Astronaut Games
Sep. 20th, 2011 11:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolI got a nine E-month sabbatical at work and found myself needing something to do with my time. We didn't have any major responsibilities or other trips planned, so I pulled the kids out of school, packed the family into the Recreational Launch, and off we went. We took off from L-5 with nothing more than a few E-months' supplies, a general Mars intercept plan, and an urge to tool around the Solar System seeing the sights.
We wound up rock-hunting on Phobos, watched the Solar Sail Regatta near the Perseids, and swept out to visit friends who have set up a commune among the Trojans. But the high point of our trip was camping in an RL park on Vesta and checking out the E-90th Anniversary Astronaut Games.
We took the cutter out a ways and picked out a good spot to watch the lighting of the fusion torch. It's a lunar-mass body a ways off from the ecliptic, contained within a magnetic bottle to reach critical density. The bottle itself is unstable, designed to explode in ten E-days. But when they lit it amid much fanfare and pageantry, it glowed an intense sapphire and was visible from all game venues. We captured excellent video of the opening parade, when the various planets' flotillas swept into the central game-space in tight formation. I loved the retro colors and stylings of all the ships, and we cheered loudly when the Earth team soared in, all crumpled foil exteriors and pre-war American flags.
And then it was time to figure out which events we would attend. There were hundreds of them spread across a substantial arc-segment of the asteroid belt, all more or less historically accurate representations of the competitions held during the first games, when the first wave of Solar pioneers finally had time to take a deep breath and realize they were bored. After consulting the schedule, we decided we would stay on Vesta and watch the Really High Jump.
Vesta has a surface gravity around 2% Earth Sea Level, making it one of the few venues in the belt where such an event could be held without a large hub. We watched from the stands as the competitors lined up in their sleek bare-bones pressure suits, each with only about ten minutes of life support and no extra padding or reinforcement. One at a time they toed the hash mark, started jogging at the green flash, and launched when they reached the target square. They immediately tucked into a ball and spun as they sailed lazily upwards, mopping up as little angular momentum as possible. The best competitors routinely cleared four hundred feet, as measured by precisely calibrated lasers, but the Charonian with the long legs set a new record at just over four hundred and twenty feet. We were all very impressed, and my son went right out and bought a suit-skin that said I WENT TO CHARON, GOT THIS SHIRT AND LOST MY TAN.
Next we went sunwards and caught the first heat of Synchronized Jetting. Each team had five participants and was permitted to use only standardized jetpacks. We watched the Martian team, which apparently has won all kinds of awards for this. As some kind of Strauss waltz was broadcast, the troupe staged a highly choreographed routine involving graceful tumbles and neatly-timed rotations. The most impressive maneuvers were when two jetters pulsed their rockets towards each other but cut them off hundreds of yards before they reached each other, then caught arms and swung around each other using only inertia and precise timing. I enjoyed it but my wife argued that this wasn't really a sport.
She liked the Hab Rolling much more. This was an event requiring large muscle mass, so it was one of the few games events where men had an advantage. Athletic men coupled with no bulky suits was a recipe guaranteed to get my wife to watch. The habs were aluminum cigars four meters in diameter and ten long and were pressurized to Earth Sea Level. Two competitors were placed inside and, when the whistle sounded, had to roll the hab. One competitor had to roll it one way, the other in the opposite direction. They could shove or trip but couldn't punch, kick or grapple in the course of trying to keep their opponents from getting up momentum. Whoever could get it up to 1 meter per second in their direction was proclaimed the winner. A Neptunian built like a barrel soundly defeated the Earth champion, shoving him neatly down the axis of the cylinder (where he couldn't reach the sides) while getting the hab up to speed with powerful thrusts from thigh as big around as my waist. Ultimately the Neptunian won the whole thing, only to be stripped of his medal for doping. Apparently there are limits on what level of simulated gravity you can train in, and his team had skirted the rules liberally. Too bad for him.
We started to watch the Zero-G Gymnastics events because the Earth team was competing, but it was obvious from the very start that there was still a lot of prejudice against the Earth squad. There was one Jovian judge in particular who kept giving the Earth girls bad marks (in this event, girls have the big edge). Whether it was the floor exercises, involving tumbling in a five-meter transparent cube, or maneuvers on the orthogonal bars, or trying to keep steady spinning at 120 RPM on the imbalance beam, the Earth team was consistently marked low by the Jovian. That score was thrown out of course, but it cost the Earthers high enough scores to do well. We saw the writing on the wall early and left.
