CH25
Boarding pods are extremely effective tools to conduct boarding operations with.
They have a number of advantages over space walk maneuvers:
The boarding teams stay concentrated rather than each marine individually piercing the hull, which may lead to defeat in detail.
The pods move much faster than the marines EVA units can.
The pods simplify hull cutting and reduce the engineering skill required.
The very fact boarding pods concentrate boarding teams into a single attack is also their greatest weakness.
A single lucky anti-missile shot can destroy the accumulated time and expense of collecting and training up to 5 marines. Considering boarding operations often require 21 marines for best results, boarding pod interceptions can be a frustrating and expensive loss to take. To combat missile interception, pilots often screen the boarding pods with other missiles like Flail missiles to draw point-defense weapons away from the pods and their valuable payload. The effectiveness of missile screens makes the use of pods vastly preferential to spacewalking.
"Okay now for the hard part. How do we get Marines into space and on board a Honji Sinhindrea Capital ship?" Jim asks.
They were in trouble. Big time trouble. Everything the group of them thought up Lucile would shoot down.
The problem was how do you take a troop carrier like an M113A1 and put wings on it? Another issue is having an engine in the back that works in atmosphere, in space, and having a method to breech the hull of a ship without losing aerodynamics required to get it off the ground.
Plus it had been worked out that you would want around 21 Marines to take something the size of a Honji Sinhindrea destroyer size capital ship. Plus they were having a hard time just getting five Marines in just one pod.
"Can we, …" and Jim is interrupted by Lucile.
"Alexis and Amanda are back." Lucile promptly disappears.
They can all hear both of them laughing even before the girls reach the top of the stairs. Everyone can see that the two of them are in very good spirits as they round the corner at the top of the stairs.
Kate is the first to rise and head for the girls followed closely by Natalie.
"I take it you two had a good time?" Kate asks them since they still have big smiles on their faces.
"We were in outer space!" Amanda tells them. "And these things are amazing!" As Amanda holds up her arm to show the bracer no one can see. "Isn't there something about a communication thingy?" Amanda looks puzzled.
"Rick?" Kate calls out.
"Already on order, it should be here, …"
Seagulls: Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine.
[repeatedly]
Nigel: Oh would you just shut up? You're rats with wings!
"I'll get it." Rick tells them.
Amanda glances at Kate with a puzzled 'What was that' look.
"That would be my husband. He watched an old Disney movie called 'Finding Nemo'. He fell in love with the seagulls squawking "Mine, Mine, Mine," over and over again. So he plugged it into the door bell for the front door.
"I keep forgetting to change it." Kate tells her. "His character traits can sometimes rub people the wrong way. But he kind of grows on you. And I love him, so what can I say?" Kate shrugs her shoulders.
Rick comes back with a really small package and hands it to Alexis. "Here you go pumpkin. I think you know what to do with this."
Alexis opens it and finds a tiny communication disk for Amanda. "Got it. I need to place this just behind your ear." She tells Amanda. "This is going to sting a bit but it won't last long."
And Alexis bends Amanda's ear so she can reach directly behind it. "OW!"
"There, now call for Lu, …um call for my sister Jenn over there." Alexis tells her.
"Just say her name?" Amanda is skeptical.
"Yup, all you do is call for the person you want to talk to, and that's it." Alexis assures her.
"Jenn?" Amanda asks tentatively.
"Hi Amanda. How were the stars at the Dome?" Jenn replies.
"That's amazing. I can hear her but only in one ear. So I can talk to anyone while I'm here?" Amanda asks.
"No, you can talk to anyone of us since we all have one from anywhere anytime." Alexis corrects her.
"So I can talk to you even if you are here and I'm in Montreal?"
"Yup! Or you can just get up and open a transmat wall on the front door down there and come see me and talk in person. Or me to you." Alexis tells her excitedly.
"Amanda sweetie, you can come here any time. You can always come here. Just show up that's all. Everyone in our family does and you can too." Kate tries to convince her.
"Just show up without notice?" Amanda is not so sure about this part.
"Yes sweetie, anytime. But if you feel more comfortable to ask first, you can. I think after you've done it a few times you'll get the hang of it." Kate tells her honestly.
"So I don't need to fly anymore?" Amanda wonders just how far this works.
"No, no more flying. You want to have dinner with us just show up. If you want to stay the night and go to your work in the morning, you can do that too.
Alexis knows how to get to the villa in the Caribbean and the house in Montana. You two can go whenever you please. Honest!" Kate draws an X on her chest.
"We go shopping in San Francisco or Munich or Sydney or wherever when the mood strikes us all the time. You and Alexis can go now." Kate clarifies hoping she sees the potential. "Not everyone knows about transmat walls so you do have to be careful that other people don't see you do it. But yes, anyplace – even back to the Evergreen if you like.
"Is that alright with you?" Kate asks her.
Amanda answers by launching herself into Kate's arms and begins to cry. She pulls away from Kate, wipes some tears away and does the same to Natalie who is also standing there.
"Once you get the hang of it, sweetie, you'll find yourself doing it all the time. You'll see." Natalie tells her.
"Why don't you two go down to the bedroom and rest till dinner. We'll call you when it's ready. We might even use your new disk behind your ear to do it."
"Have you shown her how the panels in the house work?" Kate directs her question to Alexis.
Alexis shakes her head. "I'll do that downstairs." She takes Amanda's hand and leads her downstairs.
Once they are out of ear shot, Natalie says to Kate, "Well that went well."
"Yeah, I think we both may have just gained a new daughter. That girl has been without family for far too long." Kate responds, shedding some of her own tears.
Natalie leans into Kate and whispers. "Alexis saved you, maybe she can save her too?"
"Maybe, lord knows she's good at it." Kate agrees and heads back for the others.
"Okay we've bought ourselves about another hour until dinner. What are we having anyway?" Kate asks.
Apple-Cranberry Stuffed Pork Chops
From the pantry:
2 tablespoon(s) unsalted butter
1/3 cup(s) finely chopped dried cranberries
1 1/2 teaspoon(s) garlic paste
1 teaspoon(s) kosher salt
3/4 cup(s) (14-ounce) shredded sharp Cheddar cheese
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Flour, for dusting
1/2 cup(s) chicken broth
2 tablespoon(s) Dijon mustard with honey
More Pantry Staples
Fresh ingredients:
3/4 cup(s) finely chopped onion
1/3 cup(s) finely chopped celery
1 tablespoon(s) chopped fresh sage leaves
1 Granny Smith apple
6 (5-ounce) boneless center-cut loin pork chops (1 inch thick)
1 1/2 cup(s) apple juice
Accompaniment:
Sugar snap peas
Mashed potatoes
"Let's get back to discussing boarding pods. Can we use a modified old school NASA shuttle? We could house the Marines in the cargo hold. Perhaps one of the Marines doubles as a pilot or the pod is automatic and pilots itself?" Don offers up.
"How do we off load the Marines? Out the top thru doors that open outward doesn't sound practical." Tom counters not liking this idea.
"Then we need to exit out the front." Don states.
Lucile shows up. "To do that would mean having a flat nose to provide the airlock access with which to breach the enemy ship. Without the aerodynamics it would never get off the ground." Lucile counters, shooting that idea down.
Everyone is quiet for a while. "Does it have to return?" Jim asks.
"You mean one shot boarding pods. Use them and then throw them away? These things are likely to cost millions. We are going to need an air wing of them. And you want to throw that money away?" Natalie asks questioning her husband's sanity.
"Well if you had the chance to take an enemy capital ship intact, how much money would you be willing to spend?" Jim counters.
"Point taken." Natalie agrees. "But what does having throw away pods get us?"
"If they don't have to come back we could blow the wings off or blow the nose cone off the front end. And if we do an automatic pilot we can move the cargo bay forward making room for the engine section in the back, since we won't need a pilot seat or co-pilot seat." Jim argues, thinking he is on to something.
Lucile takes his idea and starts running with it. "With no pilot we could have an internal arm similar to the one those old shuttles had to use to launch satellites. We could mount a plasma torch on the end and maybe add a grenade launcher to it."
