Starbound Flight

by computerneek

Chapter 5: First Flight

Princess Short Flight sighed as she finally threw the master simulator switch.

Then she let out a laugh.

It had been a long two years since she’d approved the larger ship- and she’d spent one and a half of them practically living in the simulator that ASC had cobbled together out of her new ship’s control consoles. Just a year before, she wouldn’t have known how to throw the master sim switch. During the interim, she’d temporarily mapped the digital switch to one of the buttons on her auxiliary control panel.

The first six months of simulator training had been fraught with confusion and malfunctions while the engineers figured out the code. Almost twenty times, when she had switched to the autopilot at hypersonic speed, it had pitched up- or down, a few times- too aggressively and snapped the wings off. It had been funny the first two times, but the rest were just bothersome.

The middle six months had been ironing out all the bugs and actually learning to fly it in a feature-complete simulator.

For the last six months, her simulator had been transplanted from the corner of an empty conference room into the ship’s actual cockpit, and she’d focused on a lot of the smaller maneuvers. Docking to larger ships, runway and VTOL landings without autopilot assistance- she’d crashed a lot when those came about, despite her practice with smaller ships. Atmospheric flight, orbital maneuvers…

And the final month had been deep space rendezvous and recovery, exactly what her planned first mission was. She’d created and used a custom little ‘boss program’ to keep the secret, so several times the mission had ended with the destruction of the ship she was recovering because she’d had to hide the screens at a critical point.

She touched a hoof against the VTOL engine controller, before throwing the power switch. The reactors were already running, having been started shortly after installation.

She could barely hear the low murmur of the VTOL engines spinning up- all eight of them. She’d just been cleared, by the ASC, to move the ship over to the main spaceport to take aboard her crew.

It was the ship’s first true flight.

She keyed the mic. “Tower, First Light requesting clearance for takeoff from ASC.”

Her first ever live ATC transmission. It should’ve felt momentus, like a major milestone…. But it didn’t.

“First Light, huh? What kinda name is- Oh. Princess. Um…. Yup, cleared to take off from ASC.”

She scowled at the controller’s grumpy tone, but didn’t say anything. At least she’d managed to get staff on the schedule at all hours of the day and night- but it was still hit or miss as to whether they would actually show up or not. Overall, she was lucky she had someone in the first place, and couldn’t afford to lose controllers for things like attitude.

She could hear the sudden thrumming from her VTOL engines almost the moment she pushed the button to expose them. A side panel informed her that the massive doors protecting all eight engines were opening in perfect sync.

She smiled, watching the readout. She technically had VTOL power available from the moment they started opening, but she wanted to wait until they were all the way open before applying power.

As she waited, her mind traveled back to the ship’s name, the First Light. She had named it herself about a week prior- when the engineers had called her in a panic. She chuckled; that had been an interesting scene to hear their side of.

---

“Hey, Princess?” Cold Coils still thought it was strange just how casually she often found herself speaking to the Princess, but now wasn’t the time.

“What’s wrong?” Princess Short Flight answered.

Coils flinched, trying to ignore the way the Princess’s voice was distorted. That meant she was using the comms in her bedroom, rather than somewhere else in- or out- of the palace. “W-Well, it’s come time to name your ship from ASC, so we contacted your father, like we’re supposed to. And he-!” She broke off, breathing hard.

“He wants to call it something stupid, doesn’t he?”

She nodded, and told her.

“He wants to call it the Expensive as $@&$!?” Flight screeched.

Coils winced. She’d known the King was cheap, but she had never realized just how cheap he was until the Princess’s microphone emitted a series of deafening pops and bangs as the Princess’s voice left its operating range. No wonder he had married a mare called Cheap Gold.

---

Flight let out a snort of laughter at the memory. It had been a good thing she had spent much of the last year coming up with names for both ships, so had one ready.

