Z minus 3.2 hours:

We have a thrust frame!

A proper cylinder truss, even, because at this point, trying to take clever short-cuts would be very much a false economy, of the type that leads to embarrassingly anticipatable anoxia. And even so, I’m still running a full fourteen minutes ahead of schedule after getting the drives attached and plumbed. I can already tell that these muscles will regret the stimulant cocktail later, but as long as they have a later, we can live with that.

I should, by the book, use the extra time to conduct a static fire test at this point. Since having to tear down and rebuild the thrust frame if there are any structural flaws in it would take long enough to kill us anyway – short of dipping into the LOX tank, which would involve doing heavy industrial work with impaired motion and a suit full of O₂-enriched atmosphere – I’m not going to.

(Having made many of these entries, I should mention to the unknown posterity reading this that I’m not actually worried about justifying my many decisions of this form to an engineering review. I just like to check that writing them down in the log makes them seem less insane.

Or, at least, no more insane.)

Z minus 1.3 hours:

So much for circuit breakers.

Damned accumulators. Orichalcium’s a heavy synthetic, so the whole thing steers like a freight sled on oil-ice. Not something you want to be hauling around on a few puffs of maneuvering nitrogen.

In retrospect, it might even have been easier to rig a temporary cable to get power on the bus, at least long enough to take the candle up by the battery room.

Too late now, anyway.

Z minus 1 hour:

Got the substrate and wireless node pulled and attached to the forward truss, wired in and powered on. They’re even talking to the ship’s ‘weave.

Which makes it time for my other other self to do her final checkout…