JFerio Wrote:I had got an idea...Quote:M Fnord wrote:Best case: incinerated and lost. Worst case: It survives, but you're never ever ever getting it back out.
I'm going to swing in here and say that dropping anything into the sun is a pretty effective way of destroying it. This also applies to handwavium structures.
A colony of Sun Surfers is based near the North Pole of Mercury, in one of the deep craters filled with water ice. These were originally ice and metal miners, who got so bored that when one of them got really stoned, and waved-up a solar 'surf board', thought it was a good idea to try it.
After a while a colony of "Sun Surfers" (sometimes called "Sun Divers") built-up, people who wanted the "hottest ride in the Solar System". While in the early days the death rate per 'dive' was 25%, this quickly dropped to 10% and within six months was down to 5%, where it stuck for a long time. Surfer Fen (some would say Dangerous Sports Fen) agree this is one of the highest adrenaline, and needing most technical accuracy, sports in Sol System.
While all really dedicated surfers wave their own 'boards' (really small, powerful, specialised space craft), there is a small tourist industry which makes 'newbie' boards, provides intensive training, and requires a large stack of disclaimers to be signed. With a 25% death rate per dive amongst newbies (called a 'sunbeam' by the cruel - as in "Jesus wants you for a ...") this is a sport that only the most dedicated take up.
The surfers keep an eye on the solar weather, looking for good times to 'dive and ride', which don't occur that often. Some of them have a hobby of watching for people dumping stuff in the Sun, but, note that the Solar System is a big place, and as they only use passive sensors, there will be a lot that they miss.
The idea was that a surfer spotted the mauler frame in orbit in the solar atmosphere. With four friends they ran a salvage operation - one of them died in this, so they consider that is enough payment that they own in. About a fifth of the frame had already evaporated (the point of the teardrop), but the remains are structurally sound.
The skeleton ends up carefully wedged (later properly anchored) in a crack in a crater wall, so it is just in occasional sunlight. In it is built the "Sunrise Hotel" (three of the four surviving surfers own shares in this), and in the lower part there is a medium-sized town ("Sunnydale"). No, this is definitely not space-worthy, and parts of the town are burrowed into the walls of the crack.
No, Brains never gets it back, or any rights to it, and it is years before he finds out what happened. There are good reasons why Brains swears by Eris and Murphy...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundiver
http://www.quantumvibe.com/strip?page=22
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"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind