Sols 451-455
MISSION LOG – SOL 451
Well, the cave farm is now seventy-one kilometers northwest of us. We’re hanging out in the trailer now, with nothing much to do but spend the day waiting for all the batteries to recharge. And I do mean all. Starlight Glimmer ran one of the small magic batteries for ten minutes on field-projection. Then she linked them all so that they’d all recharge the partially spent one. If they recharge completely, it means they can afford ten minutes of magic time a day, which should be enough to keep Dragonfly at her current level of health. If not… well, we’ll see.
Oddly enough, although I feel excited about taking the first step towards finally getting off this bastard planet and back home, I’m also feeling a bit anxious. The only time I’ve been this far from the Hab was during the Pathfinder retrieval trip. Even then I had the feeling that, if I got into trouble, I could get back to the Hab somehow. But this time we’re not going back to the Hab, or the cave. We’re driving over twice as far as I did for the round trip to Ares Vallis and back, and this time it’s all one way.
Of course, in theory we could still backtrack. We could even get all the way to the MAV, turn around, and come back with the food we have on hand. And there would likely be a fresh, edible crop of hay and potatoes waiting for us when we got back. But that’s if nothing goes wrong. This time there’s nobody left behind looking after things. There’s no telling what we’ll run into on this trip. There’s so much that could go wrong.
For the first time I’m really thinking about just how risky this whole enterprise is. And I’m wondering what NASA was worried about, when they green-lit this plan as being the least risky option. Is an asteroid going to hit the Hab on Sol 552 or something and they decided not to tell me? Is the warranty going to expire on Hermes and the next day the interplanetary tow truck has to haul it to the local AAA-certified spaceship repair facility? Is there some secret clause to the treaty that prohibits national territorial claims in outer space that says, “If aliens are on a planet for six hundred days, it belongs to them”?
OK, I admit, I’m being silly. But the thing is, I don’t know. And Venkat, I love you like a brother if my brother were my boss, but I can’t expect you to answer that honestly. You’d tell me what you thought I needed to hear to complete the mission, which is not the same thing as the unvarnished truth. And you wouldn’t be totally wrong to do that, no matter how much it sucks for me on this end.
Eh, I’m going to stop worrying about it. I’m going to see if I can get together four people for a game of computer hearts. Starlight says she hasn’t quite finished her new campaign setting of Middle-Ponyworld. She’s working out exactly how a Ring of Power would function under her world’s magical laws.
Come to think of it, that just makes me worry harder.
MISSION LOG – SOL 452
The sleeping arrangements are… well… communal. And uncomfortable.
A quick explanation: the rear part of the habitat compartment of what was the pony ship is taken up with the life support equipment looted from Rover 1, plus the RTG. The cabinets are stuffed full of hay, with what little space not taken up by that devoted to medicine and other supplies that might hurt from direct exposure to Mars’s so-called atmosphere. The floor space is ringed around with twenty-one foot-wide crystal and metal bricks- the magic batteries. What’s left of a horizontal surface for sleeping on isn’t all that much larger than a king-sized bed.
You may ask, “But where did the ponies sleep when this trailer was a spaceship?” Answer: on the cabinets. Unlike Hermes, which rotates to maintain a 0.4 G gravity in its habitat modules, Friendship had no artificial gravity of any kind. The ponies slept in sleeping bags tethered to the cabinet fronts, much like they still do on our space station and have done since the days of Skylab.
The problem is that this sleeping space was vertical, not horizontal. Even in Mars’s weak gravity, only Dragonfly can still sleep in a bag hung from the wall with anything remotely close to comfort. And it can’t be that comfortable, because when we woke up this morning she was down in the pillow-pile with the rest of us, cuddling up for warmth.
And yeah, even with the RTG only a few feet away, even with the windows blocked up, even with the pressure door to the bridge sealed, and even with the improvised insulation we threw in here, the room still gets chilly before dawn. It’s a fight between the RTG and the air from the pony life support and the metal hull conducting the heat out into Mars’s lethally cold night. So we start out in our own little private spots on the pile of Hab bunk mattresses, and we end up in a tangle of bodies when the alarm goes off.
