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currently building. One modified warp coil will suffice though."
"What about lifting these things? How do we attach to them?" Sara asked.
I explained, "Well Sara, as Tabitha and I found, you don't have to be attached
to the warp drive to make travel possible. You just need to be within the
bubble. Anything in the flat spacetime region of the bubble will travel with
it. So we just put these things near the warp drive and away we go." I
explained.
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"Anson," Tabitha interrupted. "What about the construction on the moon? There
could be a lot of
EVA time there. All of this hardware would need to be mated with airlocks and
tubes to connect them.
We would need to weld and God knows what else. These are things that haven't
been done in space before."
"I understand that Tab--but can we do it? You are the expert astronaut here."
I put the ball back in her court.
"Well, I suppose we would have to live like cosmonauts. We better bring a
shitload of duct tape."
She laughed.
I felt in my pocket and found the small flattened roll that I've kept with me
since the incident in
Florida. I vowed then that I would never leave home without duct tape. I
pulled it out and grinned, "Never leave home without it." She laughed.
"Why do we need all of these extra airframes and things?" Sara asked "Why
don't we just use the warp bubble to make a big underground dome or
something?"
I did a double-take on that one. Again, an application with the warp
technology that I had missed. I
must be getting old and slow. From the look on Jim's face as he slapped his
own forehead, I wasn't alone.
"Of course," Jim said. "We slowly poke a small hole down about fifty meters or
so by having the warp bubble force its way downward. The Moon couldn't resist
that. Then we slowly expand the bubble to a size we decide we need and then
oscillate the diameter of the outer Van den Broeck bubble by millimeters back
and forth and very fast. The oscillations would turn the lunar rocks or dirt
or whatever it is to a molten material. When we turn off the field we have a
huge ball-shaped cave with hardened magma walls."
"Excellent, Jim!" I was thrilled by these new concepts. "How about we do some
quick analyses to decide the volume that we would need and the most stable
diameter for such a cave. If we need to, we will build multiple caves and tie
them together. These caves could be built in a matter of minutes or hours
I think."
Anne Marie added, "I think we should carry as much of the hardware on Al's
list as we can. We will need safe places in case the caves leak our atmosphere
and we will need entrance airlocks. And what about living quarters? I don't
know about you guys, but I'm feeling a little stir crazy here and we have
plenty of room."
"Actually, Annie," 'Becca replied, "we could keep a warp field on inside the
caves to maintain atmospheric and structural integrity. Once we get there we
might as well put these three ECCs and the warp coil to further use. The ECCs
would give us more than enough power to maintain the warp field and to power
our entire Moon base. Annie, I do agree though that we should carry everything
we can get our hands on, including several kitchen sinks."
"That gives me an idea," Tabitha laughed. "What if we made one of these balls
higher than the rest and then warped a large part of some freshwater lake to
the cave. We could then set up a gravity-fed plumbing system."
"Brilliant Tabitha! I love it. Then we warp a ball of atmosphere right out of
the sky into the domes, and some fruit trees to go with them, and we also
abduct some livestock. This place could be self-sufficient in a matter of
days! This is great stuff." I was exhilarated with the possibilities. It was
cool to take my mind off of the war for a few moments. I think it helped the
rest of the crew also.
"Something else, Anson," Tabitha got my attention. "Gravity is much less on
the moon, about one-sixth gee. If I understand the warp theory correctly, and
I'm sure I don't, couldn't we alter the gravity in the habitat dome to equal
one gee?"
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"Well, General, it appears to me that you do understand the warp theory," Jim
said.
"Right." I laughed. "Jim, calculate a slightly slanted flat space region for
me that will add to the lunar gravity to equal one gee."
We spent the next several hours batting ideas around and revising our
concepts. By the end of the afternoon we had developed a complete concept plan
and a drawing of the underground lunar facility.
The facility consisted of the habitat sphere and "green" sphere, a
manufacturing cylinder, a research and development cylinder, and there were
multiple tunnels connecting them. Of course, there was also a spaceport pad on
the lunar surface. The pad would be adjacent to a long wide cylinder that
connected to the side of the habitat sphere. Pushing the lunar rock around
with a warp field would create the pad. Jim and I were planning to work out a
bulldozer scoop-shaped warp-field geometry. Creating cylinders would be easy.
Pushing a ball along a straight path would create a cylindrical shaft with
spherical ends.
Who cared if they had spherical ends?
Anne Marie had the idea of just building a small town with all the
infrastructure, power grid that would connect to ECCs, water purification pump
and tower, stocked fish pond, living quarters, and anything else we could
think of and then just warping that to the main habit sphere. I liked that
idea a lot.
Since time was a factor, we decided to go with manufactured homes. We would
have the first trailer park in space.
Al realized that we couldn't use Jim's approach, which was to make a tiny hole
and then expand the bubble. How would we get the town through the tiny hole?
So we modified the approach. Instead, we
would make a large diameter cylinder with a -spherical bottom. The warp sphere
used to make this cylinder would contain the trailer park and all of its
infrastructure. Leaving that warp field on, we would then use the bulldozer
warp field to push lunar material on top of the bubble to fill the hole. When
the hole was filled, we would then oscillate the bubbles' outer Van Den Broeck
bubble to turn the lunar rock to magma and then harden the cave. The outer
bubble wouldn't allow heat and shock waves into the inner static
non-Alcubierre bubble. We would then construct the outer cylinders and tunnels
and place the equipment in the right locations. The tunnels and cylinders
should be airtight at this point. So, we pressurize them with the liquid air
that we brought with us in the External Tanks. We would seal off the airlocks
to the outside and then open the tanks and let the air boil off into the
caves. When all of the complex excavation and construction is completed, we
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