KrisOverstreet

What I got written on this trip: Changeling Space Program (Patreon)

Published:

2020-07-27 05:03:26

Imported:

2026-06

Content

I start home again, at least, sometime tomorrow morning. I might make it to my own bed before dawn Tuesday.

I didn't have much time and energy to do any wtriting this past week, but here's what got done.

“Why do you have a book clipped on that clipboard?”

Twilight Sparkle looked up to notice Chrysalis, wearing a set of snazzy blue coveralls(469) contrasting Twilight’s own light violet ones. “What book?” she asked. “This is just the pre-flight checklist.”

“In whose nightmares, princess?” Chrysalis asked. “The capsule preflight checklist is three pages long, and one page is just the mission profile action items. Everything else is checked out by VAB staff before the rocket goes to the pad.”

“I know,” Twilight said. “That’s where I got this from! We have to go over all the switches in the capsule before launch, just in case the VAB crew missed some!”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Chysalis said. “Getting those switches right is the assembly crew’s job. It’s the whole reason they’re here at all.”(470)

“But everypony makes mistakes,” Twilight insisted.

“Every pony, perhaps.” Chrysalis put her nose in the air and placed a hoof over her heart. “But my changelings are highly trained professionals who know they’re working directly under their queen’s eye. Why, I’ve never been afraid for a moment to trust my life to the unfailing professionalism and skill of my subjects.”

A tiny portion of Chrysalis’s brain examined the boast the instant it left her mouth, found a potential error, and waved a frantic red flag at the rest of the brain.

Wait a moment… I said what?

Pure survival instinct froze her smug, triumphant expression in place (471) while Chrysalis reviewed her last three sentences in detail. Upon examining the evidence, she convened a mental review board to subpoena memories involving her subjects’ laziness, their tendency to squabble among themselves when not watched, their three-second attention spans, and their inability to understand why life-threatening danger was not “fun”. By the time the evidence got to certain rocket flights, and particularly her own narrow escapes from death, the verdict had become crystal clear.

HOW COULD I BE SO STUPID??

I said THAT… and I KNEW better… and oh, sweet Faust, I really HAVEN’T thought about the idiots in the VAB for flights and flights! And I KNOW they screw things up! Even with one of the brain-bulls watching over them!

“Well,” Twilight Sparkle said, not noticing the sweat beginning to run down Chrysalis’s head, “I’d still feel better if we ran a simulated launch with this checklist. Just to be thorough.”

“W-w-well, if you need the security blanket of routine,” Chrysalis said, “I’m sure we can indulge you once or twice.” She levitated the clipboard out of Twilight Sparkle’s magical grasp. “Just a moment while I discuss this with the simulator crew. Won’t be a second!”

“But I’ve already-“

“Just a moment!” Without a second glance at Twilight Chrysalis trotted towards the simulations crew with what she intended to be a light-hearted step, but instead became the High-Stepping Canter of Doom. The cheerful smile had enough jagged teeth in it to make the observers afraid for their necks, individually and collectively.

“I-i-i-is something wrong, m-my queen?” Occupant asked on behalf of the group.

“Everything’s juuuust fiiiiiiine,” Chrysalis said as she skipped up to them, her smile getting even more gapey and drooly. “Just a teensy, eensy, weensy little change to the schedule.” She leaned forward, took one glance towards the capsule, and then dropped the cheerful act.(472) “We’re spending the whole morning on launch sims,” she hissed in a rapid-fire whisper. “All morning, nothing but launches, do you understand? And you,” she said, jabbing a hoof at Cherry Berry, “will make sure between one and four switches are set wrong at the start of every sim, to see if Book Princess and I can spot the difference. If we don’t, simulate what happens. Do it.”

Occupant, von Brawn, and Cherry looked at each other. Occupant shrugged. Von Brawn tossed his head noncommittally. Cherry, having no one else to shrug at, looked at Chrysalis and said, “O… kay?”

“Capital!” Chrysalis said in a fake but less obviously lethal cheerful tone. “Let’s get to it, people!” And in one final menacing hiss she added, “And no matter how many times I mess up, we keep doing it until I get it right.(473) Clear?” With that she turned and trotted back to the sim capsule, shouting, “Co-ming!”

