Chapter 6
“All-righty. Here goes nothing.” She pushes it forwards.
A tone chimes. “Error,” the ship pitches in suddenly, and quietly, from her panel. “The parking brake is still engaged.”
Half an hour later, she pushes it forwards again. This time, finally, it works.
Nothing seems to happen. For a second.
Then, with a suddenness that throws everypony against their seats, the starscape in front of them vanishes, becoming a sea of white streaks racing past the windows.
Twilight leans forward. “Wow!” she yelps, watching the image above the table. It had zoomed out to show a field of little specks when she had, what had it called it, ‘disengaged the parking brake’? Now, all those specks are skirting past, zipping across the field, past a single speck, standing unmoving in the center- with a little, unreadable label on it. If she remembers correctly, it uses the same symbols- including the exact same sequence- as are printed on the side of this… starship.
Fluttershy gazes unblinkingly out the windows. Her lips slowly draw into a smile, her wings shifting outwards slightly. How many more friends are out there?
Nopony actually seems to notice that they hadn’t felt the acceleration at all- only a slight vibration in their panels and a painful wrenching feeling in their guts.
Pinkie loses her lunch all over the seat to her right.
The Starship Athena races through the stars, running her standard FTL drive- the ‘Distortion Drive’- up at maximum power. Thus, at roughly three times the apparent velocity any ship of her origin planet was capable of, she leaves Equestria far behind. Unbeknownst to her passengers, the streaked starscape they see is not actually stars; rather, it’s an artefact from how the Distortion Drive works. Every particle caught in the field, be it asteroid, debris, or simple space dust, is heated to truly impossible temperatures as the ship passes, emitting mass amounts of light- and creating a trail of fusion through space. This effect, jump-started by a short blast from the main engines, in turn propels the ship to a velocity proportional to the temperature of the passing particles.
Unfortunately, this drive system is usually never used at full power anywhere near a star; the particle densities can be dangerously high, for the components. Densities in and around Equestria’s local star system are even higher than in most.
The problem with high particle densities is that the ship’s hull comes into contact with any in its path. Ceramic shielding can only deflect so much before it fails- so standard procedure is to operate it just below the limiting point of where the ship can only barely disperse all the produced heat.
Starship Athena possesses no ceramic shielding. Her hull is made of alloy- and, fortunately for her passengers, a navigational shield. This shield absorbs much of the energy in these particles; it rather helps that her drive is tuned to generate these particles in a wedge shape, drawing them away from the ship.
But the navigational shields- which had been one of the switches Twilight had been forced to strike before the engines would work- can only absorb and disperse so much energy. The absolute limit is enormous- but these low-energy shields weren’t designed for any kind of significant energy transfer. The generators quickly spin right up to maximum and stay there, protected behind layer after layer of armor.
As the ship travels through the stars, casually overloading her navigational shields, her forward hull begins to heat up. Various cooling systems automatically kick on- and, eventually, the temperature of her forward hull stabilizes, once the temperature control grid begins dumping waste heat directly into her fusion plants to serve as fuel.
This, of course, presents another, entirely new problem. These fusion plants might be capable of converting starforge-level temperatures into electrical energy with amazing efficiency, but there’s one minor problem. Only four of them are running right now, the others having been shut down to conserve her limited fuel supply just hours after Twilight had first headed back to the surface.
Unfortunately, these four plants alone could not absorb the volume of thermal energy being dumped into them- even after the fusers go entirely offline.
Had somepony been sitting at the big, raised chair, they would have seen the red warning lights covering an entire sector of the control panel. Nopony is anywhere nearby- and nopony sees the lights or realizes anything is wrong for quite some time.
Some hours after they first headed out, one of the four operating fusion plants warps. The whirling containment projector catches on its track- and the overheated but properly functioning processor governing the device immediately orders an emergency shutdown.
It’s not fast enough. Long before the melted neutralizers can expend their long-wasted and difficult to manufacture cryogenic compounds into the failing fusion bottle, the containment projector catches again- causing the field to stutter, spilling a moment of plasma directly onto its neighboring, also overheated, reactor.
The second reactor’s processor melts during this exchange.
The ship’s primary processors, buried deep in the heart of the ship and operating at a comfortable temperature, calmly note this failure and, after failing to contact the backup processors on the same device, orders an emergency ejection of the failing plants.
Exploding bolts blow even as bulkheads seal shut, containing the onboard atmosphere before it can escape. Truly enormous explosive charges blow a significant segment of armor clear of the ship- and right out the top of the ship. Before it can even separate, though, the main computers seek the cause of the fault, extrapolate the situation, and drop the Distortion Drive into emergency shutdown.
Then, at the same moment as the exploding bolts intended to eject the plant successfully sever the connection, the containment bottle fails entirely.
Fortunately, the reactor rooms are designed to handle this kind of abuse. The fury of a star is vented successfully overboard, right about midships.
But as much as the master computers might consider the fusion problem solved with that, that wasn’t the only problem facing them. Emergency-stopping the Distortion Drive is its own feat of engineering; many a ship is destroyed by attempting such a feat.
The drive field doesn’t fade and disappear, as it’s supposed to; rather, it simply vanishes. The ship then slams navigational shields first into unmoving space dust and debris at approximately twenty-five thousand times the speed of light. It’s a testament to the shields and armor that they withstand the initial pounding- even before the combat shield comes on to blow everything out of the way. This done, with now cratered forward armor, the ship drops below the speed of light- but not too far below. Only to about one tenth the speed of light, where the combat shield switches back off again. Her navigational shield then runs nearly to maximum protecting the ship from impact. If anything significant gets in her path, like a micrometeorite, it’ll be up to her armor to absorb at least some of that impact.
