Stars in your multitudes, scarce to be counted, filling the darkness with order and light.

[tookashirototheknee]

[Matt might be good at the network, but that doesn't mean he has complete control over his thoughts. Sometimes things slip through. But in this case, it's probably for the better.]

Oh, for the love of space peas, that's it!

[He pauses, and then sets out to make slightly more coherent comments. Standing in front of a mirror, at first all people can see is a detailed star chart. Anyone who is familiar with stars from earth would know this isn't exactly a view from Earth, but it's similar.]

So, I totally forgot that I got blessed with visions or hallucinations or something like that, but I had a... something of a star field. I don't know if I was there or in a planetarium or what, but I drew it out.

And then I realized. This is the star field as seen from Mars. I'd be a crap Garrison graduate if I couldn't figure that one out. So, uh, on top of everything else that's going on, we're going to Mars.

I haven't been there myself, but my dad's told me a lot about it, so I can help. I hope.

Comments

[vrepit_no]

Yes. Our tech is probably more compact than it is in your era. We only needed a ship that size to do a long range mission with three people. Out to Pluto's moon.

The hard part, as always, is getting the ship off the planet. So far we kept using fuel pods like you saw there. Once we get out through atmo, we wait till the fuel runs out, then jettison the pods and start the engines.

They don't run on the same stuff. It's way more efficient than that, and you don't keep it up the whole time. Small, controlled pushes set you up on the right trajectory, and then you put her into a timed series of boosts to keep coasting unless you need to correct course for an unexpected object. [Beat.] Or the asteroid belt. [Beat.] Or a brief side trip to skim the rings of Saturn. That was great.