starships

Darkness Within (12): Airy Problems

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About that LOX tank…

The least well defined part of this candle plan has always been how to stay breathing. Before leaving Gutpunch‘s hulk, I can recharge my suit reservoirs with the last of the oxygen and inert-mix1 from the emergency supplies. That would be enough for a local journey – which is why most candles don’t have life-support systems – but this isn’t local travel I’m embarking on.

My original loose thoughts involved building some kind of bastardized non-chemical scrubber to take the CO2 out – freeze it out, perhaps – and patch that into one of the spare suits. Recycle the rest of the gas mix until the ppO2 falls too low to survive even in survival hibernation.

But such a scrubber would be massy – not a good thing on a thrust-limited candle – would take more time to build than I really have to spend, and would require substantial patching of the suit software to play nicely with the new hardware.

So instead, I’m going to attach this full LOX tank with a scavenged reduction valve, and run a pipe – flexpipe, I have plenty of – wrapped around a resistive heater to take the chill off the gas, and plug it straight into my suit’s O2 recharge port.

The flaw is obvious: I can’t scrub dioxide once the support backpack’s sequester runs out, because I don’t have spares for it and won’t have the ship’s system to regenerate it. Fortunately, the suit has a suite of emergency protocols designed for handling this situation: presented with an inability to scrub dioxide and a plentiful supply of oxygen, its decision-tree will tell it to start dumping high-CO2 air into space and backfill with pure oxygen, while dropping the pressure just as fast as it can along a curve calculated as the best compromise between efficient switching from a high-pressure standard-atmosphere protocol to a low-pressure pure-oxygen one and avoiding giving its unfortunate wearer a nasty case of decompression sickness on top of her other problems.

This is wasteful of atmosphere and more than a little dangerous. By all Navy regulations and engineering best practices, intentionally doing this is an insane design choice. In the event that this log is being read by the people who fished my vector stack out of a suit-shaped mass of char, I hereby grant you permission to tell me that you told me so at great length. Even if it’s not, I’m going to pay for it with extra time in the vat.

But it will get me extended life support and a decent chunk of extra delta-v.

 

1. “Inert-mix” is the preblended nitrogen-argon mix used to simulate a standard atmosphere.

Trope-a-Day: Starship Luxurious

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2

Starship Luxurious: Played straight in the Empire, even to a large extent with military vessels.  Part of this – see Flaunting Your Fleets – is advertising, much as the brightwork on Age of Sail ships used to be, “look, we can afford to do this with our naval vessels”, but a lot of it is just, well, we have civilized standards to keep up.  Tight mass budget or no, you can’t expect people to live like that for any sort of length of time.

Even though it is as inefficient as it sounds – although, at least at the beginning, assisted by their use of the nuclear pulse drive (see: Orion Drive).

(These are, it should be said, the people who like a lot of personal space; skyscrapers like ours, for example, tend to have the floors chopped up and sold in quarters – at the lower fiscal end of the housing market.  The middle segment is one floor, one tenant/owner.)

Darkness Within (11): Wax Off

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MET-187-5+13 et. seq.

That will go more easily if I can get in behind it and push it out, but that means exposing the forward maintenance compartment. Which will be a job in itself; a Nelyn’s a lot of spacecraft for its size, which has the unfortunate corollary that everything is packed together extremely tightly.

But there should be space once I clear room in the life support compartment.

So to start with, I’ve pulled the breakers on the auxiliary and emergency accumulators and the external power feed. That’s killed it: the Nelyn’s dead. That saves time because I can unhook the mechanical interlocker and open two of the airlock doors at once.

It’s going to be easier to make room in here if I pull the ACS engines first. They seal to the outer hull, but they penetrate it and they aren’t supported by it; they’re heavy-bolted to the quadrilateral spars.

So: for each one, I undog and pull the pressure-hull access cover to get into the void space, then cut the lead seals that cover the back of the engine off around the spar. Ignoring all the RADIATION HAZARD symbols – by the book, you’re supposed to flood the thermal core with borate solution before servicing to ensure safety when the control system is unattached, but air and time wait for no woman.

Isolate, uncouple, and stow the liquid hydrogen feed. Break and uncouple the standard blah-blah electrical power connectors. Uncouple the multifunction network connector, the structural ground, and so forth.

Then take your three-inch bolt key, brace yourself good and solid, and pull the nuts off the locking bolts. Don’t lose them, Isif, you’ll need them later. Since we’re neither in gravity nor under thrust, the engine will stay right where it is until you go outside, cut the seal, and pull it free.

Easy, right? With a trained maintenance crew, you could probably get it done in a couple of hours. With one amateur working alone in the dark… well, I’ll get it done in not much more than a couple of hours. That’s the power of incentives for you.

I should pull a LOX tank before I rip into the life support compartment. The machinery’s useless – can’t power it – and LOX alone won’t do much for me, but I have the beginnings of an idea…

 

Darkness Within (10): Revisions

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MET 187-5+3

Or possibly I don’t need a new plan. Since I can’t think of a new plan, just a variation on the old plan, it would be very desirable that this is the case.

