#595 words

[loubagga0713]

How I’ve been feeling lately...

I have been feeling really stressed. This last weekend I thought I was going home to relax. The trip started a little bumpy because I had to pick up my parents from the airport at 5 in the morning, drive them to Orlando and then drive another two hours to my boyfriends house. But when I got to his house it was bliss. I had previously done all of the homework that was due that weekend and we had plans to go on a bunch of dates. That day went off without a hitch. By that night I was so tired and annoyed with being awake that i slept like a baby. The next morning is when the bad stuff started to happen. I had to drive another hour up to my house. I got there late so I got yelled at. I felt unappreciated because I had come up and saw my parents and I felt that that was what they should focus on, not the fact that I slept in and was late only 40 minutes. But the day got way worse. I had to leave my house at 3 so I could make it back to Tampa in time for a meeting I had to go to for my sorority. I was off to another late start because my nieces did not want me to leave, but by the time I got on the road I had not eaten for the day, I was starved but I didn't have time to get food like my mom wanted me to. The drive started nice, I listened to a podcast, I was making good time so I was less stressed. Then when I turned on my cruise control, the lady in front of me decided to brake going 70mph, and she braked hard. I tried with all my power but I couldn’t get my car to stop in time. I hit her car. My airbag deployed in my face. Thankfully everyone was okay. Everyone expect my car, I got a ticket, I got a bruised nose and a hurt back, I got stuck without a car, and she got to drive off. Life felt very unfair at that moment, I understand that I should have had more space between our cars but she shouldn’t have nearly stopped on the middle of a highway. That was on Sunday, today is Tuesday. I feel very lucky right now, I am lucky that everyone was okay and lucky that the events can easily be fixed. I also feel terror. I keep reliving and experiencing guilt. Every time I close my eyes I can see my car hit hers, I can feel the panic I felt when I realized I wasn't going to brake in time. Every time my neck moves it hurts, and every time it hurts I remember the feeling of the airbag slapping me in the face. I feel lucky that I have been able to get rides from people to school and back home, but I also feel like a burden, I normally hate asking things from people. I also get scared and panicked every time I am in a car now. I feel stressed because of the insurance and dealing with everything and not knowing how long till my car can be fixed and dread that it will be fixed soon and I will be forced to drive soon. I am feeling a lot lately, but I should be focusing on how lucky that I got away with just being sore and bruised.

[spiderfire47]

World building june day 18 - Armor

Again, without the weapons, the armor was interesting - so I talked about protecting the ship, space suits, pilots and emotional armor.  

There is not a lot of armor in the traditional sense.  The security personnel wear heavy padded vests when they are on duty - they wear them under their jumpsuits in most cases and are designed to cushion a club blow - which is the the most likely attack they are going to face.  Since kinetic energy weapons are strictly not allowed, they neither train nor equip to face them.  

The shield is the ship’s armor. Because they seem to be wandering through a vast and empty universe, they do not use the shields against other space ships (though it is possible that the designers intended that that possibility may occur). The shields are for protecting the ship from space junk - from grains of sand to building sized rocks, the shield directs some of the mass into the mass driver and deflects the rest off to the sides.  Since they are traveling at around half the speed of light, even tiny bits of matter can seriously damage the ship.   Tenders and scout ships have similar deflector shields. (They do not have a mass driver - so the shields are just all deflection.)

Space suits are another type of armor. There are a variety that they use - from hard shelled servo assisted units that are basically portable space ships to soft, flexible fabric sorts that are used for short jaunts or when dexterity is of high importance. There are also pressure suits that pilots wear in the scout ships - the scout ships themselves are kept depressurized while in FTL travel, so the pressure suits are key.  

When  a pilot is piloting, the ship in essence becomes and extension of their bodies.  This is especially true for the tiny and maneuverable scout ships.  Piloting Spero herself is an entirely different proposition and one that few pilots are capable of because Spero is so vast and the prevalence of the AIs makes it so that Spero is basically capable of making her own decisions so person piloting Spero does not so much make decisions as negotiate.

Anyway, for scout ships and tenders, the pilot lays on a couch made of special form of plastic. The plastic extrudes fingers that wrap around the pilot, immobilizing them, monitoring their vitals, but - more importantly - providing a seamless neural interface.  Basically, the pilot winds up “thinking” the ship.  The sensor readings are fed to the pilot and are filtered through the pilot’s senses. They “see” what the ship sees.  They “hear” what the ship hears.  The ships have AIs and part of the AIs jobs are to filter the sensor data, prioritize and keep the amount of the data within limits that are reasonable for the human pilots to process.  If the human can’t react fast enough, the AI can and will take over the ship to keep their pilot safe.  

Emotional armor is an important part of everyone. The people who live on spero are, for the most part, tough, taciturn, and reserved.  While they can be ebullient, certainly there are some wild extroverts who love their shows, mostly they are a people who keep their cards close to their chest. They do not gossip about bad news. They tell stories of bad things as lessons and warnings, but when something terrible happens, they tell stories about the good things that person did.  This focus on the positive is a deliberately cultivated trait to combat the growing, unspoken fear - that there is no where else in the galaxy for them to go.  There are no planets out there that they could call home.