Hi Jeffery,

Great story.

Tom Rux

> On 07/05/2020 9:15 AM Jeffrey Schwartz <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Note - Google Doc version at
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/19gYlG-VC5vrNtbDaXypoAFDm68i6VFSraJKeNUjmsFM/edit?usp=sharing
> , anyone can view or comment..
>
> ==========================
>
> I was sitting in a folding lawn chair, kicked back with a drink in my
> hand. The cooler to my right was full of cans of Coors, bottles of
> pineapple juice, and a few bottles of Malbu Coconut rum. If this was a
> movie, the camera would zoom out to let the viewer see another,
> similar chair, with a little camp table next to it. The older man in
> the chair, wearing shorts, flip flops and a flower print shirt,
> exchanged the tablet he was reading with the can of Coors on the
> table, then took a sip and pondered for a bit before speaking.
>
>
> “It’s not that far off, “ he said, “but the Zuchai Crystals are part
> of the jump capacitors. And there’s parts about how the Grid and Coils
> that are… not right. Considering the handicap the writer was under,
> it’s really pretty amazing. “
>
>
> I nodded, took a matching sip of the pineapple and rum, and let him
> settle his thoughts. We’d met before, a few times, and he’d told me
> stories. I knew that you had to let him gel his thoughts, so I sat
> back in my chair.
>
>
> We were sitting in a failed housing development in rural Florida. The
> developer had paved the roads and cul de sacs, and then the 2008
> housing bubble hit and nobody wanted to buy a house way out here in
> the middle of nowhere. I’d parked my car a street over, and when he
> parked it took up the whole cul de sac… but the shade was nice. And
> his ride had an icemaker, among other things, so we had cool drinks
> and snacks. That made waiting through his reading a bunch of emails
> and discussion, then waiting while it digested more tolerable.
>
>
> He began speaking again, “And so… I’m not going to give you anything
> classified. Nor do you get the basic math behind any of it, and
> definitely not any of the really useful ‘rule of thumb’ math that lets
> you do things rather than understand how they work. All the science is
> going to be what you call ‘high school level’ , the level where people
> can discuss things with some relation to reality, rather than ‘skill
> level’ where it’s actually useful knowledge.”
>
>
> He leaned forward and looked me dead in the eyes, very serious now,
> “You push for more than that, and you’re breaking the agreement. I am
> not going to be responsible for messing up the flow of civilization in
> this weird variant timeline in which you live, especially since I
> don’t want a second wave of Solomani figuring out how to follow me
> home.”
>
>
> As he leaned back in the chair, taking another sip of beer, he began..
>
>
> “It comes down to certain key points in technological evolution.
> Magnetism - the first time some rube figured out that tying a piece of
> lodestone to a string and hanging it on his boat, there was a leap in
> transportation technology. Now you could cut straight across the sea,
> rather than having to hug the coast to figure out where you were.
> Interesting analogy to the Jump drive, heh? Out there in the middle of
> the ocean for a week,  cut off from the rest of the world, and then
> boom! You’re at a port it would have taken months to follow the coast
> to get to. “
>
>
> “Then, later, someone figures out that there’s a relationship between
> rubbing a cat with a piece of amber, lightning, and combing your hair…
> which is nice and everything, but not really useful until they figure
> out that there’s a relationship between that and magnetism, which is a
> force that’s pretty well understood by that point. Suddenly, there’s
> generators and motors and telegraph and telephone and all that good
> stuff. You don’t really understand magnetism until you’ve got an
> understanding of electricity, and you get a grip on electromagnetic
> force. “
>
>
> “And still, you fumble around and talk about ‘magnetic fields’ and
> eventually get the idea that they’re useful, and get radio. Time goes
> on, and eventually someone makes another leap and figures out that the
> photon carries EMF… which raises some weird questions about ‘is it a
> particle or a wave?’ and that gets people curious about quantum
> mechanics.”
>
>
> He sipped at the can, realized his beer was empty and nodded toward
> the cooler. I tossed him another, freshened my drink, and kept taking
> notes.  Part of the deal was I wasn’t allowed to record the
> conversation… and he had the equipment to make sure I kept that
> promise.
