120-Valkyrie’s View: A Year Among the Stars
April 29th, 2552 Landing on Theoretical Impossibilities
Exploration Team /Pilot of Schroedinger’s Kat/ – Katherine ‘ConV’ James Reporting
So, my first official day of working with the Exploration Team and what am I doing? Designing better landing gear for landing on unknown surfaces.
See, this is where simulators fail. You can program the most complex set of landing variables imaginable – but the imagination is limited by our experiences, what we think is possible. There are no protocols for landing on a dust field that is so thick that you can land, but any attempt to take off is going to stir up enough dust to choke your intakes and leave you stranded.
The folks who programmed the simulators to mimic landings on surfaces with their pitch and yaw out of synch, but there is nothing for landing on a surface that is in and out of our reality. Yeah, that’s why the moon is so erratic – it’s pitching one way while it’s Y-axis is going another and the surface is completely in the realm of Schroedinger. It isn’t there, but it is there and therefore the ship is there and isn’t there.
Talk about a hull breach. Yeah, no thank you— there is no instrument for this kind of work – you have to rely on the feedback from your ship and I need to use that feedback to build a better lander.
Damn good thing I’ve done some mechanical work.
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