Warp speed

CHAPTER 17

I checked with 'Becca and Sara on the progress of the miniature energy collection cubes or Mini ECCs. We were still two months away from the first one being produced and about three months away from the next four. The second and larger automated Clemons Dumbbell deposition systems (on a higher floor) were just now coming online and would be a couple of months behind the system put in place in our basement. After the first one was generated by the basement facility, production starts over. So, in four months there would be enough Mini ECCs to power six mini warp missiles or MWMs.

Jim and I had completed the design for the MWM's warp coils and apparently, Al had completed the design for the MWM airframes and internal hardware. Jim and I passed along notes and design information to the manufacturing guys a few floors up and they began to cut, roll, and weld metal. As soon as the mini ECCs were ready we could plug them into the missiles and integrate them into a Shuttle or an expendable launch vehicle (ELV). I started looking through Al's notes and design data for the blueprints for the mating hardware for the launch vehicle. When I realized that no hardware had been designed for integrating the MWMs into a launch vehicle, ELV or otherwise, I was a tad bit heated to say the least.

I found Al in the lab conference room doing simulations and analyses of what looked like several of the Shuttle's External Tanks stuck together along with several other older mothballed spacecraft fuselages. "Al, I thought you said you had finished the MWM hardware design?" I blurted at him. He seemed surprised by my obvious anger.

"I . . . uh . . . did." He replied reluctantly.

"Well why then—" I paused, "—have you not designed the attachment hardpoints for the MWMs to interface with a launch vehicle?"

"Why do we need them?" He looked confused.

"'Why do we need them?' he asks. Well, how do you propose we get them to orbit?"

"The same way you get them down from orbit I guess." Al looked smug.

"What the hell are you talking abou— Well, son of a bitch dog in heat." It hit me like an uppercut to the chin. "Of course we don't need a launch system. We raise them to orbit with the warp drive. Hell, I can't believe I didn't think of that. Al hold on a minute—" I ran to the door and poked my head out. "Tabitha!" I yelled. "Tabitha I need you for a second." A moment passed and Tabitha didn't show. Anne Marie bounced up instead, looking as perky and young as ever. God, was I ever that young?

"Mom heard your, uh, page. She couldn't leave what she was doing just yet. She sent me to find out what the hubbub was all about."

I looked at her and smiled. She always makes me smile. I took her by the hand and said, "Come with me." I led her back to the conference table where Al still sat. He was looking at me as though I were nuts.

"Annie, do me a favor and kiss him." Annie just shrugged her shoulders and planted a wet one right on Al's lips. "Thanks." I said.

"Uh, yeah, thanks." Al said shyly, as he turned four shades of taupe, maroon, red, and pale all at once.

"Okay," Annie said. "Now you might want to tell Al and me why you just had me give him mono." Al looked startled. "Just kidding Al."

"Well, I wanted your mother to do it, but you worked out better. Al here has just given us a rapid strike capability and no need for launch vehicles." I explained the idea of not having to use rockets to launch and that we could use the warp system for main propulsion for any application. Just because space is warped by the device doesn't mean that the thing has to travel faster than light. Heck, Tabitha and I probably didn't do that on our first warp ride. But, we did go very, very, very, very fast. The warp drive could be used for slower speeds and even just for offsetting other forces, like gravity, for levitation. The speed is proportional to the amplitude of the poles and zeroes of the Alcubierre warp. The amplitudes of the warp are also proportional to the energy required to make the poles and zeroes. The slower speed would mean less amplitude on the warp, which in turn means less energy. In fact, the ECCs running at only a couple of percent capacity could gain the amount of energy to counter the Earth's gravitational well.

The concept of designing the warp drive as the main propulsion system had immediate useful applications. Imagine using the devices as a crane or safe transportation. The road to the Moon and the planets within our solar system was now at least graveled. With a little bit of systems engineering, testing, and manufacturing, we would have the road paved. And for the immediate problem, our Secret War with China, I was beginning to roll some ideas around.

I called an all hands meeting of our crew. That meant the general, the Doctors Daniel (Jim and Rebecca), Al, Sara, Anne Marie, and myself. We sat down over sandwiches and "cocolas" in the conference room and had an old fashioned brainstorming session. Some people might call it a "think tank."

"Al here has kluged together some concepts as to get us to the far side of the Moon near term." I said kicking off the meeting. "What I want to do today is for us to figure out just how we could get there, get enough stuff there to support at least fifty people and to live comfortably, and sustain a research, development and engineering laboratory plus a manufacturing facility. I want to emphasize that we would want to be taking low-gee strolls on the lunar surface in less than four months. Is it not just possible, but also doable?"

