Today's writing: Changeling Space Program (Patreon)

Tonight's writing session is over. The next session will probably be Sunday, Nov. 25th beginning at 7 PM Central. Writing will occur live on this Google doc:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Skxg6E0Y7XkDiHs3rdAzQeXlJHVmyExGLnSLcZmLWi4/edit

Here's tonight's work, beginning with a pre-written section of text where I left off the last time I worked on this...

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Halfway between the astromare complex’s infirmary and the administration building, Cherry had to duck as one of the guard changelings, her uniform spattered with bits of swamp, almost tackled her from the sky. “Pardon me, Miss Berry!” the guard panted. “But the pony princess Twilight is on the telepresence, and she wants to talk to you!”

Cherry blinked. “But I was just on the way to call her,” she muttered.

The guard shrugged. “Maybe pony princess read minds? All I know is, she’s really upset.”

A short gallop later, Cherry saw on the screen that Twilight wasn’t upset. She was frantic. Big difference. “Cherry!” she shouted. “Thank Celestia you’re there! They won’t let me talk to Chrysalis! We’ve got a big emergency!”

“So do we!” Cherry Berry replied. “We need you here as soon as possible.”

“No, no,” Twilight said, shaking her head. “We need you here as soon as possible!”

“What are you talking about?”

“If we don’t get you in a rocket and into orbit in three days,” Twilight gasped, “three astronauts are doomed!”

Cherry blinked. “Three astronauts?”

“Doomed!!” Twilight Sparkle insisted.

“Okay, wait a minute,” Cherry said, waving a hoof to slow Twilight down. “We didn’t have anypony in orbit this past week, and neither did you, right? So how did these astromares get there?”

“They’re not mares,” Twilight said. “It’s Gordo the Griffon from the Griffonstone Rocket Project, Fireball from the dragon program… and an astronaut from Yakyakistan. All of them launched at the same time three days ago, during the Storm King’s occupation of Canterlot. They thought it was their chance to get ahead of our programs while we were dealing with the Storm King. All of them were attempting a lunar fly-by.”

“What went wrong?”

“Lots. The three rockets launched within an hour of each other. The griffons launched first and got an equatorial orbit with their first two stages. But they messed up their staging orders somehow, because when they tried to ignite the third stage, instead it decoupled the third stage. And the heat shield. And the parachute. Everything but the capsule.”

“What were they thinking?” Cherry demanded. “You always check your staging! And check it again, and again, and again! We keep it on a sticky-note in the cockpit for every launch: Check Your Staging!”

“Don’t ask me what they were thinking!” Twilight snapped defensively. “I wouldn’t have done it! But they did!” She waved her hooves wildly as she continued, “Anyway, Gordo’s rocket dropped everything it could drop at once, and one of the pieces of debris was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It collided with the dragon rocket on its way up.”

“It what??” Cherry gasped. “You know what the odds are of a collision in space!”

“It happened!” Twilight insisted. “So Fireball lost his engines too, and he’s just as stuck as Gordo.”

“Okay, so what happened to Leonid?” Cherry asked. “More debris?”

Twilight shook her head. “No. The yaks had the worst trajectory for a moon shot, and they didn’t attempt a direct ascent. Their rocket ran out of fuel just getting to an equatorial orbit. But that’s not the worst of it.” Twilight took a deep, steadying breath. “The pilot’s not Leonid. It’s the other yak astronaut. Prince Fauntleroy. Rutherford’s little brother.”

Cherry rememebered the tiny (by yak standards) prince from EVA training at Cape Friendship. “The runt?” she asked. “Why did they send him up? Rutherford loves him like Pinkie loves sugar! He’d never sign off on sending him on a moon flight.”

“He didn’t give them the option,” Twilight reported. “I just spoke with Rutherford. He tells me his brother whacked Leonid on the head and took his place in the rocket. Said he was the better pilot.”

Cherry slowly flopped onto her flanks. “So, just to be clear,” she said, “you’re telling me there are currently three astronauts overhead right now, with no engines, no parachutes, and no way home.”

“And they’ve been up there for three days,” Twilight said. “They all have seven days of food, and of course my life support system will keep them in air and water, but what happens when the food runs out?”

