Blue Star Enterprises Chapter 52 (Patreon)

Alexander sat down at the table a few minutes before the meeting was set to start. With the delivery from Jasper, the defense project wrapping up, and the repairs on the facility well underway, he finally had time to start the project he had been waiting for. It was time to discuss building his first engines, he just had some questions to ask Matthews and his engineers first.

It was too bad his friend Jasper and the Zephyr had left the system a few hours ago. He would have liked to get his opinion on some of his ideas. With his friend gone, it would be quite some time before he saw the man again. While the parting was bittersweet for Alexander, he knew it was the right decision. There was no use rational reason for Jasper to risk himself and his crew if he didn’t need to.

The screen turned on, and Alexander saw two people. One was Matthews, and he assumed the smaller woman sitting off to his side was likely his chief engineer.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Kane. As you requested, I have invited my chief engineer, Aria Sullivan to this meeting. What did you want to discuss with us today?”

“Thank you for taking the time to meet with me. As you know, my original goal for coming out here was to start a company that produces spacecraft engines. A company I finally founded with the help of Captain Daniels. Blue Star Enterprises' big debut might have been delayed due to a few unforeseen factors. The missing equipment, the state of the facility, and the need to build defenses. But now I’m finally ready to begin designing my first engine.”

Matthews nodded. “I am aware of most of your troubles. But how does this concern the Hawks? We can’t provide you with any design specifications for the Talon. Even when it comes time for you to build our upgraded propulsion system, you would need to purchase the design from STO space.”

Alexander waved away the man’s concern. “No, nothing like that. I was more curious about why larger ships, like Captain Na’s use compressed plasma ejection instead of the more common fusion pulse drives?” It had been a bit of a surprise when he saw this on the Destiny’s design schematic.

“Size constraints mostly,” the Chief Engineer of the Talon responded.

Alexander quirked an eyebrow at that. “I would think storing fuel would take up much more space than simply using up the reaction mass. Am I wrong?” He wasn’t quite that far in his engineering studies.

The woman shook her head. “At first glance, perhaps. But when you factor in the containment systems required to move the nearly spent plasma from the fusion chamber and to the engines, you lose quite a bit of space. There are other things to consider as well. The biggest consideration is the ability to enter an atmosphere. No ship equipped with a compressed plasma ejection system would be allowed to enter a planet's atmosphere. The temperatures are such that the exhaust plays merry hell with any combustibles near it. That includes the thirty percent oxygen mix of a standard atmosphere. It wouldn’t ignite the entire atmosphere or anything silly like that, but it would create a huge fireball, potentially large enough to destroy the ship. And while pulsed fusion still uses a fusion reaction, the individual pulses are far cooler than ejected plasma.”

“…Oh… Yeah, that wouldn’t be good. Thank you for answering that question. My next question has to do with reaction mass. Doesn’t plasma ejection reduce the overall life of your fusion plant?”

“Of course it does,” the engineer replied. “But most ships have what's called a fifty-year core. During normal operation, the reaction mass would last for fifty years. This is standard across any ship capable of FTL. It can also easily be topped off since the fuel used to run the fusion plants is relatively safe. In –,” the woman paused to speak with Matthews while the line was muted.

The man rubbed his chin in thought at whatever she had said to him before finally nodding.

The audio came back on and she apologized. “Sorry about that. Had to make sure what I was about to tell you wasn’t part of our operational security. As I was about to say. In normal combat operations, that reaction mass would last the Talon a year. That is a year of constant maneuvering and fighting. Sitting about like we are now, we could go ten years or more depending on maneuvering needs. It’s a trade-off for sure. Refilling reaction mass is more expensive than topping off the T20 and D2O burned by the more common pulse drive, but compressed plasma ejection also offers more thrust. A ship like the Talon can’t keep up with something like the Zephyr even with our more powerful engines, but it can still accelerate at a pretty decent speed. Since we don’t need the speed as much as a smaller cargo ship might, it's not really an issue.”

“Thank you for the information. It seems I have a lot to learn still.”

The woman nodded.

“Any more questions for us, Mr. Kane?” Captain Matthews asked.

He shook his head. “Not at the moment. I think what you’ve told me so far has helped to point me to where I need to begin my efforts. Thank you.”

