AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 337
ARES III SOL 332
TRANSCRIPT – WATER TELEGRAPH EXCHANGE, ESA BALTIMARE and ESA SHIP AMICITAS
ESA: Baltimare calling Amicitas, over.
AMICITAS: Amicitas calling Baltimare, this must be urgent, what’s up, over?
ESA: We are testing a solution for your ascent vehicle boosters. If successful we will send performance data and design guidelines. This will require very long messages in next couple of weeks, over.
AMICITAS: Good to hear. We’ll be ready, over.
ESA: Basic plan: enchant three durable crystals, current estimate 100 kg each, and mount them on underside of first ascent stage above engine bells of ascent vehicle. The enchantment will link all three crystals to each of fifteen repulsion field projectors which will draw power from the oversized batteries you have made. The link will ensure that the ship, and only the ship, is lifted by the full, focused power of the enchantments. The enchantment will be set to “away” without directional input, so steering of the craft must be done using chemical rockets on board. Over.
AMICITAS: Good idea. Any preliminary numbers?
ESA: System not yet tested with target blocks. Prior tests without blocks show lack of control but minimum potential acceleration of over 1200 m/s of a seven ton object in under one minute, over. We expect final system to be much more efficient.
AMICITAS: That’s groundbreaking! Development of this system would vastly reduce weight and cost of launch vehicles! Excellent! Over.
ESA: We still need to do more tests. We don’t want to send you up on a single test. But we can give you a head start based on what we learn from the first test, over.
AMICITAS: Very happy to hear! We’ll be waiting! Amicitas out.
HERMES – ARES III MISSION DAY 466
The shutters remained down on all the portholes around Hermes, as if the largest spaceship ever built by mankind was about to undertake an aerobraking maneuver. No such maneuver was on the schedule for another year or more, of course. Today, and for many weeks prior and many weeks to come, the shutters held out a force more potentially deadly than air at hypersonic velocities, a force more unavoidable than micrometeorites, space junk, or any other merely physical obstacle.
The shutters held out the sunlight.
At a mere ninety-five million kilometers away from the Sun, Hermes currently absorbed two and a half times the solar radiation- light, heat, and even nastier stuff- that it would ever encounter in Earth orbit. Most of the photons in the visible and infrared range reflected off the reflective white paint and the silvery cooling fins of the ship, but enough remained behind to strain the cooling systems on board to their absolute limits. The cooling pumps remained at their top speed almost constantly, despite the ship rotation that both provided Mars gravity in the habitat ring modules and, as a bonus, provided a passive thermal control, or PTC as it was called in the Apollo days- or, more popularly, the “barbecue roll.”
For harder radiation, Hermes had the lining of its hull plus an experimental electromagnetic field generator which, in deep space, generated a bubble much like that of the Earth in miniature. Twin slightly offset poles, one just below the vehicle airlock at the nose of the ship, the other just above the exhaust ports of the VASIMR engines. Here, in theory, charged solar wind alpha and beta particles would be grounded, relatively far away from the astronauts. If Hermes had had an atmosphere the auroras would have been fantastic- and frightening- but in the near-vacuum of space, this extra (theoretical) layer of protection went unseen.
And, of course, there was the final defense: in case of a solar storm powerful enough to endanger astronaut health beyond the safety margins set by NASA, the crew would evacuate the rest of the ship and retreat to the chamber most securely sealed from radiation and best provided with redundant cooling systems… the reactor room.
Watney and Martinez had both laughed and joked about the irony of getting as close to the little reactor as possible to get away from the products of the really big reactor outside, when they were first briefed on the procedure. That had been over three years before. Now Watney was on Mars, and Martinez no longer felt like laughing- not merely because the danger-room scenario was a serious possibility, but because getting fried by one of the Sun’s little temper tantrums ranked maybe fifth on his list of things to worry about today.
Number four was his bunk. He’d noticed two weeks before that he was sweating at night. When he was awake he didn’t feel particularly warm- hey, not compared to his time at Edwards AFB- but sweat glands didn’t lie. There was something wrong with the cooling system near his cabin. He’d have to talk with Johanssen, maybe Beck too, about it.
Number three was training for the MAV launch. All MAVs could be remotely piloted; after all, that’s how every MAV had been put on the ground except for the very first. But NASA hadn’t decided yet whether Martinez would fly the ship remotely or if the pony commander, Cherry Berry, would fly it manually. And more to the point, NASA hadn’t nailed down the final parameters for the modified ship, which made it impossible for either pilot to fly simulations. Martinez wanted to get started training, and the sooner the better.
Number two was Mark Watney in general, with his friends somewhere far back down the list. Oh, the aliens were cool, but Mark was his crewmate and friend. They’d spent years training together, only to be split apart by a chain of freak accidents. Now they were on their way to get him back, and not a day went by that Martinez didn’t pull out the rosary he’d made to replace his lost crucifix and say a silent prayer for the continued well-being of his buddy.
Normally Mark would be on top of the list, but yesterday something new had bumped it out of the way. Now Martinez sat in the pilot’s seat on the bridge, trying not to jump up every thirty seconds and look over Johanssen’s shoulder at the controls for Hermes’s radio systems. Since yesterday the Hermes computers had tried to establish contact with Pathfinder. Not only was Hermes well ahead of Earth in orbit around the sun, it was three light-minutes closer to Mars. Thus it only made sense to resume the communications relay through the ship… if, that is, Pathfinder still functioned at all.
Johanssen wasn’t even on the bridge at the moment. He was alone. Johanssen was doing diagnostics on the reactor. Lewis and Vogel were in the lab performing their scheduled experiments- NASA wasn’t going to waste extra time in deep space- while Beck was in his bunk-slash-sickbay checking samples taken from the crew for signs of radiation exposure.
So, when Johanssen’s console beeped, it took a moment for Martinez to realize that he needed to attend to it… and another moment to realize that it was the thing he’d wanted to attend to for a day and a half. The data link to Pathfinder was re-established. Pathfinder was still up and running… and, if the sun would settle down, they could talk to it.
Martinez opened the ship comms. “Status update,” he said. “We have signal acquisition of Pathfinder. Repeat, we have signal acquisition of Pathfinder.”
“On my way.” Lewis’s reply came immediately- no hesitation, not even a gap between Martinez’s last syllable and her first.
In less than a minute they were all there- all five of them- huddled around Johanssen’s terminal. Not that it made any sense- they all knew that any message they sent wouldn’t bring a reply for almost an hour, best case. But they still all wanted to be there as Johanssen sent the command to initiate chat and the simplest possible message:
[13:21] HERMES: test
And they waited, making the occasional bit of small talk, for the fifty-one minutes before any response could arrive, but mostly waiting in silence.
Then the responses came- or tried to.
[14:16] SYSTEM: ERROR - Signal Corruption Exceeds Recovery Threshold – Unable to Display
[14:18] SYSTEM: ERROR - Signal Corruption Exceeds Recovery Threshold – Unable to Display
[14:19] SYSTEM: ERROR - Signal Corruption Exceeds Recovery Threshold – Unable to Display
[14:20] WATNEY: Frodo lives!
[14:22] SYSTEM: ERROR - Signal Corruption Exceeds Recovery Threshold – Unable to Display
The first message bounce produced groans. The second, surprise- they hadn’t expected multiple replies in quick succession. But the last message bounce barely registered.
“Frodo lives?” Vogel asked. “Does this have some special meaning?”
“I read about it,” Lewis said. “But I thought I was twenty years too young to have seen it firsthand.”
Martinez couldn’t help grinning. “Better hope the signal clears up pretty quickly,” he said. “If that’s the last signal the Hab sends in the clear, the conspiracy kooks are gonna get a lot more mileage outta that than ‘Croatoan’.”
“I think we should look on the bright side,” Vogel said.
“What’s that?” Beck asked.
“Only two words made it through,” Vogel said. “And neither one was ‘fuck’.”
Well, this is about as final as song #2 gets. All that remains now is to record the voices, but you guys won't get to hear that for quite a while. https://musescore.com/user/27997005/scores/5153455
So, is guessing at what each Martian said supposed to be left up to our imaginations? How does the author not know who didn't send a message?
Could be a worse location for an airport, the morons who built DIA put it 30 miles outside Denver in a tornado zone!