>
>
> “QM leads, eventually, to speculation about gravitons. Your culture
> has detected gravity waves, so you’ve got some pretty strong hints
> they exist. But you’re still stuck at the ‘groom the cat with an amber
> comb’ stage.. No, really, you’re not even quite there. You’ve realized
> there is, in fact, a cat. “
>
>
> “The really big steps that you’ve not taken yet is figuring out how
> gravitons work, and then the relationship between photons and
> gravitons. You can at least easily observe light, so puzzling out
> photons wasn’t that hard, until you got to wavelengths you can’t see…
> but detecting gravitons isn’t easy. The details of how gravitic
> detectors work is part of the off-limits part of this conversation. I
> will say that the first lab experiments for us that lead to
> breakthroughs involved very very small versions of the Cavendish
> experiment. Things done down at the Casmir effect scale. “
>
>
> “High school physics time - the graviton is analogous to a photon, in
> that it exhibits particle/wave duality. Just as many things emit
> photons naturally, gravitons are pretty much continuously emitted and
> absorbed by… well.. Everything. “
>
>
> “A graviton decays on impact with an object. That decay produces no
> detectable effect in the EM spectrum, but it does have a very tiny
> ‘denting’ effect on the fabric of space-time. If we’re going to use
> the classic sheet of rubber analogy, then a graviton leaves a planet,
> hits the bottom of the empty beer can, and makes a wee little dent in
> the space time between the two, and the can rolls toward the dent. “
>
>
> He flicked the empty can on the table with his finger, and it rolled
> off onto the pile below. “Voila!”
>
>
> “Of course, all the particles in the object - planet or beer can - are
> doing the same dance on a tinier scale, so there’s a dent around the
> object, making the gravity well for the thing.. And in the case of
> planets, pulling them together to form in the first place.”
>
>
> “Now, I mentioned that gravition/particle interaction does not produce
> a detectable effect in the EM spectrum. The converse is not entirely
> true - it is possible to do things in EM which have detectable effects
> on gravitons. We are again straying into details of which I will not
> speak. No matter how many of these beers you give me. Although a hold
> full of them would sell pretty well when I get home, mind you. “
>
>
> I shrugged, “Forty cubic meters of cans of Coors adds up to a lot of
> money, and unless you’re willing to part with something useful rather
> than just story time… “
>
>
> “Anyway, “ he changed the subject.
>
>
> “The first useful thing when you figure out electrogravitics is just
> to be able to generate a field that interdicts gravitons from crossing
> it. That’s contragrav, and it’ll let you make floaters and grav sleds.
> You still need some kind of reaction drive to move it around, but at
> least it ignores the local gravity field. “
>
>
> “The second useful thing is when you can get a sacrificial mass to
> give up more gravitons than it should. That leads to grav plates,
> which are nice, but more importantly it leads to being able to pull
> things along, and that’s true antigrav. That gives you air/rafts, grav
> belts, and the first generation of M-Drives. M-Drives gulp down huge
> amounts of power, but that’s ok, because convincing some hydrogen to
> be much,much more gravitational than it should leads to fusion
> reactors that are small, cheap, and effective.“
>
>
> “The third useful thing is when you figure out that fields can be
> convinced to interact with each other. There’s where you get Jump
> drive. “
>
>
> “Now, all this conversation started because of an email about Jump
> drives, so we’ll go there for a bit. “
>
>
> “One thing you’ve learned about, especially you personally as a Ham,
> is Standing Waves. Two different waves in the same area, getting in
> the right kind of sync, leaves you with a wave that’s fixed in space
> and doesn’t go anywhere. In a radio, it builds up RF that burns out
> the finals because all the energy you’re pushing won’t leave the
> antenna.”
>
>
> “With gravitics, you get a zone of gravitons settling into an area of
> space time that keeps digging itself a deeper and deeper dent, until
> finally the rubber sheet gets fed up with it and goes SPROING!” He
> paused then, thought about it, and said,” Might as well try going to
> another star with a trampoline, or some such rubbish, right?”
