AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 248
ARES III SOL 245
[08:01] JPL: Good morning, everyone. At least, I’d like to say it’s good, but I really haven’t got much good news for you. The best I can say is that this storm has peak internal winds of seventy kph at the present time, based on satellite observation. The Sol 6 storm was eighty kph two sols before it hit you. So there’s a chance this one won’t be that bad.
But on every other count the news is bad. The storm is currently in Arabia Terra on a west-northwest track directly for you at between thirty-five and forty kph. It’ll hit the Hab sometime after sunset tomorrow evening.
And the best part? Our satellites are picking up strong electrical activity in the storm. That’s incredibly rare, and we’ve never seen electrical activity at this level before.
We want you all to ride out the storm in the cave. The soil and the quartz minerals should protect you from any electrical discharge. If at all possible, we also want you to store the Friendship engines in the cave. It’s the safest place.
There are a lot of things you need to do before you turtle up, though. We want you to take as many antenna farm components as you can spare and attach them to the outer skin mount clips on Friendship using bare wire. Once that’s done, you need to inspect the electrical ground system for the Hab and make sure all the components are still attached to the Hab. Every part of the electrical system depends on that ground system to avoid static buildup and related damage. Finally, be sure the shutters are closed on Rover 1’s windows.
Also, we want you to cut off the base from one of the pop-tents, take it to the cave, and attach the ground wires for the solar panels and battery there to it. There are some spare tungsten static discharge points in your repair kit; attach as many as possible to that pop-tent base. That’s all we have to ground any electronics in the cave.
When you evacuate the Hab, power everything down as per the Sol 31 checklist. Do not deflate the Hab, but make sure all the electronics are down. Also, disconnect Pathfinder from Hab power. Pathfinder has its own anti-static ground system, but there’s a danger of a short-circuit through the rig you built to power it- either from a direct hit to the power line or from a strike to the Hab. We’ll use Morse via Friendship’s radio for comms after the storm blows over.
Finally, when you evacuate, park Rover 2 on the northwest face of Site Epsilon, as close to the slope as you can for protection against wind. Remember to close the shutters on the windows before cross-country EVA to your farm. This is the best we can do to protect Rover 2 short of digging a hole for it, and we think that would only bury it faster and deeper.
Good luck and stay safe.
[08:34] WATNEY: That’s a lot of shit to do, but we’ll get it done. The cave airlock is wide enough for the engines- just barely- but we'll probably have to magic them inside one way or another. One question: why not deflate the Hab? Isn’t there a danger of it blowing out in the storm?
[09:02] JPL: The Sol 31 checklist deflates the Hab only to protect the MAV in the very unlikely case of a breach during launch. It has nothing to do with preserving the Hab for future use. In this case, deflating the Hab would make it easier for the wind to pick up the fabric and damage it. It’d also mean you’d have to shovel dust off of the canvas before you could re-inflate it, and there’s a good chance the weight of dust would break the plastic supports. The best chance for the Hab coming through intact is leaving it pressurized.
[09:31] WATNEY: Roger. Going outside to begin preparations now. Go ahead and order a power-down for Pathfinder so I can disconnect the power at the end of our EVA. Will signal you after the storm passes.
[09:59] JPL: Sending the power-down order now. Good luck, Mark. Good luck, everyone.
What's funny is how strongly these procedures remind me of how commercial airliners discharge the static generated from being struck by lightning (yes, it does happen. And more often than one thinks. Just goes to show how safe commercial aviation is); it literally routes the electricity elsewhere to be discharged back into the air.
Here's to hoping nothing major is destroyed in this storm, though! Mark & Co desperately deserve a lucky break at this point
and in the original story, Mark goofed and caused a short-circuit that fried Pathfinder...
Maybe it's just me but I find that the amount I prepare for something bad to happen is inversely proportional to how bad it eventually becomes. Basically the more prepared I am the less likely something bad happens. Here's hoping the same thing happens ... but the Pinky senses are telling me otherwise
8943618
Well, in the book, Pathfinder got shorted out by clumsy electrical work. In that case, Mark removed the casing from a sample drill to allow it to be wired into the Hab's power system and be used to modify the rover. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if in this story, Pathfinder gets fried by lightning.
