Building Up - jedcline's 2006 NanoWriMo

Day 18 of 30

Day 18 of 30 2006 Building Up JEDCline

The application of education being intimately applied to application on the spot each moment of the work task, was easily expanded to include other tasks too. Sports being learned, such as the "I'm a gyroscope" activity, for example. Rapid creation and inclusion of terminology to fit the education need was a key part of its success, for example, the terminology communicating the complex neuromuscular sequence patterns involved in "being a gyroscope", and had its variations among the range of free-fall to artificial 1-g at the wheel's rim, coriolis included. It also enabled rapid response to medical emergency, the education going right to the people on the spot, and later joined by what expert people were among them, if any. So the computer network was becoming a benign coordinator, by offering the accumulated knowledge in its database to every person at every instant, The rate of assimilation of that education on the spot, even in crisis mode, provided the limits of its effectiveness.

Sometimes that meant un-learning some part of what one already knew. For example, the computer input keyboard key designations used was inspired by the the Dvorak layout, so the people who had learned the qwerty form of layout needed to unlearn their earlier reflexive typing mode while adopting the more efficient movement typing mode. The increasingly complex and rapid real-time inputs and outputs required while performing a wide variety of kinds of tasks was rapidly indicating that the typing keyboard was not the optimum input device.

The best part of it all was that they were developing a working system that made up quite a bit for their limited number of personnel on the station, as compared to the wide diversity of skills, talents, and sheer numbers of workstations needed to operate a self contained world.

And it also became apparent that everyone was needed to make the space wheel go around without tripping over itself constantly. So if any of them took the return vehicles back to the Earth's surface, it would make it more difficult for the remainder to keep the whole system working best possible.

They came to the conclusion, during one of their weekly meetings and vote sessions, that they needed to gradually build an exodus fleet of vehicles, all leave for Earth at the same time. Agreed on this, they then were confronted by that standard exodus vehicle being an untested design. There were a lot of factors that would play out in the return trip, and how they would interact was not fully guess-able from what they now knew. And no doubt each flight would encounter somewhat different situations from the others, even if only the effect of precedence. The passage of a vehicle would change the characteristics of the path to some extent, for example. If a hostile entity spotted some of the re-entry vehicles, their attempts at assault would bring in even more kinds of factors, like, how to dodge rocket-borne warheads while also not leading the aggressor to one's new intended home.

Since they had plenty of tether belt material, they chose to have a primary decent tether that was a closed loop, and a secondary tether that was of the type they had already tested, but would take a cycle time of abut two days per vehicle. They had plenty of collected one-way space busses lashed to the hub, so they chose a comfortable design of only 5 people for each vehicle, with the idea that there might be an option to live in the landed vehicles for an extended time, that is, as homes from which to go to and from, while they built up a new city somewhere on the surface. So that meant building 30 vehicles, having one to spare. Fewer people per vehicle meant they could build sleeping accommodations and computerized education living systems into each vehicle, so they would be able to utilize their newly developed education system of linkage to real time activities. No doubt they would face severe adversities down there, and they needed all the advantage they could create beforehand.

They would also distribute their livestock and samples of their feed and seed stock among the various return vehicles. Getting this all planned and ready, bit by bit, without a scheduled exodus date, was the mode of living for a long time, as they psychologically accommodated to either staying up where they were, or leaving for the ground.

posted by Unknown @ 11:07 PM