28 November 2017

Duncan Lunan continues to outline the story of the unpublished Hawke/McLane story THE ICE NEEDLE. The Japanese expedition has launched its experimental manned craft towards Umbriel , a moon of Uranus where previously an unmanned probe has located an alien artifact:

The alien artifact ” is (was) in fact an enormous ring-shaped space habitat (40 miles across), a gigantic version of the ‘Stanford Torus’ space settlement design.   John Varley had already done something similar in his novel “Titan” and sequels, but his was one huge living organism with its own complete interior ecology.

Our one did have a complete interior ecology, but wasn’t itself alive. It entered the Solar System a million or more years ago after a multi-generation interstellar voyage, and is lying broken and wrecked on Umbriel. So when the Japanese scientists are awakened. after the Needle has used its rocket motors, finally, to put itself into polar orbit around Umbriel, there it is.   NB: it has to be polar orbit, to pass over the artefact. Since Umbriel like almost all moons has a trapped rotation, you can’t do your usual trick of calling it ‘synchronous orbit’ no matter the altitude.   Anyway, the ending requires the Needle NOT to be in synchronous orbit.)

 

The    chief scientist is much older than the others, so he is the one to remain in the Needle while the younger ones go down in the lander. (This lets you bring in one or more young women for the delectation of the Daily Record.)   They’ve sent a message to Japan confirming their triumph thus far, but of course there’s been no answer. They don’t know about the disaster – this is still important. Their plan is to land and explore, then return to the Needle and go back into suspended animation until rescued. But for the sake of Japan they’ve been prepared all along for it to be a one-way trip if their plans don’t work out.

The situation is that the ring of the grounded habitat is broken to bits (dramatic images), but the hub is standing upright, and there’s an obvious point of entry through one of the snapped-off spokes. No doubt that’s where the control rooms will be. But as they make their way in along the spoke, suddenly the tunnel seals itself behind them and begins to pressurise – they’re in an airlock, and it’s working. When the inner door opens they press on along the tunnel until they see an end to it ahead, and light beyond – at which point they realise that the whole tunnel is swaying slightly underfoot as they walk along it. Next there’s a slithering sound along the outside of the tunnel; a huge eye appears at the end; and as the tentacle wrapped around the tube is whipped away, it puts the tunnel into a spin, they’re thrown off their feet and the contact with them is broken.

At this point we switch to the Hope, which is now approaching Uranus from ‘out of the ecliptic’. As it swings round the planet, avoiding the rings, it passes close to the inner moon, Miranda (Fig. 7). This is so that we can see the extraordinary surface features, including the huge cliffs (Fig. 8), which indicate that Miranda has been pulled or blown apart and re-assembled. Features like the ‘chevron’ indicate massive distorting forces at work in the past, and all over the surface we see geologically incompatible terrain jammed together – so roughly that Miranda isn’t even properly spherical, and at the site of the cliffs, the level is way out of line where two chunks of the moon have been ground together.

Arriving at Umbriel, the Hope team make contact with.the Japanese leader in the Needle and are told about the loss of contact with the landing team. Fortuna warns, however, that the entity in the habitat core is already monitoring him, and it will be safer to leave him isolated for the moment. A rescue attempt is mounted by the Task Force.   At the point where the trap in the airlock tube is sprung, McLane gets a shot off and hits the eye – allowing the team to stabilise the tube and retreat under cover of Fortuna’s powers.”

to be continued.    Skipper Prossitt

 

12 November 2017

Below is the first part of the unpublished ICE NEEDLE  Hawke/McLane  story . After the description of how the launch system might work  in last week’s post Duncan now takes up the story itself :-

“For the purposes of the story, this project was the brainchild of a group of Japanese scientists who were determined Japan should be first to one of the planets. Uranus was the next target, before the disaster, and they were prepared to make it a one-way trip because they believed there was a major discovery to be made among the moons (see below). At the time of the C-Day [ collision day - the day in the Hawke/McLane universe when part of the Moon hit the Earth - my note –Skipper Prossitt] , they were ready to launch and had already gone into suspended animation in the ship – partly to withstand the very high launch acceleration but also because the ship itself is too small to carry supplies for the trip, in towards the Sun and then out again. Since the disaster the sea level has been too low to reach the intakes, because so much water has been locked up in the temporary ice-caps; but now that the ice is receding the sea-level is rising, and it reaches the intakes and triggers the automatic systems. So the occupants are on their way, not knowing how much things have changed in the meantime: they’re lucky to get away from the Earth without hitting the ring of debris – room here for a spectacular drawing of a near miss.

Of course the launch is seen, and records of the project are uncovered, though Japan itself is only now emerging from the ice. The Faith, which is still attached to the Mercury project, is scrambled to try to intercept the Needle before it goes into the next propulsion phase, but doesn’t quite make
the rendezvous in time. The shield is blown off, the tip of the Needle is exposed to full sunlight as it swings through its closest approach to the Sun, and the Needle accelerates outward – too high an acceleration for the Faith to match. (We worked out before that one-tenth of a g is top acceleration for the starships.)   Another attempt to intercept is made from Earth as the Needle is heading away from the Sun and its acceleration begins to drop; but then the ship deploys its parabolic solar sail (fig. 4) to focus sunlight from a large collecting area on to the tip of the Needle. Because the mass
of the Needle is going down all the time, this means that it will be able to keep up a high acceleration at least until well out past the asteroid belt, giving it a very high transfer velocity to Uranus. The only chance now for the occupants, who are still in suspended animation, is for the Hope to meet them at Uranus on its way back from the 10th planet.