Lightning, shit. Still, while rare it does happen. Also, just for Dragonfly and Sojouner’s sake, get Pathfinder in the cave as well because if I remember right the static discharge protection system was damaged.
Still, time to bunker up and pray that the thing doesn’t explode into a global duststorm which can last for weeks blocking out nearly all sunlight.
Man, those filler episodes because anime caught up with Kris's manga
The weight of all that topsoil in the Hab should help anchor it barring rips?
An opportunity to gather around a cocoon and go Kumbayah this way comes.
ºUº
The storm is gonna do something magical to Dragonfly.
Yeah, there's no way they're coming out of this completely unscathed. I anticipate at least a few hundred words lovingly describing the unfortunate minor fault that will lead to a catastrophic loss or five.
And I mean that in the nicest way I can.
8943618
Does anyone else hear a planet laughing? Just me?
I'm still hoping for something as cartoony as the storm literally screaming their names in hate as it rages around them.
8943686
chapter about Dragonfly's experience of the storm from the cocoon where the storm hisses things in the changeling langauge
Well, that's not ominous at all.
8943674
How about in Kumbayah they sing this?
At least they’re not invoking Murphy.
Pure water, and ice is a very bad conductor, fantastic dielectric, but perchlorrate ionised salts in solution make great conductors, so its not so much planetary ground as widespread subsurface capacitance plate with hi k dielectric?
Having all your electronics inside a continous metal box is a Faraday shield, If youre looking at radio waves you can get away with various meshes, the mesh has to be smaller than the wavelength,a nd even fairly large mesh can intercet and deflect lightning. Its the wires passing through teh mesh for power, sensors and antenna etc that are the problems, he voltage can be spark gapped over, but the current flow can overheat, melt and even vapourise parts.
Still, all that dry fine high speed electrostatic dust is going to cause some real probblems. Hopefully one where it doesnt end up with teh cave airlock entrance being under a couple metres of packed charged sticky fines.
And this is how Pathfinder meets its end.
8943682
Hey, I'm not that fat.
8943682
Hey, a man can hope in vain...
Ahh, who am I kidding?!
Time to start the betting pool... I got 15 bits on Pathfinder biting the dust, and an additional 5 bits on at least one piece of vital hardware in the HAB being damaged in some way, shape, or form
> Then dragonfly wakes up, drinks all the dangerous power from the storm and saves everyone!
So I literally just had a random thought: what is the farthest Starlight could feasibly teleport the group, provided as much mana as is needed? As in, what is the absolute limit of her abilities in this particular universe? Because it seems like a reasonable option to keep on the table as one of those "when absolutely all else fails and the only other alternative is death" plans, unless it's not at all feasible. Just curious...
Question is the storm expected to pick up a lot more wind speed before it hits?
70KPH doesn't sound very dangerous at all when you factor in just how thin the air there actually is.
8943902
When nothing it built to withstand it, any wind can be dangerous.
Electrical storms are a PAIN in Surviving Mars. They kill your buildings. And if you are short on electronics when a drone hub goes, well, your out of luck.
I wonder what the storm will kill in this story. uh dear.. The closest thing to a drone hub is... Pathfinder. Uh no...
8943686
You're really not the only one. If not now, then by the end. I mean, this storm is already demonstrating clear intent, so at a MINIMUM I expect malicious targeting for the lighting and deliberately obstructive drifts of sand.
If Mars gets any more power, I fully expect to turn the rest of their time into trying to survive a Star Trek episode...while limited to hard science. Luckily they won't be dumping much mana into the environment. Except, you know, every day...
8943851
Well, it's highly doubtful to my mind that Starlight could teleport from Mars to Earth with any amount of mana. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't really recall Twilight effortlessly teleporting longer distances (as in, from Ponyville to Canterlot) until after she ascended to Alicornhood, nevermind solar system scales. Even if Starlight is theoretically capable of doing so, it would be one hell of a fucking longshot to make, especially given Starlight's total lack of familiarity with Earth.
She could probably teleport the gang onto the Hermes flyby though. That would be a useful contingency plan.
8944053
In the original book, the initial sandstorm got up to 168 KPH.
I thought this story explained away the strange storm doubling in intensity in the beginning by blaming it on the mana thrusters firing in the atmosphere. But why would this storm be expected to also become so much more worse before it hits.
I thought I'd ask, because I don't know if the author missed something, or more likely I'm ignorant on some important part of regular martian weather, or residual magical effects on weather.
8944113
Honestly, I didn't even consider Mars to Earth to even be able to toss it out... it just plain wasn't in my mind. Popping over from the Ares IV MAV to Hermes as an emergency bailout did as an afterthought, but otherwise the question was just the result of idly wondering what Starlight could do in her present environment, provided she had enough mana batteries to push herself to the limit...
8942201
Can confirm, in Western WA we have 2 seasons: rain, and less rain. BTW, greetings from a couple hours south in historic Vancouver, WA
8944161
You forgot the third season last year: fire.
8943851
Borrowed from a number of other fan fictions, my headcanon is that a unicorn can only teleport to somewhere they've been before, or have a reasonably good image of in their head, or one can only teleport to somewhere you can actually see with your eyes, as far as the visible horizon.
8943677
Heey scar man, funny seeing you here. Good to see someone i know.
8943767
Yup i think we all hear that laugh and it sorta has a freza feel to it don't you think so?
8944172
That's not what the show has shown us, though. We have several instances of unicorns (well, Twilight and Starlight mostly, obviously) teleporting to places they can neither see nor where they could have reasonably been before, especially during their game of teleport-tag. Granted, who knows what Kris is going with in the CSP-verse.
8944227
There is the matter of velocity to consider. Even if Starlight could pinpoint the location of Hermes at that distance, Hermes would be travelling faster than the speeding bullet (pardon the cliche). Either the crew would experience supersonic splat immediately after the transit, or Starlight would have to equalize their velocities somehow - which would mean they would experience supersonic splat during the transit.
If the talk is about teleporting them to Sciaparelly, that's a more open question... but again, she needs to teleport a lot of materials for crew to perform necessary modifications. That might be too straining anyway.
8943761
If they are lucky.
There is quite a bit more that can be zapped:
I am worried about what Kris said a few notes ago: A song, pinguins or explosions.
That ares 4 MAV is about to go BOOM
Also, still vulnerable to a lesser extent are the rovers, and the hab, sunlight collection crystal,
and the solar farm.
8943804
Put me down 20 bits on Ares IV MAV.
And 5 bits on the Collection crystal.
I am betting the electrical activity will pull an "Avengers: age of ultron" on us and be the last burst of power dragonfly needs to come back...... The collection crystal could be like a lightning rod and besides quartz is i think conductive?
8944422
8943677
Dr.Frankenstein-Mark: "SHE'S ALIVE! SHE'S ALIVE!"
Cherry Berry:
8944591
I was thinking more we were setting up for Mark starting with:
"It was a dark and stormy night..."
Followed by the collective total of every mystery and horror trope you can pack into an otherworldly campfire scene.
Including the cocoon splitting open just before a convenient horror thunderclap.
MARK: You see? YOU SEE?! This is what a thriller scene looks like!
Lightning grounding actually has to do with the unequal charge distribution between clouds and the ground formed in the conditions leading to a thunderstorm, and nothing to do with the Earth's magnetic field. The cloud-ground charges and even cloud-cloud charges dictate where the lightning will discharge. The geomagnetic field is actually quite puny. A typical refrigerator magnet has a stronger field. You can prove this simply by laying a nail on the ground and picking it up with a fridge magnet. Ta-da! Guess which field is stronger? Earth's field is only 30-60 microTesla. The electrical fields in a thunderstorm are hundreds to thousands of times more powerful, hence why they can interfere with some electronics and radiofrequencies.
