Message Incoming...
Source Melchizedek.0294
Approach β Hyi
Ascension 00h 25m 45.07036s
Declination –77° 15′ 15.2860″
Distance 24.33ly
Equinox J2000.0 SOL
Year 3781, QEC adjusted
[Autotranslator enabled...]
Jerome Somerset Pasani, Warrant Master
:::
Hämäläinen has been pestering me to address our time dilation
versus what RS001 is reporting back. If our transmissions are
accurate we seem to be logging messages from the mid 25th century.
In fact, several relay messages predate our own ship's launch.
Temporal mechanics is bread & butter to space travel, and I'm sure
all of you out there are intimately familiar with the various
methods of stellar travel and the havoc they cause with calendars,
but RS001 logs for posterity and--I'm told--is analyzed by school
children in some systems. For that sake, I'll take the advice of
my navigator and try to explain exactly "when" we are.
The first thing to understand is that Melchizedek is a variable
speed craft, with a slow steady acceleration and deceleration. If
you blend all those speeds together and look at the average, we've
been making our way to β Hyi at roughly 1.875% light speed. With
no other adjustments, that explains our 1,297 year voyage (Sol
POV). Of course that's not the whole story. Our Peterse 773s
generate our thrust through gravity shelling & sheering that our
primary school audience will know from the frozen egg experiment.
Thanks to the intense gravity shell, our ship's space-time is
isolated and slowed relative to outer space. The Peterse 773
Overtreffen holds internal time at a fixed 1 miller (1 light year
per year) despite changes due to acceleration. Finally, thanks to
distance dilation, we only needed to travel 24.32 light years
instead of the full 24.33! It might not seem like much, but for
those of us living in the cold and dark, three days fewer are very
welcome.
Our cryogenic systems had us asleep for almost the full journey
while the Melchizedek kept us healthy and built up supplies to be
automatically dehydrated or frozen themselves. (To Tim Fletcher,
Chief Engineer of the Garnet Star, our botany bays are built with
auto-harvesters and processors.) Our food supply generated over
the course of the trip, even adjusting for the unknown state of
the forward crops, will keep the settlement well fed for three
generations while the terraforming does its work. Unfortunately
for the five light sleepers aboard, the equipment to reprocess the
food stores is not designed to be used in transit. I can't
complain too much, though. Prezzi Adeyemi has worked some sorcery
with the rations which she calls "salt" (That's a joke, kids).
One final note regarding our logs. While we are confident that in
normal space it is EY 3181, our gravity shell isolated our QEC
transmission node from normal space-time in a unique way that was
not accounted for in trial runs. It seems no one else has worked
with gravity shell drives over such distances and time debts
before to notice the offset. Our logs are transmitting as if we
had only travelled 24 years, effectively into the past.
In fitting with Sansom's Clause, "Any effective time travel is
immediately made irrelevant by its own nature," our distance from
Earth means that any insight we gain through observation will have
traveled so far as to be insignificant to the past audience we
could inform. Even so, the crew is excited to be numbered amongst
those logged on RS001 with confirmed cases of chronology
displacements. Apparently there's a button or patch we get to wear
now, once manufacturing is back online.
Back to duties.
.
gemini://cosmic.voyage/Melchizedek/004.txt