I had a lot more fun watching the Military Octathlon. Those first pioneers of the solar expansion were veterans of the War for Mars, and the Octathlon was meant to encompass all elements of their military skills up and down the gravity well. There were, obviously, eight events: Submission Wrestling, 5km Laser Rifle, 1km Recoilless Rifle, Atmospheric Powerdive, Decompression Scramble, Cross-Country Cycling, Monowing Pursuit, and the 5km Debris Field. We followed the Earth team through the circuit.
Submission Wrestling was interesting in that both combatants were locked in a mesh cage in hard space wearing customized combat vacuum suits. Any hand-to-hand techniques were allowed, of course, but the victory was awarded when one fighter was able to remove an access panel on the back of the other one's environment pack and simulate pulling their oxygen hose. The local Belter wrestler looked very solid and couldn't be beaten; it's hard to win a fight in a suit against somebody who spends their entire life in one.
The Laser Rifle and Recoilless Rifle events were less interesting. With the laser there wasn't much to see; the competitor would fire the weapon and then the target would either be holed or it wouldn't be. As for the recoilless rifle, the shooter would pull the trigger and then we'd have to wait a moment to see if it hit. All the shooters were very good but the Earth marksman was the best.
The Atmospheric Powerdive was the only event that required planetary simulation; they used the torch to provide the mass and a gas generator to make the atmosphere. The idea was to simulate the experience of being dropped at high altitude, falling through an Earth-standard atmosphere in a wingsuit, and racing to a safe landing at the bottom. This event was unusual in that there was an injury; the Venusian racer dropped too fast and overheated. Fortunately he was caught before he hit the torch, which everybody agreed would have been a disaster. The Earth girl came in fourth, which wasn't too bad, but it stank to be pushed out of the medals by three planets that have no native atmosphere to speak of.
I liked the drama of the Decompression Scramble, which simulated the experience of escaping a hull breach. The competitors had to dive down a fifteen meter tube in no gravity and a fractional atmosphere, opening a hatch at the far end before suffocating. Of course there were safeties in place to restore atmosphere as soon as anybody lost consciousness, but it still seemed hugely dangerous. Of course in later rounds the length of the tube was extended, and the finalists had to cross a thirty meter tube before we knew who the winner was.
Cross-Country Cycling reminded me of the old newsvids of the War for Mars, where brave and rugged marines were dropped in the high country with atmosphere suits, full packs and dirt bikes. During the war they found out that a rugged cross-country terrain bike held up much better to Martian dust than anything with an engine or battery in it, and the 'Red Rangers' were the subject of more than one admiring wartime movie dramatizing their high-flying adventures and derring-do during guerilla raids in the Valles Marineris. Gravity was much lower on Vesta, of course, but that only made their flights and stunts over the berms all that much more exciting. Several people ate it, of course, but their falls were so low that they were generally able to correct mid-air and at least land on their feet, if not on their bikes.
My son loved the Monowing Chase, which simulated dogfighting using the small ultralight fighter pods used during the war. Of course no live ammunition was used; shots were taken and registered using lasers and detectors, and one disabling shot was enough to knock a competitor out. Events were two on two, and the Earthers really shone here. We painted the new Terra Prima colors on the outside of the Recreational Launch just to show our pride.
The final event was the 5km Debris Field, which was supposed to simulate a stranded spacer navigating the wreckage of a spacecraft to get to safety. They had no jets, but had to ballistically cross the gaps between chunks of rock and wreckage ranging in size from fifty to fifty thousand pounds, jumping to an object, scrambling around to the far side, and jumping off again. It looked like a tremendous feat of endurance to make it across the five kilometer field; I have no idea how the distance scramblers make it across the one hundred kilometer range.
At the end of it all, the Earth champion got the gold medal, based on aggregate points. It was a great patriotic moment for us, but I confess that there wasn't a lot of sympathy from the crowd. Earth still flexes a lot of military might, especially out beyond the asteroid belt, and some took it as a kind of insult that our homeworld would bring home a medal that reminded one of war. Listening to the free radio chatter, there were plenty of ugly fans out there who would have started a fight with me if I had wanted one, but I didn't.
We watched the closing ceremonies. The teams filed out of the central enclosure as their respective planetary anthems were broadcast, and then the torch exploded right on schedule. Its radiance filled the sky before dissipating. Then we packed it up and programmed in a burn to take us home.
It was a long time to be out in the deep dark with the family, but we had a lot of great experiences. I don't know that we'll go to the Astronaut Games again anytime soon, but I hear you can't beat the hockey on Europa, and the Gallileo Cup comes up in two years. I hope I'll have enough saved up by then for the initial burn's fuel. But even if we just kick off for a moon jaunt, I want to get all of us out of Earth's shadow every once in awhile. It's a big solar system, but I never cease to be amazed at humanity's capacity to be human in all of it.
