Greetings, spacefarers!

This QEC broadcast will describe the layout and basic features of the
Shin-Salyut 6 orbital station.  Far be it from us to pressume
ignorance of mankind's history in space on the part of those selected
under close scrutiny to represent our species as it expands into the
stars, but of course the unstoppable march of progress means that
your own vessels bare little resemblence to our own, and the exact
nature of our daily existence here in Low Earth Orbit may be only
vaguely apprehended by our readers, many of whom may have recently
awoken from cryosuspension.

Shin-Salyut 6, from the perspective of those who live on it, is a
full-scale replica of the historic Salyut 6 station.  Cylindrical in
shape, the station is 15.8 metres long and 4.15 metres wide at its
widest point.  Attached to this cylinder are three solar panels,
mounted at right angles to each other, exposing 51 square metres to
the sunlight.  This provided the original station with some 4
kilowatts of electrical power.  Of course, 51 square metres of modern
photovoltaic material provides substantially more power, but no more
than 4 kilowatts is permitted to be drawn at any time by the
facilities used by the station's inhabitatants.

The station has fore and aft docking ports.  To the fore port is
docked a replica Soyuz spacecraft (7K series), and this was our ferry
to the station, and its descent module will be our ride home at the
mission's completion.  The historical Salyut 6 was the first space
station in human history to support long-term habitation via periodic
resupply from autonomous Progress craft which would dock to the aft
port.  Lacking the budgetary capacity for recurring resupply launches,
the Shin-Salyut 6 has a larger module docked to its aft port, which
is, indeed, larger than the station itself.  It contains adequate
supplies for a 12-month mission.  From the perspective of the station
itself, this module appears identical to a Progress craft.  Rather
than being exposed to open space, the Progress craft is, in fact,
inset into the larger supply module.  On a fixed schedule, and only
when the interconnecting door is full sealed, automated systems open
one-way doors in the pseudo-Progress and transfer strictly no more
than 2,300 kg or 6.6 cubic metres of food, water, air and other
equipment.  This provides our reenactment with a fine sense of
verisimilitude, although our health and well-being depends crucially
on the continued correct operation of the automated systems.

The engines of the Progress resupply craft also provided
station-keeping thrust to the historical Salyut 6.  In our case,
orbital decay is kept at bay by a Shinohara Heavy Industries 6th
Generation ion engine contained in the supply module, which in fact
consumes the vast majority of the energy provided by our solar arrays.
The engineering minded reader will have noticed that, even without the
additional load of the ion engine, 51 square metres of even the finest
photovoltaics is woefully inadequate to power any practical
entanglement engine for QEC communication, and this is quite right.
You do not receive these messages directly from Shin-Salyut 6,
space-farers!  Comrade Ryumin, fully licensed by the Japanese Ministry
of Internal Affairs and Communciations and a Lifetime Member of the
Japan Amateur Radio League, relays these messages to
GKRSSHPRS-affiliated groundstations via FM voice channel on the 2
metre band, as an approximation to the 121.75 MHz FM voice downlink
widely used by Soyuz craft.  From Earth the messages are forwarded to
a QEC transmission system via internet.  The QEC transmitter itself
is several additional "hops" from any contact well-known to the
GKRSSHPRS.

Comrade Ryumin reads these dispatches from my notes, hand-written
using pencils as we are, of course, in a micro-gravity environment,
modern artificial gravity systems based on LQG spin-network theory
being totally unknown to the Soviet pioneers.  Our long term presence
in such an environment requires a rigorous exercise routine to prevent
muscular atrophy, and our station, like the original, is equipped with
an extensive gymnasium.  We are also aided in this respect by the
outstanding replicas of of the "Pingvin" exercise suit, whose
integrated elastic bands provide a substitute for gravitational
forces.  The crew extends its gratitude to our comrades in the
GKRSSHPRS's Cosplay Divison for their hard work in producing these.

Our daily life in the station is simple, humble and carefully
scheduled.  Although automated systems would in principle keep the
station and its myriad subsystems running safely in the absence of
direct input, this is only a failsafe measure intended to be used due
to an unforseen lapse in our ability to operate the historically
accurate manual control systems, to which we devote much of our
attention and labour each day.  This arrangement reminds us and, we
hope, you, dear reader, that humanity's place in space is precarious
and that close vigilance and unwavering dedication are required to
safeguard it.  While we can only imagine exactly what form the efforts
required of you may take, we are doing our best at living our humble
life here, and hope that our endurance of a more "primitive" form of
life in space (though, dare I say it, I myself would prefer the
characterisation "authentic") provides a clear example and inspiration
to those of you facing hardships in your journeys.
