AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 426
ARES III SOL 419
“Glass pyramids.”
“Yeah. Bubbles would be better, because they’d be more resistant against breaking after a serious jolt, but that’s pretty much it.”
“Eighty-four glass pyramids.”
“No, just fifty-six. If we put them on the solar panels we carry on the rover, they won’t stack anymore, and we won’t be able to carry them.”
“All right. Fifty-six glass pyramids. On top of the ship. Which no longer has a safe place to stand on top of it, if it ever had one, because it’s covered with solar panels.”
“Starlight, I get the feeling you’re less than enthusiastic about my little brainstorm,” Mark said.
Starlight rolled her eyes. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
“Look, it’s this or take a lot longer to get to the Mav,” Mark said. “Like nine days longer if absolutely nothing goes wrong. Unless you can think of some other way to juice up the solar panels? Or maybe I could dismantle the wheels on the nose gear, remove their motors, and rig some sort of bicycle so we could take turns manually charging the batteries?”
Starlight shook her head. “Where do you get these ideas?” she asked.
“I dunno,” Mark said. “Where did you get yours? The cave farm is almost entirely your baby, you know.”
Starlight’s head continued shaking. “There’s a little shop in the crater behind the Hab,” she said with mixed sarcasm and disgust. “Can’t miss it. Big sign saying ‘DISCOUNT BAD IDEAS.’ Fireball has a gold card membership, and I put the shop owner’s kid through college.”
Mark chuckled. “I think my jokes may be rubbing off on you a bit.”
“No, seriously, Mark,” Starlight Glimmer said, setting her hooves on the worktable, “I don’t have original ideas. Not good ones. I know a ton of spells because I was an obsessed little filly who wanted to bend the world to her wishes. Every time I think of something myself, it goes wrong.”
“Not true,” Mark said.
“Transmuting rocks to ballistic cherries.”
“You could probably do it now.”
“The perchlorate spell.”
“Which we use for salt mining. God, I don’t know what we’d do without that.”
“The methane spell.”
“That one was my idea, remember?” Mark smiled. “Look, I’m not letting you off the hook. Most of the time if I come up with an idea, I have to come to you for implementation, right? But you came up with the translation spell that got us talking at first. You sealed the cave for the first time without asking for help from home. The lighting crystals were all you. Using the rainbow crystals to circulate water and add heat to the cave- all you. I couldn’t have done any of that by myself. If it was left to me, we’d still be playing Pictionary.”
Starlight looked at the whiteboard currently in the Hab. It had been drawn on and erased until the residue had made it less a white and more a darkish grey. “That’d be a neat trick,” she said.
“Look, I’m sorry I’m always imposing on you,” Mark said. “Believe me, I’d love to learn magic. I’d need a wand or something like in Harry Potter, but even if I could just make colored lights like you do-“
“Mark, we have wands that make light. They’re called flashlights. You have them too.” She sighed. “Look, take it from a recovering magic addict. Magic isn’t everything. It’s a tool just like anything else, and it can be dangerous if used irresponsibly.”
“I’d still love to learn.”
Starlight sighed again. “If you visit Pony-land, we’ll see what can be done, okay?” She lit up her horn- it took a lot from her reserves, with the plants gone from the Hab- and made a line-picture in light above the work table. “Why a pyramid?” she asked.
“Surface area and angles,” Mark said. “Imagine each square meter as four right triangles with the hypotenuse being a side of the square. 45-45-90 isosceles triangles, right? Each of them is a quarter square meter in area. Now imagine four 60-60-60 triangles instead- equilateral triangles, all of the sides being one meter long. Do the math, and each of those is a bit more than two-fifths of a square meter in area. More surface area. And since it stands up above the panel, you end up able to catch even a bit of light from lower angles. Add your light-gathering spell, and you get… well, I don’t know how much you get, but more than we’re getting now.”
“Huh.” Starlight thought about this for a moment, then banished the cantrip. She couldn’t hold it much longer anyway. “You don’t want bubbles,” she said. “They might be more sturdy, but they’d be lenses concentrating all the light on a single point. Bad idea, don’t you think?”
Mark blinked. “Oh. Yeah, you’re right. I’d forgotten about that.”
“I think I can cobble together something from a couple of mirror spells- not like Granny Weatherwax’s sister did, perfectly safe stuff. Instead of being a relay like in the cave, I could have the glass just refract any light that hits it straight down onto the panel. There might still be some hot spots, but nothing that would melt the panel.”
“Okay, I can see it.”
“The problem is, these things will have to be thin to save weight,” Starlight continued. “And they’ll have to rest only on the panel frame, so they don’t damage the cells. These are going to get broken a lot, Mark.”
“Can you fix them?”
“I can’t patch them. If they crack, good-bye enchantment. No, I’d have to replace any broken dome. That means bringing along raw material for repairs. A couple of big blocks of the clearest quartz we can find. I might be able to recycle broken domes into new ones, but I think we’d better add half a ton of quartz to the load.”
Mark groaned. “You know we’re trying to move faster, not slower, right?”
“If you think we’re going to find a second gem cave on the trip-“
“No, no, I get you,” Mark said, waving a hand in defeat. “When can we begin?”
“I need a place where I can stand and look down on the rover from not too far away,” Starlight said. “That means a gully with steep sides somewhere. Site Epsilon’s sides aren’t steep enough.”
“Okay. Get the crystal you need tomorrow, installation the next sol, Sirius 7C after that?”
“Sounds good.”
In my mind those batteries have more posts so that you can connect them together. Would that make sense?
Putting solar collectors on the panels? clever.
Say, that orbital shot spell, if they toned it way down and slapped on some kind of regulator, wouldn't they have repulsorlift tech? It occurs to me that Equestria jumped from steam trains to advanced rocketry without ever noticing internal combustion. funny that.
Magic batteries have two posts as a simple safety feature. If one has a brief fluctuation or interruption in drawing magic from the internal crystalline structure, the other continues supplying magic.
9109211 I think you might want to read up some deeper details on the Cuban Missile Crisis. And how it rather began by Kennedy initiating the Bay of Pigs Invasion, mainly by allowing the CIA to run the covert operation despite quite a few high-ranking military officers advising it would not be successful.
Yes, the initial plan was Eisenhower's, but what was enacted was not Eisenhower's plan at all.
Also, Kennedy was constantly in secret planning regarding assassinating Castro and staging internal coups, all of which led to the Soviets attempting to bolster their ally. Make no mistake, Kennedy HATED communists with a passion almost rivaling McCarthy. He was simply much better at presenting a smiling public face.
Indeed, as we learned many years later, one single officer on a Soviet sub in 1962 defied the others when the decision came to launch their nuclear torpedo when they were surrounded by US warships (unknown to the US ships, who were simply dropping sounding charges). So yes, the Cuban Missile Crisis too was stopped from an all-out nuclear war by one Soviet Officer on a ship who wouldn't go along with pushing the button.
Reagan was responding to increased international Soviet aggression by sickly old leaders of the USSR (especially the invasion of Afghanistan, and sentiments arising from the downing of a civilian airliner which had deviated from its flight path due to a failure of the switching of autopilot systems), 3 of those leaders whom died in quick succession leading finally to Gorbachev who'd wanted major reforms of the Soviet system for years.
At least you're aware LBJ was a corrupt idiot. I know full well Nixon was an opportunist. And he was almost a clever one. That foolish Watergate stunt was utterly pointless, as was the taking off illegal campaign contributions. His win in that reelection was practically guaranteed from the get-go, and indeed he won by the largest margin in US history. He forgot that you wait until AFTER the election to take corporate money under the table, usually in the form of hidden options trades and donations to 'charities' set up as slush funds. Then you can also receive outlandish public speaking fees from everyone who wants to buy influence.
The Clintons were masters of that. It's the one thing I had to grudgingly admire. They had corruption down to an art form.
I'm thinking that extra post is for connecting several of them in serial, or else it's just a backup in case the first one fails... what do you think?
9109254
Kinda unnecessary, when you have excess energy and are already beginning to use battery technology.
That and magic as is specified in this story and as is used in several Equestrian artifacts can be packed super dense. Take the Alicorn amulet and the the Crystal Heart as examples. They are ridiculously small, but pack ridiculous amounts of energy. Scientists today would give an arm, a leg and half of anything to have the kind of energy density and charge/discharge capacity the crystal heart possesses.
