Thirteen Days: Not Quite The X Prize
Oct. 24th, 2007 02:47 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsScott speaks to Forge about how to overcome the major problem with any mission to stop Magneto - just how are the X-Men supposed to get into orbit?
Forge didn't even break stride as he walked through the sliding door of the Situation Room. "The crazy bastard's got a satellite laser now? What the fuck, boss? I mean, what the fucking fuck is he doing in orbit? As an aside - I totally won a bet about the viability of an orbital weapons platform and if Secret Service Agent Hottie McFine shows up here, I can bet that no one's posited a ground-based solution and since we're being called in, I can assume they're not giving in to his demands?" He took a breath while he moved around to the control system of the 3-D display table, logging in and pulling up an image of the Earth, slowly rotating. He looked over at Scott through the translucent green-and-blue image. "So what can I do?"
Ridiculously, given the situation, Scott actually felt his lips twitch in something that might have been a smile. Gallows humor - practice it now, Summers. I suspect you're going to need it this week. "We need a way to get up there," he said simply. "Something that doesn't involve NASA in any way, shape or form, because if he spots any suspicious activity at Canaveral, he'll blow it up, just like he did Baikonur. That wasn't a terrorist bombing after all."
Forge raised an eyebrow. "Do we know where in orbit the weapons satellites are? Wait, of course we do. If he's able to hit both New York and Moscow, then they need to have an arc over the northern hemisphere, and one that can put him within a specific angle-of-attack on both latitudes..." Forge typed in a few commands, and two red dots appeared over New York and Moscow on the globe. A thin blue band ringed the globe overlapping the two points. "At any given time," he explained, "there are likely to be something like three thousand orbital bodies in transit around the globe in this area. Most of them are smaller than a garbage can. And since I highly doubt our former Soviets registered their wonderful packages o' doom as such on international astronomical records, all we have to do is erase the ones we do know of..."
A few more typed commands, and the blue ring broke into a series of irregularly-shaped blue blobs orbiting the globe. "Then we take out everything that's reported as likely space debris. Amateur astronomers keep databases of satellites, and a good number of them keep these records online. All I have to do is..." More rapidly-typed commands, and more of the multiple blobs faded.
Scott reached out to the console himself. "We do have the location of the station itself," he said, calling it up from the file he'd just uploaded to the database. "Plan is to hit it, and destroy the control system for the satellites. It takes them out of Magneto's control, and that's the point of the exercise." It would actually take them out of anyone's control for the time being, and hopefully the US government would manage to exert sufficient political pressure to get them decommissioned. "The Russians are balking at coughing up exact coordinates for the satellites themselves, and time is something in short supply right now."
As the station's location lit up in bright yellow, Forge looked irritated. "Crap," he exclaimed. "The station is too high up to take the Blackbird. Even if I modified it for high-orbit travel, which would take more than a week, he'd see it coming a mile away. Unless..."
"You've got to find us a way. The control system up there is the only backup." It still sounded absolutely absurd. 'What the fucking fuck' just about covers it. "If we can't take it out..." Scott's jaw clenched. "The Russians are planning a nuclear strike in six days."
"Oh," Forge said, tapping his fingers together. After a long pause, he did a small double-take. "Oh, we don't just want to default to that? Damn. I was hoping this'd be easy. So you need to get up to high orbit without launching from one of the few places in the world that you can get a passenger vehicle up that high from and-"
Forge stopped in the middle of his sentence, closing his eyes. Bar fight. Chaos. Marius grabbing his arm and swinging him around. Crack the whip. Force equals mass times acceleration. Subtract mass, increase acceleration.
Eyes still closed, Forge's fingers flew over the keyboard. On the globe, a thin golden line emerged from New York, circling the globe from east to west before bifurcating into two lines, one descending back towards the surface and the other rocketing forward to connect with the blue blob marking the satellite.
"We crack the whip," he said, opening his eyes. "Like how they'd test the Space Shuttle for re-entry. We piggyback a magnetically-transparent glider on the Blackbird and gather up speed climbing in the atmosphere, then jettison the glider to continue in a rising arc on the high-altitude winds until it meets the station. Unless Magneto's looking right out the window, he won't be able to see it coming."
"Make a list," Scott said quietly. "Of what you need to build this glider. We can get you whatever you need, and whatever help might be useful." Cooper had promised whatever help the government could provide, and he intended to hold her to it. "And in terms of defaulting to the nukes..." Scott's smile was tight, and not a happy expression at all. "Do you really want to lay money on him not being able to turn them right back around if he sees them coming?" Not to mention that even a successful strike would just be the start of the war Magneto had always wanted.
"Get me a wide-body sailplane," Forge said, swiveling his chair to one of the computer terminals and calling up a design program. "Get Agent Cooper to give me access to NOAA data streams, we're going to need to track and predict high-altitude weather patterns and surf them in. The ambient static electricity at those altitudes, it'll be like we're coming in through a pea-soup fog as far as Erik's concerned. A liquid-oxygen booster system to get the Blackbird up to speed at those altitudes. Birmingham-American Ceramics, they do the ablative tiles for NASA and the Space Shuttle, I need to get on the phone with their engineers, we're going to need a purchase order for a lot of raw material. I'm going to need a case of Pop-Tarts, a few twelve-packs of Red Bull, and lots of loud, loud, European metal. I'll have your shopping list by the end of the hour, and hopefully in six days," Forge finally looked up and smiled.
