AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 223
ARES III SOL 221
Diediediediediediediediedie.
Dragonfly heard the voice of Mars, clear as anything, speaking fluent ancient Changeling (not that that was difficult). She paid it no mind, mostly because the others could hear it too. It was the prolonged, annoying hiss of a mild dust storm.
NASA had predicted this storm, and after spending Sol 220 making certain everything outside was as dust-proof as could be managed, the castaways were spending all day indoors, away from the clingy, abrasive fine basaltic dust blowing around outside. As Mark explained, you didn’t expose yourself to suit-damaging conditions like a dust storm if you didn’t have to, especially if you had only the one suit.
With the chores inside the Hab caught up and potato harvest not for three sols yet, each of the castaways had found a dead-time task. Cherry Berry was reviewing bids from toy companies, forwarded by NASA’s lawyers, to make toys in the likenesses of the crew. Spitfire read a primer on human illnesses, provided by NASA’s doctors and written in the simplest English they could manage. (Spitfire still found it hard going.) Starlight Glimmer graded the essays the others had written for her most recent English lesson (topic: “Five Smarter Things to Do Than Wait For the Evil Tyrant to Actually Take Over Before Going Into Hiding”). Finally, Fireball and Mark studied and discussed the instructions for stripping out the interior of Rover 1, which would be the first step towards eventually leaving the Hab.
And Dragonfly had returned to a project she’d almost forgotten about, worried as she’d been about her own health. She still felt hungry for magic- hungry, but not HUNGRY, not starving-unto-madness hungry. She had time and concentration for other things now.
Things like Sojourner.
After reviving Pathfinder, there had been a good bit of on-again, off-again tinkering with the little rover. Mark had replaced Sojourner’s old, dead internal battery with a smaller rechargeable one from his supplies that produced and stored much more power. It hadn’t helped. With NASA’s help he’d established a radio link that would allow Sojourner inside the radiation-proof Hab to speak with Pathfinder outside it. Nothing doing. They’d carefully cleaned all the dust and grit out of the interior of the robot, and then they’d done the same to the wheels and tiny electric motors inside them.
Those wheels were a marvel. Mark had told Dragonfly that, more or less, the rover wheels used the same general principles as the Sojourner wheels. The rovers had four and Sojourner had six, but each wheel had its own electric engine that powered and even steered each wheel independently.
The only drawback, as Dragonfly noted again when she used a circuit tester to pass current through the little motors, was that the motors had been geared down- way, way down- trading away speed for extra torque. With power running through it, the little wheel turned as slowly as the key on a music box. Mark had looked it up; the rover’s top speed was a pathetic twenty-four meters- not kilometers, METERS- per hour.
But the wheels worked, all six of them. They’d figured that out months ago, before Mark had left Dragonfly to it and turned his attention to more vital tasks. Since then Dragonfly had opened up the insides, read the documentation politely provided by NASA, and got as far as verifying that the probe’s little radio system’s circuit board wasn’t damaged by cold or corrosion. Then her own worries had distracted her.
But today she was less worried, she had time on her hooves, and she was ready, with very tiny and judicious applications of telekinesis and larger applications of the understrength battery that had been Starlight Glimmer’s first success, to open the Warm Electronics Box, the part that held all the stuff that Mars’s cold would likely destroy.
Mark hadn’t bothered with the warm box because, as he put it, “That’s where the CPU and PROM live. If anything’s wrong with either, it’s game over.” But Dragonfly had checked the other stuff that she could, and without the robot’s computer running she couldn’t test the on-board cameras or any of the scientific tools, not that they were particularly important.
The core of the electronics inside the warm box took the form of two circuit boards linked by ribbon cables, gone stiff and brittle after their time on Mars. There were three huge resistors on one circuit board- even with the alien electronic shapes and codes, Dragonfly recognized them and their purpose right away. One was partially melted- a very odd thing, she thought, inside a probe that was working so far below freezing. Tiny bits of slag spattered the circuit board around the bad resistor, possibly in places that could produce a short-circuit.
Hm. I can fix this, if nothing else is damaged. And if the short burned out the processors, well, it’s game over anyway.
