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Turmoil II |
| Written by David Monroe | |
| Sunday, 30 December 2007 | |
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Share it:      A few weeks after breaking some serious ground on the research, we now have some really good working full scale models working in some of the non gravitational areas of the habitat, though some of the issues with power consumption were still slowly being resolved. We still have a lot of work to do but it’s less research, and more production, and marketing. So just like any other project the team that was involved in the research was slowly dwindling down in their numbers. I seen the end coming for weeks now, it’s just the thought of pouring my entire life into these damned worm holes left a lump in my throat I really hoped I would get something else to sink my teeth into, so I sought council with Zach. Zack was fairly eccentric, with little social skill, however with his success as a leader, and a businessman this was not the case. He was a 37 year old scientist who was one of the major shareholders in Kryokaughn though he didn’t do any actual scientific work, his duties were more administrative, but he knew enough. My one on one with him didn’t go well in respect to getting something else to work on. My direction now was to get my entire team, and focus on the VTMD array, I was not pleased. My past experience with this project was the financial end, scheduling meetings and overseeing the day to day stuff, little research, however Zach seeing the success of the other projects I’ve been on wanted me on this to see where I’d take it, so took it I did. The emitter was a large cannon looking machine with 32 electron emitters at the offensive end. It had wires and hoses all over the place and was definitely too large for any normal size space craft, but this attempt was for function, not application. We had to get something working first. As big as the array was the computer core attached to it was huge also, it was a multi layered, multiple core super computer and was about the size of the array itself. It seemed that in the previous 10 years of the project they created a program that needed some massive computing power to make the machine work; it really reminded me of something from the 20th century. The machine literally needed a couple days of preparation before any kind of testing could be done the work was very slow. When they did test, it was a very noteworthy occasion, people from all over the habitat came, some even earthside.
The machines main core is brought on-line, and the program is loaded into the volatile quantum memory. This is where the processing actually happens. Once that’s done a few molecules of a substance called Kegrizine was replicated at the focus point of the 32 emitters and held there with some confinement beams, not too much unlike the technology of the gravimetric research we worked on before. It takes 42 seconds for the computer core to generate the algorithms, afterwhich all 32 emitters’ fire at the particles. In theory the emitters with their specific natural frequency destroy the particle and generate a sub atomic tear in space. Then the emitters starting from the original focus point then widen the tear to a diameter large enough for a ship or whatever to pass through it. This mornings test would be different, we’re not just going to tear a hole, there’ll be an attempt to bring something through. We’ve employed some defense weaponry, a rail gun with accuracy down do a tenth of a micron at a half kilometer. Though we won’t be shooting that far it’s aimed at the focus point of the confinement beams. Loaded in this gun is a round of ammunition that has a trace element that we can scan and detect at a radius of a couple kilometers even if only a few particles get through. The theory is that the blip is actually a subspace hole, and we needed proof that it was there, this may get us that proof. We started early on the Saturday test, not many people were present because of the lack of press. One of the reasons because of the controversy the rail gun has as a terrorist weapon, and perhaps the small chance that we get a rail popping in and out of wormholes, we needed to be as safe as possible and we weren’t absolutely sure where it’d end up. Just like previous tests the arrays systems were brought on line, the particles were replicated at the focus point, and the computer started whacking away at the mammoth program, and after the 42 seconds the emitters show off their light show at the exact time the gun fired. It looked just like any other test. At first glance in the blast shield there were remnants of the round the rail gun fired off and it seemed that again we had our failure, but even worse we had more proof that it just didn’t work. However 20 minutes later Chad, one of the team leaders in charge of the rail gun itself screams "Holy ****" fairly loud and got the attention of most of us in the laboratory, it seemed he scanned for the trace element and sure as **** most of it was in the blast shield, but there was also some .256 Kilometers from the focus point. After further investigation it seemed that the portion of the round fired from the gun did make it into subspace, but only for about .21 Kilometers, the rest of its travel was normal trajectory into a bulkhead a few (un occupied) decks over, it’s a good thing we turned the gun towards that area before this live test. The tear must have collapsed while the rail was partially through, even though the rail didn’t make it through in its entirety the test was deemed a huge success. After almost a year of development that sprung from that series of tests we can now send larger items through, and keep the tear open longer. In fact most attributes we can manipulate now, but the most important. It seems that we have never broken the .21 kilometer distance ceiling and it’s beginning to look as if we never will. Every effort to lengthen, or shorten that distance have failed. Copyright 2007 David Monroe |
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