laugh (if they can laugh, that is) when you send your best ships to fight them, and the bad guys merely cough and kill 10,000 Starfleet personnel and destroy billions of credits’ worth of starships.

Such is the lot of the leader, to worry about such things. Why do you think I keep getting massages in my office? I’m going to milk this as much as I can for as long as I can until the apocalypse arrives. Allegedly, of course.

There we go. Benecia, the furthest Galactic West system in the Federation, has just been colonized. It only has a pop cap of 230, but it will hopefully serve as a stepping stone.

And this is our furthest Galactic East expansion. Namely, nada. There’s more space in space than I initially realized. We’re pretty close to getting to the galaxy’s eastern edge, but it’s going to take several more Troop Transports building Outposts. If there is nothing out in this area, I’ll just have to decommission some of the Outposts as it costs money to keep them up, and it’s pointless to have a network in empty space.

Meanwhile, the Makus system has a +1 Food surplus…close to starvation. The shelves of your local FedClub are bare, and people are starting to panic that they can’t get their five-gallon containers of mayonnaise. This Automated Farm upgrade is many turns away and I’m certain they’ll hit starvation before then as there’s only 196 population with a max of 510, so there will be babies birthin’. It costs a whopping 630 credits, but as the Federation treasury is over 36,000 credits, so this is not that big a deal to save a few lives. The more living hands, the more stuff they build.

And up here in the Galactic North, there’s several systems lined up, sort of like a wall. I’ll have to terraform and colonize all of these puppies in the name of the Federation. Because there HAS to be aliens out there! My scientists made me a special shiny-metallic, crinkly hat to wear which helps block out the alien transmissions. I know they’re there. They HAVE to be.

They have to be, because we just had a breakthrough in propulsion. The Bunsen-burner geeks tell me this while I’m trying to propel myself out the door to Hawaii for a vacation, so I guess its poetic justice in a way. I’m almost afraid, in that case, to ask them to focus on Weapons now.

Computers and Construction both are at Level 2, as well as Weapons, while everything else is 3. I’m very Churchillian in my approach to research in Birth of the Federation, so I try to advance everything at the same rate. Once I get everything to 3, I’ll start keeping an eye on future starship technologies to see what I need to research to get them built.

Still building Troop Transports and flinging them to the distant corners of the Federation. (Note to self: is it truly a Federation if only made up of Humans and no alien species? The aliens are trying to communicate with me – that much is clear – and yet, they remain quiet. What are they plotting?) Just came up and discovered a system now named Cestus. Sounds like some trailer park’s cousin got out here ahead of us. Maybe there’s some murderin’ cannibals on that volcanic planet in the system! Even if there is, there’s an M-class here, and along with that large Arctic world, this system should have lots of pop space.

The latest Excalibur-class vessel is the USS Defiant. We welcome them into Starfleet with open arms. Especially their phasers. Hopefully those Weapons geeks are discovering what a “phaser” is.

And here is the system of Hoek, with Dilithium and many planets. Another glorious discovery. We’re making more ‘glorious discoveries’ and not keeping pace with them through colonization, so I aim to rectify that with a massive wave of Colony Ship builds in the near future.

And STILL, we have not come across any other civilizations. Perhaps we should strike that bit from the Charter, about discovering new civilizations. The only thing I’ve discovered is how good it is to be the king, and how good it is to be able to shut out the thoughts of interplanetary species beyond our borders. Hopefully, we’ll see some action here soon.

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