Dragonfly yanked all three of the old resistors and replaced them with new ones of the proper wattage from Mark’s spares. Then she applied a little more magic to carefully, carefully, carefully remove the slag from the circuit board. This left a couple of gaps which Dragonfly carefully patched, using a level of precision, had she known it, that humans could have achieved only with large machines.
Okay, she thought, half an hour later and after a brief suck on the half-powered battery to replenish her magic level. Before I put power back into this thing, is anything else broken?
It didn’t take long to find the next problem, once she started seriously examining the boards. The main power lead connecting to the circuit boards was partially melted. Dragonfly had thought, when she’d opened up the warm box, that the lead was just bent backwards, folded behind the circuit board. But no- two wires of the split ribbon harness were bent back that way, but the others had slagged a gap open a small distance short of where the bend should have been. A quick look inside the cover of the warm box revealed another blotch of slag.
“Mark?” she asked. “Where’s Sojourner’s ground wire?”
Mark looked up from the computer he and Fireball were sharing. “I have no idea,” he said. “Let’s find out.”
It didn’t take long. Originally Sojourner hadn’t had a ground wire at all. But pre-launch testing had demonstrated that, in a simulated Martian environment, the little rover built up dangerous levels of static electricity. So the antenna had been modified to include a cluster of tiny tungsten filaments that would safely discharge static electricity into the Martian air.
Of the four filaments, only the tiniest stub of one remained on the antenna base. The others were broken off, gone forever.
“So,” Dragonfly speculated, after explaining what she’d found, “lightning struck the probe, fried the resistor, and melted the power cord?”
“I doubt it,” Mark said. “I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure, but I think this is two separate incidents. A static discharge event would have done a lot more damage than just popping one resistor, if it did any at all. I think the resistor failed first. Maybe the part was bad, or maybe Sojourner’s internal heat regulation system pumped too much power into it while trying to save itself from dying. Then, years later, with the probe powered down, the sandstorm that buried Pathfinder ripped off the static discharge points and built up enough internal charge to melt these wires.” He frowned and added, “And it probably fried Sojourner’s brains in the process. Pathfinder’s ground is its entire hull, and its ground wire is internal, so it didn’t have that problem.”
“Didn’t,” Dragonfly couldn’t help saying, “or doesn’t?”
The two silently considered the faint sound of Mars screaming imprecations of death at them through the canvas dome above them.
“Nothing we can do about that right now,” Mark said, after waiting far too long to do so. “And there’s a chance we might break Pathfinder trying to fix it. Let’s leave that problem for NASA.” He looked at Sojourner’s circuits, shook his head, and sighed. “The problem is, we don’t have a good way to test the chips here except trying to activate Sojourner. And if they’re bad, I don’t have replacements. So I don’t know where to go from here.”
Dragonfly considered this. Yes, she was feeling better… but was she feeling better enough for what she was about to do? Or was it a sign of her sickness that she was delusional enough to believe it made any sense? “I have an idea,” she said. “Really stupid, too.”
Mark took two rapid steps backwards. Dragonfly didn’t blame him; he’d been at ground zero for ideas she and the ponies had thought were good ideas.
She switched on the defective magic battery for a quick splash of extra power. What she was about to do wasn’t unicorn-style, flashy magic… but she wasn’t sure it was changeling magic, either. After all, changelings could detect emotion like a flavor or scent, but that didn’t make it possible for changelings to alter their flavor for others to taste.
This is silly. This is stupid. And it might be dangerous to me, weak as I still am.
And I’m doing this because I feel sorry for a stupid little ancient alien robot.
But the thing is, I’m doing it anyway.
Dragonfly closed her eyes, let out a breath, and tuned out Mark’s curiosity and the preoccupation of the others with their own tasks. She flipped the high hoof to the sandy, breezy voice of Mars- or of the dust storm, anyway. She tuned everything out, everything she could, before laying a hoof lightly on the circuit boards and thinking, Where are you hurt?
A faint taste of loneliness. Where is the voice? Where is everything? I am alone.
Where are you hurt?
I don’t see anything. I don’t hear anything. I was left alone.
Where are you hurt?
I want instructions. No one speaks. The one that instructs is not there. I am alone.