But on the bright side, nobody’s kicked me in the belly yet.
In other news, the recharge system is working perfectly. The combination of permanently mounted, crystal-enhanced solar cells and the fourteen unmodified panels that ride in a stack on Rover 2 bring the batteries up to full charge well before sunset. And since we start driving at very first light, pre-dawn, we don’t stay up all that late to burn charge at night.
So I drove another three hours, another seventy-one kilometers, and set out the extra solar panels again.
One minor bit of trouble: the magic batteries aren’t recharging as well as the original two did when the ponies first came to the lab. Starlight estimates a recharge rate of 1.4% per day per battery. She puts it down to Dragonfly’s weakened system sucking up more magic than before. Also, in the early days she deliberately strained herself to dump her inner magic reserves into the batteries to build up charge faster. Both Cherry and Spitfire are determined to stop her if she tries doing that again. Fainting Unicorn Syndrome ceased to be funny ages ago.
The good news is, that’s enough to replace the juice used to create ten minutes of magic time- but only barely, and only because we have these twenty-one heavy pointy uncomfortable toe-stub hazards where we sleep. Daily magic production is just enough for that one ten minute window of magic plus topping off the jumbo batteries each sol.
We’ll refine things as we go. For now, it’s more or less smooth sailing.
MISSION LOG – SOL 453
Excellent news- today we left the part of Acidalia with all the shallow gorges. Technically that means we’re in Chryse Planitia now, but the border between the two is really uncertain. They’re both part of the great Boreal Planum, with Chryse being the southernmost extension of the Martian lowlands and Acidalia being the northeastern region tucked between Chryse, Arabia Terra, and the polar regions.
None of which makes a fuck, except that with the gorges gone we don’t have to slow down and accelerate anymore. We squeezed out four extra kilometers today from improved efficiency.
Looking forward to tonight. Starlight says her campaign is ready, and she’s given us templates to use to build our characters. I’ve decided to play the wizard. If Starlight will let me, I’ll have him wear rainbow-striped plate armor, even though technically metal is supposed to interfere with magic according to D&D rules.
But it’s essential, if I’m going to name him Canned Ralph the Gay.
(I’m kidding. He’s not gay. He’s asexual.)
MISSION LOG – SOL 454
We all woke up grouchy this morning, partly because some of us were lying on limbs so hard they lost circulation, partly because the first, and likely last, session of Middle-Ponyworld ended with a TPK. Alas, Canned Ralph, we hardly knew ye. But apparently goblins in Middle-Ponyworld have invented the can opener.
Yeah. Apparently we started out with the Pony-Shire getting invaded by an army of orcs and goblins and wolf-riders and like that. No warm-up. No Nine Riders, no Old Man Willow, no trio of easily fooled trolls, nope. Straight into the rampaging hordes. Starlight still needs to learn a bit more about pacing.
Anyway, things were pretty frosty in the Whinnybago today, even after the sun warmed things up some. For once Lewis’s disco music is a better companion than the ponies. Cherry in particular is relaying orders through Spitfire because she isn’t talking to Starlight, not after a great goblin took her druid, tossed it, and told a worg to fetch.
And from the way Starlight looks at the rest of us, the grudge is mutual.
I suspect that, before today is out, I’ll be asked to take back the DM screen again. Which means more Discworld games. I’m thinking this time I’ll focus on Lancre. Anyway, writing up a campaign will give me something to do. Once I’ve set out the solar panels for recharging, my work day is over.
In the meantime, I think I might take a nap. I didn’t get much rest last night, because see above.
MISSION LOG – SOL 455
Fireball can snore and continue living.
Fireball can smoke and continue living.
But if he does both at the same time another goddamn night, I am going to build a plank and walk him the fuck off it.