We wound up rock-hunting on Phobos, watched the Solar Sail Regatta near the Perseids, and swept out to visit friends who have set up a commune among the Trojans. But the high point of our trip was camping in an RL park on Vesta and checking out the E-90th Anniversary Astronaut Games.
We took the cutter out a ways and picked out a good spot to watch the lighting of the fusion torch. It's a lunar-mass body a ways off from the ecliptic, contained within a magnetic bottle to reach critical density. The bottle itself is unstable, designed to explode in ten E-days. But when they lit it amid much fanfare and pageantry, it glowed an intense sapphire and was visible from all game venues. We captured excellent video of the opening parade, when the various planets' flotillas swept into the central game-space in tight formation. I loved the retro colors and stylings of all the ships, and we cheered loudly when the Earth team soared in, all crumpled foil exteriors and pre-war American flags.
And then it was time to figure out which events we would attend. There were hundreds of them spread across a substantial arc-segment of the asteroid belt, all more or less historically accurate representations of the competitions held during the first games, when the first wave of Solar pioneers finally had time to take a deep breath and realize they were bored. After consulting the schedule, we decided we would stay on Vesta and watch the Really High Jump.
Vesta has a surface gravity around 2% Earth Sea Level, making it one of the few venues in the belt where such an event could be held without a large hub. We watched from the stands as the competitors lined up in their sleek bare-bones pressure suits, each with only about ten minutes of life support and no extra padding or reinforcement. One at a time they toed the hash mark, started jogging at the green flash, and launched when they reached the target square. They immediately tucked into a ball and spun as they sailed lazily upwards, mopping up as little angular momentum as possible. The best competitors routinely cleared four hundred feet, as measured by precisely calibrated lasers, but the Charonian with the long legs set a new record at just over four hundred and twenty feet. We were all very impressed, and my son went right out and bought a suit-skin that said I WENT TO CHARON, GOT THIS SHIRT AND LOST MY TAN.
Next we went sunwards and caught the first heat of Synchronized Jetting. Each team had five participants and was permitted to use only standardized jetpacks. We watched the Martian team, which apparently has won all kinds of awards for this. As some kind of Strauss waltz was broadcast, the troupe staged a highly choreographed routine involving graceful tumbles and neatly-timed rotations. The most impressive maneuvers were when two jetters pulsed their rockets towards each other but cut them off hundreds of yards before they reached each other, then caught arms and swung around each other using only inertia and precise timing. I enjoyed it but my wife argued that this wasn't really a sport.
She liked the Hab Rolling much more. This was an event requiring large muscle mass, so it was one of the few games events where men had an advantage. Athletic men coupled with no bulky suits was a recipe guaranteed to get my wife to watch. The habs were aluminum cigars four meters in diameter and ten long and were pressurized to Earth Sea Level. Two competitors were placed inside and, when the whistle sounded, had to roll the hab. One competitor had to roll it one way, the other in the opposite direction. They could shove or trip but couldn't punch, kick or grapple in the course of trying to keep their opponents from getting up momentum. Whoever could get it up to 1 meter per second in their direction was proclaimed the winner. A Neptunian built like a barrel soundly defeated the Earth champion, shoving him neatly down the axis of the cylinder (where he couldn't reach the sides) while getting the hab up to speed with powerful thrusts from thigh as big around as my waist. Ultimately the Neptunian won the whole thing, only to be stripped of his medal for doping. Apparently there are limits on what level of simulated gravity you can train in, and his team had skirted the rules liberally. Too bad for him.
We started to watch the Zero-G Gymnastics events because the Earth team was competing, but it was obvious from the very start that there was still a lot of prejudice against the Earth squad. There was one Jovian judge in particular who kept giving the Earth girls bad marks (in this event, girls have the big edge). Whether it was the floor exercises, involving tumbling in a five-meter transparent cube, or maneuvers on the orthogonal bars, or trying to keep steady spinning at 120 RPM on the imbalance beam, the Earth team was consistently marked low by the Jovian. That score was thrown out of course, but it cost the Earthers high enough scores to do well. We saw the writing on the wall early and left.
I had a lot more fun watching the Military Octathlon. Those first pioneers of the solar expansion were veterans of the War for Mars, and the Octathlon was meant to encompass all elements of their military skills up and down the gravity well. There were, obviously, eight events: Submission Wrestling, 5km Laser Rifle, 1km Recoilless Rifle, Atmospheric Powerdive, Decompression Scramble, Cross-Country Cycling, Monowing Pursuit, and the 5km Debris Field. We followed the Earth team through the circuit.
