update from sparkleup

writing/post-self/toledot/launch/phys/Douglas/001.html

@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@
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                 <h1 id="douglas-hadje-2325">Douglas Hadje &mdash; 2325</h1>
-<p>When Douglas Hadje pressed his hands against the sides of the L<sub>5</sub> System, he always imagined that he could sense his aunt along with however many &lsquo;great&rsquo;s preceded that title, sense all of those years separating him from her, and he pressed his hands against the outside of the system every chance he could get. If he was sure that he was alone &mdash; and he often was &mdash; he would press his forehead to the glassy, diamondoid cylinder and wish, hope, dream that he could say even one word to her. His people, humanity, now nearly two centuries distant from the founding of the System, forever felt on the verge of true speciation, of mutual incomprehensibility, from those within. Did they still think they same? Did they still feel the same? Their hopes were doubtless different, but were their dreams?</p>
+<p>When Douglas Hadje pressed his hands against the sides of the L<sub>5</sub> System, he always imagined that he could sense his aunt along with however many &lsquo;great&rsquo;s preceded that title, sense all of those years separating him from her, and he pressed his hands against the outside of the system every chance he could get. If he was sure that he was alone &mdash; and he often was &mdash; he would press his forehead to the glassy, diamondoid cylinder and wish, hope, dream that he could say even one word to her. His people, humanity, now nearly two centuries distant from the founding of the System, forever felt on the verge of true speciation, of mutual incomprehensibility, from those within. Did they still think the same? Did they still feel the same? Their hopes were doubtless different, but were their dreams?</p>
 <p>But always his hands were separated from the structure by that thin layer of skinsuit, and always his helmet was in the way of the carbon shell, and always he was at least one reality away from them.</p>
 <p>He would spend his five minutes there, connected and not by touch, thinking of this or that, thinking of nothing at all, and then he would climb away from the cylinder down the ladder, down the dozen or so meters to the ceiling of his home, climb through the airlock, and perhaps go lay down.</p>
 <p>Others knew of this. They had to. All movement outside the habitat portion of the system was tightly controlled. Everything was on video, recorded directly from his eyes through his exo. All audio was recorded.</p>
@@ -21,8 +21,8 @@
 <p>The System sat stationary at the Earth-Moon L<sub>5</sub> point, a stable orbit with relation to the earth and moon such that it only very rarely required any correction to its position. Once a day, as the point rotated beyond Earth from the point of view of the sun and more briefly by the moon, it fell into darkness, but other than that, it was bathed in sunlight unmoderated by atmosphere. It rotated at a stately pace in relation to the moon and Earth such that its vast solar collector was always pointed toward the sun.</p>
 <p>The station itself comprised three main parts. At the core of the station was the diamondoid cylinder, fifty meters in diameter and five hundred meters in length. The solar collector was attached to the sunward end of the cylinder, spreading out in a series of one hundred sixty thousand replaceable panels, one meter square each, held in a lattice of carbon fiber struts. Surrounding the cylinder was a torus, two hundred meters in diameter and as long as core cylinder itself, such that it was forever hidden from the sun by the solar collectors. Seventy-seven acres, of living space, working space, factories, and arable land, all lit by bundles of doped fiber optic cables which collected and distributed the light from space and cast it down from the ceiling. The entire contraption rotated nearly three times per minute, fast enough that they had an approximation of Earth&rsquo;s gravity.</p>
 <p>That is where Douglas lived along with about twenty others.</p>
-<p>To fund such a project, the torus had originally operated as a tourist destination. Many of the living spaces consisted of repurposed hotel rooms. It had long since ceased to serve in that capacity as humanity&rsquo;s curiosity for space dwindled and spaceflight from earth once again began to rise in price.</p>
+<p>To fund such a project, the torus had originally operated as a tourist destination. Many of the living spaces consisted of repurposed hotel rooms. It had long since ceased to serve in that capacity as humanity&rsquo;s curiosity for space dwindled and spaceflight from Earth once again began to rise in price.</p>