*********************************************************************************

AND AWAY WE GO…

Cherry Berry nodded her head. “I can imagine,” she said. “What have you got for rocket parts, then?”

“That’s another thing!” Twilight replied. “We need you to send us everything you have. We used up all our back stock of parts putting the communications satellites in orbit. We were going to order more after the friendship festival, but… well, anyway, we need more, right now!”

Cherry blinked. “You have nothing at all?” she asked.

“Well, there’s the experimental rocket ship,” Twilight said. “But it needs a lot of rocket boosters to get it into orbit! Of course, once in orbit its magic thrusters should be enough to get to and from each ship, and it has plenty of passenger space…”

“No,” Cherry said flatly. “It’s a beautiful ship, and it’s my favorite color, Twilight. But we can’t possibly put together enough boosters to get it to orbit. Not in three days. It’s just too heavy.” She thought for a moment, looking away from the telepresence projection so she wouldn’t have to see the fidgety, anxious alicorn princess. “No, we’ll have to do it from here. We still have some leftover parts, if the Storm King’s goons haven’t messed with ‘em. And you have princess work to do, fixing the kingdom and un-stonifying innocent ponies and stuff like that.”

“But-but- wait a minute,” Twilight stammered. “I thought everypony that got petrified by Tempest was restored when the Storm King was defeated.”

Cherry sighed. “Look, just get down here as soon as you can, please? We can begin making plans while I explain what our price is for this launch.”

“Price?” Twilight asked. “Three people are about to die in orbit, and you want to send us a bill??”

“I’ll explain when you get down here,” Cherry said, and cut the connection.

Chrysalis shifted in her bedsheets and sipped a little water through her straw. “So, you made a deal,” she said. “The rescue mission, in exchange for my life. How did Twilight take it?”

“All things considered, pretty good,” Cherry replied. “She wanted to say she would have done it anyway, but I think the words kinda stuck in her throat.” She shrugged, adding, “Anyway, she said she needed the combined power of four alicorns to overcome the curse, and Cadance was going to be the harder sell. So I guess it was a good thing three space programs did stupid things right then.”

Chrysalis raised an eyebrow. “That almost sounds like something I would say, pony.”

“I know. It scares me a little.” Cherry Berry sighed.

“And how did those foolish space programs take it when they heard you were going to be the ones rescuing them?”

Cherry cringed. “Not well…”

“You put life of baby brother in hands of changelings?!?” Prince Rutherford looked one step, one very short step, away from saying his favorite five-letter begins-with-S word. (304)

“Well,” Twilight Sparkle began, looking at the yak, griffon, and dragon on the other side of the conference table, “if you’ll just let me explain-”

Cherry Berry, sitting next to Twilight, brought her hoof down on the conference table hard enough to drown out any further words. “The princesses,” she said firmly, “have a continent to rebuild after the Storm King’s rampage. Princess Twilight Sparkle delegated this vital task to the world’s most successful space program because she can’t be in two places at once! Why can’t you appreciate the time she’s sparing for you when there are whole cities still on fire?”(305)

This silenced Prince Rutherford, Dragonlord Ember, and Grampa Gruff. All three had the expressions of creatures with guilty consciences. 

“Anyway,” Cherry continued, “what possessed the three of you to launch without a real plan or preparation like that? Especially while Equestria wasn’t in any condition to help?”

“It was because Equestria wasn’t in any condition to help!” Ember snapped. “This was our last shot. I may be Dragonlord, but I can only push so far before the other dragons just blow me off, staff or not.”

“Gordo’s stupid hobby was bankrupting Griffonstone!” Gruff snapped. 

“Weren’t griffons already broke?” Rutherford interrupted.

“DON’T INTERRUPT ME, you young whippersnapper!” The elderly griffon’s shout did what few other things could; it made the prince of the yaks cringe for just a moment. “As I was saying, there wasn’t any money left for rockets and wasn’t gonna be. So he wanted to go out big.”

Rutherford nodded. “Yakyakistan rich in tradition, rich in culture, rich in history and glory and pride,” he said. “In gold we… less rich.”