Al turned the projector on and clicked on his presentation file on his laptop. "My idea is to take as many space-rated pieces of hardware as we can get our hands on and just warp them to the moon. We could live in a Shuttle Orbiter with the old Spacelab module in the payload bay while we integrated the pieces via EVAs. My list shows some possible hardware. There are several External Tanks we could grab, we could appropriate at least one Shuttle and the Spacelab module, there are several commercial airframes we could use. Jim and I think it could be done with a warp drive powered by three of the ECCs. Jim."

Jim nodded. "That's right, Al. I've run the simulations a couple of times. The mass requirements that we're talking about and the size of the warp field that we'd need to maintain would require three of the mini ECCs that we're currently building. One modified warp coil will suffice though."

"What about lifting these things? How do we attach to them?" Sara asked.

I explained, "Well Sara, as Tabitha and I found, you don't have to be attached to the warp drive to make travel possible. You just need to be within the bubble. Anything in the flat spacetime region of the bubble will travel with it. So we just put these things near the warp drive and away we go." I explained.

"Anson," Tabitha interrupted. "What about the construction on the moon? There could be a lot of EVA time there. All of this hardware would need to be mated with airlocks and tubes to connect them. We would need to weld and God knows what else. These are things that haven't been done in space before."

"I understand that Tab--but can we do it? You are the expert astronaut here." I put the ball back in her court.

"Well, I suppose we would have to live like cosmonauts. We better bring a shitload of duct tape." She laughed.

I felt in my pocket and found the small flattened roll that I've kept with me since the incident in Florida. I vowed then that I would never leave home without duct tape. I pulled it out and grinned, "Never leave home without it." She laughed.

"Why do we need all of these extra airframes and things?" Sara asked "Why don't we just use the warp bubble to make a big underground dome or something?"

I did a double-take on that one. Again, an application with the warp technology that I had missed. I must be getting old and slow. From the look on Jim's face as he slapped his own forehead, I wasn't alone.

"Of course," Jim said. "We slowly poke a small hole down about fifty meters or so by having the warp bubble force its way downward. The Moon couldn't resist that. Then we slowly expand the bubble to a size we decide we need and then oscillate the diameter of the outer Van den Broeck bubble by millimeters back and forth and very fast. The oscillations would turn the lunar rocks or dirt or whatever it is to a molten material. When we turn off the field we have a huge ball-shaped cave with hardened magma walls."

"Excellent, Jim!" I was thrilled by these new concepts. "How about we do some quick analyses to decide the volume that we would need and the most stable diameter for such a cave. If we need to, we will build multiple caves and tie them together. These caves could be built in a matter of minutes or hours I think."

Anne Marie added, "I think we should carry as much of the hardware on Al's list as we can. We will need safe places in case the caves leak our atmosphere and we will need entrance airlocks. And what about living quarters? I don't know about you guys, but I'm feeling a little stir crazy here and we have plenty of room."

"Actually, Annie," 'Becca replied, "we could keep a warp field on inside the caves to maintain atmospheric and structural integrity. Once we get there we might as well put these three ECCs and the warp coil to further use. The ECCs would give us more than enough power to maintain the warp field and to power our entire Moon base. Annie, I do agree though that we should carry everything we can get our hands on, including several kitchen sinks."

"That gives me an idea," Tabitha laughed. "What if we made one of these balls higher than the rest and then warped a large part of some freshwater lake to the cave. We could then set up a gravity-fed plumbing system."

"Brilliant Tabitha! I love it. Then we warp a ball of atmosphere right out of the sky into the domes, and some fruit trees to go with them, and we also abduct some livestock. This place could be self-sufficient in a matter of days! This is great stuff." I was exhilarated with the possibilities. It was cool to take my mind off of the war for a few moments. I think it helped the rest of the crew also.

"Something else, Anson," Tabitha got my attention. "Gravity is much less on the moon, about one-sixth gee. If I understand the warp theory correctly, and I'm sure I don't, couldn't we alter the gravity in the habitat dome to equal one gee?"

"Well, General, it appears to me that you do understand the warp theory," Jim said.

"Right." I laughed. "Jim, calculate a slightly slanted flat space region for me that will add to the lunar gravity to equal one gee."

We spent the next several hours batting ideas around and revising our concepts. By the end of the afternoon we had developed a complete concept plan and a drawing of the underground lunar facility. The facility consisted of the habitat sphere and "green" sphere, a manufacturing cylinder, a research and development cylinder, and there were multiple tunnels connecting them. Of course, there was also a spaceport pad on the lunar surface. The pad would be adjacent to a long wide cylinder that connected to the side of the habitat sphere. Pushing the lunar rock around with a warp field would create the pad. Jim and I were planning to work out a bulldozer scoop-shaped warp-field geometry. Creating cylinders would be easy. Pushing a ball along a straight path would create a cylindrical shaft with spherical ends. Who cared if they had spherical ends?

Anne Marie had the idea of just building a small town with all the infrastructure, power grid that would connect to ECCs, water purification pump and tower, stocked fish pond, living quarters, and anything else we could think of and then just warping that to the main habit sphere. I liked that idea a lot. Since time was a factor, we decided to go with manufactured homes. We would have the first trailer park in space.

Al realized that we couldn't use Jim's approach, which was to make a tiny hole and then expand the bubble. How would we get the town through the tiny hole? So we modified the approach. Instead, we would make a large diameter cylinder with a -spherical bottom. The warp sphere used to make this cylinder would contain the trailer park and all of its infrastructure. Leaving that warp field on, we would then use the bulldozer warp field to push lunar material on top of the bubble to fill the hole. When the hole was filled, we would then oscillate the bubbles' outer Van Den Broeck bubble to turn the lunar rock to magma and then harden the cave. The outer bubble wouldn't allow heat and shock waves into the inner static non-Alcubierre bubble. We would then construct the outer cylinders and tunnels and place the equipment in the right locations. The tunnels and cylinders should be airtight at this point. So, we pressurize them with the liquid air that we brought with us in the External Tanks. We would seal off the airlocks to the outside and then open the tanks and let the air boil off into the caves. When all of the complex excavation and construction is completed, we then would simply turn off the field in the habitat sphere for a nanosecond and then turn it back on immediately but with a diameter large enough to encompass the entire Moon base. Sara had called this the "lights-off lights-on" method. There would be some strange weather for a few moments while the atmosphere reached equilibrium, but if we calculated the pressures right we should be fine. We would bring a butt load of plants and fluorescent lights. The lake would be large enough to support twice the people planned for the facility for at least a year. We would recycle the water and everything else, but we could eventually go back to Earth with new warp ships and pick up more supplies.

But how would we get the water back into the habitat cave? This led us to a solution for heating the caves and choosing a location also. First, the complex would be placed on the far side of the moon and near one of the lunar poles where it's always in the sunlight. Six open shafts would be dug running from directly over the half-acre stand of trees to the lunar surface. Each of these shafts would be roughly ten meters in diameter and would be stoppered by large windows. The windows would be in two layers ten centimeters thick, separated by one meter, and each windowpane would be constructed of spaceframe window materials. The top window would be reinforced by a central hub airlock window one meter in diameter, the hub made of steel I-beams with steel I-beams attached radially to an outer steel I-beam rim. It would look like a bicycle wheel sort of, whereas the hub opened downward. The bottom layer would be supported with steel I-beams the same way but there would be no door. Instead, the window would be uniformly perforated with one centimeter diameter holes over the entire surface.

The windows would allow sunlight to enter the habitat sphere over the half-acre stand of trees. When we needed to bring in new water we would warp the water into the shaft above the window, then extend the main field out past the water holding warp bubble via the lights-off lights-on method. The window central hub door would be opened. Then we would turn off the bubble holding the water and it would become supported by the window. As the water drained through the door onto the bottom perforated window, voila, it would be raining onto the trees below. When the water was completely drained, the airlock would be cycled and the warp fields turned off.

Installing the windows wouldn't prove too difficult. We could countersink the shafts so that they would sit onto a magmified lunar rock windowsill. Then we would seal them off. We might even place a couple windows over the lake, which we planned to be beside the tree grove anyway.

This all seems like a lot of work to accomplish short notice whilst a war is on that we were actively helping to fight. However, the warp field technology really changed the construction paradigm. We estimated it would take less than a day to make the holes and then only a month or so to install most of the hardware. We could use parallel crews to begin manufacturing while the final construction continues.

Of course, there were also some minor details and calculations to be made like what maximum mass could be lifted at what velocities, and how we do that without tipping off our enemy as to what we were doing, how much food, what about the effect of the big heat sink at minus 33 degrees Celsius (the Moon) below us, should we put some high R value insulation under the town, and how the hell would we do that anyway, how many windows are enough to heat and light a two-hundred-meter-diameter hemisphere. Sheesh! You get the idea.