“Good Luck, Mr. Kane. Maybe you’ll even have something ready for us to see before we leave?”

Alexander chuckled at the Captain’s statement. “No pressure then,” he made his avatar smile.

The pair smiled back before the video cut off.

While it was true, that this meeting helped narrow his design efforts, Alexander had already been leaning toward the more common pulsed fusion drives because they were… more common. It seemed like a prudent choice if he wanted to carve out a market share from the other giants. In time, he was sure he would branch out into the compressed plasma engines, but that was still quite a ways off.

He chuckled internally as he thought of something. If the people from back in his time saw what these thrusters and the propellants they were using were capable of, he was certain they would have passed out in shock.

It was a good thing the elements needed to produce this fuel were easy and abundant in most systems with gas giants. Y6X-3H2 had two such planets, making gathering the elemental hydrogen and oxygen rather easy. Yup, the fuel used to propel ships at a fraction of the speed of light was water or a manufactured version of it. Good old heavy water and super-heavy water.

Using an initiated fusion reaction was brilliant. It reminded him of a much more sophisticated version of the nuclear pulse propulsion concept he recalled from back in his day. He wondered if that theory was what eventually led to this design.

Pulsed plasma was similar to the compressed plasma ejection since it used the results of a fusion process as the thrust. It was why he was confused when he first saw the form of propulsion that Na’s ship used. According to Matthews’ chief engineer, Aria Sullivan a ship with pulsed plasma could land on a planet because there was little concern of it igniting the surrounding air.

That meant the Zephyr could land on a planet if it wasn’t so large. That meant the Destiny was definitely too large to land so the issue of igniting an atmosphere was sort of self-regulating. It was probably a deliberate design choice now that he thought about it. Anyone dumb enough to try and take a large ship down onto a planet would blow itself up.

He switched gears and focused on the fuel needed. It was a good thing that the station, Na had offered him, came with the design specs for a fuel converter. Otherwise, he would have wasted quite a bit of time trying to figure that problem out.

Alexander left the communication tent and headed to his workshop. On his way, he could hear the excited laughter as the kids put the playground to great use. He couldn’t help smiling at that.

Once in the workshop, he projected an exploded view of the Omni engines on the Zephyr, along with the Sinorus engines on the Destiny. Then he walked into the massive hologram and closely examined every part as he manipulated the diagrams.

He could simply rip their entire design off and call it good. Alexander had no qualms about doing that anymore. But that was lazy, and he wasn’t the sort to do things half-assed. Over the next six hours, he poked at parts, tossed others away, and redesigned every single component to ensure there would be no mistaking that this engine was an original design.

What he found was a bit surprising. Some of the Sinorus components were superior to the Omni ones. At first, he thought this was simply due to the different forms of propulsion involved. But when he looked closer at what the parts did, he realized they did the exact same job.

When he was done, he stepped back and looked at the diagram. He moved his hands back together and the parts moved until the hologram was a single unit. From the back, not much had changed. The thrust cones were shaped slightly differently, but you would hardly notice unless you were someone like Alexander. The main difference came in the other components. The exposed bits looked slightly melted or more organic in nature. It would certainly require more printer time, but if it worked it would be worth it.

He saved the file as version one and loaded the simulation software he had purchased back on Petrov.

The simulation ran a whole three seconds before the hologram displayed a red fault message.

He had to dig around to find what the fault was. It was claiming the combustion chamber temperatures had exceeded specifications.

“No first-try home run this time,” he lamented as he tweaked the engine design and saved it as version two.

When the tenth test failed to produce a working design, he grew frustrated. He had nearly rolled back all of his changes and was almost back to the original Omni design. Gone was any Sinorus influence his design had carried before. But still, the damn program was telling him the design wouldn’t work.

He was wondering if he was doing something fundamentally wrong until he had the idea to run the original Sinorus engine schematic through the simulation program. It gave the engine a passing grade but highlighted possible failure points. If Alexander hadn’t noted those parts as superior to Omni’s during his deep dive, he wouldn’t have even second-guessed the program.

Suspecting something was up, he loaded the software onto a data chip and went to find Lucas.

It took some asking around, but he eventually found the man in the computer room as everyone called it. The room held the facility's servers. Much like the computer chips of this century, Alexander had no clue how these servers even operated. That was fine, he had Lucas for that until he got around to learning himself.

Speaking of Lucas, the man was sitting cross-legged on the floor with one of the servers in his lap. There were parts spread out all over the place and the man was listening to music while he soldered some components inside the case.

Alexander waited until the man was finished to get his attention. “Lucas, do you have a moment?”

The man looked over and smiled. “Oh, hey, Alex, what's up?”

The man had heard Yulia call him by that nickname and decided it was easier than using his full name. Alexander wasn’t really bothered by it, he just preferred his full name. It sounded more… regal.

He held out the chip. “I’m having an issue with this software I purchased. I was hoping you might take a look?”

The man paused in his reaching, instead of taking the chip like normal, he took it like it was radioactive. “You bought this from STO space?” he grimaced, barely holding the data chip between his fingers.

“Where else would I have purchased it from?”

The man shook his head and set aside the stuff he was working on. He got up and walked over to his tablet that was blasting the music. The music suddenly shut off as the man pushed the metal disk into the device. “I wish you would have come to me before running this software. You know there is a bounty out for me, right?”

“Yes. But what does this have to do with that?”

“Probably nothing. When I lived with my brother, I freelanced as a coder.”

“You mean you were a hacker?”

The man chuckled. “No. Well, not exactly. Companies paid me to make programs for them. Programs designed to prevent their competition from surpassing them. They were often designed to transmit any improvements these new companies ran through the testing software that I built for the original company. Under a separate third company's name, mind you.”

Alexander sighed. “You did corporate espionage?”

“More or less,” the man replied casually as he typed away at the pad. “I played both sides though. I would always reach out to the companies that bought the software and offer to do a penetration test after their newest secrets were somehow leaked to their competitors. I would miraculously find their leak that nobody on their internal teams could, and they would pay me handsomely. This went on for five years until one of the companies merged with the original company I designed the software for. They realized what I had been doing and placed a bounty on me. The rest is history,” he said as he pressed one last button before showing Alexander the screen.

“You know I’m not that advanced with code yet, just tell me what I’m looking at.”

The man rolled his eyes and pointed to a line in the code. “This transmits everything run through this software to a Qcomm. It’s a good thing we don’t have one otherwise your design would have gone straight to the owner of this code.”

That statement made Alexander extremely upset. Even out here, it seemed he couldn’t get away from the grubby little mitts of the corporations. “You’re certain that nothing got sent out?”

“About as certain as I can be. Whoever wrote this shit code never thought the people using it would be outside the range of a Qcomm, so they didn’t implement any contingencies.”

“So you didn’t create this one?”

Lucas shook his head. “Nope. There are plenty of other people like me in the core. Maybe not quite as talented, but they can still code something like this.”

“Can you remove that code to make the program safe again?”

“Sure, but that’s not gonna make it function.”

“What do you mean?” Alexander asked in confusion.

“The code isn’t only designed to trade all your secrets away. It’s also designed to prevent you from making something better than the people who paid for this code to be written in the first place."

"Omni," Alexander muttered, causing Lucas to pause and turn to him.

"You’re joking right?”

When Alexander didn’t say anything, the man sighed. “Of course it's Omni. You don’t do anything small do you, Alex? As for your next question, because I can already tell what you want to ask me, maybe. I might be able to make the program function correctly for its intended purpose. It’s going to take me a few weeks to go through the code. I have to make sure I’m not screwing up any of the calculations. Rocket science is not my forte, so if I get something wrong, it could make this entire simulation software useless.”

“Please, do what you can,” he glanced over at the disassembled server. “I’ll trade you two supercomputer chips for the work.”

“How can I say no to that,” Lucas chuckled. “I’ll do my best and get back to you as soon as possible… If you have any more software, bring it to me and I’ll look it over as well. No need for additional payment.”

Alexander thanked the man and walked out of the room, annoyed that he was once again delayed in producing a new engine design.

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This one turned into quite a chunky little chapter. But there was a lot to go through. I waffled quite a bit on what sort of engines might exist in the future. While BSE is soft Sci-Fi, I still want most of the things to be conceivably possible. Let me know what you think about my choices.