LOG ENTRY - SOL 19
It was kind of chilly this morning. The Hab is built to run off of half the solar cells it actually has and only four of the twelve renewable fuel-cell batteries in case a presupply flight crashes, but it wasn’t built to recharge the batteries on something the size of Skylab or the space shuttle. We went into low-power mode not long after I hooked up the electricity to the alien ship, and Mars and thermodynamics did the rest. Even with the atmospheric regulator and oxygenator providing heat, it wasn’t much above freezing when we woke up.
I did a quick EVA to unhook the power long enough to warm the Hab back up and make breakfast. The aliens- you know, I’m going to stop calling them aliens. They’re three ponies, a dragon… and whatever Dragonfly is. Starlight’s tried five different times to tell me what the bug is, and I get five different answers- “bug”, “fairy”, “changer,” “exchanged,” and “Doris.” Okay, I made that last one up, but you get the idea.
So, the pony crew gathered together in another meeting during breakfast, and sure enough they had another of their little squabbles. This time, though, it was Cherry against the four others, and for a moment I thought there was going to be a mutiny. Then they quieted down and began working with the whiteboards, writing in their language.
I haven’t mentioned their writing yet, except to mention that they have more or less our numbers and something very similar to Greek letters. Well, it turns out their regular alphabet has twenty-six letters, same as the English version of the Roman alphabet. The letters are similar, but not identical, so every time I look at their writing I have the feeling that if I squint I can read it. I tried. It doesn’t work.
Anyway, Starlight and Dragonfly did most of the writing, with occasional questions from Cherry. Spitfire never said a word after the writing began. Fireball held his peace until the end, when he said something very long and grumpy-sounding. Funny thing is, he didn’t look annoyed. If anything, he looked worried. I’ve never seen a worried dragon before. Considering how tough he is, I wondered what dragons have to be worried about.
Well, I found out. As soon as the meeting broke up, Starlight and Spitfire came over to me. Apparently it was time for our daily mutual dose of babelfish.
Transcript of the conversation:
STARLIGHT: Benign pre-noon.
WATNEY: Good morning to you too, Starlight. What were you talking about?
STARLIGHT: Need stones.
WATNEY: Okay, we can-
STARLIGHT: Is important: Stones. Gems. Crystals. Rocks. (Note: under the translation spell I heard Starlight say the same word in her language four times running. The spell offered a different translation each time.)
WATNEY: What for?
STARLIGHT: Cherry fix ship wants, need engine crystals. I magic more want, need gems batteries. Fireball gems eats, almost out.
She turned off the spell at that point and showed me the other whiteboard, the one with the big pretty pictures for pre-K students and ignorant aliens. It showed a drawing of what had to be their warp drive or whatever with a big wedge of crystal surrounded by gadgets. Next to that was a cutaway diagram of one of the magic batteries the ponies had salvaged from their ship. Finally, there was a cute drawing of a little green and purple dragon- definitely not Fireball, who is white and red with rounded gold spines- snacking from a bowl of cartoony faceted gemstones.
We erased the board (after I took a photo- Starlight wouldn’t let me otherwise) and got to picture-talking, while Cherry and Dragonfly went out to do systems checks on their ship and Fireball and Spitfire worked on bringing in more dirt.
I tried to supplement the pictures with the few words of their language I’ve picked up, but Starlight kept looking at me funny. Eventually she made an eating motion with her hooves and mouth and repeated a word I’m not even going to try to transcribe. Its vowel sound was somewhere between a short U and the sound a horse makes when it’s begging for sugar or apple slices.
I couldn’t even come close to reproducing it. Starlight had no problem with “eat”, though. Typical. First I had to deal with sufficiently advanced technology, then sufficiently advanced magic, and now I’m confronted with sufficiently advanced nasal passages. My plan to learn the pony language may have just hit its first hurdle.
Aside from that things were pretty grim, especially for Fireball. Turns out that he has at most twenty-five days of food at short rations. His meal packs are specifically formulated to include little bits of gemstone, sort of like onions in meatloaf or sprinkles on a cake.
He also has a few stones as snacks, which he’s been trying not to eat if he can help it. He’s got ten left, all this rich blue color. I think they’re sapphires, but I’m not sure. The smallest one is about the size of a value-menu hamburger, and on Earth would probably be enough by itself to buy me a mansion in River Oaks or some similar swanky neighborhood. Here it’s just food, and food only a dragon can eat.
Once his rations and the gems are gone, Starlight thinks he’s going to begin suffering from malnutrition. He can eat other meal packs- he can technically eat almost anything- but he needs at least a few gems to stay healthy.
I’m not going to question how that even works, especially since I’ve been dealing with the results of his meals for the past week or so. His shit stinks just as bad as the rest of it, and aside from being slightly drier and more powdery inside it’s not all that different. Which doesn’t make any sense, but if NASA wanted someone to make sense of such things they’d have sent up a wizard instead of a botanist.
Come to think of it, I don’t believe NASA has any wizards in the astronaut corps yet. Another thing that needs correction, all you historians and scientists of the future reading this. I’m sure that, given the opportunity, hundreds of candidates with a master’s degree or higher in Applied Thaumaturgy or similar disciplines will jump at the chance to join. Start printing those applications now, is all I’m saying.
But I’m getting away from the problem. The ponies need gems to feed their big muscle man (dragon). They need bigger gems to rebuild their magic batteries. And they need at least one huge gem to replace their warp drive. Why I don’t know- that ship of theirs is about as safe to fly as a cardboard box. But maybe they’re thinking contingency plan, and I can’t blame them.
The thing is, Mars has lots of crystals, at least in theory. Mars rovers and orbiters, and also Ares I and II, have discovered traces of a lot of precious and semi-precious gems, though so far the only crystals we’ve actually found bigger than sand grains are hematite, magnetite, gypsum and olivine. Starlight vetoed them all. Fireball can eat olivine, but it’s too brittle to use for their technology. Gypsum, of course, is worse- you can crumble gypsum in your fingers. And hematite and magnetite, according to Starlight, won’t even take a magic charge because of electric interference.
After spending an hour looking through the geology reference manuals NASA provided us with on my computer, she identified quartz and ruby as the ideal materials. That’s a problem. Ruby is unknown on Mars, and we’ve only found traces of quartz and feldspar from orbit in places where really old volcanoes have eroded away.
The problem is (if I’m remembering my briefings correctly- I was Lewis’s backup for geology work) most of the really hard gems and crystals are associated with either metamorphic rocks or light, slow-cooling granite formations. And the thing about both granite formations and metamorphic rocks is, you usually find them in mountains. And Ares III is in the least mountainous region on the entire planet.
Leaving aside crater ridges, you can see from the hab clear to the horizon 3.4 kilometers away. Even the mud volcano Starlight and her friends crashed into is below the horizon, too low-slung to see from here. The closest known traces of quartz are in Arabia Terra two thousand kilometers away, and the most promising locations for mining are in the two volcanic provinces, Tharsis and Elysium… each halfway around the planet from here.
Instead of mountains, the Hab sits on an unknown depth of ancient alluvial deposits which buried any early volcanoes this area had before the first multicellular life appeared on Earth. There’s some low rock outcrops nearby surrounding a crater, but the first look seems to indicate they’re layered, sedimentary rocks- no good for gems. The only gems larger than a grain of sand we’re likely to find here will be inside meteorites, created by ancient impacts during the dawn of the solar system.
Oh, perfect. As I’m typing this Johannsen’s Beatles collection has cycled round to a particular song. I’m sure you can guess what it is.
Ponies from the skies need diamonds…
That’s it. I found Beck’s personal data stick; let’s see what’s on it…
… medical journals. Directories and directories of nothing but medical journals. Dammit, Beck, you're a cool guy, but you have no life whatever.
So that leaves Lewis’s data stick. I’m a little reluctant to look into it, probably because she was our mission commander. But I’m just about sick enough of the lads from Liverpool to take the plunge.
Food. Water. Gems. And now entertainment.
Mars, could you please give us one little gift?
I don't suppose the geology equipment includes any diamond-tipped sample drills? Not that they'd be incredibly useful, but they'd at least do something for Fireball's food supply if all else failed.
8666022
I'm guessing that wouldn't cover more than a day of rations. You don't need much diamond for tools like that.
8666037
cant magic duplicate things?
why not use the nuclear reactor that was burred when the team arived?
If Mark has available aluminum oxide, finely ground, he can make rubies. Combined with chromium oxide in a high heat (2000 degrees Celsius) furnace, it is possible to synthesize rubies. So: dragon+chemicals+furnace, and a little luck, and Fireball eats well.
Edit: This is known as the Verneuil process.
"sufficiently nasal passages"
I think that that works alright, but was there supposed to be an additional word in there?
Ah, happy birthday!
8666077 The RTG only puts out 100 watts of actual electricity, or a bit less than two solar panels' worth of juice. The only reason it's there is because the MAV needs a steady electrical supply that will last four years without interruption to produce the fuel it needs for liftoff. At this point Watney wouldn't have the incentive to overcome the trained resistance to sharing one's immediate living environs with a large casing filled with pellets of plutonium.
8666077
Probably it can't heat up the whole hab, only a contained space like the Rover.
Can he not eat aluminum or other spare bits of the Hab or other Spacecraft littering Mars?
They've found opals in Martian meteorites. Apparently you can get opals where you either have or had hot water and silica interacting for a while, like ancient hot springs or fumaroles. Don't suppose that this region of Mars might have some dead hot springs within easy walking distance? I admit that would be a long shot, even if Big Guy can eat opals..
Happy Birthday
8666119
I imagine there's not a single pure material included in anything NASA sent to Mars. I'm sure just about every metal is going to be an alloy, and if not an alloy, the grains will be sufficiently small and compact for toughness, unlike the enormous single crystal structures seen in the show. They would probably give Fireball indigestion or something.
Fictional applications of metallurgy.
8666114 Oh, it probably could make a run at it, but not all by its lonesome. I think there's actually a point in the book where he tries it, at some point after he uses it to make a water heater for hot baths. Lemme look it up...
... yeah, on Sol 380 Watney specifically says the RTG isn't enough by itself to heat the Hab. Mars wins that battle of thermodynamics without the Hab's other heating systems operating.
8666129 Yep, and I believe Curiosity found opal deposits on the surface as well.
8666103 Hm. Does PU238 count as gemstone? If so, Watley has a few weeks worth of dragon-fuel there, but he may need to stay on the other side of the Hab...
Isn't it obvious? Pinkie packed the dry-erase markers.
Therefore, they change hue according to the user's intent.
8666178 Intriguing thought, but would that make Fireball a PU-238 explosive space alligator?
And would Mark have to change his name to Marvin?
you would be bored with Hockey too after the Blackhawks got SWEPT by my Nashville Predators in the FIRST ROUND of the 2017 Stanley Cup Playoffs, and they aren't doing so hot in the 2017-2018 season!
Happy birthday mein freund!
8666195
If mark starts going by Marvin, then he'll need some instant martians to use all the extra water they now have on...
A few meteorites have gems inside. It was on one of the episodes of "Meteorite Men "
8666195
Interesting depleted uranium is considered almost as hard as diamond and Plutonium is nearly chemically identical to uranium
8666103
it was used as a heat source for the rover, wasn't it?
edit: read other comments, makes sense now, thanks for the explanation, but wouldn't he still experiment with it?
8666313 Somewhat different circumstances. Watney absolutely needed to maximize electrical resources for the rover's motors, which meant turning off the built-in heater. The RTG was brought in not for electricity but as a heat source. The rover interior being much smaller than the Hab's, the RTG was so good at heating it that Watney ended up hammering out a large chunk of insulation so more heat would leak out and keep the interior temperature below 100 F.
IMO Mark should put this plutonium thermoelectric generator he used in the book to heat up the rovers, in the machine room of the alien ship.
And he should weld the broken hull of this ship if he has a welding machine. If not, he can use his limited supply of duct-tape, patches, and glue to cover the gap. Then he and his friends could cover the rear section of the hull with a prism of dirt (after retracting the landing gear) and fill the machine room with pure oxygen at 1/5 atm.
Then our xenomorph pony can go to work covering the gap in the machine room from the inside with her spit/hardening alien goo.
Hey, Mark watched Alien movies, so he could ask about availability of the goo :)
P.S.
There is a pile of useless shards of the shattered teleportation engine and magical batteries, that could feed the dragon for a long time.
I am pleased that you write a Fimfiction cross over ·º·, How much trouble is Dragonfly's chute fabric, made through unspeakable means, to produce and would it contain atmosphere. It's pretty tough stuff and an inflatable dome would possibly provide an added layer of defense for the habitat from Mars' atmosphere.? Yeah, I know it's a tall "grasping straws" thought.
Also, do the ponies have a Morse code analog? Turning on and off the water flow in the water supply could provide pulse patterns that might be noticed?
edit: One way communication is better than no communication.
Happy birthday!
Yeesh. Having special dietary needs really sucks when you're in space.
For Fireball, needing crystals, Earth technology is full of the things.
Silicon chip and silicon solar cell substrates. The surface circuitry is parts per billion or so dopants. If they were using spray on substrate or graphene substrate, the material being tens or even thousands of times thinner and so lighter would enabbled hundreds of times the resources being sent, given the damping function has a minimum limit for mass , as in minmaxing between total mass used for a job, and that to limit vibrations, retain control, delta V, thermal etc.
Aluminium structure can burn in Martian CO2 atosphere, if compressed enough, to give the aluminium oxide needed to make Sapphire base, but can Fireball eat WHIPOX or other Sapphire fibre builds, or the glass fiber NOMEX spacesuit liners? And gens are extremely unreactive, unless Twilight didnt magically discharge them before checking them for teleportation, so why would they explode, being otherwise totally unlike all other attempted mateials, and CSP has no Dragons on its astronaught or tourist books to check the need to before?
Now Changelings will have the incentive to work on life support Orion, as in how many molecules go boom can be pushed at a time through a given build without breaking it? Even gypsum can withstand single particles of antimatter appearing in it at a time?
So today was my 44th birthday, and my uncle took me golfing in 45-degree weather on a soggy course. I had some fun, even if I shot miserably.
... in golf you're only as good as you say you are.
Picture yourself in a hab on a seabed
With alfalfa trees and polymer skies.
Somepony calls you, you answer quite slowly.
A mare who speaks word salad tries.
Cellophane curtains all shining and clear
Keeping the tater farm wet.
Look for the drake with the sun in his mouth
And he's gone.
Ponies from the sky need diamonds...
Okay, that's enough of that. In any case, unless Cherry wants to try her hoof at fast-yield rock farming, I get the feeling that approaching bull-honkery moment will have something to do with the gem supply. The key question may be what it is about a crystal structure that makes it ideal for magic.
What concerns me are the fewmets. Fireball's leavings may not smell any better than the rest of the crew's, but given his diet, they're still going to have a higher metal content. Even if the crops can handle it, that doesn't necessarily mean the crew can... though given what's already in the Martian soil, that may just be a sprinkling of extra unpleasantness on top of what was already there.
In any case, looking forward to more.
“What did you do on your birthday?” “I wrote a chapter of MLP fanfiction.”
I think they should first focus on gettting food for Fireball. It's just obvious.
Sapphires aren't nearly as expensive these days as Mark seems to think. University Wafer will sell you 150 mm diam 1 mm thick sapphire wafers for $110/ea in quantity.
8666713
You seem to be having some problems with you emojis
This was a really funny one, loads of great lines!
This was a great moment, not only does it make complete sense that 'changeling' is not directly translatable, but also fits the nature of the species that the translated definition changes each time.
I think this story may be partly responsible for why Starlight has been climbing to the top of the cutest pony list recently.
Aww!
And it's nice that that's still Starlight's default/preferred picture of a dragon, even after working with a different one in close proximity for a while.
Can't send wizards into space, they keep trying to swirl up the stars.
That's great! And their best song, too...
I'm afraid I'm being a bit slow here... What was Cherry arguing? I understand the food was in short supply, but what was her view on it that was different to that of the others?
8667257 Cherry is of the mind that it might be possible to throw together what remains of Amicitas, the MDV, and the MAV's descent/launch stage to build a working escape shift.
Or to put it another way, why don't Gilligan and the Skipper build a damn raft and go get help?
(Serious answer: the Gilligan's Island pilot had Gilligan and the Skipper doing exactly that. A rain squall and the prevailing currents brought them right back to the island after the kind of slapstick you'd expect.)
(Serious answer that actually applies to the story: Amicitas was damaged by the crash and is structurally unsound, the MDV was damaged by the storm and won't hold air, and the base of the MAV has no habitat. You would have to be absolutely desperate to make a "raft" out of them, and getting off the ground- never mind to orbit or to Earth- is highly questionable. But not absurdly impossible, which is why Cherry wins the argument on that point.)
8667372 I'm afraid I didn't get any of that from the story; how much was I meant to be able to pick up when reading it?
What is Doris ? ..
Makes perfect sense to me... but then again about the first thing I did after the wedding episode was dig into fae mythologies surrounding changelings
Food, probably
The words "sufficiently advanced magic" made me laugh so hard.
Alas. They're in rather low supply on earth
Try Discworld
Hah.
You poor, poor man
At least you're ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin' alive!
how specific is fireballs diet? i mean watney could potentially grow crystals for him if he could eat them.
8667033
Yeah, but even "cheap" gems become pricy once they become big enough. Even our grown'n' cut gems aren't usually super big like the typical equestrian gem.
i think it's worth mentioning that in the book, one of Mark's teammates had a collection of old TV shows, including The Dukes of Hazzard, Three's Company, and The Six Million Dollar Man.
Should've brought some riches along.
Of course, now that Spitfire has a slightly improved grasp of English, she may be able to enjoy those, if only to help improve her knowledge as a medic.
Sol 19
As to "who should learn whose language? ", I will point out that the Equestrians are likely to have Earth folks to talk to long before anyone from EQ shows up.
No.
9258997
Mars: "Die, already!"
I just started reading this today and so far I'm loving it, but I do have one complaint...
I enjoy the authors notes when they are about the chapter I just read or previous chapters, but unfortunately I'm going to stop reading them because you keep putting in spoilers! I highly recommend removing spoilers from your authors notes because I do enjoy your commentary on what you have already written or on the original Martian.
Problems without solutions Hope they have a breakthrough at some point
Heh... you're only a couple years younger than me lol