TA Lucas

I’ve been working on a few short stories for the rabiki.com world building forums.  It is a sci-fi writing site that I started about 2 years ago….thought I’d post one of the stories here.  If you’re interested in this type of writing, check it out at http://www.rabiki.com/forum/index.php.  The site is home to a great group of individuals who love scifi and writing.

Well here goes:

Captain Tom Bradock keyed the ships intercom, “The last transport has just docked in C15, the sub-light engines have been prepped, and we’ll make the jump to slip space in ten minutes. Please stop all non-essential ship activities, and make your way to a designated seating area. Once we’ve locked in our travel path, and reached our cruising speed, you may move freely about the ship. You are on flight 2117 Earth to Mars, and we anticipate our travel time to be about 36 hours.  Thank you for choosing the Venus.”

The bridge of the Venus was quite a bit larger than most transport ships–it had only been in service for 5 years, and still had that new ship smell, but the crew had already made it home, especially the captain.

Tom fiddled with the settings of his display–a large sheet of transparent glass in the center of the bridge viewable from either side. “Check this out”, he said as he tapped a control on the side of his chair.

The screen immediately filled with live video from the recreation lounge. One couple had just finished their dance, and were seating themselves in a large black leather couch along the side of the dining area, the drink attendant was putting away loose bottles that were left on the bar and table tops, and tidying up a bit. The jump to light speed was hardly noticeable, but it was still standard procedure for passengers to be seated during the transition.

Tom tapped the controls again and the screen displayed the entire port side of the ship. From this view the nose of the vessel was not visible, and the side of the ship seemed to go on for kilometers, before vanishing into a small point in the center of the screen.

One more tap brought up an image of the Earth below. The Venus was high enough to maintain a stable orbit for a ship of its size, but still close enough to make out the ruins of a few large cities. “It’s amazing what 20 years without people will do to a city”, Chris said as he pointed to Old Chicago on the screen.

The larger cities began the migration to Mars first, leaving only rural communities and scattered families to be transported during the last 5 years.

“Yeah! Well this is it”, Tom said with a sigh of relief. “No more trips to this godforsaken place”.

“What about those that are still here?” Chris felt his eye twitch, “Will they just be left to their own?”

This was Chris’ first assignment on a transport ship. He had just spent 5 years on the Bonappetit, a freightliner that hauled exotic foods between the Sol system and Alpha Centauri, and the promotion from tactical to first officer was a good fit for him and the Venus crew.

“We’ve been haulin people for 30 years. If they haven’t left by now, there gonna have to find their own way off this rock.”

“FIVE MINUTES AND COUNTING”, the ships A.I. spoke in a soft feminine voice over the comm system. “Please stop all non-essential ship activities and make your way to a designated seating area.”

Not sure if it was the soft sooting voice or the whole male ego thing, but most ship A.I.s were female……[more later]

Books, books, books….they’re everywhere!  So, just how do you get your news…from the local newspaper or on the internet?  With the development of the internet, we’re seeing much more content online, but I don’t think the printed word will disappear any time soon.  Nothing quite like a soft couch and a good book in your hands.

The printing press was invented in Germany in 1447 by Johannes Gutenberg, and has been thought by many as the most influential device ever.  Germany has been a leader in printing and is still known for their printing machinery. Heidelberg, both a city and a company, manufactures several multi-million dollar printing presses.

I worked for a publishing company for about 10 years, and got to know the ins and outs of the production side of publishing.  I had the opportunity to run address labelers, book binders, and printing presses….very interesting job.

One of the more common forms of printing today is offset printing.  Here’s how it works:

An image is burnt onto a photo-sensitive aluminum plate, other materials can also used, and then attached to a plate cylinder.  As the press runs, water is first applied to the plate cylinder and sticks to the non-printable areas.

Next the ink is applied…and since water and oil (ink) don’t mix, the ink only goes where there is no water–the printable areas.
As the plate continues to rotate, it comes in contact with the offset cylinder and transfers the ink as a reversed image onto it.  Then the offset cylinder continues on around until it comes in contact with the paper…the image is reversed again as it is transfered onto the paper.

The paper continues on, and is folded and cut into pieces that can be made into magazines, books, etc…

That is the process for printing one color onto a sheet or continuous web of paper…in the case of newspaper, this would most often be black.  It is however a bit more complicated to print a color image like a photo or drawing.  First a little about color.

So what are the primary colors…well that depends on the medium.  The three primary colors of light are red, green, and blue (RGB).  They are considered additive primaries–when you add a color, it adds to the final color.  You can see illustrations of this on the internet…just right click on most any website, and then click “view source”.  Most of what you see will look like gibberish, but occasionally you’ll see numbers like (#FFFFFF, #34F4C2, #111111, etc…).

I’m not going to go too in depth, but these are called HEX numbers.  The first two digits represent the red level, the second two the green, and the third two the blue.  So with our example (#34F4C2) red=32,  green=F4, and  blue=C2.  If you want to see how hex numbers work, check out the online Color Schemer, and play around a bit.  By the way….#34F4C2 is a light-blue color.  I use this website often to see which colors work well together.

The three primary colors of ink or pigment are cyan, magenta, and yellow, and they are considered subtractive primaries–when you add colors, it subtracts or absorbs the wavelengths of light you don’t see, and reflects the wavelengths of light you do see.  Check out the color chart.

SO….when printing a color image, the sheet or web of paper must pass through four different colors….(cyan, magenta, yellow, and black).  Black is added because it’s hard to make a true black by mixing the other three color pigments.