The traces of emotion weren’t helping. Frustrated, Dragonfly shouted mentally, Shut UP about being alone and show me where you’re broken!!
I can’t think. My mind is loose. My mind is split. Where is the voice?
Disgusted, Dragonfly removed her hoof. “Knew it was a dumb idea,” she hissed. “’Oh, I’m alone,’ it says. ‘Give me instructions,’ it says. ‘My mind is loose,’ it says. Stupid little robot.”
“Wait a minute,” Mark said. “Did it really say its mind was loose?”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” Dragonfly muttered. “Maybe I imagined it. Maybe I’m crazy. Just ask anyone.”
“Did you check to make sure the chips were seated properly?” Mark asked.
“Nothing rattles,” Dragonfly replied.
Mark gingerly picked up the circuit boards and carried them over to the geology lab. The Hab had a grand total of two magnifying glasses: a tiny hand-held magnifier in Mark’s tool kit, and a larger, table-mounted glass for use in preliminary study of rock samples. Mark set the circuit boards under the magnifier and began looking them over. “Uh-huh… uh-huh… fucking wonderful,” he muttered.
“What?” Dragonfly tried to look over Mark’s shoulder, which she couldn’t do without flying (which she couldn’t, not without a magic field) or climbing on Mark’s shoulder (which would have been awkward). “What is it?”
“A lot of chip connectors have snapped,” Mark said. “No melting that I can see- just a more or less clean break. I guess it’s damage from the cold.” He stood up and let Dragonfly sit on a stool to look through the magnifier.
“No slag?” Dragonfly asked. “Doesn’t that mean it happened before the power surge?”
“Mmmm,” Watney grunted noncommittally. “A power surge can leave circuits looking fine until you try to power them up again. Still no way to know.” He sighed and added, “And those connectors are tiny. I don’t know that I have the stuff to jump the gaps.”
“Leave it to me!” Dragonfly dropped off the work stool, cleared her throat and shouted, “Starlight! Could you come here for a minute?”
“Hold on!” Grumbling, Starlight walked through the potato plants to the geology table. “What is it, Ms. B-Minus?” she asked.
“I want- hey, what do you mean, B-minus?” Dragonfly protested. “That essay was perfect and you know it!”
“The English was correct,” Starlight replied. “But I docked twenty percent because you only gave me four better ideas than waiting for the tyrant.”
“I gave you five!”
“Join the Winning Team does NOT count!”
“Slytherin, remember?” Dragonfly teased. “Maybe I’ll get a snake for a pet when I get home.”
“What. Do. You. WANT?”
“Have a look at the connectors between the silicon chips and the board,” Dragonfly said, motioning Starlight to the magnifier.
Starlight took a quick look. “Aren’t those metal filaments supposed to be intact?” she asked.
“Yep!” Dragonfly replied. “Can you cast a spell to fix it?”
“I could,” Starlight said. “If it’s important enough. What’s it for?”
“It’s Sojourner.”
“The little rover?” Starlight asked. “What do we need it to do?”
“Er… nothing,” Dragonfly admitted. “I just wanted to fix it.”
“Nothing doing,” Starlight said, dropping off the stool.
“Aw, c’mon,” Dragonfly wheedled. “Not even for cute little me?”
“You’re three… um… you’re eight centimeters taller than me,” Starlight grumbled. “And I’m not going to risk more magic exhaustion repairing equipment if it’s not necessary to our survival!”
As Starlight walked away, Dragonfly said, “Well, then I’ll have to do it myself! Of course, I’m not as talented as you, so I might mess up! And I’ll have to use a lot of magic to do it! But I’m sure I’ll be fine! It’s just a major reversal of entropy- no big deal at-“
“ALL RIGHT, I’LL DO IT!”
8908482 Your point on exotic matter is correct, but the most recent drive designs only call for a couple hundred kilograms of the stuff, rather than a whole galaxy's worth. So we've gone from "it can't be done, ever" to "We just have to solve one problem- a FRICKIN' HUGE problem, but ONE- and then it's possible."
Can you imagine the surprise that NASA would get once Sojourner does a little bit of work and then sends a data dump to Pathfinder which then sends it to Earth?
Hmm...this message is somewhat ambiguous. I wonder what Mars is trying to say...
Poor little robot :( I’m glad they’re helping it.
And yay, Dragonfly’s machine empathy is for real! I wonder, once it’s powered, if they can give instructions empathically instead of by radio. I wonder if that will tell them the threshold of power required for Mars to actually hurt them. Hmm, tests...
8908482
The Casimar effect is a result of quantum energy fluctuations in empty space. If you hang two parallel flat plates close together, that limits the wavelengths of energy fluctuations that can fit between them. This results in a lower energy density between the plates than outside them, i.e. a pressure difference, and the plates are pressed together by the higher external pressure.
8908573
Mars is speaking German. "The the the the the the the the the...."
Can I just say, I love Dragonfly. She's communicating with a broken robot and guilt-tripping Starlight. Love it.
Should be resistance and/or wattage not voltage. Other than that every thing looks correct to me.
:) A great chapter.
I note
https://rps.nasa.gov/power-and-thermal-systems/thermal-systems/light-weight-radioisotope-heater-unit/
Sojourner has inside the electronics box several tiny radioisotope heaters, with a total heat output of 3 watts or so.
Maybe dragonfly hasn't found them yet.
8908596 Just double-checking on this. My first draft... well, never mind it, but I changed this point because I was aware that a larger resistor would try to draw more power through the circuit than the circuitry might be able to withstand. But I'm easily confused by when to use volts, amps, or watts. So which would it be for "don't demand too much juice from the system"?
8908563 Ah, I normally don't hear that with regard to potatoes, since even baby tubers can be picked and eaten. There's that Little Potato Company which specializes in small potatoes. They have more skin per volume, and thus more fiber and vitamins while having less starch for a given mass.
old resistors and replaced them with new ones of the proper
voltageohmageEDIT: Resistance would be fine too.
Wattage could be considered, But does not really fit in this context.
No wonder Dragonfly is Chryssy's smartest minion
8908573
It's talking about the lethal randomness of dotted cubes.
8908678
Aww, poor lonely Mars just wants to join Mark's D&D campaign...
8908605 Huh. I didn't find that, and was going by Weir's description of those as resistors. And given that those would make the rest of this chapter bollocks, I'm going to say "different universe" on this point.
8908579 Not everything has a personality. For example, the Hab has a personality as a whole, but not the individual components.
8908608 One word re: the chicken pox vaccine: shingles.
So we have Dragonfly confirmed to be empathic with inanimate objects. She's also suffering from magic deprecation. I am really looking forward to the exchange with Chrysalis.
8908573
Troi: Captain, i feel hostility.
Somehow, after more than 20 years, the NASA Pathfinder web pages, and the radio designs are still online. Apparently they ended up using slightly in house modified bog standard commercial Motorola radios, and according to a couple of links, Googlable, Sojourners computer system was an Intel 80C85 with 512k of Ram and 176k of Flash (Rom ?) Clocked at 0.1 Mhz, 100 kHz. The biggest problem would be the 12 layer board.
NASA Pathfinder webite, pages.
8908606
Resistance is probably what you are looking for in this case. However the wattage is also something you need to watch when designing a circuit.
For reference resistance is how hard it is to push power through a circuit and wattage is total power used/dissipated by it. The wattage rating on a resistor is how much energy can be passed through / dissipated by the resistor before it burns out. See attached picture for reference.
s14.postimg.cc/hmeairrsh/resist1.jpg
8908612
Wattage should especially be considered in this case because this is a heater circuit not a logic circuit.
8908606
Resistors are measured by their resistance and wattage. The wattage rating determines how much current and voltage can flow at the same time, because current and voltage both determine wattage:
The wattage rating on resistors is a measure of their ability to regulate temperature for an indefinite period. Above the specified wattage and the resistor can be destroyed.
Depending on Dragonfly's goal, bringing the rover back from the dead or repairing the rover to handle the Martian climate, she can replace the resistor with one of a higher resistance and a lower wattage: this will produce less heat and draw less current and possibly conserve some energy. I am surprised they had an identical spare lying around to install.
So is Starlight converting from Equestrian units to cm... or is Dragonfly growing?
8908722 The "bog standard" isn't surprising. This was during "Faster Better Cheaper" (and it was pretty much the ONLY such probe that succeeded). Sojourner in particular was intended to live only four days (hence the non-rechargable flashlight battery backup power) and to never travel more than a hundred meters total.
This was a really good slowly-unfolding joke
Poor lonely Sojourner This was a nice Dragonfly chapter
Totally counts!
8908729 The former. Five centimeters is the tiniest fraction less than two inches.
I see others have already brought up the bit about the resistors, so I'll just ask if you might share the links for the two main circuit boards inside the WEB?
8908075
I was thinking along the lines of "if you move, I'll tear you to ribbons", but inconvenient is equally amusing.
This opens up possibilities.
If Dragonfly can talk to Sojourner, what else can she talk to?
Can she ask the Hab computer what it feels is wrong?
Can she talk to anything, and just never noticed because there was always too much background noise to hear them?
8908689
You could say Mark removed them without informing her.
Given that dragonfly is allergic to plutonium.
8905359
Tell me there's not a significant difference. We know the names of around... what, 12 pony settlements? All of them are puns of some sort. Now assume that only the 3 of the top 10 most populous (say Philly, Manehatten and Canterlot) are puns.
Even assuming the writers didn't give the rest of the most populous places silly names, that's still 30% pun concentration. Assuming that all the town we've seen so far ARE the only population centers that exist, almost every city (Bar a few like Dodge Junction, Los Pegasus and (if you count it) Griphonstone) are puns. Vanhoover, Batlimare, Canterlot. This is operating solely off names that are direct puns and not pony related gags, in which case every single one is some kind of gag.
Here's a map so you can look for yourself:
vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/a/a4/Map_of_Equestria_2015.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20151205072352
Now let's compare to US population centers:
You will note that not a single one is a pun on the fact that we are humans, and only one had a truly ridiculous name (Los Angeles: El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula) MOst are named after people, with all the Sans being saints, and some being named in remembrance of other CITIES, which is what I meant with the remembrance comment, not helping us remember bloody Santa Clause. Talk all you like about Gaylord, MI, but it's no grand capitol, barely 4,000 people live there. And I'm insulted that you think Little Rock, AR is a silly name. It's not a pun, it's a comment on local geography. It's also not even in top 50 most populated cities (It's No. 75).
Humans and ponies seem to function at different orders of magnitude when it comes to populations. I'd say Canterlot had a population in the tens of thousands, maybe hundreds if you're being VERY generous with densities at such a remote location. Some places consider that a mere town. From the looks of it, Manehatten is most similar, and I'm not willing to put it at much past a million even with generous assumptions of off screen size. What's big for them (the esteemed thousands of Gaylord, MI) is chicken scratch to us. Don't get me started on China.
So what's my point? Humans name their major population centers far more appropriately, while there isn't a single Pony population center I can name that isn't a joke, pun or gag. There's no projectile mineralogy going on in our cities, but over in pony land it's raining rocks on the greenhouse district.
Edit: Although I will admit we have a lot of oddly names towns/villages. But I'm looking at importance based on % of the population the pun-towns make up. IN % of total pop that lives in a town with a joke name, ponies reign supreme (harhar)
Bite my text wall.
8908726
Correct. In the Overstreet universe it is a heater circuit.
So, yes, consider wattage, After considering ohmage.
I was working under the assumption that there are 3 death boxes doing that.
8908782
I think just about everyone is allergic to plutonium.
I laughed a lot harder at that than I should have heh.
8908560
Another wonderful Chapter. Hope Sojourner lives again to serve its new Martian (Changeling) Queen!
8904984
It would be appropriate to call those names weird if the original names were weird too.
New York was obviously named after York, which comes from Jórvík, which came from Eboracum, which may have come from the local term for "place with yew trees".
New Hampshire was named for Hampshire, which was named after Hamtun (now known as Southampton), which just meant large village or small town.
New Jersey was named after Jersey, which was either named after someone or translates roughly to "dirt island".
All of them come from either naming a place after what it was or where it was. Seems reasonable to me.
I wonder when will Mark realize that this proves that Dragonfly actually is a technopath. This is going to cause so many waves in earth's science... and Equestria's too. Things get oh so much easier when you can ask the machine what the heck is wrong with it.
