MISSION LOG – SOL 138
Today we went salt-mining. Just me, Starlight, Rover 2, and a lot of Pathfinder trip flashbacks.
We took the rover due west from the Hab about twenty kilometers, then found a decent-sized crater and carefully drove into it. Why so far? Because although the Hab blowout and our own operations have contaminated the Hab site, I don’t want to contaminate it any worse for Ares VI or whoever comes after us. And what we did today pretty much invalidates any soil or rock analysis you can imagine.
You see, the ponies need salt- more salt than they’ll get from alfalfa. They’ve raided every source of it in the Hab at this point, and we’re almost out. This isn’t something we can do without; without salt to supplement the hay, the ponies will begin suffering certain deficiencies, not least of which being loss of judgment. And on Mars you do not want to lose your sense of judgment- nor do you want to be within a mile of someone who has.
(Of course, these ponies have liked 70s music and so-called comedy practically from the word go, so I may be a little late on the poor judgment thing. Just saying.)
Fortunately Starlight has that lovely perchlorate-bomb-making spell handy, which she can tweak so that, instead of pulling all the toxic crap from the soil, it pulls all the salt instead.
And it worked- kind of. When Starlight did it in the cave, she got a giant mound of perchlorates. But here in Mars’s northern hemisphere perchlorate salts vastly outnumber and outweigh sodium chloride. We ended up with two medium-sized sample boxes full of salt, but that required the spell to cover an area a full kilometer in diameter and about five meters deep into the ground. And, of course, that emptied Starlight’s battery for the day. And we’ll have to do this again a few months from now.
There’s another possibility. There’s a bit of sodium chlorate and sodium perchlorate in the soil- trace amounts, but more than the sodium chloride. Get those up to about 400 degrees Celsius in the presence of metallic iron and you get a lot of oxygen and salt. You also get a bit of chlorine gas and some other not-nice things, because chemistry is everybody's Roommate from Hell. Also that stuff is rocket oxidizer just like magnesium and potassium perchlorate are, so I won’t be doing that inside the Hab anytime soon. But it’s a possibility I can work out, or ask NASA to work out, if it becomes necessary.
(You reading this, NASA? Yeah, by all means, tell me about another fun and convenient method I can use to blow up the Hab and maybe kill everybody inside!)
Starlight’s been working on two new magic batteries, by the way, using giant quartz slices from the cave and parts scavenged from the engine room of her ship. They haven’t started charging yet, but every day Starlight tells me she knows what she did wrong, and this time it’ll work. I have faith in her.
Unfortunately for her, she’s going to have less time to work on that than she’d like. When we got back from salt mining, NASA had a message waiting for us. It seems Starlight is officially the best pony at speaking and writing English, so she gets to take over teaching. Dragonfly speaks it a little better, but it was a written test, and Starlight is more careful with her writing.
Bad news for her, but good news for me- I don’t have to think up English lessons anymore. And Spitfire ought to be happy to have me stop talking down to her.
Of course, it’s ironic that the three pilots are the worst at English (Cherry is marginally better than Fireball, and Spitfire got the worst marks by a mile). If they want to use the MDV flight simulator, they’re going to have to learn really quickly. And I will take great delight in saying, “That’s Starlight’s job now- ask her.”
I don’t know what I’ll do with my life when I get back to Earth, but I know one thing: I am not cut out to be an English teacher. And I owe about eleven women and two men sincere apologies. Mr. Lindsay, Mrs. Ventrello, Ms. Vaughn, Mrs. Bryzewski, Mrs. Stockdale, Mrs. Madsen, Mr. Brooks… damn, there’s five or six more I can’t remember at all, but I thought you were all cruel, incompetent bastards determined to make school a torment.
I’m sorry. I never realized how hard your job was. If I’d known, I would have cut the spitballs and paper footballs down maybe fifty percent.
But diagramming sentences still sucks, and I’m not apologizing for telling you that to your faces. The detentions were worth it, especially when Dad told the principal he agreed with me.
I'd much rather have short chapters than a time skip, personally
Hope your head feels better soon - I find it's usually an imbalance in the sleep-water-caffeine triangle.
My highschool english teacher turned into a crazy cat lady... I think shes alot happier now.
After seeing the season 8 premier , I love Starlight even more then before. So this story moves to the top of my list.
They still teach diagramming sentences in the future? I got through school without ever being taught it.
Short chapters are fine. Just use that time to build the characters more. Likes, dislikes or even a real fight. Day to day problems people have with each other by being to close.
I actually loved my English classes, specifically English literature, all I had to do was read a story (eg Romeo and Juliet) then theorize and over analyze EVERY.SINGLE.SENTENCE. then I would get the highest marks out of class. The creative writing was also a blast, blue and yellow, purple hills under an ocean of star fireflies.
English language however, was hell....
I remember English classes feeling both okay to not-so-bad and useless at the same time, and that's from Canada in the 1990s and early 2000s.
...Though not as a second language.