9109308
Exactly! So bring on the hover cars! 'twould Be funny if Earth wound up importing advanced "technology" from Equestria, instead of the other way around.
9109263 And now that's crossing the line into politics for sure. So, stopping it now.
9109321 The only reason we haven't already got flying cars, without magic, is that there are still enough people who realize how disastrous it would be to give the typical driver, of ANY nation, a third possible axis of movement.
This is a damn awesome potential foreshadow and likely definitive indication of what's been talked about when off-scene!
Conversations such as this and prior ones have really fleshed out the story by giving it depth that's almost always lacking. Well done, good sir, well done...
9109270
9109260
9109233
Or it could be to to be an alternating current. Picture the Sparkle Drive as a giant spell that many different components. If the power enters the spell from one location only its possible that one 'side' of the spell recieves more magic then the rest of it. And due to people being foolish, if you just have only one post they will design their components with only 1 magical entry point.
By making alternating magical charge, you prevent both this Murphy's law problem and the single spell entry point problem entirely.
Or it could be a heat thing. One node has 100% of the energy passing through it. By having 2, you have less strain on the node
And I believe I remember scenes where Magic has arced between those two nodes, like Electricity. This may actually be an intentional use of the magical battery to create a highly focused point of magical energy or increase the ambient magic level.
I have no science behind that, as generating a non-polar arc is not something I can imagine, however I do know that the energy released in such an arc is so high that the most high temperature industrial furnaces are made using electrical arcs.
Also primitive radios were made originally using Spark Gaps to create an arc to send the signal.
And finally spark gaps can be used to protect against electrical surges. Its possible its a safety system to prevent magical surges from damaging sensitive magical equipment.
9109338
Flying cars? Storms no! you're right, that's a terrible idea! I was thinking more along the lines of replacing the whole traction-based propulsion of ground-based transports with a few feet of repulsor field. y'know, Star Wars style. For sure, such a thing would make the castaways current struggles much easier. Talk about an all-terrain drive...
9109338
Yeah, we need to wait till we've got good flying autopilots and work out the legal issues with self driving cars
9109325
9109263
Ah, damn. Missed out on an opportunity to bash on dear old cousin Nixon before it got shut down...
(not joking, Nixon actually is a distant cousin of mine. I have the genealogical evidence to prove it, thanks to a very dedicated aunt whose passion was documenting the family's history)
Hah! I've finally caught up with the latest chapter! I can finally go to sleep at decent time. Except it's already 7:30 AM my time. Maybe tomorrow...
An issue with the sustainability of the cave farm.
If all the system does is inject CO2 when it gets too low, and then vent cave air back to mars when there's overpressure as a result, it seems like it wouldn't be all that long before the cave runs out of water.
Since mars is so dry, any incoming air would be devoid of water, but the vented air would be moisture rich. I'm not sure what the rate of depletion would be, but unless they integrate the water reclaimer or some equivalent into the loop, it's only a matter of time before the cave runs out.
I feel like Starlight's solution here is running an ugly case of 'Six One-Way', 'Half-a-dozen the other'.
She wants to save weight by making the collector panes extremely thin and thus fragile. But she then suggests carrying a chunk of quartz with them to act as a supply cache to replace it.
Not only does this result in putting the weight they wanted to save right back on, it also implies a loss of magical power and time. How? By stopping to repair damaged panes.
Even assuming they only do repairs when stopped, she will STILL expend magic they will need at a later critical moment for the repair, as well as lose the energy concentration of that pane until they pit stop for the day.
No. What she needs to do is make the panes suitably solid so they resist damage. But she also needs to get Dragonfly to create epoxy gaskets as they install them so that physical shocks don't transfer into the panes.
We always figured magic was more resonance-based, and the two "poles" were used to create an imbalance (effectively, something akin to how an inductor coil or capacitor interferes with electron flows) which is how actual "turning on and off" the battery works. It's a bit more complicated because it's not electricity, but just handwaving "it's magic" is silly.
The interconnecting aspect of the terminals is for linking the resonances in a similarly controlled fashion, else you just get a typical magic rush released with a bang and magic is wasted.
