In which I tell tales that are only a little bit fictionalized:
It finally happened. After years of budget-deferred maintenance and hard use, the old auxiliary stardrive on Billy How is starting to fail.
That's the starship William Howard Taft to the likes of you. It's a bulk hauler, United States Space Corps surplus like most of the NATO spacecraft on our side of the Hidden Frontier, with a long, distinguished and penny-pinching history. Not that I blame the owners; the profit margin is tiny, especially competing against the newer containerized haulers.
What she lacks in size and flexibility, Billy How makes up for with inadequate speed and inefficiency. The aux 'drive is a good example. Built early in the vague and clumsy War between the U.S. and the breakaway "Federation of Concerned Spacemen," her stardrive was built before our side had figured out how to "feather" the 'drive to reduce the effective realspace mass of a spacecraft. The high-voltage power supplies, modulators and phantasmatron tubes in the 'drive finals were built to punch a hole in space fast and rough, and not to idle at low level for months at a time. In a short pulse, the 'drives were as powerful as all but the very largest carriers, like Vulpine, Caprine and Lupine, but they were never meant for continuous duty.
So when we learned how to copy 'drive-feathering from FCS starships, ships like Billy How with Gen 2 stardrives got "realspace auxiliary 'drives," low-powered, simplified, mass-produced "stardrives" that could shunt off mass to never-never land without ever tipping the vessel into Jump space. . They're not as efficient as the FCS version, not even close, but it's still a huge saving in reaction mass. And mostly they just sit there, off or on; you dial in the mass-correction and they just run, with none of the fiddling and finagling that it takes to get into and out of Jump space with the real stardrive.
That unglamorous invisibility is part of the problem: nobody thinks about 'em. The aux 'drive is a magic lump, out of sight and out of mind. The Captains all take the aux 'drive for granted; the owners balk at spending any money on them. If you're in Engineering like me, you do your best to keep the spare parts stocked, keep the fine adjustments peaked up, change the air filters and argue for upgrades when the ship gets refitted.
Billy How's aux 'drive got solid-state finals 23 years ago -- ooh, transistors, how 1990s! -- and there they stood. I'd requested, budgeted, made reports, argued, shown the brass what was what, given them my best guess about how likely it was to go up in smoke, and they hadn't wanted to spend a dime on it. When the old-school microcontroller that provided a nice touchscreen interface for control and monitoring conked out four years ago, the Captain had me reconnect the manual controls instead of spending eight thousand dollars on a replacement. After all, there was a scheduled refit coming up before very long. (How long is "before very long?" Don't ask me; that's above my pay grade.)
The touchscreen system used to gave us a pretty good look into the innards of the aux 'drive, monitoring and logging thousands of parameters. The manual controls and meters provide a lot less detail. So when one of the nifty transistorized, sealed power amplifier modules started to flake out a couple of days ago, it took a couple of shifts to figure out just what was going on. The predrivers had become very fussy, needing more and more adjustment to keep them at maximum power but out of over-temperature or overcurrent failure, and at first the problem looked like more of that.
It wasn't. The power amplifier module -- all of a thousand Watts -- could be restored from the fault condition by a full, ten-minute cold reboot of the aux 'drive, at which point it would run for five minutes, flag a COM FAULT and shut down. No other symptoms, no weird readings -- and no way short of irreversible action with a chisel to get a look at the inside of the thing.
We didn't have a spare. The last one of those went in six months back, off Blizzard, and when I'd put in a request for a replacement, it was bounced -- after all, that refit was going to happen!
They scheduled the refit last month. It's six months off. With a dead final amplifier module in the aux, Billy How will run slow on the realspace leg of this trip and it looks like we'll be sitting at the space station until we can get a new amplifier. What it's going to cost to expedite delivery of that -- assuming Beamathon even has any in stock -- you don't want to know. What the module itself will cost, I don't want to know, cubed.
Fix it before it breaks or pay the price later. It never gets any cheaper, no matter how long you wait.
Showing posts with label Stardrive Mechanics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stardrive Mechanics. Show all posts
21 June 2019
06 December 2018
Hidden Damage
Of course, it took one of the Power Room electricians to find it.
And of course, it was the ternary degausser. The degaussers don’t run very often but they’re absolutely essential. They’re after the output of the [CLASSIFIED], five hundred feet right after the big ion trap, and cycle on whenever the induced magnetism of the support structure exceeds a preset level. There’s a neat little magnostrictive oscillator to detect it, and— But that’s too much geekery already. The blamed thing kept tripping the breaker and the riggers and I hadn’t been able to figure out why. I was sure the problem had to be in the wiring or hardware out on the boom; there’s a lot of stress on everything out there and we’d replaced the transformers for it just last year. The most recent breaker trip was nasty enough that it glitched the stardrive -- and it was pure luck it didn't happen at a critical time.
Dr. Schmid, the Chief's boss, decided we needed an electrician and I figured he was right. The degausser secondaries run a couple of hundred Amps through the coils. Power Room’s got test gear that’ll read that high; we don’t. The primary current’s only 19 or 20 Amps per leg, at 480 Volts, and even that’s enough energy to make plasma arcs on a bad day.
Ron, the electrician, was whistling a tune I didn’t recognize when he showed up at the Drive Room in one of the little electric service vehicles, loaded down with tools and supplies. There were a couple of riggers waiting with me, already in their pressure suits except for gloves and helmets. Ron’s first words after introductions were, “So what’s going on with this thing?”
“It keeps blowing the breaker,” I told him. “We haven’t been able to find any wiring problems and every check I’ve had the riggers make out at the transformer looks okay. I’m mystified.”
“Well, let’s set up to see what happens and give it a try.”
The riggers finished suiting up, Ron handed out clamp-on ammeters and we got set up: riggers in vacuum out on the boom, checking at the first junction box and the transformer, me inside watching the degausser controller and contactor in their explosion-proof box, with the door open, and the electrician at the breaker panel around the corner and a few steps down the passageway. I had the controller off, so the contactor wasn’t going to pull in and pass any juice to the degaussers. We’d just be checking the wiring from the breaker to the contactor for this first step. Just turn the circuit breaker on and right back off, unless it tripped first.
He shouted “Here we go,” reset the breaker and something went POP! like a firecracker.
I yelled, “Dammit!” right afterwards.
My radio clicked and on of the riggers asked, “What was that thump? I felt it through the conduit!”
Ron had come over to where I was by then, and asked, “What was it?”
“I don’t know. Not the contactor closing; it’s pretty quiet.”
“You want to try again?”
I said okay, told the riggers to listen close, and sure enough, the same thing happened. Pop!
So, we’re clever: we checked the wiring from the breaker to the contactor, unhooked it from the breaker and pulled it out of the conduit, laid it out on the floor. Nothing wrong. Twenty years old and the wires looked brand new.
Ron looked at me. “You sure that contactor’s off?”
“Should be.”
He said, "Mm," and we traded a look. “Should be” often isn’t and we both knew it.
On close examination, the contactor -- a big relay -- seemed fine. The contacts are fully enclosed for safety, so you can’t see them, but the moving part, the armature, has a little tab that sticks out and that was clearly in the de-energized position and moved freely.
Ron whistled a couple of bars of something vaguely classical while getting an ohmmeter out of his toolbar. “I wonder….,” he said, more to himself than to me.
Three measurements later, we weren’t wondering. Three sets of contacts in the thing and one was open just like it should be, one was closed…and one read a few hundred Ohms instead of zero or infinity.
I went to look for a spare contactor on the parts inventory. He started taking the old one apart.
* * *
Ten minutes later, having come up dry on a replacement, I walked back to see how things were going and Ron handed me a set of contacts. No bigger than dimes, scarred and blackened. “They weren’t quite welded together. I pried them apart.”
I looked them over. “Ugly. Inventory shows we should have three replacement contactors, the whole thing, new in the box; note says the last one got used in ’97, right before I started.”
“These’ll clean up. How’re you fixed for sandpaper?”
In the end, it took fine files to clear up the worst set. In a half-hour, we had them all smooth, shiny, and moving freely. With the contactor back together and wired up, he returned to the breaker, I radioed the riggers to watch their meters, and told Ron, “Power up!”
He hit the breaker — and there was no pop. I waited a minute and tapped the manual override button. The contactor pulled in with a muted “clunk,” followed by the riggers checking in on the radio:
“Twenty Amps at the J-box, over!”
“Degausser’s humming like normal. Twenty Amps. Over.”
“Thanks, guys. Stand by.” I raised my voice. “Ron, you hear that? Looking good!”
He walked around the corner smiling. “It must have single-phased every time you reset the breaker!”
I gave him a rueful grin, “Yeah, and arced like a son of a gun.”
He nodded. “The worse set of contacts were wedged in at a kind of funny angle. It can’t have been good.”
I told the riggers to button everything up and head for the airlock. I cleared the manual override, but the degaussers stayed on, with the flickering red light of the “magnetization detected” indicator lit up. Ron and I closed things up — gutter covers on the breaker box, the lid of the explosion-proof enclosure for the degausser contactor and controller — and about the time we finished, the red light went out and the contactor released with a soft thump. No arc, no popping sounds.
It’s easy sometimes to leap to a conclusion and become too attached to it. If I’d suspected the contactor myself, it wouldn’t’ve taken much effort to open it up and check, or put an ohmmeter across it. But I hadn’t. It took a fresh pair of eyes — and a lack of preconceptions — to find the problem.
And of course, it was the ternary degausser. The degaussers don’t run very often but they’re absolutely essential. They’re after the output of the [CLASSIFIED], five hundred feet right after the big ion trap, and cycle on whenever the induced magnetism of the support structure exceeds a preset level. There’s a neat little magnostrictive oscillator to detect it, and— But that’s too much geekery already. The blamed thing kept tripping the breaker and the riggers and I hadn’t been able to figure out why. I was sure the problem had to be in the wiring or hardware out on the boom; there’s a lot of stress on everything out there and we’d replaced the transformers for it just last year. The most recent breaker trip was nasty enough that it glitched the stardrive -- and it was pure luck it didn't happen at a critical time.
Dr. Schmid, the Chief's boss, decided we needed an electrician and I figured he was right. The degausser secondaries run a couple of hundred Amps through the coils. Power Room’s got test gear that’ll read that high; we don’t. The primary current’s only 19 or 20 Amps per leg, at 480 Volts, and even that’s enough energy to make plasma arcs on a bad day.
Ron, the electrician, was whistling a tune I didn’t recognize when he showed up at the Drive Room in one of the little electric service vehicles, loaded down with tools and supplies. There were a couple of riggers waiting with me, already in their pressure suits except for gloves and helmets. Ron’s first words after introductions were, “So what’s going on with this thing?”
“It keeps blowing the breaker,” I told him. “We haven’t been able to find any wiring problems and every check I’ve had the riggers make out at the transformer looks okay. I’m mystified.”
“Well, let’s set up to see what happens and give it a try.”
The riggers finished suiting up, Ron handed out clamp-on ammeters and we got set up: riggers in vacuum out on the boom, checking at the first junction box and the transformer, me inside watching the degausser controller and contactor in their explosion-proof box, with the door open, and the electrician at the breaker panel around the corner and a few steps down the passageway. I had the controller off, so the contactor wasn’t going to pull in and pass any juice to the degaussers. We’d just be checking the wiring from the breaker to the contactor for this first step. Just turn the circuit breaker on and right back off, unless it tripped first.
He shouted “Here we go,” reset the breaker and something went POP! like a firecracker.
I yelled, “Dammit!” right afterwards.
My radio clicked and on of the riggers asked, “What was that thump? I felt it through the conduit!”
Ron had come over to where I was by then, and asked, “What was it?”
“I don’t know. Not the contactor closing; it’s pretty quiet.”
“You want to try again?”
I said okay, told the riggers to listen close, and sure enough, the same thing happened. Pop!
So, we’re clever: we checked the wiring from the breaker to the contactor, unhooked it from the breaker and pulled it out of the conduit, laid it out on the floor. Nothing wrong. Twenty years old and the wires looked brand new.
Ron looked at me. “You sure that contactor’s off?”
“Should be.”
He said, "Mm," and we traded a look. “Should be” often isn’t and we both knew it.
On close examination, the contactor -- a big relay -- seemed fine. The contacts are fully enclosed for safety, so you can’t see them, but the moving part, the armature, has a little tab that sticks out and that was clearly in the de-energized position and moved freely.
Ron whistled a couple of bars of something vaguely classical while getting an ohmmeter out of his toolbar. “I wonder….,” he said, more to himself than to me.
Three measurements later, we weren’t wondering. Three sets of contacts in the thing and one was open just like it should be, one was closed…and one read a few hundred Ohms instead of zero or infinity.
I went to look for a spare contactor on the parts inventory. He started taking the old one apart.
I looked them over. “Ugly. Inventory shows we should have three replacement contactors, the whole thing, new in the box; note says the last one got used in ’97, right before I started.”
“These’ll clean up. How’re you fixed for sandpaper?”
In the end, it took fine files to clear up the worst set. In a half-hour, we had them all smooth, shiny, and moving freely. With the contactor back together and wired up, he returned to the breaker, I radioed the riggers to watch their meters, and told Ron, “Power up!”
He hit the breaker — and there was no pop. I waited a minute and tapped the manual override button. The contactor pulled in with a muted “clunk,” followed by the riggers checking in on the radio:
“Twenty Amps at the J-box, over!”
“Degausser’s humming like normal. Twenty Amps. Over.”
“Thanks, guys. Stand by.” I raised my voice. “Ron, you hear that? Looking good!”
He walked around the corner smiling. “It must have single-phased every time you reset the breaker!”
I gave him a rueful grin, “Yeah, and arced like a son of a gun.”
He nodded. “The worse set of contacts were wedged in at a kind of funny angle. It can’t have been good.”
I told the riggers to button everything up and head for the airlock. I cleared the manual override, but the degaussers stayed on, with the flickering red light of the “magnetization detected” indicator lit up. Ron and I closed things up — gutter covers on the breaker box, the lid of the explosion-proof enclosure for the degausser contactor and controller — and about the time we finished, the red light went out and the contactor released with a soft thump. No arc, no popping sounds.
It’s easy sometimes to leap to a conclusion and become too attached to it. If I’d suspected the contactor myself, it wouldn’t’ve taken much effort to open it up and check, or put an ohmmeter across it. But I hadn’t. It took a fresh pair of eyes — and a lack of preconceptions — to find the problem.
14 May 2017
The Scream
TRANSCRIPT OF TESTIMONY, DISCIPLINARY HEARING, STARDRIVE TECHNICIAN 1ST CLASS R. HUMKEL, USAS LUPINE.
QUESTION CONTENT REDACTED FOR PRIVACY, SEE USSF A/83:1(a)
Q:
A: Yes, I know why I'm here. But I didn't think the new guy — Chris — was going to take it so hard. It isn't anything that hasn't been done to any of us in Engineering.
Q:
A: Sure, they did it to me. You get a green tech, they have a lot to learn. I didn't start learning how little I really knew here on Lupine. It was years ago, when I hired in as Third 'Drive Tech on the old Billy How. That's the USAS William Howard Taft, a little freight hauler, former U. S. Space Force like most of them. I heard she was scrapped in '97 or '98.
Q:
A: Pretty much the same deal; it was my first job as a full Tech and I was pretty full of myself after saving my previous starship, the tug Schramm when the Tech First fell ill and we lost a phantasmajector tube in the RF pump for the stardrive. See, those old tugs— What? No, I guess it's not important. Anyway, I thought I was hot stuff, made some undiplomatic comments to Mike R. — he was the Number Two Tech — about how badly they ran the 'Drive. He didn't say much, but when we headed into the next Jump, the boss had me checking out the anisble, and didn't I get a warning about what not to listen to! So I did, of course. I didn't sleep well for a month.
Q:
A: Chris rubbed me the wrong way a little; there aren't many women working as stardrive techs and he — well, I thought he was a jerk. The way a lot of the guys are, talking down, that kind of thing. But it was nothing to the way he treated Jonny Zed and Gale Grinnel. Sure, Jonny's a little, well, um, he's unique. And that Gale, you'd think words cost him money — except for "Leave that the f—- alone." He says that a lot. But they've served aboard since the Lupine was a Space Force carrier. Jonny was one of the first techs down on Lyndon! Sure, they're grumpy and they have their own ways of doing things, but both of them have been fixing stardrives since before I was born. Gale taught me how to tune up the high-power amplifiers. The old tetrode ones are touchy and— Oh, sorry. Did I get too technical again? Anyway, they both go way back to real fighting parts of the War.
Q:
A: Oh, that, yes. It's the time dilation. You'd have to ask them, but I think Jonny's been at it for forty years subjective, about seventy-five years as the clock ticks. Gale's got almost as much time in, either way.
Q:
A: Chris was rude to them. He was making fun of Jonny Zed to his face when I came on duty that morning. We'd been ramping up delta-V for a Jump for a couple of months, everyone was a little on edge and you know how Jonny gets.
Q:
A: You don't? Haven't you talked to him yet? He tells stories. Sometimes they're a little, a little overstated. You'll see. Anyway, I'd tuned up a new final in the B side of the RF pump the day before and we were due to Jump sometime on the first shift. The Chief was kind of irked with me about it, he had been saying the old final had plenty of hours left but nope, the emission went flat when I tried to run up the heater voltage. That's tech-y, too, but it's important. The Chief is not a people person and he was really giving me that fishy eye that morning. I wasn't too surprised when he stuck me with the ansible warm-up. When he told me to bring Chris along and show him the process, I figured he thought the guy needed taken down a peg.
Q:
A: As near as I can read him, the Chief thinks we all need to be reminded of where we stand in the food chain, every day. But some days, some of us need it more than others. Restarting the ansible is just one of those fiddly jobs he hands out to whoever is on his, um. His list.
Q:
A: No, you can't leave the ansible running in normal space. It won't work, of course, but the problem is it makes for huge amounts of interference to comms and it kind of bollixes running the 'Drive low to reduce our realspace mass. Plus the final in it is only good for x many hours and it's a lot of work to change out, so why waste it?
Q:
A: I really can't explain the startup job without getting tech-y. The timebase comes from the ship's master clock but it's a soft lock — the details, are, um. I probably can't make it make sense quickly. You start it up after the first little Jump and make sure the multipliers didn't get a step off or start squegging, and bring the output amplifier up slowly once they've settled down. The newer ones will do it all on auto, it's not that difficult, but we're still running a Beamathon 4200, and they're— Well, they won't self-start. The 4200s were built on a military contract for USSF and they're designed to be super-rugged over being easy to use. You could beat on the thing with a hammer and it would still run! But start-up's about a half-hour job and you have to ride the Jump out in the old comms room, in lousy seats that I think must be original with the ship. I would have brought a bite guard if I'd known I was going to get stuck with the job.
I took Chris down the passageway to the comms room. It's close by the Engineering shop, about far enough for him to ask where as I reached the hatch. It's kind of a junk room — orderly, lashed-down junk, the Chief is really strict about that and if you've ever ridden through a bad Jump, I don't have to tell you why.
Q:
A: I'm getting to that. Ansibles don't tune like a radio. It's like there's just one channel. And that's because for any given Jump level, there really is only one channel. So — every Jump is really a climb up and down through several levels, or dimensions, right? I mean, approximately. And some of them are actually dangerous; the physics is too different. You jump in and right on out. Seven-A is one of the bad ones and it's one of a few where the regs say ansibles should be off or in standby: not even in receive mode. Some levels, I can't say which ones, are for USSF Fleet comms, but seven-A is— It's different.
Q:
A: Of course I've listened! Like I told you. Everybody who ever got stuck warming up an ansible has. And you wish you hadn't.
Q:
A: I'm getting to that.
Q:
A: So, Chris and I got settled in the lousy old operator’s chairs, and I made sure he could work the old-style five-point harness. Then I talked him through the start-up, checked the YIG ovens, and ran it up as far as Standby. I had him show me the step-by-step and he had it pretty well already. By then we could check sync lock — it was good — and there was nothing to do except wait for the Jump to start. So I ran down the "Don't Listen" list with him and we got the five-minute warning for Jump. That was my cue, I figured, so I reminded him to keep the ansible in Standby until we were out of seven-A, said I needed to check something in the Shop, and left. I put the intercom on to the Shop on my way out, just a quick tap on the button, so we'd hear whatever he got up to.
Q:
A: I went back to the shop. Three minutes left, everything secured, everybody sitting down and either strapped in or just about to. There was a seat left near the intercom and I snagged it. Gave C. Jay and Big Tom a raised eyebrow and waved at the com panel. I made sure the microphone was turned off and told them, "Could be interesting. Told the new guy to make sure he kept the ansible warm-up but not full on until we were past seven-A."
Q:
A: Sure we all figured he'd listen! Nobody objected. Look, it's been done to most of us — or we did it to ourselves, really. Seven-A is one of the bad ones, too; it's probably just a series of encrypted comms relays left running, but it sounds like a guy screaming, over and over. Sends chills right down your back.
Q:
A: Yes, I expected it would give Chris a scare. Yeah, I get it, "It's a new day," but I never thought of it as hazing. Neither did anyone else in Engineering.
Q:
A: The Chief? What did he think? That's above my pay grade. I was talking about the other techs. The Chief didn't think it was funny afterward, I can tell you that.
Q:
A: You already know Chis did listen. Probably because I told him not to. When he started screaming, I ran back to the Comms room, and I took a hell of a bouncing, around, too, since the ship was still headed deeper into Jump space. Big Tom and C. Jay were right behind me. When we couldn’t get him to stop — and he'd started trying to slug anyone who got too close — Big Tom held him in the chair and I called the medics.
Q:
A: No. Are you serious? Nobody ever told me his father was on one of the ships that went missing during the war!
Do — do you think Chris is going to be all right?
QUESTION CONTENT REDACTED FOR PRIVACY, SEE USSF A/83:1(a)
Q:
A: Yes, I know why I'm here. But I didn't think the new guy — Chris — was going to take it so hard. It isn't anything that hasn't been done to any of us in Engineering.
Q:
A: Sure, they did it to me. You get a green tech, they have a lot to learn. I didn't start learning how little I really knew here on Lupine. It was years ago, when I hired in as Third 'Drive Tech on the old Billy How. That's the USAS William Howard Taft, a little freight hauler, former U. S. Space Force like most of them. I heard she was scrapped in '97 or '98.
Q:
A: Pretty much the same deal; it was my first job as a full Tech and I was pretty full of myself after saving my previous starship, the tug Schramm when the Tech First fell ill and we lost a phantasmajector tube in the RF pump for the stardrive. See, those old tugs— What? No, I guess it's not important. Anyway, I thought I was hot stuff, made some undiplomatic comments to Mike R. — he was the Number Two Tech — about how badly they ran the 'Drive. He didn't say much, but when we headed into the next Jump, the boss had me checking out the anisble, and didn't I get a warning about what not to listen to! So I did, of course. I didn't sleep well for a month.
Q:
A: Chris rubbed me the wrong way a little; there aren't many women working as stardrive techs and he — well, I thought he was a jerk. The way a lot of the guys are, talking down, that kind of thing. But it was nothing to the way he treated Jonny Zed and Gale Grinnel. Sure, Jonny's a little, well, um, he's unique. And that Gale, you'd think words cost him money — except for "Leave that the f—- alone." He says that a lot. But they've served aboard since the Lupine was a Space Force carrier. Jonny was one of the first techs down on Lyndon! Sure, they're grumpy and they have their own ways of doing things, but both of them have been fixing stardrives since before I was born. Gale taught me how to tune up the high-power amplifiers. The old tetrode ones are touchy and— Oh, sorry. Did I get too technical again? Anyway, they both go way back to real fighting parts of the War.
Q:
A: Oh, that, yes. It's the time dilation. You'd have to ask them, but I think Jonny's been at it for forty years subjective, about seventy-five years as the clock ticks. Gale's got almost as much time in, either way.
Q:
A: Chris was rude to them. He was making fun of Jonny Zed to his face when I came on duty that morning. We'd been ramping up delta-V for a Jump for a couple of months, everyone was a little on edge and you know how Jonny gets.
Q:
A: You don't? Haven't you talked to him yet? He tells stories. Sometimes they're a little, a little overstated. You'll see. Anyway, I'd tuned up a new final in the B side of the RF pump the day before and we were due to Jump sometime on the first shift. The Chief was kind of irked with me about it, he had been saying the old final had plenty of hours left but nope, the emission went flat when I tried to run up the heater voltage. That's tech-y, too, but it's important. The Chief is not a people person and he was really giving me that fishy eye that morning. I wasn't too surprised when he stuck me with the ansible warm-up. When he told me to bring Chris along and show him the process, I figured he thought the guy needed taken down a peg.
Q:
A: As near as I can read him, the Chief thinks we all need to be reminded of where we stand in the food chain, every day. But some days, some of us need it more than others. Restarting the ansible is just one of those fiddly jobs he hands out to whoever is on his, um. His list.
Q:
A: No, you can't leave the ansible running in normal space. It won't work, of course, but the problem is it makes for huge amounts of interference to comms and it kind of bollixes running the 'Drive low to reduce our realspace mass. Plus the final in it is only good for x many hours and it's a lot of work to change out, so why waste it?
Q:
A: I really can't explain the startup job without getting tech-y. The timebase comes from the ship's master clock but it's a soft lock — the details, are, um. I probably can't make it make sense quickly. You start it up after the first little Jump and make sure the multipliers didn't get a step off or start squegging, and bring the output amplifier up slowly once they've settled down. The newer ones will do it all on auto, it's not that difficult, but we're still running a Beamathon 4200, and they're— Well, they won't self-start. The 4200s were built on a military contract for USSF and they're designed to be super-rugged over being easy to use. You could beat on the thing with a hammer and it would still run! But start-up's about a half-hour job and you have to ride the Jump out in the old comms room, in lousy seats that I think must be original with the ship. I would have brought a bite guard if I'd known I was going to get stuck with the job.
I took Chris down the passageway to the comms room. It's close by the Engineering shop, about far enough for him to ask where as I reached the hatch. It's kind of a junk room — orderly, lashed-down junk, the Chief is really strict about that and if you've ever ridden through a bad Jump, I don't have to tell you why.
Q:
A: I'm getting to that. Ansibles don't tune like a radio. It's like there's just one channel. And that's because for any given Jump level, there really is only one channel. So — every Jump is really a climb up and down through several levels, or dimensions, right? I mean, approximately. And some of them are actually dangerous; the physics is too different. You jump in and right on out. Seven-A is one of the bad ones and it's one of a few where the regs say ansibles should be off or in standby: not even in receive mode. Some levels, I can't say which ones, are for USSF Fleet comms, but seven-A is— It's different.
Q:
A: Of course I've listened! Like I told you. Everybody who ever got stuck warming up an ansible has. And you wish you hadn't.
Q:
A: I'm getting to that.
Q:
A: So, Chris and I got settled in the lousy old operator’s chairs, and I made sure he could work the old-style five-point harness. Then I talked him through the start-up, checked the YIG ovens, and ran it up as far as Standby. I had him show me the step-by-step and he had it pretty well already. By then we could check sync lock — it was good — and there was nothing to do except wait for the Jump to start. So I ran down the "Don't Listen" list with him and we got the five-minute warning for Jump. That was my cue, I figured, so I reminded him to keep the ansible in Standby until we were out of seven-A, said I needed to check something in the Shop, and left. I put the intercom on to the Shop on my way out, just a quick tap on the button, so we'd hear whatever he got up to.
Q:
A: I went back to the shop. Three minutes left, everything secured, everybody sitting down and either strapped in or just about to. There was a seat left near the intercom and I snagged it. Gave C. Jay and Big Tom a raised eyebrow and waved at the com panel. I made sure the microphone was turned off and told them, "Could be interesting. Told the new guy to make sure he kept the ansible warm-up but not full on until we were past seven-A."
Q:
A: Sure we all figured he'd listen! Nobody objected. Look, it's been done to most of us — or we did it to ourselves, really. Seven-A is one of the bad ones, too; it's probably just a series of encrypted comms relays left running, but it sounds like a guy screaming, over and over. Sends chills right down your back.
Q:
A: Yes, I expected it would give Chris a scare. Yeah, I get it, "It's a new day," but I never thought of it as hazing. Neither did anyone else in Engineering.
Q:
A: The Chief? What did he think? That's above my pay grade. I was talking about the other techs. The Chief didn't think it was funny afterward, I can tell you that.
Q:
A: You already know Chis did listen. Probably because I told him not to. When he started screaming, I ran back to the Comms room, and I took a hell of a bouncing, around, too, since the ship was still headed deeper into Jump space. Big Tom and C. Jay were right behind me. When we couldn’t get him to stop — and he'd started trying to slug anyone who got too close — Big Tom held him in the chair and I called the medics.
Q:
A: No. Are you serious? Nobody ever told me his father was on one of the ships that went missing during the war!
Do — do you think Chris is going to be all right?
05 May 2015
Fragment
I. Lines
Picture a line stretching down the block. Oh, not a totally grim line -- the weather's good, near seventy, and the people are brightly dressed, contrasting with the concrete and block of the buildings, the gravel and concrete of the streets -- but a serious one. Picture more lines, many more, a world of lines, a place where if you didn't work for one of the big outfits, or on a robot farm, or at the "School," an occasional missed meal was just how it worked. But how can you begin to know what it was like if you don't know why and how?
The world was called Ryall. It wasn't good for much -- halfway through a glaciation, which meant the temperate zone was a belt around the Equator a little over five hundred miles wide. But it was warm enough to grow crops and raise animals, the local weeds were neither poisonous nor allergenic, it had metals and fuel, and best of all, it was well behind the straggling, uncertain "front" between the Far Edge refuseniks and the Earth-based NATO forces searching for them.
Once the Edgers realized they hadn't fled far enough and Earth wasn't willing to let them be, the University of Ryall, until then an otherwise struggling institution that by chance had an excellent 'Drive physics program, was cultivated as a major research institution by grants directly from the Federation of Concerned Spacemen (the shadowy Edger non-government) and its various military contractors, most notably "General" Filiaggi's Mil/Space.
The population swelled as the War years dragged on, with people looking for a safer place (especially after the disastrous attempt to reclaim "Peace-And-Prosperity," the planet better known as Linden and, later, Lyndon), various professions and trades following work, along with farmers, administrators, manufacturers and the Far Edge's commercial military organizations. Agriculture struggled to keep up. Distance made luxuries (smuggled from Earth or P&P, built or grown on Trinity or Frothup) expensive and uncommon and by the time the War idled to a stop in 1989, Ryall was a distinctly difficult place. Government was small, hard-pressed, and inadvertently oppressive. Mil/Space and defense contractors dominated employment. Thirty-plus years of war and rumors of war had left more than a mere mark; FCS was reportedly considering intervention, as it had done twice before elsewhere to rein in too-powerful local governments.
A decade earlier, it had already been a hard, gray place for a long time, a place more than a world, and one with a job to do and little time or resources to spare for nonsense--
II.1979
He recognized her as they both stood on one of the endless lines that had come to dominate life in Landingport, lined up for a chance to purchase onions or cheese, lined up to register or reregister for a work permit or a housing permit or a travel permit, lined up for inoculation or delousing, lined up because you saw a line and didn't want to miss out -- or face arrest for not lining up.
Even though she was an unperson these last seven years, her poetry deemed wasteful, unnecessary, he recognized her. "Aren't you Sara-the-bard," he asked, but it wasn't a question. Students had called her that, back in the hopeful beginning, before walls had gone up around the School, before passes and air-raid drills and Security. "You're her, you are," he exclaimed, incredulous, delighted.
She never made eye contact. "I was," she said, almost whispering, and turned away.
III. A Gap In Space
Mathematics and poetry sound like an odd combination of talents to most people. Yet they're often found co-existing, happily or not, in the same mind. Oppenheimer translated Hindu epics; Ada Lovelace struggled to subdue her "poetical nature," and Dodgson, well, you already know him as Lewis Carroll.
Before the war, Sara-the-former-Bard was celebrated for poetry, valued for insights into multidimensional physics too abstruse to explain, insights she'd loved for the beauty they revealed, insights applied physics and engineering of wartime had turned into windows into terror. Or so she feared; compartmentalism had slammed down with her on the outside and all she knew of the most recent developments was rumor.
(This is the opening of a planned novel, set on the same world as my short story, Things Lost Under Bridges.)
Picture a line stretching down the block. Oh, not a totally grim line -- the weather's good, near seventy, and the people are brightly dressed, contrasting with the concrete and block of the buildings, the gravel and concrete of the streets -- but a serious one. Picture more lines, many more, a world of lines, a place where if you didn't work for one of the big outfits, or on a robot farm, or at the "School," an occasional missed meal was just how it worked. But how can you begin to know what it was like if you don't know why and how?
The world was called Ryall. It wasn't good for much -- halfway through a glaciation, which meant the temperate zone was a belt around the Equator a little over five hundred miles wide. But it was warm enough to grow crops and raise animals, the local weeds were neither poisonous nor allergenic, it had metals and fuel, and best of all, it was well behind the straggling, uncertain "front" between the Far Edge refuseniks and the Earth-based NATO forces searching for them.
Once the Edgers realized they hadn't fled far enough and Earth wasn't willing to let them be, the University of Ryall, until then an otherwise struggling institution that by chance had an excellent 'Drive physics program, was cultivated as a major research institution by grants directly from the Federation of Concerned Spacemen (the shadowy Edger non-government) and its various military contractors, most notably "General" Filiaggi's Mil/Space.
The population swelled as the War years dragged on, with people looking for a safer place (especially after the disastrous attempt to reclaim "Peace-And-Prosperity," the planet better known as Linden and, later, Lyndon), various professions and trades following work, along with farmers, administrators, manufacturers and the Far Edge's commercial military organizations. Agriculture struggled to keep up. Distance made luxuries (smuggled from Earth or P&P, built or grown on Trinity or Frothup) expensive and uncommon and by the time the War idled to a stop in 1989, Ryall was a distinctly difficult place. Government was small, hard-pressed, and inadvertently oppressive. Mil/Space and defense contractors dominated employment. Thirty-plus years of war and rumors of war had left more than a mere mark; FCS was reportedly considering intervention, as it had done twice before elsewhere to rein in too-powerful local governments.
A decade earlier, it had already been a hard, gray place for a long time, a place more than a world, and one with a job to do and little time or resources to spare for nonsense--
II.1979
He recognized her as they both stood on one of the endless lines that had come to dominate life in Landingport, lined up for a chance to purchase onions or cheese, lined up to register or reregister for a work permit or a housing permit or a travel permit, lined up for inoculation or delousing, lined up because you saw a line and didn't want to miss out -- or face arrest for not lining up.
Even though she was an unperson these last seven years, her poetry deemed wasteful, unnecessary, he recognized her. "Aren't you Sara-the-bard," he asked, but it wasn't a question. Students had called her that, back in the hopeful beginning, before walls had gone up around the School, before passes and air-raid drills and Security. "You're her, you are," he exclaimed, incredulous, delighted.
She never made eye contact. "I was," she said, almost whispering, and turned away.
III. A Gap In Space
Mathematics and poetry sound like an odd combination of talents to most people. Yet they're often found co-existing, happily or not, in the same mind. Oppenheimer translated Hindu epics; Ada Lovelace struggled to subdue her "poetical nature," and Dodgson, well, you already know him as Lewis Carroll.
Before the war, Sara-the-former-Bard was celebrated for poetry, valued for insights into multidimensional physics too abstruse to explain, insights she'd loved for the beauty they revealed, insights applied physics and engineering of wartime had turned into windows into terror. Or so she feared; compartmentalism had slammed down with her on the outside and all she knew of the most recent developments was rumor.
(This is the opening of a planned novel, set on the same world as my short story, Things Lost Under Bridges.)
13 June 2014
Introduction to Sim
A lot of people feel it, or dimly suspect it; they know there's something deeply wrong with the world but they can't figure out what it is. Some people think they know it -- drunks mumble-blurting wild stories about service in a military that doesn't sound like any Movie of the week, asking for spare change, wild-eyed, talking about events and places that don't show up on any map of Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iraq (again!) or even that Caribbean island nobody remembers? Those guys, they probably know. The guy at the flea market, with the rack of smudgily-printed flyers warning of the Roman Occupation Government, giving tips on burying guns in your backyard (do they sprout?), fretting over flying-saucer overlords, commie Russian plots and the dangers of fluoridated vaccinations? He probably knows and doesn't even realize he knows amid all the other noise.
And that's just how it's supposed to work. See, they've lied to you, lied to you all your life, lied since long before you were born. Our "precious blue marble? It's just one of dozens. First, yes; best, well, certainly the most biodiverse; only? Nope.
Interstellar travel has been around for a lifetime. "Really fast" (if somewhat inaccurate) space travel is even older, and that's where things went wrong: when the United States undertook what turned out to be the second Moon base in the 1950s, the scientists, engineers,soldiers and technicians they sent to build it decided they didn't want to be in a position to bomb the one and only Earth (then) and skipped out. Families and all. The decision may have been influenced by their finding the remains of the first Moon base, the one von Braun would have given his eyeteeth -- and more saliently, the eyeteeth of a whole factory full of forced laborers -- to know about.
There's the dusty history lesson. In more recent events, a Lukewarm War between the furtive ex-Moon crew brewed up, gave birth to an entire goofy UFO craze (and official debunking, unofficial PsyOps, etc. etc.) and finally fizzled out in the Agreement of 1989. Now there's a handful of "Far Edge" worlds (and stranger set-ups) where the writ of NATO does not run, a smaller handful of worlds where it does, a string of weird Russian worlds, some kind of French something, and a (rumored) set of earnest little Chinese settlements they can't even be asked about without letting them know that we know that they know. Oh -- and fleets of smugglers: the Far Edge still has an edge on us when it comes to the Stardrive and their "independent traders" come and go as they please, Agreement of 1989 notwithstanding.
With me so far? We have interstellar travel. For the Good Guys (that's us, right?), it not precisely exciting; it was aggressively civilianzed after 1989, but it still resembles being locked in a big, rundown, 1960s-futuristic apartment building with no windows, an air-conditioning system designed by paranoid geniuses and maintained by surly experts, with a management composed of retired Air Force officers, while three physics labs run dangerous experiments in the basement and an entire university Mathematics Department tries to figure out what's next. At any given moment, you're both bored to tears and under imminent threat of lurid death -- trapped in Nowhere, flashed into superheated plasma smeared across a distant solar system any one of three different ways, or drowned under a mass of amateur bureaucrats.
It's where I work, and I love it. Me, I'm a "peace dividend" beneficiary, it says so right here, trained up right out of High School by the United States Space Force despite having originally enlisted in the Air Force, taught everything there is to know about the maintenance, repair and proper operation of ever model of Stardrive our side ever flew, drilled, tested, qualified -- and then it was 1989. I had been the third female to get all the way through Stardrive tech training and I was out of job. Well, I never much liked saluting anyway.
There was still some work, and it's not like USSF was going to let anyone go home; trips to and from the "good, green Earth" were few and far between, so we and the Russians could mutually pretend they didn't happen at all. I got work; it turned out I had a knack for it.
These days, I'm the Chief Operator and Lead Stardrive Tech of USAS Lupine, a massive "exploratory recon/carrier" turned freight-and-passenger starship over five miles long -- the bigger you are, the faster you go -- a career like living locked in a basement with an amazing view of the Universe. It's not an adventure, it's just a job--
And that's just how it's supposed to work. See, they've lied to you, lied to you all your life, lied since long before you were born. Our "precious blue marble? It's just one of dozens. First, yes; best, well, certainly the most biodiverse; only? Nope.
Interstellar travel has been around for a lifetime. "Really fast" (if somewhat inaccurate) space travel is even older, and that's where things went wrong: when the United States undertook what turned out to be the second Moon base in the 1950s, the scientists, engineers,soldiers and technicians they sent to build it decided they didn't want to be in a position to bomb the one and only Earth (then) and skipped out. Families and all. The decision may have been influenced by their finding the remains of the first Moon base, the one von Braun would have given his eyeteeth -- and more saliently, the eyeteeth of a whole factory full of forced laborers -- to know about.
There's the dusty history lesson. In more recent events, a Lukewarm War between the furtive ex-Moon crew brewed up, gave birth to an entire goofy UFO craze (and official debunking, unofficial PsyOps, etc. etc.) and finally fizzled out in the Agreement of 1989. Now there's a handful of "Far Edge" worlds (and stranger set-ups) where the writ of NATO does not run, a smaller handful of worlds where it does, a string of weird Russian worlds, some kind of French something, and a (rumored) set of earnest little Chinese settlements they can't even be asked about without letting them know that we know that they know. Oh -- and fleets of smugglers: the Far Edge still has an edge on us when it comes to the Stardrive and their "independent traders" come and go as they please, Agreement of 1989 notwithstanding.
With me so far? We have interstellar travel. For the Good Guys (that's us, right?), it not precisely exciting; it was aggressively civilianzed after 1989, but it still resembles being locked in a big, rundown, 1960s-futuristic apartment building with no windows, an air-conditioning system designed by paranoid geniuses and maintained by surly experts, with a management composed of retired Air Force officers, while three physics labs run dangerous experiments in the basement and an entire university Mathematics Department tries to figure out what's next. At any given moment, you're both bored to tears and under imminent threat of lurid death -- trapped in Nowhere, flashed into superheated plasma smeared across a distant solar system any one of three different ways, or drowned under a mass of amateur bureaucrats.
It's where I work, and I love it. Me, I'm a "peace dividend" beneficiary, it says so right here, trained up right out of High School by the United States Space Force despite having originally enlisted in the Air Force, taught everything there is to know about the maintenance, repair and proper operation of ever model of Stardrive our side ever flew, drilled, tested, qualified -- and then it was 1989. I had been the third female to get all the way through Stardrive tech training and I was out of job. Well, I never much liked saluting anyway.
There was still some work, and it's not like USSF was going to let anyone go home; trips to and from the "good, green Earth" were few and far between, so we and the Russians could mutually pretend they didn't happen at all. I got work; it turned out I had a knack for it.
These days, I'm the Chief Operator and Lead Stardrive Tech of USAS Lupine, a massive "exploratory recon/carrier" turned freight-and-passenger starship over five miles long -- the bigger you are, the faster you go -- a career like living locked in a basement with an amazing view of the Universe. It's not an adventure, it's just a job--
06 January 2013
The Overnight Report
[This is way out of chronological sequence, as it comes after events on Frothup were...resolved. I'll get back to that.]
Might as well start with what I'm eating now: an omelet of genuinely impressive weight and density: filled with diced pork roast, carrots, chives, some leftover -- and sans dressing -- broccoli coleslaw mix and a little random hot pickle, topped with a slice of Swiss cheese. A truly fridge-clearing garbage omelet and I don't care what your option of it is. It's ambrosia!
And I earned it.
Some months ago, when the boys from the Power Room pointed out to Dr. Schmid, Lupine's 2/O and my boss's boss some irregularities in the assignment, designation and projected end-of-life of the UPSs (and one in particular) serving the Engineering control-type areas (Drive Control, RF/Reaction, the large electronics-rack compartment betwixt 'em and trailing off into Jump Control, that worthy nodded sagely and allowed as how we'd have to set a time to put it right after having made proper arrangements to, and I quote, "Minimize the impact."
The Chief decided that the "impact-minimizing" part of the three-ring foofraw should fall to -- or perhaps on -- Gale Grinnell (he's a tough old dude, don't be fooled by the gender-neutral name) and little ol' me. My first thought was along the lines of "Ejectejecteject!" but from out here where the starlight is runnin' thin it's still an awfully long trip home even if I were to steal a bicycle, so instead I tried to look sanguine, sagacious and mildly curious while asking if we were going to be doing this in Jump?
The Chief asked if I was taking up making faces as a hobby and allowed as how that would be a darned poor notion; the work scheduled for the run-in to approximately-neutral Smitty's World, next stop in our little show-the-flag tour and a little over six weeks away. Not a bad choice -- lacking the usual sort of star, Smitty's is a wandering planet, a frozen ball of (it says here) carbonaceous chondrite, thorium ores (!) assorted frozen gases accreted from Ghu knows where, and a whole lot of ice-type ice: it's hard to see, despite radio beacons, honkin' overpowered transponders and assorted other tricks you'd like to know about, which means starships drop out of 'Drive early and sort of feel their way in, leaving plenty of extra time.
Time for things like, oh, I dunno, shoving a huge lot of load from uninterruptable power supplies U4A and U3A onto U1C and "unprotected power." Because aw, hell, what's all that junk do besides help us avoid stuff we might run into? Plus U1C is nearly at capacity and U2FGP,* we do not even consider adding more load to.
So, plenty of time for prep, plenty of time for the job, right?
Riiiiight. Also, we're sellin' vacuum, two jars for $20, you want to buy in? I kept getting other "#1 priority!" projects, along with the usual parade of broken small things; Tech Grinnell (an old USSF hand, one of the men adrift in time from too much FTL service during the War) was in the same fix. Tick-tock, and suddenly there was a week left. I made a list, checked it twice, and handed it off to Gale, who added a half-dozen things and handed it right back. Along about then, Doc Schmid got in the act with another half-dozen items to add to the must-be-repowered list....
From there , it's a skip, a hop and a lot of cadging parts to me sitting at a bench, frantically wiring up receptacle strips to power cords for temporary use, making 1.5X as many of each type as I think we're gonna need, while the erstwhile Grinnel, G. and Conan the Objectivist scrounge extension cords.
Comes the day -- actually, an "overnight" watch, which means Conan (t. O.) gets swept up in fun, that being his normal shift, more or less -- and there we are, having already moved everything we could square with our consciences over to plain, un-backed-up power, checklists in hand, temporary power strips and quad boxes tie-wrapped and Velcro'ed in position, finishing up the last of the must-dos when a moon-faced kid from the Power Room shows up carrying two radios.
"Kid," I say, and Joe is young; but he looks younger and talks like the huntin', fishin' country boy he was and still is, and never you mind about the EE (power) degree, or the reactor-engineering certification. He's the 2200-to-0600 el Supremo down where the fusion roars and the MHD units run ripplin' to the stern, and he's here to put us in the loop, with a hearty, "Heya, tube-rats. Bobbi."
"That's us," I told him, like he didn't know. "Are your guys ready?"
He snorted, "We've been ready. Question is, are you?"
"Just about. Gale? Ask the big boss if we're good."
Doc Schmid himself came around the corner, looking as harried as he ever does (not much) and took a radio. "We're ready. Pull the switch."
...Of course something went "BLOOoooooop." Half the monitors went out and I heard Sol West in Drive Control splutter, "Hey!"
The 2/O didn't even blink, just keyed the radio, "Back on. Back on." He let up on the switch, fixed Gale and me with a beady eye: "Find it."
We did, stupid Dansteel data-buffer frame in rack 70 plugged into an unlikely circuit, and the go-command was given again.
Noting important went out that time, though a half-dozen alarms started beeping from the things with two power supplies we'd left half on the now-unpowered UPS. I made a quick walk-through of RF/Reaction and through the rows and rows of racks, ending up at Drive Control where Sol looked resolute but gave me a thumbs-up. The row of second-priority monitors at the top of the bulkhead his the DQ console faces were all out, items being monitored elsewhere or low-pri enough we were letting the slide. I made my way back through the racks -- meeting Gale, Conan (the Obj.) and the 2/O along the way, and through RF/Reax, across the passageway and into the Engineering Shop. Nothing to do but wait!
...I was just about snoozing when the seldom-used PA clicked on. "Need an engineer in DQ. Engineer to DQ!"
Strolled out the long way and met Conan and Gale at the hatch. Beyond, Sol was fuming. "I don't have no censoredly-deleted intercom! Navs says they've been yellin' at me for five minutes and there's no way to even tell!"
Couldn't be in his panel; that's just controls and some basic audio. Off to Rack 15, Operations-commo, and looky! A whole row of, oh, call them crosspoints, dark! --But don't they have dual power supplies per row?
No. No they do not. The have bright, shiny lights that I had assumed indicated dual supplies but really only let you know the two (count them, two) DC power rails are live -- and it takes both of them to tango. (I know that now.) Ah, but sometime long ago, we'd been careful! We'd moved the critical intercom stations to one row, and put it on -- guess, oh, just guess! -- the UPS. The the UPS, the one that is presently off. Easy enough to correct and so I did.
There were a few more brushfires and then Sol found me to announce he wasn't getting any data from the 'Drive finals, idling just enough to modulate Lupine's effective mass, and the other data he was seeing indicated a problem.
A real problem: "Are you feelin' kinda light, Bobbi?"
Maybe I was, at that. I sat down at the RF/Reax data terminal and started digging and eventually figured out a serial-to-ip tunnel interface wasn't talkin', a Harlington-Straker ESD1400 (if you're taking notes). The more I messed with it, the worse it got; and I was really feeling light. I went back to the Shop and grabbed a laptop, called up the manual, headed back to the terminal and dug in; about then the new, improved UPS configuration came online but I hardly noticed. I did notice when Doc Schmid slipped in behind me and leaned against a rack; when I looked back, he asked me how it was going.
"Not well, sir. Not well. It's got data coming in -- good data -- but it's not pushing packets out."
"So put in the spare."
Awkward: "D- Sir, that is the spare. The spare." He just nodded. I'll hear about that later, probably after The Chief has. Oh, my preemptively burning ears!
I finally thought to bring up the "Notes" tab. One line popped up on the page I was at: DO NOT REBOOT WITH SERIAL INPUTS ACTIVE. IT'S NOT SMART ENOUGH TO RESTART WITH LIVE DATA."
Could it be that simple? Really?
I tried. It was. You could feel the effective thrust pick up as the 'Drive finals resynchronized.
...After that, a couple of relatively-easy hours returning power plugs to the (new) normal condition, restowing and cleaning-up, and I was free.
And ravenously hungry.
The nice thing about being in Engineering is that your card key gets you just about anywhere it's safe to go unescorted (and many places that aren't). The kitchens, for instance. The kitchens where the chefs and lower food-service ranks were using up odds and ends to feed -- and amuse -- themselves.
Which takes me right back to the great big garbage omelet where started this tale of daring-do. It's down now, plate licked clean, coffee cup empty. I'm turning the dishes over to the dishwasher, hopping on a slidewalk and heading home, where I will sleep like a hibernating log -- sleep and with any luck, not dream of UPSes
___________________________________________________
* It doesn't really have ancillary letters but someone who didn't want it to feel left out very carefully painted "FGP" right after "U2" on the hatch not all that long after deciding to make her career on Lupine. Er, that is--
Might as well start with what I'm eating now: an omelet of genuinely impressive weight and density: filled with diced pork roast, carrots, chives, some leftover -- and sans dressing -- broccoli coleslaw mix and a little random hot pickle, topped with a slice of Swiss cheese. A truly fridge-clearing garbage omelet and I don't care what your option of it is. It's ambrosia!
And I earned it.
Some months ago, when the boys from the Power Room pointed out to Dr. Schmid, Lupine's 2/O and my boss's boss some irregularities in the assignment, designation and projected end-of-life of the UPSs (and one in particular) serving the Engineering control-type areas (Drive Control, RF/Reaction, the large electronics-rack compartment betwixt 'em and trailing off into Jump Control, that worthy nodded sagely and allowed as how we'd have to set a time to put it right after having made proper arrangements to, and I quote, "Minimize the impact."
The Chief decided that the "impact-minimizing" part of the three-ring foofraw should fall to -- or perhaps on -- Gale Grinnell (he's a tough old dude, don't be fooled by the gender-neutral name) and little ol' me. My first thought was along the lines of "Ejectejecteject!" but from out here where the starlight is runnin' thin it's still an awfully long trip home even if I were to steal a bicycle, so instead I tried to look sanguine, sagacious and mildly curious while asking if we were going to be doing this in Jump?
The Chief asked if I was taking up making faces as a hobby and allowed as how that would be a darned poor notion; the work scheduled for the run-in to approximately-neutral Smitty's World, next stop in our little show-the-flag tour and a little over six weeks away. Not a bad choice -- lacking the usual sort of star, Smitty's is a wandering planet, a frozen ball of (it says here) carbonaceous chondrite, thorium ores (!) assorted frozen gases accreted from Ghu knows where, and a whole lot of ice-type ice: it's hard to see, despite radio beacons, honkin' overpowered transponders and assorted other tricks you'd like to know about, which means starships drop out of 'Drive early and sort of feel their way in, leaving plenty of extra time.
Time for things like, oh, I dunno, shoving a huge lot of load from uninterruptable power supplies U4A and U3A onto U1C and "unprotected power." Because aw, hell, what's all that junk do besides help us avoid stuff we might run into? Plus U1C is nearly at capacity and U2FGP,* we do not even consider adding more load to.
So, plenty of time for prep, plenty of time for the job, right?
Riiiiight. Also, we're sellin' vacuum, two jars for $20, you want to buy in? I kept getting other "#1 priority!" projects, along with the usual parade of broken small things; Tech Grinnell (an old USSF hand, one of the men adrift in time from too much FTL service during the War) was in the same fix. Tick-tock, and suddenly there was a week left. I made a list, checked it twice, and handed it off to Gale, who added a half-dozen things and handed it right back. Along about then, Doc Schmid got in the act with another half-dozen items to add to the must-be-repowered list....
From there , it's a skip, a hop and a lot of cadging parts to me sitting at a bench, frantically wiring up receptacle strips to power cords for temporary use, making 1.5X as many of each type as I think we're gonna need, while the erstwhile Grinnel, G. and Conan the Objectivist scrounge extension cords.
Comes the day -- actually, an "overnight" watch, which means Conan (t. O.) gets swept up in fun, that being his normal shift, more or less -- and there we are, having already moved everything we could square with our consciences over to plain, un-backed-up power, checklists in hand, temporary power strips and quad boxes tie-wrapped and Velcro'ed in position, finishing up the last of the must-dos when a moon-faced kid from the Power Room shows up carrying two radios.
"Kid," I say, and Joe is young; but he looks younger and talks like the huntin', fishin' country boy he was and still is, and never you mind about the EE (power) degree, or the reactor-engineering certification. He's the 2200-to-0600 el Supremo down where the fusion roars and the MHD units run ripplin' to the stern, and he's here to put us in the loop, with a hearty, "Heya, tube-rats. Bobbi."
"That's us," I told him, like he didn't know. "Are your guys ready?"
He snorted, "We've been ready. Question is, are you?"
"Just about. Gale? Ask the big boss if we're good."
Doc Schmid himself came around the corner, looking as harried as he ever does (not much) and took a radio. "We're ready. Pull the switch."
...Of course something went "BLOOoooooop." Half the monitors went out and I heard Sol West in Drive Control splutter, "Hey!"
The 2/O didn't even blink, just keyed the radio, "Back on. Back on." He let up on the switch, fixed Gale and me with a beady eye: "Find it."
We did, stupid Dansteel data-buffer frame in rack 70 plugged into an unlikely circuit, and the go-command was given again.
Noting important went out that time, though a half-dozen alarms started beeping from the things with two power supplies we'd left half on the now-unpowered UPS. I made a quick walk-through of RF/Reaction and through the rows and rows of racks, ending up at Drive Control where Sol looked resolute but gave me a thumbs-up. The row of second-priority monitors at the top of the bulkhead his the DQ console faces were all out, items being monitored elsewhere or low-pri enough we were letting the slide. I made my way back through the racks -- meeting Gale, Conan (the Obj.) and the 2/O along the way, and through RF/Reax, across the passageway and into the Engineering Shop. Nothing to do but wait!
...I was just about snoozing when the seldom-used PA clicked on. "Need an engineer in DQ. Engineer to DQ!"
Strolled out the long way and met Conan and Gale at the hatch. Beyond, Sol was fuming. "I don't have no censoredly-deleted intercom! Navs says they've been yellin' at me for five minutes and there's no way to even tell!"
Couldn't be in his panel; that's just controls and some basic audio. Off to Rack 15, Operations-commo, and looky! A whole row of, oh, call them crosspoints, dark! --But don't they have dual power supplies per row?
No. No they do not. The have bright, shiny lights that I had assumed indicated dual supplies but really only let you know the two (count them, two) DC power rails are live -- and it takes both of them to tango. (I know that now.) Ah, but sometime long ago, we'd been careful! We'd moved the critical intercom stations to one row, and put it on -- guess, oh, just guess! -- the UPS. The the UPS, the one that is presently off. Easy enough to correct and so I did.
There were a few more brushfires and then Sol found me to announce he wasn't getting any data from the 'Drive finals, idling just enough to modulate Lupine's effective mass, and the other data he was seeing indicated a problem.
A real problem: "Are you feelin' kinda light, Bobbi?"
Maybe I was, at that. I sat down at the RF/Reax data terminal and started digging and eventually figured out a serial-to-ip tunnel interface wasn't talkin', a Harlington-Straker ESD1400 (if you're taking notes). The more I messed with it, the worse it got; and I was really feeling light. I went back to the Shop and grabbed a laptop, called up the manual, headed back to the terminal and dug in; about then the new, improved UPS configuration came online but I hardly noticed. I did notice when Doc Schmid slipped in behind me and leaned against a rack; when I looked back, he asked me how it was going.
"Not well, sir. Not well. It's got data coming in -- good data -- but it's not pushing packets out."
"So put in the spare."
Awkward: "D- Sir, that is the spare. The spare." He just nodded. I'll hear about that later, probably after The Chief has. Oh, my preemptively burning ears!
I finally thought to bring up the "Notes" tab. One line popped up on the page I was at: DO NOT REBOOT WITH SERIAL INPUTS ACTIVE. IT'S NOT SMART ENOUGH TO RESTART WITH LIVE DATA."
Could it be that simple? Really?
I tried. It was. You could feel the effective thrust pick up as the 'Drive finals resynchronized.
...After that, a couple of relatively-easy hours returning power plugs to the (new) normal condition, restowing and cleaning-up, and I was free.
And ravenously hungry.
The nice thing about being in Engineering is that your card key gets you just about anywhere it's safe to go unescorted (and many places that aren't). The kitchens, for instance. The kitchens where the chefs and lower food-service ranks were using up odds and ends to feed -- and amuse -- themselves.
Which takes me right back to the great big garbage omelet where started this tale of daring-do. It's down now, plate licked clean, coffee cup empty. I'm turning the dishes over to the dishwasher, hopping on a slidewalk and heading home, where I will sleep like a hibernating log -- sleep and with any luck, not dream of UPSes
___________________________________________________
* It doesn't really have ancillary letters but someone who didn't want it to feel left out very carefully painted "FGP" right after "U2" on the hatch not all that long after deciding to make her career on Lupine. Er, that is--
09 June 2012
It's A Long Way Up. Or Down.
It's a long way just getting there, and that's even before donning the mandated pressure suit. Any time there's only one thickness of stuff between you and the Great Airless Beyond, any time you're out in the nobody's-regularly-there utility and leftover spaces of the vast starship USAS Lupine, the Enviro & Physical Plant safety types require you wear an actual pressure suit, with full tanks and working radio, just like on Buck Rogers. (Which mine kind of is, being mostly a mechanical-counterpressure type, but you wear coveralls over, more to protect it from rips and abrasion and to keep it clean than for modesty -- but it is not much more than a thick leotard and every time I put it on, I resolve to spend more time working out in the ship's gym. Humbling!)
Why suit up, if you can breathe the (stale and dusty) air? 'Cos it would be way too much trouble to go rescue you, all bloated and vacuum-dried, if you managed to, oh, punch through a radar-transparent plastic bubble or trip a fire-extinguishing air dump; they'd rather you were able to yell for help and had some chance of surviving 'til help would arrive, followed by debriefing and a hectoring lecture about what you did wrong.
In the present instance, I'd done nothing wrong but one of E&PP's inspector/cleaners had: he'd managed to flip the breaker for one of the ship's primary radars, the "Ship's Horizontal Axis Search," a/k/a "Arbitrary-H Main" which sits in a handy radome at the very top of a high, tower-like structure, at the very forward end of Lupine, bit to starboard of the centerline. He'd turned it right back on but the damage was done: the High Power Amplifier had cycled back up in "local," the E&PP crewman had not noticed (it's not his job, it's Engineering's) and was much farther along in his appointed rounds by the time the Navs boffins realized they were only seeing returns on the Arbitrary-V Main, which sticks out from the port side at the forward end on the end of a long, tube-like thingie, much like the hollow tower of H Main.
The Chief was out (it happens. Rarely); Dr. Schmid, 2/O, high brass indeed and our nominal big boss was definitely In and delighted to assign me the long walk out to see what the matter might be. He paged me up to Navs -- a warren of cubicles with three bulkheads covered in very large-screen displays, up a spiral stair from Jump Control -- and commenced to enthuse.
"It's probably something simple. Radar Ralph's software can be pretty flaky, though, we might have to shut it all down and bring everything back up in sequence."
I nodded. "Radar Ralph" O'Casey is something of a legend in the starships he's never seen and can't be told about; he's never been cleared for it and from everything I hear, he never will be. But his radars are great; no one does 'em better. He himself, that's a different story; he tried to insist he was the only person who could or should install and maintain his radar designs and the USAF team fronting for the Starship Company had to wave money, a free vacation and a course of therapy before he would relent. Even at that, the documentation is sketchier than I'd like and we've had to reverse-engineer his subassemblies. Since the Search radar do two jobs -- conventional radar-type work in normal space and mapping the shape of our pocket universe in Jump -- we have to have the very best and that means Ralph or the Ukrainians who've built all the high-precision units for the old USSR and current Russian starships and publicly-known space vehicles. Trust me: odd as he is, Ralph's easier to deal with.
A mere hour later, I was suited up and opening the pressure door marked, NO ACCESS. PRESSURE SUIT AND LOGIN REQUIRED PAST THIS POINT. Aw, they do care! A nice, healthy hike though the area our switch-flipper had worked (I could see his tracks) and I was at the hatch for H Main Radar; pop it and I'm in the base of the radar mast itself, with another little compartment where the radar electronics lives dead ahead. To one side and above me is--
A whole lot of UP.
You know what we have on the Hidden Frontier they don't have on the International Space Station or even the "starship Enterprise?" Spiders. (Also sometimes mice and rarely, rats or cockroaches). Ew.
Also, I don't know why it is, when I have the whole universe to fall into it doesn't bother me, yet a large enclosed volume gives me the willies -- but it does. So of course, as soon as I had Dr. Schmid on the radio, he asked if I could see the dish rotating. You should just be able to see the yoke glide across the opening where the stairs enter the radome, but I couldn't.
So of course, I had to climb up and make sure. In zero-g, you can just clip onto the steel cable going up the center of the mast and glide; but Lupine normally runs .75 g. It's to keep your bones and muscles from turning into mush and it makes life simpler (mostly) but not easier.
First things first! I checked the radar unit itself: it had defaulted to Local control and was plain off; I set it to warm up but not transmit (there's a "man aloft" safety key you remove and clip to your belt for just that). And then trudge, trudge, trudge, up and around. It's only two hundred feet vertically but you walk at least three times that far.
Up top, the dish was gliding serenely around, all right -- and tilted down as far as it can go, trying to image the steel platform it sits on instead of what's outside the radome (the parareality in between stars just now, a sparkling gray something outlining a more-or-less oblate spheroid). Dr. Schmid tried various things, I carefully read tilt angles off the scribed marks, walking along with the yoke (a good way to get hurt -- Handsome Dave once got knocked flat trying it with the rotational speed just a little too fast, and a darned good thing it took him in the shoulder and not the helmet). Eventually, we got it rereferenced -- it makes my skin crawl to hear the 2/O muse about "dialing in a fudge factor," but Navs boffins (which is how Dr. Schmid came up) are not like you and me: he's talking about a least-practical-increment slippage and, as usual, he was right.
Back down to the equipment compartment -- look at the bulkhead beside you, not across; even down is better than across or up --
-- put the safety key back in, and pip! the radar's back up. Dr. Schmid checked his re-cal with the radar target on the fixed portion of the 'Drive mast, seven miles away at the far aft end of the ship, and lo, it was spot-on.
