Sol 7
On what should have been the morning of Sol 7 and what, instead, was past midday of Mission Day 131, the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) carrying the five surviving members of the Ares III expedition docked with Hermes, the ship that had brought them to Mars and which would carry them back to Earth.
NASA mission protocol in case of a mission abort like this one was strict, and such aborts had been simulated multiple times during the crew’s years of training. The Sol 2 rock samples, taken from the landing site and loaded in the MAV immediately so the mission wouldn’t be a total loss in case of abort, would be offloaded- twenty-five kilograms, or about one-twentieth the amount allotted for the mission. The MAV would be undocked and programmed for station-keeping, becoming yet another communications relay satellite in Martian orbit. Then Hermes would engage one of the pre-calculated burns to carry it back to Earth as quickly as possible. The sooner Hermes left Mars, the less time and energy would be required for the long trip home.
First off the MAV was Beth Johannsen, mission systems operations officer and computer technician. It was her job to inspect Hermes and make sure the most expensive ship ever constructed by mankind was ready for flight. Normally she would have a second crewman to assist with these inspections, but circumstances had changed.
Next came Alexander Vogel of the European Space Agency, mission chemist and navigator. The German scientist pushed one of the two plastic bins of rock and soil samples ahead of him, floating his way towards the science lab where they would be stowed. The samples, strictly speaking, were not his job, but again circumstances had changed.
Major Rick Martinez, US Air Force, mission pilot and second in command, came next, pushing the other sample container. Martinez had been the practical joker of the crew, reveling in the stereotype of irrepressible flyboy. Today he was as grim and focused as the strictest drill sergeant could ask for. He had saved the MAV from tipping over in the unprecedented storm that had forced the mission abort, and he would perform any orbital maneuvers required for Hermes’s trip home.
Finally, reluctantly, the last two crewmembers emerged. Commander Melissa Lewis, US Navy, mission commander and mission geologist, floated through the airlock followed by Chris Beck, mission doctor and EVA specialist. Lewis hadn’t said a word when Vogel had offered to take the soil samples to the lab in her place. In fact, she’d said precious few words to anyone after ordering the launch of the MAV. Beck, worried for her mental health, had decided to stick like glue to her at least until Hermes completed its Earth transfer orbital burn- a maneuver which would require three orbits of Mars and take most of an Earth day to complete.
Lewis barely noticed him, nor cared, but she was aware enough of her surroundings that she cared about not caring.
Buck up, Melissa, she chided herself. You’re the mission commander, and you still have four other astronauts to get home safely. They’re depending on you for leadership and morale. They need certainty right now, not a skipper whose head is in the clouds!
Yeah. Four other astronauts. Five minus one.
Her mind still gnawed on the empty sixth chair in the MAV, the one reserved for Mark Watney, mission engineer and botanist. So Johannsen saw Watney knocked flying by the antenna that impaled him. So Watney’s biomonitor showed his life signs at zero just before going dead. That’s no excuse. I should be bringing five astronauts back, not four. I failed.
No. Freak accident. Freak storm. You broke mission protocols trying to find him. You did everything possible.
Did I? Did I really? There must have been something else I could have done. I could have ordered abort sooner. I could have kept us closer together. I could have ordered tethers.
Based on what? You had no way of knowing. It could have been Johannsen, or Beck, or you. There was nothing…
… there had to be something…
Absorbed in her mental loop, she allowed Beck to guide her to the bridge. Once there, she found her own workstation- Beck knew better than to go so far as to help her sit down and strap in. The incoming-message light flashed on her terminal. No surprise there. NASA, after all, had listened to their comm chatter throughout the abort and launch, even if they couldn’t contribute anything in real-time from four light-minutes away. NASA had received their first (terse) report on the loss of Watney, and now doubtless they wanted to respond.
Without waiting for Johannsen, whose duties included message downloads, she keyed up the message to her station’s terminal and hit play.
The image of Mitch Henderson- the square-headed, square-jawed flight director and head of Mission Control for Ares I, II and III- popped up onto the screen. That’s odd, Lewis thought. Way outside protocol. Where’s our normal CAPCOM?
“Hermes, this is Mitch Henderson,” he said. “We know the loss of Mark Watney has hit you all very hard. Mark was a very special man and a true astronaut, and he will be sorely missed by everyone in the program.”
