After recovering, she goes to find Lucien and Pelape.

Pelape is helping herself to a post-shower breakfast in Keetim.

Vira plops down the star chart next to Pelape. She's bouncing a little.

"Oh, marvelous. To retain the leverage probably we want to check these ourselves, I've gotten started on the piloting course..."

"Ooh, what'd you learn?"

Vira takes some potato pancakes for herself. Nom.

"Starting out it's mostly just about how the controls are labeled."

Vira would like to know how the controls are labeled!

She can look over Pelape's shoulder while she completes the unit test.

Vira guesses you'd have to make a ship like that if you wanted different people to be able to use it. Still, she feels like if she designed the layout it would be way better than that.

It is certainly possible to improve on this, it was invented like last year! But it's the current state of the art.

Vira usually doesn't change things after she invented them too much, though she supposes she might within a year.

Well, probably her production cycle is... very different... in lots of ways. Anyway, this is what they'll be able to source from Tapai shipbuilders, though once more countries have their own programs off the ground more thoroughly they'll probably have competing standards.

Mhm, she's okay learning someone else's. It's fun to see how other people think sometimes.

At her current pace she'll be ready to go take the test on a live ship in a month. Inconveniently, it looks like they're not selling any ships to private interests - the amaliens may be able to buy one, or they can try to make a deal with Voa or Anitam or whoever without being able to deliver right away.

Lucien goes to check with the marine biologist Green that's been working with Vira on their progress.

The marine biologist and several of her colleagues have been able to get a fair number of grants and prizes for various amalien researches past and future.

Enough to pay for a ship?

The thing is there aren't listed ship prices because they aren't selling to private interests. They're going to have to talk to some blues.

Pelape points out it doesn't have to be Tapai blues if they don't want it to be - Anitam is closely allied with Tapa and has its own fleet now, and Voa's working on one, and Cene too.

Does Pelape have opinions on which of those would be best? Lucien isn't very knowledgeable about the different Amentan countries.

"Voa's big and I have the impression they have slightly less awful relations with their reds than everybody else. Like, not enough to be impressive, but relatively speaking. Anitam I natively speak the language and they're more likely to trust me. Cene I mentioned mostly just for completeness."

"Let's try Voa, if the translation issue won't be severe. If it would be Anitam sounds good."

"I don't speak Voan but the machine translation's all right."

"Okay, let's try that then. I think transl-ation difficulties will be less problematic than cultural ones anyways."

"Plausible. I think you should send the email - I'm likely to get filtered out before it hits anyone important. But I can help you write it."

Lucien appreciates the help, and is quite eager to learn how to write this sort of email.