Control Deck Atomic Rockets

This is where the spacecraft's pilot flies the ship. In fiction it is often the dramatic focus. Even though without help from the astrogator, engineer, and ship's captain one will find that the pilot is helpless. Flying a spacecraft is a team effort, but Hollywood finds that to be boring. Callahan squeezed into the crowded flight deck. Grander starships, the handsome corporate-line giants that never saw the surface of a planet, never seared their gleaming hulls with the fires of reentry, could afford spacious bridges whose crews could lounge about with...

Not the Goose. There was the captain's station to port, with its terminal and repeater screens and the vector-shift board; the pilot's chair to starboard, and the engineer's tech pit squeezed in between structural members abaft the... A 'fresher stall and ration dispenser for short-handed watches—the only kind aboard the Goose—completed the crowded layout, just behind the pilot's station. There was barely headroom enough to seat Moses' one meter ninety without scraping his hat on the overhead, just legroom enough for a stiff stretch under the boards, and it had been the heart... Mitsuko had climbed down into the tech pit, all but lost from sight behind consoles and crash padding. Callahan stooped and settled himself clumsily on the lip of the pilot's recess.

The view through the narrow forward port­holes (the ship is a belly-lander) offered nothing save the uninspiring, heat-scored flank of an orbital barge. The staccato sounds of a working keyboard rose from the tech pit and the panels around Callahan suddenly came to life, a swarm of green fireflies shot through with an alarming scatter of warning... The familiar background noises of his ship surrounded him again, the susurrance of the ventilators, the buzzes and chimes of half a dozen telltales, the static-laced dialogues between Hybreasil port control and its traffic... (ed note: one hex module is a hexagonal prism, about 3.7 meters wall to wall (12 feet), 15.2 meters long (50 feet), and has a volume of 241 cubic meters (8,500 cubic feet) What's in the engine room? The control console for the reactor and the control console for the propellant pumps.

Plus the controls to the remote waldoes/robot who fix things in the radioactive section. Damage control equipment and related items. Remember, outside the engine room hatch will be a decontamination booth. And I'm sure over the hatch will be mounted an alarm with a red rotating light, so you don't have to put your ear on the bulkhead to hear Astro say "Oh SH*****T!!!". Past the hatch will be a radiation-shielded corridor, with a dog-leg bend in it, so you can get in but radiation cannot get out (radiation has to travel in straight lines, but crewmen can... Be sure you are wearing your dosimeter.

And you might want to get a raycat as a mascot. The shadow shield will be in the floor, with the engine(s) below that. Around the engine deck will be auxiliary propellant tanks. The main tanks provide propellant, which is also used to cool the reactor and keep it from melting. In case something happens to the main tanks, the auxiliary tanks give Astro a few precious seconds of coolant time so he can SCRAM the reactor. The engine deck will also have some kind of Geiger counter to warn the crew of a radiation leak.

There will also be controls for the ship's power plant, whether the power is tapped from the propulsion system or from a separate unit. (ed note: Interstellar explorers from Terra land on a newly discovered planet. There are remarkably humanoid primitive aliens living there. The ship's linguist Kung Su learns the alien language, which is suspiciously similar to Chinese. Captain Griffin has a talk with some natives, and learns some interesting bits of the alien's history.) Alright, space cadets!

This is the way it is. If your ship is bigger than a space taxi you gotta have more than one crewperson. There are lots of critical jobs (or "hats") on a spacecraft, the more hats a given crewperson wears the lower will be their job performance. They hafta sleep sometime. What kinda jobs are we lookin' at here? Well:

(ed note: the good ship Space Angel is unexpectedly on a desperate mission. At their last encounter with hostile forces, they got away but the ship took damage. They are going to set down on an unknown unexplored planet to do repairs. ) (ed note: Kelly is the newly-hired Ship's Boy. He is barely a teenager.

Lafayette is the former ship's boy, just a little older than Kelly. Lafayette is not handling the strain of the mission well.) Where your ship goes, you go. If the pilot swings the vessel into an asteroid belt and butts it up against some rook, that's where they'll find you later. There are simulators that'll start someone off, but the only way to learn to fly is to punch the board. Oh, just look at that large silver globe scientifically packed with plenty of von Braun goodness!

This little honey is from the famous Collier's Man Will Conqure Space Soon! series. We coudda had this back in the fifties, for cryin' out loud! Most of us ugly Americans have never heard of Tintin. Which is pathetic since it is one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century. The characters might look a bit comical but the science is hard enough to bend titanium bars around.

Readers in the US might not recognize the Tintin graphic novels, but everybody in Europe has read them. This nuclear powered rocket was quite well researched for the time. The main engine is apparently a NERVA style solid nuclear thermal rocket fueled with plutonium. The launch site has a breeder reactor used to cook uranium 238 into plutonium for fuel rods. The rocket lifts off and lands with an auxillary chemical rocket fueled by nitric acid and aniline, so as to prevent contaminating the ground with radiation. The authors of the indispensable Spaceship Handbook did find one minor mistake.

The astronauts lie prone on their acceleration couches, which is second best position to lying on their backs. The authors of the Spaceship Handbook suggests that this was due to Mr. Rémy misinterpreting the diagram of the Werner von Braun moonship. In that diagram, the crew members who need to monitor the chart recorder are prone, but everybody in their acceleration stations are properly on their backs. The two main functions of sensors are navigational and tactical. Navigational sensors are used by the astrogator to determine the spacecraft's current position, vector, and heading.

They are also used by the pilot to perform the maneuvers calculated by the astrogator. Arguably a chronometer or other instrument to locate the spacecraft's current position in time is also a navigational sensor. Tactical sensors are used to watch the the region around the spacecraft. This is mostly to monitor nearby objects (such as meteors on a collision course or enemy spacecraft). Arguably this also includes solar-storm warnings which detect deadly incoming proton events. Navigational and Tactical sensors are generally found on all spacecraft, unless the designer is trying really hard to economize.

There are some more specialized sensors only found on more specialized spacecraft: Remote Sensing suites are used to scan and analyze the surface of a planet, moon, or asteroid. These are found on specialized spacecraft such as exploration vessels, mine prospecting ships, survey ships, customs and other hunter-type ships, and spy ships. Note that most of these are out of print, but can be obtain from places like http://www.bookfinder.com. One might also explore the possibility of an inter-library loan. The list is organized alphabetically by the author's (or authors') last name where possible.

The list is organized alphabetically by the author's (or authors') last name where possible. A boardgame is a game played with a paper map and cardboard playing pieces. A Role Playing Game (RPG) is a printed book containing the game rules. A Computer Game is (like you'd expect) a game played on a personal computer.

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