Beck let out a soft sigh at these words. Lewis ignored him and forced herself to breathe normally. Commanding officers maintained discipline, after all, no matter the provocation.
“Normally our focus at this point would be solely on getting the rest of you safely home to Earth as fast as possible,” Mitch continued. “But Dr. Kapoor-“ Venkat Kapoor, the overall head of Project Ares- “-has a new mission task for you.” He paused, looking down at a fistful of papers in his hand. “We ordered a scan of all satellite photos from the period immediately before and during the mission abort. One of our satellite operations workers, a…” Mitch squinted at the page. “… a Mindy Parks… spotted something in photos taken by two different satellites. We’re sending you hi-res files of the pictures, but for now, here’s the first pic.”
Mitch’s face was replaced by a full-color satellite photo. Mars filled the background- an entirely different region of the planet from Ares III’s Acidalia Planitia.
But in the foreground, where nothing ought to have been, there was something pink. Pink and, insofar as the handful of pixels could determine, pointy- two things that no asteroid or meteor known to man ever was. The brilliant pastel color of the… whatever it was… stuck out like healthy skin in front of Mars’s eternal smashed thumb.
“The second picture isn’t as good,” Mitch said, “so we’re not going to embed it in this video, but it shows an object about the size of an MAV during landing phase entering the dust storm about seven minutes prior to your abort. According to Parks, the times of the two pictures give a rough trajectory for the object that should have had it impacting Mars about ten kilometers northwest of the Hab about two minutes prior to your abort, with an uncertainty radius of about thirty kilometers. Obviously that didn’t happen.”
Lewis’s eyes had focused so hard on the little pink thing in the photo that she could still see it when the screen switched back to Mitch Henderson.
“To be blunt, we don’t know what this is, and we’re afraid to guess,” Mitch continued. “But Dr. Kapoor persuaded Teddy Sanders-“ that was the current NASA chief- “-that, at minimum, this would be an unprecedented chance to observe the immediate aftermath of a meteor strike on the Martian surface. Anything more than that,” he added, his lips compressed in obvious disapproval of what he was saying, “is considered unwarranted speculation at this time.”
Unwarranted speculation? Lewis thought. That’s obviously no asteroid fragment. It’s just possible a Kuiper Belt object would be that color, but we would have seen its cometary trail months ago, if it could even survive this long. So, what are you left with if the thing can’t be natural?
“I personally want to emphasize,” Mitch added, “that this is not our idea of a prank or joke. Nobody here at NASA would do any such thing immediately after the loss of one of our own. The attached pictures are legitimate and unretouched, taken directly as we received them from the satellites. This is very real and very serious.
“It’s so serious that we’re not bringing you back home yet.” Mitch pulled one of the papers out of his hand and took a closer look at it. “Included in this message is a series of possible orbital adjustment programs for you to select from, depending on how soon you can complete Hermes’ pre-flight checklist. We’re going to put you in as low an orbit as we dare. Hermes’s cameras are as good or better than anything on the satellites, and with your ion engines you can dip into the fringes of Mars’s atmosphere without serious risk of deorbit, at least for the week or so we’re extending your mission by.
“Your mission will be to examine the area where we project the object came down, to a range of double the computed cone of error. Once you find it, get all the pictures you can and send them back to us.” Mitch cleared his throat, looking obviously discomfited, and added, “Obviously this will also include the area of the Hab. Dr. Kapoor also wants pictures of the hab with an eye towards re-using the site and unused supplies for a future Ares mission. But in light of the loss of Mark Watney, that task is strictly optional. If you feel uncomfortable with it, we’ll leave that to the satellites.
“Also,” Mitch said, raising his tone a little and saying each word with slow, careful weight, “you are not, I repeat not, to detach the MAV at this time. We want to use Hermes to put it into an orbit that overflies the search area as frequently as possible. We’re still working on the procedure for that, but we’ll have it for you as soon as it’s ready.
“Again, we are grieved to hear about Mark Watney, and if there’s anything any of us at NASA can do to help, let us know. I’ll be here at CAPCOM for the rest of the day to answer any questions you have. Henderson out.”
The video ended. Lewis shook her head, shocked, confused, sad and excited all at once. This might be the thing that every astronaut hoped for, above all else… but… but!!
“Commander, you want me to gather the rest of the crew?” Beck asked quietly. “I think they all need to see that.”
Lewis nodded. “Yes. Please. At once.” She stifled a sob, taking deep breaths again as she keyed up the two images Mitch had mentioned in his message and displaying them on her screen. The little pointy thing in one picture, the less obviously pink speck pushing a massive shock wave in front of it through the trailing edges of the dust storm.
Why, she thought, why is it that the biggest discovery in the history of space flight has to happen at a time like this?
ARES III LOG ENTRY: SOL 7
Isn’t this just my luck? Here I am, Mark Watney, the first human being to meet intelligent life from another world. Lucky me. Problem is, nobody will ever know until both me and the intelligent life are all long dead.
I’m typing this while we eat a late breakfast or early lunch. None of us know whether or not my guests can handle Earth food, but from what I understand we don’t have much choice. Anyway, it balances out- my five crewmates leave for Hermes, and hey presto, five aliens show up to take their places at the dinner table.
I know what you’re thinking; I ought to be rationing my food to make it last, not giving it away to interplanetary hoboes. And you’re not wrong. But if I understand the pictures these guys have been drawing, these guys are just as marooned as I am, and I figure our mutual odds of survival increase if we work together.
And if worse comes to worse, I can kill them and eat them, right?
Ugh. I just looked one of them in the big, adorable, trusting eyes, and I felt so guilty about that stupid joke. No, I’m not going to eat anybody, not even if they drop dead of natural causes. (Or of NASA’s cooking, which is a distinct possibility, but nobody’s grabbing their throat and choking yet.)
Obviously we don’t speak each other’s language. They speak something that sounds a little like Welsh. Well, like I imagine Welsh sounds, anyway- I’ve never heard it. But the alien language is all high nasal vowels and gargles, and every other consonant is L.
So we’re communicating by whiteboard. Sort of like the party game Pictionary, except we’re all on the same team and we’re playing for keeps.
Did I mention that four out of the five aliens can only hold a marker with their teeth? I don’t even want to think about how many brain cells they’re losing to marker fumes every time they draw a picture.
As near as I can figure it, this is their story. They come from a planet that looks a lot like Earth, but the continents are all different. They took off in their ship headed for the next planet out in their solar system, just like we did in Hermes.
But their ship broke somehow. I don’t know how. The alien drawing the picture just drew black smoke trailing from the back of their little rocket, and one of the other aliens got into a big argument about it. I guess she wanted to make the point that smoke doesn’t look like that in space, and the one drawing the picture wanted to keep it simple. Me, I thought these aliens must be really similar to us if a trail of black smoke means “my aircraft is broken” in their culture like in ours.
I wonder what else is common in our cultures.
I wonder if I should delete my web browser history just in case.
Anyway, whatever broke on their ship, it sent the ship to Mars instead of where they were going. And boom, they crash-landed.
The next part is kind of fuzzy, though. All the aliens tried two or three different pictures to tell me the next part, but none of it made sense. My best guess is, the crash took out their ship life support somehow. Maybe there’s a hole in the hull, maybe their oxygen tanks ruptured, I don’t know. But then they showed me the displays inside their space suits, including what looks almost exactly like an old Apollo-era navigation ball, and then drew that with a blinking light on it, followed by the aliens, single file, walking up to a crude drawing of the Hab.
So, obviously the Hab beacon still works. It’s probably the only communications device that does. The radio produces nothing but static. Not surprising, since I was impaled by a piece that broke off from the antenna farm during the storm. I already know the main satellite dish is gone from my walk back to the Hab yesterday. So all that’s left is the beacon, which has its own internal antenna. But it’s only rated for about twenty-five kilometers, and it’s send-only, because duh.
So, my best guess is, they’re stranded, and they’re stuck living with me for the duration. The last time I had roomies picked for me like this was my first year in the dorms back at the University of Chicago. Down side: no privacy for when my nonexistent Martian girlfriend who lives in Canada comes over. Up side: no problem finding players for my D&D campaign!
Damn, now I wish I’d brought my dice.
So, who are my new roomies, you ask? Well, I don’t have their names yet, but I can describe them pretty well, so you can look at the pictures I’ve taken and know who I’m talking about.
