seawasp | FENRIR: Chapter 14 (Reply)

Looked like the project would move forward...

Chapter 14: Explosive Situations

Stephanie suppressed another of her moments of impostor syndrome as she entered a room filled with engineers, research scientists, and a scattering of security personnel who, she suspected, felt both pressured and out of place in a group that was focused on free exchange of ideas.

She jumped in startlement as the entire group turned towards her and applauded. "What… what was that for?"

"For you making all this," Michelle Chan said, gesturing grandly around the room, "possible." The Chinese mechanical engineer, veteran of design work for both their Navy and hydroelectric installations, smiled at her reaction. "We've all started work on the project back home, but the emergency means we might all be able to work effectively together."

"Well, thank you, everyone, even though I don't really take the credit for Fenrir deciding to malfunction at just the right time." She sat down at the presentation station. "Also, everyone forgive me if some of this presentation goes over stuff that bores you; there's a lot of pieces to go over and we have, as of today, seven hundred sixty-one days before perihelion, and we'd like to be able to launch in time to meet up before our friends are, potentially, cooked. So if no one minds, we'll just get started?"

There were nods and agreement around the room, as people resumed their seats in the auditorium.

The first slide appeared: CENT: Carpathia Engineering Nations' Taskforce, Inception and Introduction Meeting.

Stephanie was pleased with the new name for the erstwhile Welcome Wagon, suggested originally by their archivist Faye. The Carpathia, famous as the rescue vessel of the Titanic, had been far distant from the liner when it received the distress call, but had made a heroic dash, overtaxing its engines and boilers to drive it faster than any design speed imagined for the ship, repurposing dining rooms and other areas to receive survivors, and arrived more than half an hour faster than any had believed possible, allowing the rescue of over 700 survivors. Exactly the kind of thing we're trying to do here. Let's hope we can do half as well as they did.

"This is the introductory meeting for the CENT group. There's about a hundred fifty of us attending today; current numbers say that CENT actually has a membership of over five hundred and probably more for support members, but we're all the showrunners of our specific departments."

"Here," she moved to the next slide, "is the agenda for today and the next three days of our conference. After this initial presentation, we'll break out into groups handling specific areas of the R&D, and then each day at the end of the day we'll go over progress, concerns, and solutions. Hopefully, by the end of four days, we as CENT will have a clear enough idea of all our roles and tasks that we can make a real start at the design and, eventually, construction of Carpathia. Right now, we assume we'll have one meeting of CENT per week, but depending on how people progress and what problems we might encounter that can be adjusted up or down. In the future, we assume most people will likely be attending remotely, since there's no good reason for someone overseeing work in Germany to fly out to Philadelphia or Tokyo or wherever.

"Contact information for myself, Dr. Dobyns, and other section leaders is here; a full directory for all our primary members is on the thumb drive included with your entry packet and on the secure website. So… onward!"

The next slide showed a beautifully modeled concept diagram, with partial cutaway here and there. "This is Carpathia – or, at least, our current concept for Carpathia. She is a high-speed, nuclear pulse propelled vessel that outmasses everything we have ever put into space combined; including the pusher plate and all other components, Carpathia will mass something between one-quarter and one-half a million tons."

There was a murmur around the room at that; some of the engineers had undoubtedly figured that out, but a lot of others hadn't quite grasped the scale. "Partly the mass comes from the way nuclear pulse propulsion works, which requires, quite simply, ridiculously huge mechanical systems to function, but a great deal of it is because Carpathia is a multi-role vessel meant to combine humanitarian, technological, and military capabilities."

The next slide popped a cartoon graphic of one of the most familiar fictional vessels up next to Carpathia. "In a sense, that makes it rather like the original Enterprise from Star Trek; it was designed to do everything from perform first contact to fight in an interstellar war, and Carpathia, while we very much hope that it will be a rescue vessel, has to be ready for anything."

She was still somewhat annoyed with herself for not realizing right away that "rescue Fenrir" was, if not a smokescreen, at least far from the first priority from the point of view of the politicians. At least York Dobyns had made a point of busting her bubble in private, laying out the likely motives that would really drive the action – no matter what the PR said. That did allow her to look at all the discussion and concept design work with an eye that was at least informed, if not entirely unprejudiced.

"We'll start from the bottom, and work our way up in this diagram. First is the pusher plate. This is the workhorse of the entire ship, because it's going to have to withstand a lot of atomic explosions and not just stay intact, but stay strong and functional all the way there and back."

"How many?" asked one of the UK engineers – Jack Aldiss, she thought.

"Explosions? We don't have a fixed number – that's going to depend a lot on the exact design, how our drive system finally works out, and so on – but thousands, certainly."

"Thousands?" repeated Aldiss, and there was a ripple of similarly incredulous reaction around the room (with, she thought, a couple of people more in the "that sounds awesome" category). "What could you possibly make the plate out of that would withstand that much punishment?"

Stephanie had been ready for that question, so she just clicked to the next slide. "As it turns out, steel – with a bit of added flavor. Steel can take the impact fine, if you control the detonation power and distance. The radiant heat would appear to be a problem, but it was discovered way back in the Fifties that ball bearings coated with graphite or anything high in carbon or silicon would survive nuclear explosions essentially unharmed; a coating of oil six mils – that's about 0.15 millimeters – thick would keep the plate from heating up appreciably during any reasonable number of drive detonations.

"Now, we don't really want to be relying on mechanical sprayers – even though they would appear to be practical – if we can avoid it, so one area of research we're already working on is ablative coatings that might reduce the ablation thickness and thus be possibly practical to permanently coat the drive plate with. Other means of applying a coating as needed, that don't have moving components that could break or jam, would also be of interest. Does that answer your question?"

Aldiss nodded slowly. "Yes, it does. Surprising. I would not have thought ablation would work so well."

"Neither would I, before I read up on it." She looked around. "So, the plate will be connected to a first set of shock absorbers, essentially springs, to absorb the initial impact. These cannot be discussed separately from the second set of shock absorbers," she pointed to the huge cylindrical elements spaced around the exterior of the lower half of Carpathia, "because they're going to have to work together. Properly done, the oscillation of the lower absorbers works with the second set to produce smooth acceleration from the point of view of the rest of the ship."

An embedded animation showed a detonation compressing the first set of springs, which then started pushing the second set of shock absorbers, which then started the rest of the vessel moving; the two sets of shock-absorption technology moved through a few cycles of bouncing at different frequencies before settling down and then starting again as the next detonation went off.

"That's going to be fun," said Yǔzé Huang. Stephanie could see that Yǔzé, one of the top experts in large mechanical systems, was already visualizing the complexities.

"Yes," York said with a grin. "Half a million tons being driven by a giant Slinkie attached to a dozen pogo sticks will be fun. If it holds together."

Yǔzé grinned back. "That last part's going to be the problem. We'll need ways of adjusting the tension on both sides – and it will have to be able to fail gracefully. And be fixed, yes?"

"Yes, all components of Carpathia will have to be repairable – and all the critical-path elements need redundancy built in, so that the ship can keep working while something's being repaired."

"Another reason she's so big," York noted. "Redundant systems throughout, and carrying spares, or shops and materials to make spares, for pretty much anything. Carpathia has to take care of itself, because there'll be no way to get help to her if something goes wrong."

There was a moment of silence at that, then Dr. Sophie Toussaint – environmental engineering, Stephanie thought – gave an uneasy laugh. "Yes, so anyone on the crew may have to be ready to not come back."

Yes. As good a time to get that across as any. "That's right," Stephanie said. "Some of us – maybe most of us – have been thinking about being part of the crew of Carpathia. And a lot of us will have that opportunity.

"But," she felt her own grimace at what she was going to say, "even if all of us here want to think of Carpathia as a rescue mission, we're not going out just to rescue our visitors – and we don't know if they will want rescue. I admit I was naïve enough to not think of it in detail, but our governments are supporting this because Fenrir represents a huge treasure trove of secrets, and we want those secrets. Building this ship is a huge risk for everyone, and if she breaks out there in space, we could all die. If Fenrir doesn't want to share, we'll be fighting a ship a thousand times our size and probably centuries more advanced. And our countries will expect us to do everything we can to not just survive, not just rescue Fenrir, but to get something back – something that might help pay back the literal trillions of dollars they're putting in.

"This is the chance and adventure of a lifetime. It's also a chance to be part of a wonderful, or a terrible, moment in human history, and we won't know which until we get there."

There were a few people whose cynical smiles showed they not only already knew all of this but were amused by her obvious anger at the situation… but many more looking sympathetic and similarly angered. Most of us really would rather it be a rescue mission, maybe with a side of pure scientific curiosity and the chance to actually, finally meet a new species. We'd rather not be looters or pirates.

"But," she said into the momentary silence, "in any case, our job is to give everyone the best chance to survive they can possibly have."

"So," she turned back to the screen, "Let's go on. There are two parts to the main ship, the drive-related components and the actual living and working areas…"

Onward!