To make it to the stargate, I would need a vector-control core, and one that can fit on this hypothetical candle. That might be possible, since the cutter has one… had one. The break in its midsection looks like a clear break when the impact snapped the ship in two, so its at least possible that the after section is intact out there along with its core.

But I’d need a candle to go and look for it. Convenient, that.

If it isn’t nearby – well, I can at least get closer to the earlier parts of the search cube, and burning the candle should make me show up nice and bright on passives, more so than the hulk, so it will still be progress of a sort.

I have a design roughed out. Nothing that would win any design competitions, but it will serve for this.

First step: gather parts, starting with a drive. All the tactical platforms have are station-keeping arcjets, so my best option is retasking the for’ard ACS motors of the cutter. Better yet, looking at the aft end of the wreckage, one of the cutter’s remass tanks looks to be in one piece. If Athneél’s smiling today, I’ll be able to get it out still so, and holding pressure.

Time to carve.

MET 187-5+11

I need a bigger hullcutter.


(Author’s note: ideally, I should like to accompany a rapidly upcoming piece in this series with an actual sketch [meaning, y’know, sketch, not my usual “cross-sectional hack”] of Isif’s candle.

So, if anyone or anyone(s) out there feels like lending their artistic talents to the cause drop me a line, and I’ll send you the relevant art notes. Sadly, I can’t actually commission art for this, being a little on the starving artist side this month – and so I am just looking for a quick sketch, you understand, nothing too fancy, for the sake of the size of my guilt complex about asking people to work for little more than the love of it – but full credit will be given, along with the strong probability of actual commissioning of a fancy full-bore version if and when this sees print.)

 

Trope-a-Day: Excessive Steam Syndrome

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Excessive Steam Syndrome (was: Stanley Steamer Space Ship if you wondered about the alphabetization): Even those reactors that use other principles to extract energy still harness the thermal differential they produce, because it’s there and not to be wasted.

Meanwhile, spacecraft require their own complex cooling infrastructure, and often use cryogenic fuels which will produce plenty of condensation around the piping, and have pressure-release valves as does life support, and there are quench valves on superconducting systems, and so on and so on and basically, there is plenty of water vapor, et. al., to go around to produce this effect when machinery happens to be located within the pressure hull.

At least you only get a little inescapable condensation and vapor (from moisture in the air) unless something’s leaking or popped a safety valve.  In normal operation, virtually all the rest of of this stays on the inside of the tanks and pipes, where it belongs, rather than ruining your entire day the way superheated-steam amputations or being flash-frozen solid by deuterium slush tend to do.

(Also, yes, just like NASA et. al. many planetary starports do use a gagillion gallons of water to sink the heat that launching reaction drives dumps into the pad. Non-potable water has the virtue of being essentially free on many classes of planet.)

 

Darkness Within (9): Miscalculation

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MET 186-23+4

So I’ve been running some numbers.

At a best guess from the nav data available, Gutpunch had 18.5 hours1 to run at standard cruising acceleration, 9.6 standard gravities effective2. That in turn implies that I need something approaching six million m/s of delta V effective to make zero-zero with the Kerjejic stargate.

These are not happy numbers.

Actually, let me rephrase that: these numbers represent a six-species clusterfuck at a Clajdíän clambake.

The candle plan will not work, obviously, hope and head injuries notwithstanding. Samildán could bring his traveling Heaven alongside and hand me a dreadnought-sized fusion torch with all the trimmings, and I couldn’t squeeze 6e6 out of it. That’s why we had to learn to cheat in the first place.

I need a vector-control core. So let’s hope Kirchev parked the cutter facing aft the last time out.

MET 187-4-32

Well, damn.

I have half a cutter. Snapped in two at the shear line, clean as you like. Not, however, the half with the core in it.

I also have two racked tactical observation platforms, neither of which has a core, along with some spare parts racks, tools, and plenty of debris. Everything I could need to build a candle, if that would help.

I need a new plan.

  1. 20 of your Earth hours, for anyone who wants to check my numbers.3
  2. 9 of your Earth gravities.
  3. I always wanted to use one of your Earth “of your Earth”s.

Darkness Within (8): Overdue

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FROM: CS UNDERBELT (FIELD FLEET RIMWARD)
TO: FIELD FLEET RIMWARD COMMAND (CS ARMIGEROUS PROPERTARIAN)

*** ROUTINE
*** FLEET CONFIDENTIAL E256
*** OVERDUE

1. CS GUTPUNCH ATTACHED TO TASK GROUP R-4-118 HAS MISSED THREE (3) ROUTINE STATUS UPLOADS AND IS NOW CONSIDERED OVERDUE.

2. CS UNDERBELT AND COHORT PROCEEDING FROM CURRENT LOCATION (PARDERIC SYSTEM) TO CONSTELLATION-EXIT RENDEZVOUS POINT TO PERFORM BACKWARD-SLANTED COURSE SWEEP, STAGGERED-SECTOR SEARCH PATTERN, AS PER STANDING ADMIRALTY INSTRUCTIONS.

