A-to-Z Blog Challenge: D is for DESCON V

DESCON V

    “-I will transmit from Varangian, Flagship of the 3Gleise Free Forces.”

    “How many times are you going to listen to that, sir?”

    Such an informal question, being directed to one of the Commodore's of the King’s Own, would normally not be tolerated.  But these were hardly normal times, and who, if not the senior staff officer, could ask it?

    Commodore 2Hilna Lin regarded the person of her senior.  “Until it makes bloody sense.  Until I believe it.”

    Captain 4Charl Itawa smiled one of hir enegmatic smiles, “We don’t have that kind of time, sir.”

    Hilna sighed.  It was true; according to conventions of war, the constellation of destroyers had but one local sol to leave port or be detained for the duration.  They might make it...by leaving 40% of their forces.

    As if s/he read her mind, Charl said, “Vonday did say ‘with our weapons or without’.”

    Hilna snorted.  “It’ll be with weapons, I assure you.  I’m damned if I leave a single destroyer behind.  It’s the collier and dromedary that look likely to stay.”

    “They were never meant to join us if PREISTHOLE went into effect.  They were fine aresenal ships; we’ll get the cargo and crew off loaded before we reach the treaty deadline.”

    Hinal scowled and kicked off her deck, vectoring for the cabinate behind in her dining room.  The compartment for formal meals was now taken over by tablets and flimsys velcroed to every surface.  The flag pantry was now used mainly for heating rations and endless liters of coffee.  Such was a ship at war.  2Hilna prefered it this way.

    “PREISTHOLE.  Move the King’s Own out into space so they won’t be caught in a coup.  Brilliant strategy.”  Hilna’s sarcasm was obvious as she poured a liquor into two wingcups.  “Might’ve worked better if the King’s Own still had any capital ships.  What of the two crusier constellations?”

    Charl consulted hir files.  S/he eschewed tablets in favor of reading the data directly.  “The Fighting Third is trailing and nadir to the homeworlds, so they’re cut off from us.  DESCON III and VI may be able to rendezvous with Them, but they’re out in the black with AdStar all round.”

    “And the First?  Queen Anna’s Cruisers?”

    “Last reported position was caught between the Spinward StarGate Flotilla and advancing forces from AdStar at Xibalba.  We don’t have an official report - “

    “And we won’t.”  Hilna tossed off her drink in a single practiced sip and carefully vectored the second wingcup to Charl.  S/he caught it but did not drink.

    “So, no cruisers, and maybe two DesCons besides mine on this side of the front.  And Varangian.”

    “It’s not all bad,” Charl countered. “There’s actually a major defence contractor out this way.  Cavalier Arms.”

    “The Starfighter manufactuer?”  Hilna floated back to her table, giving Charl a look of considerable interest.

    “The same.  My datasearch shows that CA opened an operation in the unclaimed Librans.  Headed by a fork of the old lady herself.  With Royal support.”

    The Commodore finally smiled.  “His Majesty seems to think of everything, doesn’t he?”

     “Well, when you’re in the fourth century of your reign, I suppose you learn to spot trouble far off.”

    “Speaking of, we’d better be heading off soon.  Have all Flights prep for a burn to the spinward StarGates.”

    “Varangian?”

    “Indeed.  Vonday is Prime now.”  2Hilna chuckled without humor. “Besides, he’s the only one who seems to have a damned cruisier anymore.”

Nano-Fic: A Gentleman's Duty (8)

In the airlock, The Giru Ruku Mat, and the Sloak Sagkal performed the final checks on their vacuum suits.  Both were wearing the bulky, one-size-fits-all soft suits as opposed to form fitting mechanical pressure skinsuits.  Sagkal, whose skin was covered with slab-like plates of metal and mineral deposits, simply couldn’t wear a form fitting garment.  Ruku Mat also could not fit into her skinsuit, but for a different reason.  Just prior to the suiting up process, Ruku drank nearly thirty liters of water.  With swollen belly, thighs, bust and buttocks, Ruku could only fit into the loose pressure suit.

“Doin’ alright?” Sagkal’s voice was loud as ever, but now slightly metallic and distorted by the speakers in Ruku Mat’s helmet. She turned the volume on his channel down.

