💾 Archived View for cosmic.voyage › Melchizedek › 004.txt captured on 2020-10-31 at 00:42:14.
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Message Incoming... Source Melchizedek.0294 Approach β Hyi Ascension 00h 25m 45.07036s Declination –77° 15′ 15.2860″ Distance 24.33ly Equinox J2000.0 SOL Year 3781, QEC adjusted [Autotranslator enabled...] Jerome Somerset Pasani, Warrant Master ::: Hämäläinen has been pestering me to address our time dilation versus what RS001 is reporting back. If our transmissions are accurate we seem to be logging messages from the mid 25th century. In fact, several relay messages predate our own ship's launch. Temporal mechanics is bread & butter to space travel, and I'm sure all of you out there are intimately familiar with the various methods of stellar travel and the havoc they cause with calendars, but RS001 logs for posterity and--I'm told--is analyzed by school children in some systems. For that sake, I'll take the advice of my navigator and try to explain exactly "when" we are. The first thing to understand is that Melchizedek is a variable speed craft, with a slow steady acceleration and deceleration. If you blend all those speeds together and look at the average, we've been making our way to β Hyi at roughly 1.875% light speed. With no other adjustments, that explains our 1,297 year voyage (Sol POV). Of course that's not the whole story. Our Peterse 773s generate our thrust through gravity shelling & sheering that our primary school audience will know from the frozen egg experiment. Thanks to the intense gravity shell, our ship's space-time is isolated and slowed relative to outer space. The Peterse 773 Overtreffen holds internal time at a fixed 1 miller (1 light year per year) despite changes due to acceleration. Finally, thanks to distance dilation, we only needed to travel 24.32 light years instead of the full 24.33! It might not seem like much, but for those of us living in the cold and dark, three days fewer are very welcome. Our cryogenic systems had us asleep for almost the full journey while the Melchizedek kept us healthy and built up supplies to be automatically dehydrated or frozen themselves. (To Tim Fletcher, Chief Engineer of the Garnet Star, our botany bays are built with auto-harvesters and processors.) Our food supply generated over the course of the trip, even adjusting for the unknown state of the forward crops, will keep the settlement well fed for three generations while the terraforming does its work. Unfortunately for the five light sleepers aboard, the equipment to reprocess the food stores is not designed to be used in transit. I can't complain too much, though. Prezzi Adeyemi has worked some sorcery with the rations which she calls "salt" (That's a joke, kids). One final note regarding our logs. While we are confident that in normal space it is EY 3181, our gravity shell isolated our QEC transmission node from normal space-time in a unique way that was not accounted for in trial runs. It seems no one else has worked with gravity shell drives over such distances and time debts before to notice the offset. Our logs are transmitting as if we had only travelled 24 years, effectively into the past. In fitting with Sansom's Clause, "Any effective time travel is immediately made irrelevant by its own nature," our distance from Earth means that any insight we gain through observation will have traveled so far as to be insignificant to the past audience we could inform. Even so, the crew is excited to be numbered amongst those logged on RS001 with confirmed cases of chronology displacements. Apparently there's a button or patch we get to wear now, once manufacturing is back online. Back to duties. .