{"id":18,"date":"2015-09-09T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-09-09T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/2015\/06\/21\/chapter-04-2\/"},"modified":"2015-06-23T19:27:56","modified_gmt":"2015-06-23T23:27:56","slug":"chapter-04-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/chapter-04-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapter 04.2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Valerie and Jackie didn’t plan a specific area on the ship as the designated ‘Sick Bay’. There are first aid kits located throughout Bolo One, and it is small enough that anything can be retrieved in about two minutes, even if it’s on another deck. Should the need arise; the main work area on Deck One is plenty large enough to set up a temporary dental chair.<\/p>\n

Also, one of the garden bays on the Hydroponic Deck could serve quite nicely as a medical quarantine area, as the rooms are specifically designed to segregate one crop from another.<\/p>\n

\"ch04-2a\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Everyone has received the necessary vaccinations to ward off just about every known ill. For the most part, their medical needs should only consist of scrapes and bruises while on board the Hab. God forbid they should need emergency treatment outside the Hab, once they are on the ground. A broken bone could be dealt with by splinting, using whatever tools are on hand, but a massively breached suit can only be handle by burial or storage of the body. Cremation on Mars will have to wait until proper facilities can be constructed.<\/p>\n

The first deck has a pretty nice layout. The control area is not quite as large as the flight decks of the old Space Shuttles, but it doesn’t need to be. In fact, above the foot pedals controlling pitch and yaw, there is a counter-top with surface mounted digital displays, controls, and joysticks to operate the braking thrusters and roll. Just above the thruster controls is a pair of 17″ monitors, sitting one above the other, and two more monitors, one on each side of the first two, for a total of four, set in a plus sign formation. When the crew is preparing to land, these monitors will display forward, below, left, and right, respectively. On the bottom monitor, they will be able to view the ground as seen from the area of the landing thrusters. Or, at least Tom can, as he will be piloting Bolo One down to the planet.<\/p>\n

Carl will be sitting in the second seat, monitoring altitude and rate of descent, as well as viewing two other monitors – covering their butts, so to speak. While Tom is mostly peering forward and down, Carl will be checking rearward and down. The flatter the landing site, the better for everyone.<\/p>\n

Two years prior to their arrival, the Fuel Processor 1 (FP1) spacecraft landed by computer in a predetermined location. A small remote controlled light truck will already have scouted the surrounding area, dropping transponders for the Bolo One crew to zero in on.<\/p>\n

Ideally, the crew will land Bolo One within sight of the FP1 lander. However, as planned for in the mission scenario, their craft carries with it a small, fully fueled, unpressurized rover having a one-way range of 500 km. Provided they only miss the mark by a distance within that range, they will be fine.<\/p>\n

When the time comes, two crewmembers will drive the rover to the FP1 landing site, where a larger pressurized rover awaits. Even if the crew further misses their landing mark, there is another fuel processor (FP2) following them to Mars, due to land about two weeks later. The crew will guide it down to land near their landing site.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, if all goes well with Bolo One landing near FP1, the crew will land FP2 further out, but still within the 500 km rover range. This will give the mission an even greater range of exploration. They will be able to explore everything within a 250 km radius of FP1, plus after the 500 km trek over to FP2, everything within a 250 km radius of that site.<\/p>\n

After the Bolo One landing, every two years an exciting leapfrog event would occur on the planet. FP2 would then become the primary fuel processor for the following manned landing craft, basically the next mission’s FP1. Thus setting up a chain of exploration and expanding the bases of operation.<\/p>\n

Besides the control console, the first deck contains a full bath with laundry facilities, an Extravehicular Activity (EVA) prep room leading to two airlocks, and a sample collection box. The box acts like a mini-airlock: a variety of samples (such as ore) are placed in the container from outside the ship. Then, the box is sealed to the outside and opened from inside the Habitat. As an added precaution, the box has a secondary seal so that any possible contamination is contained within the box. The person examining the samples can easily see them through the clear lid of the box and conduct tests, after slipping their hands into gloves that are attached to the box from inside the Hab. A variety of tools and testing supplies compliment the box’s laboratory features.<\/p>\n

\"ch04-2b\"<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the more interesting attributes of the ship is the ladder-well. On each deck there is an airlock hatch. In the event of atmospheric depressurization, this enables any one deck to be sealed off from the other two until repairs can be made. In a manner of speaking, the entire ladder-well thus becomes an airlock.<\/p>\n

The ladder-well also features a Jefferson Staircase running from the first deck to the second and another from the second deck to the third. Thomas Jefferson invented this type of stair for loft areas and places where a typical staircase wouldn’t fit. It has a much steeper incline than a regular staircase only requiring four feet of horizontal differential between the bottom tread and the top, but is quite easy to use because of the alternating half-stair design. The trick is to always start out on the right foot, or is it the left foot? After a few bruised shins, the crew will quickly figure that out.<\/p>\n

\"ch04-2c\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Aboard Bolo One, Ty and Brandon wanted a place where the entire crew could gather in the event of a major solar flare eruption while en route to Mars. The ship itself will provide sufficient shielding for day-to-day background radiation, but a major solar flare (occurring about once per year, on average) can emit a very high dose in a short period of time. A shielded area was needed for protection. Running through all three decks, from top to bottom, the ladder-well seemed to be the best choice.<\/p>\n

Another benefit of this ladder-well design is something that Ty helped Brandon work out. Claustrophobia can become a problem for people cooped up in small spaces for long periods of time. It can affect many spacefarers, even if there was no sign of it in the psychological evaluations. So, the more open a space can be made to appear, the better for the crew’s psyche. Mirrors were considered, which can double the visible size of a space, but they can also cause disorientation due to distortion and multiple images.<\/p>\n

To lessen the claustrophobic effect of this enclosed space, Ty and Brandon introduced the concept of constructing the interior walls from leaded, clear acrylic. While mostly transparent, the leaded acrylic still provides radiation shielding (much like the small windows used by X-Ray technicians). They jokingly referred to the moment they came up with this idea as a ‘moment of clarity’, but opted to build the staterooms out of opaque materials. Of course, they first wanted to make it even stronger and lighter by using a clear, leaded polycarbonate, reasoning that polycarbonate is 250 times stronger than glass and about five times stronger than acrylic. But, as leaded polycarbonate doesn’t exist yet and the leaded acrylic was already in common use and commercially available it seemed prudent to go with that.<\/p>\n

The two did, however, use clear polycarbonate in designing the interior walls on the Hydroponic Deck. The leaded version would have been nice to have, but would be sort of like ‘Transparent Aluminum’, the stuff of science fiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Valerie and Jackie didn’t plan a specific area on the ship as the designated ‘Sick Bay’. There are first aid kits located throughout Bolo One, and it is small enough that anything can be retrieved in about two minutes, even if it’s on another deck. Should the need arise; the main work area on Deck One is plenty large enough …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":158,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chapter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":236,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions\/236"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}