201-Valkyrie’s View: A Year Among the Stars
July 19th 2552 – Lunar Base
Scout Pilot/travel agent/Chef Kat “S-Kat” James Reporting
Today we started work on a base station on the moon, the idea being that we’d have a place to process ore from the belt and, if it pans out, produce from Ptera without having to keep the fleet near-by.
Ptera might be the closest thing we’ve found to Earth-norm for growing plants but dodging exploding bugs does not make for easy processing. As it is the ore is more than enough to warrant a base. While Dancer took the scientists planetside, I played chicken with the exploding fireflies.
I had to make sure I avoided the belt, the fleet, and the moon and for the first time, Fipps saw the bugs in action, and instead of continuing his work he was getting readings and trying to work out exactly what was going on.
On my second pass, Fipps was with me monitoring the area and he was fascinated by the fact that the little buggers could actually explode instead of imploding in the vacuum. I also made Bio, Medical and theoretical physics happy since I gave them not one but two people who’d been through four jumps in one day— more to study seems to make them happy.
While my mind was more in tune with the Well, Fipp’s mind was on fuel and resources and the theory that the fireflies might prove a good source of fuel.
I tried to point out that it took a lot less ‘umph’ to blow a ship up than it did to propel it, but Fipps wasn’t having any part of it. “In space,” he explained. “A little umph goes a long way.”
He is getting better at physics for pilots, but I’m more interested in the fact that my MRI turned up the way we’ve come to expect and his didn’t. Then again, he wasn’t the one dropping into the well and picking our destination – he was just along for the ride.
It means that maybe we could get a ship to jump further if you had two pilots taking turns. Something to think about.
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