Chapter 158: Chapter 157: Isn’t Science Fun

So, Suba was fired and what I said would likely happen came about. He applied to many places for a research position and no one was willing to touch him. From what I was told the government is keeping him on a tight leash. They also revoked his passport and refused to let him leave the country so he can’t sell what he knows to, oh, I don’t know, China?

On to a matter that I consider to be very important. After many interviews, and a recommendation from Jenny, we finally found someone to help me run this place and oversee all the projects. Her name is Erica Peters. She’s an American, a friend of Jenny’s and has an extensive background in business and finance. I love that she’s open and personable most of the time, but when pushed, well… a dragon would run and hide from her, from what Jenny said. I have yet to see that side of her, but if it’s true, I don’t want to. Thankfully, the coalition readily approved her.

She’s a 32 year old, tall brunette with large hazel eyes. Very smart, slim, quite cute, fashionable and I like her. Now, when I say tall, she towers over me, at 175 centimeters, just like Dad does. She spent all of three days reading up on all the projects and then jumped in with both feet. My time spent at work has dropped from over 80 hours a week to around 30 or so. The weekend that she started working, I dragged Chinatsu and Ryu out for our first date in months. Afterward, we literally holed up on our floor for the remainder of the weekend. Let's merely say that there wasn’t much in the way of laundry to be done, other than bed sheets.

So, back to DTI.

Ohta’s project is coming along nicely. He’s quickly met my 50 gigawatt requirement. So far, he has one working reactor that we built in a new building. Tokyo Electric grumbled about it, but did as directed by the government and connected it to the grid. It powers not only our campus, but also slightly more than a quarter of Tokyo.

You might think that since a 50 gigawatt reactor produces about 1000 times more power than his original design, it would be 1000 times bigger, but it isn’t, and it’s not even close. The scaling for them isn't linear, and thank God for that or it would have been around 25 cubic meters. Instead, it’s right at 4 cubic meters. Extremely small compared to your typical power plant and produces far more power. We already have a long waiting list for them to be installed in coalition countries once we have more powerful plant designs.

There's a good reason there's a waiting list as well. Helium-3 is pretty rare on Earth, which makes it rather expensive. Money isn't the issue, it’s that the amount of H-3 we have available to us is in the hundreds of kilograms and we need about two hundred metric tons or so per year to build the reactors needed. That might make it sound like they are going to be far more expensive to the end users, but they aren’t. You need to amortize the cost by how long they will last. According to Ohta’s calculations, the scaled up reactors will last around 100 to 125 years. So, the cost of power will be dropping massively for them, since after installation and run up, there’s no maintenance or fuel costs and it only requires a single operator per shift and a level 4 AI to oversee it.

As many of you can already guess, this makes going back to the moon simply that much more urgent. Think back to science in school. While helium-3 is rare on Earth, it’s fairly abundant on the moon as in 20-30 parts per billion in lunar regolith. Mining it is easy as well, and we have a couple of options as for how we can do it. One: nanites to remove and concentrate the H-3 for transportation, or two: basically running harvesters through the regolith like you would through wheat. The harvester would then separate the H-3 and dump the cleaned regolith behind it as it slowly moves across the surface. Easy peasy, right? The problem is, you got it, getting to the moon, building the base and all the harvesters. It simply wouldn’t be cost effective to build them on Earth and lift them into orbit to transfer to the moon. By far the most cost-effective method would be nanites. We simply make them, send them via disposable rocket to the moon, deploy them, then eventually, go pick up the H-3 and bring it back.

So, let’s jump off the science lesson tangent and get back to the points I was making. Ohta’s reactor has helped the dark energy project tremendously. Now that they have the ability to run the containment grid within the vessel at full power, they are finally making progress again, but they still are quite a ways from reaching the power outputs we need for a spacecraft since a full scale ‘System Drive’ engine requires an exorbitant amount when running at full power, which we’ll never be able to fully utilize unless the inertia damper project, which is another energy hog, makes more headway. They are stuck at reducing it from 25 g’s to 1 g and have been for weeks.

Now, don’t get me wrong. 25 g’s of acceleration is a huge amount. At 25 g’s you gain roughly 250 meters per second per second. For those of you who aren’t familiar with scientific terms, that means you gain 250 meters in speed per second for every single second you are accelerating. Another way of looking at it: the moon is roughly 382,000 kilometers from Earth. Assuming a 1:1 thrust to mass ratio, and you accelerate for 10 minutes, your velocity would reach around 147 kilometers per second. You still have to decelerate when you get near the moon, but as you can see it would take less than an hour. Quite fast when you consider that the Apollo missions took over 2 days to reach the moon.

Isn’t science fun? And no, I’m not being sarcastic.

Once we decided that we had the ability to intercept the asteroid I mentioned, a new batch of engineers, etc… began building the intercept spacecraft, System drive and all the myriad other little things needed to capture it. The full scale drive compared to the spacecraft has a thrust to mass ratio of 115:1. It was designed to be so powerful since it has to be able to return with the asteroid in a timely manner.