3. REMAINDER OF TASK GROUP HAS BEEN ISSUED ORDERS TO PROCEED TO LAST KNOWN LOCATION CS GUTPUNCH TO PERFORM FORWARD-SLANTED SWEEP, OTHERWISE AS ABOVE.

4. MORE FOLLOWS.

5. AUTHENTICATION MORAINE HAMMOCK VAULT SIMMER GOLDEN PAWL / 0x9981ABD43E3ECC22

ENDS.

Trope-a-Day: Space People

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Space People: Well, about three-fifths of everyone, actually.

That would be “about” principally because it’s really hard to determine, say, exactly where one draws a line between people who live on large asteroids in “habitats” and people who live on small moons in “domes”.

And depending on how you want to count things – well, you could count only people who live in starships or city-ships (habitat-dwellers say “Hey!”), or ships and habitats (asteroid-dwellers have an issue to raise), or people who have the key spacer biomods (absolutely everyone without some sort of compatibility problem, since even planet-dwellers find themselves in space enough that the calcium hack, thumb-toe, etc., are now part of the baseline set), or only members of the genuine four-armed sennóris clade (a long way from everyone dwelling in space long-term), or people who live in space-type habitats (includes lots of moon- and actual-planet-dwellers), or people possessing the characteristic shibboleths of spacer culture (although since spacer and groundling cultures have been bleeding into one another for centuries)…

In short: there are Space People, but there’s not a readily denotable boundary between them and everyone else.

Trope-a-Day: Spaceship Girl

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Spaceship Girl: Every time a female-presenting digisapience uses a starship as a cybershell, yes.  Of course, they can equally well be the resident operating intelligence of a habitat, or other vehicle (Spacestation Girl), and by no means all present as female (Spaceship Chap?), so it’s also subverted a fair bit.

(As a side note, whatever the gender of the operating intelligence, the gender attributed to the actual ships in question tend to be mixed; eldraeic tradition is that a vessel takes the gender opposite that of its first captain, and so…)

Trope-a-Day: Space Is Air

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Space Is Air: Averted, because it really, really isn’t, and all our spacecraft move nothing like aircraft, promise!

The only vague seeming non-aversions are the following:

  • Some starships do in fact run their engines all the time. That’s because they have astonishingly powerful and efficient engines that let them fly brachistochrone courses, in which they accelerate halfway, flip, and decelerate. Unlike aircraft, however, throughout the back half of such a journey the engine is directed ahead of the ship.
  • It actually is possible to make elegant swooping and banking turns in space, if you’re willing to waste money, time, and fuel using your attitude control system to force your starship through the otherwise unnecessary and quite unnatural maneuver. As such, it is the purview of people who own fancy overpowered yachts and suchlike with hot-shot pilots who want to give their passengers – or themselves – a good view.

Trope-a-Day: Space is Cold

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Space is Cold: Averted.  You need matter to have a temperature, and guess what space doesn’t have?

You’ll freeze to death eventually, sure, thanks to the slow process of radiating your heat away – in the absence of any form of conduction or convection – into that giant sky heatsink that surrounds you – unless there’s a star nearby, in which case you’ll roast to death first.

But on the whole, you are much more concerned with how to get rid of excess heat in space than you are with how to hang on to the heat you have.  Starships carry a lot of machinery – radiative striping, liquid-droplet radiators, and in extreme cases, neutrino heat pumps – to get rid of heat, and a total failure of these systems will pretty much slowly bake you from the reactor and life support system’s heat budget.  (Naturally, they’re pretty redundant.)  This is also why you can’t have perfect stealth in space, and even very imperfect stealth – using heat sinks to capture most of this – runs out fairly quickly as those sinks run out of capacity.

Darkness Within (7): Headaches

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MET 186-14-2

I have now completed a dead-reckoning navigational fix using the surviving server rack and data stored in the logs. The good news is that the kinetic impacts do not appear to have significantly altered Gutpunch‘s trajectory.

The bad news is that while the shit-pile’s no deeper than I’ve been assuming, it’s also no shallower.

Gutpunch was on a brachistochrone course for the Kerjejic stargate. Kerjejic’s an untenanted system but a major gate intersection, which made it the perfect place for the task force to meet back up after sweeping the Loop. Trouble with a brachy is that making your zero-zero counts on maintaining continuous deceleration throughout the second half of the course, so the moment your ship gets broken, you’re off on a long ride to nowhere. One of those ways in which space travel became less safe when better drives were invented, the irony of which is rather less appreciated when you’re experiencing it personally.

On my present orbit, I’m heading off into the Shards without intercepting anything further in this system. If these calculations are correct, I should reach another star system – IGS 88-99172-B, given some dubious assumptions about the emptiness of the deep black – in roughly 875,000 years.

