Chapter 5: But Why Can't We?

Our ship's culture didn't promote a high level of information security. When my team members let the cat out of the bag that we'd successfully tested a star drive the entire ship's crew went into an uproar. The captain finally had to drop the hammer on everyone to get any productivity out of the ship. No, we wouldn't be going to the stars in any hurry. One, the Miranda hadn't been paid for yet. Two, gallivanting out among the stars wouldn't be very prudent as we were the big fish in our little pond, but out in the big ocean we would be more than likely eaten alive by something a lot bigger and meaner than we were. Three, we were simply not prepared for interstellar navigation. Four, our sensors were sadly lacking in the range necessary to cope with speeds above that of light. We'd hit anything before our sensors had a chance to report on its existence. That would blow the entire ship into plasma. Entirely new concepts in sensor theory had to be developed and the equipment designed then tested before we would be anywhere near ready to explore outside our system.

There was a lot of grumbling, but saner heads prevailed. I let out a profound sigh of relief that we hadn't had to break out the puke gas grenades.

Oh, we were prepared for insurrection and mutiny. The ship could be locked down to all except specific identity chip codes and the atmospheric controls could be set to reduce the O2 partial pressure in selected air domains, thus immobilizing anyone outside of a pressure suit. Also, our unused air domains would make great lockups.

I thought about converting our ship to artificial gravity. We had the technology. The trouble was she simply wasn't engineered to do it easily nor reliably. That was off the table. Really, all of our recent inventions save the tractor beam were infeasible to implement on our current ship. She was designed for what she was currently doing. Long term self-reliant mining of a vast cubic volume of space larger than the planetary ring system as well as scientific research.