Of Torchships and Compartmentalized Hearts

On By Matt FraserIn Alpha Reads, Serial, Work in ProgressLeave a comment

(The Silence of Ancient Light, continued)

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“Won’t it take hours to effect an orbital change and advance to our position?”

“Normally, yes, that would be the case. With the shuttle, that’s what we would have to do, firing thrusters retrograde to push down to a faster orbit and get ahead of us, then firing again prograde to lift the orbit and let us catch up to the shuttle. That would easily be a two-day maneuver, although in an extreme case we could push all the way down to the Karmann line and back up, and maybe it could be done in a few hours, at a huge cost in fuel the shuttle just didn’t have.”

“We don’t have a few hours.”

“No. But the lander, of course, has an engine designed for descending to the surface of a high-G world and then lifting back up to orbit again, with a fuel tank to match. The lithium saltwater fusion engine has more than enough thrust and specific impulse for a brachistochrone trajectory straight to our position, and we’ll still have fuel to spare afterwards.”

“Brachisto…”

“Think straight-line. With enough thrust…”

Read more at

Compartmentalized

(1,810 words; 7 min 14 sec reading time)

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An engine designed for descending to the surface of a high-G world and then lifting back up to orbit again. A lithium saltwater rocket with enough thrust to accelerate quickly and enough specific impulse to keep on burning for some serious delta-V. Brachistochrone trajectories capable of ignoring orbital dynamics and just powering on through to where you want to go.

In other words, a torchship to make even Robert A Heinlein proud!

This really is the only way to get quickly from one part of a high orbit to another location on that high orbit that is 22,000 kilometers away without taking multiple days (multiple orbits) to get there. And to do it, you need either a ton (or, many tons) of fuel, or a very efficient engine. You need that unicorn of space drives, an engine that shift gears between high thrust and high specific impulse, two attributes that normally are exclusive of each other.

And there is a design out there to do this. The only problem today is that we haven’t quite mastered the trick of running a nuclear fusion reactor, which is the key component we need for this.

I’m going to talk a great deal more about this in a future blog post, very soon, but right now I’m very excited to present to you the next installment in the saga of our hapless heroes, The Silence of Ancient Light. You’ll recall that when last we saw our friends, Anna, Laxmi, Jaci, and Ca-Tren, they were stuck in an abandoned alien space station with no obvious way to get out, and with less than two hours before imminent destruction in the form of a severed space elevator cable would smash their part of the station into tiny bits.

Not good.

But you’ll recall that Anna, after all this time, finally found a way to connect Jaci’s handheld tablet computer to the alien station’s radio broadcast network, and from there create a digital connection to their faraway spaceship. What can she do with such a connection?

You’ll need to read on, of course, to find out, but my earlier comments are surely a big hint.

I’ll warn you now, there’s an emotional component to this scene that you may not expect. Jaci is going to reveal something…

But read on to find out!

header image credit: Ioulou Nash / pixabay.com under Pixabay License

The 2022 Post-Apocalyptic Purple Prose Contest — The Capricious Narrator

On By Matt FraserIn Contests, Other Authors, Reblogs4 Comments

[Note from Matt: Remember this contest from a few years ago, when I won (well, I was the only entrant, but I did win)? It’s on again! And there are prizes! I highly recommend clicking that link and heading over to Gerhard’s website, perusing the entries, and even better, submitting one! What follows is the text from Gerhard’s post.]

I thought we could have some fun with the release of The Atomic Ballerina by celebrating purple prose, post-apocalyptic style. (This is the second time I’ve done one of these. Author Matt Fraser won when I did this a few years back.) What’s purple prose? Elevated language where none is needed. Overly flowery descriptions of […]

The 2022 Post-Apocalyptic Purple Prose Contest — The Capricious Narrator

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What Frequency Do We Need?

On By Matt FraserIn Alpha Reads, Serial, Work in Progress2 Comments

(The Silence of Ancient Light, continued)

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“It’s not a Fourier transform! Or, not a straight-up one, anyway. I think we’re looking at a Hartley modulator circuit, and if I apply the Hilbert variant on the Fourier… Damn, no one has used that for years, does this app even have that function?”

“A Hartley modulator what?”

“I should have known when I saw the phase-shifted single-sideband signal with its own inverse! It’s a technique for radio broadcasting that was popular a couple-hundred years ago, and for a while it was popular with early digital signal processors, but those processors became obsolete a long time ago, somewhere around the turn of the millennium. We learned about this in…”

Anna trailed off as she madly tapped and swiped at options on the tablet. Laxmi looked at Jaci.

“Do you have any idea what she just said?”

“Nope, but I like her enthusiasm. I say we let her run with it and see what happens. I mean, we’re all probably gonna die anyway, right?”

Read more at

Radio Frequency

(2,683 words; 10 min 43 sec reading time)

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Would you know how to quickly hack into a WiFi network if your life depended upon it? What about if the WiFi signal not only didn’t use any encryption algorithm you’d ever heard of, but it was broadcast on a wholly different frequency band, using an unknown method of encoding digital data into a radio signal, and even if you can decode the signal, it’s based upon a language never spoken or written on Earth?

In other words, you’ve detected an alien radio network, but you cannot understand the nature of the information it is broadcasting, and yet you have about half an hour to figure out how to connect your handheld tablet computer to it and use it to send a signal. If you don’t manage this impossible task, you and your friends are all going to die.

No pressure, in other words.

The good news is that radio technology is ultimately based upon mathematics, and while the terminology and symbols may be different, the fundamental rules still apply. The aliens might not call it single sideband (SSB), but doubtless they too figured out this more efficient method of transmitting information over great distances with less power and bandwidth consumption. And while Fourier, Hilbert, and Hartley were all pioneers of mathematics and radio signal processing on Earth, the mathematical discoveries they made are likely to have been independently made by alien mathematicians and engineers as well.

It’s still probably a stretch to decode and tap into the signal in just half an hour, I admit. However, when the alternative is being blasted into the vacuum of space, there is quite the motivation!

Yes, I know, I greatly oversimplified things in this scene, and I threw a lot of technical terms around and probably badly mangled how all this works, but I hope you will forgive me and enjoy it regardless. Please give it a read and let me know what you think!

header image credit: user:WikiImages / pixabay.com via Pixabay License