“How many pilots?” Marc asked.
“We recommend three per spaceplane, round it up to one hundred thirty.”
“Okay, I assume they can do other things?”
Liz laughed, “They can eat, drink, party, . . . Oh, you mean, can they do other work? Give us a list of skills, and we’ll try to match them.”
“Thank you,” Marc said, trying to avoid smiling at her joke. He didn’t want to encourage her.
“We’ll give you numbers for the space carriers once you’ve been on Artemis for a month or so. That will give us enough data to make some projections,” Kal said. He folded his hands, indicating he was done.
“Fred,” Marc prompted.
“Our new Academy and new University are slated to start holding regular classes in late August; things are on track. You can check out Jonas’ report for status of production and sales, nothing new to report there. On our new airline, we were tracking for an October certification, but based on last month’s discussion, we’ve pushed it to after the first of the year and surprise, surprise, a lot of the politics went away,” Fred said.
Marc chuckled at that, then said, “Nikola has something she wants us to see.”
Masina showed Governor Paratar and an older man into the room, after receiving a signal from Nikola that she was ready.
“I’ve brought Dr. Feinberg to present his findings,” Nikola said. “He’s the quality engineer we’ve had examine the Paraxean Foxes and some of the other material we’ve removed from their ships. I think you’ll be very interested in what he’s learned. And since this will impact our planning for the colony missions, Marc asked me to invite Governor Paratar to sit in. Dr. Feinberg, you have the floor.”
“Thank you for having me here,” Dr. Feinberg said as he took his seat. “As most of you know, I started this investigation following the after-action review of the Paraxean war that exposed a few anomalies.
“The review showed that the Paraxean FX4s were not as resilient as the FX4s from Delphi. Initially, it was put down to superior pilots and some weapons improvements we had made, but Admiral McCormack asked me to dig deeper.” Dr. Feinberg nodded at Blake.
“My analysis found some astounding differences. The hulls of Paraxean FX4s had over three defects per square centimeter, while the Delphinean FX4s only show one defect per ten square centimeters. It is the density of the defects that undermined the Paraxean FX4s’ ability to transfer heat when they were hit with a laser or a plasma cannon. Simply put, they could only absorb eighty percent of the energy that the Delphinean FX4s could.”
“I assume you’ve discovered why that is true,” Marc said.
“I have. It comes back to the fact that the Paraxeans print their FX4s. In fact, they print just about everything,” Dr. Feinberg said. “I had samples produced for me, made using both techniques, by printing and by your plasma deposition process. What I found was that the printed samples showed the same defect density.”
“Is there something wrong with the printers?” Marc asked.
“Not really. The problem is inherent in the printing process,” Dr. Feinberg said. “The process relies on what one would essentially call vacuum deposition, the process we use for most of our integrated circuit development. When that vacuum is not perfect, you get defects; now, when you’re using the process for integrated circuits, those defects are not particularly harmful, a small variation in impedance along the circuit traces. But when you’re expecting to carry the type of energy in the superconductors you deposit that are necessary to survive a plasma cannon shot, they’re catastrophic.”
“What do you mean by the vacuum not being perfect?” Fred asked.
“A few molecules of air here and there,” Dr. Feinberg said. “Even in space, it’s hard to create a perfect void. There are hydrogen ions from the solar wind, and outgassing from your tools and structures. Down here on Earth, it is even worse. Things that are printed on the surface show even higher defect densities. Again, generally, they’re not important, but they do reduce the strength of whatever you’re making.”
“By how much?” Blake asked.
“For a polysteel beam, when it is made with your extrusion process, it is fifteen percent stronger than one that is printed with a particle printer in space. If the beam is printed here on the planet, the difference is twenty-four percent.”
“So, what does this mean for us?” Marc asked.
“A lot of things won’t change,” Nikola said. “We don’t print that many things where the defect density is critical. But it does put more pressure on us to come up with a better way to make the gravity drives. And we should look at our fusion reactors and see if we can break them down into smaller components so we can avoid printing more of the structural components.”
“What about the Paraxeans?” Marc asked. He looked over at Dr. Metra who shrugged and looked at Nikola.
“We need to break them of their reliance on the printers,” Nikola said.
“That shouldn’t be too hard,” Catie said. “To them, the plasma process will just look like another printer. The hardest thing will be to get them used to assembling the final product. But they have to do that anyway when there are big defects in the print job. They go in, and pull out components, and replace them.”
“But this will be at a finer level of detail,” Dr. Metra said. “We’re going to have to get used to replacing a gear instead of an entire engine.”
“The Paraxeans from the Sakira should be able to help. They had to do that kind of stuff on the Enterprise and the Victory,” Catie said. “Chief O’Donnell and Chief Hopkins would be a great resource. They were the ones getting the Paraxean team to focus on parts instead of systems.”
“Good idea,” Marc said. “Governor Paratar, you’ll probably want to start training