I only remember one of my English teachers from high school (which was over a decade ago, by the way) - Mr. Leventhal. And I only remember him because he reminded me a lot of Gordon Freeman from the Halflife games; short dark hair and thick glasses.
love this fic. keep it coming. i look forward to it every day
8817750 I'd definitely agree a long chapter is preferable to a short one, but I'm not sure how I'd cope without a new chapter of this story every day; it's become that central to my evening routine And I think a time skip would be bad for narrative pacing, even the trek of Mark and Starlight in the rover felt too short because some days were missed out (I understand why, of course, and it was probably for the best, but it didn't feel like 21 days).
Darnit. Get to feelin' better!
Hm I probably owe one of my teachers an apology for hiding a bunch of books she was going to hand out when she stepped out of the room for a second. However I still stand by my statement that Billy Budd was the worst book I was ever forced to read. Still is, in fact.
OBTW. Has Starlight been doing any reinforcement spells on the cave boundaries?
I've only had 5 different English teachers. In primary school there was no dedicated English teacher, with each class having one teacher for almost everything. In the six years of secondary school, I repeated English teachers twice but had two different English teachers in year 12, for a total of 5 different teachers.
Mr Bennett is the only name I remember, but I also remember that one of the others had a lisp, another had immigrated from Russia as a child and usually taught French, the year 10 teacher was cool, and I don't remember the year 11 teacher at all.
I also remember the names of five of my primary school teachers.
What have they been doing with all the salt from their urine and sweat? Might as well grab all that with the perchlorate bomb spell, too...
8817803
Not yet.
She asked Twilight to research a better spell for it.
Has starlight picked up any of rarities grooming spells? Has anydragon explored his cave? Do they have any spare electric motors or seven that could be repurposed for labor saving machinery? Is starlight magic capable of transmute get complex shapes, such as converting nearly pure iron meteorites into useful tools? Is dragon resistance to high temperatures the type of magical ability that is weaker in the absence of a universal field? Do dragons poop diamonds? I cant imagine they poop like a mamal. Could they somehow jurryrig a sort of sledge or trailer for the rover? How has the Martian surface responded to constant trips too and from the cave. Have they improved this road at all.
Have they moved more than the essentials to the cave like chairs and stuff so they can take breaks from being cooped up in the hab.
Do they ever need to change lightbulbs? Did the hab include a small science oven for analysing the gasses given off by samples when heated? Slate should for on Mars you could use it as a writing surface. Maybe starlight needs some material for the drive and they need to figure out how to make it? Resistors, capacitors, and inductors are all possible to make with a wide variety of materials by hand if you are willing to be inefficient and fiddle alot. Some of the earliest metal tools were made from space rocks, which are usually a very good mix of nickel iron. They could maybe better insulate the cave by scavenging insulation from mdv? How are the rover tires doing after so much use? Remember how curiosities wheels got holes poked into them bY sharp rocks. Maybe they need to jack up the rover for repairs to suspension?. With nuke out of rover did they ever replace removed insulation?
That's all the ideas I can vomit up right now.
QUESTION: Does the Equestrian public know about them being stranded on Mars? Or is the ESA keeping it a secret to prevent mass panic?
P.S. Don't forgot about Twilight and Discord trying to find a way for non-unicorns to charge runic arrays, which if publically released would throw the Equestrian status quo into chaos.
Every source except Mark's food packs and stinky-one-that-must-not-be-named
So she casually sifted through ~10 million tons of soil to get a few kilograms of product? Holy crap!
Looking it up I kind of wish I learned about sentence diagramming in school. I feel like I might have a lot less trouble dissecting sentence structure if I had that as an exercise to practice.
8817703
Agreed on the chem mixture... Sleep vs. Caffeine vs. Hydration is a tricky balance.
I don't have a strong opinion on chapters either way. Ultimately, whatever works best with the life schedule. Practically everything in the story has been a great read, so keep it going however works best.
English... if you'd told me Junior year of high school that I'd pursue a degree in Literature I'd have laughed at you. One good teacher can make a lot of difference... even if I hated her guts at the time. Brooks, funny enough, though again not a Mr.
8818052
Only if a cubic meter of Mars is ~2.5 tons. Which is... not as far off as I expected. Google says:
where 1.52 comes from Pathfinder measurements, and short tons are lighter than long tons or metric tons. (1.68 short ~= 1.5 long ~= 1.52 metric. Oh, and of course grams per cubic centimeter would match metric tons per cubic meter.)
Anyway, a kilometer in diameter means half-a-kilometer in radius, so pi*r2*h = pi*5002*5m3 ~= 3.93*106m3, which is where I interpolated 2.5 from your guess. The actual number from multiplication is 6.58 short tons, 5.87 long tons, or 5.97 metric tons.
...You know, approximately.
8818153
And that all boils down to the great universal measure of "a metric fuckton".