She then glanced sideways at the engineering panel again, and started increasing VTOL power. The thrumming outside fast became a roar before the ship slowly started to rise into the air. Her sensor panel informed her that the blast from her engines was being redirected back up towards it by the buildings around, and the heavy shutters over each window- meaning, she’d probably have to increase power to keep climbing clear of the rooftops.

Coils had been the one to call her because, after she had finished her schooling, Flight had offered her the position as the ship’s senior engineer, and she had accepted it. As a member of the crew, Coils was then allowed to be part of the production and everything, even without working for ASC.

She was just transitioning to forward flight for the ten-mile journey when her tactical panel chirped suddenly with a proximity alert.

She glanced at it, but it was only the Guard, crowding her too closely as usual.

Then, as she watched, one of them made the mistake of swooping directly underneath her starboard wing. Her ship didn’t really notice, except for the calm observations of its sensor arrays, but the same could not be said for the tiny fighter. It was only marginally larger than the ones she liked to use, as a missile-oriented air superiority fighter, but it still made a rather impressive fireball when it slammed into the ground a thousand feet below less than a second later.

Flight raised her eyebrow at the display. If she was being honest with herself, which she usually was, she had been surprised that it had withstood the forces exerted by the hypersonic blast from her VTOL engines- though utterly unsurprised that the pilot hadn’t survived the hundreds of gees placed on him.

She sighed. She knew that those fighters- and the ones she liked- were a leftover from her great grandfather’s rule, back when Equineothame was a military and industrial power, and that they were built to handle far more than their pilots could- but even so, surviving those forces, even if it didn’t survive the subsequent supersonic impact with the ground, was just plain impressive.

“And that’s not even full power,” Flight muttered, with a chuckle. She glanced in the direction of the engines- she still wasn’t sure how the engineers had managed to increase the air intake mass so much that they could actually produce so much thrust rather than just spinning in a vacuum, no matter how dense the atmosphere, but they had. When she had asked, Coils had told her it was a trade secret.

She sighed, and completed her transition to forward flight. Shooting Star had resigned from the GSC a couple months before in order to accept a position as chief engineer aboard the Dawnbreaker, the ship GSC was making her, and would be joining her and Coils for the mission. In theory, by the time they got back to Equineothame, they’d be ready to start actually building Distortion Drives, without needing to do any reverse engineering first.

---

The First Light sat on the Capital City Landing Pad for three full months. Flight didn’t leave it much; every time she did, the Guards went haywire, galloping across live sectors of the pad and other areas. At least once, a pair of guards had gotten cooked by the thruster flare from a landing orbital cargo rocket.

Those unponied rockets were used to lift equipment and supplies into low Equineothame orbit and back- so they were fueled on the ground, and ran entirely on rocket thrust, unlike the First Light’s full suite of airbreathing thrust, rocket thrust, and Gravity Drive. As far as Flight understood it, that let them vastly simplify its flight software, which consequently improved its reliability in adverse conditions- the conditions that other ships had pilots for. The things still didn’t know how to check for stray ponies on the landing pad, though- they simply assumed the pad was clear, once Orbital Control assigned them a slot. It was supposed to be clear, after all.

However, while Flight had not allowed anypony that wasn’t crew to come aboard, both Shooting Star and Cold Coils had joined her aboard just a couple hours after she had arrived, then Willowstone two days after that. They were, as she, getting used to living aboard a starship- and of course, training and learning to more efficiently use the ship’s systems. Flight joined them in that; she agreed with High Admiral Timber Wolf: There was simply no such thing as too much skill.

And she was getting better. Not just at operating the ship in simulators, of course, but also in moving pallets of goods throughout the ship, and managing the logistics of getting all of those goods into the ship in the first place. She got the standard full years’ worth of preserved space food for a full crew complement of a hundred ponies and passenger complement of two hundred ponies, alongside full hydroponics supplies. She even got several pallets of uranium fuel that the engineers emptied into the automatic fuel hoppers, so they could be sure they would have the fuel to run at capacity for decades to come… And, at least partly, just to spite her father. They all knew they wouldn’t need that much fuel, but uranium was expensive, and the ship supplies were billed to him.

