LOG ENTRY: SOL 211 (Jun. 9, 2036)
I am smiling a great smile. The smile of a man who fucked with his car and didn’t break it. This is considerably more rare than you might think.
I spent today removing unnecessary crap from the rover and trailer. I was pretty damn aggressive about it, too. Space inside the pressure vessels is premium. The more crap I clear out of the rover, the more space there is for me. The more crap I clear out of the trailer, the more supplies I can store in it, and the less I have to store in the rover.
First off: Each vehicle had a bench for passengers. Bye!
Next: there’s no reason for the trailer to have life support. The oxygen tanks, nitrogen tanks, CO2 filter assembly… all unnecessary. It’ll be sharing air with the rover (which has its own copy of each of those) and it’ll be carrying the regulator and Oxygenator. Between the Hab components it’ll be carrying and the rover, there’ll be two redundant life support systems. That’s plenty.
Then I yanked the driver’s seat and control panel out of the trailer. The link-up with the rover is physical. The trailer doesn’t do anything but get dragged along and fed air. It doesn’t need controls or brains. However, I did salvage its computer. It’s small and light, so I’ll bring it with me. If something goes wrong with the rover’s computer en-route, I’ll have a spare.
The trailer had tons more space now. It was time for experimentation.
The Hab has twelve 9kwh batteries. They’re bulky and awkward. Over two meters tall, a half-meter wide, and 3/4 meter thick. Making them bigger makes them take less mass per kwh of storage. Yeah, it’s counter-intuitive. But once NASA figured out they could increase volume to decrease mass they were all over it. Mass is the expensive part about sending shit to Mars.
I detached two of them. The Hab mostly uses the batteries at night. As long as I return them before the end of the day, things should be fine.
With both of the trailer’s airlock doors open I was able to get the first battery in. After playing real-life Tetris for a while I found a way to get the first battery out of the way enough to let the second battery in. Together, they eat up the whole front half of the trailer. If I hadn’t cleared the useless shit out earlier today, I’d never have gotten them both in.
The trailer’s battery is in the undercarriage, but the main power line runs through the pressure vessel. I was able to wire the Hab batteries directly in. (No small feat in the damn EVA suit).
A system check from the rover showed I had done the wiring correctly.
This may all seem minor, but it’s awesome. It means I can have 29 solar cells and 36kwh of storage. I’ll be able to do my 100km per day after all.
4 days out of 5, anyway.
According to my calender, the Hermes resupply probe is being launched from China in two days (if there were no delays). If that screws up, the whole crew will be in deep shit. I’m more nervous about that than anything else.
I’ve been in mortal danger for months; I’m kind of used to it now. But now I’m nervous again. Dying would suck, but my crewmates dying would be way worse. And I won’t find out how the launch went till I get to Schiaparelli.
Good luck, guys.
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