“When Dad told the principal he agreed with me”
LOL
I approve. I always felt like the stuff we did in high school English class was worthless for anyone who didn't need remedial work (and a lot of people did, I suppose), except for learning how to write papers.
am counting it down to hope that prob have this on board the most
8818261
its only for people who work for government officials work and all that. God I hope by 2030s the school system will have hit the update button by now, it feels like its running on MS-DOS 6.22/win 3.1 with an Intel 286 CPU with only 256kb of ram.
its like school just give you stuff that is half useless and all the useful stuff gone out the window, so far the stuff that will help you live life like repairing you home, computers, cars and many other things like cooking just gone out the window
Diagramming sentences? Isnt that the 2 dimentional grammatical tree method which is how you would expect a computer to work out what the implicit meta information about words and word order is far more easily than giving it Finnigans Wake and saying, there you go, English language. Learn it.
Current AI is the state it is, horribly inefficint for the given power, because approximately 35 years ago a group of hardware and software genii decided to make the worlds most advanced home computer.
They succeeded beyond the bounds of all expectations.
Curiocities OS, Windriver, is the only current code Ive heard of that even comes close, because I havent kept up with the details of BSDs and QNX etc.
You dont need speculative execution when your OS tasks switches in sub microseconds per Ghz, and if you need more speed, you just add more processors.
Something to do with all those perchlorates and silica sand, is to consider a chemical plant that makes Silicones, from fibres and sheets to gasses, liquids, gels, elastomers etc. In situ resources, dont keep getting stuck on ultra complex absolutely minimum structures, because those are the ones that fail when situations exceed limits very quickly.
On Mars, possibly the simplest build is Habbakuk, because cooling is easy, and insulation is simple?
Wouldnt a scan and extraction of kilos per mega cubic metre, be equivalent to the percentage of gold in average garden soil? if theres plenty o life energy on Earth, Starlight could lift a couple thousand tons of gold from the Kansas corn fields alone?
I really hope someone doesnt try to get her to pull the Uranium from coal power station fly ash pile. Its a wonder that stuff isnt already excess warm due to the hundreds or even thousandfold concentration and megatonnage piles.
You seem to be having A Bad Day. Would you like to try again, Press A to continue.
EDIT.
Forgot. first episode of Season 8 was yesterday, and was relavent to certain comments here. When the situation is out of bounds of the rule book, the first thing that has to go, is the rule book that no longer applies. NASA should have this inscribed above mission control.
Apollo 13. Fk The Rules.
8817987
I think they're probably where the expression "s*** bricks" came from in Equestria.
I'm kind of curious: Is there any reason that ESA can't just send a salinated water solution through the life support systems? As far as I'm aware, the only stated limitation to the teleportation matrix the life support systems use is that anything with carbon bonds is going to have a bad time going through the system. That shouldn't stop them from sending saline water through though. Did the idea just not occur to ESA or NASA? Do Equestria's oceans not have salt in them? Hell, you could maybe just dump a bunch of pure salt through the water tubes and flush them out with the telegram system. Am I not thinking of something?
8819077 It would explode. For magical reasons. >__________> (a clever excuse saves the day!)
8819027
dragon sh*t is best mineral suppement for plant
So are those the names of your English teachers, Kris? Did Mark Watney ever say anything about his childhood in the book?
8884236 A few. More of them are science teachers.
They delved too deep!
8920585
Ha ha obvious sex joke ha ha.
9005916
No, reference to the Dwarves in Moria in The Lord of the Rings . They reached a Balrog
Yay, salt mining!
Yes, I got the impression NASA was minimising that problem a little too much...
Which is a lot safer than mining the substance and extracting the perchlorate, yes
Oi. I read how you got your water in the original book. You got no grounds to diss NASA on this
*cue shitstorm before anyone reads the rest of the sentence*
Damn, he's good at remembering names. I only remember the nicknames of my old teachers
Hah!
I'm a bit surprised they didn't take the obvious and less resource-intensive solution for salt supply. Ask Twilight to put salt in the water.
I can remember the faces of most of my high school teachers, but I can only remember 1 name.
The great thing about a story of this length and method of publication is that you discover new things every time you go back and re-read it. For example, this line of reasoning seems a bit off to me now that I think about it. If the Hab, as well as places like the crash site and the cave, have already been contaminated, surely it would be best to start the salt mining there so that followup missions can complete Ares III's unfinished science in the unsullied areas within reach.
9360775
A couple of possible reasons:
1. They use the same same water reservoir for every mission in progress and there's no reason to contaminate everyone's water.
2. Salt water is nigh-undrinkable because of the taste
3. They don't want to risk oversalinating the plants
reminds me of a Peanuts comic where Sally Brown misunderstood and tried to DECORATE a sentence by drawing flowers on the paper!
9394450
Same.
Of course, when you factor in that I was homeschooled up until college with some trade school near the end, there's far less faces to keep track of.
Diagramming sentences? I've never heard of that excersize before. Obviously didn't harm me, considering I've been told plenty of times that my grasp of the language is way beyond most people's.
Perhaps the point of it was the same as Schoolhouse Rock's Grammar collection did... only not nearly as effective as said music. Good old Conjunction Junction and Busy Prepositions, among others...
10586288
Ah, I see you're a man of culture as well. :)
Salt. To bad the salty people of the 'let em die' campaign can't be harvested for it
Teacher. The pillar of Civilizations
I completely forgot about the hell that was diagramming sentences
School, pillar of Civilisation and bain of most school kids...