Four of them are quadrupeds, ungulates to be exact- that’s right, they have four hooves and no hands. And not split hooves either- what they have is kind of like horse hooves, except instead of being black and shiny they’re the same color as their pelt. And speaking of, three of the four are covered in fur of colors not normally associated with animal life. But then again, it’s aliens, so what do I know?
Hell, I watched these creatures remove spacesuits with locking seals and zippers and the whole nine yards- spacesuits nowhere near as advanced in design as mine, by the way- with no help from me or from each other. No thumbs, no fingers, and no fuss. And I still don’t understand how the fuck they did it. Somehow they can grab a zipper with a hoof and pull it, because aliens.
I get the feeling I’m gonna be saying “because aliens” a lot.
The first of these little horse alien things is pink- pink like your kid sister’s Pretty Pansy Princess Playroom Set- with a kind of poofy blonde mane and tail hair. She’s the friendliest of the bunch. She also did most of the drawing during our attempts at communication. Every time there the aliens had a discussion or argument, she had the last word, so I’m guessing she’s their leader- their equivalent of Commander Lewis. There’s this sort of brand or something on her butt- I’m reluctant to examine it too closely, lest I start the first interstellar sexual harassment lawsuit- but it kind of looks like a cluster of cherries.
“But Mark,” I hear you say, “this is an alien! Its planet’s biosphere must be completely different to Earth’s! How can it have a picture of a cherry on its ass?” To which I reply: that’s what it looks like, so that’s what I’m calling her. Cherry.
Then there’s the second one- the one who fussed over drawing black smoke pluming out of a spaceship. This one has a unicorn horn, which I’m guessing makes her a different species. I could be wrong. Maybe it falls off like antlers out of season, or maybe she’s a genetically altered uber-whatever, or maybe it’s a sex toy she had surgically implanted for whatever reason. But I’m going with unicorn horn because her brand isn’t cherries, it’s a really abstract wavy magical spark thing. So I’m calling her Magica for now.
Anyway, besides the horn, Magica’s coat is this really pale violet I don’t know the name for. Her mane and tail are dark purple with streaks through it, kind of either turquoise or teal, I don’t know which. She kind of looks tired all the time, and the other aliens are all a bit worried about her. I hope she didn’t have internal injuries during the crash.
One other thing about Magica. The first thing my visitors did after they came in and took off their suits was look for the bathroom. (And can you blame them? Their last potty break was in another solar system!) But after that, Magica came to me and used her hoof to go through numbers with me, then prime numbers, then squares, then cubes, then Fibonacci’s sequence- all by stomping her foot. Obviously this can only mean one thing: she’s a sci-fi geek who’s read all the classic first-contact stories. Guess the good things are truly universal!
Now onto the third alien. Remember how I said the pink one was sort of like Lewis? Well the third alien acts like Lewis. She’s the only one I haven’t seen smile even once. She’s always looking so serious, so on-duty. I don’t know how quadrupeds come to attention, but I think she’s doing it all the time. About the only thing that spoils it is her eyelids. They tend to stay half-closed all the time, which would give her a sleepy look if she didn’t have the alien equivalent of resting bitch-face.
Instead of a unicorn horn, this one has wings. That’s right, wings. Six limbs. I don’t know what for- last night she tried flying in the Hab, and she was barely able to get into the air flapping like a chicken the whole time. They’re clearly too small for sustained flight. She’s got pale orange fur and hair that’s brilliant orange at the roots but dark orange at the ends, and her brand is of a fireball, so I’m calling her Fireball.
Now for the fourth one. Everybody’s seen at least one Alien movie, right? Well, imagine a xenomorph crossed with Cherry or Magica or Fireball. That gives you some idea of the fourth alien. It has huge glowing pale-blue bug-eyes- not compound eyes, but no irises or pupils like the other aliens have. It’s black from horn to toe except for its eyes and a pair of bug-wings (which work even worse than Fireball’s- the bug tried to get airborne until her wings sounded like an outboard motor and never left the floor). And, strangely enough, it has holes all through its extremities- holes like her grandmother was a block of Swiss cheese or something.