Think about one of those old 'Aliens' movies where a salvage team used this arm to cut a hole in the ship and then sent it in with a video camera to check the interior before they entered. Just instead of a video camera, as soon as the hull falls away, it shoots a number of grenades or flash bangs thru the opening before the Marines enter thru the hole that was just cut."
"Lucile, you must really like those movies." Rick comments. "First it was the acid for blood stuff, now this."
"I seem to lack the inventive creativity or imagination that you have. So I borrow from movies that are available and see if they can be adapted to solve the problem." Lucile tells Rick.
"I don't remember seeing that bomber in any movie?" Rick counters.
"That was an artist's rendition of an attack ship. I simply borrowed the airframe and attached weapons that are available with today's technology." Lucile explains.
"Sorry to burst your bubble Lucile, but that right there IS imagination. You may think of it as something else, but it was your imagination that took that picture and added today's weapons to it." Kate counters.
Lucile simply remains silent.
"Okay Lucile, you now have a design parameter based on dad's verbal analysis. Show us what you can do." Tom challenges her.
Lucile replaces her projection with one of an old fashioned NASA space shuttle. In a series of flashes she adds engines, flattens it considerably, adds winglets to the wing tips, inserts an airlock door at the front, attaches and then shows how the nose cone detaches and falls away. Inside she adds seats with a pull down overhead harness. She adds storage for food and water under the seats and houses the weapons the shuttle will carry on either side of the airlock door. Then she takes away one of the seats and goes from 6 to 5 and expands the storage locker between it and the first seat and places explosives and weapons inside.
Next comes the arm that swings down from above with a plasma torch attached to the end. Lucile then demonstrates how the grenades are launched off the arm behind the torch. She shows how it re-stows itself back up into the ceiling. Men and/or women are shown sitting in the seats wearing the gear previously discussed.
The display shows how they stand up and activate the belt for their space suit and insert the breather in their mouths which is attached to the harness that they lift up in order to stand. Then their weapons are removed by the person up front and handed back.
The arm swings down and the airlock door opens and the plasma torch is shown cutting a hole the same size as the airlock door. Then the grenades are shot thru the opening and the Marines enter one by one.
The automatic pilot or computer takes up the rest of the ceiling that the arm does not utilize. Lucile shows the engine section as a variation of the engines used on the fighter. Flattened and stacked on top of each other, they effectively double the engine capacity that the fighter has to account for the additional load of the Marines and their equipment.
Lucile starts to shorten or add length to the design as well as either flatten or add height as required to achieve optimal results. She adds a large first aid kit into the ceiling at the back and raises the overall height a fraction to account for the lost computer space due to the installation of the first aid kit.
In the floor that they are standing on is a large flat space located between the landing gear needed for take-off that gets retracted. In it is located the carbon dioxide scrubber.
Objective
A submarine sodalime scrubber was filled with (18.73 ± 0.02) kilograms of sodalime. The base of internal bed dimensions is about 299 by 278 millimeters and height is 276 millimeters. Calculated bulk density from that is d = 0.82 kilograms × dm-3. This means that it corresponds to the density determined earlier in the laboratory. The total flow resistance (channel flow resistance and bed flow resistance) in the carbon dioxide scrubber is measured with the aid of an attached differential manometer. For air steam, (1320 ± 10) dm3 × min-1 bed resistance was Dp = (100 ± 2) pascals. From these measurements, sodalime qualities can be determined for the shape factor of sodalime particles, which is needed for scrubber pre-design.
Monitoring System
A submarine was equipped with a portable atmospheric monitoring system. The monitoring system consisted of four carbon dioxide gas analysers (Polytron IR CO2), produced by Drägerwerk AG (Lübeck, Germany).4. These analysers were placed in the bow, midship, stern and hydro-cabin. The analysers were connected to a typical personal computer by Advantech data acquisition modules into exchange electronic signals standard RS 485 net. Readouts were recorded every five seconds.
Lucile was forced to stop when Rick announced that dinner was ready.