Alexander sat down at the table a few minutes before the meeting was set to start. With the delivery from Jasper, the defense project ing up, and the repairs on the facility well underway, he finally had time to start the project he had e out here to start in the first pce. It was time to discuss building his first engines, he just had some questions to ask Matthews and his engineers first.
It was too bad his friend Jasper and the Zephyr had left the system a few ho. He would have liked to get his opinion on some of his ideas. With his friend go would be quite some time before he saw the man again. While the parting was bittersweet for Alexander, he k was the right decision. There was no rational reason for Jasper to risk himself and his crew if he didn’t o.
The s turned on, and Alexander saw two people. One was Matthews, and he assumed the smaller woman sitting off to his side was likely his chief engineer.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Kane. As you requested, I have invited my chief engineer, Aria Sullivan to this meeting. What did you want to discuss with us today?”
“Thank you for taking the time to meet with me. As you know, my inal goal for ing out here was to start a pany that produces spacecraft engines. A pany I finally founded with the help of Captain Daniels. Blue Star Enterprises' big debut might have been deyed due to a few unforeseen factors; the missing equipment, the state of the facility, and the o build defenses. But now I’m finally ready to begin designing my first engine.”
Matthews nodded. “I am aware of most of your troubles. But how does this the Hawks? We ’t provide you with any design specifications for the Talon if that’s what you’re asking. Eve es time for you to build raded propulsion system, you would o purchase the design from STO space.”
Alexander waved away the man’s . “No, nothing like that. I was more curious about why rger ships, like Captain Na’s use pressed psma eje instead of the more on fusion pulse drives?” It had been a bit of a surprise when he saw this on the Destiny’s design schematic.
“Size straints mostly,” the chief engineer of the Talon responded.
Alexander quirked an eyebrow at that. “I would think st fuel would take up much more space than simply using up the reaass. Am I wrong?” He wasn’t quite that far in his engineering studies.
The woman shook her head. “At first gnce, perhaps. But when you factor in the tai systems required to move the psma from the fusion chamber and to the engines, you lose quite a bit of space. There are other things to sider as well. The biggest sideration is the ability to enter an atmosphere. No ship equipped with a pressed psma eje system would be allowed to enter a p's atmosphere. The temperatures are such that the exhaust pys merry hell with any bustibles near it. That includes the twenty-one pert oxygen mix of a standard atmosphere. It wouldn’t ighe emosphere or anything silly like that, but it would create a huge fireball, potentially rge enough to destroy the ship. And while pulsed fusion still uses a fusioion, the individual pulses are far cooler thaed psma.”
“…Oh… Yeah, that wouldn’t be good. Thank you for answering that question. My question has to do with reaass. Doesn’t psma eje reduce the overall reaass?”
“Of course it does,” the engineer replied. “But most ships have what's called a fifty-year core. Durior idle, the reaass would st for fifty years. This is standard across any ship capable of FTL. It also easily be topped off sihe fuel used to run the fusion pnts is retively safe. In –,” the aused to speak with Matthews while the line was muted.
The man rubbed his in thought at whatever she had said to him before finally nodding.
The audio came ba and she apologized. “Sorry about that. Had to make sure what I was about to tell you wasn’t part of our operational security. As I was about to say. In normal bat operations, that reaass would st the Talon a year. That is a year of stant maneuvering and fighting. Sitting about like we are now, we could go ten years or more depending on maneuvering needs. It’s a trade-off for sure. Refilliion mass is more expehan topping off the T20 and D2O burned by the more on pulse drive, but pressed psma eje also offers more thrust. A ship like the Talon ’t keep up with something like the Zephyr even with our more powerful engines, but it still accelerate at a pretty det speed. Since we don’t he speed as much as a smaller cargo ship might, it's not really an issue.”
“Thank you for the information. It seems I have a lot to learn still.”
The woman nodded.
“Any more questions for us, Mr. Kane?” Captain Matthews asked.
He shook his head. “Not at the moment. I think what you’ve told me so far has helped to poio where I o begin my efforts. Thank you.”
