reminded him. For the first time she really regretted he wasn't her sworn man."I'm impressed how practical you are for a technically oriented person."
Mo's eyebrows shot up in surprise. "Hey, I'm not one of these scientists! I'm an engineer ."
Chapter 7
Jeff's phone gave a priority chirp and he checked it without pausing the movie he and April were watching. It wasn't really holding his interest. It was made in the 2050s. Some of the assumptions and tech were so dated as to be silly, but mostly it was so different culturally it might as well have been an alien planet they were viewing. If he missed something by answering his phone no great loss. The family around which the story revolved were at a vacation home on Puget Sound. There were long stretches of shore and the hills behind covered with trees and no homes or big buildings. The chalet style cabin was ridiculous, hard to maintain and insecure. It looked nothing like the area did now. You'd think from the camera work that there was still hardly anybody living there but the Indians. The young boys ran around the beach in swimming suits with no top that would get them arrested now. In fact the movie download was restricted in North America to academic use now, because it would be regarded as soft porn and anti-social. The social issues the three generations were trying to resolve in the story were as antiquated as the cabin. Jeff didn't mind the interruption. He was about ready to give up on the movie anyway, but April hadn't said anything that way yet.
"It's always something," Jeff complained, frowning at his phone. "One of our primary weapons failed to respond to an inquiry. Its anticipated position was hit with a laser when there was a safe area of Indian Ocean behind it and it should have made a status report on its internal diagnostics. Chen says an optical double check shows no object the right size anywhere near where it should be."
"Backtracking traffic scans is there any indication somebody matched orbit with it? April asked.
"That's what Chen's guys are checking now. We'll have a company in Pakistan who'll run the numbers for us. They have a lot of data to process to see who was looking at it in the last ten days and buy the best coverage to check. We never have a hundred percent coverage, so there's no guarantee we'll see a rendezvous, or the flash of a meteor strike for that matter, though one big enough to knock it out of orbit without a flash and debris would be unlikely."
"If it got impacted by a natural object would it make it fail-safe and self destruct?" April asked.
"It might," Jeff decided. "It would be more likely to destruct from a small strike than a big one. Because the acceleration profile would match a rail gun projectile more than a massive object. If it fail-safed we'd have heard about it. The self destruct mode isn't as powerful as the weapon setting. But still enough that everybody with satellite sensors would freak out at the detonation."
"Oh, I just assumed it would go to the full yield automatically," April said.
"No, first of all, no need. The purpose is to keep it from being captured and reverse engineered. You don't need a couple hundred megatons to do that. Secondly you can initiate a smaller burn in the device faster than a full one. Which means you stand to accomplish the destruct before an impact can disassemble the device and scatter components from which people could get clues."
"So how big a boom?" April asked.
"I'm not sure," Jeff admitted. "I've never had opportunity to test one in that mode, obviously. I'm pretty sure it will yield at least a megaton. I wouldn't want to try to model it way off near the end of the graph line, down to a few kilotons and have it totally fail on me. On the other hand I have no idea if it will still get some secondary fusion reactions like surprised us with the first one. If it goes past the primary reactions into secondary or even a few ternary reactions it could get as much as twenty
Mo's eyebrows shot up in surprise. "Hey, I'm not one of these scientists! I'm an engineer ."
Chapter 7
Jeff's phone gave a priority chirp and he checked it without pausing the movie he and April were watching. It wasn't really holding his interest. It was made in the 2050s. Some of the assumptions and tech were so dated as to be silly, but mostly it was so different culturally it might as well have been an alien planet they were viewing. If he missed something by answering his phone no great loss. The family around which the story revolved were at a vacation home on Puget Sound. There were long stretches of shore and the hills behind covered with trees and no homes or big buildings. The chalet style cabin was ridiculous, hard to maintain and insecure. It looked nothing like the area did now. You'd think from the camera work that there was still hardly anybody living there but the Indians. The young boys ran around the beach in swimming suits with no top that would get them arrested now. In fact the movie download was restricted in North America to academic use now, because it would be regarded as soft porn and anti-social. The social issues the three generations were trying to resolve in the story were as antiquated as the cabin. Jeff didn't mind the interruption. He was about ready to give up on the movie anyway, but April hadn't said anything that way yet.
"It's always something," Jeff complained, frowning at his phone. "One of our primary weapons failed to respond to an inquiry. Its anticipated position was hit with a laser when there was a safe area of Indian Ocean behind it and it should have made a status report on its internal diagnostics. Chen says an optical double check shows no object the right size anywhere near where it should be."
"Backtracking traffic scans is there any indication somebody matched orbit with it? April asked.
"That's what Chen's guys are checking now. We'll have a company in Pakistan who'll run the numbers for us. They have a lot of data to process to see who was looking at it in the last ten days and buy the best coverage to check. We never have a hundred percent coverage, so there's no guarantee we'll see a rendezvous, or the flash of a meteor strike for that matter, though one big enough to knock it out of orbit without a flash and debris would be unlikely."
"If it got impacted by a natural object would it make it fail-safe and self destruct?" April asked.
"It might," Jeff decided. "It would be more likely to destruct from a small strike than a big one. Because the acceleration profile would match a rail gun projectile more than a massive object. If it fail-safed we'd have heard about it. The self destruct mode isn't as powerful as the weapon setting. But still enough that everybody with satellite sensors would freak out at the detonation."
"Oh, I just assumed it would go to the full yield automatically," April said.
"No, first of all, no need. The purpose is to keep it from being captured and reverse engineered. You don't need a couple hundred megatons to do that. Secondly you can initiate a smaller burn in the device faster than a full one. Which means you stand to accomplish the destruct before an impact can disassemble the device and scatter components from which people could get clues."
"So how big a boom?" April asked.
"I'm not sure," Jeff admitted. "I've never had opportunity to test one in that mode, obviously. I'm pretty sure it will yield at least a megaton. I wouldn't want to try to model it way off near the end of the graph line, down to a few kilotons and have it totally fail on me. On the other hand I have no idea if it will still get some secondary fusion reactions like surprised us with the first one. If it goes past the primary reactions into secondary or even a few ternary reactions it could get as much as twenty
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