Read Online Glory's People by Alfred Coppel - Free Book Online
Authors: Alfred Coppel
Tags: Science-Fiction
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astronauts.
He had been taught that the engine was powered in the environment of the Near Away by the tachyons storming out of the white hole at the galaxy’s center. Goldenwings, Ichiro knew, were powered by the same tachyons, but their capture of tachyons with skylar sails was primitive compared with the processes within the tokamak at the heart of the MD propulsion unit.
Goldenwings used tachyon pressure on square kilometers of golden skylar sails to drive their great tonnage in the same way the winds had driven the clipper ships across Earth’s vast oceans. Since tachyons exceeded lightspeed only by a small fraction, the sailing ships could never actually surpass lightspeed. The Near Away remained forever out of reach. Like all sublight matter and particles, the Goldenwings were subject to all Einsteinian time-dilation effects.
The mass-depletion engines operated with a complexity orders of magnitude greater than the Goldenwing sailplans. Tachyons were captured by the engine and stripped of inertia. The resultant power was channelled to the plasma rings that were the most obvious physical feature of MD ships. In flight the vessels were ringed with plasma that glowed like St. Elmo’s fire. The MD rings converted the tachyons’ inertia into delta-V, driving the ship into and through the analog of normal space the Yamatan builders called the Near Away.
In that “place,” analogs of distance and direction existed, but an analog of time did not. Entry and exit from the Near Away were simultaneous; direction and distance were controlled (or so the crews hoped and believed) by the amount of inertial mass depleted by each jump. The results were stunning. A voyage that would take a nuclear rocket-powered spacecraft years to complete would take a Goldenwing months of shiptime (and decades of “nondilated” downtime). But an MD-powered spacecraft, destroying its own inertia as it went, took no time.
To the visionaries on Yamato, the new technology offered instantaneous travel throughout the galaxy--and even extragalactic voyages seemed within reach. The dreams were unlimited.
The first problem to arise for the MD engineers was the endurance of the engines. A voyage of three hundred light-days totally depleted the largest tokamak’s inertial mass-destroying capability, leaving the spacecraft stranded months, or even years, from planetfall in ordinary space.
From Tau Ceti, to the nearest star, Epsilon Eridani, was a mere 5.4 light-years--a voyage of months in a Goldenwing, but quite unreachable through the Near Away because an MD ship would burst helplessly out of the Near Away a light-year and a third from its launch point, tokamak drained of power, marooned between the stars. The Near Away eliminated time, but in normal space distance remained, real and demanding.
There were “to-come” MD ships in the design computers, ships capable of carrying two or even more of the massive MD engines to be used serially. But an MD tokamak functioning in the vicinity of another destroyed the passive engine’s ability to generate the necessary plasmas. Unless shielded with impossibly dense barriers, an MD engine, when carried within the inertialess field created by another MD engine, swiftly became useless.
The problems would be solved, all Yamato’s space engineers agreed with that. What no one could be sure about was when.
For the moment, in order not to exceed the Point of No Return, Yamato’s Near Away craft were limited to a journey through the Near Away of less than 300,000,000 kilometers. Enough to reach the orbit of ringed Toshie, Amaterasu’s inner gas giant, but no more. Higashi Ichiro and his experimental ship floated in normal space at the end of Planet Yamato’s reach.
Whatever the unsolved technical problems, Ichiro thought, Yamatan physicists’ and engineers’ genius had brought them across the system faster than light could make the journey.
Shorter flights were routinely made now, but this great
He had been taught that the engine was powered in the environment of the Near Away by the tachyons storming out of the white hole at the galaxy’s center. Goldenwings, Ichiro knew, were powered by the same tachyons, but their capture of tachyons with skylar sails was primitive compared with the processes within the tokamak at the heart of the MD propulsion unit.
Goldenwings used tachyon pressure on square kilometers of golden skylar sails to drive their great tonnage in the same way the winds had driven the clipper ships across Earth’s vast oceans. Since tachyons exceeded lightspeed only by a small fraction, the sailing ships could never actually surpass lightspeed. The Near Away remained forever out of reach. Like all sublight matter and particles, the Goldenwings were subject to all Einsteinian time-dilation effects.
The mass-depletion engines operated with a complexity orders of magnitude greater than the Goldenwing sailplans. Tachyons were captured by the engine and stripped of inertia. The resultant power was channelled to the plasma rings that were the most obvious physical feature of MD ships. In flight the vessels were ringed with plasma that glowed like St. Elmo’s fire. The MD rings converted the tachyons’ inertia into delta-V, driving the ship into and through the analog of normal space the Yamatan builders called the Near Away.
In that “place,” analogs of distance and direction existed, but an analog of time did not. Entry and exit from the Near Away were simultaneous; direction and distance were controlled (or so the crews hoped and believed) by the amount of inertial mass depleted by each jump. The results were stunning. A voyage that would take a nuclear rocket-powered spacecraft years to complete would take a Goldenwing months of shiptime (and decades of “nondilated” downtime). But an MD-powered spacecraft, destroying its own inertia as it went, took no time.
To the visionaries on Yamato, the new technology offered instantaneous travel throughout the galaxy--and even extragalactic voyages seemed within reach. The dreams were unlimited.
The first problem to arise for the MD engineers was the endurance of the engines. A voyage of three hundred light-days totally depleted the largest tokamak’s inertial mass-destroying capability, leaving the spacecraft stranded months, or even years, from planetfall in ordinary space.
From Tau Ceti, to the nearest star, Epsilon Eridani, was a mere 5.4 light-years--a voyage of months in a Goldenwing, but quite unreachable through the Near Away because an MD ship would burst helplessly out of the Near Away a light-year and a third from its launch point, tokamak drained of power, marooned between the stars. The Near Away eliminated time, but in normal space distance remained, real and demanding.
There were “to-come” MD ships in the design computers, ships capable of carrying two or even more of the massive MD engines to be used serially. But an MD tokamak functioning in the vicinity of another destroyed the passive engine’s ability to generate the necessary plasmas. Unless shielded with impossibly dense barriers, an MD engine, when carried within the inertialess field created by another MD engine, swiftly became useless.
The problems would be solved, all Yamato’s space engineers agreed with that. What no one could be sure about was when.
For the moment, in order not to exceed the Point of No Return, Yamato’s Near Away craft were limited to a journey through the Near Away of less than 300,000,000 kilometers. Enough to reach the orbit of ringed Toshie, Amaterasu’s inner gas giant, but no more. Higashi Ichiro and his experimental ship floated in normal space at the end of Planet Yamato’s reach.
Whatever the unsolved technical problems, Ichiro thought, Yamatan physicists’ and engineers’ genius had brought them across the system faster than light could make the journey.
Shorter flights were routinely made now, but this great
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