By the way, seventy-two kilometers, if you give a shit.
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You the best dude. Keep it up!
Can't get this song out of my head at this point.
Hmm, the chapter says to Sol 455, but in the chapter it's 555. Typo?
Really enjoying hearing about their rover-based escapades, hope we don’t skip too much!
Here's yesterday's song. Enjoy!
"Boreal Planum, which Chryse being the southernmost"
"Boreal Planum, with Chryse being the southernmost"?
Oh, sorry about the sinus infection; I hope it clears up soon.
9131082
Not done with the song in the cave yet? I was loong forward to it...
"Canned Ralph the Gay"?
Really?!
*groan*
Somewhere, the ghost of Tolkien is plotting to give you a wedgie...
*Eye roll*
Either the chapter title is wrong, or the Sol count is. Jumping 100 days, while an easy way to speed things up, does seem a bit lazy.
9131095
I point the finger at other people on my team who still haven't gotten their lines in yet. Please subscribe to the Fireball YouTube channel, though. We'll get it done one way or another.
9131074 I considered doing another filk for this chapter, but I couldn't decide on an MLP song to use for a melody, and anyway songs in consecutive chapters are a bit overkill.
There will be at least one more musical moment before the end, though.
9131082
Dang, I'm impressed.
9131169
Thanks!
9131154
Oh joy.
Heh, speaking of pacing issues... this journey has just started and they're already barely speaking to each other? The next 3 months fic time will be a joy to read at this rate...
Then again, I'm sure they'll be distracted by something more horrible than inexperienced DMing before long. Yay?
Even though I say that... excited to see them on the move. The poignant goodbyes to the Hab and the Cave affected me more than I'd have expected. If you'd told me a couple months ago I'd tear up over leaving a cave...
Carry on, good sir, and thank you for writing.
The joys of communal sleeping arrangements, am I right?
We
We will resist and ride
Ride hard
Cause we are all in sight
We
We take up wheels and ride
Ride hard
Resist and do what's right
9131262
Someone likes Sabaton :)
Attention, female readers of this story! I'm looking for someone who can sing as Spitfire. Interested? https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/825065/looking-for-someone-who-can-sing-as-spitfire
9131276
Well, it's just fitting with the planet that tries to kill thee.
I died
9130820
You did after all say you hadn't done the math, but running five mega amps of current along the Martian equator would not produce a useful magnetic field. Using the Biot-Savart Law for a current loop, this ends up producing a field at the surface of Mars (or, more exactly, at the pole of Mars) of about three hundred nanotesla...well, it would if Mars was a vacuum, which it is not, of course. Figuring out the magnetic susceptibility of a planet is a bit more than I want to do for a post, though, so we'll pretend it is.
Anyway, that works out to be less than one percent of the field strength of Earth at Earth's surface, i.e. not much more than nothing. Generating a magnetic field of equivalent strength to Earth will therefore require seven hundred and fifty mega amps of current, not five. Given the parameters you describe above of a cable of one square meter of copper carrying five mega amps of current and copper's resistivity of 16.78 billionths of an ohm-meter, I can deduce from Ohm's Law that you are assuming a voltage of eight-hundredths of a volt. Assuming that same voltage, then, shows that we need a cable with a resistance of no more than about one ten-billionth of an ohm, which corresponds to a copper cable with a cross-sectional area of one hundred and fifty square meters. The resulting Joule heating will be about sixty-three megawatts per meter, which gives an overall power demand of about two hundred terawatts, which is starting to be a rather significant fraction of your Kardashev level 1 civilization's total energy production, about one percent. To put that in perspective, it would be proportionally similar to dedicating about thirty gigawatts of energy in the United States continuously to a single project. There might have been projects that came close to that in the past, but all the examples I can think of involved wartime projects, not something intended to be maintained forever.
