Exploring the Stars

Chapter 1 - A New Ship

Captain Adannaya Gbadamosi (Dannay to her friends, and there were many) of the AGV Udyamita looked at her vessel floating on the mid-Atlantic Ocean at the Asimov Island docks and smiled. She admired the long clean lines of the ship, as she ran her dark, lean fingers along it. The ship was 75m long, and 20m in circumference. It's ovoid bow and pointed stern, with only clean lines between made her proud – and she was sure others were envious.

She knew its four warm fusion reactors would power her and the crew she chose to the stars, and could easily reset her FTL drives within minutes of each jump. She also thought of how it would protect itself: it had limited weaponry – the country of Atlantis hadn't needed weapons since its inception, much to the chagrin of the countries that used to attack regularly – but the weapons it did have were powerful.

She chuckled as she thought about that: being able to absorb the inertia from an attacking enemy was quite unnerving, to say the least. And the four shields on the ship, each powerful enough to absorb the energy from nuclear explosions, also ran redundantly in layers from those same four GravFusion reactors. If one was breached, there were three more behind it, while it came back online.

If needed, Dannay considered that the ship's best offense would be a) defending itself with its multiple shields; b) using its GravSieve to repulse inbound projectiles; c) placing the attacking vessel totally in stasis; and d) hightailing it back to their previous port-of-call as soon as trouble hit them. She really didn't like the idea of blowing another vessel apart just because of a misunderstanding. And the over-abundance of reaction capacity and gravitics-based technologies meant she had options beyond the known capabilities of any other country. She was hoping her theories on extra-terrestrial life meant they didn't need to worry about external confrontations, either. "But better safe than sorry," she mused to herself.

Thinking about how the vessel was outfitted, Dannay grinned as she thought of the best thing about having the four GravFusion reactors, and their four associated GravFTL drives – they required space. So she'd designed the ship with the reactors in the stern, and FTL drives in the bow. She also had room to slip in eight GravDrives, four forward and four abaft, for more conventional travel, both on planet and in space. This left roughly 40 meters of a 20m wide cylinder for the crew. She loved the idea of more than 2500 cubic meters of room for each of the five crew that would be on the ship for this foray.

Granted, she lopped off the top and bottom 6 meters for fuel and storage (fuel – what a laugh! They were taking water, pure, clean drinking water for fuel! She loved the Grav systems!), but they still have roughly 1200 square meters for each crew member. At 4m height, that means about 300 square meters per person. So each crew member will have a cabin that is two levels, with at lesat 35 square meters per level, leaving plenty of room for shared space. For instance, the ship's salon will be 15m by 8m, and 4m high. She also ensured that other areas of the ship would be equally roomy. So unlike the ocean-bound vessels of the Atlantis Home Groups, this ship would be spacious.

She was glad the Foundation accepted the name she'd chosen – they would have known what it meant in English. She walked up to check it over, and saw the nearly two meters of her old friend Emeka Abioye, the man she'd chosen as the ship's engineer, and another who worked on its design, inspecting every inch of the ship.

He was also the only crew member she'd have to physically look up to, she thought, as she called, "Emeka, my friend, how does she look?"

Emeka turned and smiled. He shook Dannay's hand as she reached him, saying, "My dear Capt Gbadamosi, we meet again. She's looking every bit as worthy as we'd hoped. And while I'd rather she'd been built in space than here on Asimov Island, I accept that we don't yet have acceptable 'space drydocks'."