Deep down in the Engineering decks, her twin triple-redundant inertial compensators are working overtime. Normally, starting the Distortion Drive is the most taxing event an inertial compensator might expect to handle- but, since many a starship gets away with a gentle start and no compensator, they generally don’t take much load. Twilight’s jump to full power had presented a little load, but nothing that just one of the six massive machines scattered across three different locations couldn’t handle.
Then, there’s the emergency stop. Twenty-five thousand cee to nothing, effectively, in a microsecond. All six of them hit full power- at least they don’t have to spin up like many of the shields- in but an instant, battling the sudden deceleration before even a single neuron can fire aboard the Observation Deck. Two of them blow generation components in action and simply shut down. One more blows a control ring, disrupting the work of the last three until the computer can force it into emergency shutdown. A fourth simply explodes as the stop comes close, and the fifth is downchecked immediately after the event for unacceptable wear on the control coils. The sixth would also have been downchecked, but it’s wear isn’t dangerous just yet- and besides, it’s the only one still working.
Next, the holoprojector on the Observation Deck simply switches off. Ship-wide, the lighting switches from a soft white to a harsh amber as the computer orders a switch to emergency power; the last two surviving fusion plants successfully went into emergency shutdown, and all of her remaining plants are far too hot for ignition.
At least they’re in a star system, though; the computer sees no need to instigate strict power control protocols. So long as her FTL drives and combat systems remain silent, given current passenger count, she will produce more through solar than she is using.
Finally, the ship as a whole saved from total destruction, the computer considers its passengers.
Fluttershy winces as Rainbow puts all her strength into pulling on her forelegs. She’d discovered these interesting buckles on the seats, and decided to try them out- and now, Rainbow’s putting them to the test.
The painful test.
Her seat readily flexes slightly forwards, but those strange buckles hold- and she remains firmly in the seat. She scowls; she’s just about ready to ask for a break.
Then everything goes wrong.
Rainbow is no longer pulling on her forelegs. Her chair has flexed so far forwards she thinks it’ll break off- then it snaps back, dragging her with it, to bounce back and forth for a second before it comes to a stop in its normal position.
She shakes her head dizzily, trying to make sense of what had just happened. It doesn’t exactly help that her head had not been attached to the chair.
Then she looks forwards, and her jaw drops. Momentarily.
The stars have stopped. A huge fireball is billowing out from the middle of the ship someplace; the lights have turned orange, and the giant, floating image has completely disappeared.
More importantly, her friends are in… predicaments, she thinks. A couple of them hit the floor with a wet thud. She spots more than one sizable dent in the wall- and more than one splatter of what looks like blood.
The spiderweb of cracks in the window from where Twilight’s forehead seems to be sticking to it does not look friendly.
Oh, and it’s talking.
“HULL BREACH,” it hollers into the room. “Evacuate the Observation Deck immediately.”
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More importantly, her friends are in… predicaments, she thinks. A couple of them hit the floor with a wet thud. She spots more than one sizable dent in the wall- and more than one splatter of what looks like blood.
The spiderweb of cracks in the window from where Twilight’s forehead seems to be sticking to it does not look friendly.
No, nopony died. I don't do that.
Then you may want to rephrase said paragraph above as it soundls like some of them hit hard enough splatter
and it sounds like ti hit the winsheild so hard her head caved in leaving her forehead stuck to the glass
...
...
Okaaaay.
I suppose that is not suprising at all, in hindsight.
Wow, they managed BOTH types of "lost in space:"
That list is courtesy of another story on here. I suspect I recall which one, but I'm not sure. I think LordOfDorkness is to blame yet again.
But yeah, between the fact that it's proven that they have no idea what they are doing and the late designer's questionable computer skill (and possibly poor bridge design -- or at least apparent lack of audible warning?), I can't be too surprised that entire fandango happened.
9182569
Me neither. It being a computer, it was designed to operate in automatic mode... or be flown by experienced pilots.
What’s more, had there been more active fusion plants, it would have successfully cooled itself- and this whole shebang wouldn’t have happened! As for why it didn’t do that... Four was enough for current power demand, and no one told it to ignite more.
9182455
Hmm... While I appreciate the recommendation, I think I’m going to leave it as-is. Nopony died- but that doesn’t mean nopony got hurt... or seriously injured, even. Yes, I’m putting them up as resilient enough to dent alloy and live. Note that it’s Twilight’s forehead sticking to the glass- and the spiderweb of cracks in the glass. That’s meant to suggest something very specific- and no, her skull did not cave in.
9182800
oh i relise that nopony died and twilight horn is either destroyed or is what is currently stopping the breach in the glass ie plugging it
9182800
i really hope twi's horn isnt broken
9183601
Well... There is a little predicament related to that, yes.
Note that any disability I apply to any protagonist in any of my stories will necessarily be solved by the end of it- because otherwise, I wouldn't like the story.
9183605
oh good i kinda tend to stay away from stories that either perminatly kill or hurt twilight badly they tend to leave me in a bad place afterwards and id rather not be there
This breaks my suspension of disbelief, because it breaks relativity. An object with non-zero rest mass (like the ship, or a pony) traveling at the speed of light has infinite energy. Not just large, literally infinite. And at speeds faster than light, the energy is an imaginary number, which makes no physical sense.
In units where the speed of light is 1, energy = rest_mass / sqrt(1 - velocity^2)
10288337
Not if time dilation doesn't exist.
That's the world that she's operating in. As such, object with mass traveling at speed of light has limited energy, albeit pretty large amounts of energy, defined by Ek=MV2/2 for any V.