Notes: We are 1% away from desired power consumption reduction on the station. While this is within tolerances, we are expecting that, with the shutdown of the glass furnace at 2330, we will hit our mark of 15% station-wide power reduction. Congratulations!
Sys-side: The launch vehicles in their sabots are settled into their creches and the doors are shut. Everyone’s excited, but I’m pleased at the calm efficiency of the control tower I’m in (Blue). We are 1 degree offset spinward from the launch arm, so we should be able to see the start of the launch well enough.
+Phys-side: The launch vehicles in their sabots are settled into their creches and the doors are shut. Everyone’s excited, but I’m pleased at the calm efficiency of the control tower I’m in (Blue). We are 1deg offset spinward from the launch arm, so we should be able to see the start of the launch well enough, but the arm appears to disappear into nothingness after about 100m, so the show won’t be great past then. We’ll all be watching the cameras. Even those won’t be very exciting, given the speed the LVs will be going. Models suggest that we will likely feel a simple bang and sudden reduction in gravity, that will be quickly compensated by the rockets.
+Phys-side: Given your apparent interest in the subjective aspects of the launch, I have to say that I wish there was a big red button I could hit to trigger the launch. Wouldn’t that be satisfying? I picture it like one of the keyboards, where there’s some sort of spring in there, and a satisfying click as the button snaps down that last bit and makes some physical electric contact Everything’s done on a timer, however, and the chances of any manual intervention being required are essentially zero. Everyone in the tower here is essentially in place to take in data and give reports. I didn’t receive permission to pass those on directly, however, so you’re left with them being filtered through yours truly.
+Phys-side: One minute.
+Phys-side: Thirty seconds.
+Phys-side: Ten seconds. Godspeed.
+Sys-side: Godspeed, you poor fucks.
+Phys-side: 3
+Phys-side: 1
+Phys-side: HOLY SHIT
+Phys-side: They weren’t kidding about the bang. Two of them, actually, as the rockets fired a half second before the launch. We’ve got two injuries up here - bumps and bruises. Reports from the torus indicate that damage was minimal. Some sloshing from the hydroponics, but that’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’s still nominal, though. We’ll get it fixed.
+Phys-side: Did you feel anything up there?
+Sys-side: 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 if it did so from the LVs. I would not be surprised.
+Phys-side: Your clade sounds fascinating. I don’t understand a single bit of it.
+Sys-side: I will tell you a story one day.
+Sys-side: How do you feel with 20 years of work gone in an instant?
+Phys-side: I’m still processing that. Numb? Giddy? Can I be both at the same time?
+Sys-side: I see no reason why not. Why numb? Why giddy?
+Phys-side: Numb because there was nothing to see. Not even a flash. The LVs were here, and then they were gone, and I’ll never see them again. Giddy because it worked. Telemetry is good, speed is nominal, entanglement is nominal, radio communication is nominal, though the rate at which message times are increasing is surprising, though I knew that this would happy. How neat is that?
+Sys-side: Very neat. I feel much the same. I feel numb for the reason I mentioned above. They were here, and then they were gone, and there was no feedback from the action. As planned, we are hogging all of the entanglement bandwidth with communication, some of which you will be receiving on other streams. This is where the numb and the giddy cross, as in some ways, it feels as though they never left (modulo the fact that Dear would almost certainly rather talk via sensorium messages rather than text, but Codrin (Dear’s pet historian) is much suited to words. Giddy, though, because this remains exciting for all of us.