“Interiors?”
“The plumbing and fixtures should be Stade so they stay clean. Toilets should be Stade so they’ll self-clean without wasting water to flush. Except for the floors, industrial areas should be Stade so they stay clean too. I’d argue that all the ceilings should be bumpy Stade to cut the energy required for lighting. Otherwise, the interior designers cover the Stade walls with whatever they want,” she shrugged, “and that Staze can afford.”
Seba nodded thoughtfully. “That all sounds good, we just need to decide where we want to be located—”
Lanis interrupted, “About that. Arya Vaii already told us a little about the location dilemma. I’d like to suggest you consider drilling a Stade tunnel from one Staze location to the other. Evacuated of air, it could act as a hyperloop that’d be able to move people the hundred-mile distance from here to Staze East in ten to twelve minutes.”
Seba said, “Drill?”
Which was what Prakant was wondering, so he was quite happy to hear the question posed.
Lanis nodded, “You only have to start about ten feet below ground on each end because the curvature of the earth would put the midpoint of the tunnel about 1,500 feet deep. You drill with a conical Stade point rotating at high speed. Similar to friction drilling of metal, it’d generate heat that’d soften the material it’s going through, allowing it to displace the material outward. You’re pushing it in with the same large diameter Stade tube that ends up lining the tunnel. Since it’s completely rigid and absolutely straight, once you’ve got it aimed correctly, you can’t miss.” She grinned, “Of course you could still miss if your crap engineer doesn’t get it pointed correctly to begin with. Better drill from here toward that 1,700-acre destination to allow her a little room for error. Oh, and make her drill a small diameter pilot hole to be sure she’s going the right way before she does the actual tunnel.”
Prakant glanced at Seba to see how he was taking all this extravagant thinking. He couldn’t tell whether Seba trusted her or not.
After a moment, Seba looked over at Prakant. “What do you think?”
“Sounds doable,” Mahesh said, “but the devil’s in the details.”
“Exactly what I was thinking,” Seba said. He looked back at Lanis. “I’m impressed Dez. I’m sure you can’t do all those things, but I’m pretty sure whoever does the ones you don’t work on could benefit from that fountain of ideas that’s exploding out of your head. Why don’t you start thinking about which ones you’d like to work on the most?”
She grinned impishly, “All of them, but I’ll try to prioritize a few top choices.”
As they finished eating and walked back to Staze, Kaem told Prakant about some of the other things Staze was working on, or that he wanted Staze to take on. These included saving people’s lives by putting them temporarily in stasis. When Prakant asked him if he thought it was safe, he shrugged and said he’d been stazed himself and couldn’t even tell it’d happened… either of the two times he’d done it.
“And we need to start thinking about how to work with people who’ll staze industrial quantities of agricultural products to save stuff from surplus years, then dispense it during lean years. Staze foodstuffs with short shelf lives so they can grow in the summer and be eaten in winter yet still be fresh.” He grinned at Prakant, “Imagine tomatoes that haven’t had all the taste bred out of them getting them to last on shelves. We need a system to staze meals in restaurant kitchens while they’re hot… so they can be destazed a few years later to let you eat a chef-prepared, hot gourmet meal while hiking up a mountain. Make a box sized like a microwave that you could staze and unstaze your food at home.
“I’ve been working with Brad Medness, a scientist from Maryland who’s trying to induce fusion by laser-accelerating hydrogen protons into boron targets. I think with Stade to contain radial expansion he’s got a good shot at inducing fusion at low cost with low radiation emissions.”
After explaining H-B fusion and its direct production of electricity without needing a steam cycle—in more detail than Prakant understood—he moved on. “We need to be able to manufacture vacuum Stade at scale. I’m hoping you can shepherd some of the industrial and manufacturing engineers we’ve hired. We need them to figure out how to cast lots of small Stade parts in our vacuum chambers without having to bring the vacuum up and down for every stazing event. I’m sure you’ve already dealt with some of the difficulties of working in vacuum while you were stazing Space-Gen’s booster, but we want to move from stazing one big thing at a time to stazing thousands of them using some kind of assembly line that works inside an evacuated area where humans can’t work.”
“What kind of small parts?” Prakant asked.
“Well, for one thing,” Seba grinned, “a two-hundred-kilometer bicycle chain.” Prakant felt like his brain was cramping as Seba went on to explain how they expected to accelerate upper stage type rockets up their space tower with big sprockets and a really long chain.
“Not a linear motor?!” Lanis asked, surprised.
He shook his head and reminded her to always consider the advantages and disadvantages of Stade. In this case, how all the wiring and electromagnets would increase the weight and costs over chain they made out of vacuum. As he was explaining this, he mentioned that he wanted the motors mounted a couple of kilometers high on the tower so the sound wouldn’t bother people on the ground.
Lanis grinned, saying, “It’s gonna take a lot of electrical cable to carry that kind of power up to those big motors.”
Seba snorted.
