Part 21: X-COM SOLDIER BRIEFING for March 31 - SERGEANT CLEARANCE LEVEL

X-COM SOLDIER BRIEFING for March 31 - SERGEANT CLEARANCE LEVEL


March was another month with huge swings between good and bad. The loss of two Interceptors was cruel and difficult to recover from. On the other hand, we have captured an alien leader, and discovered something we never expected.

We had previously believed that psionic waves were neither strong nor directed enough to alter the state of mind of other beings. We were very wrong. The Sectoid leader we have captured has had to be constantly sedated to prevent it from controlling any nearby humans. Rather than attempt a difficult interrogation, we have made it a priority to study this psionic ability, how to amplify and direct it, and if it is possible to allow humans to use this ability. If we can create a device that will allow human minds to generate a psionic field, all future interrogations will become far easier. We will no longer require Allen to translate for us. Human beings will be able to communicate directly with any alien, and draw information out from their minds. The possibility exists that psionics may even be an effective battlefield weapon, as the leader has proven. On that note, until we have developed a method to prevent or lessen the impact of psionic attack, we cannot interrogate the leader for more information about the 'Hive Ship'.



Funding wise, this was a very good month. The UK was obviously distraught at out inability to deal with a very large UFO in their airspace and withdrew funding. Germany, India, China and Canada did not increase funding. The latter three countries have seen a huge increase in the number of UFOs in their area, areas that X-COM has had little presence.




The increase of UFOs in Asia is worrying. Thanks to the decoder we know that most of these craft are on 'retaliation' missions, attempt to find the location of an X-COM base.



Unlike China, Russia and India, Japan has been an excellent funding source to X-COM. To help deal with the increased UFO presence in Asia, we have lowered the security clearance for the following information from Colonel to Sergeant clearance.

Since the middle of the 1990s, most developed nations on Earth have attempted their own version of the X-COM program, to very little success. The inability for individual nations to enter the airspace of their neighbors has meant that UFOs have an easy avenue for escape if detected. The greatest strength of X-COM is its multi-national support, allowing us to patrol the world. A single nation is incapable of doing this, or even defending simply their own nation. However, Japan came close.

In 1998 Japan started the Kiryu-Kai program. This program eventually turned into the model for X-COM when Japan made the proposal to the UN. What we have not revealed until now is that the Kiryu-Kai program was not shut down, it merged into X-COM.



While the Kiryu-Kai base is far less equipped that Early Light, it is quite capable now of dealing with alien threats. It is this base that the aliens are looking for in Asia, not Early Light. You may remember the failed Terror mission to Tokyo - it was the Kiryu-Kai Interceptor that bombed and destroyed the area to pacify the situation.



Early Light has the range to patrol all of Europe and most of Africa. The circle ranges from smallest to largest are small radar range, large radar range and hyperwave decoder range.



Stationed outside Kyoto, the Kiryu-Kai base is protecting the highly populated Eastern Pacific seaboard. The reason we are now revealing this information to you is that the Kiryu-Kai cannot handle the massive influx of UFOs in the region. We are considering transferring our best and brightest soldiers to this base to assist with the threat. We ask you to keep watch of your fellow soldiers and determine who you think would best be able to succeed in our sister base.

One new piece of technology we have finished with we believe will give us a new edge in airborne battles.



The plasma beam is a massively scaled up version of the heavy plasma. While the heavy plasma relies on as yet unknown technologies, reverse engineering a larger, less efficient version of the weapon is possible.



Manufacture of even one plasma beam is incredibly difficult, and also resource and time consuming.



We will equip one on each of our ships for the time being. One of the main benefits of this weapon is that it does not require ammo, all recharging of the weapon can be done on base quite easily. The main fuel source is element Elerium-115, which has an incredible capacity to generate energy.



Possessing 115 protons and 184 neutrons, elerium is a stable superheavy element right at the peak of the "island of stability" of elements. As the number of protons of an element increases, the stability decreases, and as such all elements heavier than uranium are unstable and radioactively decay. Most elements above 100 decay so rapidly that it is impossible to generate a macroscopic quantity of them. However due to a quirk of chemistry, this one isotope of elerium is perfectly stable. When bombarded with protons, elerium briefly absorbs the proton before radiating away another proton and an anti-proton. The anti-protons can be stored and used as an anti-matter fuel source. Anti-matter reactions are a 100% conversion to energy. We cannot stress enough that this ability of elerium is unique and has incredible potential for humanity. Wars will one day be fought over this element. Acquiring large amounts of elerium is vital for various sources such as plasma weapons, fuel for future craft and basic power generation. This is a problem since elerium is not found in our solar system and we are unable to synthesize it. All our sources of it come from the aliens, and it should be a high priority among soldiers to avoid destroying UFO Power sources which contain elerium. It may even be a good idea to one day recover any elerium from UFOs that were shot down over water.

I could continue for pages on this topic, but I'm probably already over the head of most of you. So let me summarize:

CAPTURE AS MUCH ELERIUM AS YOU CAN.

X-COM Head Scientist,
Dr. Reis Markus