Just Like Magic of Old

by computerneek

Chapter 15

“Y-You’re scary, you know that?” Cold Coils mutters, staring at Short Flight in shock.

Flight blushes, averting her gaze. “Yeah… I do know, actually. I just hope they don’t start talking about it.”

Glowing Coals lifts a hoof slightly, as if she wants to point. “You’re… You’re Princess Short Flight.”

She sighs, and nods. “Yep, that’s me. You’d be amazed how many idiots I run into.”

“Y-Y-You’re the Princess!?” Coils asks in alarm.

She nods. “Yeah, yeah. But let’s not worry about that right now, shall we?” She gestures behind her. “Let the idiots learn to behave, and the properly behaved citizens-” she gestures forwards, at Coils and her mom- “carry on with their business without worrying about me.”

“Ahh…” Glowing Coals mutters confusedly, before looking up at the chastised fireponies. “Did you say… that ship had a reactor?”

She nods. “Yeah. I managed to pull it free before the explosion- thank Equus for Reactor Recovery Drones- so there’s no radiation hazard.”

“And… it was leaking?”

She nods. “Yeah. Almost melted down, too- but I managed to save it. According to my computers, it’s salvageable.”

“What-?”

She nods. “Yeah. It’s in my Reactor Recovery Bay right now, fully stabilized.” She casts a glare back at the fire department. “And something tells me that if I give it to them, it’ll melt down before it reaches a recovery plant, even though one of the Orbital Control engineers that boarded with me was able to force all the control rods back in before the meltdown cutoff.” She scowls. “I heard the controllers were fried by a power surge.”

“... Right. Um, shall I have my company- NuCoils- send a team to bring it in for salvaging?”

She blinks. “Wait, you’re with NuCoils?”

“Ahh, I own NuCoils, though I suppose that counts.”

“Awesome, then yes please. Um…” She looks up at her ship, unsure of whether she should tell the mare the Shadouette was crewed by thestrals. The discrimination against them isn’t as bad back on Earth, but not by much.

“We’ll send the money- and receipt- from the salvage to you, so you can forward it on to whoever it should be headed to?”

She blinks. “Uh, yeah, that works. Hmm…” She looks back at Glowing Coals. “Those… new reactors NuCoils is making. How quickly can they defrost…?”

“Ahh… Thirty-two hours, about three hours shorter than the industry leader.”

“Any way to shorten that? Three days ago, I had some pirates turn my reactors into ice cubes, and they came off of defrost right about as I hit the upper atmosphere yesterday- another five seconds and I would’ve lost my aerodynamic controls at a critical point in reentry.”

“There really isn’t any way to accelerate the defrost, I’m afraid- except activating it sooner, I guess…” She scowls. “Wait, how did you have power…?”

“Solar paint,” she answers promptly. “It was a powered defrost. Can the reactors be designed to allow an extra infusion of power to defrost them faster?”

Coals tilts her head. “I… I’d have to ask the engineers, but I don’t think it’ll be all that hard.”

“Easy,” Cold Coils injects. “Just install heating coils around the coolant lines and turbine chamber. Unpowered defrost time might go up by an hour or so, but powered defrost could get the thing going safely to startup strength in half an hour- when there’s still ice in the reactor chamber!” She scowls. “We could probably also offer it as a modification to most existing reactors, though none of them would be able to perform a powered defrost nearly as quickly, even after upgrade. Call it… between two and twelve hours, depending on the reactor.

“And if we install a small battery bank into the reactor, which would never discharge into the ship reserves and be recharged as first priority, we could even allow it to make a powered defrost in a zero-power situation. And implement a powered startup at normal operating strengths too, call it five minutes from start to power.”

Flight blinks. “Huh. That’d make them pretty pirate-resistant, wouldn’t it? I mean, the deorbit burns pirates use are only just enough to down the ship- meaning, any survivors would have a good two hours at least to restore power. Then, that barely-deorbit trajectory the pirates use is an easy- though tedious- unpowered reentry profile. And that’s not counting that most autopilots can do that gentle a profile completely unassisted!”

Coils blinks, while Coals stares. “True!” She swipes a tablet out of her saddlebags with one Hands, and starts typing away.

---

“So… what was that all about?” Flight asks Coils, as soon as the airlock door closes behind them. Coals is headed off someplace, to do her own thing.

Coils looks at her. “What-? You don’t-?”

She shrugs. “I think it started as some kind of ‘thank you’, then the fire trucks came, I woke up everypony’s neighbors, and it all got very confusing after that.”

“... Oh. Um, yeah. She approves of my wanting to help restore your ship- both before and after she realized you’re the Princess… Which…?”

She sighs. “Yes, I’m the Princess. And I wish ponies would quit talking about it quite like that- makes me sound like some kind of… deity or something.”

