The first Weird-Field spaceship (Patreon)

The WF Mandela

The first message received arrived in May of 2089. Once it had been deciphered, and it was discovered to be instructions to build a spaceship, the real work began.

The UN, the EU, USA, Japan, Brasil, China and Russia eventually managed to set up a joint working group with a base of operations on an ex-military airfield near Dresden. Parts would be built at various locations in the participating countries and assembled at ‘The Studio’. The message had its origins in the constellation of Pictor - the painter’s easel, this led to a lot of nomenclature relating to the message being artistic in nature.

The instructions for the spaceship made it pretty clear that it was designed with humans, or at least humanoids, in mind. The interior spaces, the controls, interfaces, were all human scale. More than that, the form of the acceleration couches seemed perfectly designed for humans. While dials and readouts were in Base 7, it was simple enough to convert these to Base 10. Humanity had been studied it seemed.

Five months after The Studio began assembling the ship, they discovered they’d been a little slow off the mark. In November a team of engineers, backed by a South African tech billionaire, announced they had completed the Mandela. After a few months of testing, in early 2090, the Mandela took flight for the first time. 

The Mandela was a hub of spheres and pipes, cells and canisters, arranged around a roughly cylindrical fuselage. The front of the fuselage was capped by a four metre diameter cone of glass - the chemical composition of which was new to Earth engineering. Behind the dome three acceleration couches sat, with an array of equipment - identical for the two outer couches, and a little more complex for the central one - surrounding them. Behind a bulkhead were two further seats arranged facing each other, a bank of equipment to one side. At the rear of the crew compartment was a simple bathroom and a storage/kitchen area. The interior space was pretty snug, it certainly wasn’t a ship designed for long voyages. 

When the Mandela was switched on, the specific start-up routine carried out exactly as the message instructed, it hummed. Not a whine, or a roar, a very gentle hum. It also glowed with a soft violet light - not bright enough to obscure the ship, just enough to give it a slightly eerie look. While it was being built the Mandela was supported on cradles, but once it was switched on, these weren’t necessary and the ship simply hung in the air a couple of feet above the ground. Even though it weighed over eighty tonnes, you could push the ship around the assembly space with one finger. Once you stopped pushing the ship would stop. There was some very strange science going on.

The Mandela’s first flight was a simple orbital one. The ship was taken up vertically to 200km, before starting a series of circuits around the Earth. The first thing the crew reported was the complete lack of any sense of movement. Even when the Mandela accelerated to 6,000kph in just over a minute, there was no feeling of having moved at all within the spaceship. So apart from having an entirely undecipherable propulsion system, the Mandela also had inertial cancelling. During 50 orbits, over the course of four days the Mandela was tested up to speeds of 40,000kph. After more tests, on the crew as well as the ship, the Mandela left Earth for its first real mission. Sixty hours later the ship arrived at Mars. The maximum speed attained was just over 1,000,000kph. Even at that velocity the crew stated there was still no feeling of movement or acceleration.

Earth to Mars in just two and a half days. Previously this had taken weeks. The Mandela could change everything.