The dream of expansion often begins with ships, settlements, and statements of intent — but nothing moves, nothing endures, without the machinery behind the scenes. In the early years of Sol Expansion, humanity’s progress depends not on grand breakthroughs, but on quiet reliability, redundancy, and resilience.   Virtual and Programmed Intelligences — VIs and PIs — form the nervous system of every off-world venture. They coordinate environmental systems on Luna, monitor orbital drift in the LISI scaffolds, and manage drone operations around Mars and in deep-space testbeds. Though stripped of sentience by legal design, their precision and obedience make them indispensable.   Hardware remains inconsistent. Newer modules push efficiency, while legacy systems from early orbital installations creak with patched firmware and mismatched interfaces. Battery efficiency, thermal shielding, and radiation-hardened circuitry are the frontier problems — more pressing, in many ways, than propulsion or comms.   There is innovation. But it is not headline-making. It is done in isolation, aboard floating labs and lunar bunkers. Each advancement, each successful test of life-support cycling, radiation mitigation, or cryogenic containment, becomes another brick in the wall we are building between survival and catastrophe.   These are the years where systems must be made to last — or everything else will fail.