"I'll have you in orbit."
Forge didn't even break stride as he walked through the sliding door of the Situation Room. "The crazy bastard's got a satellite laser now? What the fuck, boss? I mean, what the fucking fuck is he doing in orbit? As an aside - I totally won a bet about the viability of an orbital weapons platform and if Secret Service Agent Hottie McFine shows up here, I can bet that no one's posited a ground-based solution and since we're being called in, I can assume they're not giving in to his demands?" He took a breath while he moved around to the control system of the 3-D display table, logging in and pulling up an image of the Earth, slowly rotating. He looked over at Scott through the translucent green-and-blue image. "So what can I do?"
Ridiculously, given the situation, Scott actually felt his lips twitch in something that might have been a smile. Gallows humor - practice it now, Summers. I suspect you're going to need it this week. "We need a way to get up there," he said simply. "Something that doesn't involve NASA in any way, shape or form, because if he spots any suspicious activity at Canaveral, he'll blow it up, just like he did Baikonur. That wasn't a terrorist bombing after all."
Forge raised an eyebrow. "Do we know where in orbit the weapons satellites are? Wait, of course we do. If he's able to hit both New York and Moscow, then they need to have an arc over the northern hemisphere, and one that can put him within a specific angle-of-attack on both latitudes..." Forge typed in a few commands, and two red dots appeared over New York and Moscow on the globe. A thin blue band ringed the globe overlapping the two points. "At any given time," he explained, "there are likely to be something like three thousand orbital bodies in transit around the globe in this area. Most of them are smaller than a garbage can. And since I highly doubt our former Soviets registered their wonderful packages o' doom as such on international astronomical records, all we have to do is erase the ones we do know of..."
A few more typed commands, and the blue ring broke into a series of irregularly-shaped blue blobs orbiting the globe. "Then we take out everything that's reported as likely space debris. Amateur astronomers keep databases of satellites, and a good number of them keep these records online. All I have to do is..." More rapidly-typed commands, and more of the multiple blobs faded.
Scott reached out to the console himself. "We do have the location of the station itself," he said, calling it up from the file he'd just uploaded to the database. "Plan is to hit it, and destroy the control system for the satellites. It takes them out of Magneto's control, and that's the point of the exercise." It would actually take them out of anyone's control for the time being, and hopefully the US government would manage to exert sufficient political pressure to get them decommissioned. "The Russians are balking at coughing up exact coordinates for the satellites themselves, and time is something in short supply right now."
As the station's location lit up in bright yellow, Forge looked irritated. "Crap," he exclaimed. "The station is too high up to take the Blackbird. Even if I modified it for high-orbit travel, which would take more than a week, he'd see it coming a mile away. Unless..."
"You've got to find us a way. The control system up there is the only backup." It still sounded absolutely absurd. 'What the fucking fuck' just about covers it. "If we can't take it out..." Scott's jaw clenched. "The Russians are planning a nuclear strike in six days."
"Oh," Forge said, tapping his fingers together. After a long pause, he did a small double-take. "Oh, we don't just want to default to that? Damn. I was hoping this'd be easy. So you need to get up to high orbit without launching from one of the few places in the world that you can get a passenger vehicle up that high from and-"
Forge stopped in the middle of his sentence, closing his eyes. Bar fight. Chaos. Marius grabbing his arm and swinging him around. Crack the whip. Force equals mass times acceleration. Subtract mass, increase acceleration.
Eyes still closed, Forge's fingers flew over the keyboard. On the globe, a thin golden line emerged from New York, circling the globe from east to west before bifurcating into two lines, one descending back towards the surface and the other rocketing forward to connect with the blue blob marking the satellite.
"We crack the whip," he said, opening his eyes. "Like how they'd test the Space Shuttle for re-entry. We piggyback a magnetically-transparent glider on the Blackbird and gather up speed climbing in the atmosphere, then jettison the glider to continue in a rising arc on the high-altitude winds until it meets the station. Unless Magneto's looking right out the window, he won't be able to see it coming."
"Make a list," Scott said quietly. "Of what you need to build this glider. We can get you whatever you need, and whatever help might be useful." Cooper had promised whatever help the government could provide, and he intended to hold her to it. "And in terms of defaulting to the nukes..." Scott's smile was tight, and not a happy expression at all. "Do you really want to lay money on him not being able to turn them right back around if he sees them coming?" Not to mention that even a successful strike would just be the start of the war Magneto had always wanted.
"Get me a wide-body sailplane," Forge said, swiveling his chair to one of the computer terminals and calling up a design program. "Get Agent Cooper to give me access to NOAA data streams, we're going to need to track and predict high-altitude weather patterns and surf them in. The ambient static electricity at those altitudes, it'll be like we're coming in through a pea-soup fog as far as Erik's concerned. A liquid-oxygen booster system to get the Blackbird up to speed at those altitudes. Birmingham-American Ceramics, they do the ablative tiles for NASA and the Space Shuttle, I need to get on the phone with their engineers, we're going to need a purchase order for a lot of raw material. I'm going to need a case of Pop-Tarts, a few twelve-packs of Red Bull, and lots of loud, loud, European metal. I'll have your shopping list by the end of the hour, and hopefully in six days," Forge finally looked up and smiled.
"I'll have you in orbit."
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