I’d like to be rescued before then. Well, I would be rescued before then, but by the time the squadron notes that we’re overdue, comes looking, runs the search pattern, and so forth, they’ll be rescuing my backup out of my space-chilled skull. That seems rather unsatisfying, even if no unofficial salvors find us first. Narijic System isn’t what you might call the good part of town.

That defines the next problem, then:

I have four and a half days to build a candle, sufficient to move myself, the substrate, and preferably the FDR, that can produce enough acceleration, and have enough delta-v, to reproduce the second half of the brachy plus correction (although at least for lesser mass) – close enough that I can survive it without a vector-control core. The closer I get to the Kerjejic gate, the quicker I’ll be picked up once they start coming; and if I’m under thrust, I’ll be easy to spot.

Time to check out the remains of the hangar deck.

…and then there’s another impediment. Which I will not call a problem because there’s very little I can do about it that’s not already being done.

The impact evidently shook something loose in my own hardware that my medichines can’t find, or at least can’t fix, because drugs or no drugs, this headache is not going away. And now there are little light-haloes around characters I’m reading, and other irritating visual glitches. Which might mean that I’ve got a slow leak bleeding into my brain, except the ‘chines would have fixed that by now, but in any case, something is wrong upstairs that a good scanner and a healing vat could probably fix overnight, if I had either a good scanner or a healing vat.

As it is, there’s not much to do but hope that I don’t stroke out or go insane before I get the candle built, and that whatever it is doesn’t react too badly to being put under multiple gravities of thrust.

On I go.

Darkness Within (6): Memories

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2

MET 185-18-6

In the ongoing list of people to whom I owe profound thanks –

Everyone back at BuShips and the people who write the ISDPs, such that the pipes are color- and texture-coded, the fittings are standardized and snap-together, and all the other features that make it possible for an ensign in a fragmented hulk to patch enough of it together to stay breathing. 

All of which is to say – pump is installed. And I shall complain no more about the size of the crawlways. 

MET 185-20-14

I’ve crawled down to the server room, or what’s left of it. To be precise, what’s left of it are the for’ard two racks and a pile of debris. Coolant pressure tank for the quai must’ve exploded. So much for the safety systems. 

Maybe I’ll mention that to BuShips. 

First task – get the substrate out. 

MET 185-20+7

First subtask – find a bloody hullcutter. 

MET 185-21-15

Okay. Opened up the subfloor rack and got the substrate out. Which should make the rest of the crew happy. Continuity dates on these backups are all up-to-date, give or take a watch or two. 

Assuming I make it out of here, that is. 

MET 185-21+4

If these diagnostics are right, I might be able to get a single rack working with parts from the other. I need to get a navigational fix worked – well, some dead reckoning, with the navigational sensors aft of the fracture and the inertial platform so much scrap. 

That can be next watch’ problem. 

MET 185-21+19

Mm, the delicious yeasty taste of rat. 

Headache’s still there. 

Starships of the Imperial Exploratory Service

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1

Of course, what I didn’t establish in the previous posting is exactly where the Empress Eledíë-class fits into the line-up of starship classes used by the Imperial Exploratory Service, so that I shall expand upon in this post. The short answer is: basically, pretty much in the middle, in what we might call the “cruiser-weight” classes.

Now, it’s somewhat harder than it might otherwise be to list all the classes the IES uses, because they’re big believers in the philosophy of modular design and assemble a lot of specialized starships of one-off classes from parts when there’s a mission requirement (like, say, Sniffer Packet), or even a mission convenience, to do so. But if one excludes those, a list of the most commonly used classes would read something like this, smallest to largest:

Clairvoyance-class far horizon probe

Which, as starwisps, are accompanied, naturally, by the previously described Lucifer VI-class starwisp tenders. The far horizon probes are tiny, solid-state AI craft whose job is to be the real “first in” explorers to any given star system, working beyond the boundaries of the stargate plexus, out in the Outback, looking for interesting systems to poke around in.

Inquisity-class planetary exploration vehicle
Vertiginous-class planetary exploration vehicle

The lineal descendants of the rovers and robots that did the first planetary exploration way back in the heyday of the first Spaceflight Initiative, like Wayseeker, the planetary exploration vehicles carry out similar missions of groundside investigation even today.

There are two distinct classes of PEV for two distinct types of planets: the rather more common Inquisity-class drives along the ground (or occasionally floats) for investigating those planets that have ground. The Vertiginous-class, contrariwise, flies throughout its mission, for investigating those planets that really don’t.

Aval Cyprium-class microscout

The chosen vessel of first-in scouts, the Aval Cyprium-class (named after famous historical explorers, starting with the one who found the Edgestorm the hard way) is a single/double-person landing-capable starship found flooding into newly opened constellations and chasing reports of anomalies all over the Worlds for the IES, doing preliminary investigations and figuring out if there’s need for follow-up and, if so, of what kind.