“Feel sloshy.  Not used to being full….”

“Camel genes in you, girl. Ready to go for a walk?”

“...No…”

“That’s the spirit!”

Joking aside, Sagkal had thoroughly check both space walkers’ suits and was confident that both were ready, even if Ruku was not.  He keyed the electronic combilock and began to turn the manual wheel on the exterior hatch.

The Gentleman Scoundrel was not designed for EVA operations except in extreme circumstances, which admittedly, these were. The only hatch to the outside was the the airlock that serviced the missing shuttle, which opened into the reception bay on the first-class deck.  Once through the lock, Sagkal and Ruku stood in the shallow cradle of the shuttle dock.  Both had full face shields down to protect their vision form the blazing rays of the pimary.  Nonetheless, if it weren’t for NegMat’s property of repelling the deadly particles being blasted out by the sun, both would have already been dead.  Sagkal positioned himself protectively between Ruku Mat and that vast light.  The young woman seemed transfixed, frozen in place.

“Ruku?”

“...It’s so bright.”

Sagkal took her by the shoulders. “Mat!  I need you to keep it together.”

Ruku Mat blinked several times.  Sagkal noticed for the first time she had two pairs of eyelids.

“What?  No, no - I’m fine.  With the face shield down, it looks like home.”

“Huh.”  Sagkal grinned, showing quartz teeth.  “I guess it never occured to me you actually had a comfort zone. Not too hot?”

“It’s only fifty-two*.”

“...Okay, then.  Let’s get to it.”

*That's about a hundred and twenty-five Farenheight, for us ugly Americans.

Of Tall Ships and Trading Posts

You know what, RocketFans?  It's been entirely to long since we've had some honest-to-Heinlein speculative worldbuilding around this blog.  Let's fix that, shall we?

So I was perusing that clearing house for all things Hard SF, Atomic Rockets, and came across a wonderful design for a cheap, reusable interplanetary spacecraft with the romantic name of Spacecoach.  It's an exciting idea - the ship's structure is primarily water ice and kevlar strands, a mixture known as Pykrete.  The habs are inflatable, the engines double as mining drils, and the propellant is grey water from the crew's life support.  It's a genius mixture of innovation, simplicity, and safety that would allow the average mortal to reach for the stars.

Part of the design that drew my curiousity was the large solar arrays needed to power the Microwave Electrical Thrusters.  Nothing wrong with solar - its the oldest and most mature form of In-Situ Resource Utilization used in orbit and, as they say, the sun is always shining in space.  The thing that concerned me was that the sun may always be shining, but its only half as strong around Mars, and a mere 4% of it's NEO intensity once you reach the Jovian system.  The excellent nano-fic Spaceward Ho! suggests that microwave rectennae could be utilized beyond Mars, but the price of such a system is dependance (and financial obligation) to whomever turns on the microwave beam.

Call me a recluse, but I didn't like that.

So I posed a question to the modern virtual agora that is Google+, in which I proposed the use of regenerative fuel cells to make the Spacecoach energy independant past Mars.  My reasoning was that 4% power on the solar array may not be enough to power the ship, but it could power the regenerative cycle on a fuel cell.  Since fuel cells crack water for hydrogen and oxygen, and the Spacecoach is pretty much made of water...you see my logic, right?

Alas, Robert Davidoff, who is to the untrained writer/artist like myself what the Logisician is to Generals (Read the first entry in Logistic Quotations and know that it's a compliment) points out that you can add hectares of solar arrays for the same mass that the regenerative fuel cell and enough solar panels to run them.  I wondered if it would make sense to stow the extra panels when in the inner system, or just leave them out all the time.  Like modern Muse of Hard SF, Rob posted a quote that seved as great inspiration:

"Well, there's the potential justification of protection from micrometeors and other debris, like you said, plus just general rule of cool". Maybe something like a roller-furling jib, with a fixed "boom" and retracting flexible solar array "sail" would do? The boom could be very light, and rigged inboard when not necessary to avoid docking issues, and it'd be easy to swing it out and unfurl the array to and start making watts when necessary."

...Masts?  Jibs? SAILS!?  That sounds like... a TALL SHIP!

So my fevered brain had to design one, of course.

