Chapter 7: How to Build a Starship

Some inventor on another one of the great ships had invented a field generator that created a shearing plane--a highly compressed and well-controlled field boundary which disrupted chemical energy links within the knife-like field. This was amazingly good news for the miners as it removed the last reason for them to do regular EVAs. However, it required a careful touch at the controls and a bit better education than the miners usually had.

The scent of change was in the air. New concepts and devices revolved around the field affectors.

A device was designed around the shearing plane generator to automate the breaking up of dross when hollowing out the decks and chambers of new great ships. Once fed the ship's interior schematic, The cutting field was energized in a grid under robotic control; carving out a lacework of corridors, chambers and galleries. This totally automated the process. It certainly decreased the time and materials costs required to convert a moonlet into a great ship.

Instead of hollowing out the entire core of a moonlet and building an engineered framework within, the wheel came back around and we built like our more primitive ancestors that dug their homes out of mountains with picks, hammers and chisels.

The tractor beam changed the way great ships were financed and constructed. Instead of having to lay thousands of kilometers of cable and all the field generators to move a planetismal, three to twelve powerful 'tugs' flew near the object that they wanted to move, established a balanced pattern among their vessels with computer control over their navigation and energized the tractors. It was a slower process, and over the next several decades the tugs became unmanned remotely piloted vehicles. However, for less massive projects it was still quite a bit less costly in manpower, time, equipment and funds. The tugs were re-useable.

For a while there were several stony masses in Mercury's orbit getting the organics, water and gasses baked out of them. One was our project ship, 42355 Typhon with a raw diameter of 162 Kilometers. After a decade it was towed into L2, permanently shaded from Sol by Earth's shadow. The residual stony mass had to be carefully shepherded by a tender to keep it away from all the telescopes inhabiting L2.

While the core was still nearly molten, a focused tractor was used to extract plugs of the metal alloy making up the central axis. These were saved. Why discard a windfall like that? This measurably sped up the proto-ship's radiative cooling process. Ten more years at eight degrees Kelvin got the mass down to a working temperature. It was then towed to the shipyards at L4 where it was given its final shape. Huge shearing fields were used to carve the mass into two extended cones fused at the large ends, with truncated tops Then the automated diggers began their job of breaking down the unwanted material while leaving the ship's decks and chambers behind like a 3-dimensional lacework. Conveyors moved the discarded material to the central tube where mining ships used tractors to pull all of it free and into their salvage bays.

This ship's decks were not designed as concentric cylinders. They were designed as stacked plates.

The ship had been planned to have forty eight decks of varying diameters and two landing bays, one at the bow and one at the stern. Once the faceted cones were shaped and the interior was excavated, the dross was heated in solar furnaces and spun, causing the lighter rock to come to the surface. While still molten, the stony material was carved away while the remaining stew of metals was sliced into sheets by more shearing fields. Then the alloy was applied over the surface of the vessel. This resulted in a 90 Kilometer long metal-clad ship with no penetrations save for the boat bays. The alloy tested out to be primarily iron and nickel with some crystalline metal carbide inclusions.