“More of a statement, sir.”
“Yeah, Chief?”
“Sir, there’s a grapping window on this submarine.”
“Spaceship, Mister Miller,” Weaver said with a laugh. “Spaceship.”
“Where’s your station?” Miller asked, shaking his head and finally tearing his eyes from the window on a submarine!
“Over here,” Bill said, waving to a station. “It’s a bit odd. I have to be able to navigate underwater and in space.” Miller saw a paper plot charter and three separate computer screens. Bill brought up one of the latter and pointed at the planet on the screen. “Since I’m also, effectively, the ship’s science officer and they figured that Conn’s going to be asking lots of questions, they managed to squeeze me in Conn instead of the usual Nav spot downstairs. Anyway. We’re here. Terra. This system’s really easy to use until you start filling it with real data, but if we wanted to go to, say, Jupiter…”
He brought up a menu and found the planet, then punched in a command. The system displayed a series of coordinates.
“It’s at angle 233 mark 5.18, more or less,” Bill said. “We need to come around to 233 and point up about five degrees. Only problem is…” He punched in another command and nodded. “Depending on how fast we’re going, we’re liable to run into Venus if we go that way and we’re going real close to the Sun.”
“I think you need to find a different vector,” Miller said dryly, trying not to look over his shoulder. He might need to know this stuff to save the universe and maulk. But there was a…
“Sho-tan,” Bill said. “So we vector to 197, catch a slingshot around the moon, catch another around Mars and there we are…” he added, showing the movement on the screen.
“Glad you’re doing it,” Miller noted.
“That’s what everybody seems to say,” Weaver replied, grinning. “One guy I was showing how to do this grabbed his head right in the middle of the lecture and screamed ‘Rocks don’t move!’ ”
“Who designed the system?” Miller asked.
“I did,” Bill replied, shutting it down. “We paid Rath-Mirorc fifty-five million dollars for a system and they turned one in, late, that couldn’t navigate its way out of a wet paper bag. So I built one.”
“That’s… a lot of coding,” Miller said. “Isn’t it?”
“Nah,” Bill replied, waving him towards the rear hatch. “Not that much. Besides, I scagged a bunch of it from other programs.”
“Wait; what other programs?” Miller asked, as he ducked through the hatch.
“Oh, here and there…” Weaver replied. One of the crew coming the other way limpeted himself into the starboard bulkhead, so that the two officers could squeeze past.
A nuclear submarine does not have much free space. Besides the obvious areas that fill the boat — the conn, the engine room, the missile and torpedo compartments — the boat had to pack in the thousand and one things that kept it going. Kitchens, mess halls, quarters for the crew, a state-of-the-art workshop, laundries.
Because there was only so much space to work with, the boat was cramped. The corridors were narrower than a hallway in a home and much lower. Doors were narrow. Bunks in the crew compartment were four-high stacks and everything the crew carried onboard had to fit in either their bunk or a very small locker.
“You got that thing off the Internet, didn’t you,” the warrant officer said, sliding past the crewman. He’d spent enough time in subs to know the moves. “You’re navigating using some damned freeware program!”
“Only the basic data,” Bill protested. “And some of the graphics code. And the kernel, okay. But the gravitational effect algorithm is all mine! Mostly…”
“Oh, God,” Miller muttered.
“You know we’ve got to be able to pinpoint our position, right?” Weaver said, cycling open another hatch.
“What?” Miller said, stepping past the officer so he could dog the hatch closed. It was the internal hatches that, in the event of flooding or depressurization, would give the crew some marginal chance to survive. “Let me guess. Use a sextant or something?”
“Sextant’s old tech,” Bill replied. “I figured out something better.”
“I can’t wait,” the SEAL said.
“See, all you have to do is pick out bright spots against a dark background,” Weaver said. “You need to make sure they’re the right bright spots, but that’s really all it is.”
“Some sort of telescope?” Miller asked as they walked down a corridor. They had to stand to the side as a seaman walked past with a large box of cans in his arms. Besides all the other crowding, every nook and cranny of the boat was slowly filling with boxes of food. The major limitation to time “at sea,” or in space in this case, was how much food the boat could cram in. It could desalinate water for drinking, cooking and washing. It could break out oxygen from that same water for air. But nobody had figured out a way to make more food. You could pack prepared food into a much smaller area than a hydroponics department could ever create. There were some very new systems that created meat from nutrients and a “kernel” but those were still in their infancy. Until someone came up with a replicator, the menu was canned food.
“There’s a telescope involved,” Weaver said. “But the system that picks it up comes from an optical mouse.”
“An optical mouse?”
“Oh yeah, its actually kinda cool. You ever seen those optical mice that have a little red light coming out the bottom where a ball is on the old-style computer mouse?”
“Uh, huh.” Miller knew Weaver well enough to know that this explanation was not going to reassure his confidence in the ship’s navigation system. But, what the heck. They had some sort of weird sword that would go through the foot of the guy trying to crush them like a beer can, a navigation system off the Internet and a window on a submarine. How much worse could it get?
“Well, they work off a DSP chip that is actually quite remarkable—”
“Doc… Sorry, ‘Sir’… ?”
“DSP… digital signal processing. Anyway, there is a little video camera inside the mouse that looks straight down at the table surface. The little red light is just for, well, light. The DSP chip stores the image from the camera and makes note of where any spots, dust specks, scratches, or any other surface features of the table are within the image. The chip then grabs another video image a fraction of a second later and compares it to the previous one. If the spots moved within the image, the chip calculates how far and then moves the cursor on the computer screen a similar distance.”
Weaver paused for a breath and Miller stood motionless, not making a sound, but the slightest hint of a rictus grin began to form on his face. It was worse.
“I had the idea that the little DSP chip should work for any sort of scene change. I mean, after all, a video image of stars against the night sky looks about the same as dust specs on a tabletop with the contrast inverted. So, I blaged a few prototypes together to show that it would work. There are several small two-inch diameter telescopes distributed about the surface of the ship and each of these has an optical mouse DSP system fixed at its focal plane. The data is then piped into the main navigational computer where the vector changes found in each DSP chip are filtered and optimized. It actually works really well. And, the good news is we’ve got over a hundred spares on board.”