After being delayed by military affairs for two months, Wang Qi returned to the mission command headquarters and stared at the project advancement and testing progress of each group.
The most important thing inside is undoubtedly the vehicle.
It stands to reason that in order to resist vacuum, cylindrical and spherical shapes have better strength, but because it is launched through a portal instead of a rocket, there is no weight limit for the vehicle, and there is no risk of disintegration with thicker steel. It is easier in a more regular space. Take advantage of.
Therefore, the vehicle was finally made into a wedge shape instead of a cuboid for observation purposes.
The front window of this vehicle is two pieces of V-shaped sapphire glass, which looks extremely inappropriate, but it is excusable because it can be used in conjunction with the "Stone Tablet" mission.
The existing spacesuits are not mature enough, and the astronauts themselves cannot complete the dressing. Two people help each other, and the space inside the vehicle is not enough. Simply put, the vehicle is not pressurized, and the astronauts wear spacesuits to work inside.
There is no pressure difference between inside and outside, so large enough glass can be installed to provide a better view inside the cabin.
Two vehicles were built for backup purposes and may also be used for mission adjustment. They are undergoing underwater testing at this time.
In order to meet the needs of the full-dress mission, the spacesuit also needs to be upgraded again, with the focus being on the in-suit eating and urine and moisture collection systems.
...There is still no water circulation, because the capacity of the flight backpack equipment after magic is large enough, and a few more liters of boxes can be stuffed in, and the overall size is even smaller than the first version.
The conditions for taking it in the body are limited, it can only be liquid, and the very sweet jam is actually a mixture of syrup and jam, with some salt added, it turns out to be even sweeter, which is really scary.
But the conditions are just like this. Thinking on the bright side, with such a high-energy liquid, a few sips can cover the consumption of a day's activities. It is also a practical solution with the lowest equipment space and technical difficulty.
For Wang Qi, the process of advancing the task was much easier than before the first opening. At least the companies and personnel contacted by each department were already familiar with it, and the frequency of meetings was reduced a lot.
A few months passed quickly, and it was time to open the door again.
Wang Qi was not in a hurry. He waited for the second batch of two reserve astronauts to be trained and the equipment to pass the ultra-low temperature test. He waited for two months to have the work ready before calling Solaris to open the door again.
When the door opened, the air pressure was close to 700 Pascals. Many older people on the scene were wearing breathing masks. It was terrible, but compared with the outer space, the ground was still like heaven.
After opening the door, people and vehicles were sent through the door immediately.
This time there was no temporary structure, but a special vehicle built by the vehicle team. The overall condition is more like a crane. The difference is that the boom is specially designed to eject the vehicle to ensure that the vehicle enters without an upward vector. Inside the door, avoid hidden dangers.
The reason why people need to be brought inside is because the automatic control capability of the vehicle is not good. In order to avoid being sent to the opposite side and lost, someone must be on it to ensure that it can maintain a relatively stationary position with the door and not with other people who need to enter or exit. Object conflict.
Don't look at it in just one sentence. In fact, in order to achieve the goal of "relatively stationary", a set of positioning instruments for vehicles has been specially developed. When there are two reference objects, it can detect its own movement greater than 3 millimeters per second within one kilometer. Displacement.
This kind of accuracy is very necessary in a vacuum environment, because Solaris cannot tell where to open the door. Without the support of a swimming pool, it is now unable to safely recover the vehicle, which means that when the astronauts come back to rest, the very small relative speed will It will cause the vehicle to fly and disappear.
In fact, even if there is a swimming pool to support the portal, it would still take half a day to pull out a vehicle the size of a minibus weighing dozens of tons and put it back on the ejection vehicle. Interference with the "five-second cut-off" rules of the Reese portal, as well as various hidden dangers caused by multiple changes in the environment, make it difficult to ensure that the vehicle is put into use again intact.
The task of the first two astronauts is to secure Vehicle 1 and activate its always-on communication light.
After the people came back, they adjusted for a few hours, replaced by the old and the new, and formed two groups with the two reserve astronauts to perform the mission simultaneously.
