(Kokuten, I'll post basic descriptions of folks in the Characters thread as soon as I write'em up, okay? Meanwhile, only Scott and I are there to greet your character; everyone else is back at the "bridge"... in a scene I haven't written yet.)
After thanking Nina and the boys for the banner, we folded it back up and then hopped into a golf cart. (We'd gotten a dozen scrapped carts dirt-cheap a few months earlier and 'waved them all, both as practice for the eventual conversion of all our cars and trucks and to use in getting around the ship after we sealed the dome.) It was one of the ones that had come out of the 'waving something like a hovercraft, or maybe a landspeeder -- it floated a foot or so off the ground, bouncing gently but not far when the two of us climbed aboard.
It took just a couple minutes to drive the quarter-mile down Blue Horizon Boulevard (or rather, the segment of it that came with us) from "town hall" to the east garage/air lock. Suiting up for vacuum took a only little longer.
One of our number, Joe, was until launch an aerospace engineer. He'd worked for several of the big-name air/space firms, mostly doing up wiring harnesses for satellites and space probes. In the years he'd been in the business, he'd made a lot of casual contacts, and one of them had given him a line on perhaps the most useful bit of salvage we'd come across during the GC's development -- a set of three space suits, Apollo-vintage Michelin-Man outfits. They weren't real space suits -- they were a set of mockups for display that were being thrown out for the dual sins of being too old and deteriorating -- but they'd been made by the original contractor for the actual Apollo suits, and were damned close to the real thing, lacking only the working guts.
Well, if there was one thing handwavium could do, it was make working guts.
So we snapped them up. We installed our own basic air and comm gear into each one and then dropped them into a tank of 'wavium. We tossed in a (new) copy of Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel for flavor, cast a circle around the whole thing, and let them soak for a day or so while Kat intermittently sang filksongs nearby.
The results looked more like costumes from a 1950s B-movie than Apollo suits, but as far as we could tell from our testing, they were properly airtight, hellishly strong, and had an operating time measurable in days. To our surprise they automatically resized themselves to fit their wearers perfectly, from tiny Nina to Scott's somewhat oversized frame. And just as an added extra bonus, they were also incredibly easy to get into and out of -- like putting on a set of overalls.
Which is how it came to be that, only a few minutes later, Scott and I were learning just how well duct tape worked in space as we hung Nina's banner over the garage door during our first-ever excursion into hard vacuum. (Surprisingly well, as it turns out.) Below us, the two Saturns' headlights blazed out into the black from the open garage door. Hopefully our prospective visitor would notice our attempts at a beacon -- but one disadvantage of having a ship the size of the GC is that both the door and the banner were little more than specks on its huge surface. High-contrast specks, at least the garage, but specks nonetheless. Spotting our efforts to welcome him would be more luck than anything else.
Fortunately, luck was with all of us.
-- Bob
---------
Visit beautiful Boston, proud successor to Seattle as
"City Most Scared Of Its Own Shadow
After thanking Nina and the boys for the banner, we folded it back up and then hopped into a golf cart. (We'd gotten a dozen scrapped carts dirt-cheap a few months earlier and 'waved them all, both as practice for the eventual conversion of all our cars and trucks and to use in getting around the ship after we sealed the dome.) It was one of the ones that had come out of the 'waving something like a hovercraft, or maybe a landspeeder -- it floated a foot or so off the ground, bouncing gently but not far when the two of us climbed aboard.
It took just a couple minutes to drive the quarter-mile down Blue Horizon Boulevard (or rather, the segment of it that came with us) from "town hall" to the east garage/air lock. Suiting up for vacuum took a only little longer.
One of our number, Joe, was until launch an aerospace engineer. He'd worked for several of the big-name air/space firms, mostly doing up wiring harnesses for satellites and space probes. In the years he'd been in the business, he'd made a lot of casual contacts, and one of them had given him a line on perhaps the most useful bit of salvage we'd come across during the GC's development -- a set of three space suits, Apollo-vintage Michelin-Man outfits. They weren't real space suits -- they were a set of mockups for display that were being thrown out for the dual sins of being too old and deteriorating -- but they'd been made by the original contractor for the actual Apollo suits, and were damned close to the real thing, lacking only the working guts.
Well, if there was one thing handwavium could do, it was make working guts.
So we snapped them up. We installed our own basic air and comm gear into each one and then dropped them into a tank of 'wavium. We tossed in a (new) copy of Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel for flavor, cast a circle around the whole thing, and let them soak for a day or so while Kat intermittently sang filksongs nearby.
The results looked more like costumes from a 1950s B-movie than Apollo suits, but as far as we could tell from our testing, they were properly airtight, hellishly strong, and had an operating time measurable in days. To our surprise they automatically resized themselves to fit their wearers perfectly, from tiny Nina to Scott's somewhat oversized frame. And just as an added extra bonus, they were also incredibly easy to get into and out of -- like putting on a set of overalls.
Which is how it came to be that, only a few minutes later, Scott and I were learning just how well duct tape worked in space as we hung Nina's banner over the garage door during our first-ever excursion into hard vacuum. (Surprisingly well, as it turns out.) Below us, the two Saturns' headlights blazed out into the black from the open garage door. Hopefully our prospective visitor would notice our attempts at a beacon -- but one disadvantage of having a ship the size of the GC is that both the door and the banner were little more than specks on its huge surface. High-contrast specks, at least the garage, but specks nonetheless. Spotting our efforts to welcome him would be more luck than anything else.
Fortunately, luck was with all of us.
-- Bob
---------
Visit beautiful Boston, proud successor to Seattle as
"City Most Scared Of Its Own Shadow