by The Awethors
Copyright 2015 Simon Coates
All Rights Reserved
Thunder in the Sky
Introduction
It is the year 2300! Humans have developed a special racing formula with spaceships; think Formula One but with spaceships instead of cars. This document is a test report written by a top pilot from the sport’s formative years, reporting on what an early championship winning spaceship is like. Before we begin, it is worth clarifying a number of special terms:
Cr - short from credit, the universal currency of the time. One credit is worth the same as an English pound today, or (US) $1.50.
Formula X - the name for the spaceship racing formula. The sport has a championship, the Formula X Galactic Championship, that takes place over the course of the year, with races over celestial bodies, examples being ten laps of Planet Mars or one lap of the Moon. Points are awarded to the pilots based on their finishing positions, with the pilot gaining the most points at the end of the year being declared Galactic Champion.
THz - short for terahertz, a measure of power in a spaceship engine (a bit like brake horsepower in cars).
There are also a number of spaceship companies mentioned:
Britus - the manufacturer of the spaceship on test in the report. Britus are a specialist engineering company and a top spaceship racing team (think McLaren).
Clydesale-Frisson - specialist dealer who sell retired and prestige spaceships to the public. An advert describing some of their current stock is at the end of this report.
Gilbern - builder of top quality super-luxury spaceships, a car equivalent today would be Rolls-Royce.
Palatia-Sonnar - a race team who also make upmarket ships for the public (like say Mercedes-Benz today).
Sunstar - their spaceships have a distinctive sporty feel with very powerful engines. A good comparison with a car maker today who are similar would be Ferrari.
Hope you enjoy the report. At the end there is an advertisement for a specialist spaceship dealer so you can see the sort of spaceships that are readily bought and sold.
All there is left to say is tighten your safety belts, and get ready for the ride of your life. From here on, you will be transported to the 24th century. Enjoy!
Flight Test of a 2287 Britus B Type Formula X Galactic Championship Race Spaceship
By John Messier, 2283 and 2284 Formula X Galactic Champion
On 5th October 2037, Sergy Abramov stepped out of his spaceship onto the surface of Mars, becoming the first human in history to set foot on a planet other than Earth. On doing so, he uttered the words, “Well, it’s red, dusty, barren, but one day might just be called home.” It was a beautiful moment which harked back to 68 years previous, when Neil Armstrong uttered equally poignant words as he set foot on the Moon, to become the first human to step on the surface of a celestial object other than Earth.
From those beginnings, the project to colonise the Red Planet began. It became the biggest civil engineering project ever undertaken by humankind: to terraform Mars and transform it into a planet that people could live on. It took over a century to complete, and from that point, people started to live there. As the population became settled, so the interplanetary transport system developed alongside. In 2250, the first commercial spaceship was put on sale for the public, the Galaxis Solar Explorer, giving people the option of having their own personal interplanetary transportation device. With spaceships now capable of flying to Mars from Earth in just one week, and with the price of such machines falling, making ownership possible for an increasing number of people, interest in spaceships was at unprecedented levels. Inevitably, people began to take an interest in the speed of these machines, which led to an intriguing offshoot spin-off: competitive spaceship racing.
The start of what would eventually become a full-blown racing formula was relatively low-key. In 2283, a group of Earth-based spaceship enthusiasts decided to hold a race to the Moon, and then have a second race back to Earth. I was one of them, and I won the first two of these races, in 2283, and then a year later in 2284. From those early beginnings, a sport was born, what has become known as Formula X, the biggest and most popular motorsport in history. Today, it attracts huge sponsorships and has a following of billions. The ships that compete in this motorsport today bear little resemblance to those early fire-breathers, but the ethos remains the same: if you were to create a spaceship with one goal in mind — to make it as fast as possible — what would it be like? Today’s Formula X racers represent the ultimate incarnation of a spaceship built for one purpose, to go as fast as possible, with absolutely no concessions to anything else. This insatiable quest for speed is why Formula X started in the first place and it remains a central point of the sport.
Today, Formula X spaceship racing takes place over the course of a year, with a number of teams competing against each other in the ultimate test of speed. It covers set routes over the surface of a celestial body, or between bodies in the case of the Earth to the Moon event. A modern racing spaceship has an engine with a power output well over 15,000 THz and weighs less than ten tons. These machines represent the absolute state of the art in propulsion technology. They will never, however, be used to transport people; these monsters are created for the sole purpose of racing, and are not legal for use on the public highway.