Mars likely has little or no lightning because there simply aren't the sorts of cumulonimbus storm systems that could generate the charges. What little there might be is not going to be generated by the same mechanisms, but instead static build up in the rarified atmosphere reaching enough of a level that a spark can traverse the insulating near-vacuum once in a while, most likely generated by iron-rich dust carrying static charges into Mars' upper atmosphere rather than water. In an Earth storm, you need a lot of turbulence, a rapidly rising moist air column that's much warmer relative to the surrounding air and an equally strong downdraft in the core of the storm (hence why you can sometimes get thundersnow in very strong blizzards). The various ice and water particles collide as the air currents jumble them around, trading charges, since they have different charge-carrying capacities, the charges end up moving in different directions, generating an electrical field.
Wikipedia's page on lightning lays it out quite well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning
Jupiter and Saturn have intense lightning because they have enormous storms racing about with winds far stronger than Earth's along with rapidly increasing density in the cloud layers; a perfect scenario for separating charge-carrying molecules.
But Mars is essentially a large, cold desert with very little weather activity overall. The conditions are hardly ever even marginally favorable for a single lightning bolt to form.
8944771 Mars leans more towards "rare" than "none" on lightning. It's true that there's no water-based weather to speak of, but the dust in dust storms is heavy in iron- with a lot of rust, hematite and magnetite in that dust content. Current theory is that friction among dust particles produces a triboelectric charge much the same way scuffing your socks on the carpet in a dry room does. And our orbiting probes have picked up signs of lightning by-products in the Martian environment, so we know something happens.
But most of this lightning would be "heat" or aurora lightning, basically propagating in a rough sphere until the electrical charge is equalized. An actual bolt would, indeed, be a rare, rare thing.
8944688 (Dragonfly emerges with sparkly wings, a sciences-trek-blue carapace, and a distinct lack of holes)
Mark: And now it's spoiled. Nobody's going to be scared of-
(Cherry, Spitfire and Starlight scream in abject terror)
8944877 I've made that sort of 'lightning' in the bio lab on rare occasions in the winter when the forced air heat drives the humidity to -1000% or some impossible imaginary number. (It gets REALLY dry in there) And at times I build up enough static that I can make wide radial discharges between my finger and other objects with opposing charge.
God help you if you touch something metal when the lab's like that.
8944883
I think Vegeta would agree with Mark on this one:
8944227
Okay, then amend it by saying they can also teleport to somewhere, even if they've never been there before or seen it, if they have a solid idea in their head of where it is and what it probably looks like. Off-limits areas can have spells erected around them to prevent unicorns teleporting in where they shouldn't.
I don't think they should park anything near the remains of the Perchlorate Accident.
Just saying.
8944883
You jest, but I’d be all about the little jewel bugs turning into Treklings :p Ah well, maybe in another universe.
Though not usually a fan of OCs, Dragonfly and Fireball have really grown on me over the course of the story (and Cherry Berry too, of course, who isn't really an OC but I think her personality here is more your invention than Hasbro's, since canon gives so little to work with). So I preface this by saying I really like Dragonfly, and she was a great presence in the story.
That said, all this talk of the storm being the thing that wakes her up has me a bit worried. I have to say, I think she should stay in the cocoon for a long time yet. Like, a couple of hundred sols or so. It just seems like if she wakes up much sooner, then that whole storyline will be pretty much for nothing, like something tacked on just for a bit of drama but without many serious consequences affecting the story. Whereas 'how will we survive for six months without our engineer?' changes the shape of the story, and means that everything Dragonfly went through actually mattered.
Again, for character reasons I'd like her back, but for narrative ones I think that'd be a big mistake
Absolute worst case is that thing becomes a global dust storm. Mars does indeed get them and they posed a major threat to Mars Rovers a couple years back. Imagine what that would mean for Mark.
8945186 They're not. The cave is on the northEAST side.
To be clear, the geography of Site Epsilon (which is very nearly round when seen from space) is like so:
Southeast side - Crash site of Amicitas
Northeast side - crystal cave
Northwest side - where Rover 2 parked during the second storm
Southwest side - as yet unimportant
Um. How are they going to get those through the airlock?
No, really?
Oh. Lucky.