Journal Entry
Captain Nathan C. Jackson
Day 0
Some day this has been. For the record, which is kind of what this is, I am only doing this because it would have been sort of a mandatory expectation for my position as a member of the military. I know I would have maintained something similar to this as a member of the advance team. Plus, I have been maintaining a personal log of mine as well, so maybe I ought not to be complaining.
Asteri and Tara are still trying to find a way to find and retrieve any scraps of the data that was wiped. They have also been going at Stella's data core as well as her logs. It is still unresponsive though and her logs are also sealed. But I am not holding out hope on it, if Asteri's and Tara's logs were deleted why would Stella's remain?
Maybe I ought to explain the situation in case the reader is for some reason unaware of the happenings. Let's start at the beginning. In 2068 humanity had finished construction of 50% of the Dyson Sphere, a mega-structure to collect the energy of the Sun, super-efficiently, and broadcast it around the Solar System. At this point, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were the only planets, dwarf or not, that remained with no sizeable human presence on or around them. Research stations, mining facilities even residential structures as far out as Titan. It seemed the right time to start building another mega-structure, a stellar engine called the Caplan Thruster. What is a stellar engine?
Imagine a nuclear engine. Shouldn't be too hard, point-thrust craft have been outdated since 2026, so just think of one of your regular old space engines powered with your small-scale reactor. Got that? Great, now scale it up to the size of a planet. Yeah, you read that right, a planet. If you cannot fathom that easily, think of how you see Venus from Earth, a point of light visible to the naked eye. Yeah, an engine visible by its reflected light, 90 million kilometres away. Just as well you may never see it. It will be parked next to the Sun.
You have an engine the size of a planet, so the fuel source needs to be of a proportional size. Luckily we had something big enough, the Sun. The Caplan Thruster uses magnetic fields to pull matter off the sun much like how the solar prominences form. This is the fuel for the engine. This fuel is used in a fusion reactor, and the energy released, along with a little input from the Dyson Sphere, is used to power the engine which also throws out the end products from the fusion reaction. To prevent itself from crashing into the Sun, some of the fuel is electrically accelerated back at it. Believe it or not, this actually pushes the Sun along with the thruster.
The end result of all this? Since everything in the Solar System gravitationally tags along with the Sun, moving the Sun is enough to move the whole system. The Solar System could now be moved. The Caplan Thruster finished construction in 2187. We now had complete control of the Solar System. It was time to expand.
And thus, the Nexus Outreach Program. Using the Caplan Thruster, the Solar System would be brought as close as possible to neighbouring star systems. In doing so a starship is sent to the system. Its mission? Do the same thing we did to the Solar System, with a technological headstart. In time the Program envisioned multiple Caplan Thrusters, running around the galaxy with their own planetary systems in tow. Maybe one or two will choose to brave intergalactic space and travel to another galaxy.
And so here we are, aboard the Transcender, trying to fulfil that very mission. But something seems to have gone wrong. Only opening the cryopods after sending people back into them causes data wipes, this is so that if the starship can be used again it will have a clean slate to work with. But in causing the data wipe here and now, we have lost all reliable information on what happened before it. Asteri and Tara cannot access the deleted data, and my experiences as part of the advance team on the surface of our target planet, Beta II, are 'frozen' away after the double experience of cryotherapy.
There is only one way ahead, as far as figuring things out stands- conducting a surface operation, as a one-man crew. If the advance team did go down then some of our handiwork will still be there. It is the best place to start looking.
Some day this has been. For the record, which is kind of what this is, I am only doing this because it would have been sort of a mandatory expectation for my position as a member of the military. I know I would have maintained something similar to this as a member of the advance team. Plus, I have been maintaining a personal log of mine as well, so maybe I ought not to be complaining.
Asteri and Tara are still trying to find a way to find and retrieve any scraps of the data that was wiped. They have also been going at Stella's data core as well as her logs. It is still unresponsive though and her logs are also sealed. But I am not holding out hope on it, if Asteri's and Tara's logs were deleted why would Stella's remain?
Maybe I ought to explain the situation in case the reader is for some reason unaware of the happenings. Let's start at the beginning. In 2068 humanity had finished construction of 50% of the Dyson Sphere, a mega-structure to collect the energy of the Sun, super-efficiently, and broadcast it around the Solar System. At this point, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were the only planets, dwarf or not, that remained with no sizeable human presence on or around them. Research stations, mining facilities even residential structures as far out as Titan. It seemed the right time to start building another mega-structure, a stellar engine called the Caplan Thruster. What is a stellar engine?
Imagine a nuclear engine. Shouldn't be too hard, point-thrust craft have been outdated since 2026, so just think of one of your regular old space engines powered with your small-scale reactor. Got that? Great, now scale it up to the size of a planet. Yeah, you read that right, a planet. If you cannot fathom that easily, think of how you see Venus from Earth, a point of light visible to the naked eye. Yeah, an engine visible by its reflected light, 90 million kilometres away. Just as well you may never see it. It will be parked next to the Sun.
You have an engine the size of a planet, so the fuel source needs to be of a proportional size. Luckily we had something big enough, the Sun. The Caplan Thruster uses magnetic fields to pull matter off the sun much like how the solar prominences form. This is the fuel for the engine. This fuel is used in a fusion reactor, and the energy released, along with a little input from the Dyson Sphere, is used to power the engine which also throws out the end products from the fusion reaction. To prevent itself from crashing into the Sun, some of the fuel is electrically accelerated back at it. Believe it or not, this actually pushes the Sun along with the thruster.
The end result of all this? Since everything in the Solar System gravitationally tags along with the Sun, moving the Sun is enough to move the whole system. The Solar System could now be moved. The Caplan Thruster finished construction in 2187. We now had complete control of the Solar System. It was time to expand.
And thus, the Nexus Outreach Program. Using the Caplan Thruster, the Solar System would be brought as close as possible to neighbouring star systems. In doing so a starship is sent to the system. Its mission? Do the same thing we did to the Solar System, with a technological headstart. In time the Program envisioned multiple Caplan Thrusters, running around the galaxy with their own planetary systems in tow. Maybe one or two will choose to brave intergalactic space and travel to another galaxy.
And so here we are, aboard the Transcender, trying to fulfil that very mission. But something seems to have gone wrong. Only opening the cryopods after sending people back into them causes data wipes, this is so that if the starship can be used again it will have a clean slate to work with. But in causing the data wipe here and now, we have lost all reliable information on what happened before it. Asteri and Tara cannot access the deleted data, and my experiences as part of the advance team on the surface of our target planet, Beta II, are 'frozen' away after the double experience of cryotherapy.
There is only one way ahead, as far as figuring things out stands- conducting a surface operation, as a one-man crew. If the advance team did go down then some of our handiwork will still be there. It is the best place to start looking.
A galaxy of physics happening.
ReplyDeleteWild wild worlds.
ReplyDeleteImagined wonderfully.
ReplyDeleteCaplan Thruster, Parked next to Sun _ crazy imaginations
ReplyDeletebecomes history