Magnetic Anomaly Project

I was talking with one of my readers about the things that got left out of my Bad Dog novel and its sequel Strike Dog. Things like risk mitigation etc. Also, why planet One-Nine-Six was chosen, and what about alien pathogens?

I had in an earlier draft of Strike Dog a whole chapter on atmosphere analysis and the reason for choosing to go to One-Nine-Six. While I imagine I could've found a way to make the chapter more interesting, the main problem was that it had people telling other people what they already knew. In short, classic info dump.

So it had to go.

Besides Tachikoma is a Marine, and there remains a few lines that refers to the outcome of all the discussions where she says,

"After weeks of arguments over which of the three worlds to go to, One-Nine-Six won. Mostly on the basis that a desert environment would be easier to drive out onto. That, and the fact that we could retrieve our robot teams that had either broken down, gotten lost, or fallen into a hole."

Which I judged as being all she would care about the things discussed in said meeting.

Anyway, meetings implies some sort of hierarchical structure. Here's what I wrote for my series bible:

The Magnetic Anomaly Project is the name I've given to the organization that discovers two alien pillars beneath a mountain in the Cascades. By the second book MAP has morphed into MAPCOM, a unified combatant command as a subsidiary of the North American Confederation Special Operations Command.

The organization for MAP was inspired by NASAs The Mars Science Laboratory.  So like them, I have five groups as follows:

Organic Geochemistry & Bio-Signatures 
Inorganic Geochemistry & Mineralogy
Atmosphere & Environment
Geology
Mathematics & Physics

As part of the backstory I created the Strategic Science Operations Team consists of the five following people, one of whom goes onto play a larger part in the storyline.

Dr. Carlyle: Organic Geochemistry & Bio-Signatures
Dr. John Cameron: Inorganic Geochemistry & Mineralogy
Dr. Carpenter: Atmosphere & Environment
Dr. Samantha Emmerich: Geology (alpha science team leader)
Dr. Linda Scott: Mathematics & Physics

At the end of the first three novels  I still have a lot of story to tell.