Project Overworld

It took a few dozen of minutes for Keith to completely fill up all the tanks of his space shuttle. The whole structure was around a hundred feet in size and it held three large tanks supplying its main engines as well as four more reserved for the side engines. It also somewhat resembled a plane, or a spacecraft of some sort.

The reason behind such an appearance was actually efficiency. Since it could not fit onto the head of a rocket because its length, Keith has had to build an aerodynamic structure so the movements of its launcher would not be hindered too much.

'I should also be giving it a name in the future. I'll think about it once I successfully reach the Moon though.' Keith decided.

While the tanks were filling up thanks to a pump, Keith went back inside his station using the decompression chamber and rummaged around his storage. He had a few more objects to retrieve before actually going to the Moon and make this journey worthwhile.

Indecisive on which flag to take with him, he actually postponed this deadline until the last moment. The conquest of the Moon would certainly not be accepted until one actually put down their own flag on its surface. However, Keith hesitated between showing off the flag of his country or making his own.

He knew the Starise group already invented their own logo. Each city also had their own flag, and it would not last long until each continent possessed theirs too.

In the end, he quickly made up a name and a logo for his group, albeit alone for now, and using some dyes he brought up there to make a flag during the few following hours.

The Starise's logo was made up with a rocket onto a background showing off a star seen from up close. Because of this, he decided that his flag should showcase the shape of his space shuttle and a giant futuristic space station on its background to exhibit his future plans.

WIth that being done, Keith embarked onto his shuttle with his flag and a few other objects before activating the engines.

He checked whether the fuel tanks were indeed filled to the brink and proceeded to test the shuttle's behaviour with this much weight.

'I should be good to go.' He realized after a few minutes of inspection. 'Let's conquer that Moon!'

_______________

- "We can easily do it!" Eric exclaimed while motivating his fellow members of the Starise group. They had just come back to their base after a successful launch towards the Moon. This flight went flawlessly regarding the fact that it was their first time actually trying to reach the Moon.

They came into orbit of the Earth at around four hundred miles of altitude before flinging their trajectory towards the Moon thanks to a calculated acceleration. However, they used up almost every bit of fuel left in their rocket to only exceed fifty thousands miles of distance away from the Earth. It was not even a quarter of the distance separating them from the Moon, but they were really happy nonetheless.

In the end, they have had to kill themselves by igniting the whole rocket. Obviously, before doing so Eric said farewell to his chat and turned off his livestream. It was an embarassing enough act to intentionally kill oneself so he could not afford to be humiliated by his viewers.

After spawning back in their base, they immediately started working on their next rocket. According to Eric, this had to be their final attempt at landing onto the Moon and they would spare no effort in doing so.

First off, he called in reinforcement the few remaining member of their group who were not yet working on spatial engineering. Since it would be their last shot, they agreed on helping them with that matter. Since they were not proefficient in building such vehicles, they instead were assigned with the tasks of controling their automated crafting machines and channeling the required resources to them.

Secondly, he took a few days off his work and asked for his team to do the same. He wanted to be ready by the end of the following week after the next one, so in fourteen days from now. It would be quite the challenge for them to accomplish such a feat, especially since they would have to revamp their rocket design to reach that extra acceleration that would get them to the Moon.

However, Eric was really confident in their ability to do so. Only three of them ended up being able to take their five days off of work to be able to play Project Overworld for a whole week, but it would be sufficient since Leyla was one of them. She was also very motivated by their project and worked very hard to improve the various engines of their rocket and how they would be supplied.

By the end of their first week of building the rocket, most of its core components were already built. They only required a bit more polish to be fully ready for the take off, but the structural parts still needed to be printed out by their machines. Eric was really elated by seeing how much they had accomplished during the past few days and everything seemed to place itself in his calculations.

'By the end of next week, we shall be ready to conquer the Moon' He said with determination in his mind.

_______________

Although it was the first time for Keith to maneuver around the Earth and launch himself towards the Moon, the journey went pretty uneventful. He did not even have to manually input some changes in the trajectory that much since the space shuttle was equipped with the latest optimized programs he has been working on during the several days he has been stuck in space.

Just as he expected, he really did overshoot it with the amount of fuel being stored in his vehicle. However, since he was now in orbit, the weight of the shuttle did not really matter during the maneuvers it did to fling itself towards the Moon. In fact, the extra fuel would come in handy when trying to reach the perfect spot where the Starise group would be landing.

Keith was now orbiting around the only natural satellite of the Earth, waiting for the fateful encounter with his rivals. He did equip his vehicle with solar panels and also installed a computer on board, so he would have something to occupy himself on during the following days.

He was not that concerned about waiting for long, though, as he learnt on social medias that 'Ericality' and his team took a few days off of work to focus themselves onto their next rocket. He just hoped that everything went according to plan for them and that he would not have to wait for for more than three weeks for them to reach the Moon.

'Mhh...' Keith questioned himself. 'What should I be coding now?' Since he was left alone with his computer, he was pretty much forced to find a worthwhile project to work onto for the several days of waiting on the Moon's orbit. He had thought of many programs he could be using, such as one managing various projects at the same time and other quality of life programs, but none would really be useful if he was always working on his own.

'Wait, if I need someone else... Why don't I program an AI?' Keith was suddenly struck with a really attractive idea. He was always forced to do everything by himself, be it managing his stocks, chosing which products that would be produced by his machines and even going through all these satellite images just to check whether something unusual appeared in one of them.

That was why, the eventuality of developing an artificial intelligence to do such things in his stead was really interesting in terms of time saving. Hell, with an artificial intelligence he could even fully automate the creation of rockets that would be transporting fuel and resources to his space station. Thanks to this, he may even live up there in space and only go down on Earth to take care of important matters such as expanding his land base or building new modules for his station.

Well, most of these ideas would not actually be achievable in the near future, but developing an artificial intelligence would still be a must-have for him.

'I don't have anything to do anyways, why don't I start scratching my head over this matter?' Keith concluded. He did not know a lot regarding artificial intelligences, other than the theory being all of this. He knew that actual artificial intelligences such as 'Jarvis' in that popular movie were only dreams for now.

Current artificial intelligences were not really 'intelligent' and could only focus on a few types of action such as creating images based on sound inputs for example, or anything that could come to mind. Regardless, the method of transforming sound into an image still had to be programed by a human beforehand and the artificial intelligence would only serve as an automated process to create said images. One could even argue that his automated crafting machines were, in fact, artificial intelligences.

For now, Keith decided to work on a program that would output irregular images taken by his satellites. This would be a really simple first draft for his plans to fully automate the management of his base, but would still be quite valuable for his future progress. He may even expand upon this idea to automatically identify what type of irregularity was being observed by the program and alert him regarding this matter.

'Well, let's do this for the time being.' Keith decided.