Notice that the Needle is getting shorter all the time, so the parabolic sail has to be able to alter its focus, and has pleated segments to take up the slack. This lets you do another spectacular sequence when the sail opens, frustrating the rescue attempt from Earth: the pattern of pleated and reflecting segments makes a Japanese flag.

One important point is that because Uranus rotates ‘on its side’, and gees round the Sun in 84 years, in 2088 the Sun will be much closer to the plane of the equator and the rings than it was during the Voyager 2 flyby in 1986, when the Sun was almost overhead at the planet’s north pole.   Having the Sun nearer to the ring plane favours the braking method we have in mind for the Ice-Needle ~ which is now down to just a stump, but with a sharp point. (That’s going to be important.)
Ed Buckley’s painting ‘Golgotha Moon’ in “New Worlds for Old” was right about the existence of rings, and right about the material being dark and chunky, but wrong about the rings being very spread out. (“Man and the Planets” p.230.)   The rings are narrow and Voyager 2 found three shepherd satellites, one 50 miles in diameter and the other two a bit smaller. Gordon and I assume that there will be more, smaller still, and the Needle’s guidance system is now looking for one just a mile or two in diameter. It’ll have to use rockets to position itself for a close pass by one such, either above or below the planet’s orbital plane as the Needle comes ‘out of the Sun’ (fig.5).

The Needle now turns itself around so that it’s flying spike-foremost. The sail is braced by super~strength cables on the back, so it doesn’t collapse.   (It needed those in the acceleration phase anyway, to keep it open and in shape.)   These are now paid out, so that the sail is trailing behind the Needle like a parachute, and it snags the dwarf satellite. Since the satellite weighs billions of tons, of course, it acts like an anchor and as the cable pays out it slows the Needle down enough to be captured into orbit around the planet.

(Gordon and I are fudging the numbers here: the Needle is travelling at something over 1000 kilometres per second and it’ll be one hell of a cable that will withstand being paid out at that rate.   I would have it paying out from a coil rather than a drum…)

At the end of the deceleration the Needle is heading for Umbriel, the dark satellite which is the middle one of the five major moons. (Why it’s so dark doesn’t really concern us except that it’s probably carbonaceous material which would be very useful for life-support.)   The reason the Japanese mission is going to Umbriel is because of the orange ring on Umbriel (Fig. 6). (Mind you, I wouldn’t place too much reliance on the colouring here because JPL describes the surface as ‘generally grey and colourless’ and in this photo it looks pink, as does the star or whatever at the bottom of the frame.)   The secret is that back before C-Day, the Japanese sent out an exploratory probe which got a close-up of it and revealed that it’s the wreck of an artefact – and back then we hadn’t contacted any ETs, so that was a big discovery and the Needle scientists were determined to claim it for Japan alone. ”
It is an intriguing and interesting twist in the story that the launch itself, with its crew in suspended animation and its ground crew and scientific support all swept away by the c-day disaster , is triggered solely by the rise in ocean level   and not by any human hand.

Skipper Prossitt

 

5 November 2017

The second unpublished ( and undrawn ) Hawke story by Duncan Lunan, centres around an interesting and theoretical propulsion system  designed to carry a spacecraft far out into the Solar system. According to Duncan the idea for the story  had a number of origins, but one that was key was  a breakthrough in Adaptive optics made by a reasearch team at Strathclyde university in the early eighties, in which a flexible parabolic mirror would instantly re-focus as it changed shape. A second strand in the development of the story  , namely the exploration of Uranus , resulted from Duncan’s  lecture tour of the U.S. in 1986. While on a visit to the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, he was presented with a set of photographs of the planet Uranus which Voyager2 had transmitted back to Earth earlier that year. As the complex propulsion system  is such an integral part of ICE NEEDLE, it might be worth explaining  how such a system would work before embarking on the story itself.

Duncan himself explains the concept  ” The launch site is a deep pit dug on the Spaceport island, with the actual ship suspended by gantries over the centre of the pit at sea level (see Fig. 1). After the pit has been filled with water, the refrigeration unit builds up a column of ice below the ship, and then the water is pumped out again.

The interior of the pit is lined with flexible mirrors like searchlights; (this would be much cheaper than a similar number of glass mirrors, and it’s known that the Japanese have put a lot of money into studying applications of the Strathclyde University patents.) These are fed by banks of‘mirrors outside the pit (Fig. 2). On1y three of the units inside the pit, equidistantly spaced round it, are active at any one time, focussing on to the tip of the Ice-Needle: violent evaporation forces the Needle upwards at high acceleration.   As the blast destroys the foil of one trio of mirrors, protective covers are removed from three more and the feed banks of mirrors outside swivel to focus on them. (NB This means the feed mirrors also have to be flexible.) The whole system has to be
computer-controlled to keep all the gathered sunlight concentrated on the tip of the Needle as it rises. Ideal launch time would be the afternoon of one of the Equinoxes, presumably the spring equinox since the story will be running during March. Time of launch would be as late as possible without losing power as the Sun gets lower; aim-off from the vertical would be towards the East (see Fig. 3). The effect of this, as the Needle passes escape velocity, is that it’s now making a retrofire with respect to the Earth’s orbital motion, and also boosting itself towards the Sun. Once the thrust phase stops, the Needle pivots so that its tip is pointed towards the Sun, and a robot puts a protective shield over the tip to stop evaporation meantime.”

continued next week. Skipper Prossitt