Another day, another $53.77 an hour, or whatever it will work out to. (We get paid for Earth-elapsed, which is like variable-rate overtime, hooray! But only because any other way complicates payroll; aboard ship, you're drawing against pay 'til next time Lupine gets back to the homeworld and they settle accounts).
Why suit up, if you can breathe the (stale and dusty) air? 'Cos it would be way too much trouble to go rescue you, all bloated and vacuum-dried, if you managed to, oh, punch through a radar-transparent plastic bubble or trip a fire-extinguishing air dump; they'd rather you were able to yell for help and had some chance of surviving 'til help would arrive, followed by debriefing and a hectoring lecture about what you did wrong.
In the present instance, I'd done nothing wrong but one of E&PP's inspector/cleaners had: he'd managed to flip the breaker for one of the ship's primary radars, the "Ship's Horizontal Axis Search," a/k/a "Arbitrary-H Main" which sits in a handy radome at the very top of a high, tower-like structure, at the very forward end of Lupine, bit to starboard of the centerline. He'd turned it right back on but the damage was done: the High Power Amplifier had cycled back up in "local," the E&PP crewman had not noticed (it's not his job, it's Engineering's) and was much farther along in his appointed rounds by the time the Navs boffins realized they were only seeing returns on the Arbitrary-V Main, which sticks out from the port side at the forward end on the end of a long, tube-like thingie, much like the hollow tower of H Main.
The Chief was out (it happens. Rarely); Dr. Schmid, 2/O, high brass indeed and our nominal big boss was definitely In and delighted to assign me the long walk out to see what the matter might be. He paged me up to Navs -- a warren of cubicles with three bulkheads covered in very large-screen displays, up a spiral stair from Jump Control -- and commenced to enthuse.
"It's probably something simple. Radar Ralph's software can be pretty flaky, though, we might have to shut it all down and bring everything back up in sequence."
I nodded. "Radar Ralph" O'Casey is something of a legend in the starships he's never seen and can't be told about; he's never been cleared for it and from everything I hear, he never will be. But his radars are great; no one does 'em better. He himself, that's a different story; he tried to insist he was the only person who could or should install and maintain his radar designs and the USAF team fronting for the Starship Company had to wave money, a free vacation and a course of therapy before he would relent. Even at that, the documentation is sketchier than I'd like and we've had to reverse-engineer his subassemblies. Since the Search radar do two jobs -- conventional radar-type work in normal space and mapping the shape of our pocket universe in Jump -- we have to have the very best and that means Ralph or the Ukrainians who've built all the high-precision units for the old USSR and current Russian starships and publicly-known space vehicles. Trust me: odd as he is, Ralph's easier to deal with.
A mere hour later, I was suited up and opening the pressure door marked, NO ACCESS. PRESSURE SUIT AND LOGIN REQUIRED PAST THIS POINT. Aw, they do care! A nice, healthy hike though the area our switch-flipper had worked (I could see his tracks) and I was at the hatch for H Main Radar; pop it and I'm in the base of the radar mast itself, with another little compartment where the radar electronics lives dead ahead. To one side and above me is--
A whole lot of UP.
You know what we have on the Hidden Frontier they don't have on the International Space Station or even the "starship Enterprise?" Spiders. (Also sometimes mice and rarely, rats or cockroaches). Ew.Also, I don't know why it is, when I have the whole universe to fall into it doesn't bother me, yet a large enclosed volume gives me the willies -- but it does. So of course, as soon as I had Dr. Schmid on the radio, he asked if I could see the dish rotating. You should just be able to see the yoke glide across the opening where the stairs enter the radome, but I couldn't.
So of course, I had to climb up and make sure. In zero-g, you can just clip onto the steel cable going up the center of the mast and glide; but Lupine normally runs .75 g. It's to keep your bones and muscles from turning into mush and it makes life simpler (mostly) but not easier.
First things first! I checked the radar unit itself: it had defaulted to Local control and was plain off; I set it to warm up but not transmit (there's a "man aloft" safety key you remove and clip to your belt for just that). And then trudge, trudge, trudge, up and around. It's only two hundred feet vertically but you walk at least three times that far.
Up top, the dish was gliding serenely around, all right -- and tilted down as far as it can go, trying to image the steel platform it sits on instead of what's outside the radome (the parareality in between stars just now, a sparkling gray something outlining a more-or-less oblate spheroid). Dr. Schmid tried various things, I carefully read tilt angles off the scribed marks, walking along with the yoke (a good way to get hurt -- Handsome Dave once got knocked flat trying it with the rotational speed just a little too fast, and a darned good thing it took him in the shoulder and not the helmet). Eventually, we got it rereferenced -- it makes my skin crawl to hear the 2/O muse about "dialing in a fudge factor," but Navs boffins (which is how Dr. Schmid came up) are not like you and me: he's talking about a least-practical-increment slippage and, as usual, he was right.
Back down to the equipment compartment -- look at the bulkhead beside you, not across; even down is better than across or up --
-- put the safety key back in, and pip! the radar's back up. Dr. Schmid checked his re-cal with the radar target on the fixed portion of the 'Drive mast, seven miles away at the far aft end of the ship, and lo, it was spot-on.Another day, another $53.77 an hour, or whatever it will work out to. (We get paid for Earth-elapsed, which is like variable-rate overtime, hooray! But only because any other way complicates payroll; aboard ship, you're drawing against pay 'til next time Lupine gets back to the homeworld and they settle accounts).
17 December 2010
In Space, The Connectors Are Not Flatulent
The Hidden Frontier comes to Earth: PEI-Genesis offers a full range of space-rated connectors. Outgassed, even, to keep them from failing in interesting and dangerous ways.
Riddle me this, Mr. Detective: if NASA (+.mil), commercial satellite folks, SpaceX, Blue Horizon, Bigelow, Virgin Galactic and the various X-prize contenders are the only market, how're they turning these gadgets out in bulk without going broke? Total up all the known customers and you might use up a week's production at the connector factory to replace every vacuum-spec, low-magnetism, non-toxic plug and socket they're using.
Just thought I'd point that out.
Riddle me this, Mr. Detective: if NASA (+.mil), commercial satellite folks, SpaceX, Blue Horizon, Bigelow, Virgin Galactic and the various X-prize contenders are the only market, how're they turning these gadgets out in bulk without going broke? Total up all the known customers and you might use up a week's production at the connector factory to replace every vacuum-spec, low-magnetism, non-toxic plug and socket they're using.
Just thought I'd point that out.
05 February 2009
Class
The only light in the Engineering Shop came from the corridor hatch and the Chief's cubicle. We were variously arrayed on chairs and workbenches, facing the big monitor. On the screen, flames shot from the windows and doors of a large industrial building. As the camera zoomed out, a column of smoke could be seen streaming though the partially-collapsed roof. In the foreground, a figure in overcoat, boots, gloves and helmet reached for a fence, touched it, convulsed, and fell. The camera panned over to center on him, revealing heavy wires -- power lines -- drooped ungracefully down, draped over the fence and off to the burning building. As the title appeared, LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP, narration started up:
"That firefighter survived, but you may not. Look Before You Leap! Industrial Safety Is No Accident!"
In front of me, Jonny Zed snorted and whispered to the guy next to him -- C. Jay -- "What's that got t'do with us?"
Jay shook his head, meaning pipe down, Jon, but to no avail. Jon kept on, "We haven't got any overhead power, that wouldn't work. We just need to get the power we need when we need to get the power we need."
Jay stifled a laugh, turned and gave me a help me look over his shoulder. I leaned in and hissed, "Jon, the Chief's givin' us the eye. Aren't we in trouble enough already?"
Indeed we were. The UPS debacle had had repercussions throughout Power and Engineering and while the official word was Disaster Narrowly Averted, a Lead Tech in Power had been busted down to plain ol' Electrician and a couple of them had been dropped back to Probationary Apprentice -- and everybody but everybody was gettin' another round of How Not To Screw Up And Kill Us All training. --Say what you will, it might be a little hokey but it beats having to walk home.
"Walking home" was looking a little more likely than usual; our hastily-refigured short hop had gone off without a hitch, though palms were sweatier than usual throughout, but when we'd set the stardrive finals back to idling, one had crashed. I spent the better part of an entire shift messing with it, got it working -- and then it shut down hard just as I was fixing to leave the Drive Room and would not come back up. I'd had some of the parts I most suspected on hand and ordered the rest from Stores & Cargo, but that was gonna take a day. The Chief was Not Happy at this and not all reluctant to show it. I was a bit unhappy myself. Stardrive finals are fiddly things and I was hoping the big phantasmajector tube -- the newest of the three! -- had not given up the ghost.
But for now, the second in a series of required meetings. LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP! It was a pretty interesting video. The first two or three times. I sure hope S&C gets those parts here early.
"That firefighter survived, but you may not. Look Before You Leap! Industrial Safety Is No Accident!"
In front of me, Jonny Zed snorted and whispered to the guy next to him -- C. Jay -- "What's that got t'do with us?"
Jay shook his head, meaning pipe down, Jon, but to no avail. Jon kept on, "We haven't got any overhead power, that wouldn't work. We just need to get the power we need when we need to get the power we need."
Jay stifled a laugh, turned and gave me a help me look over his shoulder. I leaned in and hissed, "Jon, the Chief's givin' us the eye. Aren't we in trouble enough already?"
Indeed we were. The UPS debacle had had repercussions throughout Power and Engineering and while the official word was Disaster Narrowly Averted, a Lead Tech in Power had been busted down to plain ol' Electrician and a couple of them had been dropped back to Probationary Apprentice -- and everybody but everybody was gettin' another round of How Not To Screw Up And Kill Us All training. --Say what you will, it might be a little hokey but it beats having to walk home.
"Walking home" was looking a little more likely than usual; our hastily-refigured short hop had gone off without a hitch, though palms were sweatier than usual throughout, but when we'd set the stardrive finals back to idling, one had crashed. I spent the better part of an entire shift messing with it, got it working -- and then it shut down hard just as I was fixing to leave the Drive Room and would not come back up. I'd had some of the parts I most suspected on hand and ordered the rest from Stores & Cargo, but that was gonna take a day. The Chief was Not Happy at this and not all reluctant to show it. I was a bit unhappy myself. Stardrive finals are fiddly things and I was hoping the big phantasmajector tube -- the newest of the three! -- had not given up the ghost.
But for now, the second in a series of required meetings. LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP! It was a pretty interesting video. The first two or three times. I sure hope S&C gets those parts here early.
25 January 2009
In Space, It's Hard To Ignore The Phone
Today should have been a day off. I still haven't got out my nightgown, let alone my quarters, yet I've been working most of the last four hours.
It all goes back to the Power Room gang. Lupine Power & Light, as they are often known -- and they do sell commercial power to the various subcontractors and merchants; even the functions of the ship proper generate a paper trail akin to billing. They have taken our recent string of power issues (UPS crashes, fried service transformers and other sorts of barbecue) very much to heart. Their most recent project has been a huge upgrade to the distribution system from the central fusion/MHD reactor, ripping out the last of the late-50s infrastructure and bringing the whole thing up to modern standards. Yay, hooray and it should have been transparent to the end user, most especially us.
By "should have been," I would be saying not so much. By "us," I mean the Command/Control core, where the Engineering Shop, the rack area, Drive and RF/Reaction Control and Master Control are to be found, where Navs, Imaging and Signals have their primary tech offices and where, one deck up, Officer's Country can be found, all panelling, hushed voices, carpeting, incongruous displays and gazillions on the line. The important stuff's all triply-backed up, right?
Right. Except for the few bits that aren't. You install a new thing in an old rack and don't check out where it's powered, could be later on there are tooth marks where you sit down. Or maybe on someone else, whoever else it fails on.
If you get bit, then fake your way out of it and leave the next shift to get burned, you'll learn there are worse things than tooth marks and once the heated wrath of the Chief has singed you to the bone, quiet, gentle Dr. Schmid is waiting, an otherworldly look in his eyes, as noble as Dr. Guillotine. 2/O and the big boss of Navs and Engineering and a man whose time, he refrains from pointing out, is not to be trifled with. What he might say or do, one should never find out firsthand.
...Let me draw a curtain across that scene, for it doesn't -- thank the Fates! -- concern us, not this time. Suffice to say, there was a big ol' glitch on the power and a couple of near-critical items took nasty hits that took 'em down, one of them a trick little Tweed "intelligent controller" that helps keep us from tearin' the place apart with the realspace drives; and here we are, inbound yet, with some fine maneuvering a few days away. So that was A Bad Thing.
What was worse was just patching around it and leaving it for the next guys along with a pile of other, less-critical fubars while making no particular note. By the time my phone started beeping, dayshift was looking lunchwards and the perps were snug abed -- unless the Chief had hold of them by then.
So I've been online, digging up files and notes: workarounds, software to reload and how we ran without it. That last gets us back to Navs some and piloting a whole lot -- looks like at least half the star pilots have eased this contraption into orbit without such invisibly automated help and a quarter of that group date back to before the thing it replaced...which I have located in a Stores & Cargo index and sent for. Might be a bit more zero-G this planetfall than folks have gotten used to.
I've also spent time on the phone with Dr. Schmid, talking through resetting another important item the night-shift guys left about half-right and I've volunteered to just head on down to C&C twice. "Better take what's left of your day off," he said, "It looks like there might not be any more of them for awhile." Ow.
What I'm wondering is, just what the dickens else messed up that the overnight crew had so little time to spend on these things? --And why didn't they start callin' for help when it happened?
I may be adventuring among the distant stars but from where I'm sitting right now, it sometimes bears a stunning likeness to Peoria.
P.S.: And after a morning spent that way and a middlin' nice mid-day spent reading and housecleaning, I'm on the phone again -- seems the Drive Control operator just tried to call up some seldom looked-at telemetry and the whole subsystem crashed. Yum.
It all goes back to the Power Room gang. Lupine Power & Light, as they are often known -- and they do sell commercial power to the various subcontractors and merchants; even the functions of the ship proper generate a paper trail akin to billing. They have taken our recent string of power issues (UPS crashes, fried service transformers and other sorts of barbecue) very much to heart. Their most recent project has been a huge upgrade to the distribution system from the central fusion/MHD reactor, ripping out the last of the late-50s infrastructure and bringing the whole thing up to modern standards. Yay, hooray and it should have been transparent to the end user, most especially us.
By "should have been," I would be saying not so much. By "us," I mean the Command/Control core, where the Engineering Shop, the rack area, Drive and RF/Reaction Control and Master Control are to be found, where Navs, Imaging and Signals have their primary tech offices and where, one deck up, Officer's Country can be found, all panelling, hushed voices, carpeting, incongruous displays and gazillions on the line. The important stuff's all triply-backed up, right?
Right. Except for the few bits that aren't. You install a new thing in an old rack and don't check out where it's powered, could be later on there are tooth marks where you sit down. Or maybe on someone else, whoever else it fails on.
If you get bit, then fake your way out of it and leave the next shift to get burned, you'll learn there are worse things than tooth marks and once the heated wrath of the Chief has singed you to the bone, quiet, gentle Dr. Schmid is waiting, an otherworldly look in his eyes, as noble as Dr. Guillotine. 2/O and the big boss of Navs and Engineering and a man whose time, he refrains from pointing out, is not to be trifled with. What he might say or do, one should never find out firsthand.
...Let me draw a curtain across that scene, for it doesn't -- thank the Fates! -- concern us, not this time. Suffice to say, there was a big ol' glitch on the power and a couple of near-critical items took nasty hits that took 'em down, one of them a trick little Tweed "intelligent controller" that helps keep us from tearin' the place apart with the realspace drives; and here we are, inbound yet, with some fine maneuvering a few days away. So that was A Bad Thing.
What was worse was just patching around it and leaving it for the next guys along with a pile of other, less-critical fubars while making no particular note. By the time my phone started beeping, dayshift was looking lunchwards and the perps were snug abed -- unless the Chief had hold of them by then.
So I've been online, digging up files and notes: workarounds, software to reload and how we ran without it. That last gets us back to Navs some and piloting a whole lot -- looks like at least half the star pilots have eased this contraption into orbit without such invisibly automated help and a quarter of that group date back to before the thing it replaced...which I have located in a Stores & Cargo index and sent for. Might be a bit more zero-G this planetfall than folks have gotten used to.
I've also spent time on the phone with Dr. Schmid, talking through resetting another important item the night-shift guys left about half-right and I've volunteered to just head on down to C&C twice. "Better take what's left of your day off," he said, "It looks like there might not be any more of them for awhile." Ow.
What I'm wondering is, just what the dickens else messed up that the overnight crew had so little time to spend on these things? --And why didn't they start callin' for help when it happened?
I may be adventuring among the distant stars but from where I'm sitting right now, it sometimes bears a stunning likeness to Peoria.
P.S.: And after a morning spent that way and a middlin' nice mid-day spent reading and housecleaning, I'm on the phone again -- seems the Drive Control operator just tried to call up some seldom looked-at telemetry and the whole subsystem crashed. Yum.
23 January 2009
Starship Lupine Exterior View
(Much busy, so here's a descriptive tidbit to tide you over).
At first sight, the Lupine resembles nothing so much as a junkyard sculpture of a horseshoe crab. The ship is so huge that the fine details are lot once you're far enough away to take it all in.
Originally a combination colonization/freighter/carrier vessel, one of three in the United States Space Force fleet, built back when the vacuum tube was king and the only power source up to the job of folding space to outrace light was not one but five modified Navy-type nuclear reactors,[1] it was intended to pursue the fleeing ships of what came to be known as the "Far Edge" after they swindled the USSF out of their planned Lunar missile base. By the time she was complete, it was already too late, but USSF had to find out the hard way. "Better safe than sorry," especially when your quarry possesses the means to wipe out the Earth several times over.
That, as it turned out, was never the problem. But it was a heady time, when the "black" budget swelled to unaccountable levels and a trip to space was, like as not, one-way journey. Very few people have realized that the primary goal of Project Mercury was perfecting reentry techniques: a late-1950s squirt-booster would get you to Earth orbit and beyond but landing on a celestial body was a much trickier prospect; the airless Moon allowed for "bounce-down," cushioned by JATO[2] units and vast airbags but return to Earth was problematic, as the Sgt. Snodgrass Crater in Nevada testified.
At closer range, Lupine is more "junkyard" and less "arthropod," a collection of various sized structures interconnected by corrugated tubes, vast M.C. Escher arrays of scaffolding and a myriad of random what-is-its, shoved along by acres of MHD and ion rockets underneath.
________________________
1. "How did they condense the working fluid and shed waste heat?" you ask, and considerin' that USN has entire oceans (or at least seas) to cool theirs, it's a good question. The answer, like a lot of things from the early days of the USSF, is unsatisfactory. A lot more water in the loops plus vast radiating area, for one thing; and the even more vast framework of the ship to heat up, as well. At full steam on a long jump, this meant things were...toasty...aboard at the end of it. They'd make orbit and shut as much down as possible, shining brightly in the infrared. Not at all stealthy but in a fighting-type situation, the .mil squirt-boosters would have been dropped off shortly after returning to normal space and before deceleration, so they'd be moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, while the carrier vessel lagged behind.
2. Some readers want me to say "RATO" but here's the deal: we're talkin' about folks back In The Day who had just finished whuppin' Nazis. Germany had RATO units, fueled by flesh-melting T-Stoff; the United States had JATO units, running on good ol' American know-how (also solid rocket fuel). The Brits had real jet engines in theirs but in any case, JATO is what the USSF boys called 'em and so will I. Wikipedia says we're right enough.
At first sight, the Lupine resembles nothing so much as a junkyard sculpture of a horseshoe crab. The ship is so huge that the fine details are lot once you're far enough away to take it all in.
Originally a combination colonization/freighter/carrier vessel, one of three in the United States Space Force fleet, built back when the vacuum tube was king and the only power source up to the job of folding space to outrace light was not one but five modified Navy-type nuclear reactors,[1] it was intended to pursue the fleeing ships of what came to be known as the "Far Edge" after they swindled the USSF out of their planned Lunar missile base. By the time she was complete, it was already too late, but USSF had to find out the hard way. "Better safe than sorry," especially when your quarry possesses the means to wipe out the Earth several times over.
That, as it turned out, was never the problem. But it was a heady time, when the "black" budget swelled to unaccountable levels and a trip to space was, like as not, one-way journey. Very few people have realized that the primary goal of Project Mercury was perfecting reentry techniques: a late-1950s squirt-booster would get you to Earth orbit and beyond but landing on a celestial body was a much trickier prospect; the airless Moon allowed for "bounce-down," cushioned by JATO[2] units and vast airbags but return to Earth was problematic, as the Sgt. Snodgrass Crater in Nevada testified.
At closer range, Lupine is more "junkyard" and less "arthropod," a collection of various sized structures interconnected by corrugated tubes, vast M.C. Escher arrays of scaffolding and a myriad of random what-is-its, shoved along by acres of MHD and ion rockets underneath.
________________________
1. "How did they condense the working fluid and shed waste heat?" you ask, and considerin' that USN has entire oceans (or at least seas) to cool theirs, it's a good question. The answer, like a lot of things from the early days of the USSF, is unsatisfactory. A lot more water in the loops plus vast radiating area, for one thing; and the even more vast framework of the ship to heat up, as well. At full steam on a long jump, this meant things were...toasty...aboard at the end of it. They'd make orbit and shut as much down as possible, shining brightly in the infrared. Not at all stealthy but in a fighting-type situation, the .mil squirt-boosters would have been dropped off shortly after returning to normal space and before deceleration, so they'd be moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, while the carrier vessel lagged behind.
2. Some readers want me to say "RATO" but here's the deal: we're talkin' about folks back In The Day who had just finished whuppin' Nazis. Germany had RATO units, fueled by flesh-melting T-Stoff; the United States had JATO units, running on good ol' American know-how (also solid rocket fuel). The Brits had real jet engines in theirs but in any case, JATO is what the USSF boys called 'em and so will I. Wikipedia says we're right enough.
07 January 2009
Sometimes, It Is Easy. Other Times, Er...
You've got to hand it to Stores & Cargo: any time you don't want 'em to be, that bunch of slobs is efficient. The very morning promised (and the morning after I'd wasted my post-dinner relaxing time enduring a twenty-minute lecture in the lesser of the Lupine's two bars from a half-sozzled squirt-booster pi-lut annoyed at my hand-waving oversimplification of how their jarring little toys "fly," geeeesh, it's just a darned good thing he's pretty handsome), there were two only slightly scuffed and dusty boxes waiting, bungee-corded to the perforated wall just inside the Engr'g. Shop with my name scrawled on them: one (1) 9017 power grid tube and one (1) Y100 broadband amplifier cavity, 9017, for use with. Oh, huzz-ah.
Checked in with the Chief -- him in a slightly better humor this ayem, for a wonder -- and he allowed as how Big Tom was available to lend a hand. This is good (you just about can't swap out the awkward cavity single handed) and bad (we kid Tom with friendly, caring, slanderous questions like, "Were that puppy's legs attached when it was handed to you?" and "Broke an anvil again?" It's not quite true). But there's not all that much to break on this job. Mostly.
We were still outbound at that point -- under thrust but the stardrive throttled back; it's safe enough to work in the drive room until we prepare to go transluminal. Off we went, in the doofy electric car I've mentioned in the past, and a mere 45 minutes later, we were undogging the hatch to the Drive Room. The little (about big-fridge size) RF driver for this octet of ion engines is tucked in an out-of-the-way corner next to the triple phantasmatrons of the stardrive, one of the louder compartments but not terribly hard to get at. We'd talked through the process on the way up, so I rang down to Ops/Drive Control, told 'em what alarms to ignore, and we set to.
It went quickly; I started the test gear warming up (solid state but thermal drift is a still a PITA for the first half-hour) and we had the cavity out and the new one mostly in before we hit the first hitch: the thing hangs from a vertical panel on four 1/4-20 studs, the business ends of bolts about as big around as a pencil, and the threads on one of them were mashed. What screws down onto it is an aluminum spacer with internal threads -- except it wouldn't. I spent ten minute trying workarounds; installed, this stud is in a spot you can't actually see without removing the entire assembly and starting over and it seemed most likely the soft aluminum was what was out of whack. No such luck, couldn't start a steel nut on it either, no room to run a die down it.... They're way oversized for the app; after weighing the time against the possible negative outcomes, we just left the thing off. The spacer is one of two holding a little mind-your-fingers cover over the incoming 3800 Volt supply; one spacer can do the job alone, since the cover backs up to a forced-air cooling connection and can't be twisted to expose the hot stuff, not to mention the whole thing is buried inside the locked cabinet of the RF supply.
That settled, we finished up the installation (fighting the teeny-tiny hardware that hold the grid /screen supply connector, what were they thinking?), I popped the tube into its socket (that round gizmo pointing at you in the photo above; you're looking down at what is the top of it when installed) , fought the dozen Dzus fasteners that hold the cover into lock, and set it to warming up. Yay, nothing shorted out on start-up and after ten minutes, we applied high voltage, set the idling current, flipped the switch to put RF through it, and it came right up. Took very little tuning and tweaking and sha-zam, it was right as rain. Could it be Big Tom is good luck?
This never happens. Except that once.
...And for my next magic trick, after several days of routine splice this, reboot that, add n through x to the second assistant drive tech's display, yadda-yadda, things did not go nearly so well.
I have mentioned (have I not?) that the RF supplies for the octets of ion-drive maneuvering rockets are a mix of solid-state and tube, whatever the starship company comes up with, generally trending towards the no-adjustments-needed solid-state stuff over time. "No adjustments needed." Ha! Control of the newer versions is stupefyingly complex compared to the older tube-type finals. There's a fancy little box to do that. The amplifier itself, oh yeah, that's just a honkin' big brick with gain, hasn't got Knob One. But the controller? Spare me! Menu-driven, minimal controls, maximal settability. (Hear the foreshadowing ticking?)
We'd had one go dead out at starboard/forward, a section of the ship where hardly anyone goes, a long nasty walk to a locked hatch with a big reminder: PRESSURE SUITS MUST BE WORN BEYOND THIS POINT. It's dusty, too, which is another reason for the suit. (Built in the late 50s, they're very nearly sure the asbestos abatement was successful. But just in case...?) And it's about five feet between deck and overhead out here, since it's near the edge of the field interface under full stardrive. There's plenty of safety margin, they tell me.
One of the control units had been getting flaky and shortly after we skipped out of rational space, it just plain died. Nothing coming back on telemetry. Nowhere near the stardrive room, so no reason not to get a preset spare from Stores & Cargo and put it in. Since I'd had just great success with the last ion driveproblem opportunity, it fell to me. Oh, yay me.
Still, no big deal, just the aforementioned nice walk, checking in with Security along the way since they do like to know why we are waking them up by making motion alarms go off. Got out to what amounts to a star traveling basement or attic, had the replacement in no time flat, powered it up and -- de nada. Nil. Nuttin' "Pre-set?" Did I say "pre-set?" Every blamed setting in the thing had either never been entered -- check the tag, "refurbished," it says -- nope, they'd all been lost last time it went in for repair. So I spent the next four hours on the horn to my peers in the shop and to Drive Control until, finally, every last fiddlin' parameter was right and it popped right up, "lock" light on, working just as it should in every detail and, I swear, snickering somewhere deep inside itself.
--Also? I don't care how advanced they get, all pressure suits, space suits, whatever they call them, they all chafe and reek after a couple of hours. It had sure better build character.
The observant reader will have noted I still have not accounted for the "0900" written on my left hand. That's 'cos the associated project has been put off. But stick around; it's coming up soon!
Checked in with the Chief -- him in a slightly better humor this ayem, for a wonder -- and he allowed as how Big Tom was available to lend a hand. This is good (you just about can't swap out the awkward cavity single handed) and bad (we kid Tom with friendly, caring, slanderous questions like, "Were that puppy's legs attached when it was handed to you?" and "Broke an anvil again?" It's not quite true). But there's not all that much to break on this job. Mostly.
We were still outbound at that point -- under thrust but the stardrive throttled back; it's safe enough to work in the drive room until we prepare to go transluminal. Off we went, in the doofy electric car I've mentioned in the past, and a mere 45 minutes later, we were undogging the hatch to the Drive Room. The little (about big-fridge size) RF driver for this octet of ion engines is tucked in an out-of-the-way corner next to the triple phantasmatrons of the stardrive, one of the louder compartments but not terribly hard to get at. We'd talked through the process on the way up, so I rang down to Ops/Drive Control, told 'em what alarms to ignore, and we set to.
It went quickly; I started the test gear warming up (solid state but thermal drift is a still a PITA for the first half-hour) and we had the cavity out and the new one mostly in before we hit the first hitch: the thing hangs from a vertical panel on four 1/4-20 studs, the business ends of bolts about as big around as a pencil, and the threads on one of them were mashed. What screws down onto it is an aluminum spacer with internal threads -- except it wouldn't. I spent ten minute trying workarounds; installed, this stud is in a spot you can't actually see without removing the entire assembly and starting over and it seemed most likely the soft aluminum was what was out of whack. No such luck, couldn't start a steel nut on it either, no room to run a die down it.... They're way oversized for the app; after weighing the time against the possible negative outcomes, we just left the thing off. The spacer is one of two holding a little mind-your-fingers cover over the incoming 3800 Volt supply; one spacer can do the job alone, since the cover backs up to a forced-air cooling connection and can't be twisted to expose the hot stuff, not to mention the whole thing is buried inside the locked cabinet of the RF supply.That settled, we finished up the installation (fighting the teeny-tiny hardware that hold the grid /screen supply connector, what were they thinking?), I popped the tube into its socket (that round gizmo pointing at you in the photo above; you're looking down at what is the top of it when installed) , fought the dozen Dzus fasteners that hold the cover into lock, and set it to warming up. Yay, nothing shorted out on start-up and after ten minutes, we applied high voltage, set the idling current, flipped the switch to put RF through it, and it came right up. Took very little tuning and tweaking and sha-zam, it was right as rain. Could it be Big Tom is good luck?
This never happens. Except that once.
...And for my next magic trick, after several days of routine splice this, reboot that, add n through x to the second assistant drive tech's display, yadda-yadda, things did not go nearly so well.
I have mentioned (have I not?) that the RF supplies for the octets of ion-drive maneuvering rockets are a mix of solid-state and tube, whatever the starship company comes up with, generally trending towards the no-adjustments-needed solid-state stuff over time. "No adjustments needed." Ha! Control of the newer versions is stupefyingly complex compared to the older tube-type finals. There's a fancy little box to do that. The amplifier itself, oh yeah, that's just a honkin' big brick with gain, hasn't got Knob One. But the controller? Spare me! Menu-driven, minimal controls, maximal settability. (Hear the foreshadowing ticking?)
We'd had one go dead out at starboard/forward, a section of the ship where hardly anyone goes, a long nasty walk to a locked hatch with a big reminder: PRESSURE SUITS MUST BE WORN BEYOND THIS POINT. It's dusty, too, which is another reason for the suit. (Built in the late 50s, they're very nearly sure the asbestos abatement was successful. But just in case...?) And it's about five feet between deck and overhead out here, since it's near the edge of the field interface under full stardrive. There's plenty of safety margin, they tell me.
One of the control units had been getting flaky and shortly after we skipped out of rational space, it just plain died. Nothing coming back on telemetry. Nowhere near the stardrive room, so no reason not to get a preset spare from Stores & Cargo and put it in. Since I'd had just great success with the last ion drive
Still, no big deal, just the aforementioned nice walk, checking in with Security along the way since they do like to know why we are waking them up by making motion alarms go off. Got out to what amounts to a star traveling basement or attic, had the replacement in no time flat, powered it up and -- de nada. Nil. Nuttin' "Pre-set?" Did I say "pre-set?" Every blamed setting in the thing had either never been entered -- check the tag, "refurbished," it says -- nope, they'd all been lost last time it went in for repair. So I spent the next four hours on the horn to my peers in the shop and to Drive Control until, finally, every last fiddlin' parameter was right and it popped right up, "lock" light on, working just as it should in every detail and, I swear, snickering somewhere deep inside itself.
