The Dead Ship

Ever have a dream where you're walking through some place and everyone is dead?

Neither have I, but there is a scene of just such a think in my fourth Chapter.  The Yascurra, a small shuttle carrier, is close to a nuclear weapon that detonates.  The radiation is brutal, killing much of the crew where they stand, the rest suffer terrible radiation sickness before death....

Are there any survivors?  You'll have to read my book to find out.  Here is the first part of the chapter.

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          Seto informed the captains of the fleet the jump neared termination. “All fleet ships, acknowledge receipt.”

“Schein, jump termination in less than ten.”

“Hinden copies.”

“Palino copies.”

“EF2358 acknowledges receipt.”

“Amalli, drop before ten.”

Seto waited a moment. “Yascurra, acknowledge drop to realspace.”

Silence.

“Yascurra, Stennis, over.”

“Hinden is standing by with two shuttles if you need boarding parties for the Yascurra, Stennis.”

“Captain Dayson has a shuttle ready to go here, Hinden, but I’ll pass along your offer to the Captain.” Seto looked questioningly at Sarah.

Sarah “Have them stand by, Lieutenant. We will send our men in first, then get help if it’s needed. We don’t know the conditions over there.”

“Hinden, Stennis. Have your shuttle standing by, but first boarding will be one shuttle only, from the Stennis.”

“Hinden acknowledges. Marines standing by.”

Seto turned to Sarah in frustration. “The fleet is ready for drop to realspace, Captain, except, of course, the Yascurra.”

“It’s OK, Lieutenant, you’ve done what you can. Check to make sure you’re secure in your station.”

 “It’s frustrating.”

“For us all, Hanali.”

“Maybe the nuke destroyed their communication equipment.” 

“Let’s hope, Lieutenant. But they were close to the bomb. We will do what we can. Speaking of which, Mr. Gilbert, we do have a shuttle ready to go? I want men on board that ship right away.”

“I have four marines on board our command shuttle, Captain. The pilot will dock toward the rear of the hangar deck. The marines will let us know as soon as they can.”

        "Good."

Sarah listened to Corriea fend off an incoming call from medical. The main view screen displayed the face of Commander Thea Jennis, the Chief Medical Officer of Seventh Fleet.

“…I just want you to be aware that we have much better shielding than some of the escorts. They almost certainly suffered horrible radiation exposure when the bomb detonated. Extensive burns, sickness, incapacitation... it’s even possible the Yascurra crew is dead.”

Maybe she’s just trying to prepare me. Either way, debate is pointless. It’s time for facts. “Doctor, we’ll know soon enough. Get to your acceleration couch for the drop to realspace. Quickly. That’s an order.”

Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers

I'll be at the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Conference on Sept 20-22.  I'll get to pitch my book to an agent, see if I can pick one up.  I believe that will probably be the impetus to polish On the Shores of a Dark Sea off. 

The funny thing is it's all written in my head, but getting it on paper in an orderly fashion is a huge deal.  Organizing half a million characters into something that not only makes sense, but is appealing is quite the task.  Especially for someone like me who is far more visionary than functional. ;) 

I will also get my work critiqued by a couple of editors/agents as well.  I'm not going to say I'm excited about that, because it will probably be painful.  But it will be educational.

I'm going to have the same work critiqued at both sessions, I think, just to see if they come up with the same result.

The Oasis System

In Chapter 4 Ensign Eris Dantora reports to Captain Dayson what she finds in the Oasis system as the Seventh Fleet drops out of FTL and approaches the newly discovered star.

Oasis is a K4 orange dwarf, with two inner terrestrials, two large gas giants, a thin asteroid belt, and three more smaller gas giants.  Two "snowballs" (large Kuiper belt objects) orbit farthest out.

So it looks like this:

(_)  Oasis
.    Oasis I
.    Oasis II
O    Oasis III (named Ember by the crew)
O    Oasis IV
:::::::  Asteroid Field
o    Oasis V
o    Oasis VI
o    Oasis VII
.     Oasis VIII  (dwarf planet)
.     Oasis IX  (dwarf planet)

The gas giant Ember winds up having four moons larger than Earth, as Ember itself is 11 times the mass of Jupiter.  My reasoning for this is simple.  The sun, when it ignites, blows the volatile gasses out into the outer solar system.  Since a K4 has a weaker solar wind than a G2 (like our sun), I think the first gas giant will form closer in toward the star.  Not only that, I think since the volatiles will have less outward pressure, that first gas giant will be a doozy.  The second might really be large as well.  The next planet I don't think could form because of the two massive gas giants constantly disturbing that orbit, preventing real accretion.

The next three planets are basically Uranus and Neptune types, cold, distant, made of the leftovers from III and IV.  VIII and IX are just Kuiper Belt objects, just as Pluto, Charon, Xena, Sedna, etc.

Planet IV will have a massive ring system, although that really doesn't come to play in my first book.  It might in later books. 

V, VI, and VII are really not of much interest.  I'll plan on them having moons, maybe some use will come of those at some point.  Gas giants tend to like their moons if our solar system is any example. 

So that is my thinking on the Oasis System.  Any thoughts?

What I've loosely based my FTL drive on

This article is a good one, it covers the fact that NASA is working on a theory by Mexican physicist, Miguel Alcubierre.

NYT FTL article

I believe, one way or another, the universe is ours to move into, make our home, and expand what it means to be human, sentient, and alive.

I just wish I would have been part of that galactic society.  I guess that's why I'm writing sci-fi, because my vision is bigger than my reality.

Wheels... wooden

I write a section in one chapter where one of the prime characters meets a local wagon train.  When I wrote it, the thought occurred to me that there is no metal in my society on Refuge.  The wooden wheels of a wagon, without a rim, would be hammered to splinters in short order.  So what to do?

I started researching the information, of course, and you'd be surprised exactly how little there is on that type of thing on the internet.  I was surprised.  But I did find some pictures of an old Egyptian chariot, and they didn't look like they had metal rims.  They rode those things into war at speed, so the wheels had to stand up to abuse.  But I couldn't tell from the photographs exactly how.

I came up with three solutions, one of which is improbable due to the time consuming nature of it.

1. Wrap the wheels in stone.  This would involve tedious hand shaping of small stone pieces to be attached to the wheels with pegs.  This seemed ludicrous.
2. Wrap the wheels in bricks.  Easier to shape, but bricks can be brittle and would likely shatter often on rocks or cobble.
3. Wrap the wheel in rawhide.  It absorbs impact, it could be quickly cut to fit and attached with wooden pegs.  The ends of the pegs would splay out, holding the hide in place.  Easy, quick, and cheap since animals are common.

I assumed #3 would be used.  Humans are very good at finding the quickest and easiest solutions for most things.  And innovative. For more protection for the wheel, I suppose a combination of #2 and #3 could be used.  The actual wooden wheel would have two protection layers, and the brick would be more durable if layers of thick rawhide were used. 

Is this actually in my book?  No, but I wanted to be ready for that person who said, "You can't have wheels on your moon, there isn't any metal for the rim!"

Oh, yes I can, Mr. Smartypants I haven't met yet.  Oh yes I can.