Peregrine-class scout

The bigger cousin of the Aval Cyprium, similarly landing-capable but with a crew of a dozen and a replaceable laboratory module that can be swapped out to suit the requirements of the mission specialists aboard, the Peregrine is the “little workhorse” of the IES, doing a lot of those follow-up investigations and much of the general work of exploration and survey. When doing a whole-system or multiple-system workup, several of these will often accompany a –

Empress Eledíë-class explorer

As described here. This is the first “cruiser-weight”, as you might put it, vessel of the IES. It’s the “big workhorse”, the dedicated exploration vessel that takes lead in going where no sophont but a first-in scout has gone before, and turns their notes on what a system is like into a complete, detailed, scrupulously accurate work-up suitable for inclusion in the Repository of All Knowledge.

It also serves as the go-to craft for any large exploration missions of virtually any profile. It’s flexible and modular enough to support a wide range of roles, so when something needs investigated on a large enough scale that you can’t fit the mission profile or the mission specialists into a Peregrine, you send for an Empress Eledíë.

Chatelaine-class surveyor

The second of the cruiser-weights, the Chatelaine-class is a specialized variant of the Empress Eledíë used by the IES’s sister organization, the Imperial Grand Survey, whose job rather than pushing into and exploring the unknown is comprehensively cataloging and checking on the known, and maintaining the essential infrastructure that keeps the known known.

(Less respectful IES personnel sometimes deride the IGS as being naught but a bunch of asteroid-counters and beacon-fixers. The IGS responds that it’s all very well going off and having adventures, but if you want to be able to find your way home and be sure that it hasn’t been smacked by an errant comet in the meantime, thank them.)

Calria Adae-class establisher (DSOV)

The third, the Calria Adae-class (named after the first soph on one of Eliéra’s moons), looks very much like a miniature colony ship, because it is. When the IES needs to plant a hab (bigger, obviously, than an inflatable temp) or a planetside outpost somewhere for long-term studies to be carried out, these are the starships that do that. 

Hello, World-class contact cruiser

And the fourth of these, the Hello, World-class, is a specially dedicated vessel for the task of making First Contact with New Life and New Civilizations. It has more in common with the IN’s cruisers than most IES starships – hence its designation – because, sadly, experience teaches that sometimes, things don’t go smooth. 

(Not necessarily meaning hostile aliens, of course. Sometimes it just means having to shoot down a whole bunch of ICBMs because  anything appearing in the sky is obviously a secret weapon of their local planetary enemy of the day. Eye roll obligatory.)

Sung Iliastren-class mobile research base

The really, really big one, for when they need to science the shit out of something in a hurry, the Sung Iliastren-class (named after the natural philosopher who basically invented the scientific method thereabouts) is a dreadnought- or even superdreadnought-sized agglomeration of laboratories, supercomputing centers, and other science-oriented facilities with a suitably large propulsion bus stuck on the end. 

When you need an entire research institute somewhere in a hurry, this is what you call for. After serious budget approval. 

(In some particularly interesting locations, there are very permanent-looking research stations that are actually one of these covered in a couple of centuries’ accumulation of add-on modules and temps.)

Empress Eledíë-class explorer

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So, if you were following my G+, this is what I said this morning:

Well, since The Martian , and seeing their gorgeous model of Hermes , I’ve had a real urge to design the Empress Eledíë-class explorer, which one might be able to claim resembles its bigger, upteched, somewhat more Raygun Gothic cousin, but still from the same essential design school.

(This may slightly confuse people who’ve seen William Black‘s awesome rendering of the Drake-class frigate. The answer is that the Empire has multiple schools of spacecraft design: the Drake and its colleagues have their sleek, unitary look because the necessities of building starships that get shot at a lot, especially in the ‘can classes, mandate packing everything you can inside the well-braced armored shell.

The more commercial ships, the Cheneos-class and Kalantha-class freighters, for example, have a more industrial look that eschews the above for efficiency, although still with the Imperial eye for beauty.

And so the Imperial Exploratory Service’s vessels, the direct lineal inheritors of the scientific, research-oriented, modular tradition going all the way back to the Spaceflight Initiative, reflect that in every line of their design.)

So, yes, I’m mucking around with some preliminary sketches and numbers for that. Post at later.

Well, turns out that’s not stringently true, because I have yet to produce some sketches which satisfy me even to the level of the various dubious sketches posted here before. But what I can give you is a nice verbal sketch of the design layout, so here we go.

The Empress Eledíë (a class named after the founder of the Imperial Exploratory Service, if you were wondering), like the Hermes, is essentially a spinal design; it’s built around a long central passage-core, in this case a cylindrical axial passage and conduit space nested inside an octet truss, with internal handguide tracks for getting about the length of the ship quickly, and a matched pair of very long emergency ladders for those occasions on which it’s necessary to move about under thrust when the microgravity-sustaining space magic isn’t working. (This is not a recommended procedure.)

(To simplify matters in the following description, I’m going to use the standard IN nomenclature of defining cardinal directions perpendicular to the thrust axis as dorsal, starboard, ventral, and port. These are, of course, entirely arbitrary: the designers simply defined a 0° meridian and allocated names to directions at 90° angles therefrom. But they’re convenient for description.)

