Proof Of Concept - Bit 1: It's Happening! :)
28 Oct 2017LongDistanceClara
Proof Of Concept - Bit 1: It's Happening! 
First of all, thanks so much to the folks who pm'd me with positives! It was great to see there's a bunch of other people who clearly have my obsession with pools on spaceships! It's definitely motivated me to get on with the modelling project, so thanks you guys!
I did have a couple of "it's not practical" posts, which is like a red rag to my small-minded bull of a brain
And I felt like I really wanted to "link" the project with my in-game time in a more tangible way - so the following is me having a very goofy stab at trying to do something in Elite that would make it seem a bit more "real". Consequently it's more wordy and a lot more techy than usual! Hopefully you'll grant a bit of poetic license on the techy bits and just go with it - as much as I want to make it "real", we're talking about internet spaceships after all! ---
It's happening!
I spend way too much time saying "wouldn't it be cool if-" or "I wish we could-"; well for once, I'm going to do something about it!
There's a lot of things in life to be serious about. Sometimes it's out of necessity. Sometimes it's because although you don't consider something to be serious, others do - so you take it seriously out of respect for them; but sometimes people just have a stick up their butt and need to let their hair down
I'm just like anyone else out there - none of us like being told we can't do something. So I'm building my pool
But where to start?! I have absolutely no engineering know-how. I can operate my ship, know what wiggly bits to move and clicky bits to press to make her move (aaaand the Pilots Federation just revoked my license hearing me say that >.< ). Start talking to me about superstructure stress margins as they relate to tensor domains under magnetic resonance when near a star's corona and yep - eyes now fully glazed over, commence drool...
Fortunately, I've gotten pretty chummy with the guys and girls down on the engineering decks at Jameson Memorial. I'm forever tinkering with my ships - by which I mean I come up with some crackpot idea and leave those magicians to make stuff happen! The speed with which they can strip, repair and refit a ship is eye-watering and they've always got what I need.
Not this time though! I had a few ideas about how I was going to conjure up a swimming pool, but I needed someone with actual nuts-and-bolts know-how. Enter Donk, stage right - a deck chief at Jameson, an enormous bear of a man with a voice like thunder and who wouldn't hurt a fly. Unless it was obnoxiously drunk in his favorite bar; in which case 'said fly' would leave 'aforementioned bar' on a horizontal trajectory through 'nearest window' into 'adjacent wall'
So! Went back to Jameson, set down and went off to find Donk, who fortunately was around the shipyards and after he stopped crying with laughter after I told him my plan, sat me down and explained:
"Right. The problem you've got here is you're building a module from scratch. Those shiny boxes of tricks with all their gadgets that we just "hook" up to your ship are incredibly sophisticated bits of kit that have had months or even years of very expensive R&D pumped into them. There's a reason it's an unbelievable pain-in-the-ass to get module supply accreditation! There's a story about a guy who tried to develop his own fuel scoop; turns out if you don't use exactly the right shape and size of capture tank, resonance builds up and tears it apart - and then your ship basically becomes the fuel scoop..."
At which point I think he saw me getting a bit down-hearted. So, bless him, the big lug took pity on me;
"But what you're after isn't as complicated as a scoop or a vehicle hangar, so let's see..."
Cue a few minutes waiting while Donk thought it over. The guy looks like he'd struggle to write his own name in crayon but I long ago learned not to judge folks by their appearance - Donk's got a mind as sharp as a tack and for all his playing up to being a bear of little brain, he can argue structural engineering and fluid dynamics with the best of them!
"OK. So first of all, yep, you're right, it's probably easiest to retrofit a cargo container - they're already good to go as far as fitting is concerned, they're built like bricks and they'll take the mass. Next, I'm no interior decorator - but I'd guess you're going to want some fancy slinky surround when you walk in, with the pool recessed in the middle?"
I nodded.
"Right-o. That case, we'll need to fit some kind of skeleton cradle to the floor of the cargo hold - probably titanium ribs, it's strong and light and you're going to need to save as much weight as possible. Then we'll need to skin it to create the pool, the deck, walls, all that stuff. CMM composite's your best bet, it's not cheap but again, it's light, ridiculously strong and you can get a really swanky finish on it."
Deep breath and chin rub;
"Let's say ballpark, your pool is what, near ten meters wide, just shy of twenty long and a meter deep one end, bit more at the other - that's two hundred tons of water, give or take. Probably more. Which isn't a problem, the hold will take it. You'll need to keep it clean, but that's easy enough - we can get hold of some industrial water purifiers to clean the water, there's no way your dinky onboard environmental systems will cope with that much. You can even get really fancy and have one of those aquaponics systems that monitor and regulate the water quality, they're not heavy."
Pause - which probably means this bit will be expensive!;
"Here's the tricky bit. When we usually hook up a module, each internal slot on the ship comes pre-fitted with a power umbilical from the engine. All the modules on the market have their own internal regulators and so on to change the feed to suit whatever the power requirements of the module are. You won't have any of that, plus some of the kit we'll be using is meant for planet-side, so we'll have to come up with our own bespoke setup. That means a power transfer bus, to bring the feed from the external umbilical into the module; and a power converter, tuned to power the aquaponics and purifiers."
Ok...not so bad, maybe this would be doable after al-
"Now's the really tricky bit. As far as I know, you're not part eskimo so we're going to need to heat the water. So most of the heating on ships these days is super efficient and comes from the power plant, with whatever excess that is generated bleeding off through thermal conduction channels to the outer hull; on the way there, they pass through your heat sink launchers, assuming you have 'em fitted. So the best thing to do would be to tap into those thermal channels and run a feed to your fancy pool room.
"Thing is, now it's there, we need a completely hand-crafted heat exchanger to transfer that heat to the water feeding the pool. Best way I can see of doing that is grabbing some of those thermal cooling units you can get from the market, they're pretty cheap and with a bit of tweaking we can hook it up and tap the heat from the feed - basically use the thermal cooling unit like a heat exchanger. Then we can probably rig some kind of system to circulate fluid through the heat exchanger that'll draw the heat out and then pipe it to a heating jacket around the pool's water feed. We can use micro-cooling hoses for that, they're designed to cope with the kinda heat we're talking about. We won't need any kinda thermostat either, get the right kind of fluid and it'll only get "so" hot. It'll probably be a good idea to line the pool with insulating membrane though, to conserve the heat, but that's no drama.
"Last thing; the gravity idea, that's fine, that'll work. But to keep two hundred tons of water from smashing around while you're on the move, you'll need that cover to be very strong. Which is fine, we can do that; but you're gonna need some pretty powerful motors to drive the covers and keep it locked down - some of those articulation motors would be favorite. They're not that easy to come by mind you, never on the market when you need them; and don't worry about a moisture lock - just keep the door closed when you're in there, any moisture that gets out while the door is opened won't be that much and the environmental systems on the ship will easily take care of that. That...that's about it I think."
Long silence. Which I eventually break;
"So you're saying it is doable?"
That got me a Donk-laugh
And a few minutes later, I was leaving with a shopping list of parts, some I'd heard of, the rest were in engineering-ese. Donk had told me there was a bunch of other stuff we'd need, some electronics for the controls and so on but god bless that man, he said he'd cannibalize them from stuff lying around - providing he got a chance to use the pool.I don't think 200 tons of water is going to be enough >.< Still - almost there right?
Wrong! Some of the parts were a piece of cake to get hold of from adjacent systems; some were a fair bit further afield; and some were just impossible to find on the market. Donk had been absolutely right; the articulation motors, the micro-weave cooling hoses - nowhere to be found. Grapevine had it that these could be obtained by doing the odd job for various contacts here and there, but I had to scour a fair few systems before I could find anyone willing to trade a favor for the parts I needed! After a day of hunting around though, I dragged the Cassandra back to Jameson, exhausted but excited that I had all the raw ingredients sitting in my hold for a hell of an exciting cake
It turns out, I'd jumped the gun
Went and found Donk, grinning ear to ear, all ready to get started - more laughing;"We can't just throw it all together overnight - it's going to take ages! As in, weeks probably! We need to design it, create some brand-new components to shimmy all that heat and power in, run simulations to make sure it won't pull your ship apart the first time you jump - once we get to building it shouldn't take long but I'm not putting my name to something that'll get you killed. The first swimming pool in space? Kind of a big deal, so let's get it right!"
I was pretty crestfallen and it probably showed, since Donk then came up with a brain-wave.
"You don't want to be mooching around waiting for weeks on end, it'll drive you crazy. Tell you what - this thing is going to be heavy. Like seriously heavy. As in two-fifty of pig-iron and water heavy. That's going to crush your handling and jump range. Why don't you help me out and do a little testing of your own? I know you're only happy when you're out in the ass-end-of-beyond. Why don't you take everything you've collected, throw a coupla hundred tons of water on board your ship in containers, and head off to - oh I dunno, Sag A*? You might change your tune about it all then!"
The man's a genius
So - back to the Cass, got her prepped, ordered two hundred tons of water to be delivered to her hold along with all the other paraphernalia from Donk's shopping list. As an afterthought, I threw another ten tons of the "Waters of Shintara" onboard - I don't believe in all that guff but what the hell
All that was left was to grab some crew! With Yari having left a while back, I was kinda short handed and although there'd be no passengers, I could always use the help/company. 
Recruiting in Sol
So after some fairly dubious interviews and a lot of "thanks anyways"(!), I finally hired on a pretty feisty ex-fighter pilot by the name of Paislee King Elliott - although she prefers PeeKay, which is fine by me! Her first brownie points came when suggesting that the pool clearly needed a well stocked bar! So I threw a coupla tons of booze in the hold, along with some synthetic fabrics - we're going to need some loungers after all! I doubt we'll need three tons of the stuff, but that weight should cover the bar and furnishings - and we've still got about eleven tons to play with before we hit the cargo hold cap if not.
Everything looked good to go and then right at the last minute, we had another crew member show up out of the blue, knocking on the door! He answers to various names - dummy, klutz, dopey, but his real name is Hallin and he's a very, very good friend. Couldn't believe it! And as if I wasn't excited enough about this trip already
Well, here we go. It's almost twenty-six thousand light-years to the Core, we've got a full tank of gas, two hundred and forty five tons of 'stuff' in the hold and an incredibly happy crew;
Hit it
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(And yep, I really was stupid enough to hunt around for all those bits, load 'em on the Cutter - and we've just left the Shinrarta system for the Core
My plan is to alternate between E:D in-game time and designing and building the model, so that by the time we get back from the jaunt, the model will be finished and ready for some piccies. Fingers crossed!)Manifest:
