Rocket Patrol Plot Ideas
This document is currently a free-form, no idea’s a bad idea list of possible plots. Feel free to toss new ideas into the mix with as much detail as you think necessary for folks to get it.
Also… let’s try not to bash ideas right away. Let folks toss ideas against the wall to see what sticks. We can debate them later. For now… be creative! And, if you see an idea you really like that someone else suggested, go ahead and add to the mix (just try to stick to the “yes, and…” philosophy of improv so that we’re building on each other’s ideas).
NOTE: For now, this is just a list, identified by a working title for easy reference.
“FRONTIER SABOTAGE”
The Cosmic Rangers have been deployed deep into the frontier on a mission to investigate the apparent sabotage of a robot manufacturing outpost. Someone (or something?) is causing the machinery on the planet to malfunction, requiring the Rangers to rely on their ingenuity to find the culprits (and survive).
“ROAD TRIP / BALLOON TOWN” (Venus)
Venus is hellish, and no sane person would land there, because ammonia and heat and Ray Bradbury short stories of men going mad from endless toxic rain.
But, twenty years ago, a small crew of two (Apollo minus lander) was sent on a free-return trajectory to Venus and back. Everything worked. They did 42 orbits and made it back with 42,000 hard drives’ worth of data, but both were Sally K. Ride / Neil Armstrong types who didn’t seek the limelight, and in-depth recorded interviews with them are rare. One was later killed in a training accident with other young astronauts, and the other has died of natural causes. So neither one is talking now.
Now a new crewed mission to Venus is being planned, led by Captain Bender: once there, this time there’s the option to board a previously robotically deployed experimental, inflatable Skylab-sized “balloon town” in Venus’s atmosphere (where, thanks to the incredible density of Venus’s atmosphere, breathable air at Earth atmospheric pressure is a lifting gas, the way Helium lifts toy balloons here and would have lifted the Hindenburg, except Nazis). Captain Bender wonders, what was the experience of her predecessor, the now-dead leader of the last expedition to Venus, who chose to keep her experience private? The mother of the late expedition leader is still living, but, on the phone, Captain Bender can only get a “maybe” out of her, when she phones to ask if she could recall for her what her daughter told her after returning. Why would an astronaut keep private their experience of the Cosmic Perspective, their experience of the Overview Effect? Captain Bender decides to drive from South Padre Island to Florida to try and win an interview with the late commander’s mother, and find out.
“MESSENGER 2” (Mercury)
When no one is too close to anything really massive, like our Sun, space-time acts like a reasonable person (GPS transmitters and receivers know different, but even in Captain Bender’s time, the most ardent “Rights for Robots!” activists don’t militate for equal human rights protections for simple minded GPS systems). Most people follow their Google or Siri Map Directions and have no idea of time dilation.
The effect of the bending of space-time on the precession of the perihelion of Mercury was discovered in 1859 by Urbain Le Verrier. All manner of completely incorrect ideas were proposed to explain it, and it would be another 50 years before Einstein proposed a solution with his Theory of General Relativity. Einstein’s prediction was backed up by the 1919 observation of Mercury (by A. S. Eddington et. al.?) during the Solar Eclipse of that year, which was also observed, and memorably commented upon, by the English writer Virginia Woolf, in her diary (Commander Bender will have read that diary in childhood, it was part of what got her interested in space – in ENGLISH CLASS!!! [horrors! – and an opportunity to have a “whole brained” approach to the series, if this is to be juvenile fiction]).
It would be still longer, in the 1950s, almost 100 years after Le Verrier, until measurements really nailed Einstein’s prediction of the extremely subtle effects of the Sun’s gravity on Mercury’s orbit to a precision that showed that Einstein was demonstrably correct, and the incredibly reliable testimony of Newton, had been justly amended.
What would it be like, to be the first person to know they were going to experience the most severe time dilation available in our local Solar System? Captain Bender will soon (!) find out, as her crew hurtles to a gonads-to-the-wall, daring landing on the not-eternal-as-once-thought, but still temporarily usable “nighttime side” of Mercury? What does it feel like to be not only fairly remote from home…
(Mercury is actually more often nearer Earth than Venus because of Mercury’s very short orbital period and (Kepler’s 3rd) mean orbital diameter).
…but to also know, as one exchanges greetings with Earth, that one’s communications with earth are not simply delayed (not by much, 8 minutes at max) but red/blue shifted, so that radio receivers must be slightly recalibrated at both ends (near the Sun, radio receivers will need to be tuned ever so slightly higher than mission frequency than Earth’s? The effect would never be enough to notice the other person talking like a chipmunk or an ancient land tortoise, but just the thought of it might be enough to produce an effect (that of the Cosmic Perspective) in the mind of the commander, and her crew, who, returning to earth, will be able to brag that they aged 1.2 seconds (or whatever it is) less than everyone else who stayed behind on Earth?
If some daring “The Martian” drama happens so that the ship returns six months later than it should have, from the trip to Mercury, one of the astronaut’s spouses could hug their returning hero and say (because they memorized the initial mission parameters in terms of General Relativistic effects) “Oh, darling, I can really see how you’re now 1.2 seconds closer to my age.”
The dashing astronaut, Captain Bender’s deputy, hugs their spouse right back, and whispers, suggestively in that way married people say when it’s going to be one of those kinds of nights: “1.2 seconds? My dear, it’s 1.25!” [Note: The time dilation difference is way smaller than I thought, so it’d be better to add some zeros in front of both those numbers.] The Hole Truth While exploring the inner solar system, Captain Bender and her crew learn of an object falling through the solar system on a hyperbolic trajectory. Unlike previous extrasolar visitors like ʻOumuamua and Borisov, the new rogue object has no albedo at all, does not reflect radar tracking pulses, and was discovered only because of faint pulses in the X-ray spectrum detected by space telescopes far from earth.
Soon the object will enter the inner solar system! It won’t hit earth, but the race is on to see if Captain Bender and her crew can equip and launch a “science torpedo” to intercept the rogue object.
As the months go by, the torpedo homes in on its target, returning telemetry which is oddly redshifted…. Will the crew be the first to return data from the event horizon of a black hole? ARICEBO LUNA: “VOYAGER 3” [or: “PIONEER 12”] (The outer Solar System).
Arthur C. Clarke once pointed out that there’s never a good time to launch people to the stars, because long before they’re even significantly out of our solar system, technology would improve so that the next generation of interstellar explorers would pass them up.
Clarke also said, to Carl Sagan’s face, on national television, that he knew what would happen to Carl’s pet projects, Pioneer 10 and 11, and Voyager 1 and 2: that they would be overtaken by the next generation of space probes, and safely returned to Earth for exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution.
Captain Bender is part of the project to guide the mission to do exactly that: return one of those four famous extra solar probes to earth for study, as the scientific commander of a robotic mission. She’ll do that on the far side of the Moon, where the best receiving radio telescope stations have been built, “shielded from the electronic racket of Earth” [Clarke} What will she think about the relationship between human time, and cosmic time, as she bosses the team that guides the gentle interception of 80 year old space probes, to return them to earth for study, even as modern 21st century probes like New Horizons and its fictional successors hurtle at impossible speeds towards not just the Heliopause, but a true shot at reaching the nearest stars in what will be her granddaughter’s life times? How does she explain what she’s doing, in her executive decisions, to the old, grizzled JPL scientist who wasn’t even born when the Voyagers launched, but remains the one remaining person at JPL in charge of tracking all four Pioneer/Voyager missions? SNOOPY, COME HOME! Same basic idea as “Messenger 2”, but the capture and return of the Apollo 10 Descent Module (“Snoopy”) from heliocentric orbit, unseen by human eyes since May 23, 1969. Will one of Commander Bender’s crew enter the module before they shrink wrap it, and what will they find? If their ship encounters a problem on the way back to Earth, could something from inside the module, or a lesson the crew learned from studying the Apollo 10 mission, save the life of the crew? OOPS! On a mission to the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange Point to service the James Webb Space Telescope, almost a million miles from Earth, one of Captain Bender’s team drops an important tool. The crew thinks they’re prepared for such a contingency, since they are carrying a zero-gee 3D printer and 3D models of all their important kit….but they find out that the printer is “out of toner” (or otherwise inoperative). But could the unaided and inexorable laws of physics come to the rescue and save the mission? A LaGrange point behaves gravitationally as if it had mass at the center of it, so a dropped object, such as a tool, should orbit the L2 point as if it were a gravitationally significant feature, far more massive than would be accounted for by the combined mass of the telescope and Captain Bender’s ship). The lost tool is tiny and Captain Bender would have to be pretty close to it to detect it using radar. And if you are too close, and it hits you at the wrong speed, there could be a danger to the mission! Good way to introduce Differential Equations, Lagrange Points, and Strange Attractors, Feigenbaum’s Number, and Chaos Theory, to the kiddies. And a rare orbital rendezvous scene with a tight but slow orbit around exactly nothing (except the Space Telescope, which for the physics of the story doesn’t make any difference at all). BACK SEAT DRIVER: CAPTAIN BENDER’S FIRST MISSION Before she went to work in outer space, Captain Bender was a normal, mid-21st Century girl, who longed to visit Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A natural leader, she wrangles three high school friends to make the trip. One’s Sam, a cheerleader who works out: they want to hit the beach and get a non-artificial tan. One’s Sascha, a wannabe Disney Prince/Princess who actually has a Blu-Ray player and a stack of questionably obtained Disney films on 3D-nano-printed plastic, so you know where they want to see in central Florida..