Sadly, most ordinary people will never experience what they are like. To fly one, you need a special racing licence, and also a contract with a Formula X race team. However, with an increasing interest in older spaceships, it is possible to bypass this procedure by purchasing a retired racing spaceship, but only if you can afford it! A Formula X race ship is insanely expensive, with running costs to match, and it is no different with the older machines. However, thanks to a very generous owner, I have been given the opportunity to fly such a machine, and to give a very detailed report here. Even if you might never get the chance to do so yourself, at least by describing to you how it feels, you might get some sort of idea what such a machine is like to fly. What does it sound like? What is the acceleration like? And is it really as terrifying as it looks, flying at over one hundred thousand miles per hour over the surface of Planet Earth? In this report, I hope I can answer these questions and convey what a racing spaceship is like to fly. Yes, you have every right to be jealous. This experience is one that will remain with me for many years, as opportunities to do what I am going to do are very rare and occur once in a lifetime. It is going to be fantastic.
Here we go then. The ship I am going to fly is a 2287 Britus B-Type, one of the early nuclear powered racers. It had phenomenal success in racing, winning the championship at the hands of Gilmon J’olum that year. The ship was used for just one season, being replaced in 2288 by the C-Type. In the year it raced, there were just four races, and the actual ship I will be flying is the same one that was used for the final race (the five laps over the Earth event) which it won, giving Britus their championship win. It was built as a spare machine in the event of the primary ship having some sort of problem, which indeed is what happened; the engine failed in the third race, meaning the spare ship was used for the final race.
The ship features a nuclear-powered engine, the Britus FX Quad 16, which produces 8,300 THz in base tune, and over 10,000 THz in maximum hard-tune form. The whole ship weighs just 17.8 tons, which gives a power-to-weight ratio of 561 THz per ton. This compares very favourably to the most powerful and fastest spaceship ever produced for public use, the Sunstar Type C, which has 200 THz per ton. This ship is a very fast machine, but Formula X racers, even older ones, are on a totally different level compared to even the fastest public spaceships. By way of comparison, a modern Formula X racer for the 2298 racing season has 15,000 THz and moves the scales to 9 tons, showing the development made in the years since the B-Type. However, where the ship I’ve got use of today scores heavily over the modern racer is value, and this is a huge point, and the reason why doing this test required a very generous owner.
You see, classic spaceships have incr
eased in value tremendously in recent years. A good early Sunstar Type C could easily set you back over five million credits but the most valuable ships are the Formula X racers. In terms of value, the earlier the better, with race winners adding tremendously to the value. A championship winner has the very highest value. The ship I am going to fly has all those things; the championship it won was in the fourth year of the sport, so (it) is a very early racer, and the actual ship on test won the final race of the season. It ticks all the right boxes, and as a result, it is incredibly valuable; it has an insurance valuation of Cr 40m. To put that in perspective, that is around 1,500 times more than the average yearly salary for someone in full-time employment. My job is to fly this thing, close to the limit. I did say it has a very generous owner, didn’t I? It is just the sheer monetary value; it is difficult to comprehend this. But more than that, this is a very historically important machine, so it is a very rare privilege to be able to fly such a spaceship. The one I am going to fly is actually for sale, so I am going to be extra careful! People in the know consider this machine to be one of the ultimate ships in existence, and in many respects it is priceless.
OK, so here we go then. Firstly, it would be good to describe the look of the thing. At first glance, it looks very similar to a modern Formula X machine, the main difference being the absence of solar cells; this spaceship is from an era when nuclear was the powerplant of choice. It was a good few years before solar power would be used for Formula X racers. So, as a result, it has a far greater surface area for graphics, and inevitably, sponsor logos. Of note are the companies and organisations themselves. At the time when Britus raced in 2287, their main sponsor was Forlami, the Mars-based watchmakers, along with the Mars Tourist Board, with co-sponsors being Force Major-Greenbelt, who today are their main sponsors. How times change. The engine is very big, housing the nuclear powerplant, and is one of the things that give away the fact that this is an early Formula X racer. Modern racing engines are much neater and smaller; one of the main developments in engine technology has been in the improvements in power delivery through the powertrain, and it is quite obvious that the Britus FX Quad 16 is of the older generation. It still looks fabulous, though, as all racer engines do, and has a very serious look about it. The engine has that edge to it that screams pure performance, and just looking at it, even if you didn’t know much about the finer points of spaceship engines, you just know it has immense power. An interesting design feature are the side turbines; in this machine, the turbines taper to a very wide rear thruster, whereas for the current racer, Britus have an asymmetric design where the front is slightly wider than the rear. Overall, the general consensus is that the older Formula X racers look better than the current machines, but that is personal preference. I think any racing spaceship looks great! Here is a technical illustration of the machine: