Horrible Mechanical [Slice of Life, OCs]
A few days in the work life of Trinket Toss.
June 11, Monday.
Boss assigned me to fix a small airship today. Its mass was probably under 10 tons, though Boss didn’t specify the model. I could only hope it wouldn’t be necessary to know the model number to find the right parts to fix ut. Apparently, the customer brought it in because it “turns sluggish” and “the lift doesn’t feel right”. I guess that’s better than saying “it doesn’t fly normal”.
Boss didn’t think the model number was important for the small airship I had to fix today so he didn’t try and find it. I wish I could say this was the first time. He told me if it was so important that I could find it listed on or near the ship’s wheel. I would have explained that most ships didn’t have that, especially if the wheel had been replaced, but it wasn’t worth it. Part numbers were the best I could expect, and those aren’t always present.
Boss worked in his office most of the day, which was good. Ether kept me company, but she got in the way a bunch. I couldn’t be angry at her, though. Boss just thought she was a stray cat that hung around, but if he ever went out back, he might see the bowls I fill every day for her.
This ship was a standard steam-lift, steam-power model. Packer (his name is actually Pay Load, but we just call him Packer ‘cause he packs the gasbags up a lot) had no trouble stowing the gasbag.
I checked the steering system first: The ship uses a pulley transmission from the ship’s wheel, and it doesn’t look like the motors are involved in turning or at least not with the wheel and I guess this ship just turns slow anyway. The rear rudder assembly was rusted a lot. The whole assembly needed to be replaced. I tugged the pulley and it wasn’t any harder to turn than I expected, but more parts of the rudder assembly were moving than were supposed to. The rudder probably didn’t turn as far as it was supposed to, either. The rusting probably started a long time ago and the customer never bothered to bring it in.
I have to wonder why ponies or companies can buy expensive ships and then not take them in for maintenance or repairs for so long, but they do that a lot. Last month, Wing Nut spent two weeks fixing almost everything on one used for internal deliveries by a company. It almost would have been easier to build a new one, but I don’t think it would have been cheaper.
I told Packer that the rusting suggested a gasbag leak because there weren’t any water lines ran nearby and the boiler wasn’t close either. He’s going to pump air in and check later.
Rusted bolts don’t come off well, but there are some holding the rudder assembly together and the gears especially and I need them to come off. I used a hammer to force the wrench, and it worked, but the wrench was all wonky after. Wing Nut has a large set of specialty wrenches and I think some are longer and they are all stronger. I probably should have borrowed one.
I’ll have to take measurements for the parts, but they don’t look special and shouldn’t be hard to find replacements for.
After I got the rudder assembly completely off, I talked to Wing Nut about her set of wrenches and she told me where I could buy them, but they weren’t cheap. Boss never agreed on buying tools that were expensive, so I would have to pay for them myself if I wanted them. Wing Nut said it was okay if I needed to borrow one, though, but not to hit it with a hammer because that was her privilege.
I found the parts to replace the rudder assembly in our catalogue. I asked Boss if we should order the rust-resistant ones but he said the customer hadn’t asked for it and that would just increase the repair cost so no. I figured Boss would say that.
June 12, Tuesday.
There was a special airship in the drydock today. Boss says it’s an important customer.
It’s a BD-12. I know Yellow Diamond is a company that makes magitech engines and boilers and imbued materials and things and I heard they made a sister company to start manufacturing their own airships, but I haven’t seen any ships built by Blue Diamond before.
The problem is that the right-side engine isn’t spinning up as fast and that’s turning the ship when it accelerates or slows down. I wasn’t certified to fix magitech engines but Boss told me to try anyway because it was still an airship so how different could it be?
Boss still won’t get my name right. He calls me “Tinker”. I admit it’s not really far off from “Trinket Toss”, but he won’t even try and that’s what annoys me.
His “important customer” I think is a buddy he golfs with who must have a lot more bits than I do, because magitech airships are expensive. His buddy is probably a unicorn, too, because the doorways to the rooms on the airship are small but peaked, which you usually see on airships that unicorns pilot because of their horns. I don’t know what Boss gets in return but I think it must be something. Maybe he just want to look good in front of his friends. Canterlot ponies are like that a lot.