The fourth is Kris, the only person in school who got a higher SAT score than Captain Bender (though not by much, and their math scores and language arts scores beat each other). All are androgynous characters and their particular sexes are never mentioned or commented upon in the story. Kris wants to see what remains of EPCOT: Kris reminds the future Captain Bender that one of her literary heroes set one of his novels at EPCOT (we may or may not be clued in by a footnote that the novel is 2010: Odyssey Two), and now a cash-strapped Disney is selling part of it off, it actually might fulfill Disney’s futuristic dream of a true “Community of Tomorrow”, where people actually live. Four highly educated young people, then, climb into their autonomous car (as all cars are, human driving except in emergency situations having been made illegal in all sixty states since before any of them were of driving age), and head to Florida with their individual dream destinations in mind. Quickly they discover that although they were in different (but overlapping) cliques in high school, now that they’ve just graduated, all of that drama seems a million miles away, and for the first time, they can all feel free to enjoy each other’s company as liberated adults.
And they do, until an EMP (accidental satellite explosion? Solar flare?) fries the satellite and cell tower based navigation system for the “smart highway” they’re travelling on (in my mind, it’s I-75 or I-10).
So it’s the other “brainiac” in the car, Kris, who happens to be sitting in the traditional drivers seat when an alert sounds, the car does an autonomous safe pull-over to the emergency lane (like every other car and truck on the road is doing). Having come to a complete stop, the car pops a cover and extends a driving joystick. Which is locked out pending activation by 911 services for emergency manual driving. Which 911 service cannot be reached, either by call flooding from all the other stranded motorists on half the planet, or by the EMP itself, Bender and her comrades do not know. They have one possible means of communication: an old amateur mobile radio transceiver. It’s 10 meter band, with a lead-acid battery. Kris had insisted on bringing it, because his grandmother, an old NASA hand, had given it to him the previous Christmas in anticipation of their long awaited road trip (“No one ever drives anywhere anymore, just for the sake of it,” his grandmother had explained.)