>
>
> “There are, of course, issues - like, all the matter in your ship is
> going to be drawn toward that ditch. So you need a contragrav bubble
> around the ship so you don’t get destroyed by your own J-drive. Like
> you need sacrificial mass to provide the extra gravitions, so you need
> lots and lots of LHyd you can dump out, in addition to the lots and
> lots of LHyd to power it. And we’re talking power levels where even
> superconductors get hot, so you need more LHyd to cool that...although
> vented coolant is used as sacrificial mass too.”
>
>
> “And you need to do it quickly, because a long slow pull on the rubber
> sheet leads to the Universe getting grumpy and things , for want of a
> better word, tearing rather than slingshotting. There’s some
> scientists who are pretty sure that the weird stuff the Ancients did
> with bubble universes were cases of a deliberately slow J-field build
> up and a controlled tear. We don’t know how to do that, and the
> experiments were… not pleasant. Not very survivable, either. There’s
> several Red Zones where experimental bases used to be … never mind,
> not relevant, other than when you get to where you start trying to
> build a J-Drive, do not do it within 10 light seconds of anything you
> care about.”
>
>
> “Beer, please?”
>
>
> I passed him one, then showed him the cooler was running low. He took
> the opportunity to go aboard, empty himself, and fill another bucket
> with ice, while I walked to the car and got another case out of the
> back seat.  We settled back into our chairs, and I smiled at the open
> cargo door above us, and realized he’d turned the enviro systems up. A
> steady breeze of cool, dry air came out, doing it’s best to mitigate
> the still, humid, hot air of a Florida afternoon over asphalt.  We
> spent a few minutes settling back in before he picket the tablet back
> up, scrolled through, and continued speaking.
>
>
> “Step one, course gets built up in the computer, yeah. Preplanning of
> navigational charges, yeah. Aligning Zuchai crystals, no.”
>
>
> “Step two, Big Honking Handwavium Reactor goes gonzo, yeah. Funny
> thing here… Normal long-duration reactors have one set of gravitics,
> and one set of sacrificial masses that get replaced during annuals.
> The one for the jump drive uses some of the fuel going in as much more
> sacrificial mass, sacrificed at a higher ratio than normal, as well as
> using the normal sacrifice systems. So there’s two graviton sources,
> overlaid on each other and producing a very strong field. That there’s
> two sources means the technical term for this kind of reactor is
> \Binary Hyperdense Hydrogen Reactor’, so he got the acronym right even
> if he got the words wrong. “
>
>
> “Step three and four is where things are off the rails, which means we
> need to talk about Zuchai crystals”
>
>
> “Capacitors … normal caps have layers of conductor and non-conductor,
> and the electrons ‘pile up’ in the space between them. Massively gross
> oversimplification. But you can make a capacitor from foil and paper,
> and it’ll hold a charge. More paper, more foil, better materials, and
> you still have electrons piling up between atoms. At some point
> though, you get so much charge that the dielectric - the paper -
> doesn’t hold up any more. With normal electronics, there’s a pop
> sound, the smoke comes out, and the device doesn’t work any more. “
>
>
> “At the power levels for jump drives...well… the pop sound is much
> louder, destructively so. Work around is to work in parallel, have
> more caps. The size of a capacitor bank needed for the Snipe to jump,
> using even superconducting and superinsulating materials would be…
> probably about double the size of the jump drive now. Maybe triple.”
>
>
> “Zuchai crystals have a feature in the crystal lattice between the
> atoms that lets them store electrons in additional electron shells.
> Sort of like the way you’d pump the shells in a free electron laser,
> the electrons just move up a shell. What’s special about Zuchai is it
> will then let you fill in the lower shell too, and let that pop up to
> another electron shell. The other atoms in the lattice have a lot of
> protons and they kind of force everything to behave even though the
> thing is ionized to hell and gone. On the other hand, the outer shell
> is ‘full’ , so you don’t get the acid/base effect you’d expect, and
> the whole thing doesn’t just eat itself.”
>
>
> “For a while, anyway. Leave the crystals charged for too long, and you
> get random electrons in the outer shells that decide to wander, and
> then things get ugly fast.”
