Sol 91
AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 89
ARES III SOL 91
“Okay, next page please, Mark.”
Starlight Glimmer watched from her bunk as Mark gingerly turned the page of the Amicitas’s ship specs book on the ground next to her, careful not to flex the brittle page more than necessary. The book was a looseleaf binder, making it easy to keep open while Mark took photos of the two newly visible pages. This done, he sat back on his own bunk and typed on his computer while Starlight used her magic to type on another. He was working on his diary; she was trying to translate the text of the manual so the whole thing could be sent to Earth once a steady communication system existed.
It was a quiet day in the Hab. She, Cherry Berry and Spitfire had eaten the last Equestrian-prepared meal packs except for Fireball’s remaining handful the night before. The morning’s breakfast had been an attempt to eat the small supply of freeze-dried alfalfa left after the hab breach. After a couple of bites the whole mini-harvest had been set aside as raw material for Dragonfly’s future use, if and when more goo and goo by-products were needed. After that they had a second breakfast, splitting two of Mark’s mostly-grain breakfast meals between the three ponies and Mark himself.
The main task for the others today was to mulch up the dead potato plants so they could be added to the compost box and their nutrients recycled into the soil. Mark would suit up about once an hour and step outside to look at the space probe he’d spent the previous day working on. So far, nothing had changed. The smaller robot rover sat on a work table, inert, its battery removed, its solar panels sitting directly under a reading lamp.
When Mark wasn’t committing the robot equivalent of watching snail races, he was helping Starlight with her project. She literally couldn’t do it without him. The digital dictionary in the computer wasn’t up to the task, or her English wasn’t up to finding the answers in the dictionary. She had asked a couple of dozen times already for technical words, and on several occasions she’d asked him to transcribe pony words for units of measurement that didn’t line up exactly with human measurements. And although typing by magic was a bit faster than typing by hoof, the tiny trickle of her inner magic’s regeneration in this universe limited her typing speed.
“Hey, Starlight.”
Starlight looked up from her typing a list of labels for the Amicitas’s heat transfer system to see Spitfire walking over. Another of Mark’s computers was carefully perched on her back. Mark didn’t even blink; he’d seen the ponies use this method of carrying things around, without incident, too often to be worried anymore.
“What is it, Spitfire?” Starlight groaned. “You gave me a dose of bone-knit only an hour ago, and the painkillers are still working fine. I don’t need more medicine.”
Spitfire frowned, and for a moment Starlight was afraid she’d argue the point. But she shook her head and said, “No medicine. I just need help finding that dictionary you told us about.”
Starlight raised an eyebrow. “Is there some reason you don’t ask someone who knows better than me?” she asked. She used her tiny trickle of magic to cast a minor cantrip of a glowing arrow pointing down at Mark behind his head where he couldn’t see it.
“It’s a surprise,” Spitfire said, smiling.
“Ooooooookay,” Starlight said carefully, cancelling the illusion. “What are you looking up?”
“Dinner.”
It seemed like every question left Starlight more confused than ever. “Right,” she said. “Let me see.”
Spitfire used her wings to pick up the laptop and turn it so the screen faced Starlight. With a few keystrokes the unicorn brought up the dictionary app. “There you are,” she said. “The tab up top with the long label that begins T-H-E,” she used the English letters, “gives you the thesaurus. If you’re looking for a lot of words for the same thing, that’s where to begin.”
“Thanks,” Spitfire said, turning the computer back around and walking carefully back to the pony-use worktable.
“What was that about?” Mark asked.
“Um…” Starlight tried to remember if the word she wanted had ever been in their English lessons. “Thing where you don’t know something is going to happen until it does? Like a party? Or the inside of a box?”
“Surprise?” Mark asked, his hands miming a sort of explosion.
Starlight looked the word up in her own dictionary and nodded. “Yes. Spitfire has a surprise.”
Mark looked a bit wistful. “I used to like surprises,” he said.
“What happened?”
Mark pointed to the elliptical patch in the Hab canvas where Airlock 1 had been. “I came to Mars,” he said.
MISSION LOG – SOL 91
This morning I woke up to a Pathfinder that wasn’t any different than it was when I left it yesterday afternoon. Considering the lack of vandals on Mars, that shouldn’t be too surprising, but I had hoped for something.
If hooking Pathfinder up to Hab power and adding a heater to warm it up to operating temperatures doesn’t work, I’m going to have to crack it open and see if I can find anything broken that I have tools to fix. If the CPU or the circuit board is damaged in any way I’m probably fucked, but anything else might be solvable.
Right now I’m thinking about backup plans if Pathfinder’s brains are permanently offline. The simplest experiment would be to rip off the low-gain and high-gain antennas and hook them up to the Hab radio and see if that works. That’s a last resort, though, because I don’t think I can do that without irreparably breaking the rest of Pathfinder’s systems.
Another alternative would be to bugger the leads to the high-gain antenna and make a telegraphy key. I’m certain I could get an outgoing signal that way. The problem is, I’ve got no clue how to receive a reply. I don’t know enough about the insides of either Pathfinder or the Hab radio to turn incoming transmissions into either audible tones or something the Hab can read.
And that’s really the key flaw in my plan. Getting an outbound transmission is easy; I have the pony ship radio for that, even if it is fighting with Top 20 Radio and public broadcasting for wavebands.
Wait a minute… here’s an idea. I could use Pathfinder as my outgoing telegraphy key. Assuming NASA’s radio telescopes pick up the unexpected microwave transmission from Mars, I can use it to send instructions to reply by one of the five presets in the pony ship radio. The time lag will be enough for me to move from Pathfinder to the pony ship and await a response. (It’s about 11 minutes lag one-way- Earth is a speedy fuck compared to Mars’s orbital velocity around the sun, and in ninety sols one-way transmission time has almost tripled.)
The pony radio is set up for voice. And analog. I’ll have to include that in the instructions I send them- make the return signal loud and in Morse. It might just be possible to get a voice transmission here from Earth, but signal decay makes that unlikely, and that decay’s only going to get worse for the next two hundred and fifty or so sols.
But yeah. That’s doable, as a last resort. I hope it doesn’t get that far, though.
But that’s days ahead. I want to give Pathfinder at least two more days to heat up. The thin Martian air is all too damn good at whisking heat away, but kind of shit at helping heat transfer into an object, even when the object is literally sitting on the heat source like Pathfinder is.
The thing is, the direct power feed I have running into Pathfinder ought to be powering its internal heaters, if they still work at all. But I don’t have a good way of knowing. That’s why Rover 1’s environment heater is there- a backup in case the on-board heaters are offline. Or stolen. I did mention I couldn’t find them yesterday, right?
Maybe I ought to be worried about Martian vandals after all. It might not be a coincidence that when we got here on Sol 1, neither rover had any hubcaps.
Just sayin’.
“Okay, everyone,” Mark said, “here’s lunch. Enjoy!” He laid a full mealpack each in front of Cherry Berry and Spitfire, then walked over to Starlight’s stool-turned-nightstand to offer her a third.
“Excuse, Mark?” Spitfire asked. “Can ask choose meal?”
Mark walked back over to the other two ponies. “Choose your meal?” he asked. “What do you want?”
“Meat.”
Mark went pale.
“Fish meat,” Spitfire continued. “Cod. Hake. Pollock. Trout. Carp. Salmon. Tuna.”
Mark went paler.
“Sardines. Anchovies. I like anchovies,” Spitfire said. With a large toothy smile she added, “Eat whole. Eat fins. Eat heads. Crunch, crunch, crunch.” She made biting motions in Mark’s direction.
Mark turned slightly green. “Excuse me,” he said, stepping uncertainly in the direction of the little-used Hab toilet.
Spitfire laughed, long and loud. “That got him!” she cheered in Equestrian between fits. “That’ll- ha ha- teach him- ha ha ha ha- to treat us- hee hee- like cows!”
She hadn’t noticed that Cherry Berry next to her had turned even greener than Mark, a sight which looked pretty impressive through pink fur.
“Now maybe we can get some of the good stuff,” Spitfire said. “At least eggs for breakfast. I miss eggs almost as much as my-“
“Spitfire,” Cherry said, gulping a bit of air, “shut up right now and that’s an order.”
And the pink pilot pony pushed her pack away.
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While I was looking up some facts about Pathfinder, it struck me how big the gulf between Human and Equestrian electronics might be. What figures I could dig up indicate that the 20-year-old computer in Pathfinder performs about 100x faster than the one the Amacitas used for the Sparkle Drive (aka “the most powerful computer available”). By that same metric, a decent processor today can run 1,000,000x faster than the one the Pony ship is packing. Plugging that into the Sparkle Drive would theoretically bring the speed up to over 3000c (aka “Really Frickin’ Fast”), provided they had a Warp Core to power the thing.