There are two places in the design where things aren’t simply hung off the spine, at the furthest extent of the bow and the stern. At the bow, this is the foreshield and the cargo pod. Like most sensible tail-lander designs – not that this class does or could ever land – this also includes the for’ard airlock, which is the starship’s primary airlock.

But you need a foreshield, or something to fulfill its function, when you’re going to go flying around on top of powerful drives. So at the bow, the spine expands into a support frame around the outside of the cargo pod, which in turn supports the foreshield. The axial passage runs through the cargo pod to the for’ard airlock. (Having the cargo pod right up here makes it nice and easy to move supplies in and out.) The pod includes vacuum-accessible cargo holds mounted on its surface at the cardinal directions, to store big items intended for use outside, like replacement probes and cutter modules.

The foreshield itself is a large convex plate divided into four quarter-circle segments, mounted at the 45° intervals onto the surface of the cargo pod by damn great motorized arms. When you need to use the for’ard airlock, these arms pull the plate segments out and back to expose it and let you dock, or something dock to you.

Moving aft, the next thing we encounter are the communications and sensor towers. The actual towers are to dorsal and ventral, and are designed to extend, raising the forest of antennae and telescopes and dishes and sensors at their tips to the point that they can look beyond the foreshield, when the ship’s not under hard burn. Lesser geodesics to port and starboard house the continuously operating navigational sensors.

A minor bulge a short distance behind them houses the working elements of the for’ard reaction control system.

Aft of those, four cylindrical-with-rounded-ends bitat pods, very similar but differentiated by minor features (the bridge has a cupola for visibility, for example, and the robot hotel has an airlock for the maintenance ‘bots to clamber up and down the spine), strapped onto the truss provide working space: the bridge from which the ship is navigated to dorsal, the sensory analysis center to ventral, and the robot hotel and some auxiliary engineering space to port and starboard, respectively.

Next up, the low power radiators (to port and starboard), for dissipating modest amounts of heat from life support and other auxiliary systems that aren’t the reactor and drive.

We now enter the pleasingly symmetrical central section of the ship, with the for’ard gravity wheel, the habitation wheel, which rotates clockwise on a four-spoked mount. It comes with crew quarters, the galley and mess, the gymnasium, the library, recreational areas, and various other your-home-in-space facilities.

Behind that is the docking cruciform, in which a symmetrical four-fold expansion of the spine hosts secondary airlocks. On an Empress Eledíë with its standard loadout, these carry the starship’s small craft – standard Élyn-class microcutters, capable of commuting to and from planetary surfaces. A supporting framework helps secure them while under thrust.

In the middle of this section, a bigger cylindrical pod which wraps around the axis, is the ship’s park. The central part of that is exactly what it says on the tin, an open microgravity space that functions as a park and greenhouse, serving both to freshen the air and replenish the food supply, and to provide some open space to help people from going space crazy on long missions. Tankage for life support and spare water and so forth is wrapped around the outside, which lets it double pretty effectively as a caisson, in case of solar flares that the regular shielding can’t manage.

Aft of that is the laboratory cruciform. These aren’t the main labs, however: the cruciform structure itself is basically identical to the docking cruciform. In the standard loadout, though, it holds the hot labs, which are Bigelow-style inflatable habitats used for additional microgravity lab space. With the advantages of being isolated by the airlocks, and readily detached from the rest of the starship in the event of some artifactual oops.

And at the aft end of the symmetrical section, the aft gravity wheel, the laboratory wheel, which has a similar four-spoked mount to the habitation wheel, but rotates anticlockwise, thus cancelling out the gyroscopic effect of all this spin gravity as much as possible. It contains laboratories, workshops, and other research-oriented facilities. Most importantly, it contains a segment that’s offset to the outboard, whose “floor” opens up; this is the probe garage, so designed to allow probes to simply be dropped through the floor and centrifugal force to carry them outward and away from the starship, clear of the shielding and to safety range, before engine ignition.

Aft of this, finally, we now reach the drive and engineering section. First, of course, we reach the propellant tanks, multiple layers of D/He3 tanks strapped onto the truss serving in their double role as fuel bunkerage and radiation shadow shield, and right behind them, at the 45° intervals, the four high power radiators to carry away the heat from the reactors and the drive. The pressurized axial passage within the truss ends at this point in a heavily shielded airlock: it’s mostly the ship’s mechs that climb further back down the truss, and even when sophonts do, they go outside to do so.

Beyond this point the spine begins to broaden into the drive-supporting thrust frame through which’s volume the various high-power engineering machinery is fixed, including the power reactors, the vector-control core, and so forth, and on top of which is surface-mounted the clusters of the aft reaction control system,

And then, at its base, the clustered fusion torch drive that pushes the whole starship along.

(Keep well clear.)

Darkness Within (5): Sandwich

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MET 185-14+10

So the air, not so delicious, and getting less so by the minute. What is delicious?