>
>
> “So, then the power from the Caps - the Zuchai Crystals inside the
> capacitors - is dumped into two sets of gravitic generators. The
> so-called ‘Jump Coils’. These are going to produce gravitons by the
> lorry load, and dump them outside the ship in very specific patterns
> to produce that standing wave effect we talked about earlier. This
> gives you a spherical jump field. Now, there is a set of antennas on
> the hull to release those gravitons, and one meaning of the words
> ‘jump grid’ is those antennas. It’s kind of like people saying
> ‘wheels’ on a car, when they mean the rim and the tire, as opposed to
> ‘wheel’ as just the rim.”
>
>
> “The first jump drives just used the Coils and a spherical jump field.
> A lot of ships still do that - The Service likes it better, since you
> can get by with damage to the surface antennas and still Jump. There’s
> also the advantage that with a ship with a drive capable of over-norm
> mass you can clamp a pod on the outside of the ship and still make
> your normal jump.”
>
>
> “The disadvantage to a spherical field is that if you get unexpected
> masses in it, then you’re going to misjump. No ifs, ands or buts. Have
> some unexpected space rock go shooting by just as the computer closes
> the switch, and you have a problem. The Service has a lot of sensors
> on our ships, so it’s not such an issue, just know the rock is coming
> through, delay the jump a few milliseconds, and then go. Merchants
> will head out to known ‘quiet places’ where there’s not much in the
> way of dust or debris.”
>
>
> “Jump Grids, in the proper use of the term, are a specialized phased
> array antenna system that let you deform the jump bubble to make it
> conform more closely to the ship. The advantage here is that stray
> mass - ie, the sand you dumped overboard an hour ago that’s still on
> your vector - is not in the field. You go where you were planning to
> go, regardless of what’s under your feet when you hit the trampoline.
> On the other hand, that hinges on having enough of the redundant grid
> of antennas intact, so ships which use this method and have taken a
> lot of surface hits have a problem. The Navy likes this system,
> because they like sand, and they like lots and lots of surface armor
> with multiple layers of redundant antennas.”
>
>
> He rolled his eyes at the mention of The Navy, but then looked back
> down to the tablet resting on his tummy, scrolled a bit while
> muttering, “where was…”
>
>
> “Ok, so that covers three, four, five… yeah, the caps dump into the
> coils, that’s six….”
>
>
> “BHHR steps down - well, yeah, it goes non-binary and behaves like a
> normal reactor, but a big part of that is not maintaining the jump
> grid or the coils, because they’ve done their job. The rubber sheet
> has been twanged like a rubber band, and you’re outside normal space.
> He is right about making sure the jump bubble is intact, and that’s
> mostly handled by the equilibrium between the last of the sacrificial
> LHyd outside the ship being drawn to the only mass in this pocket
> universe - the ship - and the inner contragrav field that first
> shielded you from the Jump field forming keeping it from falling all
> the way in.  You realize that in this pocket universe, your ship is
> like 99% of the mass of the whole universe? So the LHyd falling in
> would make you into a star. “
>
>
> “Pulses… yeah, you can pulse the grid. Not commonly done, you should
> have had your bubble and trajectory right when you first made the
> jump. “
>
>
> “Jump complete - that’s going to happen no matter what. The universe
> gets tired of having a piece stretched all out of the norm, and it
> snaps back into place. Not the same place, mind you, which was the
> whole point of the exercise.”
>
>
> He took another sip of his beer, then said, “Lunch? “
>
>
> I got the other cooler from my backseat, and pulled out the subs I’d
> picked up on the way over. We ate, talked about other things for a
> bit. I went aboard and used the fresher, while he scrolled through the
> emails, and as I came out and sat down, he was grinning.
>
>
> “This other thread - about skills and licenses and such. They’re
> focussing on the technology and the type of drive, and not thinking
> about how they’re actually used.”
>
>
> “Ship’s Boat - what’s that guy doing with his life? He’s either a
> commercial pilot, and eight out of ten that means he’s shuttling from
> Highport to Downport. Or he’s a fighter pilot. Or he’s a long-run
> insystem pilot.”
>
>
> “Nine out of ten, the guy has a mission time of less than two hours.
> All of its hands-on.”
>
>
> He paused - “When I say hands-on, do you savvy? I’m saying he actually
> has hands on a stick and throttle, he’s looking and making decisions
> based on what he sees outside. He’s got a destination he can actually
> look out the window and see, like the Highport above or the Zho he’s
> chasing. Might be that the HUD is helping him see it, but it’s still a
> line of sight that doesn’t involve much planning about flying to where
> it’s going to be in a few days, or flying to a particular spot in
> space.”
>
>
> “He’s making decisions about the last 200 meters to a landing pad or
> docking port, and he’s doing it with more instinct and feel and
> training than he’s doing it by instrument and computer. He’s doing it
> in a craft that’s very responsive to the helm. “
>
>
> “And he’s doing it 40 hours a week. For a guy doing the High/Down run,
> that’s four up and four down a day. He’s almost all stick-time.”
>
>
> “Compare that to a guy in a Type-A. In half his work-weeks, he’s
> stepping in every few hours and checking the Jump field. In the other
> half, he’s set the autopilot, and he does one lift and one drop.
> Nothing fancy, and for a big part of his atmo time, he’s limited in
> what moves he can do by the aerodynamics of the ship and his approach
> protocols. Yeah, the contragrav gets rid of the pull from the planet,
> but the ship still has inertia, and the aerodynamics are pushing on
> it, so it can’t make the tight turns a 20 ton fighter can. “
>
>
> “So the difference is like being the pilot of an F-16, and the pilot
> of a 747 for an airline. The fighter pilot spends all his time
> sharpening his skills for tight, fast moves. The airline pilot takes
> off, sets the autopilot, kills time, then lands. “
>
>
> “And then they look at grav pilots, like an air/raft. That is, in some
> ways, the worst of both worlds. Anyplace that has a traffic grid,
> you’re probably never going to fly manual. Just tell it where you want
> to go. “
>
>
> “If you are out in the hinterlands, “ he said, waving a dismissive
> hand around, “then you’re probably going to be going low and slow to
> stay off the local’s sensors. Or you’re going low and slow to look for
> something. Or because you’re using the air/raft as a tractor to lift
> something from one place to another. Very rarely are you doing the
> all-day-climb-to-orbit.”
>
>
> “So… the skills in your ‘game’ reflect what people get into the habit
> of doing as they do their jobs, and that does in some ways balance
> into what happens when you go and get tested to get certified that you
> know how to use that hardware. A guy with level two certs on small
> craft has probably spent a huge number of hours doing hands-on flying.
> A guy with level two certs as a starship pilot probably has spent 25
> weeks of the year not having his hands on a stick, and when he does
> his habits are straight, sensible approaches to starports, not the
> turn-and-burn 6G that a Rampart jockey does.”
>
>
> “Which means that if you put a starship pilot in the cockpit of a
> Rampart, he’s not got the practice, habits or temperament to do what
> the guy who does it every day does. “
>
>
> “On the other hand, if you ask a Rampart jockey or a High/Down
> operator to set a ship up for jump, they’re going to look at you like
> you’re nuts. Or if you ask them to land it, they’re going to see it as
> a huge, lumbering elephant of a thing, and not feel comfy trying it,
> because the normal come in fast, then pull 4G’s decel does not work in
> a Type-A… and they have that nagging feeling that if they forget that
> they’ll end up lithobraking.”
>
>
> We talked a bit more, rambling about other things. Personal lives, my
> spouse, his series of girlfriends, that sort of thing. And then the
> inevitable came - the beer ran out.  His ability to consume it with no
> ill effect was impressive, and it had been spaced out over the long
> day. It was dusk when I packed up my lawn chair and cooler, and he
> packed his lawn chair and cooler. We shook hands, he boarded and I
> drove off a few blocks. Then that odd mirage effect made the stars
> that were coming out ripple as the contragrav field encircled
> (ensphered?) the Snipe, and it fell into the sky above me.
> -----
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