In Space With a Junkyard Ship chapter 174

POV: Bob

“If you had glasses on, your image right now would be perfect.”

My head snapped up to see Lola standing in the doorway watching work. Ever since the battles in this system were over, most of my day-to-day work was managing the operations of the ship, and while I could use the ship’s AIs to do this, I enjoy it. It also gives a better overview of everything if I do the bookkeeping myself.

“I can see what you an. Why are you here? Do you have another request?” She looked a bit too smug for my liking right now.

“Not really. Captain’s busy fixing your drone problem, and my other projects are currently running on their own. So, for the mont I’ve got nothing important to do.”

“It’s sotis important to take a bit of ti off, but I have work to do. It’s difficult to replenish so of our supplies in this system, as currently everything is quite expensive because of the demand.”

“Yeah, when you showed the numbers to the captain, he finally started properly working on making us better space drones.” She gave that smile of hers that was quite disarming. She enjoyed it whenever the captain made stuff, and so did the rest of us. Why that was, I was not entirely sure.

“Hopefully, he gets them finished soon. We still have plenty of wrecks to salvage. We already took a large hit on our drone fuel reserves, pushing those space monster corpses out of their portal.”

“Was it worth it to do it then?” she asked, seemingly actually curious about it.

“If we account for the 50% split we’re getting, and the higher prices of fuel in the system, it was well worth it.” It took only a mont to pull up the data about our estimated profit from that and show it to Lola by flipping the monitor around.

“That’s actually quite good. But even with all of this, would it be enough for all the skill stones the captain wants to get us?”

That was a leading question, which made twist the monitor back around. Eventually, we were going to a place where there would be a lot of skills, but I got the sense that the captain wouldn’t allow us to get cheap builds. That made sigh out loud, which made Lola raise an eyebrow.

“The captain would want sothing special for us. I have no idea what I want. Getting us so cheaper builds that are known and tested would take away the need to think about what kind of skills I would want, but it feels like I would be letting the captain down by doing so.”

She took a seat, and I saw her posture relax, showing so of the wariness she had been hiding.

“Sa here. I think the problem is that this isn’t a ga. It’s easy to have a build if you do sothing narrow. Getting skills to make yourself do that thing better is easy, but look at what we all do. That list is a mile long even before we discuss combat.”

The silence grew between us as both of us tried to think of a solution. Eventually, sothing occurred to .

“All five of us haven’t really fought together. We have always been more separate, leading our own units, we haven’t fought together.”

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She tilted her head the way the captain sotis does, but when she did it, it was cute, unlike when the captain does it. He’s seems more nacing.

“That’s a good observation Bob. Another problem I see is us not knowing what would fit us and what wouldn’t. We have a list of hundreds of thousands of skills thanks to FH. Yet scrolling through that seems pointless, as there seem to be too many options to make any permanent choices.”

“I’ll add this problem to so future eting. From the tiline I’m seeing from you two, we’re going to have plenty of ti in this system.”

She gave a nod before standing up and then slowly walking out. “I’ll stop bothering you so you can get back to work,” she said as she reached the doorway, not looking back.

Now that that was done, it was ti to get back to work. The next thing I needed to tackle was another request from Sam for more ammunition for training his squad. Pretty sure he was the one who was spending the most ammunition, even though his aim seed perfect.

Opening up the manufacturing list, I squeezed in a couple of thousand rounds to be produced in the next two days. He was probably going to request more. Scrolling down the list, a week from now, I added tens of thousands of rounds to the list. That should stop him from requesting training ammunition every week.

The required materials were updated automatically. Checking the supply showed that there was plenty left. That was the good thing about actively salvaging spaceships. We had plenty of materials to go around.

In two weeks, I had my first squad of proper space-rated drones. These were still prototypes, as the captain said, but their efficiency was off the charts compared to the previous ones.

They had propellers like the drones, ant to be operated where there was air. These ones wouldn’t need air, as they were interacting with space itself. Each one of those drones costs so much because of those propeller blades, but right now, we have so much of that material produced it was ridiculous.

Running the numbers showed that if these drones continued to salvage at the current rate, it would take about four months for them to beco profitable, if we didn’t count secret stashes and safes that we were occasionally finding.

Every once in a while, I also went over the data the ship was collecting about the operations inside the solar system. That truly had been a brilliant idea by the captain. Already I had a list of utility drones we could build in the future that would be needed if we wanted to do sothing similar.

The number of different tasks that needed to be done to properly utilise a system was staggering. You would constantly need to ferry materials from gas giants to the different manufacturing and growing centres, then bring in other materials whenever needed.

That was just the start of the logistics required to keep a solar system functioning. We would need so many more drones than we had storage for. Even if FH managed to upgrade her current inventory skills, I did not know if it was going to be enough.

Perhaps the captain had been a bit too ambitious with this one, or perhaps he’s planning on making more ships. As soon as I thought of that, my head started to hurt a bit. The logistics that would co with running a fleet would be orders of magnitude higher than I currently have to deal with.

Hopefully, the captain won’t do that, at least not anyti soon. Although having more ships would an that we could keep a lot more of our salvage. It was so annoying constantly having to worry about not exposing the fact that we could store more than our current volu would allow.

That ant constant trips to one of the space stations that had been partially restored. There, we were given storage space so we could keep more of our salvage, and where the processed space monster parts went that we got from our cut.

It was a good thing that the captain was so busy trying to figure out how to make the ship stronger once again; otherwise, we would have left so much value behind. Hopefully, I will get everything done before he finishes with his projects.

The latest wreck had a safe with skill stones stored inside of it. Those were like mystery loot boxes. I loved it whenever we found one. Now I can easily understand why back on Earth they had banned loot box gas. That made stop what I was currently doing.

“FH, in the galaxy, are there rules in populated places about predatory ga practices?”

Through our bond network, I got the sense that she was confused, but she answered a mont later.

“Not that I have recorded. Why do you ask?”

“I might have an idea to make a lot of passive inco. We would need to make so sort of servers and perhaps a few AIs that would run the entire thing when we're gone.”

With only a couple of words to explain what I wanted, FH already understood what I wanted to do.

“With the amount of data I have available from Earth, it shouldn't be hard to make sothing like that. The initial investnt would be manageable, and I could see heavy returns if we focus on matching ga design with the culture of those places. But Bob, is this really sothing we should be doing?”

“What do you an? It's extra credits. Why not?” She purposely sighed; she chose to act that out and send that to through the bond.

“I won’t be putting it on high priority, but I can see it would be viable, as I’ve noticed quite a lot of Earth’s cultural aspects spread quite well in the galaxy.”

“Excellent. It would be another good source of inco.” Though there would be a problem of getting the captain to stop by more centres of population. It will take ti. We had a few wrecks left, and who knows what was inside.

With the last wreck done, I had to swallow my disappointnt, as there weren’t any other exciting finds. It had been five months since we started to salvage the wrecks. The captain and Lola were far from finishing their own project.

Ti for us to set up on one of the stations so we can connect ourselves with their cooling system and run the refinery continuously.

We would need to be on a platform and not inside a dock, as they needed to repair their own ships. Every single day we stayed there, we would increase our profit from this venture. I did love seeing our cargo’s value constantly going up.