This scene obviously took me a bit longer to finish than the others before it, as I wrestled with a number of factors. Not least among those was simply figuring out how the crew would go about forcing their way into an alien space station, one that has no direct analog to our technology or knowledge.
That turns out not to be that big of a deal in the end. Is there a hatch on the station? Well, yes, the aliens would have needed a way to get in and out. Ok, so how different can a hatch be? Well, it might be quite a bit smaller, for one thing, if the alien species is quite different in size from humans. But otherwise, it’s still going to be essentially a door, and a door must have some mechanism for opening it.
But… what if the aliens don’t have hands in the way that we do? What if they have claws, instead? Hmm, well, a handle for claws is probably not too different than a handle for hands, assuming those claws can grasp something. And if they can’t, then we don’t have much in the way of tool users in the early history of those aliens, do we?
Do we? Oh, we could go down so many interesting rabbit holes with this one. I think we’ll return to this subject in a later post.
Ok, so there’s a hatchway, possibly a bit of a tight fit, but still a hatchway, and it has a handle. One that’s either frozen with disuse, or locked. Either way, it’s going to need some modicum of force to get in. Applying force, or cutting your way in, in vacuum, in microgravity. What could go wrong?
A lot could go wrong.
The other factor that kept me up late at night doing math puzzles was figuring out what a good parking orbit for Aniara would be relative to the space station. I spent a good part of the last two weeks reading and reading about orbital mechanics and astrodynamics, and my head still spins from some of the math involved. At one point I had myself convinced that, like Zeno’s arrow reaching its target, it was impossible to truly rendezvous in orbit.
Except we do it all the time with the ISS here at Earth.
There’s another post to come on this subject. This one is really quite fascinating to the geek in me.
However, for purposes of this ongoing serial story, there is one factor about Aniara‘s orbit that the careful reader will discern as a departure from the previous scene. In Flip and Burn, you may recall, the Captain, David Benetton, asks our pilot, Anna Laukkonnen, to bring the ship to a parking orbit 100 kilometers north of the station, and to a matching altitude.
However in the scene you’re about to read, Anna does something different. She parks the ship 100 kilometers higher than the station, but directly over it.
Why the change? That, my friends, is going to be the primary subject of my forthcoming post on orbital mechanics. Suffice it to say that after several evenings of scratching about on Excel, I realized that the only way to maintain the same altitude but a different inclination and not smash into the station (twice per orbit, in fact) would be through a fairly constant use of thrusters. This would be an expensive thing to do, in terms of using up not-unlimited propellant, and a responsible pilot wouldn’t do it when a safer alternative that uses far less fuel (or none at all) is readily available.
The risks of pantsing a novel, indeed. That detail in the previous scene will have to change in the rewrite.
Right, so more to come on this subject. Meanwhile, you’re tired of me driveling on about these boring topics, and just want to read a good scene, right? Well, here you go!
image credit: NASA
Matt Fraser 