“Wait,” says Bender. “Your mom worked for NASA!?” In her mind: “High school cliques are a devil’s business…. I never knew that about Kris. And now I feel bad for thinking of him better for that now. Shit.” Kris: “Sure she did. She lives in Huntsville. She has a nice place. God, I wish we were there now.” They take stock. The car can run in “limp mode” but all its higher electronic functions are fried. It is engineered, by Federal law, to take an EMP and still give a basic, very elementary, level of functionality, and that’s it. Since the same laws that forbid human driving are emblematic of a safety consciousness/paranoia in the “nanny culture” of the day, they’ll be able to make a maximum speed of __ miles per hour (5? 15?). All their mobile devices are dead. Sascha grieves for the probable EMP damage to their cherished bootleg Blu-Ray player in the trunk. But the 10m ham radio works, because Kris’s grandmother gave them a vintage one. It uses vacuum tubes, still, though it has been lovingly re-capped (had its original wax and cardboard capacitors replaced). They reach her on the radio, and since she’s a 1960s NASA computer scientist and electrical engineer, AND a loving grandmother, she asks them if they think they can make it to Huntsville. And, she says, no matter how slowly that “jalopy” goes, they’d better start sooner than later. She sounds ominous, but between transmissions, Kris tells the rest of the crew that “she’s an old NASA hippie, she’s like that all the time”. Kris has the emergency joystick in front of them but a quick straw poll shows that, though they had the best SAT score in their school, they had the second worst of their respective mandatory Emergency Driving training scores. None of them really want to do it. Sam, the cheerleader who had the best score (and everyone in the car now knows it), finally says, “I’ll do it. Fire Drill?” They all cringe at the echo of racist high school culture from the past. Some of their grandparents still talk that way. But they know what Sam means. Bender speaks her mind. “No. My score is only two points higher than Kris’s. But Kris is the most scared. He’ll be the most careful.” Kris is transformed: having something to do is the cure for Kris’s anxiety. So are Sascha and Sam. Because the fourth person in the car, Bender, made a sensible sounding decision and assenting means that all four of them are still a team. Bender has now breveted (field promoted) herself into her first command. Still there’s not a lot of talking as Kris guides the car back onto the highway at golf cart speeds for the 60 mile journey to Huntsville. Sam handles the radio from the front seat, holding the microphone to Kris’s lips when they’re able to make contact with Kris’s grandmother, who, as an active ham, is communicating with the few reachable stations that still use vacuum tube sets. Bender can’t restrain her enthusiasm at meeting an old NASA hand whose house she will reach the next day, and dominates the conversation: Sam’s shoulder gets tired, and he hands the mic to Bender. Bender learns that Belle Burnell, Kris’s grandmother, worked with the great Margaret Hamilton, the programmer initially responsible for the escape tower code that was never used in Gemini / Apollo, eventually put in charge of the AGC code to fly the whole mission, including landing and return, and whose ideas on perfectly reliable and fail-proof computer systems became textbook examples for generations to come. For instance, if you want to avoid arithmetic overflow on multiply and divide, you can’t go wrong by representing all numbers internally with a mantissa greater than zero and less than or equal to 1. And since a computer is a finite state Turing Machine, it is possible to mathematically prove, for small computers, that the code you’ve written can never result in a hung machine state. Simple computers can be built that can never fail unless physically injured. Mysteriously, in the night, a vehicle passes them at full highway speed, with no audible or digital emergency services siren: the “PULL OVER” light doesn’t come on on the dashboard. Someone important. Or someone with a secret to keep? Eventually they pull into Huntsville, and there’s hot cocoa waiting, along with a working, stock but never flown Apollo Guidance Computer plugged into the TV, one of only two existing. MaryJo lets her young charges shower and change, then talks them to sleep with tales of reliability, and failure, in the history of human spaceflight….. The next morning, All are watching the news of the EMP and the slow resuscitation of the autonomous highway system, along with the millions of other systems affected world wide by the worst solar flare ever recorded. Sam and Sascha watch Belle puttering around her kitchen with Kris, her grandchild, and confide in Bender: “You know, this place is probably loads more fun than Florida, what do you think?” They are asking for their commander’s approval. Bender replies, “I think staying here is a great idea. Florida next year, if the Flare don’t rise?” Sam and Sascha readily agree. The Surfers of Sustainaville! On South Padre Island, near the Texas / Mexico Border on the Gulf of Mexico, lies Sustainaville. Originally a mom-and-pop gathering place for surfing enthusiasts, founded in the early 21st Century, the construction of a spaceport nearby led to a confluence of surfing and spaceflight enthusiasts. Initially the colony was a destination for day trippers and RV culture travelers interested in the