--Also? I don't care how advanced they get, all pressure suits, space suits, whatever they call them, they all chafe and reek after a couple of hours. It had sure better build character.
The observant reader will have noted I still have not accounted for the "0900" written on my left hand. That's 'cos the associated project has been put off. But stick around; it's coming up soon!
18 December 2008
On A Starship, Success Is Its Own Punishment
Bet it's that way where you work, too.
We were in the outbound runup from Vineways. I strolled into the Engineering Shop at something near the usual time, for a wonder. Said, "Howdy," to the First Watch gang -- Jonny Zed and C. Jay -- and the "earlybirds" on Second Watch, who come in three hours early to maintain continuity (all the "mission-critical" positions are covered that way, a tricky juggling act for the Chief to schedule but he's always got at least one fresh techie in Maintenance and Operators in Drive Control and the Power Room who aren't completely focused on dinner and a warm bunk. At least that's the theory). As soon as I could grab a phone, I called up Stores & Cargo to check on my order: "RX? Yeah, we'll have your tube and...cavity? We'll have 'em at Engineering by this time tomorrow."
I thanked them and hung up as the Chief emerged from his Inner Sanctum (a private office about the size of a shoebox. But it's got a hatch an' everything, which is nothin' to sneeze at), fixed me with the beady eye and asked after the squirt-booster drive that got added to my task list the other day.
"I've found the problem but ran outta hours before I could fix it last night, chasing the bad ion engine. --Parts for that 'll be here tomorrow."
"Fine. Go fix that drive, then. Today."
Ooops. A good day for the soft answer that turneth away wrath, I do believe; made same and a hasty, quiet exit.
* * *
There is this about the maintenance bay for squirt-boosters: There's no one to bug you. Or lend a hand, but there are plenty of tools and supplies. It's a bad day when these critters don't work. Not a fatal one, usually -- minimum complement for any trip up or down is two and, yes, one alone will do the job. We're not paranoid, it's just that we don't get paid if the freight goes splat. Downside, there's precious little concession made for maintenance access.
A standard squirt-booster is a cubist's version of a lemon wedge, twenty feet long, eight and a half feet high and four feet wide. For passengers, there are fatter versions, usually a pair of wedges sandwiching a tarted-up freight box full of fancy seats. In each wedge, there's a very simplified stardrive engine in it along with some very basic reaction-drive for fine maneuvering and it seats six -- or four big guys, or eight people who really, really want to get from Point A to Point B. Especially if they like roller coasters. The Conestoga wagon settled the American West, but these beauties are what's still settling NATO-allied planets. Even the Russians fly a copy; Edgers take a whole different approach, cribbed from the guys who beat everyone else to the moon. In many ways, it's more flexible but it's got side-effects.
How does a squirt-booster work? It very nearly doesn't. You strap 'em to a collection of standard freight containers (ours are a little different, mostly a matter of mods to the basic 8 by 8.5 by 20-foot box) and for planet-to-orbit, blip the drive. That small a mass, that close to a planet, there's not much control, but you can match a hovering starship in a single bound or hit orbit with a couple of quick zots and use the drive's vector-shifting tricks for gross maneuvering. --Very gross for the passengers, if any, since you go from rightside up to sideways to whatever; but it does the job. Trips down are nastier; a typical four-by-four drop is four containers, four squirt-boosters tucked in the corners, a wad of crash balloons, some ribbon parachutes just in case and a big ol' ball of foamed ablative. Blip the drive to deorbit, fall and flame, flutter the 'chutes, then jink and jitter around with the drive to get over your landing zone; kill the remaining velocity with the reaction drive and bounce down on the crash balloons. Needless to say, the LZ is nothing more than a large, wide-open field. Very large. It's complex but cheap and modularly scalable. As far as I'm concerned, the pilots who run 'em are either gods or insane. Probably both.
The unit in question, however, has developed a nasty tendency to do nothing at all about half the time when it's supposed to go blip. There's always another unit backing it up, but it adds an unpredictable lurch to the motion; the system's automated but nothing's fast enough to do a complete correction when it fails over. This annoys the pilots, plus there's a small but non-zero chance of lurching into the ground it fit happens at the wrong time they don't like, either.
Yesterday I ran it down to intermittent RF from, yes, another verdammt drive modulator -- simple as a hammer and not itself the cause. RF signal leaves it fine, occasionally does not get to the power amplifier; there is one piece of coax about twelve feet long between them and all I had to do was check it. Every inch. Which I did last night and found a suspicious flat spot.
Today, once I get the suspect section free of the clamps and two layers of spiral-wrap, it's obvious there's more than a flat spot; there's a tiny rectangle punched in the cable, too! Right through to the inner conductor. Maybe a tool slipped when the thing was assembled, maybe someone got clumsy while fixing some other broken bit, but I'll have to cut the line, install a connector, and add a new piece in place of the bad one. Fussy work but straightforward. (Translation: I loathe the connectors and coax used for this application; you can count on ruining one and having to start over at least once, every time).
A mere three hours (and one dropped and lost forever SMA "barrel" coupling -- at least it fell out of the squirt-booster) later, it's working reliably in test mode; I untangle myself from the cramped innards, gather up tools and use the terminal to log it back in service before putting the cover plates back on. Yay, hooray, another problem solved. It had sure made for an interesting ride down a few days ago!
The neck you save may be your own. It does add a touch of personal interest to the work.
Which reminds me, I found part of one of the old RCA ion engines stuffed in a storage locker while fixing the booster. We haven't used them in years!
There's a plastic cover over the more-delicate bits, so it's a plain-looking item. Probably someone rebuilt it, years back and it has never been needed. It's definitely been in use -- see the typical erosion of the flange in the 8 o'clock area, which is next to the compensating electrode in a complete unit. The last octet of RCAs was replaced in '95, about ten years too late according to the old-timers.
We were in the outbound runup from Vineways. I strolled into the Engineering Shop at something near the usual time, for a wonder. Said, "Howdy," to the First Watch gang -- Jonny Zed and C. Jay -- and the "earlybirds" on Second Watch, who come in three hours early to maintain continuity (all the "mission-critical" positions are covered that way, a tricky juggling act for the Chief to schedule but he's always got at least one fresh techie in Maintenance and Operators in Drive Control and the Power Room who aren't completely focused on dinner and a warm bunk. At least that's the theory). As soon as I could grab a phone, I called up Stores & Cargo to check on my order: "RX? Yeah, we'll have your tube and...cavity? We'll have 'em at Engineering by this time tomorrow."
I thanked them and hung up as the Chief emerged from his Inner Sanctum (a private office about the size of a shoebox. But it's got a hatch an' everything, which is nothin' to sneeze at), fixed me with the beady eye and asked after the squirt-booster drive that got added to my task list the other day.
"I've found the problem but ran outta hours before I could fix it last night, chasing the bad ion engine. --Parts for that 'll be here tomorrow."
"Fine. Go fix that drive, then. Today."
Ooops. A good day for the soft answer that turneth away wrath, I do believe; made same and a hasty, quiet exit.
There is this about the maintenance bay for squirt-boosters: There's no one to bug you. Or lend a hand, but there are plenty of tools and supplies. It's a bad day when these critters don't work. Not a fatal one, usually -- minimum complement for any trip up or down is two and, yes, one alone will do the job. We're not paranoid, it's just that we don't get paid if the freight goes splat. Downside, there's precious little concession made for maintenance access.
A standard squirt-booster is a cubist's version of a lemon wedge, twenty feet long, eight and a half feet high and four feet wide. For passengers, there are fatter versions, usually a pair of wedges sandwiching a tarted-up freight box full of fancy seats. In each wedge, there's a very simplified stardrive engine in it along with some very basic reaction-drive for fine maneuvering and it seats six -- or four big guys, or eight people who really, really want to get from Point A to Point B. Especially if they like roller coasters. The Conestoga wagon settled the American West, but these beauties are what's still settling NATO-allied planets. Even the Russians fly a copy; Edgers take a whole different approach, cribbed from the guys who beat everyone else to the moon. In many ways, it's more flexible but it's got side-effects.
How does a squirt-booster work? It very nearly doesn't. You strap 'em to a collection of standard freight containers (ours are a little different, mostly a matter of mods to the basic 8 by 8.5 by 20-foot box) and for planet-to-orbit, blip the drive. That small a mass, that close to a planet, there's not much control, but you can match a hovering starship in a single bound or hit orbit with a couple of quick zots and use the drive's vector-shifting tricks for gross maneuvering. --Very gross for the passengers, if any, since you go from rightside up to sideways to whatever; but it does the job. Trips down are nastier; a typical four-by-four drop is four containers, four squirt-boosters tucked in the corners, a wad of crash balloons, some ribbon parachutes just in case and a big ol' ball of foamed ablative. Blip the drive to deorbit, fall and flame, flutter the 'chutes, then jink and jitter around with the drive to get over your landing zone; kill the remaining velocity with the reaction drive and bounce down on the crash balloons. Needless to say, the LZ is nothing more than a large, wide-open field. Very large. It's complex but cheap and modularly scalable. As far as I'm concerned, the pilots who run 'em are either gods or insane. Probably both.
The unit in question, however, has developed a nasty tendency to do nothing at all about half the time when it's supposed to go blip. There's always another unit backing it up, but it adds an unpredictable lurch to the motion; the system's automated but nothing's fast enough to do a complete correction when it fails over. This annoys the pilots, plus there's a small but non-zero chance of lurching into the ground it fit happens at the wrong time they don't like, either.
Yesterday I ran it down to intermittent RF from, yes, another verdammt drive modulator -- simple as a hammer and not itself the cause. RF signal leaves it fine, occasionally does not get to the power amplifier; there is one piece of coax about twelve feet long between them and all I had to do was check it. Every inch. Which I did last night and found a suspicious flat spot.
Today, once I get the suspect section free of the clamps and two layers of spiral-wrap, it's obvious there's more than a flat spot; there's a tiny rectangle punched in the cable, too! Right through to the inner conductor. Maybe a tool slipped when the thing was assembled, maybe someone got clumsy while fixing some other broken bit, but I'll have to cut the line, install a connector, and add a new piece in place of the bad one. Fussy work but straightforward. (Translation: I loathe the connectors and coax used for this application; you can count on ruining one and having to start over at least once, every time).
A mere three hours (and one dropped and lost forever SMA "barrel" coupling -- at least it fell out of the squirt-booster) later, it's working reliably in test mode; I untangle myself from the cramped innards, gather up tools and use the terminal to log it back in service before putting the cover plates back on. Yay, hooray, another problem solved. It had sure made for an interesting ride down a few days ago!
The neck you save may be your own. It does add a touch of personal interest to the work.
Which reminds me, I found part of one of the old RCA ion engines stuffed in a storage locker while fixing the booster. We haven't used them in years!
There's a plastic cover over the more-delicate bits, so it's a plain-looking item. Probably someone rebuilt it, years back and it has never been needed. It's definitely been in use -- see the typical erosion of the flange in the 8 o'clock area, which is next to the compensating electrode in a complete unit. The last octet of RCAs was replaced in '95, about ten years too late according to the old-timers.
25 November 2008
Starship Maintenance
"Co-workers are people who know all your faults -- and would dislike you even more if you didn't have them."
_______________________
Spent the better part of the day removing wires that went from Ending Unconnected to Noplace Useful and/or vice versa, and when I say "wires" I mean "instrumentation and signal cable" -- UTP, STP, coaxial cable, multiconductor cables and so on. To the tune of about three 55-gallon drums full.
It didn't start out that way. We're relocating a slew[1] of servo and instrumentation amplifiers to improve performance and maintenance access and in the course of this, discovered some of our peers had decided the best way to "remove" unneeded cabling was to clip the ends and tuck it under the computer-type flooring. (Removable 2' x 2' deck plates with about 18" of wiring depth under 'em). This is not actually such a great idea for two reasons: A) There is only that foot-and-a-half of room and B) Service Life Weight Gain, which is not your Uncle Ted retiring from the Navy two hundred pounds heavier then when he enlisted but what happens to ships, airplanes and starships when some people leave the nonfunctional bits in place. We got two amplifiers moved and found ourselves out of room, snared like hapless insects in a spider's web.
Rather than kvetch or give up, it occurred to C. Jay and myself that this was A Wonderful Opportunity! We lifted up and stacked the deckplates with joyous abandon and told Navs we'd have some mass overboard by the end of the first watch, numbers to follow and did they have a preferred vector to guide our selection of hatches to haul it to for disposal? (Drive Control is right around the corner and told us it wasn't going to make any difference but The Forms Must Be Observed -- and filled out, or it's a bad time when the Chief finds out).
Navigation didn't care, just wanted to know the mass of the mess. We wanted to know it too: wanted to know it was gone! With a bitta red tape to mark the dead 'uns and our very own personal diagonal cutters, we set to with a will; my peer broke for lunch and I filled about half a barrel while he ate, then went off to the little automated "breakroom" mess near Engineering myself, where a committee of upper-decks types were in the process of getting a head start on the holidays by setting up a small Christmas tree. I am what I am: took a couple'a minutes to check that all the pretty bits were properly secured, then asked where they proposed to mount it: "If you leave it on that table, the Second Watch gang will have eaten most of it by dinnertime."[2]
"Oh, we'll put it here by the door -- just have to move that waste can... Ummm."
"It's a hatch, not a door.[3] Can's bolted down, see the flanges? It'll move, there's inserts all over the deck, just get it fastened back down[4] and don't block any accesses or the vending machines." (Yeah, vending machines: the Starship Company is only too happy to provide candy and cupcakes...at twice the dirtside price: they didn't just float here by magic!)
Lunch over (pastrami and Swiss cheese on whole wheat, it is so worth fixin' personal electronics for the cooks), I went back to discover even more floor opened up and one drum filled and closed with nothing but dead wires -- and even more on the floor. C. Jay was laughing:
"Half of these are for the Pine Hills Three Thousand drive controller -- we took that thing out out in 1995!"
"'95?"
"Nothing else aboard uses these connectors!" (Holding up a mutant D-series plug).
"Geesh," digging into the tangle and yanking on a likely wire, "Is this that same cable?"
"Yeah, just a sec...." snip "Connector's off now, haul away!"
...And so passed the rest of the afternoon (with a short break to fire up a new comms circuit back to the home port, yet another "improvement" in ansible design, one that cuts the round-trip time for the signals down to mere 15 minutes and hardly ever breaks up, yeah sure), until the Second Watch early birds showed up, made a try at gawking and found themselves put to work on the project, too. Eventually, we worked the cables that were still connected at one end back to either the high-precision reference distribution -- 'cos, you know, it's fine if the primary frequency standard for the stardrive crashes because some tekkie was too lazy to remove a dead wire and it got shorted and we have to get out and push -- or the external imaging -- like we care to see where we're going? We left the next watch to get the rest of the deck plates back down, loaded our drums onto powered two-wheelers, and sent the drums and the miles of wire in 'em off on the first steps of their trip overboard, to vaporization at the drive field interface. Good riddance!
...In hindsight, we could have just left 'em in the breakroom with a sign warning not to eat the wires; they'd've been gone by our next watch. I'm just about certain of it.
Naturally, the Chief cast a fishy eye at the proceedings.
"You didn't get the amplifiers moved?"
"Boss? Have a look in here..." (Leading him to the area where we'd been working and a third of the deck was still opened up)
"Whoa. Isn't that where we had to use long bolts to pull the plates down on the cabling?"
"It used to be..."
"All right then. Continue. And get those amplifiers relocated!"
All in a day's work.
_______________________
1. This is a weak electronics in-joke. Measured in Volts per microSecond.
2. Utterly true. There is nothing the Second Watch won't eat if they find it on a table in the break room. No matter how long it has sat out or what biohazard signage is on it.
3. Hatch, deck, bulkhead, overhead, ladderway -- I know what you called similar things back in Duluth but Duluth isn't moving at transluminal speeds, okay? The first starships past the R & D stage were built from salvaged WW II Navy vessels and it's become tradition. Also? Were the doors back in Duluth airtight?