The task of the first group is to build a mission support framework around Vehicle No. 1.
This equipment is used to provide remote positioning optical signals and "power swap" services to mobile groups.
The power swap is a choice based on the local environment. During the last test, no available magic power was detected in the vacuum environment. Magic power exists similar to elementary particles. There is no atmosphere here, so it is natural that magic power cannot be detected.
Searching for a suitable mission location requires very powerful wide-area lighting equipment, which even exceeds power consumption. After all, a vacuum environment does not require additional energy consumption to maintain speed.
It cannot be charged while being used, so it is natural to use battery swapping. Otherwise, the energy department carried by the vehicle will be too large and difficult to control.
The task of the second group is to drive Car No. 2 and park it, and then drive Car No. 3 to do transportation work.
There were only two vehicles participating in the underwater test before, and there was no No. 3. The extra one was an open-top vehicle that was acquired later.
The open-top space vehicle really feels like "the body breaks through the atmosphere".
But to be honest, Wang Qi thought it was very good, even better than the two original mission vehicles.
Because it was done later, there was no need to perform serious tasks. The only job was to transport people and goods between the door and the two task vehicles, so reliability was not considered much. There were many experimental things, which were very interesting.
For example, its control method is different from the double lever and gear lever of the flying fortress and mission vehicle, and is more like a trackball.
Its operating console is a semi-covered sphere with longitude and latitude lines on it, and a fixed pointer structure pointing to the original 0 and 0 positions. If you move the ball, the vehicle will adjust its direction accordingly, and then use the push rod next to it. Before and after operation.
Although this thing also uses "vector generation" power, it can only move forward and backward, sacrificing a certain degree of flexibility, but it greatly simplifies the operation method. Even if you are wearing a bulky space suit, you can control the entire machine with one hand.
To compare with vehicles, the two mission vehicles are high-end cars, and the No. 3 vehicle is a tractor. The instruction manual is only three pages, and no driver's license is required at all.
There were many preparation tasks. The astronauts came in and out. On the third day, the basic preparations were completed. One group was left to continue improving, and the other group drove the vehicle to search for a suitable mission point.
The mission point is preferably rocky. However, due to the total time required to open the door and the unpredictability of visual search with light, this stage is limited.
The equipment and time were too improvised. Among the two brightest stars, we determined the direction of the corresponding star in the exile place and searched in the area facing that direction. After actually reaching the range, there was no time left for the search. many.
The first group lasted a day and a half, and the second group persisted for two days, but still could not find a suitable location.
Less than fifty hours, including more than ten hours spent on the road and back.
In a vacuum, you want to accelerate and decelerate, but because the local gravity is too small, it will exceed the escape velocity a little faster, and the orbiting period will be much longer than that of a large planet. If you repeatedly accelerate and change the course, it will be supported by existing technology. It is easy to get lost in strength.
In short, the opening position of the portal was not very good, and the search time was not enough. After struggling twice, I started the backup plan and settled on the next best option, choosing the water ice layer.
If you want to find water ice, you naturally have to look for it in the crater. Although there is no way to date it with isotopes, the water ice and other materials in the crater will be more completely separated after being hit.
In addition, the shape of the crater itself can also provide certain help for "directional radio frequency", and the receiver signal will be slightly better.
When the location was confirmed, it was already the eleventh day, because enough preparations had been done and there was still enough time.
Spend a day uninstalling the search lighting equipment and fixing the debugged base station and mission vehicle together.
This action completely relies on the astronauts' extravehicular hands-on ability. It is simply like archaeological aerospace. Fortunately, everyone is used to it.
There were not many surprises in the process of installing the base station. Facing the ice that had been frozen for countless years at minus 200 degrees Celsius, there was no intention of using an electric drill or chisel. It was just a magic device that simulated a laser to drill holes.
The pressure created by the gasification during the hole opening process blew the astronauts away several times. Fortunately, everyone did not leave their backpacks during the whole process and could fly by themselves. No one was missing.
After decades of development, it finally faltered, and the work was still quite sloppy, but there is still a long way to go.
