“Want to use the main viewers?” the CO asked, pointing forward.
While there was not a huge amount of lateral space in the conn, there was a bit more vertically. Oh, it wasn’t a high compartment, but there was some free space.
The Blade, during its repairs, had been upgraded with a set of adjustable screens for viewing in the conn. Made by the Adari, they were not only thin, they were flexible. They could be rolled down from the overhead and while fairly rigid were flexible enough that if someone hit them with his head they would bend rather than cause a concussion.
They also were selectively sizeable. Although they were normally rolled down so that they were only a meter or so in height they could be lowered all the way to the deck. With all six deployed and an exterior view on, it was a bit like being on the hull. The capability had forced the refitters to, reluctantly, remove the “window” in conn from the Blade.
“Not with what I’m working on, sir,” Bill said, grinning. “I don’t want the crew getting any more nervous about this mission than they already are. And having the astrogator obviously unsure where he’s going wouldn’t be good.”
“Just tell me we’re not going to hit any stars,” the CO said.
“Can’t, sir,” Bill replied. “Basically, we’re going far enough out that the star charts start getting iffy. I take that back. We shouldn’t hit any stars. Just the new visuals would prevent that.”
The viewscreens wouldn’t be of much use without something to see. Another upgrade had been to install a series of powerful telescopes on the sail and in “bubbles” about the circumference of the hull. With the new main telescope, which was good enough to resolve a twenty-meter diameter boulder on the Moon, the ship had powerful “eyes” pointed in every direction. In space, visual detection was still one of the better ways to find things. But the retrofit of such a large aperture telescope was a problem.
Initially the plans were to put a three-meter diameter mirror Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope on the sail. The problem with that was the fact that the three-meter honeycombed optic and housing and the tracking and pointing hardware would take up an area on the boat the size of a one-car garage. They might have gotten the various countries interested in this new “submarine” to think it was a helo hangar… or not. And the drag underwater would be God-awful. So a single large telescope idea was scrapped.
Weaver had figured out a better solution. He set up five smaller half-meter diameter telescopes in the right locations about the ship’s circumference so that they would look like they were pieces of a much larger mirror when they were pointed together. The mirrors were placed in a circle about the submarine’s hull and when acting together they acted like one mirror the diameter of the ship plus some — about twelve meters. In technical optics terms this was called a sparse array telescope. The actual configuration was known as a “circle five” primary optic.
The problem with the sparse array was that all the mirrors had to be precisely positioned and controlled to within a few millionths of a meter and this required two things: 1) Adar jitter control hardware and software and 2) the ship had to be pointed in the direction of the celestial object being observed. The design also limited the main scope to a degree or so of steering about the ship’s travel axis. On the other hand, there were five half-meter telescopes that could be used as separate systems giving full spherical view of the space around the ship. Each would have less resolving power but until someone came up with “long-range viewers” that not only could identify an individual face from a hundred light-years away but could do so faster than light… they’d have to put up with reality.
“What’s giving me fits is trying to get a good algorithm for the grav bubbles.”
On the previous mission the Blade had discovered that gravity worked differently between stars than it did in the immediate region of them. This caused a gravitational disturbance area around each star. The disturbance area was related to the size of the star, how massive it was. Around Sol it started at about a light-year and stretched for about sixty astronomical units, the latter being defined as the distance from the Earth to the sun, one hundred and fifty thousand kilometers or about eight light-minutes. Bigger stars had larger bubbles. In some cases, where two stars were in a binary or multi-star system, the bubbles overlapped, creating massive regions of gravitational disruption. Traveling into and out of the bubbles had been worked out. Moving through one of the multi-star regions, though, was “problematic.” The last time the Blade had traveled through one it had been bent, folded and darn near mutilated.
“I’ll add that I would prefer not to hit a grav bubble unawares,” the CO said dryly. The first time they’d gone through one, mostly unawares, it had sent the drive haywire and kicked the Blade through a dimension jump that left it forty light-years off-course. If it hadn’t been for Weaver and the other astronomers onboard, they’d still be playing “Lost in Space.”
“So would I, sir,” Bill admitted, peering at the screen. “But what’s really got me worried is what’s not on the charts. We’ve had teams out on the other planets doing paralax studies of stars and other stellar phenomena for over eight years. But we still don’t have solid distances and positions on every star in the catalogue, much less uncatalogued ones. And where we’re going, we’re hitting ‘uncatalogued’ area. So, really, I don’t know what’s out there for sure and for certain.
“And it’s not just stars we’ve got to worry about. I’ve got to worry about. We don’t know if there are any black holes out there, for example. Just because they’re not on the charts doesn’t mean they’re not there. And the course I’m laying in is going to put us in just the sort of area where they’d be undetected. There’s only two ways to detect them at any range. Either by effect on nearby stars — and I’m planning on staying far enough away from stars that that’s not a way to see them — or if they occlude a star. Then they make a particular diffraction pattern of the occluded star’s wavefront as predicted by general relativity: That’s a sort of cross pattern that’s really cool. But that doesn’t matter.”
“Are we getting anywhere with this?” Spectre asked, sighing. Sometimes Weaver’s technobabble could try a saint.
“The thing is, sir, they just sit there,” Bill said, frowning. “Well, sort of. If the black hole has been around long enough to start sucking in matter the accelerated ionized debris will be emitting gamma rays like all get-out. That is why I wanted to have us grab the Chandra X-ray telescope out of orbit and mount it in the ship somewhere, but NASA whined and whined… so we aren’t gonna be detecting the black holes that way and our on-board X-ray telescopes ain’t accurate enough to do us any good in that regard. Besides, we don’t know that all black holes have accretion disks that emit gamma rays. Though I kinda think they do.”
“So we’re not getting anywhere with this?” the CO growled.
“Bottomline, sir?”
“Please.”
“There’s just no sure way to detect them until it’s too late. We probably shouldn’t get near one, but it’s got me worried. So do undetected neutron stars. Those are less of an issue since they generally give off a pretty solid X-ray signature. Actually, it’s strong enough to kill us if we’re not in warp…”