“Anyway, we figured… I guess we all figured,” Ember said, making the distinction between we dragons and we three space programs, “that the Storm King invasion would delay the ponies and the changelings enough to give any of us one last chance to take the lead in the space race. If we were the first to the moon, maybe that would give us a chance to keep things going.”

Cherry Berry heard Twilight Sparkle’s teeth begin to grind. “Are you telling me,” the purple princess said in a tone Cherry usually heard from Chrysalis’s mouth, “that when we were under the cloven hoof of the Storm King, seeking any possible way to free our people from his subjugation, that you-”

Cherry put a hoof on Twilight’s shoulder, breaking off the impending rant. “Okay, fine,” she said. “But the Storm King was going to come for everybody else next, after he had the princesses’ magic. Why weren’t you getting ready for war?”

Grampa Gruff snorted. “You kiddin’?” he snapped.

“It’s true the Storm King went through you ponies like a claw through gypsum,” Ember said.

“But you’re ponies,” Grampa added. “We knew something would happen-”

“-you hit dumb Storm King with mighty rainbow smashy magic-“ Rutherford said.

“-or recruit a band of unlikely heroes to save the day at the last minute-“ Ember continued.

“-or else that idiot Storm King would something stupid like betray his chief lieutenant, allowing the ponies to snatch victory from the beak of defeat!” Grampa Gruff finished.

“What??” Twilight Sparkle wasn’t going to be silenced by a shake of the shoulder now. “We won by a miracle, and you were COUNTING on that? That’s absolutely stupid!!” (306)

“Where ponies concerned-“ Rutherford began.

“- the more stupid it sounds-“ said Ember.

“- the more likely it is to work,” Grampa finished.

“Remember landslides?” Rutherford pointed out, waving a hoof as if surrounded by the snow-heavy peaks surrounding the land of the yaks.

“Remember the drake who tried to take a nap in Smoky Mountain?” Ember reminded Twilight..

“Remember baking soda?” Grampa muttered. “Who ever thought a powder would change a way of life?”

“Ponies do the stupid and impossible every day,” said Rutherford

“So this was our one and only chance-“ said Ember.

“-to do it before the ponies,” Grampa said.

“The ponies,” Cherry said coolly. “And what about the changelings?”

“Who cares about the changelings?” Grampa grumbled. “The changelings are crazy!”

Ember and Rutherford nodded solemn agreement.

Cherry Berry felt a headache coming on, and she reached both hooves up to rub her temples. I don’t want this job, she thought. I just wanted to fly a rocket. But the sooner this is done, the sooner I get the evil mastermind back on her throne and go back to letting her handle roadapples like these…

Fortunately for the pink earth pony, Twilight Sparkle had regained control of her tongue and her temper. “Well, let’s leave aside arguments about who is crazy and who isn’t, after what happened,” she said. “Cherry Berry already has a plan to bring your astronauts-”

“Baby brother!” Rutherford wailed, bringing his hooves down on the conference table and breaking a chunk of it off in his moment of emotion.

“-bringing them back safely,” Twilight finished.

I have a plan? Cherry thought. That’s nice- now how about someone tell me what my plan is? Right now all I know is we’re gonna do it.

“Is there anything we can do to help?” Ember asked. “I feel responsible for Fireball. I… well, I kinda blackmailed him into this.”

Grampa looked at the blue dragonling. “You mean Fireball didn’t want to go up?”

“He quit after his orbital flight,” Ember said. “Just like he quit after his first flight. But I said that if he didn’t go up on this flight, I would. Without training. That shut him up.” She looked down at her claws and added, “I guess that wasn’t such a hot idea, huh?”

“I guess we should consider ourselves lucky the diamond dogs didn’t manage a launch along with all of you,” Cherry Berry said into the silence that followed (307).

“In any case, you can leave everything in Cherry Berry’s hooves,” Twilight said. “In three days she’ll be on the way to rescue-”

“Four days,” Cherry said. “The first thing we do, we tell all the marooned astronauts to go on two-thirds rations.”

“What?” Rutherford had to stretch his forehooves a little to prop himself up on the broken edge of the table. “You starve baby brother??”

“You packed seven days of the pre-packaged rations into the capsule, right?” Cherry asked. 

“Well… yes, yaks think so,” Rutherford admitted. “Whatever you send us. Yaks not make space food.”

