Rocks crumbled under pressure, the grinding of metal against its brittle surface. A mining drone drilled for hours on end, the vein deep below slowly encroached by mining machines. Above the miners light flickered from an entrance two miles above them. That's right, right now we are at one of many mining sites. Their operations consist of detecting the veins of ore, before digging vertically to them.
For the last month the expansion has been underway. Stretched thin as they were, there is nothing to stop them. And no threat to worry about. So there is no real worry, or rather not at this moment.
In which such expansion is greatly needed, Synthesis is aware that after a sort of reprieve. Someone is going to come, be it from deactivating the ship, the missing crew or exploration. Someone will come and he will pay dearly if he doesn't hurry up and get defenses going. Not all encounters will be Tin-can, nor will all be alone. In the words of a human, he got lucky.
Over the last month he had been rapidly expanding, even going as far to build more assembly lines for construction. Only using the resources scrapped from the ship, to build machines. His current system had plenty of flaws, but he did so purposefully.
Every station built resided over a dozen mining sites. Every four stations in turn is linked to a large storage site. Which is then transported back to the main storage. Apart of the main hub of mining operations he operated and had machines operate out of.
Synthesis had this main station act as the main hub between all his outpost stations. Which served to charge the drones, drop off materials, relay reports and the access point to a small transit tunnel that led to the fortress.
The hub and outpost stations at this moment were running on solar, due to the inability and unwillingness to use the main reactor. He did want them to be self-sufficient, but he also didn't want to connect them. He won't, he had his own reasons, and they were alright on their own.
The main hub was even more functional than the others and had a different purpose then watching over the mines. In fact when Synthesis built it he did so for the sole reason of refining. Metal and other ores need refinery, purifying, into usable materials. He even put a system into place for alloy crafting. The main hub was the second phase, in which ores were given to it and it in turn refined the ores into usable products.
Then delivered them to the main storage beneath it. For later use, the storage below is much much larger than the main hub. This is due to the fact that the flow of resources will increase and that he has yet put the system in place to use those resources. It's like storing cash into a savings account whilst you use a billion dollars slowly, but all your earnings go to the savings. Once you are done you switch to savings. That's what is essentially happening here.
There are sixteen outpost stations, one hundred and ninety two mines, and hundreds more machines at work. As the ores are brought back the outpost sifts through them. Categorizes them into five categories and then sends a report to the main hub along with the ores.
Which undertake refinery, before they are categorized into specific metal ingots or alloys and are stored down below for later use. This is the current system in place, yet this is a fraction of what Synthesis wants.
This is the foundation for greater projects, there is a reason they mined vertically for both convenience and due to a massive project. Which will be more thoroughly explored when the time comes.
For now, he has laid down the workings of his foundation. Even going so far as starting an underground factory. Of course it's not done, he is personally working on that one, whilst also taking more important matters into mind, upgrades.
He has been thinking of this over the last few months, upgrades are in order. He has been building machines with basic materials, but also basic machinery. Like the processors they had are basic, he needs efficient machines, right now they are not that. They could be so much better
Especially the terminators. Their basic logic processors are slower than humans. It takes them a moment to realize their target is dead, they wasted precious ammunition on a dead corpse. He needed to change that… even if he had actually purposely wanted them to do that. His hypocrisy is not a part of his thought process..
After looking over data from the old Prism Collective's system. He did find mentions of that, there is an intermediate logic processor, and by the looks of it they were attempting research on a greater version. Like advanced, but this was barely before the devastating blow, so its likely they didn't manage to succeed. Why is that? Machines are tireless and constantly computing. So why couldn't we find a possible simple solution. Was it due to the many fronts we were tackling or the desperate research into stronger effective weapons, ships, and so forth? Unfortunately he doesn't know the whole picture. So this did leave him questioning.
History aside, the intermediate seems to be an easy craft. He best get building and replacing. Shouldn't take long. After all he wants to give his machines greater armaments and equipment to make use of.
Whilst on the topic of research, synthesis glanced at the distant regions that he had been eyeing for a while. You see, he had a long look and discussion with himself over his own plans. Lets just say there was a change in them, involving the enclosed region of clustered mountain ranges..
Ok, maybe the change is a little more drastic than he let on..