Ah, know the place well. The KC Gem and Rocks That My Wife Needs To Buy show is there every year, and the KC pony convention was in half of the hall one year (since cancelled, darnit). This is indeed the Year of the Blasted Wood Ants, and I have to spray daily here to keep them out of the house. They're like... ants, really.
I once had a car with a fire ant infestation. It was a crummy cavalier. I could run over a flea and the car would die, yeah that crummy.
9027879 The voices in my head don't tell me everything.
9027927 What I'm wondering is, I drove well over 700 miles today, and I didn't see the first damn ant until I was almost done unloading the van. And black wood ants aren't as aggressive as fireants, but they're not particularly shy, either....
... on the other hand, I haven't seen any fireants around the house in years. Wonder what's up with that.
9027940
That seems like code for something.
Oh, that's a bright side all right. Not quite as bright as the thing right outside Hermes' window, but definitely a bright side
Checked map. It is the northwest edge of KC,MO. If you go a bit more west, you will enter Leavenworth.
9027940
Count your blessings as far as fire ants go. Luckily they confined themselves to my trunk.
Photons are physical too
It should probably be "reflected" instead of "radiated". And cooling fins definitely should not be reflective, or else they wouldn't radiate anything.
From how toasty it is around, they should be pretty deep inside Earth's orbit. And, since currently Earth and Mars are at opposite sides from the Sun, everything inside Earth's orbit is closer to Mars than Earth. 3 seconds is comparable to Earth-Moon distance.
9027885
Don't forget the original automated baggage handling system that lost your luggage with greater speed and efficiency than any system before it.
9028068
True—the radiator surfaces proper would be the deepest, darkest, microstructured matte black that could be engineered, held edgewise to the sun. And three seconds is round trip time between the Earth and Moon; a quarter million miles is roughly 1.5 light seconds.
So. Tin can in an oven, or the sweat shack at a WWII P.O.W. camp?
Only been in KC twice, because, airport. To go to where OK would apply the enema syringe.
9027940
The research entomologist down the hall is studying the fire ants and believes that they have been knocked back a la "War of the Worlds" but seem to be making a resurgence in some areas.
I'm not sure i get it
9028143
Thank you! I'm eager to work on not only this, but also the radio interviews and the "Home (Martian's Lament)" that River Babble (Riverfox) wrote music for. Our team's current challenge is nitpicking over the instrumentation and arrangement of the music to "Home". After that, I want to render the music with better samples (the default Musescore samples work great for WDDM, but not for the more serious Home), then we have to record the singing, all the talking parts that aren't singing, and create artwork. I'm having a lot of fun, though! I've never done a project this big. And we have no deadlines or due dates/release dates. Hopefully we finish before Kris finishes this story.
9028141
Maybe it's a reference to Frodo surviving something? I'm not an expert on LotR, sorry.
9028133
Hey, have you heard River Babble's melody she wrote?
9028141
It’s an old meme dating back to the late 1960’s/early 1970’s. The Lord of the Rings hadn’t quite hit the mainstream yet, so “Frodo Lives!” was sort of a counterculture slogan at the time. Since it’s a spoiler for the end of the trilogy, in which the named character survives extraordinary adversity to accomplish a seemingly impossible task after being cut off from all but one other member of the Fellowship, it’s also a rather fitting first intelligible message from the castaways on Mars following the radio blackout period.
Of course, the ponies likely don’t know that, but I wouldn’t put it past Starlight or Dragonfly to find the offline copy of Wikipedia you just know Johanssen has stashed somewhere on her computer…
…
If anyone starts chanting, “The Ringworld is unstable!” I will personally thwap you with a wet noodle of scrith.
9028155
I'd offer to help do the music, but I'm already overcommitted to other things as it is.
9028270
Are you Samurai Penguin Studio? Did you make that music? Maybe after you're finished with being overcommitted on things, if we're still working on our project, you could join if you wanted to. Or if you want, you could join our Discord server and offer feedback and advice with minimal time commitment. I'll leave it up to you.
(Also, I probably already said this but I really enjoyed your Arrow 18 stories.)
9028284
I am Samurai Penguin Studio(s). [It never let me put the 'S' on the end back when I made that channel.]
I might offer help over the discord server, that sounds like a way to help out. And maybe I can finally find a voice for this.
9028294
I'll send you a PM.
9028300
I had forgotten about that passage!
If Twilights solving the problems of Magic Laser launch systems, how long before theyre launching Big Dumb Crystal Magic batteries into orbit for assembly, and how big would the resultant Sparkle Drive be? I hope they remember to do intermediate steps so they dont find out about temporal dilation the hard way.
In order to have the radiators in shade, if they cant do a nose first pointo towards teh sun, they would need a partial rotating shade shroud over the radiator fins at least so they can remain pointing towards space one side without being bathed in thermal sunlight on the other?
9028191
Ah, I see.
Thank you for clearing that up for me.
You know your friend very well.
Alondro draws closer and closer to the Sun... absorbing radiation! "Yes! YES!! Soon I will be reborn!"
He turns into... Nuclear Man.
adventuresinpoortaste.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/nuclear-man.jpg
Well, that sucked. Maybe the next Superman series won't go off the rails as badly as-
media1.popsugar-assets.com/files/thumbor/-ZDID8CZYUd4JXvZMdQ4UIhxu58/fit-in/1024x1024/filters:format_auto-!!-:strip_icc-!!-/2017/11/17/666/n/1922283/e99a40635a0ef96e737728.72711739_edit_img_cover_file_17268548_1510930468/i/Why-Superman-Mouth-Weird-Justice-League.jpg
Oh dear god...
9028407
If the radiators are essentially flat panels, they just need to be kept edgewise to the sun to radiate out to space. The ISS has Thermal Radiator Rotary Joints to do just that while the station orbits the Earth. It’s really surprising to learn just how many moving parts the International Space Station has on the outside aside from the obvious ones, Canadarm2 and Dextre.
Ugh, black ants. I don't know if they're worsen than SUGAR ants though. I had those in my bedroom when I was about six.
In my dresser.
Deleted two more political comments today, dammit.
9028561
M aybe they'll fix it later.
A quaman is getting a movie this year!
R ight before Christmas!
T hey aren't that evil to ruin Christmas...
H onestly...
A re they?
9028191
You might need to lower your expectations of future hard drives...
9026437
They said that changelling will probably survive.
And that Chrissy's only concern is her daughter, Princess Johansonbug.
And humans most concern is getting valuable alien data.
Corpses = valuable data.
Talking bug = Valuable Data.
I'm gonna get downvoted to Tartarus.
9029422
I have a copy right now. It’s about 80GB in size and includes images, but no video or audio files. It’s less than 50GB if you dump the images. Remember, encyclopedias are mostly text. There are even apps that allow you to put it on a smartphone, provided you have enough storage.
That's how Phase IV started, run before you have weird psychedelic underground ant sex!
9026437 Well, Cherry is there and Chryssie does see her as a kind of a friend.
That would be either speed, or delta-v. At least if that's m/s.
If that's acceleration, it needs to be m/s2, but 130g sounds a bit much for even a changeling to survive.
Would be ballpark 30g for a 27 ton vehicle. I don't know about keeping that in check with a few puny chemical thrusters.
9030142 No, you sure wouldn't. The main engines would have to be run at the same time for any real steering to be possible.
Some adjustments will definitely be required.
9029159
Why even bother censoring people? Just ignore them if they say things you can't stand.
9239441 It's not about whether or not I'm annoyed, but whether or not readers are put off by the comments.
9239782
That’s... an interesting perspective. Honestly never thought of that before.
AMICITAS: Rubber boots equipped. Go ahead, ESA.
Ahh, that lovely, absolutely logical irony.
You know, the way network messages work, even if it's corrupted, they might still make it out even if it's not entirely readable...
I mean unless they send their data in zip stream
The reactor thing is totally true.
Hell, Nucs working on missile subs actually receive less overall radiation per year then people do on average due to spending half of it underwater and shielded from solar and other background radiation sources.
The ponies have developed launching lasers.
The basic idea is that by leaving the engines & fuel on the ground, you get a much better power/mass ratio
Uncertainty time ahead
Radiation in space must be a bitch for future familie plans...
10065485
Rubber Shoes in Motion!
11356746
I was not expecting a red alert 2 reference when I scroll down to this comment section. A+ work.
11495261
Yer welcome.
Mark is a lot better of than in the original, yet i wonder what Mars colonies would look like, more importantly:
When?