As an aside, the drive is so powerful that it almost tore itself off the test rig mounts when they ran it at full power. The engineer's reactions to that would have almost been funny if the situation wasn’t so scary because it isn’t as if we’d have had the time to build a new one if it tore itself apart. Why is it always the little things that put plans at risk?

Then there is the AI, his name is Helios. Rather apropo in that respect. He’s been custom designed to run the spacecraft, intercept and return with the asteroid. Last, but definitely not least, the power system to run everything. For the moment, we’ll be using Ohta’s reactor. This one is purpose built for the craft since it had to be a minimum of 400 gigawatts to power the engine and inertial dampers. With safety margins being taken into account it ended up being 550 gigawatts.

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The whole spacecraft has been heavily over-designed with multiple redundancies to ensure it makes it back. Don’t even ask what this is costing. Trust me, you don’t want to know. You have no idea how excited everyone is to see it launched, which is scheduled for July 15th. All they lack is some final integration tests and it’s done. I’m frankly amazed at how quickly they’ve put everything together.

A couple of days ago, we finished human trials at TGR. Kotomi told me that we received approval to sell the treatment and that she had them go to full scale production of the nanites for it. I guess this is what they meant when they said they would fast track the approval process. Regardless of anything else, this is going to help a lot of women, not to mention TGR’s bottom line, which also means a raise for everyone that works at TGR.

Another point that I should bring up is that I made Mirai COO of TGR. She still consults me on anything huge, but other than that, she has free reign since I simply don’t have the time or energy to devote to TGR considering everything that’s going on.

Even with my reduced time at work, I’m still rather stressed out. Thank God that I have Erica. She’s taken over fielding 90% of the calls from our partner nations. She only allows through those that she deems necessary for me to deal with personally. Believe me, I’m much happier about the fact that she does that than you can begin to understand. I used to get calls in the middle of the night all the time, and that has now dropped off to only once in a while. Trust me, I get it. They are providing huge amounts of support with very little in return for the moment, all while also trying to hide it. We’re trying to avoid the panic that would ensue if everyone knew what was going on. It’s not easy to hide things, especially in democracies that have to publish where the peoples’ money is going yearly.

Final item. Katsuo referred a gangly teen from Spain to Erica, who called me almost immediately. During the video call, Enrico Perez astounded the both of us with his plans for quantum communications. Think Star Trek’s subspace communicator and you’ll get the idea. Basically, distance wouldn’t matter since all you would need is the ‘address’ of whoever you want to talk to.

It took us all of 5 seconds of looking at each other to set him up with a lab and all the funding he could ever want. Instant communications regardless of distance, yeah, no-brainer.

[Friday, June 27]

Yay! Final day of school for the year! So, that means… Dun dun dun! Summer Vacation!

Now, there’s no way that I can spend two full weeks at our summer house on Okinawa like I did last year, but I am going to take a week to rest and relax. You might say that Airi, Mama and Dad demanded it.

Since we’ll be out that way, we’re also flying to Yakushima to take a look at the progress Gen’s company has made. The seaport has been rebuilt and expanded to accommodate the amount of civilian, US and JMSDF ships that are expected to be there at any one time. Unfortunately, the airport was a total loss though. He asked for permission, and I gave it to him, to bulldoze the entire thing and start from scratch. Again, they’re expanding it as well. The reason being is to accommodate aircraft of any size, be it civilian or military, and yes, Jenny said she will be stationing a couple of squadrons of fighters out of there. The Chinese learned the hard way not to mess with the American F-48’s that the JSDF uses. The 5 air battles we’ve had with them resulted in demoralizing losses for their side. Needless to say they rule the sky. By the way, them having an airbase there also means that the USAF is paying for part of rebuilding the airport as well and my bank account thanks them.

Did I mention that I’m literally hemorrhaging money? Even Dad mentioned how much is being spent. All I could do is shrug because there isn’t that much I can do about it. We already knew that rebuilding Yakushima and starting up DTI would be expensive. Even with all that’s been accomplished at DTI, we’re still in the red. Not all that surprising since much of what is being developed isn’t for use on Earth.

Okay, back to our vacation. Mama, Dad, Eri and Kaede are coming this time. Yay! Of course, so are my sister's boyfriends, Mayumi, Kazuto, Miyuki and Hiroki. Our other friends have plans with their boyfriends or families.

Speaking of Mayumi. I’ve barely seen or been able to speak to her, but Kazuto and her showed up one day at the house. Wow, is all I can say! She now looks to be no older than 16. Her height didn’t change, she’s still 161 centimeters tall, but boy, everything else sure did! She now measures 81B/56/86 and her hair reaches the top of her butt. She’s so much happier with her body. Kazuto thinks she looks good as well.

Anyway, we’ll be flying out on the 30th and returning July 7th. I’m quite happy that Jenny and her husband, Mark, will be joining us for a few days. She’ll be flying in on the morning of July 3rd and leaving on the evening of the 6th. She mentioned something about having plans for us on Independence Day. I had to look that up to get what she meant and it sounds fun since I love fireworks.

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