MISSION LOG – SOL 302
We have a trailer.
It took all of about ten minutes, using magic and a bit of hands-on fine guidance, to put what remains of the pony ship onto the Rover 1 chassis. It then took a total of eleven hours of EVA over Sols 299 and 300 to make sure it stayed there. Three people crawling over each other in a trench made to hold maybe one, reaching up with socket wrenches with every extension attached, fumbling around every time a nut failed to thread and fell down in the trench with us… oh, and did I mention the spacesuits? Yeah. Spacesuits.
There are now forty-four separate places where we’ve improvised a bracket or clamp and bolted it down tight around a member of the rover chassis. But we had to do it. The details on Sirius Tandem Rover Procedure 5-E say that we should reuse or install fresh “as many mounting points as possible,” and NASA is absolutely right when they say that. We need them all and probably more.
Even empty, with everything we can strip out of it yanked, and even with close to half the ship cut off, Friendship weighs at least sixteen tons. Every bump, every wobble, every tilt of the chassis is going to put stress on those attachment points, and if they fail on the trip, we’re fucked. We can’t make it lighter- in fact, every step from here on adds more weight to it. So our only choice, short of welding the two together (which we might do, if Starlight has the spell and we can find something for filler), is recycling every fastener for which a hole already exists on the bottom of the pony ship’s hull and looping it around bits of the rover chassis.
Which we did. Fortunately the rover chassis is a big open mesh frame, which makes it easy to fasten things to. Unfortunately that requires threading socket wrenches through the frame while wearing spacesuits, which is why it took two sols to install forty-four mounting points.
By comparison, yesterday’s chore was dirt simple- finishing the connections that unite the towhook assembly, with all the linkages to Rover 2’s life support, and the pony ship. I’d already installed the mounts in the ship’s pressure vessel, complete with their self-sealing-in-vacuum valves. So all I had to do, with Starlight Glimmer’s and Dragonfly’s help, was rig a few new hoses for the few inches between the towhook and the rear of the ship (the ship being mounted backwards on the chassis, remember), then going into the ship to connect the life support system from Rover 1 plus auxiliary lines to the place where the big life support box will be mounted.
That required a bit of tinkering. The life support box’s original home was in the engineering compartment, which breached on landing and which now is so much scrap metal awaiting our need for more bolts. The air lines on the pony ship automatically seal if any one compartment loses pressure, but we needed to salvage those lines to make the linkages between the box and Rover 1’s old life support. That meant patching two more holes in the pressure vessel, which required precision-cutting and threading two plugs and screwing them into place, with changeling goo as a thread gasket.
Putting in the plugs was the easy part. The hard part was moving the hay we’re storing in the ship for the third time so we could depressurize the habitat compartment and remove the pipe sections we wanted. Moving the hay took twice as long as all the other EVA tasks combined.
But we got it done, and now the only thing left to do with the trailer life support is to put the box in its new mount and connect the air hoses plus a water faucet. We even had EVA time remaining to install the lighting strips and get some real light in the ship again. The ponies were down to one bulb per compartment and no spares left.
The next step is moving as many solar panels as possible onto permanent mounts on top of the ship. That takes planning, because (among other reasons) it’s a long way down from the top of the ship- even more than before, since the rover chassis stands a lot taller than the old rear landing gear.
That’s fine by me. There are only two action points left on the procedure for the trailer, and then four for Rover 2 (since I already decided Pathfinder isn’t coming along). We could be finished by Sol 320 even if we take it easy. And since the tests require steps that commit us to shutting down the cave farm, I don’t want to do them until at least Sol 420. So there really isn’t a hurry. We can take it easy.
I especially want Dragonfly to take it easy. It’s nice to see her around, and she’s filling out a bit now that she’s out of that cocoon. But she still looks like a bug-pony chemotherapy patient. She’s nowhere near as energetic as she was pre-cocoon, and as much as she tries to hide it, she gets tired easily. Recovery for her is going to be a long, slow process- which is the main reason I’m in no hurry to decommission the farm.
Tomorrow, after a stop at the cave farm, Starlight and I will go a bit further east for a new salt-gathering site. We’re scraping the box now, after using so much on the homemade baked chips we had for the party. Then we’ll see what we can do about safety gear for me being on top of the ship bolting solar panels onto the roof. After that, we’ll spend a day just moving the panels close enough to the Hab to make it easy.
Actually, come to think of it, I need to rebuild the power converter I cobbled together so it can include a socket to plug the solar panels into. There’s another reason to postpone trusting my life to the skill of a unicorn whose magic has this unfortunate habit of flickering out without warning. I can’t possibly imagine why I’d have misgivings about that.
So, yeah. We’re going to take it easy. While Mars lets us.