There is the general spoiler page for general questions.
I’m making this set of pages for more specific questions.
The rule is: do not ask or comment about a book until it has been at least a month in issue. I think that will make everybody happy re spoilers.
Selling your sewage to station? I suppose that would depend if the price was enough to offset the cost of the reaction mass it takes to move it.
Or you could use it as reaction mass…..
Or do you just dump it overboard at the null points? How much of that muck at Urtur really was muck, eh?
Yes, but, isn’t your sewage just nutrient for the food growth processes? ISTR (can’t remember if it was Tripoint or another) an announcement made on the overheads (or some such) about the ship dumping a certain quantity of what seemed by context to be sewage or equivalent at a mass point. Why spend the reaction mass to shift it, if you can’t use it?
I think dumping would be a last resort. In the A-U future I think recycling would be such a part of daily life that no one would think it worth mentioning. All types of organic waste could be recycled providing clean water, and nutrients for hydroponic gardens, with a small amount of mass which could be sold to stations that have gardens.
I’m sure you’re right. The idea of a mis-timed toilet dump on system entry creating a near-c poo bolide…..
LMOL! Bet they have a special fine for that sort of entry!
Since I imagine stations as buying the used organics from
ships, you understand why shooting up the hoses on a
dock upsets the stationmaster.
Jump capable ships probably do what wet navy ships do.
Foodstores are long term storage and dry materials
packed in first, then canned goods and lastly fresh
things that won’t keep. So you eat the perishables,
then switch to canned and prepared stuff.
Once you get to the back of the storage its beans
frozen cheese and lunchmeat and frozen bread (baked
before eating). The sublight and insystem ships would
have to be fairly self sufficient but scarcely have
a gourmet diet. Good cooks might even be press ganged
and would be jealously guarded by their ships.
One model that works for the Rus North Pacific fishing
fleet is being serviced by a mothership that restores
consumables and takes the catch. I heard they stay out
for years doing it that way.
I don’t think that the jumpships are out that long, subjectively. Accelerate to the jump range, trank down for hype, course change at the null-point, trank down…. etc
Remember Lucy? Sandor had “50 standard frozens” on board, and Allison accepted that as enough for the 5 crew.
A day or two on either side of a jump, more if they start from a station: it takes the Pride 48 hours to cross Urtur while following the course directions from Jin’s computer. Assuming that, one, mahendo-sat vanes are in the same region of effectiveness as Alliance engines, and that the distance between the jump points was around, oh, 1.5 times the distance(yay averaging) from a station to a jump point, then we can guestimate that it takes about 3 days to accelerate up to a jump point.
Except then you run into issues like the fact that, hey, that whole sentence was made of wild guesses based on one point of data, and then toss in how the increasing affects of general relativity affects the crew’s subjective time as the ship accelerates, and the fact that I’ve no idea how far apart those jump points were, etc, etc..
So, then, questions for Herself: How far apart are average jump points, how far from stations are they, how quickly can/do ships accelerate, and how fast do they have to be to hit a jump? Given those…well, we can do math.
Or, we can work it the other way. 50 standard frozens, assume three meals a day, five crew. 15 frozens a day, and that sucks up the supply in just over 3 days. Ouch. Day and a half on either side of a jump, or they miss meals.
Merchanter’s Luck is probably my most favoritest book ever, btw.
Also, just read it, its 75 standard frozens that Sandor has on Pell…and Allison was adding a lot of other consumables to that list, so we can’t claim that the frozens are all their food. Up it to 75 at three meals a day, and that’s closer to five days, stretch it by other things, and they could go for a week without skipping meals. Which seems a lot more reasonable, 3 days up a jump and 3 days down.
I tend to think of Sandors standard Frozens as huge canisters that can be
re-sold and replaced at the next station. A fully operational jumpship
wouldn’t need to use one at all, but it would take a great faith in your
technology to move out into such enormous distances knowing you would
starve if it became broken. Any ship that has taken damage moves more
slowly and if Chanur is any example moving too far too fast breaks the
crew. The whole operation becomes a set of compromises between limits.
It is possible that Union and Alliance and ECS have a major logistics
train in place to locate and help a stricken ship, but I don’t seem to
recall it from the books.
It was more like you are on your own.
Yeah. Reading through Merchanter’s luck, Sandor threatens the crew with the same problem that the Hani ship suffered, the inability to slow down, as a death sentence. I’d bet that Alliance/Union has even less ships than the Compact, and as such, less chance of catching even an escape pod..and such a logistics train in space is about impossible. One, these ships are outpacing their own scanners a lot of the time, and two, space is big. Unbelievably big.
But I expect that ships aren’t out long subjective time, and Sandor, especially, is living very much on the edge.
I think that ships that miss their target masspoint have pretty much had it. Once the ship moves outside a system it’s very much on it’s own.
It’s not too clear what happens when a ship falls short or overshoots in jump, but I get the impression that without a masspoint the jump field doesn’t collapse and you just go careering along the interface. First the trank runs out, then the food…..
On the issue of how long it takes to get up to jump, I’m thinking of Tripoint – Corinthian seemed to get up to jump velocity in a lot less than 3 days. OK, she was pushing hard, probably a lot harder than an honest merchanter, but don’t forget than very few voyages are a one-jump. Two or three hops is normal, with dump and vector changes at the jump points. “75 standard frozens” is beginning to sound dangerously low unless they’re spending relatively little time in normal space, regardless of how much chocolate Allison has brought on board!
Ms Cherryh — I know that in the Belt, there’s a wealth of ethnicities that came together to make up the Shepherds. I’ve got a running bet with a few fellow fans about Sal’s ethnicity.
I’m thinking that the name Aboujib is arabic in origin. I’ve got a friend from Kassim, Saudi Arabia who thinks so as well, but isn’t sure. Another friend says it’s Persian because the name Soheila is Persian. Another one thinks its Hindu and another buddy of mine says Irish (don’t ask LOL)
Are any of us right?
Soheila is Persian; and Aboujib is Arabic. She’s very North African in appearance. No, no, it’s Meg Kady (Hungarian) who is part Irish. 🙂 My vision of the future is that once we get off this planet, we’ll scramble our nationalities as sort of family curiosity, so you’ll get combinations like Sumitra O’Keefe and Jesus Mackenzie.
Cool 🙂 (I won the bet)
I think my buddy got the Aboujibs of Algiers confused with the O’Aboujibs of Donnegal and Killarney. It’s an honest mistake 🙂
I think your vision of the future is quite accurate. We’re pretty much seeing the beginnings of it now as international travel and has become more commonplace than before.
As always, I love your books!
Reminds me of a Cornishman who was trying to trace branches of his family that had emigrated to the Sierra Madre in Mexico when the Cornish mining industry collapsed – he found that the celtic genotype had sunk with no trace other than the phone book. Jesus Manuel Esteban Trelawney, Concepcion Maria Pengelly, etc
Now that’s funny.
It’s not too clear what happens when a ship falls short or overshoots in jump
They careen along the interface until they get stuck on the station from Port of Eternity. 😀
It does raise an interesting question about the night-walkers, though. If we trust Hallan, Chur can find new mass points by dead reckoning. Could a night-walker conceivably sense a mass point and steer the ship to safety if it overshot? If so they’d be in considerable demand as navigators- they’re the only failsafe you could have if something went wrong with the jump. For humans it might not be so critical since they never seem to worry about things going awry, but from the way Pyanfar freaked out over practically every jump, I’m assuming hani technology isn’t entirely reliable. I guess they could just recruit kif…
Dear CJ,
Just finished Regensis. I have to admit that after reading the first 80 pages, I realized that I had to stop and reread Cyteen again to refresh my memory. Good thing I did, because Cyteen rocks!
(BTW, upon rereading I saw some slight parallels with Ender’s Game: young kids, super smart, out thinking grownups, etc.)
I don’t know how you got back in the zone to write Regensis after all these years given its complexity, so hats off to you for the thinking it must have taken.
The biggest shock was that Ari managed to be NICE the whole time without abusing Grant. She’s pretty psycho for him, desu neh?
I can’t wait for Part 3: I think its fair to say that Giraud and Abban will be causing some serious havoc once they’re born. I just wonder, will they be scheming mass murder from the time they are toddlers running around in bunny slippers? Will Giraud hack Base I to give him all the candy and vid games he wants? Will Abban’s nurses all mysteriously disappear from the day he can walk? Guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Peace! (To Union Alliance and our Universe)
😆 bunny slippers.
The Adolescence of Giraud (Fanfic)
Giraud, sucking his thumb and wiggling his overly chubby toes behind the console to his game station, which he used to over-ride Base I. “Base I: Cancel Nurse’s laundry and meal schedule. Replace Happy tape with Ari’s tape of Grant; and put kat in her daily vitamin injections.”
Nurse thought I wouldn’t know she added a bran biscuit to my baby formula. But I know. Nurse is Working me… I don’t like being Worked!
QUOTE Could a night-walker conceivably sense a mass point and steer the ship to safety if it overshot?
Don’t think so. There doesn’t seem to be any control over the ship once it’s in hype, although you can drop out early once you’re on the target mass’s gravity slope.
They could probably sense a masspoint, but not do a lot about it.
I love the nightwalker concept, esp as embodied in Capella (Tripoint)
As far as Hani attitudes to jump go, maybe it’s just that little difference between pressing the button yuourself and letting a computer do it for you. Humans just trank down and trust the machinery.
They could probably sense a masspoint, but not do a lot about it.
The ship still has its in-system propulsion, though. It ought to be able to change course, especially since as long as it hasn’t done the Maid of Astolat/i> thing and punched all the way through, it’s still skating along the jump interface. It’s partly in real space, right? And Newtonian physics still seems to apply in jump space, so the rockets should work normally even if they can’t affect real space.
So much for that closing tag. Sorry ’bout that.