I can just imagine Boss complaining to some rich pony about how the ponies who work for him can barely do their jobs and aren’t as smart as he is. I’d bet my savings that he does. I told him I wasn’t certified and we got into a bit of an argument about how hard it was to fix arships and how magic worked. I think Boss thinks that all magic is the same but pegasus magic and unicorn magic aren’t and I don’t think earth pony magic is the same either. I don’t know what earth pony magic is any more than I think he knows what pegasus magic is. I don’t even think he knows what unicorn magic is beyond his own horn.
It took a couple of hours for me to open up the engine and be confident that I wouldn’t break it worse and forget how to put it back together. It was pretty neat to see the faintly-glowing lines running through and a few larger crystals neatly arranged around a similarly-glowing rod, which faded into the metal shaft that the propellers were attached to. One of the crystals looked a little more dull than its friends, and I wondered if it was cracked but I couldn’t get a good look without taking the engine apart more.
Over lunch, Flywheel and Wing Nut and I talked about it and from what we knew, the crystals were the accelerators and they made the shaft spin. If one was broken that’d make sense because the engines are probably supposed to stop at a certain speed for safety reasons, so it wouldn’t make a difference once the engine got up to that speed.
Then we also talked about airships in general. Flywheel knew that Princess Twilight Sparkle had given out grants for airship research a few months ago, and that Yellow Diamond had gotten a big one for trying to power a boiler with just draconic mana. We all figured that we’d start to see some new parts and models of airships before too long, so we’d probably want to read up on who’s doing what. Packer joined us and said he heard about a double-layered gasbag prototype in the works so the middle could have superheated steam that was lighter but the outside would be colder steam and it would still act as a condenser for the engines.
Packer also told me I was right and he found the hole in the unidentified airship’s balloon so he was working on patching it up.
I took the engine apart some more and the crystal was definitely not right. I don’t know what caused it, though, and that has me worried. I traced the ley lines to the onboard mana bank (that’s what powers the accelerators). I guess maybe the mana bank or the ley lines could have had something to do with it, kind of like a leaky pipe.
I had to shoo Ether away so that she didn’t try and jump in front of me, which would have been into an engine. After I had opened the one engine, I opened the opposite one so I could compare and that’s how I knew the crystal was bad. I’m at my wit’s end trying to figure this out because I really don’t know that much about magitech but that doesn’t matter to Boss. I guess that makes sense because I don’t think he knows much about anything other than money and that doesn’t matter to him.
Boss came in to check on me again and he wanted to know why I opened the other engine. That started another argument about why he accepted a magitech airship in the first place when nobody here knew how to fix them. I would feel worse arguing with him but I knew it was just the way he was and he argued with everyone the same way. I told him I didn’t want to make it worse by removing the wrong bolt or something but he wasn’t really happy with anything I could say. He told me he wanted it done by the end of tomorrow then he went to his office. I’m glad he did that because he helps us fix the airships sometimes and about half the time he just makes it harder to get anything done.
I finished tracing the ley lines after he left so I wrote him a note. I knew approximately how to check for bad ley lines or a leaky mana bank, but I wasn’t a unicorn so I’d need special tools for that and he would have to rent them. I don’t think he’ll be happy with that. I didn’t say it was because I wasn’t a unicorn, because if I did that then I know he’d just diagnose them himself and I don’t think he would do a good job of it.
June 13, Wednesday
The BD-12 suffered another crystal failure, probably due to a bad ley line or mana bank. It isn’t possible for me to tell without the proper equipment, which Boss did not opt to rent.
When I got to the drydock, he complained about how late I stayed yesterday because he’d have to pay me overtime. And he had decided that he was going to diagnose the ley lines and mana bank himself and he had already sent for a new crystal. I told him we should get a proper thaumometer and diagnostic interface, but he said they never worked right and the last time he used one it displayed the number four followed by a bunch of gibberish letters. I almost told him that was probably an error code, but I didn’t want to argue against Boss, who was never wrong.
I ended up helping Packer fix a personal airship that had been caught in a gust while landing and run into some trees. Mostly the hull had been banged up, but some of the water lines needed replaced and that’s what I did. The gasbag was intact, so Tow Line took the tug-ship out and spent the morning bringing it in. Tow Line is nice, and I kind of wish he had more reason to come by.
Then we heard a loud “poof”, which sounded sort of silly and sort of serious. That’s when the second crystal failed. Boss had decided, qualified only by his status as a unicorn, that the mana system was fine, so he replaced the crystal and fired it up (figuratively, because it didn’t need a fire). I’ve heard of “magic smoke” coming from magitech failures, but the green haze was more than I had expected.
Boss started yelling at me about how I should have known that something else was wrong and I started yelling back that he just determined it was safe, but the way he saw it, I didn’t know what was wrong exactly so it was my fault anyway. I don’t think he completely believed that deep down or he might have fired me. Or he’s just not good at running a drydock because I probably would have fired someone if I knew they did something very wrong that cost a lot of money.
One day, maybe I can build my own drydock and run it myself so I don’t have to deal with ponies like this. Boss was furious at everything (except Ether) for the rest of the day.
The replacement rudder assembly for the airship I looked at two days ago arrived, so I spent some time installing that and I’m glad it was in the bay farthest from his office.
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Steven Universe~! Magitech!
Diamond... Diamond Tiara companies?
Slice of Life-y! ... Lol, totally missed the tags.
Hope the Diamond Industries run an investigation and clean up this joint, getting Trinket Toss some better working conditions?
Interesting how Trinket Toss is never indicated as female, and it only appears in the Author's Notes. Not like it's relevant to the story. Makes sense.
9060069
Nah, Tiara is still a filly.
The problem with pointy-haired bosses is that they do a good job of looking fine on paper and even in person because they know what to say to someone important (like his golf buddy). The working conditions aren't terrible, but Boss (which is not actually his name) is a narcissistic possibly-rageaholic that makes it less-than-enjoyable sometimes.
That is mildly interesting, but there really isn't much reason for her to remark to herself that she's female. It's just too obvious to her.
Bowels are usually something you empty
They're actually both subsidiaries of a holding firm called White Diamond, but nopony knows much about it. And the less said about Pink Diamond, the experimental petriculture supply company, the better...
In any case, some delightful Biscuity goodness. Awesome example of technological word building from a great viewpoint for it.
9060600
Fixed; thanks. Maybe I should have Bugsy go over these a little more often. The last several have been sans any sort of proofreading. That said, only a few typos per thousand words is probably reasonable for an unchecked nearly-first draft. The dumb-humor side of me wants to make some sort of joke about the cat's bowels being the ones Trinket Toss is filling (indirectly), but it's not a good joke so I'm gonna leave it at that.
9060792
(Mandatory AB heart.)
If this idea ever goes anywhere, your contribution to the reference is/will be canon.
I don't know if the Admiral himself has had a chance to read this yet; unless my understanding is way off (nobody told me specifically exactly when Trotcon is and I haven't bothered to look it up yet), he's at Trotcon this weekend.
Steam airships are now my headcanon for ponies' default airship technology. Vacuum airships would have the best lift and potentially be the easiest to "refill" with their "lift gas" on the field (especially in a desert), but the material science required to pull those off are beyond what we yet seem to have, and I think it'd take the ponies a bit to come up with equivalent workarounds or properly imbued materials. Vertically-mounted magitech engines are a potentially more viable option for them to increase payload, but I imagine that magitech is an efficient option in small scales, but gets less viable as the scale goes up. Plus, a failing large mana bank is probably roughly equivalently as dangerous as a failing lithium-ion battery bank (catastrophic failure, that is). The red-mana-powered boiler might be a good compromise between magitech and steam power, but I don't know enough about the workings of various steam engines (yet) to keep exploring these ideas.
Huzzah! Finally had a few minutes to actually read the story.
Thoughts incoming!
It’s kind of weird that she just calls him Boss, although given that it’s pony his name could actually be Boss.
A few weird grammatical bits, but then this is in diary format, and I do know people who misuse words like that (which may or may not have been what you were going for). “Some of the water lines needed replaced,” for example; I’ve heard people say that.
Trinket’s voice in the story sounded really authentic. Kind of like Silver Glow, but not quite the same. And it did sound very much like a mechanic.
I liked the way you dealt with four.gquqoption. You probably don’t know this, but there’s a standard for automotive codes, and they’re four digit hex, with an identifer for system (B for body, C for chassis, P for powertrain, and U for network), so for example you might have a P0300 code (random misfire). That was great during the early days of OBD-II (the protocol) but now that systems are far more complex than they were in the 90s, a lot of automakers have taken to adding more information to the code--you still get the base code with anything, but with the right tools, you can get the suffix. Like P0300-00. Ford’s taken it one step further, and they have a suffix and a sub-code for some vehicles. Like a B10D7:51, which tells you that a PATS key isn’t programmed, and there was a secondary code (I think it was 68, but I don’t have my notes for that vehicle with me) that indicated that it had been programmed but not correctly, so the whole code was something like B10D7:51-68. When my boss pulled the code numbers on that one, he didn’t bother with the suffix or sub-code, which didn’t narrow it down all that much.
The more you know!
(also, there isn’t a standard format for suffixes or sub-codes)
You’re also right that only the owner of the tool gets to destroy or misuse them, but there is a special case, and that’s ‘lifetime warranty.’ Then it’s okay no matter who breaks it.
i.imgur.com/KPZdTkI.jpg
(this break was mine; my co-worker broke that same ratchet much better but I don’t have a pic of that online)
You may or may not know that Blue Diamond is a company that makes matches; I found that particularly humorous given that we’re talking about airships, which were traditionally quite flammable.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2012/9/17/99885__safe_artist-colon-mortuaryjoe_lily_lily+valley_animated_hindenburg_photo_ponies+in+real+life_pony_the+horror_vector_zeppelin.gif
The Boss/Mechanic relationship is about right. I’ve had a few that do know their shit and trust the techs, but sadly that’s less common than it should be. My current manager does know his shit, but he talks down to me all the time and he’s not so good with non-GM vehicles, and he takes a lot of shortcuts where he shouldn’t. Also he’s angry all the time which doesn’t help anything.
You’re also spot-on about people who buy nice cars and then don’t maintain them. It always irks me a little bit to see someone who’s got a far nicer car than mine but who doesn’t fix anything on it and has turned it into a total piece of crap. Not that my cars aren’t pieces of crap, but the last four (not counting my current van) were literally bought on the way to the junkyard, so of course they were in rough shape.
i.imgur.com/5RHslSp.jpg
This is an older pic, but the four vehicles in the pic cost a grand total of $2000. For all four. If you zoom in, you can see that the front bumper of the white van is held together with zip ties. :P
I like the explanation of the magitech engines, too. It’s suitably vague, like in Firefly where the port catalyzer fails--it sounds good, but they never say exactly what it is. You’re also spot-on about looking at the other side to help identify flaws; it’s also a good idea when doing normal repairs. I always do drum brakes one side at a time, so I’ve got a ‘known good’ to look at if I forget where a spring’s supposed to go or something.
Even if that’s not exactly what you had in mind, I have a great mental image of Tow Line dragging a stuck airship out of a tree. Sort of like Charlie Brown’s kite, but bigger.
And if you didn’t know, uneven thrust in a twin-engined aircraft can and has caused crashes, such as Manx2 flight 7100.
Also from a technical standpoint, I like how you subtly indicated that she was a pegasus without going out there and just saying it.
Overall, I like the story. And I like Trinket and Wing Nut and kind of want to punch Boss in the muzzle. Didn’t see enough of Tow Line to get a good read on him, but if Trinket likes him, I do too.
I like the headcanon about the airships. I also have my doubts that a high-pressure steam airship would actually work, but it might. Given magic, we obviously can’t rule it out (I suspect that it’s an impractical way to build one without magic, although it may be possible). Likewise, I have my doubts about a vacuum airship; I think that in order for the envelope to be strong enough to hold a meaningful vacuum, it would be too heavy to fly, but again, it might be possible, and magic could certainly make it so. A magic shield bubble like the one around Canterlot during the changeling invasion could theoretically be strong enough and hold a vacuum. Having said that, a failure of a vacuum ball might be horrifyingly spectacular. Actually, a high-pressure steam failure might be, too, although in a different, flesh-melting way.
9067051
So much comment. I'm glad you liked it!
My notes for the story refer to him as "PHB" (short for "ponty-haired boss"). She's referring to him generically as "Boss" because he's her boss, possibly because she's not happy he won't even get her name right (a passive-aggressive valve of sorts for her frustration?), and also because I looked up Dilbert's boss. Dilbert's boss is specifically not given a name so that underlings everywhere can more easily (sympathetically?) map that boss to their own (and in a way, get to laugh at their own boss).
I did not know that, but that's actually quite close to what I had in mind here. I figured there was no reason the tools couldn't use characters beyond decimal. The letters themselves may be chosen outside of the ones you'd find in hex to denote more specific things or communicate more "clearly" than just a value you have to flip through a handbook to understand. What I had in mind was generally the code is a loose, linear map of the system being diagnosed, with the characters potentially specifying each point of interest any any errors found.
I'm more familiar with the error codes you'd find on a computer motherboard, which you can generally flip a coin to interpret: heads, it's in the book, but you have to flip the coin to see if you can do anything about it; tails, it's in the book and 'reserved for future AMI codes'.
Aye, there's a box of those somewhere in the house. That wasn't what I had in mind, but it is somewhat ironically fitting. That's one of the reasons I went with steamships; ponies probably wouldn't appreciate the potential for massive fireballs.
This, I think, is why the pointy-haired boss resonates with so many people: there are a lot of them that exhibit similar behaviors. If I have one and you have one, it's likely that at least half of what I go through is similar in one way or another to what you have to go through. Your positive reaction here just confirms it.
It doesn't stop at cars. The concept of fixing something before it breaks is foreign to a lot of people in pretty much all situations.
I had a conversation with Caliaponia about this later and how to write something you don't fully understand without conflicting with the knowledge of someone who knows all about whatever it is you're writing. I couldn't tell you how the ship's wheel translates to rudder movement, and I couldn't tell you how exactly the enchantments used in the magitech engines turn the shaft. I have good ideas, but not specifics, so I can point at the bits that aren't wrong and let the people who know fill in the rest, and the people who don't know either have enough information to move on or look it up and also fill in the rest. The consensus so far is that I succeeded.
That was a bit of a "What would I do?" moment. I have enough experience trying to figure out things that I don't understand to know that a functional, intact reference is worth at least a thousand pictures.
Nah, that's the right idea. The airship might have puttered along, but odds are at least one engine suffered enough that the thrust won't be right. It also might have gotten caught up in the trees enough that towing it out was the easiest solution anyway. With some of that hull damage, some of the pony-habitable spaces might be less-than-safe, so they didn't care to risk it.
I knew that she was (likewise with her gender), but I never thought to go out of my way to say that, because why? I just wrote the story with that knowledge in mind and apparently this is what happened. It was never really important to say, and those facts influenced the story where they did, and that's all.
High pressure is exactly what you don't want in an airship – the idea is to have a balloon filled with something lighter than air, and in most cases, having the internal pressure equal about 1 atmosphere of pressure. Less is good, if you can get away with it; that's the idea behind vacuum airships: there's nothing lighter than nothing. That said, material science is the limiting factor behind vacuum airships, though it may be possible for us to overcome that one day. Ponies do have the benefit of magic, but it might still be tricky, especially for larger airships.
Thus, I went with steam ships. Of the available lift gasses, steam and vacuum are probably the easiest to obtain anywhere, but steam has the potential to reach 1 atm of pressure, which might actually make it safer than a vacuum airship in the case of balloon failure. Condensation in the balloon can be limited with insulation, and can also serve as a condenser for steam engines that propel the ship, which is pretty neat.
The basic logic behind using steam as a lift gas:
Hot air balloons exist, so we know that heating up something that weighs as much as air (air) reduces the density enough to generate practical lift.
Air is roughly 80% N2 and 20% O2;
N = 14 g/mol, so N2 = 28 g/mol;
O = 16 g/mol, so O2 = 32 g/mol;
One mol of air, therefor, has an approximate average mass of 28.8g.
H = 1.01 g/mol, so H2O = 18.02 g/mol, significantly less than the 28.8 g/mol for air.
As a gas, the steam will generally occupy the same volume as air under similar conditions, but then consider that it has to be decidedly above 100°C, probably 105 to 110 °C for best results. The heat requirement further reduces the density of steam versus the surrounding air (and no, I'm not calculating that right now). I see it slightly more feasible for ponies to vastly superheat steam to get 1 atm of pressure with vastly reduced mass and just have heat-resisting enchantments on the balloon. It'd probably scale better than a vacuum airship. I don't know if it'd be safer at that point, though.
Since he's a unicorn, could PHB stand for Pointy-Horned Boss?
There's something about Trinket's naive-yet-incisive demeanor that really makes this fic. That and the amazing details, and the fact that you made this card work and feel so natural at the same time. I could read stuff like this forever.
Trinket Toss is a surprisingly good name. Also, the moment there was mention of the four and gibberish, I knew it had to be a direct reference to the card. :)