“...Sorry! Um… She approves of it… though any more, she tells me to make my own decisions more often than not.” She scowls briefly. “She came along today, because she wanted to give her thanks face-to-face. Then the fire trucks came, that happened, and you gave me an idea for NuCoils’ reactors. Which I sent to their engineers, because that little of a modification will be easy for them to figure out, and I wanted to help you put your ship back together. So, um… how bad is the damage?”

She grins. “The damage is pretty bad- come see.”

She leads Coils up to C Deck, and straight to where the massive gash is.

“... Wow. I… I daresay we’ve got a lot of work to do,” Coils mutters, staring up at the damage.

“Actually,” Flight smiles. “Night Skies tells me my reactors are behind this wall.” She taps the cratered wall.

Coils turns to it, looks up and down the passage, and blinks. “... True.” She points at a little mark visible on the surviving wall. “That there is one of the cut zones to reach the things for servicing.” She tilts her head. “... Which means, if you want to wait a week or two to patch this hole, we can replace all three reactors with minimal effort.”

She grins. “About that, there’s something I’d like to show you.”

“Hmm?”

“Yeah. C’mon.”

This time, she leads her all the way back to where Star and Skies are still working on the Distortion Drive. Judging by the terms they’re using, they’re into the details phase- and their chatter attracts Coils’ attention instantly.

“Are- Are you making a Distortion Drive?” Coils asks, just as much to Flight as to the other two engineers.

“Yep!” Flight cheers. “And there’s something a little different that you might be particularly good at.” She trots up to the table, opposite Star and Skies once again… and opens the partial fusion plant blueprint. “As near as I can tell, this seems to be a partial blueprint for a fusion reactor, rather than our fission reactors.” She doesn’t miss Star abandoning his prior work and stepping around to look at it as well. “It came from the same place as the power-hungry Distortion Drive blueprints they’re playing with, so…” She shrugs. “Think you can make it into something that might work?”

It takes Coils about six seconds to duplicate the file and add a number of elements to her duplicate- which, Flight notices, had been downloaded directly from her personal library back home. “Hmm…” She scowls at it a little. “Well, I want to say it’s not impossible. But even if we do end up building this thing, she’s going to take a lot of power to start up- and it’s not going to be something I’d feel safe trusting a battery bank for, no matter how big. The critical failure on this will make nukes look small.”

She scowls. “Would it be something two of those NuCoils reactors would be able to do?”

A snort. “Yeah, easy. Probably get away with just the three archaic things you have, for that matter- though, you would need all three. In exchange, this thing would burn… probably hydrogen, and not all that much of it, for… What?” She looks up at Star. “Fifty gigawatts?”

“We can do better than that,” he mumbles. “Whoever gave these blueprints to our Princess hasn’t a clue how our Gravity Drive works. These… what, containment field projectors? They look to work similar to the drivers in a lot of those Distortion Drives; if we replace that with the upgraded Gravity Drive tech we just came up with, we can probably reduce containment power cost by a factor of about ten… and boost maximum ‘chamber’ temperature and pressure by close to a thousand times. This thing stands a chance of generating enough to run even the most power-hungry of those old Distortion Drive blueprints all on its own.”

“Wow,” Flight mutters. “How big would it be?”

“Uh… This would be on a scale similar to modern nuclear reactors. And unlike those old things, it looks like this stuff should scale fairly easily anyways.”

“Awesome,” Flight smiles. “Then when NuCoils finishes that reactor with powered defrost and startup, we’ll install two of them, and one of these.”

“Uh,” Coils mutters. “That’s… assuming it comes to fruition, right?”

She smiles. “Of course. It’s not like I want to star in Equineothame’s biggest tragedy.”

Author's Note:

And, that's done. Life's a pain...

And believe it or not, the coronavirus scare might just save my financial situation, rather than destroy it. Who knows...

Patreon, Discord. I need to get my breakfast before I resume writing...

Comments

[Argentyros]

Hey, look, it does pay off to do good things.

[LostArchivist]

A bit trusting to hand that info off to a person just walking by...
I am beginning to guess how their planet of the unpronounceable name got their own blueprints! :D

[computerneek]

10161755
It's "Equineothame"... Equine-O-thame, where the last one is like "same" but with the "th" sound from, say, "thing". It's not that hard.

[platogkrone]

Actually, Fusion Reactors are incredibly safe.

[computerneek]

10196240
Well yes, they are. But if you design it such that the chamber temperatures and pressures are both in the extreme, you can get more power out of it... and containment failure starts being more destructive. They’re talking worst case.

[ssokolow]

“Yes, I’m the Princess. And I wish ponies would quit talking about it quite like that- makes me sound like some kind of… deity or something.”

*chuckle*

10162080

It could also be pronounced ee-quin-ee-oh-thaum.