4. Sad but true: we spend time in zero-G every most every trip -- and some crew members still can't wrap their heads around the idea that things.have.to.be.secured. Lunch, for instance; but that's another peeve.
2. Utterly true. There is nothing the Second Watch won't eat if they find it on a table in the break room. No matter how long it has sat out or what biohazard signage is on it.
3. Hatch, deck, bulkhead, overhead, ladderway -- I know what you called similar things back in Duluth but Duluth isn't moving at transluminal speeds, okay? The first starships past the R & D stage were built from salvaged WW II Navy vessels and it's become tradition. Also? Were the doors back in Duluth airtight?
4. Sad but true: we spend time in zero-G every most every trip -- and some crew members still can't wrap their heads around the idea that things.have.to.be.secured. Lunch, for instance; but that's another peeve.
12 August 2008
The Stardrive: A Photo-Essay
Here's what a stardrive field "generator" (so-called in the popular press) looks like when it is (almost) ready to get to work. Coolant hoses have not yet been connected, retention rail and outer door are still off:Pretty kewl, hey? The primary cavity, wrapped around the phantasmatron, is under the big cylinder and just above the fat electromagnet.
The thing we found in it after a recent ugly failure is shown at left, not so far off actual size.
And in the next photo, the damage it caused. Gee, doesn't look like much, does it? It doesn't take much to gum up the whole works and there you are, a bajillion miles from nowhere, with a silly look on your face hoping the Captain is in a really happy mood and the Enviro gang hasn't messed up the greenhouse again.The inside of a stardrive assembly is nasty -- oxidation and fine, fine, fine dust from the high-pressure filtered air, droplets of coolant and so on; so you wear nitrile gloves. Blue nitrile gloves, with heavier gloves over them so they don't get torn up quite as quickly. And you work in pairs. Just sayin'. (I swear I never chased no research subject or like that. It's a coincidence. Honest).
I'm reaching in through the hole left in the secondary cavity (after removing the tuning dome) with a hex driver to unbolt it from the primary. Note the ample, comfortable work space: that and the easy, short hours are a couple reasons why folks are not just linin' up to work in the Somewhat-Faster-Than-Light Engine Room crew on this nation's starships -- or those of any other nation, most of which are, when compared to ours, frankly, goshawful.
09 August 2008
Bad Things In Space
This would've been bad anywhere but where I work? Worse.
Better, too -- 58 years after first launch and over fifty since the first stardrive equipped spacecraft, designers and engineers have something of a clue about designing for safety.
It started innocently enough. Most of the day watch in Engineering had spent the morning installing a new control/comms/telemetry link for the remotely-operated work drones, this part of it being pulling in new cables for RF and positioning control.
Nice clean hard work, no? --No. The finest, filthiest dust builds up even in well-sealed conduit and, if you're not lucky, condensation does, too. We were not lucky this time and to add to the fun, the combination was enlivened by the remains of decade-old wire-pulling lube. Everything people do creates dust, which settles in out of the way corners, even on a starship. Especially on a starship, no matter how good the air system filtering is. And you can't just open a conduit up to the vacuum, people notice. So, every bit of old cable we pulled out was coated in nasty slime, charcoal-gray muck that smelled worse than it looked, looked absolutely awful, and made getting a firm grip on the wires nearly impossible.
The impossible, we finish shortly after lunch. In this case, we'd put off lunch until we were done and had cleaned up, eaten and were hangin' around the shop discussing the next step when the ship gave a distinctly bad-feeling lurch, everything rattled and the intercom came to life:
"Bobbi? Dave? Jay? Steve in Control. We just lost main power to the 'Drive. Backup came up okay but I dunno what happened."
I reached over and flipped the toggle. "On it. I'll call up Power." Proceeded to do so, to be told by a bored watchstander that A) Nothing was showing tripped B) Nothing was logged as having glitched recently C) They had no crews working on that circuit (Midships Primary, TR-17; not that I would have it memorized or anything) D) Why was I wasting their time, anyway? Meantime, Jay called up the camera in the drive room. Nothing -- blank screen.
Walked back to the Chief's cramped office-ette to tell him. He looked over his monitor and frowned. "I've overheard enough already -- get to the Drive compartment." We idle the Drive most of the time; at low level, it reduces the effective realspace mass of the ship and makes the whole constant-acceleration "artificial gravity" trick a lot simpler and more efficient. Plus it's finicky to restart from stone cold. So any odd problem is A Problem, not to be shrugged off.
Off I went. Twenty minutes later I'm at the aft end of the Lupine, looking at...normal operation. Except status panel for the big transfer switch matrix is lit up red, on Portside CT-2 and the normal branch is flagged off, all three phases. Looks like no power to me, you'd thunk the Power Room would notice? Electrical is a maze of sealed compartments opening off corridors to port and starboard of the main Drive room, with the main and third backup feeds to starboard; opened that hatch to find a nice red light over the transformer access for our normal power source...and a faint hint of smoke in the air. Uh-oh.
Trotted down to the panel and it was way too hot. And bulging. Crap. It could get very dead in here--
Fire suppression, as I have mentioned before, is just about free where I work -- as free as the vacuum we have in plentiful supply. I flipped up the safety cover and slapped the big DUMP button, to be rewarded by the clack of valves opening, a short hiss as the seals reseated and a disturbing series of thumps from behind the no longer bulging panel.
Dump air, get noticed; the hardwire phone panel a few feet away lit up, beeped and our emergency center (yet another branch of E&PP) came on with, "Extinguisher activated, what's your emergency?"
A quick chat with what amounts to our version of a 911 operator later, I'd been conferenced with the Power watchstander's boss and electricians and firemen were on their way! E &PP's fire/spill/leak crew was first, looked at the situation and said SOP was (as I knew) to watch it and wait for the electricians.
Fifteen minutes later, they were on the scene; with the FSL techs, they repressurized the transformer and popped the access: a black-on-black sculpture, nothin' but soot; and that's just the low-voltage side (480 VAC, three phases, "low voltage," I laugh). Next panel in, primary side, 13700 Volts, and one of the four connections is, oh how does one put it nicely? Melted in two. There are signs of a flaming arc: pitted tracks on the metal, melted plastic bits, an annoying whistling leaking kind of sound....
It was at that point that FSL started opening their kits, chased me out and dogged the corridor hatch; one of the electricians followed and headed on out to get to the next disconnection point upstream. By the time he got back, the leak was cleared (debris in two sections of the three-section safety-first air-dump valve-- and section three, um, not actually sealing) and the other electrician was pronouncing the transformer a total loss. I called up the Chief, who said he was on his way (this is like getting Nero Wolfe out of his apartment: it happens, but darned rarely) and fielded a call from Dr. Schmid right after; once he had the story, he said he was headed aft, too. This serious and mysterious a failure gets plenty of attention! Despite which, there wasn't much for me to do but watch, so I checked out the camera that should have given us a view from the shop: dead. Power-cycled it and it came up okay. Low bidder, count on it.
More electricians had arrived already and were rearranging vehicles to clear their cargo crawler, already en route with a new transformer. That took no little time and kept me busy, too. New transformer and the Chief showed up one right after the other. While he was quizzing me on the present state of affairs, the electricians rolled out the old transformer, bagged and on a heavy-duty dolly I didn't remember seeing anyone unload (turns out it's part of the device). Their lead guy came over to us, shaking his head. "HV wiring's shot. We're going to have to pull in new from the disconnects, about two hundred meters. I've got 'em readying replacements now, should be on the way in a couple of hours."
...Two hours later, no wires. Dr. Schmid had come and gone. It was an hour past my usual end of shift. The Chief and I were sitting at the workbench, the electricians were sitting waiting on their supplies and FSL had departed, convinced no further excitement was in store for them. The Chief looked over at me. "I'm going to call in Andy from the Second Watch; he can keep an eye on this while you get some sleep and head back in on sked tomorrow."
I was disinclined to argue. I got.
Next morning, I called down to DQ when I awoke. Still on backup power! The op told me, "Andy says they're almost done. Maybe another couple of hours yet."
...Sixteen hours (and one retransfer lurch) after the initial loss of power, we were back on the normal power feed and the Power gang had departed, leaving only a series of sooty smears on the deck and a few stray handprints on the bulkheads. See? This is how we end up with nasty grime in the conduits!
Never a dull moment. E&PP has the dump valve scheduled for replacement, too. Rust never sleeps and out here, it's got a lot of little helpers.
Better, too -- 58 years after first launch and over fifty since the first stardrive equipped spacecraft, designers and engineers have something of a clue about designing for safety.
It started innocently enough. Most of the day watch in Engineering had spent the morning installing a new control/comms/telemetry link for the remotely-operated work drones, this part of it being pulling in new cables for RF and positioning control.
Nice clean hard work, no? --No. The finest, filthiest dust builds up even in well-sealed conduit and, if you're not lucky, condensation does, too. We were not lucky this time and to add to the fun, the combination was enlivened by the remains of decade-old wire-pulling lube. Everything people do creates dust, which settles in out of the way corners, even on a starship. Especially on a starship, no matter how good the air system filtering is. And you can't just open a conduit up to the vacuum, people notice. So, every bit of old cable we pulled out was coated in nasty slime, charcoal-gray muck that smelled worse than it looked, looked absolutely awful, and made getting a firm grip on the wires nearly impossible.
The impossible, we finish shortly after lunch. In this case, we'd put off lunch until we were done and had cleaned up, eaten and were hangin' around the shop discussing the next step when the ship gave a distinctly bad-feeling lurch, everything rattled and the intercom came to life:
"Bobbi? Dave? Jay? Steve in Control. We just lost main power to the 'Drive. Backup came up okay but I dunno what happened."
I reached over and flipped the toggle. "On it. I'll call up Power." Proceeded to do so, to be told by a bored watchstander that A) Nothing was showing tripped B) Nothing was logged as having glitched recently C) They had no crews working on that circuit (Midships Primary, TR-17; not that I would have it memorized or anything) D) Why was I wasting their time, anyway? Meantime, Jay called up the camera in the drive room. Nothing -- blank screen.
Walked back to the Chief's cramped office-ette to tell him. He looked over his monitor and frowned. "I've overheard enough already -- get to the Drive compartment." We idle the Drive most of the time; at low level, it reduces the effective realspace mass of the ship and makes the whole constant-acceleration "artificial gravity" trick a lot simpler and more efficient. Plus it's finicky to restart from stone cold. So any odd problem is A Problem, not to be shrugged off.
Off I went. Twenty minutes later I'm at the aft end of the Lupine, looking at...normal operation. Except status panel for the big transfer switch matrix is lit up red, on Portside CT-2 and the normal branch is flagged off, all three phases. Looks like no power to me, you'd thunk the Power Room would notice? Electrical is a maze of sealed compartments opening off corridors to port and starboard of the main Drive room, with the main and third backup feeds to starboard; opened that hatch to find a nice red light over the transformer access for our normal power source...and a faint hint of smoke in the air. Uh-oh.
Trotted down to the panel and it was way too hot. And bulging. Crap. It could get very dead in here--
Fire suppression, as I have mentioned before, is just about free where I work -- as free as the vacuum we have in plentiful supply. I flipped up the safety cover and slapped the big DUMP button, to be rewarded by the clack of valves opening, a short hiss as the seals reseated and a disturbing series of thumps from behind the no longer bulging panel.
Dump air, get noticed; the hardwire phone panel a few feet away lit up, beeped and our emergency center (yet another branch of E&PP) came on with, "Extinguisher activated, what's your emergency?"
A quick chat with what amounts to our version of a 911 operator later, I'd been conferenced with the Power watchstander's boss and electricians and firemen were on their way! E &PP's fire/spill/leak crew was first, looked at the situation and said SOP was (as I knew) to watch it and wait for the electricians.
Fifteen minutes later, they were on the scene; with the FSL techs, they repressurized the transformer and popped the access: a black-on-black sculpture, nothin' but soot; and that's just the low-voltage side (480 VAC, three phases, "low voltage," I laugh). Next panel in, primary side, 13700 Volts, and one of the four connections is, oh how does one put it nicely? Melted in two. There are signs of a flaming arc: pitted tracks on the metal, melted plastic bits, an annoying whistling leaking kind of sound....
It was at that point that FSL started opening their kits, chased me out and dogged the corridor hatch; one of the electricians followed and headed on out to get to the next disconnection point upstream. By the time he got back, the leak was cleared (debris in two sections of the three-section safety-first air-dump valve-- and section three, um, not actually sealing) and the other electrician was pronouncing the transformer a total loss. I called up the Chief, who said he was on his way (this is like getting Nero Wolfe out of his apartment: it happens, but darned rarely) and fielded a call from Dr. Schmid right after; once he had the story, he said he was headed aft, too. This serious and mysterious a failure gets plenty of attention! Despite which, there wasn't much for me to do but watch, so I checked out the camera that should have given us a view from the shop: dead. Power-cycled it and it came up okay. Low bidder, count on it.
More electricians had arrived already and were rearranging vehicles to clear their cargo crawler, already en route with a new transformer. That took no little time and kept me busy, too. New transformer and the Chief showed up one right after the other. While he was quizzing me on the present state of affairs, the electricians rolled out the old transformer, bagged and on a heavy-duty dolly I didn't remember seeing anyone unload (turns out it's part of the device). Their lead guy came over to us, shaking his head. "HV wiring's shot. We're going to have to pull in new from the disconnects, about two hundred meters. I've got 'em readying replacements now, should be on the way in a couple of hours."
...Two hours later, no wires. Dr. Schmid had come and gone. It was an hour past my usual end of shift. The Chief and I were sitting at the workbench, the electricians were sitting waiting on their supplies and FSL had departed, convinced no further excitement was in store for them. The Chief looked over at me. "I'm going to call in Andy from the Second Watch; he can keep an eye on this while you get some sleep and head back in on sked tomorrow."
I was disinclined to argue. I got.
Next morning, I called down to DQ when I awoke. Still on backup power! The op told me, "Andy says they're almost done. Maybe another couple of hours yet."
...Sixteen hours (and one retransfer lurch) after the initial loss of power, we were back on the normal power feed and the Power gang had departed, leaving only a series of sooty smears on the deck and a few stray handprints on the bulkheads. See? This is how we end up with nasty grime in the conduits!
Never a dull moment. E&PP has the dump valve scheduled for replacement, too. Rust never sleeps and out here, it's got a lot of little helpers.
02 July 2008
I Work On A Starship
Hi. My name is Roberta X, and I work on a starship.
Sure, it sounds loopy. That's what I thought, too, as a radio-minded under-21 between jobs, when the USSF -- that's United States Space Force -- recruiter called me up. Of course, he didn't tell me what I was getting into; I thought he was Air Force and the deal he offered, tech school at Uncle Sam's expense plus a "good chance of space travel" sounded too good to be true.
It was true, though. There's a Hidden Frontier out there and when I signed on, we were still officially at war. After the Treaty of 1989, the "peace dividend" (hah!) left me highly skilled, out of uniform and a long way from home. Kind of a win-win, the way things turned out.
20 years later, I'm still a long way from the old home world most of the time. I started this blog on a dare but it turns out the USSF/NATO types in charge of keeping a lid on this great big interstellar webwork don't think anyone will believe me and they're probably right.
Make up your own mind; it's just before the start of my shift and the Stardrive is overdue for some preventive maintenance. Gotta git!
Sure, it sounds loopy. That's what I thought, too, as a radio-minded under-21 between jobs, when the USSF -- that's United States Space Force -- recruiter called me up. Of course, he didn't tell me what I was getting into; I thought he was Air Force and the deal he offered, tech school at Uncle Sam's expense plus a "good chance of space travel" sounded too good to be true.
It was true, though. There's a Hidden Frontier out there and when I signed on, we were still officially at war. After the Treaty of 1989, the "peace dividend" (hah!) left me highly skilled, out of uniform and a long way from home. Kind of a win-win, the way things turned out.
20 years later, I'm still a long way from the old home world most of the time. I started this blog on a dare but it turns out the USSF/NATO types in charge of keeping a lid on this great big interstellar webwork don't think anyone will believe me and they're probably right.
Make up your own mind; it's just before the start of my shift and the Stardrive is overdue for some preventive maintenance. Gotta git!
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