However...it’s been established that the cost of teleportation, and thus the Sparkle Drive, decreases exponentially with the length of the jump. A much faster computer means that they could make much smaller jumps for the same overall speed, but at a fraction of the cost. There aren’t any numbers as to how that would affect power consumption, but it leads me to wonder how low it can go, and what implication it has for our castaways.
Even assuming that the computers NASA shipped to Mars can only be rigged to run the drive 10,000x faster, that would still let them cut the length of the jump down to under a millimeter without increasing the length of the journey. It leads me to wonder if the cost could be brought down far enough to get them from Mars to Earth solely on battery power.
Was I meant to fill that in with something dirty? Or am I just a fucked up person for that being my go to thought?
8748900 She was going to say "breakfast cereal."
8748904
Shit...
Hey Dragonfly! How do disgust and nausea taste?
Is Cherry a full vegetarian? Not sure why else she would react this way.
From what I recall in the show, ponies do eat eggs a fair bit, but in terms of actual meat I only recall fish, and even then I think it's only ever Pegasi that eat fish. Just Spitfire switching to fish meal packs would probably buy them another two weeks or so before Mark's vegetarian meal packs run out, which would put them solidly into the alfalfa harvest. (Assuming Mark has enough fish meal packs at least.)
I do wonder what's wrong with the alfalfa being freeze dried though. I mean alfalfa is often served to animals dried. If lack of water content made it unpalatable they could have rehydrated it to help. It doesn't have to taste good, and it should still have the necessary calories and nutrition.
8748911
Same. I don't get it.
8748911 I think it's because he assumed they were all full herbivores. It's like someone being disturbed by seeing, say, a rabbit eat roadkill . Less what's being eaten and more what's doing the eating. Doesn't add up. Horrifying.
8748911
I think it was her rather graphic description of Spitfire nomming on whole fish, suggesting that they just eat 'em raw. Or rather, alive and uncleaned.
Which they might. I dunno. They DID have fishing poles in that one MLP episode. I don't have a hard time picturing them eating sushi, for some reason. And Flutters DOES feed fish to her carnivore animal friends. They're obviously not strangers to the idea.
NB: There's a funny story called "Surviving Sand Island" where a shipwrecked Rarity gets squicked by Dashie crunching up whole crabs. Not really anything to do with this, but I liked it.
8748934
Real-world horses, deer and even cows and sheep sometimes eat meat or carrion. They've gone back and forth on whether they're doing it just for the minerals if their diet is lacking, or if they actually do it because...well, because they like a bit of extra protein from time to time. But it's been well-documented. It usually doesn't hurt them.
8748925
8748904
am starting to think his worry of being eaten
8748940
yeah, but a lot of people who don't know this find it really disturbing to watch. Idr how much Mark knows about horses to be honest so that's why this is my guess.
8748887
given about that knowlage........ can we just sent a raspberry pi zero to them, its tiny light wight and can do lots with it... now i think about it now i have to wonder what that damn little computer have done in those years in 2030.
i mean no really it have a huge user base and its now the new standard in the internet of things
8748887
Interesting point. If they had an intact Sparkle Drive then they really might be able to get to Earth on the two batteries they have instead of the banks of batteries they started with. Problem is that they don't have an intact Sparkle Drive. Going by their inability to even build a new communication system on site, I'm doubtful they could make a new Sparkle Drive on Mars.
Though it does raise the idea of exploring much of the local stellar region once trade between species is more available. Magical travel cost is likely still prohibitive though for multi-light year travel though in Earth's universe given the sheer scale of distance involved for traveling on battery power.
8748933
She does specify heads fins and all.
8748917 Cherry Berry is indeed vegetarian. And Mark is squicked because he can't handle the mental image of a carnivorous pony. Maybe he was exposed to a rerun of Honky Tonk Freeway on cable TV as a tyke? https://hashed.io/c100276/honky-tonk-freeway/t911051/ricky-the-carnivorous-pony
(Also, I can't stomach the idea of eating a fish head, I don't care what Barnes and Barnes say.)