“We just add gem sprinkles to mix in with the packs,” Ember said. “For proper nutrition, like Dad always told me.”

“If we’re paying for the capsules,” Gruff grumbled, “why should we blow money on new food packs when yours will do? It’s not like any griffon will pay money to eat that garbage on the ground!”(308)

“Okay,” Cherry said. “Those meals are calculated for a very active astronaut, doing a lot of things in the capsule. They’re heavy in calories. Two meals a day would be enough to live on, on the ground, even for a yak.”

“Yak have mighty, mighty appetites,” Prince Rutherford said doubtfully. 

“But by cutting out one meal a day, we buy the astronauts maybe two days,” Cherry said. “We can use one of those days to build the best rocket we can- one that can get everypony home. The other day is insurance in case we have trouble getting to them.”

“Trouble?” Grampa Gruff snorted again. “You just aim your firecracker at them and keep flying till you catch them! How hard can it be??”

Footnotes:

(304) Which is to say, not all that different from how any yak usually looks.

(305) This was something of a lie. Specifically, it was a blatant lie. No cities were on fire anymore. Granted, there was other damage that, unlike Canterlot, hadn’t been automatically repaired by the power of Friendship/Love/Dreams/Whatever Celestia Did Besides Delegating To Twilight. But actual fires had been very few and far between during the invasion, because the Storm King had gotten as far in the Evil Mastermind’s Handbook as, “Pillage before burning.” (309)

(306) Twilight Sparkle thinks she is a vastly better diplomat than she actually is. She has the handicap of being unable to not say what she’s thinking at the worst possible times.

(307) The dogs had precisely one Flea-powered flight to their name, but the promised Project Stardust was due to launch Any Week Now… and had been for months.

(308) Here, for once, Grampa Gruff seriously underestimated both the willingness of griffons to part with money for something more valuable (to them) than money, like for example a chance to live a little like their space-going heroes, and the willingness of other griffons to seek to make a profit on the first group of griffons. Fortunately for himself, Gordo hadn’t made that error, and he’d kept the food cabinets in the capsule locked until just before liftoff.

(309) Admittedly, this is the first page after the contents, dedication, and preface.

“How hard can it be?” Goddard the Griffon choked. “How hard can it be??”

Cherry and Twilight blinked at the elderly griffon on the telepresence screen, who looked fit to lay an egg. (Which, as he was a tom, would have been something to see.)

“What my colleague means,” Warner von Brawn, standing next to him, interjected before Goddard could overcome his shock, “is that achieving a rendezvous between two orbiting space objects requires careful planning and precision flight. It’s never been done before.”

“What’s so difficult about it?” Twilight asked. “You merely calculate the relative position and trajectories of the two objects, you calculate an orbital insertion burn that produces a close intercept, you plan a second burn that matches velocities between the two objects, and then you use small bursts of power to achieve a final rendezvous. It’s really quite simple!”

“Simple!” Goddard gasped, his feathers bristling, his hackles rising on his back.

“Not everypony can do calculus in their heads,” Cherry replied quietly.

“Princess,” von Brawn said carefully, “look at it from the point of view of an ordinary pony. Supposing you are an earth pony, on the ground, chasing another earth pony. You can’t fly or teleport. Assume the pony you’re chasing maintains a constant speed, what do you do to catch up?”

“Run faster, of course,” Twilight said. 

“True. That’s common sense. That’s what any normal person in a normal situation would say.” von Brawn steepled his massive fingers and continued, “But orbital mechanics and common sense don’t operate in the same way. Suppose you are in a ship in orbit. You accelerate prograde, burning straight ahead. What happens?”

“Well, my apoapsis rises,” Twilight said. “The orbit gets higher, bigger, until I achieve escape velocity.”

“Correct,” von Brawn replied. “Now imagine you are in orbit, behind another ship. You burn straight ahead, trying to catch up, the way common sense dictates you catch up to someone else.” The minotaur’s cool blue eyes bored into the princess’s. “Which of you has the longer distance to travel to return to the starting point of your orbit after the burn- you, or the ship that has executed no burn?”

“Er… burning prograde enlarges the orbit… which means I’d have the longer distance to travel,” Twilight said.