Footnote:

(469) Marred somewhat by stitching here and there to suggest the holes in the body underneath. Chrysalis couldn’t actually wear a patched spacesuit, no matter what inspirational propaganda posters suggested, but the new astromare duty uniforms provided the next best thing.

(470) Chrysalis elided over all the actual assembly of the rocket, the welding and bolting, the inspection of each component, the thwacking over the head of the changelings who thought roller hockey in the parts storage room was a good idea, the chewing out of the ponies who sold them the equipment, the stocking of capsule stores, the strapping down and shutting in of the crew, and above all the lifting of the massive, easily toppled rocket from the VAB all the way out to the launchpad. When it came to Chrysalis making an argument, accuracy only got in the way.

(471) Chrysalis was not as perfect a deceiver as she liked to believe. Had any pony not focused on a critical issue been watching, they would have noticed the moment the eyes widened, the pupils contracted, and the sweat beaded up on her face. Twilight Sparkle, on the other hoof, had decided to tune out Chryssy’s brags in favor of her own agenda, and so she didn’t notice the queen cracking at the seams.

(472) Much to everyone’s relief.

(473) To be fair, out of eight simulations, Chrysalis only missed four switches, and Twilight caught three of them. The one switch neither of them caught turned out to be relatively harmless; the RCS was turned on in flight, and it took Chrysalis only a second to shut it back down before resuming the practice liftoff.

The next day, simulations continued, this time focusing on docking practice…

… or, as Twilight Sparkle thought of it, teaching a particularly difficult student that “good enough” was not actually good enough.

“All I’m saying is,” Chrysalis growled (474), “I targeted the docking port like you told me to. I got the ship oriented at the target, no problem. I flew the ship just like I would an EVA, like you told me to- and like the LAST THREE TIMES!!”

“Volume, please,” Twilight said, trying to be patient.

“And we made contact at zero point four meters per second,” Chrysalis continued, dialing back the volume again. “Perfectly safe speed. And then all the controls go crazy, every single thruster fires at once, and we end up with zero monopropellant and a failed sim! AGAIN! I’m doing it like you TOLD me, princess!” Chrysalis waved a hoof at the red-lit controls. “Now you tell the moronic computer I’m doing it right!”

Twilight sighed. “But you forgot one thing, Chrysalis,” she said, reminding herself not to use a didactic tone.(475) “It’s not enough to hit the target. You have to hit it straight, so the docking couplers can interact. If you hit it at an angle, the docking magnets just throw everything off, and the SAS and RCS fight the magnets, and everything goes crazy until the two ships settle down.”

Chrysalis raised an eyebrow. “Oh, really?” she asked. “So the magnets will pull the ships together if I do nothing, right?”

“If the ships are very close, yes,” Twilight said. “As in less than two meters. And only if the ships are within a certain range of degrees off the perfect-“

“BLAH BLAH BLAH,” Chrysalis interrupted. “I get close, I do nothing, and the magnets dock the ships. Got it.” She leaned from her seat on the left of the three-pony capsule over the empty center seat. “So when were you going to tell me to turn SAS and RCS off right before docking?”

Twilight blinked. “Um… but you want those,” she said. “You want to maintain your ship’s attitude to the target, because if you don’t, the magnets could throw either ship back and forth like a rodeo pony throwing a haybale! You could hit vital components or even breach the hull! That’s why you always want to find a good translation of your ship in relation to the target until-“

“Uuup, uup uup uup!” Chrysalis interrupted again. “What is this ‘translation’ you’re talking about? Do I have to learn how to speak Spaceship?”

Yes, you do, Twilight groaned mentally. And I don’t know how you haven’t learned it in a year and more of spaceflight. “In this case,” she said aloud, “translation means shifting your position and orientation in relation to another object, like a targeted ship. It means that, instead of coming straight at the target when your angle is bad, you make a right-angle turn, moving sideways and then turning the ship so you’re on the right line to dock!” She waved the heavy flight checklist(476) in the air and finished, “It’s all right here in the documentation!”

“I haven’t got time to read everything shoved in front of me!” Chrysalis said. “We launch in four days, right?”

“Five,” Twilight corrected.

“As soon as we get this to work,” Chrysalis countered. “And it doesn’t have to be pretty. So long as we don’t actually break anything on either ship and we get a dock, everything will be fine. Right?”

“But it’s important to learn the right way to do-“

“RIGHT??”

Twilight decided to surrender. “Fine,” she sighed. Whatever. The next sim will prove me right anyway.

“Good!” Chrysalis banged a hoof on the inner wall of the simulator. “WE’RE READY!” she shouted. “LET’S DO IT AGAIN!”

“You know they can hear us over the comms, right?” Twilight asked, tapping her headset with one hoof.

“Whatever,” Chrysalis grumbled, resetting the SAS and RCS systems as the simulator internal lighting blinked red, then resumed normal white as the computer verified all switches in their proper position.

A few minutes later, Twilight found herself grinding her teeth as Chrysalis made the same oblique approach as before, then switched off both RCS and SAS at two meters out, and then pumped SAS off and on to reduce the ship’s thrashing until the docking ports registered a solid link.

And then it worked again in the next sim.

And the next.

And the next, with Chrysalis staring smugly at Twilight as she switched the SAS on and off with one hoof.

“It’ll never work this way in real life,” Twilight huffed.

“Watch me, princess,” Chrysalis gloated.

Footnotes:

(474) Which Twilight liked better than the shouting. She’d heard enough of that.

(475) And not a shouty rant either, no matter how very good it would feel at this moment.

(476) On the Operations and Objectives of Changeling Space Program Mission Twenty-Three in Conjunction with Equestrian Space Agency Flight Thirteen, Fourth Edition, Revised and Expanded, With Annotations By the Author, Baltimare University Press, printed on demand. Being a princess meant people in authority no longer tried very hard to curb one’s obsessions with checklists.

Four days of simulations passed. The giant rocket, assembled and early, sat on the launchpad before dawn of what the mission conference had dubbed Day Seven- one day earlier than the target date. The immense Twin Boar liquid-fuel boosters, the newest invention from Goddard and von Brawn, flanked a central stack powered by the Skipper engine, cousin to the Mainsail engine which had propelled the rovers R5 and R6 to Minmus and the Moon, respectively. Further up the stack lay weaker but more efficient Poodle engines, ending in the final stage, the experimental lander which would get its orbital testing around Luna’s moon.

And inside the capsule, slowly, methodically, Chrysalis and Twilight Sparkle went down the entire expanded checklist(477). Just as the checklist finished, the sun broke the horizon over the Celestial Sea, the almost new moon hovering above it in the early morning sky(478).

“Repeat mission objectives,” Cherry Berry called out from the capcom seat in Mission Control.

“Testing of prototype landing ship in orbit of the moon,” Chrysalis replied. “Suborbital flight test and delta-V verification test. Docking with ESA Amicitas and evaluation of on-board malfunctions. Return of astromare Rainbow Dash safely to Equus.”

“Roger, Twenty-three,” Cherry Berry said. “Final fueling in progress; launch countdown now rolling at four minutes… mark!”

“Confirm T minus three fifty-five and counting,” Chrysalis said. She flipped the switch to cut her microphone and muttered, “I miss the days when we could just go.”

Twilight Sparkle blinked. She hadn’t expected conversation from Chrysalis. Bickering, yes- she’d had days of bickering, and she’d come to expect it, even if it did drive her up the wall. “More complex ships require more caution,” she replied.

“It ought to be the other way around,” Chrysalis muttered. “The more we build ships, the easier they ought to be to fly, not harder.”

“We’ll get there,” Twilight said. “That’s what this flight is all about. We’ll get there.”

Twilight saw Chrysalis turn her spacesuit helmet to give her an icy glare. “Yesss,” she hissed. “We will.” With a click the comms switched back to open channel. “Horseton, Twenty-three, fuel reading optimal, please confirm.”

Oh well, Twilight thought, and sat back in her flight couch as the last minute of the countdown ticked down in Cherry Berry’s squeaky voice.

At zero two times the force of Equus gravity shoved Twilight back in her seat- rather more forcefully than her one prior liftoff, which even under eight Thumper solid rocket boosters and full main engines had barely topped 1.4 G’s at launch. In a mere thirty seconds the rocket had gone supersonic, shaking under the forces of aerodynamic pressure ahead and four controlled explosions behind, all kept under skillful control- much to Twilight’s ongoing surprise- by a calm, stern Queen Chrysalis.

The giant rocket shuddered and shook its way through max-Q, tipping slowly in a controlled curve towards the eastern horizon. The forces of acceleration continued pushing Twilight deeper against her spacesuit backpack and flight couch, as two G’s crept up towards three. As three G’s reached towards four, plasma began to flicker through the capsule’s hatch window, as the upper reaches of Equus’s atmosphere objected to the massive thing plowing through it.

Chrysalis, so far as Twilight could tell, didn’t bat an eye. “Approaching first stage burnout,” she said calmly.

“Confirm, Twenty-three,” the squeaky voice of Mission Control replied.

Then, at a mere one minute and eleven seconds into flight, the ship staged. For a moment Twilight felt herself yanked forward in the straps, her horn tapping the inside of her helmet uncomfortably before, a split second later, she was slammed back into place by the ignition of the second stage’s Skipper engine.

And then, after only a few seconds, Chrysalis shut down the engine. “SECO,” she called out. “Showing a high apoapsis, Horseton. Will circularize orbit once we’re out in space.”

“Copy, Twenty-three,” Cherry replied. “We show all systems GO for space, GO for orbit.”

Twilight saw light flickering in the hatch. She looked down at the nav-ball in front of her and saw it steadily rolling from the blue into the brown. “Chrysalis, what are you doing?” she asked, trying not to panic. “We’re tumbling! The aerodynamic forces will-“

“We’re already well into the upper atmosphere,” Chrysalis replied. “The air’s too thin to do more than drag a little. Sit back, shut up, and let me show off.”(479)

A few moments later something went BANG directly in front of the two astromares. “Nosecone separation,” Chrysalis said, as the pointed metal that had shielded the docking port through the launch got sent up and away, well out of the flight path of the rest of the ship.

“Confirm nosecone separation,” Cherry said. “The bullpen is sending data up to your computer for orbital insertion burn.”

“Roger, Horseton,” Chrysalis said, flipping a switch with her hoof and looking with a casual disdain at the diagrams on the little computer screen before her. “Specialist, extend solar panels.”

Twilight blinked, then shook her head. “Solar panels, aye!” she said, finding the switches and flicking them on with her magic. A soft whirr filled the capsule, followed by a snap as the retractable solar panels locked into place.

“Apoapsis in forty-five seconds,” Chrysalis said. “Preparing for manual orbital burn.”

“Roger, Twenty-three.”

Twilight opened her mouth, saw Chrysalis glaring… well, no, not glaring exactly. This time there wasn’t either heat or cold in the expression. There was just this look of… supreme indifference. They locked eyes for a moment, and Twilight’s mouth clicked shut. Without even a nod of recognition Chrysalis returned her attention to her console, tweaking the flight yoke in her hooves before slowly bring the throttle back up to full.

The ship rocked back and forth as Chrysalis sought the optimum trajectory, glancing from one readout to another almost faster than Twilight could follow the motions. The changeling queen’s eyes seemed to narrow slightly, but aside from that Twilight couldn’t read anything in that silent, stoic expression. For a moment she had the impression of a changeling Maud Pie in a spacesuit… except that Maud talked a bit more.

Footnotes:

(477) It actually went surprisingly quickly, once you realized there were maybe four action items per page, tops, and began ignoring the explanations for why the switches needed to be in those positions. By launch day Chrysalis had mostly gotten over her annoyance at Twilight’s pedantics, especially once she’d privately learned from von Brawn exactly how many ways those switches could get her killed. (Hint: lots.)

(478) Celestia and Luna had actually planned this in advance as a good-luck gesture for the rescue mission. For the large crowd of launch-watchers at Horseton Space Center, the sight was almost as impressive as a Summer Sun Celebration. For the two people actually in the spaceship… the hatches were turned the wrong way, and they missed it completely. Unfortunate, but as Rarity would point out much later, this is why cameras were invented.

(479) Truth be told, Chrysalis didn’t have control of the craft. Without the engines firing, the reaction wheels weren’t enough to counter certain aerodynamic forces that caused the finless second stage to tumble. But there were reasons why Chrysalis didn’t like the phrase, “truth be told.”