Then of course, Flight had a conversation with her father’s accountant, Days A’Counting- a very interesting name, considering her job- and found out that she hated the King’s guts as well, no matter how richly he paid her. Which he didn’t- pay her richly, that was. He paid her little more than minimum wage, but had threatened to kill her if she ever left. He would’ve targeted her family, but she didn’t have any left.

So, she was papering over the cracks for Flight, hiding all the expenses from the King… with the promise of being protected from the King’s wrath as the Dawnbreaker’s Chief Logistics Officer, once the ship left the drydock. She even helped Flight acquire so many pallets of small missiles, all camouflaged as various shipboard supplies, that both missile bunkers were completely full and they had two entire storage rooms crammed full of pallets of quarter-ton missiles. She’d managed to get a few pallets of larger missiles aboard, camouflaged as mechanical supplies and spare parts and materials, but they’d had to keep them to a minimum- in addition to onboarding them at night- to keep it from looking suspicious. Still, though, they had six ten-kiloton nuclear warheads as their largest weapons aboard, and so many half- and full-ton chemical warheads that Flight was almost afraid to check the computer to see exactly how many there were, all stored securely in the missile bunkers. Only about a quarter of the quarter-ton bombs had fit in the bunkers after all the larger weapons.

And finally, Flight was forced to leave a pallet of missiles in the middle of the passage for a few minutes when her father called right in the middle of it.

---

“Hi Dad,” she greeted. Her greeting wasn’t nearly as cheerful as it had been a couple years before- any more, every time she said that, it brought her a pang of pain as she remembered her sister.

“Shorty,” he began.

Flight winced, again remembering her sister’s fiery temper, but didn’t argue.

“We’ll be taking a journey to Earth and back tomorrow afternoon,” he told her. “Be ready.”

“Uh- Your Highness,” she muttered. “About that. We haven’t yet confirmed that this ship is capable of such a flight. It’s not going to be possible to make such a journey with her tomorrow.”

He stared at her through the comms screen. Flight could almost see the gears turning under his thick skull. “Then what are you doing at the Capital City Landing Pad?”

“Testing the life support, getting hydroponics up and running so you don’t have to eat freeze-dried space food, and loading her up with all the appropriate supplies. Once we’re done, me and my skeleton crew will take her on a little cruise around the Sun to verify her space-worthiness. Once that’s done, she’ll be ready to take on the rest of her crew, and available for Royal duties, since we will then be sure she won’t kill you by accident.”

It was the exact excuse her sister had used to hold the Flying Surface in orbit for nearly six months when she’d gotten it, while she hunted up a decent crew and onboarded supplies. It was also the excuse her sister had used to take a month-long cruise with the Flying Surface even after that, before making it available to their father’s assignments.

It hurt Flight to remember her sister like that- but her father gobbled it up, hook, line, and sinker.

“Oh. Well let me know when you’re done.” He hung up on her.

Flight sighed. “And so the Stupid King falls for the same thing twice,” she muttered, before returning to her missile pallet.

They were planning to orbit in two weeks, and Flight hadn’t told Willowstone, but the plan was to go on the committed mission immediately. They were going to fake an electronics failure that would keep the Gravity Drive from turning off, conveniently launching them well past Equineothame and towards the asteroid belt.

Author's Note:

orbital cargo rocket

These things are basically SpaceX rockets, except that they're SSTOs and actually dock to other ships on orbit to transfer cargo.

Patreon, Discord.

It's alive!

And yes, this time around, I've taken into equation the sort of forces necessary for a ship that large to hover... and they make for some terrifying results for anything that gets too close.

Okay, got Patreon caught up too. Four more chapters available there for patrons right now- and yes, that means you've got at least a month of regular updates coming here too. My muse has been real slow lately, especially here- I've been simply lazy. But I finally finished the chapters I had floating around, and lined them up for release!