Moreover, there's a bigger problem, which is that given copper's density of (roughly) nine thousand kilograms per cubic meter and heat capacity of 0.000385 joules per kilogram-Kelvin this degree of heating that the cable will heat up by about one hundred and twenty thousand Kelvin per second...which is a bit of a problem considering that copper's melting point is only thirteen hundred kelvin. In other word, without an [expletive deleted] amazing cooling system, which will probably consume much more power than the cable itself, the cable is going to explode as soon as you turn it on. You could, of course, reduce this by making the cable bigger, but this is just a little bit too complicated for me to do easily enough to bother (you have to take into account the fact that increasing the cross sectional area both reduces the temperature gain from a given heat input and reduces the heat input due to lower resistance), so I'm not going to figure out how big the cable would have to be to heat up at some vaguely reasonable rate. It would need to be big, though.
So, there's a good logical reason why people aren't considering wrapping a big copper cable around the Martian equator: it won't work. You have to have superconductors or something similar to avoid melting the cable given the current loads you need, and to get your power requirements from "difficult" to "somewhat doable".
So, Starlight-gives-no-fucks-Glimmer is working out how to make a real Ring of Power.
I can't think of any way that could possibly go wrong!
You know, part of me is wondering that if Mars doesn't like them and wants them dead, how would it react to Bruce Willis and a team of Psychopaths armed with nukes landing and preparing to blow shit up?
9131336
Mars will throw a temper tantrum, a global temper tantrum.
Dang not even a week in and grumpiness is setting in?
9131276
We were told to do the SCIENCE
And that is what we did
We will fly outta here
In despite of our foe
It feels like Starlight is both aiming for instant TPKs and disappointed that she's getting instant TPKs which is about as fun sounding as Mark thinks it is.
9131310
Yep, that's exactly the point where I estimated magnetic field
109A should be well enough unless Mars is very diamagnetic (which it probably isn't with giant iron/nickel core).
That's 6 orders of magnitude off.
5A/mm2 is a standard current density for copper in industry. Just use enough standard bars instead of single large chunk.
elektronordic.eu/uploads/1/7/1/5/17158830/copper-flat-bars-1438321406-3-big_orig.jpg
Well, cable weights a fraction of what artificially created atmosphere just above it weights
Because people find coming up with ways of doing it more efficiently interesting?
I kinda feel sorry four Starlight, but only kinda.
DnD is NOT a game you typically retreat. The system it's very forgiving and the heros want to be heros.
Unless you are very VERY good at setting the scene, there campaign shouldn't start with running away. If you feel there urge to do such a thing..... cause you are crazy....asking for Wisdom checks is a good call.
Wisdom... it's the party's common sense stat.
9131461
Unfortunately, there is a problem with generating a field this way.
The core of Mars is conductive, and the induced current when you turn on your coil cancels your applied field.
The skin effect limits how fast the magnetic field can propagate downwards to unfortunately low velocities, meaning it is many thousands of years before you get much of a global field.
She should have learned it from her teacher
vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/6/61/Twilight_pacing_S2E20.png/revision/latest?cb=20120314230021
Time-travelling revenge is coming?
9131441
She's used to a world where destiny makes heroics even MORE forgiving than dnd.
At least Starlight’s improving her DM experience.
9131313
To be fair, the only problems with Rings of Power were:
a) Sauron "influencing" the crafting process (except with the three elvish ones).
b) The existence of an evil Ring to rule them all.
Otherwise, a Ring shouldn't have to be different from any other enchanted artifact.
I like that we are getting a little glimpse of each day, without each one having to try and be its own chapter. Looking forward to the rest of the trip!
9131461
Ah yes, I made a mistake converting from J/g*K to J/kg*K. Point granted. Still, the point that you need more than just a bare copper wire wrapped around the equator of Mars stands.
So? Just because something is lighter than something else doesn't mean that it's easier or cheaper to produce or install or take care of. Right now, for instance, I can buy about forty-four kilograms of copper for the price of a single computer chip (specifically an i5-8600K) that masses maybe a few grams, whereas by your assumptions the fact that the computer chip is orders of magnitude lighter obviously means it should be much cheaper.
