I arrived at out research facility just before the lightning surrounded it.  The entire sky would light up with each bolt and for a split second silently cast a pod shaped shadow on the floor.  I actually found the light show to be relaxing and settled in to continue my work.

Then, the air raid sirens began blaring their klaxon.  It could barely be heard through the sturdy walls and ceiling, and I had to walk out past our first security checkpoint to confirm what I was hearing.  My first reaction was to rush back in, grab my Deimos, and prepare for the attack, but then I remembered that air raid sirens predated me and that it was, in fact, our tornado sirens.  Apophis and I got back inside just as torrential sheets of rain began to fall.

Most people at this point would begin looking for a safe location in their house or building, but not our researchers.  Instead, we settled in and continued our work.  We could have moved to one of our lower levels (all of B3 is dedicated to a storm/radiation/apocalypse shelter), but then we would lose our view of nature’s show through the windows.  The usual commotion of R&D was as continuous as the white noise of the rain, and even in the face of power outages we pushed on.

Ninety minutes later it was all over, leaving only a strong wind and wet asphalt behind.  Behind me, the cheers of Apophis and Slinky could be heard.  I discovered that they had vastly improved some of the sensor processing code and greatly reduced the telemetry cycle time.  We each took turns dropping onto different locations on the RedPlanet to compare the new gantry with what we remember from the old.  I think we will take a trip down to B2, and power up one of the old 4.X gantries for some side by side comparison.  In any case, this milestone represents an important step forward and that much closer to a release later this year!

Adam “Thor” Butt, VGC R&D.

For those of you who have not seen it yet, here is the video we have released from our new location.

As you can see, we have our translation pods up and running in our new location. Our equipment is powered up and running, and we are currently working on theming elements. We even had our first local tournament (a gunslinger) where much destruction was had. In fact, yours truly came in second to Dallas’ new Sheriff KnightHawk.

But, what you might not have noticed is the translocation to RedPlanet that we snuck in. The voice you hear in the video belongs our brave test monkey Draco, who was attempting to pilot his vehicle through the camera’s display. As you can see, all (internal) displays and controls are fully operational! This was thanks to the late night efforts of Apophis and my self last week. We were able to finally isolate a problem that was causing an emergency return translocation during a mission. After hours of testing and diagnostics, we discovered a loose flux conduit connected to the stabilizer coil (which keeps a pod in it’s destination elsewhen during a translocation) resulted in a boson leak in the mechanical compartment. The coil, not being supplied with the a balanced particle stream caused the inertial mass of the ship to change during your flight and resulted in sluggish or “squishy” controls. And, when the boson particles reached a dangerous quantity, the pod’s safety mechanism performed an emergency return translocation which sometimes resulted in a crash of the local logic and control computer (making it even harder to diagnose).

But once we found, the error, a few turns of a wrench fixed the problem. This also demonstrates the first stable version of the Russell process translocations on existing gantries!  We also plan to have another new update later this week.

Adam “Thor” Butt, VGC R&D.