Astro Sciences, Friday
"Hey," Kaidan said to the class, looking not at all like he'd been up at the crack of dawn to make sure Joker's bed downstairs was set up right. "So, uh, we were going to run a class on the Doppler effect today. But an old friend of mine just dropped by - Flight Lieutenant Jeff Moreau. He's the best pilot the Alliance has got, and I thought it'd be a good idea to drag him in in case any of you are interested in becoming a pilot some day."
"Ha ha, drag the cripple, funny, Kaidan. Hilarious, even," Joker replied dryly. "And if you call me Jeff again, I will find a way to hit you with my crutch without breaking my arm in six places."
"Yeah, I'm Joker, and I’m the best damn helmsman in the Alliance fleet, don't let my charming good looks fool you. Hell, I can do a sucessful Mako-drop with only twenty meters of open ground. And if you don't want to become a pilot someday, you're probably mental like Alenko and like getting shot at."
"There's nothing crazy about the marine corps, Joker," Kaidan said lightly. "We do good work." And if it hadn't been for recent events, he might have even attempted - awkwardly - to crack a joke about crashing ships.
"Says the one getting shot at and breaking his brain," Joker taunted. "What you need to understand is that there's nothing that can prepare you for taking a ship like-- any ship out of dock and atmo and between galaxies. It's not theorems on a page, or equations, or any of that shit which Alenko is teaching you."
"I was actually saving astronav for later on in the course," Kaidan said. "Don't let the attitude fool you - he really can hit the head of a pin in any vessel." He shot Joker a dry look. "But I'll get out of your way."
"Hop to, marine, and get me a chair," Joker jibbed at him. "Before I tell Chakwas you left me standing around."
Kaidan walked over to grab Joker a chair and dutifully put it down on the floor behind him. "Thought you didn't want Chakwas knowing where you were," he said. "Something about syringes."
"That woman is going to stab me with every needle known to man and krogan for going off without her, especially to a potentially imuno-compromised location, but it would be worth it to see her wack you upside the head in her dignified doctor way," Joker cackled. "But I'm here to talk astronav and physics and flight, not send Tali vid of you getting beat up by the good doctor."
"Here's the basic thing you need to know; if you don't love your ship, eventually you'll crash her," he said directly to the students, carefully lowering himself into the chair and dropping his crutches to the side. "They say there's no way a bumblebee can fly, but she does it anyway, because it is what she was born to do. Probably an overly-poetic way of saying it, but it's true."
"Here's what you need to know. Your trajectory? Is affected by its shape, mass, spin, attitude, deformation of your ship, but only in atmo. Space is a whole new ballgame, because you have planets out there, pulling at you. Stars. Solar wind flares that are going to make your comms staff bitch like hell, and you probably don't want your baby getting melted unless she's into that kind of thing."
"Start with the simple shit, because it's not really that simple. Pilot 101, which I'm pretty sure they even define for the marines: Flight is the process by which an object moves, through an atmosphere or beyond, by generating aerodynamic lift, propulsive thrust, aerostatically using buoyancy, or by ballistic movement, without direct support from any surface. And you're not just driving. You have to know what the aerospace engineers were doing when they put her bones together. You need to know her software, her hardware, Aeroelasticity, Avionics, Astrodynamics... like I said, it's not the fucking math. You have to breathe the math. You don't have time to do the math. You have to helm thousands of tons of steel hurling through space at massive speeds that hurt to think about. And spaceflight is a walk in the park, since you generally don't have to deal with weather. Just politics, and that's your commander's problem."
"From what I understand, you guys don't have interstellar or intergalactic flight yet, which sucks for you. So let's talk interplanetary."
"Right now, you got remotely guided space probes have flown by all of the planets of the Solar System from Mercury to Neptune, with the New Horizons probe currently en route to fly by the dwarf planet Pluto and the Dawn spacecraft en route to the dwarf planet Ceres. The four most distant spacecraft -- Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 -- are on course to leave the Solar System," he read from a ragged bit of paper he pulled out of a pocket. "See, Kaiden? I did research. And it's pretty pathetic, guys, that none of these are manned. If you want a real mission, real flight, you don't send a drone. And you do not want to be sending an AI, because whoa, way to end the world. No Hal 9000-ness, okay? Bad. That is why you have people like me."
"Basically, interplanetary travel has to solve two problems, other than escaping from the planet of origin. First, the planet from which the spaceship starts is moving round the Sun at a different speed than the planet to which the spaceship is traveling, because the two planets are at different distances from the Sun. Kepler's third law. Know it, love it. So as it approaches its destination, the spaceship must increase its speed if the destination is closer to the Sun, or decrease its speed if the destination is further away. Two, if the destination is farther away, the spaceship must lift itself "up" against the force of the Sun's gravity. Doing this by brute force - accelerating in the shortest route to the destination and then, if it is farther from the Sun, decelerating to match the planet's speed - would require an extremely large amount of fuel. And the fuel required for deceleration and velocity-matching has to be launched along with the payload, and therefore even more fuel is needed in the acceleration phase. The change in speed required to match velocity with another planet is surprisingly large. For example Venus orbits about 5.2 km/s faster than Earth and Mars orbits about 5.7 km/s slower. To put these figures in perspective, Earth's escape velocity is about 11.2 km/second. So matching a space shuttle's velocity with that of Venus or Mars would require a significant percentage of the energy which is used to launch a shuttle from Earth's surface." Joker grinned wickedly. "Wake up, plebs, don't let me bore you to sleep."
It was possible he was having too much fun with this.
"For many years economical interplanetary travel meant using the Hohmann transfer orbit. Hohmann demonstrated that the lowest energy route between any two orbits is an elliptical "orbit" which forms a tangent to the starting and destination orbits. Once the spacecraft arrives, a second application of thrust will re-circularize the orbit at the new location. In the case of planetary transfers this means directing the spacecraft, originally in an orbit almost identical to Earth's, so that the aphelion of the transfer orbit is on the far side of the Sun near the orbit of the other planet. A spacecraft traveling from Earth to Mars via this method will arrive near Mars orbit in approximately 8.5 months, but because the orbital velocity is greater when closer to the center of mass - which would be the sun - and slower when farther from the center, the spacecraft will be traveling quite slowly and a small application of thrust is all that is needed to put it into a circular obit around Mars. If the maneuver is timed properly, Mars will be "arriving" under the spacecraft when this happens. The Hohmann transfer applies to any two orbits, not just those with planets involved. For instance it is the most common way to transfer satellites into geostationary orbit, after first being "parked" in low earth orbit. However the Hohmann transfer takes an amount of time similar to ½ of the orbital period of the outer orbit, so in the case of the outer planets this is many years - too long to wait. It is also based on the assumption that the points at both ends are massless, as in the case when transferring between two orbits around Earth for instance. With a planet at the destination end of the transfer, calculations become considerably more difficult. Especially since, like, that's ancient science. 1925 AD, pre-ME. How the fuck they managed to make it work, I have no idea."
"We tend to use fuzzy orbits and powered slingshots, mostly 'cause they're fun and easier, or aerobreaking, which is an art, but the marines on-board generally bitch about getting tossed around."
"Keep in mind, you have rockets, thrusters, engines - no mass effect generator, because you're all tiny - solar sails... you can't divert all power to thrusters like on your shows, because there's life support to deal with. And thermal shields. And engineers who get cranky if you take their guns offline because turians have no sense of adventure." Joker shook his head sadly. "Sometimes other species are allergic to fun. Or call it being a cowboy, but I don't have cows. Cows and ships don't mix. Hey, Kaidan, I want a cow on my next chair."
Kaidan held up his hands. "Take it up with your next commander. Don't think they'd be too happy with that, but..."
They were planning to unground Joker soon, right? It'd be crazy if they didn't.
"That's cute. You think they'll unground me. The only way the Alliance will unground me is if I agree to tow the party line, and hell if that's going to happen. I know what we did, and what happened, and I'm not going to pretend it was all a delusion," Joker scoffed. "Kids! No matter how good you are or how many lives you save! If you're driving around space marines or want to drive anything better than a shuttle or freighter, your boss gets touchy if you tell them they're delusional. Funny thing, that. They don't like hearing that you know they're wrong, and can and will take your ship. And, well, if they say you're not goin' nowhere, they have ways of making that happen. So. Know what you're getting into, and decide if it's worth it."
Someone was going a wee-bit planet-bound crazy, yes. Joker and Earth-grav were not good buddies.
Yeah, and Kaidan almost thought about breaking in and bustling him out of the room a few times, but... well. What would it hurt? It wasn't like the Alliance was going to find out about this and pull him... and it was true, and... the kids would have no idea what Joker was talking about.
"Probably a good place to finish this up on today, thanks, Joker," he said, scraping his throat. "We have some Alliance grade flight sims up here in the Danger Shop. Hope you took a lot of notes."
Joker just favored Kaidan with a Look, because he was perfectly aware of how deep in denial the other man was. "Yeah, sure, whatever," he replied. "Let's see how much I can crush whatever 'records' the have on the sims."
"This one's all yours," Kaidan said, nodding at the closest one. "Leather seats. Home programmed."
Don't judge Kaidan's denial, Joker. If he didn't have it, he'd be much more of a wreck than he already was.
"Ha ha, drag the cripple, funny, Kaidan. Hilarious, even," Joker replied dryly. "And if you call me Jeff again, I will find a way to hit you with my crutch without breaking my arm in six places."
"Yeah, I'm Joker, and I’m the best damn helmsman in the Alliance fleet, don't let my charming good looks fool you. Hell, I can do a sucessful Mako-drop with only twenty meters of open ground. And if you don't want to become a pilot someday, you're probably mental like Alenko and like getting shot at."
"There's nothing crazy about the marine corps, Joker," Kaidan said lightly. "We do good work." And if it hadn't been for recent events, he might have even attempted - awkwardly - to crack a joke about crashing ships.
"Says the one getting shot at and breaking his brain," Joker taunted. "What you need to understand is that there's nothing that can prepare you for taking a ship like-- any ship out of dock and atmo and between galaxies. It's not theorems on a page, or equations, or any of that shit which Alenko is teaching you."
"I was actually saving astronav for later on in the course," Kaidan said. "Don't let the attitude fool you - he really can hit the head of a pin in any vessel." He shot Joker a dry look. "But I'll get out of your way."
"Hop to, marine, and get me a chair," Joker jibbed at him. "Before I tell Chakwas you left me standing around."
Kaidan walked over to grab Joker a chair and dutifully put it down on the floor behind him. "Thought you didn't want Chakwas knowing where you were," he said. "Something about syringes."
"That woman is going to stab me with every needle known to man and krogan for going off without her, especially to a potentially imuno-compromised location, but it would be worth it to see her wack you upside the head in her dignified doctor way," Joker cackled. "But I'm here to talk astronav and physics and flight, not send Tali vid of you getting beat up by the good doctor."
"Here's the basic thing you need to know; if you don't love your ship, eventually you'll crash her," he said directly to the students, carefully lowering himself into the chair and dropping his crutches to the side. "They say there's no way a bumblebee can fly, but she does it anyway, because it is what she was born to do. Probably an overly-poetic way of saying it, but it's true."
"Here's what you need to know. Your trajectory? Is affected by its shape, mass, spin, attitude, deformation of your ship, but only in atmo. Space is a whole new ballgame, because you have planets out there, pulling at you. Stars. Solar wind flares that are going to make your comms staff bitch like hell, and you probably don't want your baby getting melted unless she's into that kind of thing."
"Start with the simple shit, because it's not really that simple. Pilot 101, which I'm pretty sure they even define for the marines: Flight is the process by which an object moves, through an atmosphere or beyond, by generating aerodynamic lift, propulsive thrust, aerostatically using buoyancy, or by ballistic movement, without direct support from any surface. And you're not just driving. You have to know what the aerospace engineers were doing when they put her bones together. You need to know her software, her hardware, Aeroelasticity, Avionics, Astrodynamics... like I said, it's not the fucking math. You have to breathe the math. You don't have time to do the math. You have to helm thousands of tons of steel hurling through space at massive speeds that hurt to think about. And spaceflight is a walk in the park, since you generally don't have to deal with weather. Just politics, and that's your commander's problem."
"From what I understand, you guys don't have interstellar or intergalactic flight yet, which sucks for you. So let's talk interplanetary."
"Right now, you got remotely guided space probes have flown by all of the planets of the Solar System from Mercury to Neptune, with the New Horizons probe currently en route to fly by the dwarf planet Pluto and the Dawn spacecraft en route to the dwarf planet Ceres. The four most distant spacecraft -- Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 -- are on course to leave the Solar System," he read from a ragged bit of paper he pulled out of a pocket. "See, Kaiden? I did research. And it's pretty pathetic, guys, that none of these are manned. If you want a real mission, real flight, you don't send a drone. And you do not want to be sending an AI, because whoa, way to end the world. No Hal 9000-ness, okay? Bad. That is why you have people like me."