This sandwich, battered as it is.

Alwyn, I recant every harsh thought I ever had about you. Or about your lamentable taste in lóskith-stinking food from the Dominions. One decent sandwich pays for all.

In related news, I have completed the inventory of food available in the mess. I have five bottles of various liquor – which might pass for rocket fuel in an emergency, or a worse emergency rather, but which it would be a very bad idea to start drinking with this much pharmacy in my brain – three cases of rat bars and three water packs from the emergency-rations space, and the stone bread in the walls.

Things to do, now:

  • Blow the lock. Can’t think of any practical way to clean this air even if I could save it. Or blow the ball, rather: go outside, leave the door open, punch some holes in the half-ball, and let the air out slowly.
  • Pull the floor panels, and install this blasted airlock-style pod-depressurization pump.
  • Float the rat packs out, tether them up, open a case of bars, and divide them up among the pods so I have handy snacks.
  • Then check out whatever’s left of the server room.

Headache’s getting worse.

Darkness Within (4): Air!

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MET 184-17-12

Air!

Delicious air!

…well, no, not delicious air, but I get ahead of myself. I made accessing the for’ard mess my third priority after rigging the air feed for the pod, rigging the k-blanket, and pulling the hardware, because rebuilding these scraps into an airlock-style depressurizer will go a lot more smoothly without suit gloves on, even skinsuit gloves.

Here’s how you build an airlock out of a rescue ball. First, pull out your pocket laser cutter, and chop it in half. (Try not to cringe too much at the thought of cutting one of your vacuum-tight spaces apart, despite the fact that if you’re even contemplating this crazy plan you must be almost out of things that’ll hold air in the first place.) Make sure the entrance flap is in the middle of one of the halves. Stash the other half for later.

Then you need a tube of bioglue, or whatever vacuum-safe glue you have handy, preferably of the kind that sticks to itself, too, as well as metal because you want a good, thick bead of the stuff all around the spacetight door you’re using as the other end of your airlock that you’re going to push the cut edge of the ball down into. Once that sets, slather another layer on top of that, because you need to be damn sure the bond will hold pressure. You now have a door with a bag on it.

Check your work.

Climb into the bag, and seal the flap of the rescue ball. Check that it’s sealed properly. Now check your work again.

Offer up your most profound and fervent prayers to Mahánárel and Athnéël, who between them look after engineers, gamblers, and the poor bastards who have to be both at the same time.

Then open the spacetight door, and hang onto the wall while you do, because air will be coming out in a hurry, and the wire-and-tape-job you just rigged will be under enough stress inflating with a bang without you falling ass-over on it, too.

Now step inside, and close the spacetight door again. Feel greatly relieved that this insane plan worked at all and that you didn’t manage to vent all that precious oxygen overboard. You may permit yourself a caper or two.

Suffice it to say: it worked. Once. I don’t feel confident enough in its reliability to use it more than once, so unless the situation changes, I’ll be staying in here until this air fouls; the air that escaped into the ball is going to have to be written off, but that’s better than all of it.

As far as the local situation goes: the mess is surprisingly orderly; the stowages mostly held. Some floaters to clean up, but not too many. The food situation may be a little better than I thought, but that’ll have to wait on inventory.The telltale on the emergency hatchway down-deck confirms there’s no air below me in the server room.

Finally, I must now formally log confirmation of the temporary deaths of Lieutenant Leresif Inachios, Sailing Master, and Sublieutenant Alwyn Lelad, Power/Thermal Engineer, present in the for’ard mess deck at the time of the recorded impacts, who both appear to have been killed instantly by massive kinetic trauma. As is standard protocol, I have removed and taken possession of the vector stacks and command keys of each officer, and recorded this in the flight systems log.

(I also took possession of Leresif’s locket. He’d never forgive himself if he lost that.)

Darkness Within (3): Breathe Shallow

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MET 184-12+34

Got out of my pod.

Expenditures: one podful of soured air, and a can of Quicksilver Quaff I’d forgotten which didn’t take well to depressurization. That’s not going to be viable in the long run, especially since it’ll be fresh air unless I wait exactly 12 hours-and-some in between every time I take a walk.

That, at least, should be easy enough to fix. There are five other pods on the port side, each with its own emergency oxygen tank and dioxide scrubbers. If I pull the access panels, I can unhook them and link them into the feed for my pod – well, not my pod, one that I’ve not bled all over – and scavenge their scrubber cartridges, likewise.

At least with the ship shot all to hell like this, it’ll be easy enough to scavenge the necessary pipework. The floor of what used to be the axial corridor is ripped up; I can see down through the plenum cable bundles as far as the mass driver coils. The battery room’s missing its deckhead, just a fragment left curling up from the outer hull fitting, leaving all the accumulator coil-stacks exposed to space. I should rig a k-blanket over that to prevent further damage, but air first.