“Good Luck, Mr. Kane. Maybe you’ll even have something ready for us to see before we leave?”
Alexander chuckled at the Captain’s statement. “No pressure then,” he made his avatar smile.
The pair smiled back before the video cut off.
While it was true, that this meeting helped narrow his design efforts, Alexander had already been leaning toward the more on pulsed fusion drives because they were… more on. It seemed like a prudent choice if he wao carve out a market share from the iants. In time, he was sure he would branch out into the pressed psma eje engines, but that was still quite a ways off.
He chuckled internally as he thought of something. If the people from ba his time saw what these thrusters and the propelnts they were using were capable of, he was certain they would have passed out in shock.
It was a good thing the elements o produce this fuel were easy and abundant in most systems with gas giants. Y6X-3H2 had two suets, making gathering the elemental hydrogen and oxygen rather easy. Yup, the fuel used to propel ships at a fra of the speed of light was water or a manufactured version of it. Good old heavy water and super-heavy water.
Using an initiated fusioion to propel a ship was brilliant. It reminded him of a much more sophisticated version of the nuclear pulse propulsion cept he recalled from ba his day. He wondered if that theory was what eventually led to this design.
Pulsed psma was simir to the pressed psma eje si used the results of a fusion process as the thrust. It was why he was fused when he first saw the form of propulsion that Na’s ship used. Acc to Matthews’ chief engineer, Aria Sullivan a ship with pulsed psma could nd on a p because there was little of it igniting the surrounding air.
That meant the Zephyr could nd on a p if it wasn’t se. That meant the Destiny was defie to nd so the issue of igniting an atmosphere was sort of self-reguting. It robably a deliberate design choiow that he thought about it. Anyone dumb enough to try and take a rge ship down onto a p would blow themselves up.
He switched gears and focused on the fuel he would need. It was a good thing that the station, Na had offered him, came with the design specs for a fuel verter. Otherwise, he would have wasted quite a bit of time trying to figure that problem out.
Alexander left the unicatio and headed to his workshop. On his way, he could hear the excited ughter as the kids put the pyground to great use. He couldn’t help smiling at that.
On the workshop, he projected an exploded view of the Omni engines on the Zephyr, along with the Sinorus engines on the Destiny. Then he walked into the massive hologram and closely examined every part as he maniputed the images.
He could simply rip their entire design off and call it good. Alexander had no qualms about doing that anymore. But that was zy, and he wasn’t the sort to do things half-assed. Over the six hours, he poked at parts, tossed others away, and redesigned every single poo ehere would be no mistaking that this engine was an inal design.
What he found was a bit surprising. Some of the Sinorus pos seemed to be superior to the Omni ones. At first, he thought this was simply due to the different forms of propulsion involved. But when he looked closer at what the parts did, he realized they did the exact same job.
When he was done, he stepped bad looked at the diagram. He moved his hands back together and the parts moved until the hologram was a single unit. From the baot much had ged. The thrust es were shaped slightly differently, but you would hardly notiless you were someone like Alexahe main difference came iher pos. The exposed bits looked slightly melted or more ani nature. It would certainly require more priime, but if it worked it would be worth it.
He saved the file as version one and loaded the simution software he had purchased ba Petrov.
The simution ran a whole three seds before the hologram dispyed a red fault message.
He had to dig around to find what the fault was. It was g the bustion chamber temperatures had exceeded specifications.
“No first-try home run this time,” he mented as he tweaked the engine design and saved it as version two.
Wheenth test failed to produce a w design, he grew frustrated. He had nearly rolled back all of his ges and was almost back to the inal Omni design. Gone was any Sinorus influence his design had carried before. But still, the damn program was telling him the design wouldn’t work.
He was w if he was doing something fually wrong until he had the idea to run the inal Sinorus engine schematic through the simutiram. It gave the engine a passing grade but highlighted possible failure points. If Alexander hadn’t hose parts as superior to Omni’s during his deep dive, he wouldn’t have even sed-guessed the program.
Suspeg something , he loaded the software onto a data chip ao find Lucas.