“Which means?” 

“That the ship that hasn’t made the burn, having the shorter orbit, will complete that orbit faster than the ship that executed the prograde burn,” Twilight said. 

“In other words,” Goddard grumbled, “by going faster, you fall farther behind.”

“And this,” von Brawn agreed, “is the fundamental paradox of the mechanics of orbital rendezvous. The entire notion of catching up with your target must be thrown out the window. Instead you have to think of it in terms of achieving a point of intercept and then matching velocities with your target.”

“I think I get it,” Cherry said, feeling obligated to hold up some part of the egghead conversation. “Rather than try to catch the target, you want the target to catch you!”

Both Goddard and von Brawn worked their jaws for a moment, trying to think of a constructive response. Finally von Brawn said, “If it aids you to visualize the problem, so be it. But more properly, the question remains one of intercept: plotting a course that puts two ships in the same place at the same time, on vectors which can be adjusted to keep them in proximity using the minimum fuel possible.”

“Ideally, a direct ascent intercept could do the job,” Twilight said. “One burn from the surface to the target.”

“The first target,” Goddard muttered. “We have three to deal with, Faust help us.”

“Also, a direct ascent intercept would require a level of precision in both calculation and piloting no space program has yet come close to achieving,” von Brawn said. “And we would be doing it with leftover parts and experimental equipment.”

“But can you do it?” Twilight asked. 

“Oh, assuredly we can do it,” von Brawn said. “Intercept and rendezvous is merely difficult, not impossible. It helps that we have complete tracking and communications with the stranded ships, courtesy of your satellite network.”

“The two big problems,” Goddard said, “are finding a way to get space for four astronauts into a single capsule, and then finding a way to get that capsule down again safely.”

“Weren’t you working on a three-person capsule?” Cherry asked. “Can’t we just launch that with a Probodobodyne core?”

Goddard shook his head. “Even if we had that capsule ready for flight- which it isn’t and won’t be this week- we haven’t got rocket engines of matching size. We’re still working out the bugs in the next generation of rocket motors.” (310)

“And besides,” Twilight said, “after Shotputnik I don’t think the other space programs will be happy about entrusting their people’s lives to a robot pilot.” She grimaced and added, “In fact, I think even suggesting it might trigger a war. Three wars.”

“The problem is not insoluble,” von Brawn insisted. “Goddard will see what can be completed and rushed to Horseton in time for launch. I will return to Horseton immediately and see what we have to work with. Then we may consult together and find the optimal configuration of resources to achieve the desired ends.”

“Well, okay,” Twilight said. “Remember, all Equestria- all Equus- is counting on you to bring those people home.”

“Relax,” Cherry Berry said confidently. “What space agency is more reliable than the Changeling Space Program?”

“You said that with a straight face?” Chrysalis asked. 

“Barely,” Cherry admitted. “I still didn’t have any clue how I was going to make it all work. I’d have to organize the rocket design and assembly, train for the mission, fly the mission, and somehow oversee it from the ground- all while basically reorganizing your kingdom to keep things running while you were napping. I didn’t see how I could do it all.”

“And then Dragonfly came to you,” Chrysalis said. 

“That’s right- hey!” Cherry said indignantly. “How do you know it was her idea?”

“I know her, and I know you,” the changeling queen said. “She’s a changeling, and you’re a pony. You’d never think of disobeying me without a very good reason, but a proper changeling thinks about disobedience all the time.”

“That’s… really weird,” Cherry said, her eyes crossing as she tried to figure out how that could even work.(311)

“That’s my children,” Chrysalis said. “Now go on with the story. You were just about to tell me how Dragonfly talked you into disobeying my express orders…”

Footnotes:

(310) In the Changeling Space Program, “getting the bugs out” is not always a figure of speech. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but a little knowledge in a changeling’s head, plus a complicated piece of equipment, is a recipe for explosions.

(311) How it works is a mystery, but how it fails to work can be summed up in one word: “lethally”.

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CSP is going to be my main focus, but I'm also looking at my Civil War alt-history project Lee Goes North and my adult projects Mu Beta Epsilon and a couple of hulky-like sexy concepts. Feel free to reply to this post with your requests for what I should work on more!