8748960
Obligatory:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKDtUzRIG6I
i mean just stop and think if it comes down to them starving to death one of them would go apeshit crazy and wanting to eat the other.... now mark have a new problem because the mean reason why we don't eat each other (other then morel reason) is because you will go all mad cow like (go look it up) but look at this there's a dragon a chealging and a human and 3 ponies. if anything those 3 have to run for there fucking life if the ponies go carzy
8748940
there own to eat worms all the time deers and others like it
8748966 I'm assuming the word came up as part of TV watching. Parties are a frequent thing in TV, particularly 70s comedies.
Just wana point out that the last thing you want to be doing to pathfinder in this situation is heating it up quickly.
The stress of too fast uneven thermal expansion could result in damage to electronic contacts.
Now pathfinder was of course hardened for such stress, but you still should be careful if you are relying on it after it has sat for years.
8748974
WAIT!!! i think i know how to self there meat problem, sent bugs up there for them to breed and eat like east asisa dose (i only eat them for a rare time given i live in the usa where there way more food to eat)
deep fry bugs are the best with spice and more
8748960
So that just leaves Starlight as uncertain now.
Interestingly while researching my hypothesis that it was only pegasi that eat fish I came across Pinkie Pie saying:
"Both our diets, I should mention
Are completely vegetarian "
During a song in the season 1 episode "Over a Barrel" trying to make peace between Buffalo and Ponies.
Mind you it then makes little sense why they're keeping pigs at Applejack's farm. Fishing poles are shown in the series as well, but they don't ever go fishing for fish. Fluttershy feeds some fish to her animals, so the fishing poles might be to feed other things with.
As to fish heads, I can't really see eating them myself, but I've seen other people eat them and it didn't gross me out much. Humans eat all sorts of bizarre things that I wouldn't personally eat on a dare.
8748984 Heating too fast.
On Mars.
Yeah, somehow I don't think that will be a problem.
8749014
They might sell the pigs to folks who aren't vegetarian. Not really many reasons to keep pigs around unless someone's eating them or making leather or something. The fertilizer they produce isn't that good, really.
I've made fish stock with whitefish heads. It made a pretty nice soup base. Great in a breadbowl.
Ponies can eat meat... Within limits. It's mainly the fat contents as certain fatty acids break down slower than others, and can cause digestive blocking. I would imagine that Soldiers, and ponies that have been in survival situations are aware of this. I can also see that a Taste for "high protien" items can end up an aquired taste. Other ponies would see this as a "squick" problem, along the line of eating certain Mollusks, for the first time.
8748960
A Barnes and Barnes reference, WOW, I am impressed!
Crunchy Fish. It's the bones that make these crunchy.
8749045
could have been worse...she could have asked for the chocolate called Crunchy Frog...and if u get that reference, u get an internet cookie
8749045
All this talk of raw fish is reminding me of Smeagol... Nasty tricksy ponieses...
8748887
also i think they used what we mostly use in our smartphones an ARM cpu not the old x86 or the newer x64
8748953
I actually missed the part about the Drive crystal being destroyed in the crash.
But I don't think their inability to build a comms system is relevant to their ability to create a new drive crystal.
From what I understand, problem one is that their systems just aren't compatible. The ESA comms are a combination of Telepresence spells and analog radio. But the Telepresence is useless because nothing can receive it, the analog radio is hard-wired to frequencies that render it functionally useless, and neither one can connect to Mark's own equipment. Problem Two is that the only one who can actually work on this stuff is Starlight, and she hasn't had the time or energy required to make it a priority.
Arguably, they're in a better position to recreate the Drive than to build a new comm. Starlight has the full blueprint for the spell array, and enough crystal material, as well as experience designing and creating the original Drives. Whether they could build a magic-powered radio to contact Earth is unknown; their priority has been getting the Telepresence spell working again up until now. But even if they could, it's doubtful Starlight has experience building magic-powered radios, since they never really needed them. Even if they had some already designed, it would be impractical to try and talk her through building one from scratch with their current method of communication.
8749095
I'm not talking about communicating with Earth. Chapters back before they went to get Pathfinder the ESA walked Starlight through the process to make a new magical communication system so that they could communicate with the ESA properly instead of by water telegraph. She couldn't get it to work, despite the same availability of crystals and not being injured at the time.
Plus if they have the blueprint for the Sparkle Drive they almost certainly have the blueprint for their telepresence spell array.
8749054
Well, yes, but no one would expect it to be an actual real frog in there. Poor labeling, if you ask me. Wouldn't have had nearly the same impact.