Buggy (as I’m calling her for now) poked her nose into absolutely everything. She was the one who found the toilet and showed the others how to use it. She didn’t use it herself, and even more strangely, she refused a meal-pack last night and today too, though she did steal my cup of coffee. I’ve had to gently guide her away from more sensitive things several times, including twice while I’ve been typing this.
And then the last one, whose sole resemblance to any of the others is that he speaks the same language. For one thing, he’s a he- or so I assume, since his voice is like two octaves deeper than any of the others. Also, he’s not a quadrupedal ungulate, he’s a bipedal reptilian, standing on two long rear legs that would be almost human except for a few minor differences, like clawed feet, scales, digitigrade legs- you know, trivial stuff like that. The others occasionally stand on their hind legs to reach things or even take a few steps upright in a sort of awkward way, but he’s the only one who stays like that all the time. He also has a spiked tail, about half the length of his legs; his spacesuit is the only one that has a special limb made just to hold the tail.
He’s slightly taller than me- which makes him about a head and a half taller than Johannsen or any of the other aliens standing on their hind legs. He makes up for it by being skinny as hell- like a snake with arms and legs, but a dragon’s face. He’s mostly white with a red trim along the sides of his body and in a sort of V around his neck. He has dark yellow ridges down his head and spine, like Godzilla’s only rounded and blunt. The top ridge is fat and kind of leans forward over his forehead, making it kind of look like combed-back hair. I haven’t decided yet whether to call him Puff or Kirk because of that.
The other aliens being ungulates, I’m treating them as herbivores until I learn differently, and so I’ve been giving them the vegetarian dinners. About one-quarter of all the meal packs have vegetable protein instead of meat; it keeps better longer and it’s cheaper, a double win for NASA. But Puff is an omnivore, and by omnivore I mean that he didn’t even unwrap or heat up the meal packet. He just bit into it and ate the whole thing. Though to be honest, he might have been showing off. The guy just exudes machismo.
Okay, I’ve blown more than half an hour writing this up, and I need to stop for now. If all six of us are going to live together, I need to make sure everything’s up to scratch. That means cleaning the solar panels and making sure they survived the storm OK and then doing diagnostics on all the mission-critical equipment- the oxygenator, the atmospheric regulator, the water reclaimer.
And I also need to clear off at least one of the rovers. If the Hab systems check out, then tomorrow I’m going to have my guests take me back to their ship. If anything can be salvaged from it- especially food- that needs to be done sooner than later.
I just hope it’s within the ten kilometer limit specified by mission regs. If the rover runs out of juice away from the Hab, it’s going to be a mighty long wait for AAA service to show up with the jumper cables.
Stats
Page generated in 0.073 seconds
Total duration
1,110 users online
2,002,266 hits today, 2,571,732 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
i think its fair for Mars to tell Huston that "we have a pony..."
You have my full and undivided attention.
Unhappy dragon at least has better tasting wrapper than contents of MRE, but would be even unhappier if he was Kirk. Three alien females and nothing going on.
Depending on the camera resolution etc, accessing GOCHE ion drive atmosphere flight data, telepphoto optics, they should get not just better than a metre resolution, but compensating for relative angular velocity by pivoting the camera, taken from spy planes data, they could get down to inch per pixel res or so. But that would be like 256 Meg camera, 18 inch diameter optics, 100km altitude ? Then again, theres a neat trick with multiple slipped fast photos computing the phase difference between them to increase the effective resolution, sort of like super sampling?
I forgot the overall delta V of the Hermes, but Ive read Azimovs Lucky Starr, and Clarkes 2063, and so even when an ion drive can give you a short flight time direct accross the solar system, like the local road network, theres this horrendously impassible structure in the way that just has to be avoided. And it aint Granny Weatherwax.
It will be typical that the magic exudate of the Equestrians will keep causing compact dust devils, preventing direct detailed viewing, but could end up making Wells? style writing communication just by wandering out for a few letters.
Pity noones got a corner reflector to make a self tracking laser radar heliograph.
Oooooooh, I like this. Keep going.
Wait, are you sure you don't mean digitigrade? The sentence structure suggests that his plantigrade legs are counted in the list of minor differences, but humans are plantigrade, too.
8645747 Thanks, I get those mixed up too often.
Oh, Featured. #4 overall, #3 without mature fics.
8645791 I'm pleased about that, but for the moment I'm chalking that up to carryover from CSP. We'll see how things look after a week or so of this. I have high hopes.
You are really nailing Mark Watney's voice in the log updates. I think the Hermes crew being aware of something off from the very beginning of the story, before they even left Mars, puts an entirely different spin on the rest of the story. Their options are still really limited, but there is the potential for near-instant communication between Hermes and Mars while Earth talks to Hermes on a slower line.
8645897
Well, you definitely continue to hold my interest. :)
Reading CSP is needed to understand this?
8645684
Ares III, Houston. What do you mean, you have a pony? Everyone since Apollo 11 knows that only the Moon has a pony on it.
8645897
I hope this continues to do well in the feature box, too.
I've chipped in a little on Patreon as well, hope it helps. It's certainly past time for me to start supporting an author whose work here I've been enjoying so much.
8645990
"just what we said, Huston...and not just one...four of them...and i dragon!"
Well, he got half of one name, so he's already decoded (assuming Equestrian has all the same words as English) almost six thousandths of a percent of their language! Good progress, at this rate he'll get done in only 470 years or so.
I find it amazing that on Chrome for mobile, there is an Articles for You section right below your most visited sites when you open a new tab. I don't know how it works, but it recommended this story the moment it came out, and I can't believe that it's something I'm actuslly interested in. The ladt time it did this, it also recommended The Musings of an Old Fool by Monochromatic, which I also plan to read very soon.
I guess Google Chrome is on it's shit.
I don't even need to be on site to find good stories.
Spitfire is my favourite pony so I am so glad you included her. I hope she finds something to smile about sooner or later
I will be eagerly reading this each day when it updates. It's one of those things where I could easily see 3K+ words of chapters building up when I miss a few days, but right now I'd happily read a lot more
I've only seen the film of the Martian, but as the plot changes anyway I imagine that'll be ok. I definitely recognise how you've captured Mark's character, he was engaging enough on his own and imagine he will be just as good when surrounded by stranded ponies.
Great job with this!
I like that straight away you've already diverged from the plot of the original. This is no thin overlay on The Martian, this is a full story in its own right.
It's worth noting that their wings aren't strong enough to lift them even on Mars' lesser gravity. They'd be even more useless on Earth.
8645987 Not really. I'm going to try to limit spoilers for unwritten chapters of CSP to the absolute minimum.
The main things you need to know are being told in the story- Cherry Berry is Equus's most experienced astromare; Fireball was the sole pilot of the dragons' space project; Spitfire is on her first-ever space flight; etc.
8645990 Thanks!!
8646314 Spitfire, as shown in chapter 1, is feeling awkward. She's trained as a backup pilot, but this is her first time actually in space. She was picked so there would be an earth pony, a unicorn and a pegasus on the flight, and also so there would be two crew each from Changeling Space Program (Cherry Berry and Dragonfly) and Equestrian Space Agency (Starlight Glimmer and Spitfire). Until training for this flight began she was commander of the Wonderbolts; now she's the team rookie with her principal role being first aid. So she's feeling very out of place, deferring to Cherry Berry (a civilian and an earth pony, for Faust's sake, but such experience!!) and fulfilling a role she has very little experience in.
8646212 Watney hasn't picked up even that. You'll notice that one of his pet names is not only wrong, but it would be correct if he applied it to a different Equestrian.
8646409 The plot changes from necessity. Ponies, and the tech they bring with them, solve a lot of the problems Watney originally had in the book. One of the things I'm working on is replacing every solved problem with a new problem, and giving both Watney and the ponies new ways to potentially kill themselves and each other through blunders or oversights.
I'm also going to address a few problems the book had. For example: in the book Watney states that the Martian rations are 2000 calories a day, and from an early point he goes to 3/4 ration, 1500 calories, which he can survive on with vitamins added. Well, no. 2000 calories are an average recommended intake for someone not particularly active. Soldiers get 4000 calories a day. I looked it up, and meals for astronauts in orbit- zero-G- run between 3200 and 3500 per day. The end result will be the same- Mark (and the ponies) go on rations and have to reduce their activity a bit, but it eliminates one of my personal pet peeves.
There's another oversight in the original novel, and it's a GIGANTIC one, that will be addressed when we get to it. And it will be a major early plot point.
I like that both the corrections "But, Mark" and "Butt mark" work in this context.
Really enjoying this so far!
8643567
Yup. Liked the movie adaptation right up until that.
Well, this went off the rails immediately. Delightful. The new challenges should be fascinating to see, not least the ongoing attempts to learn English and Horse-Welsh. Meanwhile, the Ares crew will likely be terribly frustrated at their inability to go back to the surface.
8646412
Lack of magic is likely having an impact there, though at about one-third Earth gravity, it is a stark statement about unassisted pegasus muscle power.
Hah! Priorities: he has them!
Liked, tracking, and definitely enjoying. Quite enjoyed the book and movie too, even with the utter boneheaded method used at the end to cross that last bit.
Am I the only one who thinks the RTG will play a major role in this story too? I half expect Fireball to eat it.
Ok. Something thats botherd me ever since the book, and all through present flights, and I keep forgetting about it. they keep saying that suit radios only have a few miles range.
He shouldve taken a $5 cell phone with him.
Apparently jodrell Bank, the smaller than DSN radio telescope thats 60 plus years old, is claimed to be sensitive enough to pick up a cell phone on Mars.
But, this is a major piece of resources, being abused for something so cheap that every teenager and their dog would be abusing it. So, everything is always declared to be expensive and difficult not only to make sure its more likely to keep people alive, but also to try and stop people trying to pull it off with build in back yard stuff.
Instead of saying, what is the minimum power needed for a suit radio for DSN to pick it up in voice to text to Morse code?
Or, how quickly can those 100 metre inflatable listenin in to cell phone dishes on the ground be launched on Orbitals airdrop?
Another neat trick tat can be done, is to point out you can make a very decent arc transmitter out of a 6 volt battery and a pencil lead. Ive had arcs off 5 volt USB. The only thing I dont have is with the pencil lead glowing red hot, just what its resistance, and so current flow through it, given plasmas are clased as negative resistance, and so essentially the whole 6 volts is dropped accross the pencil lead. Which was out of a propelling pencil, so the length was the spacing of the terminals, and the lead was 0.5 to 0.75mm diamater, but I cant remember if it was HB, 2H etc, for the graphite to clay ratio.
Remember kiddies, potatoes might keep you alive, but arc transmitters are damn near impossible to miss or block. Thats why they are Heavily Banned. The regulations for DC electrical equipment is increadible, just to limit every possibility.
How many people know a 30 year old petrol car with spark ignition that drowns out all your wifi as it passes by the end of the road?
8646574 It's true that Earth has antenna farms like Jodrell Bank, the VLA, etc. that can pick up feeble signals. The Voyagers, for example, are putting out a signal that, by the time it gets to Earth, is just barely above background radiation.
But the thing is, the Voyager signals are directed- that's how come the giant dish.
Mars is a lot closer, but without the satellite dish Watney doesn't have a directed signal. Even if he rigs up a broadcast antenna from the scraps he has on hand, the signal will be diffused, omnidirectional, and a lot harder for Earth- or even the satellites overhead- to pick up.
And all of that overlooks the true problem: Watney could send messages to his heart's content, but he can't receive any. As the book puts it, a signal would have to be "melting-the-pigeons strong" for the crippled Hab radio to pick it up.
All of this will be addressed in coming chapters, of course.
After reading the first chapter, I went ahead and took the copy of The Martian that's been sitting on my shelf for the past 6 months and read it cover-to-cover. If nothing else, this story has inspired me to pick up a good book.
Wondering when/if the subject of contamination will come up. Not like I expect Watney to catch the Pony Pox or something, but I find myself thinking bacterial cross-contamination might cause some problems. Especially given ponies use their mouths so much.
I almost forgot this is "hold my cider and watch this" Dragonfly we're talking about. That poor, unsuspecting human.
8646448
Speaking of solved problems, you mentioned in the previous chapter that the air and water crystals survived the jump (unsure about the crash). I wonder how long it will take Horseton to realize that they are still being used.
8646706 Well, that's a thing. The Amicitas's main air and water crystals are intact, but they're shut down. They'd have to be re-activated from the Equestria end of the connection. So, at the moment, they're not being used.
But the same system is used in each of their space suits, and those are active... sometimes.
