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Light Skies
Nov. 12th, 2007 03:06 pm"I never trust these things." Lt. Cmdr Leitner said, ignoring the sigh from the tiny brown woman hunched over the keyboard. He'd spent twenty-two years driving every type of ship the Navy employed across all the oceans, in every weather imaginable and through more than a few disasters. The last one, which had cost his ship six men fighting to extinguish an electrical fire and himself the use of his right arm below the elbow had left him finishing out his career one of their oldest facilities; the US Naval Observatory in DC.
"Look, I'm not some Neanderthal scared of change. The first thrower we had buzzed blue arcs of energy every time it was on, and rendered everyone on the USS Monitor either sterile or infected with FLK."
"FLK?" Dr Braun looked up from her work with a puzzled expression.
"Funny looking kids."
"Ah." Obviously Naval humour hadn't made it to the brain banks in the service yet. "Sir, with all due respect, those early... 'throwers', you called them? They bear about as much similarity to the SEP plasma particle polulation projector as a musket does with a laser guided howitzer. Those old SEPPGs were the excuse for a military application."
"Huh. I thought this was just on a larger scale." Leitner scratched his stubbled neck.
"Yes, and no. The old throwers were supposed to act as part of the 'Total Environment Engagement' targeting system, right?" Braun thought back, trying to remember the project that had been obsolete at the time she'd joined the Navy.
"Yeah, the T-Shot never worked right."
"The basic problem was that all four of the systems feeding into it operated on vastly different response and upload times. Integration just wasn't possible, like trying to pass a baton between four people running at different speeds." She patted the side of the terminal she was working on. "The P-Quad only works on a single system element, and has one additional component in our uplink to the Interferometer on Falstaff Mesa."
"What's the value then? Is this just a cosmic rangefinder."
"Yes, but looked at sideways. We can generate ultra-high energy particles in the 57 billion squared electron volt range. Throw those out, and it takes the gravity interference of a black hole to pull one off course. So when we multi-generate, or 'buckshot' a quadrant of the sky, those rays go until they hit something, and the resulting crash is fed back into the interferometer that determines the distance." Braun said, her voice jumping with excitement.
"Sounds like a radar."
"That's exactly what it is. That energy jumps out, and when it stops, we get a tiny view of millions of light-years, like a map in a tube." She smiled, her teeth very white against her face. "We're blind from the distances, sir, but now we can map the entire universe with light, sir. Just guess what we're going to find!"
"Look, I'm not some Neanderthal scared of change. The first thrower we had buzzed blue arcs of energy every time it was on, and rendered everyone on the USS Monitor either sterile or infected with FLK."
"FLK?" Dr Braun looked up from her work with a puzzled expression.
"Funny looking kids."
"Ah." Obviously Naval humour hadn't made it to the brain banks in the service yet. "Sir, with all due respect, those early... 'throwers', you called them? They bear about as much similarity to the SEP plasma particle polulation projector as a musket does with a laser guided howitzer. Those old SEPPGs were the excuse for a military application."
"Huh. I thought this was just on a larger scale." Leitner scratched his stubbled neck.
"Yes, and no. The old throwers were supposed to act as part of the 'Total Environment Engagement' targeting system, right?" Braun thought back, trying to remember the project that had been obsolete at the time she'd joined the Navy.
"Yeah, the T-Shot never worked right."
"The basic problem was that all four of the systems feeding into it operated on vastly different response and upload times. Integration just wasn't possible, like trying to pass a baton between four people running at different speeds." She patted the side of the terminal she was working on. "The P-Quad only works on a single system element, and has one additional component in our uplink to the Interferometer on Falstaff Mesa."
"What's the value then? Is this just a cosmic rangefinder."
"Yes, but looked at sideways. We can generate ultra-high energy particles in the 57 billion squared electron volt range. Throw those out, and it takes the gravity interference of a black hole to pull one off course. So when we multi-generate, or 'buckshot' a quadrant of the sky, those rays go until they hit something, and the resulting crash is fed back into the interferometer that determines the distance." Braun said, her voice jumping with excitement.
"Sounds like a radar."
"That's exactly what it is. That energy jumps out, and when it stops, we get a tiny view of millions of light-years, like a map in a tube." She smiled, her teeth very white against her face. "We're blind from the distances, sir, but now we can map the entire universe with light, sir. Just guess what we're going to find!"
