Path: newsspool2.news.atl.earthlink.net!stamper.news.atl.earthlink.net!elnk-atl-nf1!newsfeed.earthlink.net!feed1.news.rcn.net!rcn!news.maxwell.syr.edu!wn14feed!worldnet.att.net!attbi_s54.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail From: Rain Mitchell Newsgroups: alt.startrek.creative Message-ID: <2004093023152616807%rainmitchell@gmailcom> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Subject: [ORIG] - STIB - #3 User-Agent: Unison/1.5.2 Lines: 78 NNTP-Posting-Host: 12.219.22.224 X-Complaints-To: abuse@mchsi.com X-Trace: attbi_s54 1096604126 12.219.22.224 (Fri, 01 Oct 2004 04:15:26 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 01 Oct 2004 04:15:26 GMT Organization: MediaCom High Speed Internet Date: Fri, 01 Oct 2004 04:15:26 GMT Xref: news.earthlink.net alt.startrek.creative:160952 X-Received-Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 21:15:27 PDT (newsspool2.news.atl.earthlink.net) By all standards it was a normal launch and ascent. The shuttle lifted off from a Starfleet facility in Chicago a little before 22:15 on Christmas Eve. This wasn't any high-risk flight. Routine was possibly the best adjective to describe it. Just a quick trip to Spacedock to transfer some passengers, then back home again to it's home in hanger A12 at the Great Lakes Starfleet Training Facility. The pilot was a student, but the flight profile was nothing demanding. It basically amounted to filing the computer prepared flight plan and telling the computer to carry it out. The student behind the controls had ferried VIP's up to Spacedock and the shipyards for over a year now. Truth be known the assignment was boring. At 22:18:35.103 the flight stopped being routine. As the shuttle passed 2000 meters, the bulk of the atmosphere behind it, it powered up and accelerated to close the distance to the geosynchronous Spacedock. The acceleration program had only run for a few microseconds when the Structural Integrity Field generator on the port side failed. The starboard field generator tried to compensate, going to 115% of rated power, but it wasn't enough. In this 'boost' phase the shuttle was undergoing 40 G's of acceleration. The Inertial Dampening Field kept the occupants from experiencing the acceleration, but that field didn't extend to the shuttle's warp nacelles, even as close as they were to the shuttle's body. At 22:18:35.631 the shuttle's computer registered a slight deformation in the port nacelle, as well as the loss of the port SIF generator. The alarm had hardly reached the cabin before the stress on the port nacelle ripped that system from the craft. It would take another 0.314 seconds before the computer decided that the lack of data from the port nacelle meant that it had been lost. The commands to the shuttle's thrusters hadn't even completely shut those systems down yet. What had started as a fault in the Structural Integrity system was quickly spiraling into a full-blown catastrophic deformation incident. As the lost thrusters from the port nacelle changed the dynamics of flight the shuttle car-wheeled to the left. The nose of the shuttle passed 20 degrees from the direction of flight in 0.045 seconds. The starboard SIF generator gave up the ghost, burning out. At the time it was delivering 214% of rated power, a testament to the design engineers that had crafted it. It had managed to keep the crew compartment together for a little over a second, which in these conditions was amazing. However, with the loss of both SIF generators the only system still protecting the shuttle from the acceleration forces was the Inertial Dampening Field. As the shuttle continued it's left yaw the IDF had a great deal of trouble keeping up. The shuttle had 'departed controlled flight', was the technical term. The IDF was several milliseconds behind the attitude changes the shuttle was experiencing. The occupants of the shuttle were likely thrown into the right side of the cabin at this point. Not so hard as to kill them, though there may have been some broken bones. The IDF imparted nowhere near the resilience on the space frame as the SIF did. Three seconds following the shutdown of the port SIF generator, and six complete revolutions around the yaw as well as pitch axis the starboard nacelle was also lost. The computer decided 0.153 seconds later to initiate a catastrophic failure emergency. The anti-matter pods were ejected. They were designed to withstand massive shocks, but the last thing that needed to happen was to subject them to the break up of the shuttle. Loss of anti-matter containment would result in radioactive contamination to the environment, as well as a massive explosion. The computer was preparing to eject the deuterium fuel cells when those containers ruptured. Pressurized slush deuterium flashed to vapor. All it took was a spark, something that the remnants of the nacelles provided in abundance. The deuterium exploded in a massive fireball that ripped the shuttle apart like nitroglycerin in a piņata. The shuttle's computer didn't even have time to start a distress beacon, not that the beacon had survived. The largest pieces of the shuttle that survived were the nacelles, which weren't subjected to the explosion. The anti-matter pods fell back to Earth, creating two craters 2 meters in diameter, but they operated as designed. They maintained the magnetic containment of the anti-mater. Of the rest of the shuttle nothing larger than a square decameter remained. There were precious few pieces of that size. NewMessage: