Chapter 1: He Did What!?

Tyrone Colla was a Junior in High School in Southeast Arizona, His father was working with a small Shipbuilder making Jitneys and Shuttles. They were hoping to get into building larger things like small space ships. Tyrone had hung around the shops some and became aware of how they had to call the tower at the Army fort or Tucson’s airport to find out if it was safe to fly off one of their ships.

So he decided that there was a need for a smaller device to track ships at air ports, as the need to run a standard Benko-Chang turbine at airport as was done now, was costly both in installation and in cost to operate 24/7.

So he decided to investigate and when the science projects were assigned for grades, he decided to look into the needs for a cheaper device to track air traffic around smaller airports. His first goal was to research the need, which became apparent, with local airports needing to call major airports for clearance to launch and fly almost anywhere. He then began to envision this device and decided to make a simple model of his concept. His first attempt burned up the bearings in a matter of seconds.

He told his father, who nodded with a smile and sad the speeds at which the turbines ran was more than any small, commonly available bearing was going to handle. Ty was irritated that he’d not been helped and that he “couldn’t” build his device, so he went to work, eventually creating a bearing that used air under pressure and directed into multiple small orifices in the bearing to support his turbine rotor. The air got hot but was being vented out quickly as the low pressure turbine pressed more through the bearings. This worked quite well and he finished building the detector and then hooked it to a moderately large oscilloscope to show what was detected. That took some careful tweaking and he had to write some of the code to get it to display useful information. Ty put a range scale adapter in to allow the oscilloscope to display various ranges. The device worked surprisingly well, tracking shuttles and ships for a seeming large distance around his house, although he had no way to establish exactly what distance each range scale was seeing. But as his science project was due to be turned in on Monday, he spent a lot of time, money and effort the weekend before the project was due, creating the boards that explained what his device was doing and why it was useful by doing simple cost comparisons.

Ty was feeling upbeat on Monday when he asked his dad to drop him and all his stuff off at school. His dad was in a rush, but did help him lug all of the material to his science classroom. Jerry Hardesty, his science teacher, asked what he had done and Ty explained his thoughts and what he had built. Jerry frowned a bit, for while Ty was a very good student, Jerry knew that building such a device was well beyond a high school student, especially with the supplies available locally. Jerry had been a sensor operator in the Fleet before his ship had been seriously battered by a combat damaged fighter that had seriously injured Jerry as well as many others in the sensor bay, when it crashed into the ship.

Jerry asked Ty to set it up and let him see how it worked; Ty was delighted that someone was finally interested in what he’d done. He put the detector on its tripod out side the window and ran the cable inside, then hooked up the oscilloscope and plugged the power cord into the wall. He then showed Jerry how he could see ships moving around and could adjust the range although he admitted he had no feel for what sort of ranges he was seeing. Jerry however did have a good feel for what was around them, where the mountains were and where the larger airports were. He turned the range knob up and down carefully and marveled at the distances he was pretty sure he was seeing. “Ty, how about you turn this off for a bit, but leave it plugged in. Have a seat, I think you have a solid A here. But I need to make a call and do some stuff.”

Jerry went to the door and looked around, he saw the school resource officer and waved him over.

“What’s the problem Jerry? everything looks quiet.”

Jerry smiled “I need you to keep everyone away from this door. I’m going to call an old friend, I think Ty has a really cool science project and don’t want anyone snitching his idea. If you could get someone to watch that Tripod too just for a little bit I’d be most appreciative.”

The officer smiled and shook his head “Nobody is going to be a problem, You know it as well as I do, I got stuff to do.”