V = (2μ/707E3 − μ/25350E3)0.5 = 3,697 m/s
Fortunately, this is achievable through low-tech means, as we shall see in the next volume.
Note that Lune’s sphere of influence—the maximum radius of a stable circular orbit—is just over 65,000 km. Past this point, the gravity of Earth (even murdered Earth) will perturb the orbit of an orbiting object over time, until the object either crashes, is ejected from the Earth-moon system, or becomes a stable satellite of Earth. Of the eight planettes orbiting Lune, Varna is the most remote.
The dimensions of Lune give it a surface area of 6.28 million square kilometers—about 17% of its original area, or 1.7% of Earth’s. This is slightly smaller than the continent of Australia, and while it includes ocean as well as land surfaces, it does create a plausible home for hundreds of millions of human beings even at sub-Queendom technology levels.
Fetula (Star Sail) and Sila’a (Pocket Star)
Camp Friendly’s “star” is a pinpoint fusion generator consisting of a wellstone-sheathed core of industrial neubles surrounded by gaseous deuterium in a state of continuous hot fusion. Orbiting the planette at a distance of 47,500 kilometers and with a period of 24 hours, it requires a total power output of 3.1×1013 watts in order to provide Earthlike insolation to the planette.
When focused into a laser beam and shone on a perfect, 1 km 2 light sail, this radiation produces the following maximum forces:
In fact, these forces are so high that for the first seconds of the journey it is necessary to throttle the sail’s reflectivity in order to avoid crushing the cabin and its passengers. Pushing the star sail ( fetula) using starlight alone is rather more difficult. The energy flux from starlight is approximately 1E−5 w/m2. If the sail is 100% transparent in one direction and 100% reflective in the other, the resulting force is:
Not much, but it does add up over time. If the sail were able to reflect high-energy cosmic rays, with a flux of 2E−4 W/m2, then its maneuvering ability would be about twenty times greater.
Tongan Culture
Some readers may note that I’ve taken liberties—or Bascal and Conrad have—with the Polynesian fairy tales. Two of three are not from Tonga at all, but from other parts of the South Pacific, and all have been modified to fit your screen.
Similarly, the prince’s boastful accounting of Tongan navigational prowess—while accurate—properly belongs to the entire Polynesian culture. Excellent references on this include Bryan Sykes’ The Seven Daughters of Eve, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, and the Lonely Planet travel guide for Tonga, which includes a surprising wealth of historical detail. An excellent English-Tongan dictionary is published by Friendly Isles Press (no known affiliation with the Friendly Products Corporation).
(On a related note, the Latin word viriditas, or “greenness,” generally connotes inexperience rather than vigor— an irony of which Bascal Edward is unaware at the time of the Children’s Revolt.)
The Cyades
Approximating each body of the near-contact comet pair as a clathrate sphere 100 km in diameter, with the approximate density of liquid water (typical for methane hydrates), yields a mass of 5.2e17 kg (or half a million neubles’ worth) apiece. Orbiting their mutual center of mass with an apoapsis of 500 km and periapsis of 50 km (just close enough to collide), the two bodies will complete a revolution in 3.7e9 seconds, or 118 years.
Decelerating with Magnets
The force of a magnet on a ferromagnetic material (such as iron or neutronium) drops off with the square of the distance between them, and is a function of the magnet’s residual flux density. The strongest fixed magnets in existence at the time of this writing are alloys of iron, boron, and the rare-earth (lanthanide) element neodymium, with residual flux densities of 13,300 gauss.
The acceleration profile described in this story requires a fixed magnet approximately 100 times more powerful than the NdFeB—speculative but not implausible given the nature of quantum-dot materials.
Observing the Neutronium Barge Telescopically
As any astronomer will tell you, light waves can’t be magnified forever. Over large distances, the resolving power of a telescope is constrained by the limit of diffraction, where the light breaks down into interference patterns rather than images. This is a function of wavelength, lens diameter, and range. At a distance of 0.2 AU, the smallest feature resolvable by a 200-meter lens in visible light is around 94 meters, or one-tenth of the barge’s diameter.
Appendix C.
The fax wars
The very first thing the Fax Wars revealed was the deep-seated desire of every human being to be larger. Not larger in the abstract, with respect to the environment, but larger in relative terms, with respect to his or her peers, on account of the latent genetic programming that equated height, and to a lesser extent muscle mass, with social status.
Simply scaling up the human form was quickly shown to be an unhealthy—and in some cases fatal—oversimplification. You couldn’t get more than about ten percent larger without major problems of bone diameter and systolic versus diastolic pressure coming into play. Not that this stopped everyone—among the eighty % of humanity who could afford fax access, average height increased overnight by about fifteen percent, and body mass by around thirty percent and we can only assume that each individual found a balance point between the pain and fatigue of gigantism, and the psychological distress of watching everyone else get larger.
The next wave began in the following year, with the first of many morphing filters that permitted intelligent, systemic changes to the human form under little more than voice command. The enormous mathematical complexity of these filters—which operated on the quantum waveforms themselves—are a testament to the cruel severity of the Old Moderns’ dysmorphic yearnings. Once again the change occurred abruptly, with some twenty percent of travelers exiting the system in body forms that could barely fit through the print plate, and most others opting for at least another ten to twenty percent height or mass increase.
The third wave followed close behind, with a series of conformal filters that bent the knees and elbows and neck just so, arranging the human body for optimal packing without major redesign of the ligature system. Soon, even larger giants were rolling out of the public faxes in a tight fetal crouch. And then of course came the ligature changes that allowed for tighter packing still.
At this point, regional and national governments (such as they were) applied pressure to the makers and operators of fax hardware, who were themselves greatly troubled by what they had wrought. Hard limits were imposed on the mass of a faxed human being, with no exceptions made even for the natural giants and willful corpulents who still existed here and there in the world. What followed was a brief but intense flurry of exotic body styles designed to circumvent the restrictions: bird-boned women towering over their stocky peers, and men with hollow sacs beneath their falsely bulging muscles.
This was solved with equally inflexible limits on height and volume, and later the ratio between them. As a result, some people refused to travel through the public networks at all, preferring to retain their ill-gotten glamour by traveling the long way around, in vehicles or on foot. However, the rapid disappearance of highways, airports, and other travel infrastructure—no doubt encouraged by the bribes of the early Fax Lords6—made such a lifestyle choice increasingly difficult and austere. And because it was also associated with religious extremism—the Murder-Me-Not crowd who believed their souls would be imperiled by the physical destruction of their original bodies—the practice was never particularly fashionable.