The two post could be set so they put out different wavelengths of the magic or a high pressure feed and low pressure feed.
9109415
Welcome to the club!
If a magic battery only had one terminal, then it would be more like a gas storage tank like pressurised hydrogen or liquid nitrogen? but to get self recharging versions of those would imply Maxwells Deamons crammed into the walls?
Quartz is pretty resiliant stuff, especially fused quartz, but even with Fireball Im pretty sure they couldnt cast transparent enough sheets at all. Non rigid mounting reduces shocks by orders of magnitude. Takes little goop, fabric etc?
With the rover covered in solar panels, and those being covered in dozens of glass pyramids, all I can imagine is a giant glass hedgehog, just rolling it's way across Mars.
9109338
Pffft, it's my opinion that many drivers of any nation arent competent to drive conventional land cars, let alone anything that can fly.
> pops champagne cork
9109565
She wants to make collectors lighter not because it's lessen strain on suspension (which is already overloaded anyway), but to lessen chances of breaking solar panels by this pyramids over them,
9109338
Heh, we'd need to overhaul air traffic control.
By the way, have you seen the new KSP workshop mission made with the DLC: "THE DUNATIAN 2.4"? As the name suggests, this is (a part of) The Martian, but in KSP. Seeing as CSP is inspired by KSP, I though that this might interest you, if you don't know about it yet.
I haven't done it, since I don't have the Making History Expansion (mixed reviews made me hold back), but maybe you might want to do it.
Don’t make promises like that Starlight. Were I in Marks shoes, you would have zero chance of getting out of turning me into the first ever legitimized human wizard. Good luck getting me to stop training either, I would put Twilight to shame with magical studies.
Hmm. Given the maintenance, the raw materials, the magic expenditure...
I'm really not sure if those focusing d4s are worth the trouble. I suppose we'll see in time.
Pyramids? On Mars? Sutekh will be delighted.
9109897
Depends on how much electricity they need at the other end.
Should they do the modifications i’d have in mind, rather than the ones they are currently planning, they would need to create a lot of methane, such that power is a potential limiting factor.
9109753
Nooooo, I'm not buying that. Mounting the edges around the panel vs. on the panel should be trivial.
EDIT:
@Yutah123
Oh no, there is no overhaul in the concept of air traffic control in the history of forever that could fix the problem. The Lowest Common Denominator of driver (which is also the most prolific in number), has enough of a problem following instruction, maintaining awareness of their surroundings, and being considerate of basic consideration for the traffic around them in a 2D environment. Many of them can't even handle forward and backward without a good amount of dopeslaps to the skull and shouts of 'WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!?' You give these people the third axis, and the resulting death toll will make it look like the Nazi Party was right about their insane plans for eugenics. And I'm ONLY counting what you would call the 'immediate' deaths you would normally find in mildly energetic ground collisions, not how many people would die after their non-functional vehicles plummet a few hundred feet to the ground at over a hundred MPH, and whatever building they may happen to be over at the time.
Humans are not psychologically built for flying. Our entire awareness is centered on perceiving a flat plane around and in front of us at low speeds. It is proven and implemented in VIDEO GAME DESIGN that people need some kind of active prompting to even look UP in a known 3-D puzzle environment. Understand that? Essentially, looking up and down has to be actively thought about by the person. It's not automatic. Even the arrangement of our sensory organs doesn't permit it. The eyes and ears are only spaced horizontally, so you don't even have any real fidelity in detecting altitude differentials. Especially with hearing.
No, Starlight can not make new dome on the trip , because they can not use magic battery.
9109880
It has been already stated magic can only be accessed by unicorns and other races with a built up "magic wand". The most Starlight can do for Mark is to give him an enchanted, charged item.
Just say that Mana batteries require particulate flow. Thaums are electrons, or something.
Wait... thin... to save weight? But if you’re going to bring along extra materials for repairs, why not just make them thick using said materials instead?
9109909 Or not. Wasn't Sutekh's philosophy basically a more verbose version of "diediediediediediediediediedie"?
9110014 No, they're explicitly taking along a lot of magic batteries so they can potentially use them. It's just that any magic used will be glacially slow to regenerate, if it regenerates at all- basically stuck at the same rate of regeneration it was when the ponies first brought the two emergency batteries to the Hab.
9110169 Not weight on the ship, weight on the existing panels. The panels are robust, but not indestructible. They were deliberately built to be lightweight for transit to Mars in the first place. Though weight on the ship is also a concern.
9109912 The frames are stronger than the solar cells themselves, of course, but they're still lightweight- and silicon dioxide is HEAVY in pretty much any form.
9110380
Doesn't matter. It's not like the frames are made of plastic that's been turning brittle in the sunlight like a milk jug left on the porch.
You need two posts so you can grab them and go, "Ahhhhhhh!" with all your hair standing on end with lots of lightning bolts dancing over you..
Hang on, the farm solar collector crystals work by being X square area large but grabbing X times Y square area of solar insolation from the surroundings above, essentially pretending via magic that there was an invisible Fresnel lens floating above each the solar collector crystals focused directly onto the crystals.
This means, if the solar crystal array on the panels act like one big crystal instead of each section stealing incoming light from the rest and can spread out the gathered light across the entire base, then you would have to space out the stationary solar panels even further apart when deployed and the mobile solar panels jammed side by side would each be stealing light from eachother with no net gain after the first solar panel stole the light that would have landed in its X times Y surrounding area.
But, if the crystal array cannot work in tandem as described above, then the only way the solar collectors can work are as single fist sized crystals -suspended- above each solar panel on a sturdy telescoping rig of some sort, exactly like an inverted fresnel solar stirling engine.
9110693 Which is one reason why they're not going to do it exactly that way.
9110380
I don’t think those panels will be collapsing under some added quartz weight. Do you think you can run those stress calculations to check?
I sure don’t know how to >.>
9110762 A sheet of quartz only one centimeter thick, of two square meters in profile, weighs 53 kilograms, or just short of 117 pounds. The solar cells underneath, minus the frame they're in, weigh about one-TENTH that.
A centimeter is damn thin for glass (or crystal glass), but that's already adding a ton and a half, almost, to the roof of the Whinnybago.
Half a ton for repairs, to be honest, is optimistic.
9110815
While that is many, many times heavier than I expected... Just because the panel is light, doesn’t mean it can’t take some weight. Solar panels, particularly mars rover panels, are designed not only to be light, but (I would presume) able to support heavy Martian dust and winds- Perhaps not stronger storms, which would have them folded, but at least lighter storms. I would think (haven’t run numbers) that this would put the panel at being able to support enough weight that the crystal probably would be too thick to break under most conditions, excepting another Crazed Martian Storm.
9110816
My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
"One shall stand, one shall fall."
9109912
So, leave flying to the birds, pegasi, and not-totally-incompetent professional pilots?
It's just like in some kind of action movie; hide on the ceiling, and no one will find you.
I wonder what would happen if people were allowed to build and fly their own rockets in real life willy-nilly. Considering the number of "rapid unplanned disassemblies" I've had in Kerbal Space Program, I'm sure it will be the start of the Acopalypse.
9110700
Do i take your reply to mean that i correctly described how the solar concentrator crystals work?
Where X is the physical square area of crystal exposed to physical insolation, which is magically multiplied by Y to produce Z, which is the total square area of insolation the crystal is gathering centered around the crystal, and that total insolation of the square area of Z is then re-emitted within a square area of X at the underside of the crystal with a resulting higher concentration that can only diffuse over distance or geometry if the emmitting side?
-------------------------
also, which way were you referring to by "they are not going to do it that way":
A.) Sheet of thin tandem-enchanted crystals cooperatively gathering insolation across a X times Y area and diffusively distributing the light across the square area of X, the bottom side of the sheet
B.) fist sized chunk of solar concentration crystal suspended over each panel to diffuse via distance the collected insolation across the area of the panel i.e. how a projector spreads concentrated light across a prefocused rectangle.
C.) Neither
D.) Spoilers
There have been functional flying car designs[/ur around for quite some time. None of them are especially practical though, although several have been both driven and flown.
9111089 When I came up with the idea my main thought was, "Collectors up top with a complex carved shape that has a LOT of surface area, all collecting sunlight, then beaming it down to more simply carved emitter made from the base of the crystal the collector was lopped off of."
That'll look gaudy as fudge.