Jim figured out that we could alter the warp bubble for the main habitat construction to the shape of a spheroid. The upper half would be a perfect hemisphere two hundred meters in diameter. The lower half would be a section of a much larger sphere only a few tens of meters deep at the bottom. We would go make the hole first. Come back and pick up a suitable surface area of dirt layered with several feet of insulation then covered with several feet of sand. Place it in the hole and hope the sand kept the nonspace qualified insulation from outgassing while we came back to get the town. Then we planned to pick up topsoil, fill dirt, trees, lake, fish, air, bees, birds, squirrels, and probably a lot more with the town.

After a few hours of Moon base design we decided to assign individual action items and go do them. We mutually decided that the move to the lunar surface would be priority second only to the development of the MWMs. Tabitha instilled in each of us the reality of the situation and that the Lunar Base would be a great idea and we needed to be there to hide from the Chinese if they have warp field detectors like ours. We all realized that six MWMs wouldn't be enough to keep the Chinese from developing further warp weapons. Actually, one of the bright analysts about eighteen floors above us had completed a study showing that we needed at least twelve well-placed simultaneous strikes to completely remove the Chinese infrastructure. One really big one would do, but we would risk the onset of greenhouse phenomena and God only knows what other types of global ecological nightmares. Carefully planned "surgical" strikes would be better. So, we needed to be out of reach of their missiles, and detection, soon. It would take us at least another year and a half to build that many MWMs. In the meantime, we would be sitting ducks at the mercy of our modified National Missile Defense system, unless our Chinese counterparts have a smart guy like Al to realize that they don't need launch vehicles. Then there would be no defense. This war was only going to be won by completely removing our enemy's ability to make war or by some miraculous diplomacy. Since neither side was admitting that there was a war to begin with, diplomacy seemed like a very big stretch.

Sara had asked me earlier why I thought the Chinese were attacking us. I told her a story that a friend of mine is so fond of telling about the Chinese business world. The story goes like this.

Back in the early nineteen nineties the Chinese government announced that they were going to open their borders to American businesses with hopes of moving China into the world market place. Once China had opened their doors, American businessmen rushed to the airports and headed off to China hoping to be the first to get a foothold on a billion new consumers. Well, these businessmen spent the first few days meeting their Chinese counterparts while being wined and dined and wining and dining some themselves. After a few weeks of this continued and none of these businessmen had even talked business yet, they began to start pressuring their hosts to discuss business opportunities. The response they got was that they were welcome to stay and enjoy themselves as long as they wanted. However, China hadn't needed to do business with the Western world or anybody else for that matter for thousands of years. So why should they be in a hurry to conduct business now? Needless to say most of these businessmen came home with their tails dragging and nothing to show for their huge trip expenses. That was more than twenty years ago and there are still no large western businesses based in China.

The Chinese falsely believe that they don't need the world and that they are a "chosen people." Well they sure needed the Russians to upgrade their current military. And it was real nice of former President Clinton to give them the American guidance, navigation, and control technologies required to steer the rocket that launched the warp bomb into orbit that killed fifty million American citizens. Oh wait; Clinton didn't give the missile technology away. He got a big campaign contribution in return didn't he? That's okay. I'm sure he is "feeling the pain" of those poor souls in Colorado just as he did for the boys that had to run the "Mogadishu Mile" back in the early nineties.

Oh well, I digressed and Sara was four at the time and had no idea what the "Mogadishu Mile" was. Well, I'm sure that Tabitha and I won't forget it, fellows. That is one of the reasons we aren't going to back down now. If the Chinese wanted to be diplomatic, they wouldn't have destroyed fifty million people without saying, "Give up or else!" The ironic part here is that they did need the rest of the world just as they needed the Russians before. They needed the Americans to develop warp drive for them to steal.

"Now I don't want it misunderstood," I told Sara. And by this time the whole gang had gathered around my soapbox. "I have many Chinese friends. There are no quarrels I have with any people. That is, until they let their government do something as hideous as this. You can argue that it's likely that most of the Chinese people have no idea that these events are even occurring. Hell, most of them are living peasants' lives. But, does that make them innocent? Should the people be held accountable for the actions of their government? At least on some level, yes. Perhaps the outcome of this war will change China, America, the World, and our views on how things should be. We'll see. One of the biggest problems we had back in Gulf War II is that we would never hold the people accountable for their hideous government and the crazy factions that arose during the war. That is why that war dragged on and didn't seem to have a decisive end. This war must, it will, have a decisive end. We had better make sure we are on the winning side when it's over. The only thing that bothers me is why now? For thousands of years China was enough for China. Why did they feel they needed to take over the world, now, so aggressively at this very moment? Doesn't make sense to me. But we'll stop them anyway!"