-<p>To build such a project, the area had been cleared of much of the Trojan asteroids that had collected there, either used for raw materials or slung out into space into eccentric orbits that would keep them from impacting earth or winding up once again captured in the same Legrange point. Even still, one of the many jobs was to monitor the area for newly captured rocks and divert or collect them as needed. The material could be used for new solar panels, or perhaps the two five thousand kilometer long launch arms sprouting on opposing sides of the torus, the Hall Effect Engines that kept the rotation of the system constant as the arms had been extruded from its surface, or of course the two new cylindrical systems at the tips of those arms that had, over the last two decades, been constructed as half-scale duplicates of the core.</p>
+<p>To build such a project, the area had been cleared of much of the Trojan asteroids that had collected there, either used for raw materials or slung out into space into eccentric orbits that would keep them from impacting Earth or winding up once again captured in the same Legrange point. Even still, one of the many jobs was to monitor the area for newly captured rocks and divert or collect them as needed. The material could be used for new solar panels, or perhaps the two five thousand kilometer long launch arms sprouting on opposing sides of the torus, the Hall Effect Engines that kept the rotation of the system constant as the arms had been extruded from its surface, or of course the two new cylindrical systems at the tips of those arms that had, over the last two decades, been constructed as half-scale duplicates of the core.</p>
 <p>Little of this mattered to Douglas.</p>
 <p>He was, he was forever told, a people person. He was an administrator, a boss, a manager. It was his job to direct and guide and herd people into doing what was required for this twenty-year project. He was forever told that he had the empathy and skills to lead, though he forever doubted it.</p>
 <p>He simply cared about this with a fervor that was dimmed only by the idea that, somewhere within the mirror-box that was the System cylinder, his distant ancestor dwelt.</p>
@@ -190,7 +190,7 @@ Launch director</p>
 <li><em>Capacitor charge:</em> 6 nines, on track to 100% (go)</li>
 <li><em>Speed:</em> 100% (go)</li>
 <li><em>Expected acceleration:</em> Nominal (go)</li>
-<li><em>Expected expected jerk:</em> Nominal (go)</li>
+<li><em>Expected jerk:</em> Nominal (go)</li>
 </ul>
 </li>
 <li>Pollux:<ul>
@@ -202,7 +202,7 @@ Launch director</p>
 <li><em>Capacitor charge:</em> 6 nines, on track to 100% (go)</li>
 <li><em>Speed:</em> 100% (go)</li>
 <li><em>Expected acceleration:</em> Nominal (go)</li>
-<li><em>Expected expected jerk:</em> Nominal (go)</li>
+<li><em>Expected jerk:</em> Nominal (go)</li>
 </ul>
 </li>
 </ul>
@@ -267,7 +267,7 @@ Launch director</p>
 <p><strong>Phys-side:</strong> 1</p>
 <p><strong>Phys-side:</strong> Launch looks good.</p>
 <p><strong>Phys-side:</strong> Watching the struts flex and jolt with the release of mass is quite beautiful.</p>
-<p><strong>Phys-side:</strong> They weren&rsquo;t kidding about the jerk. Two of them, actually, as the engines fired a half second after the jerk reached the torus. We&rsquo;ve got two injuries down here - bumps and bruises. Reports from the torus indicate that damage was minimal. Some sloshing from the hydroponics, but that&rsquo;s easy to clean up. One of the furnaces will need some care. Worst bit of damage, however, is that the solar array suffered a cascading failure: one panel broke loose and tumbled end-over-end across a few hundred others. Power&rsquo;s still nominal, though. We&rsquo;ll get it fixed.</p>
+<p><strong>Phys-side:</strong> They weren&rsquo;t kidding about the jerk. Two of them, actually, as the engines fired a half second after the jerk reached the torus. We&rsquo;ve got two injuries down here &mdash; bumps and bruises. Reports from the torus indicate that damage was minimal. Some sloshing from the hydroponics, but that&rsquo;s easy to clean up. One of the furnaces will need some care. Worst bit of damage, however, is that the solar array suffered a cascading failure: one panel broke loose and tumbled end-over-end across a few hundred others. Power&rsquo;s still nominal, though. We&rsquo;ll get it fixed.</p>
 <p><strong>Phys-side:</strong> Did you feel anything up there?</p>
 <p><strong>Sys-side:</strong> Har har. No, nothing up here. I, like you, wish that we had, though. If there had been some sudden jolt or a flicker of the lights, I think that perhaps this launch would have felt more real. I suspect that my cocladist, Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled, would have simulated an earthquake at the exact moment of launch, destroying its home in the process, but alas, it was one of those hopeless romantics who transferred entirely to the LVs without leaving a fork. I will have Ioan (my pet historian) ask it if it did so from the LVs. I would not be surprised.</p>
 <p><strong>Phys-side:</strong> Your clade sounds fascinating. I don&rsquo;t understand a single bit of it.</p>
@@ -285,7 +285,7 @@ Launch director</p>
 <p><strong>Sys-side:</strong> You too.</p>
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-                <p>Page generated on 2021-10-17</p>
+                <p>Page generated on 2021-11-17</p>
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