Submission Wrestling was interesting in that both combatants were locked in a mesh cage in hard space wearing customized combat vacuum suits. Any hand-to-hand techniques were allowed, of course, but the victory was awarded when one fighter was able to remove an access panel on the back of the other one's environment pack and simulate pulling their oxygen hose. The local Belter wrestler looked very solid and couldn't be beaten; it's hard to win a fight in a suit against somebody who spends their entire life in one.
The Laser Rifle and Recoilless Rifle events were less interesting. With the laser there wasn't much to see; the competitor would fire the weapon and then the target would either be holed or it wouldn't be. As for the recoilless rifle, the shooter would pull the trigger and then we'd have to wait a moment to see if it hit. All the shooters were very good but the Earth marksman was the best.
The Atmospheric Powerdive was the only event that required planetary simulation; they used the torch to provide the mass and a gas generator to make the atmosphere. The idea was to simulate the experience of being dropped at high altitude, falling through an Earth-standard atmosphere in a wingsuit, and racing to a safe landing at the bottom. This event was unusual in that there was an injury; the Venusian racer dropped too fast and overheated. Fortunately he was caught before he hit the torch, which everybody agreed would have been a disaster. The Earth girl came in fourth, which wasn't too bad, but it stank to be pushed out of the medals by three planets that have no native atmosphere to speak of.
I liked the drama of the Decompression Scramble, which simulated the experience of escaping a hull breach. The competitors had to dive down a fifteen meter tube in no gravity and a fractional atmosphere, opening a hatch at the far end before suffocating. Of course there were safeties in place to restore atmosphere as soon as anybody lost consciousness, but it still seemed hugely dangerous. Of course in later rounds the length of the tube was extended, and the finalists had to cross a thirty meter tube before we knew who the winner was.
Cross-Country Cycling reminded me of the old newsvids of the War for Mars, where brave and rugged marines were dropped in the high country with atmosphere suits, full packs and dirt bikes. During the war they found out that a rugged cross-country terrain bike held up much better to Martian dust than anything with an engine or battery in it, and the 'Red Rangers' were the subject of more than one admiring wartime movie dramatizing their high-flying adventures and derring-do during guerilla raids in the Valles Marineris. Gravity was much lower on Vesta, of course, but that only made their flights and stunts over the berms all that much more exciting. Several people ate it, of course, but their falls were so low that they were generally able to correct mid-air and at least land on their feet, if not on their bikes.
My son loved the Monowing Chase, which simulated dogfighting using the small ultralight fighter pods used during the war. Of course no live ammunition was used; shots were taken and registered using lasers and detectors, and one disabling shot was enough to knock a competitor out. Events were two on two, and the Earthers really shone here. We painted the new Terra Prima colors on the outside of the Recreational Launch just to show our pride.
The final event was the 5km Debris Field, which was supposed to simulate a stranded spacer navigating the wreckage of a spacecraft to get to safety. They had no jets, but had to ballistically cross the gaps between chunks of rock and wreckage ranging in size from fifty to fifty thousand pounds, jumping to an object, scrambling around to the far side, and jumping off again. It looked like a tremendous feat of endurance to make it across the five kilometer field; I have no idea how the distance scramblers make it across the one hundred kilometer range.
At the end of it all, the Earth champion got the gold medal, based on aggregate points. It was a great patriotic moment for us, but I confess that there wasn't a lot of sympathy from the crowd. Earth still flexes a lot of military might, especially out beyond the asteroid belt, and some took it as a kind of insult that our homeworld would bring home a medal that reminded one of war. Listening to the free radio chatter, there were plenty of ugly fans out there who would have started a fight with me if I had wanted one, but I didn't.
We watched the closing ceremonies. The teams filed out of the central enclosure as their respective planetary anthems were broadcast, and then the torch exploded right on schedule. Its radiance filled the sky before dissipating. Then we packed it up and programmed in a burn to take us home.
It was a long time to be out in the deep dark with the family, but we had a lot of great experiences. I don't know that we'll go to the Astronaut Games again anytime soon, but I hear you can't beat the hockey on Europa, and the Gallileo Cup comes up in two years. I hope I'll have enough saved up by then for the initial burn's fuel. But even if we just kick off for a moon jaunt, I want to get all of us out of Earth's shadow every once in awhile. It's a big solar system, but I never cease to be amazed at humanity's capacity to be human in all of it.