Where was I? The twelve-hour wait problem. Rigging the scavenged tanks and scrubbers will provide more air, but won’t solve air loss from entering and leaving, and the pod system isn’t designed to depressurize and depressurize unassisted. I do, though, have an airlock that isn’t useful any more. If I pull the backup atmo pump and a gas backflow valve from that, then put the existing regulator on a toggle, it should be possible to rig a manual system.

The for’ard mess is holding air, by the hatch telltales. Getting in without losing it will be tricky. I do have a couple of rescue balls…

Darkness Within (2)

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1

Flight data logs, CS Gutpunch, MET 184-11+04:17: Text entry, Capt. Isif Alclair

This is Acting Captain Isif Alclair, CS Gutpunch, two hours after regaining consciousness and approximately eleven hours after the kinetic impact that destroyed the ship.

Herewith an asset/liability analysis while I devise some sort of plan. Assets, first:

Well, not being dead and splattered across the bulkheads in bloody chunks is probably the big one.

The emergency life support built into each crew pod lasts twelve hours. This one is almost exhausted, but since no-one else seems to have made it to their pods, I have five more sets of tanks and scrubbers to cannibalize.

I do have a fully-charged vacuum suit in here with me, so I can move around.

(Have you ever tried donning a vacuum suit inside a crew pod? [If by some chance whoever ends up reading this isn’t a spacer, try putting on a wetsuit inside a wardrobe. In the dark. Covered in sticky goo.] The Bureau of Equipment assures us that they have been carefully tested for this exact scenario. I should very much like to know if the Bureau of Equipment have ever tried it for themselves.)

Some jackass in a watchvid I saw said “At least we’re still flying half a ship.” If what I’m getting from mesh probes and the surviving cameras is accurate, I have something under a quarter. Gutpunch on this deck now consists of the port crew pods, an airlock that now opens from vacuum to vacuum and its conning station, and the for’ard mess – which may even still hold air, and does hold emergency rations. On the mid-deck, there’s a chunk of the mass driver barrel, part of the server room, and the auxiliary battery room. Breakers have tripped on the mains, so at least there’s plenty of power stored. And most of the hangar remains attached below, surviving contents unknown.

Liabilities, though.

As far as I can tell from the remaining aft-facing cameras, the debris of the after section has drifted far enough away to not be visible as more than a speck. So as far as I’m concerned, it and all its surviving resources might as well be in another system – blind-jumping after it would just be a slow way to die stupid, and I should at least aspire to die smart.

So. No sensor domes. No communications section. No reactors, no fuel tanks, no life support systems, no…

Enough of that.

No accurate navigation fix, and no way to get one. Although since even this much of the ship survived the impact, we can’t be too far off the brachy course to the Kerjejic stargate.

Whoever hit us could still be prowling about out there, waiting to attack any rescue vessels, or any wreckage that shows a sign of life. But that’s not worth worrying about, because it’s not like I could do anything about them even if they were hove to at spit range.

And flying high on cranial trauma, painkillers, zoom-juice, and mixed euphoriants. Which always helps.

Darkness Within

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Narijic (Freeport Loop) System
CS Gutpunch

I woke to the worst stabbing, throbbing headache of my life, nausea, and the stink of burnt insulation, stomach twitching with the electronically-repressed urge to vomit – all of which was helped immensely by the ship screaming at me, the piercing electronic screech of the general quarters signal.

At least the ship shut the hell up when I told it to.

— Isif? Are you back on-line? –

Sort of. Almost. What – I went to rub my eyes, encountering the gummy feel of clotting blood and another jolt of pain – aaah! What the hell?

— Your internal diagnostics suggest that you have a concussion and many contusions. Repairs are underway, but you shouldn’t move yet. –

No choice. Can you damp this pain, maybe clear the fog out of my brain?

— Pain damping is already enabled at the highest automatic level. And it would be most inadvisable to administer stimulants in your present position. –

Something must have happened to the ship. Maximum damping and a shot of zoom-juice. Override code… agh. Override code whatever. Hit me.

— This is against my better judgment. Enabled. –

I opened my eyes as the relief flowed in, blinking them against a light that wasn’t there. My pod was dim, lit only by the faint glow of starlight. That was a relief; some of the sticky wetness must be the bio-gel from the emergency light, rather than my blood, although the splatter across the deckhead looked dark enough.

Do you know what happened?

— I recorded three sharp kinetic transients. They were what knocked us both off-line. No further information. –

Can you raise the bridge? Or damage control central?

— No. Isif, the ship’s mesh isn’t responding. The carrier is up, and a few local nodes, but none of the servers are responding.  I can’t find any crew presence, even on broadcast. –

My finger stopped half an inch from the hatch release. Starlight gleamed weakly silver through the translucent door of my pod, but the crew pods opened into an internal corridor. That suggested it would be a really bad idea to open the door, even before checking the pressure warning…

…and then it caught up with me. I couldn’t hear anything.

The general quarters signal had stopped.

The general quarters signal had stopped when I told it to.

But an Ensign can’t do that. That meant the local processors had run down the command-succession tree, and not found –

“Well, shit.”