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f57349.jpg
Ribbon Candy
f57349
Main hull is approximately conical/cigar-shaped, bioplastic wings can be reconfigured for atmospheric maneuvering, extra tankage, heat radiators, photovoltaic power, various combinations thereof, or just collapsed and tucked away, as they currently are. Hull rotates on it's long axis for weak artificial gravity while in space, but on planets with atmosphere it's a belly-lander. Habitable portion of the ship is divided radially into four sectors: Keel, Port, Starboard, and Topdeck. Topdeck includes, from tail to nose, the hangar bay, main fabricator, secondary reactor, administrative offices, and armory, all designed to function equally well when gravity reverses direction. Port and Starboard include most of the tankage and maintenance spaces, designed to function on either of two gravity vectors roughly perpendicular. Keel holds actual living spaces, because there's just no good way to build a toilet so it keeps working when you flip it over.
Down the center is the axial tramway, linking the CIC in front with damcon central and minimal-ping reactor controls at the rear. In the context of plans for defense against a boarding action, the tramway is referred to as "the barrel," because it is where fish go when they want to flop helplessly and then be shot. Most hatches slide open and shut along the walls of the barrel, like tumblers in a lock, rather than swinging on hinges where they might obstruct traffic or serve as tactical cover. Tramway is 130 yards long, a bit narrower at the center and wider at the ends. Around each heavy rubberized shock-absorbing endplate, there are three accessways which double as fighting positions, artfully angled so each of them has a clear line of fire to virtually every point in the tramway volume, but no good way to hit anyone properly positioned at the other end. Thus, so long as both ends are secure, defenders have an open highway to reposition at will, while an invading force can only painstakingly advance room by room.
Flywheel is a repurposed slab of reactor shielding, six meters in diameter and 20cm thick. Alloy is more than 80% tungsten, remainder selected to mitigate corrosion, neutron embrittlement, and thermal stress over a 150-year operational lifetime, of which it'd only seen 30. Current spin is nowhere near a serious delamination risk - angular-momentum saturation was due to limitations of the lathe's drive motor. If that dull-edged 10^8 gram rotary sawblade tears loose, it will definitely still be in one piece wherever and whenever it comes to a complete stop. Wish I could say the same of anything else it might encounter while bouncing merrily along.
Pilot AI module has a solution available for partially braking the flywheel, transferring most of the stored energy into capstacks. However, doing so involves performing a barrel roll, which would increase lateral uncertainty, plausibly resulting in impact on what appear to be jagged volcanic rocks, rather than snow.
Tapping flywheel for power would also allow earlier shutdown of the aneutronic fusion cell. It's control circuitry is almost entirely optical - fluidics can't respond anywhere near quickly enough, while more conventional chimeric semiconductors are too vulnerable to magnetic disruption. Tradeoff is that optic fiber is structurally brittle, and tightly optimized single-purpose opticirc is troublesome to repair if, say, shattered by a violent impact.
Embedded nanobots wouldn't be able to survive the heat necessary to reconnect high-purity glass. Specialized microbots can, but they need to be able to rotate out, which means their tiny little robo-bug brains can't keep track of all the details, so there are inevitable errors, crossed wires and so on. Fusion cell is massively parallel, with millions of linear accelerators each less than 3cm long, directing individual nuclei into precisely calculated collisions with each other. If too many wires are crossed, with no higher-level intelligence available to analyze and correct those errors, cascading misalignments will brick the entire reactor on any attempted startup. Fabricator knows how to build a fusion cell from scratch, but no available AI module can confidently do diagnostics and repairs on damage at that level.
One of the surviving human crew is fully qualified for that sort of repair work. The engineer in question is currently in stasis. Revival would require eight hours, plus a highly variable period of disorientation and impaired memory, and in any case is contraindicated due to a level of radiation exposure which would otherwise be fatal within days. Complete recovery is likely still possible, but only after weeks of intensive treatment.
Security chief is also in stasis, with a punctured lung. Simple surgical fix. Could be ready for light duties inside 24 hours if somehow nothing else goes wrong.
Comms/liaison officer is in hibernation, and technically on medical leave, but may be recalled with sufficient cause. Where stasis brings the metabolism to a complete halt, hibernation only reduces it to about 10%. Revival takes about fifteen minutes for full consciousness, then another hour or two for core temperature, heart rate, and so on to normalize. No significant neurological side effects since the brain is switched to a 'natural' low-power mode, similar to very deep sleep or a coma, rather than individual neurons being locked down on a molecular level.
Medical/science officer is in a hibernation-capable acceleration couch, awake, and technically on duty as acting captain, but lacks MMI implants. Doc's hand, foot, and eye interface channels are currently occupied with customizing the couch's ergonomics. Past five minutes of audio is unintelligible apart from screaming or retching. Personnel file shows that the doc passed microgravity certification very narrowly, on the third attempt, and has no prior transatmospheric combat experience.
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