Miriani

Hale Uncovers Political Extremist: New Ways Of Salvaging Opened Up

Today The Hale Collective published a report that indicates "a breakthrough in science and technology", according to the authors. The report, which consists mostly of legal information, has been released as a result of the surprising capture of Sir Atkins earlier this week. The sixty-page document lays out what happened and who was involved, and it describes the furnishing of proof.
Sir Atkins was found to be a political extremist and on those grounds he was taken to a cell somewhere on a remote Hale-station. The exact location remains unknown, supposedly to protect the ones involved. Having expressed his intentions to rule the AIE and Commonwealth to members of The Hale Collective, Atkins was arrested and, after a time of painful negotiation, handed over to a Hale Security Officer. This Officer, Mr. Temple, told us: "The General was in a terrible condition when I picked him up on Outreach. All attempts that were made to talk about his ideas and beliefs developed into violennt quarrels and even resulted in the man almost escaping. As soon as he had been securely imprisoned we proceeded by thoroughly questioning him. And as you know the results of these interviews are now available in the report written by Peterson and Stevens."
The part of the report that is probably of most interest to private starship pilots is the story as it was told by Staff Officer McMara, a researcher who was stationed on Remote Outpost 27 - the station that is now marked by the remains of what will be known for many years to come as one of the biggest scientific catastrophe. Hilary, finally abandoning her tradition of keeping everything as secret as she could, tells the reader about the nature of the scientific experiments that were carried out on the station. "The problem", she writes, "was that we were asked - no, forced - to do everything without drawing somebody's attention. This wasn't too problematic while we were working on the theoretical side of the concept, and even the simulations we ran on our computer systems passed unnoticed. However, the tests that actually involved the use of the newly developed vehicles greatly worried me. I had started to learn more and more about Sir William Atkins' philosophy, and my team informed me that they couldn't pull the experiments off anymore, so to speak. But what could I do? He was the one behind 90 percent of our funding and he had an unbelievably well established influence on our government. And then the fire struck... That, frankly, was the cause for me to decide to ask a Hale-pilot to get a set of back-up discs off the station. She did this, and I sent copies to the other alliances. I would probably not have done anything if that fire hadn't risen, and I don't dare to think about the consequences of my loyalty to Sir Atkins."
The consequences of McMara's loyalty to The Three Alliances, on the contrary, means a positive contribution to the way we know salvaging. Thanks to the fact that the concept had been fully described on paper by McMara's team already, the joined efforts of the alliances has resulted in the immediate availability of gas giant salvagers: one of the biggest and quickest scientific discoveries of the last few years, similar to the design process of the one-person interdictor. The only thing that is believed to hold many pilots back is the relatively high cost of the vehicles and upgrades, obviously caused by the massive bill for expenses which has an entirely new outpost on it.

Dated: 07/14/2356