"Basically, interplanetary travel has to solve two problems, other than escaping from the planet of origin. First, the planet from which the spaceship starts is moving round the Sun at a different speed than the planet to which the spaceship is traveling, because the two planets are at different distances from the Sun. Kepler's third law. Know it, love it. So as it approaches its destination, the spaceship must increase its speed if the destination is closer to the Sun, or decrease its speed if the destination is further away. Two, if the destination is farther away, the spaceship must lift itself "up" against the force of the Sun's gravity. Doing this by brute force - accelerating in the shortest route to the destination and then, if it is farther from the Sun, decelerating to match the planet's speed - would require an extremely large amount of fuel. And the fuel required for deceleration and velocity-matching has to be launched along with the payload, and therefore even more fuel is needed in the acceleration phase. The change in speed required to match velocity with another planet is surprisingly large. For example Venus orbits about 5.2 km/s faster than Earth and Mars orbits about 5.7 km/s slower. To put these figures in perspective, Earth's escape velocity is about 11.2 km/second. So matching a space shuttle's velocity with that of Venus or Mars would require a significant percentage of the energy which is used to launch a shuttle from Earth's surface." Joker grinned wickedly. "Wake up, plebs, don't let me bore you to sleep."
It was possible he was having too much fun with this.
"For many years economical interplanetary travel meant using the Hohmann transfer orbit. Hohmann demonstrated that the lowest energy route between any two orbits is an elliptical "orbit" which forms a tangent to the starting and destination orbits. Once the spacecraft arrives, a second application of thrust will re-circularize the orbit at the new location. In the case of planetary transfers this means directing the spacecraft, originally in an orbit almost identical to Earth's, so that the aphelion of the transfer orbit is on the far side of the Sun near the orbit of the other planet. A spacecraft traveling from Earth to Mars via this method will arrive near Mars orbit in approximately 8.5 months, but because the orbital velocity is greater when closer to the center of mass - which would be the sun - and slower when farther from the center, the spacecraft will be traveling quite slowly and a small application of thrust is all that is needed to put it into a circular obit around Mars. If the maneuver is timed properly, Mars will be "arriving" under the spacecraft when this happens. The Hohmann transfer applies to any two orbits, not just those with planets involved. For instance it is the most common way to transfer satellites into geostationary orbit, after first being "parked" in low earth orbit. However the Hohmann transfer takes an amount of time similar to ½ of the orbital period of the outer orbit, so in the case of the outer planets this is many years - too long to wait. It is also based on the assumption that the points at both ends are massless, as in the case when transferring between two orbits around Earth for instance. With a planet at the destination end of the transfer, calculations become considerably more difficult. Especially since, like, that's ancient science. 1925 AD, pre-ME. How the fuck they managed to make it work, I have no idea."
"We tend to use fuzzy orbits and powered slingshots, mostly 'cause they're fun and easier, or aerobreaking, which is an art, but the marines on-board generally bitch about getting tossed around."
"Keep in mind, you have rockets, thrusters, engines - no mass effect generator, because you're all tiny - solar sails... you can't divert all power to thrusters like on your shows, because there's life support to deal with. And thermal shields. And engineers who get cranky if you take their guns offline because turians have no sense of adventure." Joker shook his head sadly. "Sometimes other species are allergic to fun. Or call it being a cowboy, but I don't have cows. Cows and ships don't mix. Hey, Kaidan, I want a cow on my next chair."
Kaidan held up his hands. "Take it up with your next commander. Don't think they'd be too happy with that, but..."
They were planning to unground Joker soon, right? It'd be crazy if they didn't.
"That's cute. You think they'll unground me. The only way the Alliance will unground me is if I agree to tow the party line, and hell if that's going to happen. I know what we did, and what happened, and I'm not going to pretend it was all a delusion," Joker scoffed. "Kids! No matter how good you are or how many lives you save! If you're driving around space marines or want to drive anything better than a shuttle or freighter, your boss gets touchy if you tell them they're delusional. Funny thing, that. They don't like hearing that you know they're wrong, and can and will take your ship. And, well, if they say you're not goin' nowhere, they have ways of making that happen. So. Know what you're getting into, and decide if it's worth it."
Someone was going a wee-bit planet-bound crazy, yes. Joker and Earth-grav were not good buddies.
Yeah, and Kaidan almost thought about breaking in and bustling him out of the room a few times, but... well. What would it hurt? It wasn't like the Alliance was going to find out about this and pull him... and it was true, and... the kids would have no idea what Joker was talking about.
"Probably a good place to finish this up on today, thanks, Joker," he said, scraping his throat. "We have some Alliance grade flight sims up here in the Danger Shop. Hope you took a lot of notes."
Joker just favored Kaidan with a Look, because he was perfectly aware of how deep in denial the other man was. "Yeah, sure, whatever," he replied. "Let's see how much I can crush whatever 'records' the have on the sims."
"This one's all yours," Kaidan said, nodding at the closest one. "Leather seats. Home programmed."
Don't judge Kaidan's denial, Joker. If he didn't have it, he'd be much more of a wreck than he already was.