My review of a warehouse I found on Earth's Moon in the video game Starfield
I work at a cidery in the PNW. We have a pretty hefty canning line that can handle what I like to call a Solid Chunk of Volumetric Output. Our fulfillment and warehouse team touches several hundred pallets a day. We handle ingredients that come in drums, plastic IBC totes, 5 gallon buckets, and raw ingredients off the back of peopleās Ford Raptors. We have pipes and valves and connectors. We talk about glycol and peracetic acid a lot. We have standard 4 level pallet racks, as well as push-back pallet racking and back-load pallet racking that maintains a First In First Out order.
I manage our Quality Assurance team, which means I spend most of my team at a desk or in a lab. I have driven our forklifts and our scissor lifts. Iāve blended our ingredients into our batching tanks. I verify our sanitation practices, and I help solve problems as needed. I spend a lot of my day staring at stainless steel pipes and mumbling about dissolved oxygen to myself.
Thatās all to say, Iām not an expert. I would call myself a warehouse hobbyist and enthusiast. Not out loud to anyone, but when I play a video game that has a warehouse in it, I like to spend my time looking at how the warehouse is put together.
In addition to this, a note on Forklift Certification: Itās largely made up. There are some machines that require special licenses, and OSHA has classes you can take that probably look good on a resume, but if you look at the language that OSHA uses to define who is allowed to drive a forklift it only has two requirements. āTrained operators must know how to do the job properly and do it safely as demonstrated by workplace evaluation.ā Itās up to the employer how thatās interpreted. My employer had me watch a forty five minute video and then someone watched as I drove around for thirty minutes saying āoh fuck oh fuck okay okay okay donāt hit anyone.ā
I took my character, Dr. FLIPJUMP DARKSWALLOW, to the moon. I brought my companion Sarah with me, she said she wouldnāt mind a detour so that we could finally live out our shared dream of owning a pair of moon boots, so down we went to explore a seemingly abandoned lunar station. It seemed to be some kind of staging facility for receiving shipments, landing dock, staff kitchen and common area, but as far as I could tell there wasnāt anywhere within a kilometer or two to send the shipments once they arrived. Typical supply chain issues, major distro hub with nothing in site to distro to. But it did have a small on-site warehouse so Sarah and I both agreed to put a pause on our moon boots dream and explore.
This is called an IBC tote. You can fill these up through a big screw-top hole on the top, super easy to use, cheap ($275 new), universal. The most common versions Iāve seen have a galvanized steel cage and a galvanized steel pallet attached to the bottom so it can be universally picked up by a forklift. They typically have a 2ā drain valve with a butterfly and a camlock. This is a pretty good example of an IBC tote! You can see how the galvanized steel was welded together at each intersection, bent into place and held there. The butterfly at the bottom has a cap in place, it has a pressure valve thatās clearly labeled. This looks pretty good!
This is a pallet jack. On Earth in the present day, you roll it into the slats on a pallet, squeeze on a hand lever in the handle, and pump the handle bar up and down as it lifts. On the Moon in the future, it looks like itās been upgraded for use in space with what I assume is probably some electric battery type of deal. Otherwise itās very similar to a normal pallet jack! It even has the double wheels in the front, a detail I was very excited about. There doesnāt seem to be the hand lever though, or any buttons anywhere. I assume thatās because this model has a voice assistant like an Alexa in it.
It has a spring in the back as well, another neat little detail. Iād be curious to see how this works in action, thereās a decent number of mechanical parts on it for how futuristic it looks. Thereās also two smallā¦ baskets, I guess? For paperwork maybe? On either end of the handle shaft. I made up the term handle shaft.
Here is what I assume is a future-forklift. And Sarah. Please ignore Sarah. I was required to take her on a mission early on, but she keeps saying things like āthatās not yours!ā and āwe should not break the law,ā which has been definitely cramping Dr. DARKSWALLOWās style. Anyway, this forklift is a far cry from the kinds we have in present day. Barely recognizable.
My best guess is that you stand on this platform to operate it. But thereās no buttons or levers again, no key ignition. Presumably this turns on somehow and that panel is a touchscreen, or maybe itās another Alexa operated device. This whole thing seems pretty dangerous. Thereās no roll cage. I guess maybe thereās no OSHA in the future? Or maybe this thing has a lot of safety tech built into it to protect the operator from making mistakes. Maybe it follows Asimovās rules of robotics and canāt allow a human to come to harm, through action or inaction. But that seems like a lot of liability to pack into programming, and it seems expensive to attach a positronic brain to a forklift. I donāt know how it would anticipate other drivers doing things badly, knocking over pallets? It seems dicey.
I do like that the cabling looks like itās painterās taped onto the frame so it doesnāt get caught anywhere. Thatās a great little detail, very much something a maintenance team might do in a pinch. A āshort term holdā as they āwork with supply chain details to implement a long term repair.ā
I climbed up onto a pile of boxes to get this picture. It looks like they redesigned the forks in the future, kind of a high-heeled shoe thing going on at the ends there. And this forklift seems like it has reduced functionality from what forklifts here on Earth can do. Forklifts can usually do three things with the forks: lift up and down, pitch the forks back and forth, and spread the forks wider or narrower. I think this can only lift the forks up and down. There also seems to be a large orange ball on the bottom, but I donāt know what thatās used for. My best guess, given the short cylinder above it, is that the forks can control their yaw and rotate on a horizontal access? But theyāre right up against the axle so Iām not sure how that would work. Maybe if you lift the forks up itās able to rotate? But I donāt see much of an engine to ballast the center of gravity anywhere. Maybe the entire body is made with a very dense metal, it does seem to be pretty flush with the ground.
My biggest complaint is that this forklift doesnāt have any headlights or taillights. Itās important for forklifts to have a horn and bright lights to let other workers know thereās a forklift around, especially reverse lights. These might be taillights, if Iām giving some benefit here, but theyāre so low to the ground Iām not sure how other drivers are going to be able to see them. But Iām not an expert in future light bulbs, maybe these work just fine.
These look like future pallets! Pallets come in different materials, with wood or plastic as the most common, but they also come in standard sizes. But these pallets look like theyāre way too small for the forklift to pick up. Maybe theyāre just for the pallet jack? And big note here: I really hope for the sake of the warehouse manager in this facility that OSHA doesnāt exist, because each one of those pallets standing up on its side is going to be its own fine. Overall these pallets look pretty good, if small. And this disaster of a pile seems pretty true to form with how pallets are stored, no matter how many @everyone pings on Microsoft Teams you see get sent out about stacking pallets correctly.
I suspect everyone in the warehouse crew here hates their coworkers. They have four of these pallets in a square but are stacking things randomly on top of them. None of these things are strapped down, this black cube is on a pallet thatās a different size than the pallets underneath it. Just a bizarre move. I hope everyoneās doing okay.
And then on the other side is this: ā¦ Why? Why would anyone do this? You canāt pick those rolls up, the rest will roll right off the pallet. Theyāre not centered on the pallet so even if you did pick it up, you couldnāt put this onto pallet racking anywhere, itās hanging off the edge.
This is pallet racking. It seems bolted together for some reason. I havenāt seen that before on this style of racking. It seems counter-intuitive; the whole point of this type is that itās easy to put together, itās modular. But if you bolt it together, itās not modular anymore. Normally you just slot the pieces in, they fall into place and donāt require additional parts. Just welded steel with drop slots.
Oof. A dead body. Iām a little surprised there arenāt more of these here. It does feel a bit dangerous.
Hereās another pallet jack, but they arenāt using it correctly. The pallet goes into the forks, why did they put a pallet on top of the forks? Ridiculous. Now theyāre just lifting things for no reason. A forklift put the pallet on, now a forklift has to take the pallet off? Why use the pallet jack at all?
And lastly: a propane cage! Thereās no locks on it, the maintenance team is probably screaming at everyone to make sure they Lock Out/Tag Out their equipment, but Iāll give the benefit of the doubt and sign off on it because thereās no propane tanks inside the cage so maybe the locks just arenāt necessary. Hopefully itās just in someoneās pocket while theyāre going to refill the tanks.
Overall, this is a pretty dangerous looking facility but probably usable. Iād say they ought to start working towards shoring up some safety gaps here, maybe making more intentional decisions about purchases for a while so they have the equipment they need for their process flow instead of all this equipment that requires rework and multiple touches to get anything done. But a growing business sometimes has to take whatās available! Kudos to them for getting things up and running on the moon, not an easy feat.