oceans, those made of water or vacuum. For some it was the trip of a lifetime…and for those who chose to stay, “lifetime” means a whole lifetime. Some of the original camper trailers and lean-tos of the original Sustainaville remain, but they have long since been dwarfed by (and absorbed into) later construction, as recycled Mars habitat simulator modules were donated by long-shuttered programs like HI-SEAS in Hawaii, and bolted on to the existing structure in a enthusiast-constructed hodge-podge of experimental sustainable housing. Ariel, 16, isn’t the first baby to be born in Sustainaville, but she might be its most enthusiastic young citizen. Her parents were among those who “washed up” at Sustainaville to watch one of the very early SpaceX launches, and soon realized that this is where they were meant to be: their former trailer is now a hen house which Ariel herself lovingly maintains. The old timers think their modular town can take anything. But when an earthquake loosens the foundations of Sustainaville through soil liquefaction, Ariel, whose specialty is geology, realizes that nothing lasts forever. And when Hurricane Judith [think Resnick] reaches Category 6 strength, and turns unexpectedly towards South Padre Island, Ariel thinks that the grown-ups at Sustainaville might just need the help of the only other group that’s hunkering down in place against the evacuation order, the Rocket Patrol and their team of Equine Engineers…. [The idea of an earthquake followed by a coincidental hurricane is all Jules Verne (“The Invasion of the Sea”, “The Meteor Hunt”). What I’d really like to see is the lashed-together-at-the-last-moment Sustainaville be actually washed out into the Gulf of Mexico by the Hurricane, but then (in typical Jules Verne Nature-ex-Machina fashion) be pushed right back onto shore by the same hurricane, just when all seems lost. (And of course there would be a middle act when they’re in the eye of the storm, adrift at sea.)] The Fountains of Enceladus Following the success of the Cassini Mission to Saturn in the early 21st century, the first crewed mission to the moons of Saturn suddenly ceases responding to increasingly alarmed queries from earth, though telemetry shows that the spacecraft and its crew are in norminal condition. Captain Bender and her crew are the closest with enough Delta-V to investigate. What could have happened, and why did loss of contact happen shortly after the lost mission’s sample-collecting fly-through of the polar ice jets of Saturn’s moon Enceladus? They’ll have months to ponder the question while they’re on the way…and the chance to make contact with the suddenly taciturn mission, if Captain Bender can just think of the right question to ask. The Pet Rock Asteroid 1729612 Steele is a Jupiter trojan, one of hundreds of thousands which orbit both the sun and the L5 Jupiter-Sun Lagrange point.
Experiments to nudge asteroids using uncrewed probe rendezvous are nothing new, but the planners of the commercial asteroid mining Max Wolf Industries have something more ambitious in mind: using a combination of experimental techniques, they have perturbed 1729612 Steele’s orbit in a grand publicity stunt, with its goal being the transfer of the asteroid into the trojan’s twin asteroid population, the Jupiter greeks, which librate around the L4 Jupiter-Sun Lagrange point.
Guess whose ship is hired to deploy the array of technologies that will be the “catcher’s mitt” at the receiving end, when a gross and potentially deadly “miscalculation” in the initial transfer burn is revealed to have been made? And who signed off on the wrong figures?
As Captain Bender races to intercept the rogue asteroid, earthbound astronomers work to predict the precise orbit of the inbound: it’s unlikely to hit the earth, but it will almost surely hit the front side of the moon in its orbit around the earth… and a lunar colony is in the impact zone! Captain Bender and her crew work feverishly to deflect the asteroid. There’s no stopping it from hitting the moon, now. The most they can do is to nudge the asteroid slightly, so that it doesn’t hit the crewed lunar base.
And they do. The asteroid produces a prominent crater on the Moon, soon to be named Bender Crater by a grateful scientific community. Bender and her crew prepare for Trans-Earth-Insertion. It’s time to go home.
As they do so, someone runs the numbers, in a Monday-morning Quarterbacky sort of way.
“Cap, I’ve got some figures for you. It turns out our mysterious stranger at Max Wolf Industries may have done Earth a favor. You know how we’re losing the Moon, and have been for billions of years, through tidal forces? Yesterday, pre-impact, the rate was 3.89872 cm/year, with an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place.”
“Yes….” replies the Captain. He knows I know that.
“Well, as you know, the impact amounts to a completely inelastic collision: momentum in equals momentum out. The revised figure for Lunar retreat is 3.89870 cm/year: I don’t know the uncertainty yet, but it’s probably about the same as before. So, it’s a crude way of doing it, but whoever misdirected that asteroid just delayed the Moon’s escape by, I don’t know, maybe five days in 15 billion years. What do you say to that?”
“I’d say,” said the Captain, watching the moon retreat imperceptibly on the viewscreen, “that it’s an excellent start. Fortunately, for this crew at least, there’s no hurry.”
“Have another idea?”
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