Yes! I was hoping you would touch more on Dragonfly's inanimate object empathy!
Although...you made me remember this.
https://xkcd.com/695/
i.imgur.com/yCxqUza.png
Let's just hope talking to probes doesn't end up like
https://xkcd.com/1504/
i.imgur.com/zLoCeN6.png
8908857
hehe you and me both
8908589
Oh for..... *grml*.. i wanted to make that comment...
Stupid Simpsons fan
Dragonfly: Tech priestess of Mars
8908560 So you need some Cavorite. Big deal. H.G. Wells had a bunch of the stuff.
8908782 Heck, just about everybody is allergic to Pu, in dust form and inhaled. In a solid lump that isn't near criticality, it's just a slightly warm metal that you probably don't want to hold for more than an hour or two.
8908783 Ahem. We have a nearby town named Flush. Make of it what you will, and the yearly picnic that is held there.
Incidentally, for those curious...Kris has been foreshadowing this issue with Dragonfly a lot longer than maybe some of us realized. While reading over earlier chapters, I found this from Sol 14:
Starlight added, “suit battery check. Forty percent here.”
Fireball checked his. “Fifty-two percent.”
“Thir… that can’t be right!” Dragonfly tapped her own visor, but the projected numbers didn’t change. “Thirty-one percent here, Starlight.”
“Roger. I’ll tell Mark we need to abort the tow and return to his base in one hour.”
“Starlight, how much farther is it?” Fireball asked.
“I can’t read Mark’s controls yet. At a guess, we’re a little more than halfway there. Straighten wheels.”
“Straightening wheels,” Fireball reported.
“Thirty-one percent,” Dragonfly muttered. “And I’ve been doing the least work of the three of us.”
“Yeah, what’s up with that?” Fireball chuckled. “Got the munchies for juice instead of love?”
“Don’t laugh,” Dragonfly said. “To us changelings it’s one and the same thing. And it’s not like I get much of a snack off of you.”
It would probably be easier and faster to just cut damaged one off: it's not like there is much need for heating electronics inside the Hab (and controlling electronics is most likely something very stupid and robust, like thermal relay that switches power on when temperature is below the threshold, so cutting would not disrupt anything).
8908726
Actually, on second thought, this circuit is powered, at night, by a single LiSOCl2 NON-RCHRG(Andy weir) or 9 8Ah 3 V d-cells in series (real)(Also used for other stuff, including in space, and nighttime experiments)
So, no, I don't think wattage needs be considered. Anything reasonable will take whatever that battery would throw at it, during the spaceflight and during martian nights
Also, This circuit would be off, it is hot enough not to need heating. As long as the resistor makes it past the self check it would be fine. If it even has such a thing.
But this also makes electric heating completely dead. No electric heating here. Not for 4 martian nights, and a long space voyage. When you also need to run nighttime experiments.
8908689
Also, can't find where andy discusses sojourner electronics, beyond putting it under a lamp and looking at the battery(SOL 95). It seems discarded in favor of the rover plan (SOL 97).
Did you mean: abrasive fine balsamic dust
...Here's hoping she was just converting inches into centimeters.
So I find it very odd that Dragonfly was able to close up holes in the circuit board caused by pulling out molten bits of metal, but she wasn't able to handle reconnecting wires on the CPU. She was said to have precision greater than humans are capable of with that fine detail work, so she should have been able to reconnect the CPU in the same way.
Though for that matter a counter-entropy spell to reverse it back to a function state seems gross overkill compared to just reconnecting the broken bits, the material should still be there. If they have a reverse entropy spell available they could have used that to repair even a fried CPU, so wouldn't be all that consistent with saying there'd be nothing they could do.
I'm also curious about the "My mind is split" bit, if that's different from being loose.
Still confirming that Dragonfly can sense the voices of inanimate objects is very interesting.
8908729
The more important question is, if Dragonfly is in fact growing taller, how will that impact her suit, because I assume they're custom fitted. If she outgrows her suit, then she'd be confined to the Hab nearly permanently (I assume Starlight could whip up a force field long enough for her to get from the Hab to the. rover, if needed.
8909197
No, I'm pretty sure that's 'basaltic', as in "made of or relating to basalt."