I haven't decided for certain, but I'm leaning strongly against showing the Equestria end of this scenario because of potential major CSP spoilers.
Dang i wanted to see live reactions and interactions between the human and ponies
Oh well
8646743
Avoiding showing Equestria is fine by me. It'll add a lot of tension to the story. I was thinking more along the lines of the crew wondering why their supply crystals keep acting up and finally figuring out that it's Horseton using them as the pony equivalent of Morse Code. And then having to figure out how to even respond. An interesting parallel to Mark's radio problem.
Occupant stood facing every engineer available on such short notice. Between them sat a table loaded with astrogation gear, ship parts, thaumic crystals, ops manuals and any number of miscellania that could be found on the Amicitas. Occupant held two crystals, water an air supply, in one hoof and a telepresence crystal in the other. "Alright, everyone! We need to turn these," indicating the supply crystals, "into this," holding up the telepresence crystal then motioning to the table, "using nothing but that. Get to work!"
8646879 *sigh* Since you guessed it and I'd rather not be accused of lifting ideas, I'll give you this much: yes, the ponies will eventually make contact with home by a combination of water valves and Mares Code. It won't be very useful, though, since Horseton can't send that much without drenching the recipients of the message.
But kudos for the Apollo 13 riff. That's my favorite movie of all time, by the way.
"Unnnh... is it PM or AM?" "AM. Very, very AM."
8646954
I find an excuse to use this line every time I work a grant proposal with an absurd 6am deadline.
No one here at my job has ever gotten the reference,
8647672
It doesn't strike me so much as a sequel as a "what if?" side story. It'd only be a real sequel if it had lasting changes to the status quo from the results of this. First Contact, exchange of technology, culture, tourism, and the works. Not to mention all the time spent on Mars and not back at the Changeling Space Program. If it's years... that's the kind of thing you can't ignore. However, the author will probably show very little of the Changeling Space Program, if at all, to avoid spoiling the unwritten chapters of Changeling Space Program. So, expect it to be disconnected from that.
8647678 Er... this story takes place after the planned end of CSP, so it couldn't affect the older work.
(And I've just given away the fact that I have a pre-determined ending for CSP, gameplay be damned. Well... I already kind of did that, in that I've given away the fact that Cherry Berry will not be allowed to die no matter how badly I screw up a flight.
)
Hmm so the ponies are about the mass of a human?
When down on all fours they get to be mid-thigh to Watney at the back/withers?
Yay, optimism!
interplanetary hoboes
At least they brought their own rations... though they might still be in the ship, I guess.
I sincerely doubt he had internet there anyway
It's almost as good as "because magic"
Well, kind of, I guess. Do they have any spark batteries left for her to suck dry?
Bwahahaha.
Well, kind of a wing on fire kinda thing, but, close enough. I guess he didn't want to analyse it too closely, to avoid the aforementioned first interstellar sexual harassment lawsuit
I knew the comparison would go that way
Poor changeling, heh.
Yes, pretty trivial
Pfff
Remarks and corrections:
> Did I mentione that four out of the five aliens
Small typo; "mention".
> like Godzilla’s only rounded and blunt
Needs a comma before "only".
Besides the calorie issue and the lack of atmospheric pressure negating wind force, I'm not entirely sure that I remember any other errors in The Martian.
Before going into the story, I at first was worried that you might not be able to capture Mark Watney's character to a faithful degree.
That concern was put to rest the moment I got to the line "interplanetary hoboes" and burst out laughing.
You managed to replicate his sense of humor perfectly in his log entries it's uncanny, and I found myself giggling at every other paragraph. So far it's turning out to be a very worthy adaptation of the original.
I love you.
I'm reading CSP and I've seen The Martian movie, so how I could I resist reading this?
One correction:
It should be -- if worse comes to WORST -- It's a progression like bad to worse to worst.
I love this, and I love you for this.
Platonically.
Finally, someone drew a parallel between Equestria and Houyhnhnm
this catches the vibe of the book perfectly. Nice writing.
If you don't read this in the voice of Matt Damon then shame on you.
Of course, now that they've found the cave, Starlight can simply carve out dice from the crystals
8649293
oh, yeah, i never thought of that!
that does make the first part seem a bit silly.
reminds me of "because magic" in several other stories.