8748887
Programming is hard. Really hard. Pathfinder was engineered for a specific purpose and her computer will not include the programs needed to write new software. While it may be fast, there is no conceivable way to get it to control a Sparkle Drive.
Analogy- the space shuttle had very strong engines. A roman flour mill would indeed spin very fast if the shuttle fuel could be used to power the mill. However, the shuttle main engines couldn’t possibly be hooked up to the mill using only spare engine parts found on a space shuttle.
8748911
Fish goes bad really fast, and according to my Dad MRE type meals with fish Stink worse than the Latrine...
8748887
Clever. Very clever.
While I could see them finding out that the exponential relationship breaks down as they push the cycles-per-second speed limit*, that solution has some beautiful synergy of human and pony tech to it. I like it. I like it a lot.
*Every seemingly simple natural law ends up covered in hair and tree sap (
Not our fault this time, I promise!) when you push it to its extremes. (Like how mass gets... weird as you approach the speed of light)
Hooking a key directly to an antenna would do absolutely nothing. So Mark’s idea about getting a signal by buggering the leads on the antenna is very wrong. The thing that makes the signal is a transmitter circuit. If all the circuits are dead, there is no way to generate a signal. (Morse code keys do not produce energy. They are just switches which control a transmitter.)
8749021
With a changeling working on it, anything is possible!
8749115
So Spitfire is gonna be That Guy? The one who microwaves fish in the office microwave?
Good thing they don't have popcorn...
8749107
what about their sales?
8748960
I'm more wondering how much Cherry had to understand to turn green. Though on reflection, "Eat heads. Crunch, crunch, crunch" would probably be among the easier words.
8749105
True, they couldn't get the telepresence to work, even when they repaired it. But there was a reason for that:
It couldn't bridge the dimensions, even when they overcharged the spells. Building a whole new array wouldn't fix the problem. But that's not a problem they would have if they only used the Sparkle Drive to get to Earth.
8749108
Oh, I know. I wasn't suggesting that they would use Pathfinder; even if it were practical, they still need it to ultimately talk to NASA (which would make tearing it apart a Bad Idea). I was just pointing out that it was orders of magnitude more powerful than the one used onboard Amacitas, and that modern computers are orders of magnitude more powerful than Pathfinder. And modern computers are something Watney has in relative abundance.
8748338 "Mission to Mars". It's sooooo dull. And the CGI looked stupid back then, and looks even worse now.
8748344 Or really dopey-looking aliens.
Oh well, could have been worse...
2.bp.blogspot.com/-HdR2vdKesF0/UOD2JjCDoRI/AAAAAAAABCc/ZbFZ8hilqQk/s1600/ARP+3.jpeg
8749021
Yes. It could.
Micro-rover mass 16kg
Mars ambient temperature at the landing site ranges from -60 to 0 Celsius.
Hab ambient temperature around 23 C.
Specific heats of metals likely to make up bulk of rover (in kJ / kg K:
Aluminium: .91 Steel: .49
1 kJ/hr = .27 watt
Pessimistically it would take 300 watts to bring the mini rover up to temperature in an hour.
Heat lamps are easily a hundred watts, so three hours, not including heating from the surrounding hab environment.
Wait... The mini rover was carried back in the big rover for several days, it have heated up by now anyway right?
My point is that the problem this chapter is either not a problem, or is the wrong problem. And thermal stress gives you a potential plot point down the line for why equipment breaks down.
8749021
In the immortal words of Capt. Edward A. Murphy, "If there is any way to do it wrong, he'll find it!"
8749126
Just because the circuits are dead doesn't mean all of the circuits are dead. Especially for an OOK signal.
Jury rigging a repair for the parts that allow a transmission would be likely (not definitely though) possible.
Most importantly though he is planning on using the analog system from the Amicitas for the transmission. Which is working. Just not designed for that distance and unfortunately designed for operation on the Earth standard FM commercial frequency bands.
It being so distant and every thing close to Earth is so loud they may not be heard unless some one is looking.
But I think the author is under estimating Human boredom and the rather large systems official and not on the planet.
There are enough amateurs, governments, and other systems out there it has a likely-ish chance of being heard if it is clear enough. Especially if it is repetitive.
Heck. Amateur hams heard the original Hindenburg disaster transmission decades after the original transmission due to it being bounced back to Earth. Verified by multiple stations.
Also no... Noone was looking for it. Similar things still happen. Man I miss the Monitoring Times. Guess the IRC will have to suffice.