In this case, the difference is clearly down to all the extra manufacturing steps needed to produce a computer chip--you need not only to purify the raw materials, the way you do with copper, but also perform lots and lots of other steps to actually turn your pure silicon into a useful computer chip, many of which are complex and costly. But then, the same is true for your copper wire compared to the atmosphere of a terraformed Mars. Building the wire not only requires purifying the copper, it requires forming it into bars or wires, shipping those to Mars, assembling them into a cable, building a support structure for the cable, constructing insulation and cooling systems for the cable, and performing continuous ongoing maintenance of a planet-girdling structure, which (by the way) will probably have to pass underwater at several points, adding even more costs. Someone who was an electrical engineer instead of a physicist could probably come up with more issues that a wire carrying giga-amp currents would run into that would have to be solved somehow, all of which would add even further costs.
By contrast, the gases in the atmosphere merely need to be refined from their source material and shipped to Mars--and some of that refining (for instance, removing carbon monoxide from cometary ices) can probably be effectively outsourced once you reach a certain stage of the process, whether to chemical processes in the Martian atmosphere (that oxidize methane into carbon dioxide and water, for example) or biological processes on the surface, thereby removing any need for the terraformers to pay for them at all. The whole project is on a grand scale, yes, but in a relative sense it's not especially complicated, and so may be relatively cheap once it's actually possible, just the same way that producing, say, iron (or, indeed, gases like nitrogen) is relatively inexpensive today despite the huge quantities of those materials that are actually produced. Therefore, it's entirely conceivable that building this giant copper wire would actually be more expensive than setting up the entire atmosphere, despite the difference in masses. There are certainly factors pointing that way.
Finally, the Mars-clicker game is in a playable alpha.
Well, playable, not bug-free. The game can't currently be played to the end, but it's a test.
The game is kinda rushed, I'm a known procrastinator, so this is only a very few hours worth of acual work.
I made a github repo with the source for you. If you think you know how to improve it, be it the art, UI or game-pacing (all probobly bad right now), just send a pull-request.
If it's good, I'll let it in, and find a way to give credit.
https://github.com/KvaGram/MarsClicker
Latest builds:
Linux build (32bit & 64bit)
Windows build (32bit)
Want a web version? Know a place I can host it for free?
Please tell.
9130214
here:
9132314
9131154
Totally agree with the GM expecting mind-reading players thing.
Knew a guy like that who, after we defeated the Big Bad Evil Guy one way, we asked him why our idea (which was similar but easier) didn't work.
His reply: "You weren't suppose to do that."
I late quit gaming with him...
9131313
Actually from what I'm getting is how it would work in terms of her campaign. Pony magic is very different from Middle Earth Magic.
Invisibility is not that impressive to a Unicorn who has that spell in her arsenal. Heck, everything all the rings do isn't impressive considering her own arsenal.
9131479
Except the whole idea for the Lord of the Rings was that they were retreating from the Shire to keep the ring away from the riders and get it to Elrond.
9132346
To be clear, your reply didn't directly reach Sandstorm just because my prior reply included them. One of us has to tag 9129465 again (like that), and it's not going to be me next time.
You could argue that the elements of harmony are mind controlling/altering artifacts like the one ring.
9132498
I know, but I did it for the sake of the reply chain, not for a notification.
Well, many characters would stay and fight due to RP-related reasons. I mean, role play is in the title. They'd stay to try and defend their homes and loved ones.
... You're not cool enough to be Sauron, Glimglam.
See, now you've got me curious as to just how soundly Dragonfly is sleeping, being so close to the Box 'O Death at virtually all times. Almost certainly, the presence of DEATH encroaching on her senses would result in some nightmares, no?
warg
9132650
No, she's cooler then him.
9132774 There's more than one reason why she always squirms her way to the bottom of the cuddle-pile.