It took some asking around, but he eventually found the man in the puter room as everyone called it. The room held the facility's servers. Much like the puter chips of this tury, Alexander had no clue how these servers eveed. That was fine, he had Lucas for that until he got around to learning himself.
Speaking of Lucas, the man was sitting cross-legged on the floor with one of the servers in his p. There were parts spread out all over the pd the man was listening to music while he soldered some pos ihe case.
Alexander waited until the man was fio get his attention. “Lucas, do you have a moment?”
The man looked over and smiled. “Oh, hey, Alex, what's up?”
The man had heard Yulia call him by that niame and decided it was easier than using his full name. Alexander wasn’t really bothered by it, he just preferred his full sounded more… regal.
He held out the chip. “I’m having an issue with this software I purchased. I was hoping you might take a look?”
The man paused in his reag, instead of taking the chip like normal, he took it like it was radioactive. “You bought this from STO space?” he grimaced, barely holding the data chip between his fingers.
“Where else would I have purchased it from?”
The man shook his head a aside the stuff he was w o up and walked over to his tablet that was bsting the music. The music suddenly shut off as the man pushed the metal disk into the device. “I wish you would have e to me before running this software. You know there is a bounty out for me, right?”
“Yes. But what does this have to do with that?”
“Probably nothing. When I lived with my brother ba Helios, I freenced as a coder.”
“You mean you were a hacker?”
The man chuckled. “No. Well, ly. panies paid me to make programs for them. Programs desigo prevent their petition from surpassing them. They were often desigo transmit any improvements these new panies ran through the testing software that I built for the inal pany. Under a separate third pany's name, mind you.”
Alexander sighed. “You did corporate espionage?”
“More or less,” the man replied casually as he typed away at the pad. “I pyed both sides though. I would always reach out to the pahat bought the software and offer to do a peio after their secrets were somehow leaked to their petitors. I would miraculously find their leak that nobody on their internal teams could, and they would pay me handsomely. This went on for five years until one of the panies merged with the inal pany I desighe software for. They realized what I had been doing and pced a bounty ohe rest is history,” he said as he pressed o button before showing Alexahe s.
“You know I’m not that advanced with code yet, just tell me what I’m looking at.”
The man rolled his eyes and poio a line in the code. “This transmits everything run through this software to a Q. It’s a good thing we don’t have oherwise your design would have goraight to the owner of this code.”
That statement made Alexander extremely upset. Even out here, it seemed he couldn’t get away from the grubby little mitts of the corporations. “You’re certain that nothing got sent out?”
“About as certain as I be. Whoever wrote this shit code hought the people using it would be outside the range of a Q, so they didn’t implement any tingencies.”
“So you didn’t create this one?”
Lucas shook his head. “here are plenty of other people like me in the core. Maybe not quite as talented,” he puffed out his chest, “but they still code something like this.”
“ you remove that code to make the program safe again?”
“Sure, but that’s not gonna make it fun.”
“What do you mean?” Alexander asked in fusion.
“The code isn’t only desigo trade all your secrets away. It’s also desigo prevent you from making somethier than the people who paid for this code to be written in the first pce."
"Omni," Alexander muttered, causing Lucas to pause and turn to him.
"You’re joking right?”
When Alexander didn’t say anything, the man sighed. “Of course it's Omni. You don’t do anything small do you, Alex? As for your question, because I already tell what you want to ask me, maybe. I might be able to make the program fun correctly for its intended purpose. It’s going to take me a few weeks to gh the code. I have to make sure I’m not screwing up any of the calcutions. Rocket sce is not my forte, so if I get something wrong, it could make this entire simution software useless.”
“Please, do what you ,” he gnced over at the disassembled server. “I’ll trade you two superputer chips for the work.”
“How I say no to that,” Lucas chuckled. “I’ll do my best a back to you as soon as possible… If you have any more software, bring it to me and I’ll look it over as well. No need for additional payment.”
Alexahahe man and walked out of the room, ahat he was once again deyed in produg a new engine design.