Here we see her shaping an orbit from Cape Dread to points beyond in the Belt.  There's a family aboard, who will use their ship's MET thruster as a mining drill to tease volatiles out of the cold rock.  They'll trade surplus water for phosphorus and other necessities. I may be hard life, but there's freedom and opportunities in the Black.

See?  Inspired!

But I'm not just interested in making fun art pieces out of these ideas; I've been crunching numbers just as feverishly as I have been drawing pictures and sculpting pixels.  And while it is only a matter of many maths to come up with the essential specs of such a spacecraft, justifying its existance is another matter entirely.  Sure, you could build one, but who's gonna buy it?  It can go from here to Marse, or even Ceres, maybe, but what will it do once it gets there?

In future posts we will start seeing what this Tall Ship can do, and why it should do it.

Hard Star - Episode 1: The Death's Head

Here it is:  The first episode of my new series, retelling the Star Wars saga as a Hard SF, Transhuman space opera set in the Diaspora RPG Universe.  Hope you enjoy! 

Major General Joseph Gerard, Mission Commander of the Emperor's System Control craft Devastator, stood erect but at his ease just outside the main passenger air-lock of Shuttle Bay Two.  His posture was easy to maintain-the main body of the massive space craft was now in free fall, it's spin stilled and it's ponderous momentum transferred to the main flywheel five hundred meters aft.  Only  magnetic boots kept Gerard and the squad of white armored Espaciers on the deck.

Great men do not fidget. Gerard reminded himself.  And was he not a great man?  Did he not command the flagship of the Emperor's Death's Head Constellation? His monstrous ship...two thousand meters long, boasting the largest laser dishes ever mounted on a moving platform - and those considered secondary armaments compared to the hoards of Excalibur lasers and combat drones Devastator could field.  No planet in the entire cluster had defenses equal to his mighty rocket's power. Men with such lethal force at their command should not fidget.

The urge was real, however, for Gerard suspected he knew who was coming.

The shuttle was now close enough for the cameras to make out details.  It was mostly rockets; a cluster of three chemical propulsion stacks, each with a long radiator boom that was now slowly retracting in preparation for docking. Mated to the propulsion bus was a blended-wing lander that served as command module and habitat.  The lander could hold two dozen easily but the manifest claimed only one occupant.  The VIP that rated the Commander himself on the quarter-deck with the side party piloted his own transport.  There was only one of such rank so eccentric-and so Gerard shifted uncomfortably, despite being a great man.

Soon enough, the Commander's fears were be confirmed.   In only a few minutes, the airlock began it's cycle and the heavy gas-tights parted.  There before him stood his superior, his new master, resplendent in a glossy black armored space suit whose helmet bore the effigy of the Constellation - the Death's Head, a skull in hard composite with faintly glowing red eyes.

The figure did not move, yet traveled into the receiving bay on puffs of air from a cold-gas maneuvering system.  The massive, sepulchral figure was utterly still; he touched no control, made no gesture.  Direct neural interface-  Gerard swallowed and snapped to attention with his troops.  It is him -the cyborg!

"Sir Garth, this is an unexpected pleasure." Gerard was faintly pleased at the steadiness in his voice.  "My congratulations on your assignment-"

"You may dispense with the pleasantries, Commander"  Sir Garth Walker, Knight of the Void and personal bodyguard to the Emperor, dismissed Gerard with a contemptuous wave.  "I'm here to put you and the Devastator back on schedule. The Emperor is most displeased with your apparent lack of progress."

"Our preparations are nearly complete Sir Garth, I assure you!"

"They had best be.  We will traverse the Slip knot to Aldebaran in 100 hours."

Gerard's blood ran cold.  A hundred hours!  That was only four solars - impossible!  Yet, what could he say?

"We shall double our efforts, Sir Garth!"

"I hope so Commander, for your sake."  The black-clad cyborg produced a holograph of the Imperial Seal, astonishing Gerard. "I have been named by his Majesty the First Space Lord for the Invasion.  Effective immediately. You will find me less forgiving  than the late Lord Christopher."

"I-I understand, Sir Garth."

Gerard saw his terrified reflection in the black skull's blood-red eyes.

"Forgive me... Lord Invader."