Solar Sailer: Lightways Book One by Stephan Besik

Author:Stephan Besik [Besik, Stephan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Artiplex Publicatons
Published: 2019-08-26T22:00:00+00:00

Fixing the Drones

“Okay, Albert, let’s hear it. Can we fix the drone design?”

Albert nodded. “Yeah, Wallace, it can be done. We’ve run a couple of designs through the simulators and the best one works really well. The only problem is that none of the workable designs are modifications. It’s actually a brand new drone. At least half, maybe more of the original design is being replaced.”

Wallace looked stricken. “Oh, man. So we just threw away a bunch of money on a bad design and we’re going to have to go to the drone builders and tell them to start over?”

Albert nodded again. “Pretty much. The drone guys aren’t going to be real happy, but on the plus side we caught this early. They haven’t gotten very far into assembly yet. And they’ll grumble, but they’ll think about the extra cash flow and the pain will go away. The guys that are putting up the money, though…” He left the punch line unsaid.

Wallace frowned and wiped a hand across his forehead. “Man. They’ve been good about the money so far, but this one’s going to hurt. There’s no way we can fix the old design?”

“Not really. We looked at it and it’s pretty fatally flawed. We just didn’t realize how close the tolerances had to be on the jets to ensure that the push and the brake forces were identical. The only good thing about this is that the simulations let us catch the problem early instead of getting drones up in space and finding out they didn’t work then.”

“How does the new system work?”

“It’s pretty simple, really. In the old model the operator maneuvers the drone around to get the sight set on the destination. In the new system, the only thing that moves before the operator pulls the trigger is a sighting camera. The drone stays stationary until the operator executes the move. The drone can be completely out of sync with the camera. The drone does its reorientation as part of the process of getting to the target.”

“That’s great! Why didn’t we design the drones that way in the first place?”

Al shrugged. “There are some tradeoffs. The programming is more complex now; it’s not just about figuring out how much force is needed to launch and stop. It’s more expensive, too, both for the software and the drones themselves. Now the cameras have to be able to rotate, elevate, and decline separate from the drone. The engineering is tricky because we have to counterbalance any camera motion to hold the drone steady until the operator is ready to go. We didn’t think the original design would cause the operators as much trouble lining up the drone as they had.”

“Yeah. Well, I’d better go tell Klaus. He’s not going to be happy.”

Albert looked shocked. “You mean you haven’t told him yet?”

“I didn’t want to take him a technical problem until we had a solution.” Wallace shrugged. “I hate telling him that we’ve got a problem we don’t know how to fix.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.