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Source Melchizedek.0294

Approach β Hyi

Ascension 00h 25m 45.07036s

Declination –77° 15′ 15.2860″

Distance 24.33ly

Equinox J2000.0 SOL

Year 3781, QEC adjusted

[Autotranslator enabled...]

Jerome Somerset Pasani, Warrant Master

:::

Hämäläinen has been pestering me to address our time dilation

versus what RS001 is reporting back. If our transmissions are

accurate we seem to be logging messages from the mid 25th century.

In fact, several relay messages predate our own ship's launch.

Temporal mechanics is bread & butter to space travel, and I'm sure

all of you out there are intimately familiar with the various

methods of stellar travel and the havoc they cause with calendars,

but RS001 logs for posterity and--I'm told--is analyzed by school

children in some systems. For that sake, I'll take the advice of

my navigator and try to explain exactly "when" we are.

The first thing to understand is that Melchizedek is a variable

speed craft, with a slow steady acceleration and deceleration. If

you blend all those speeds together and look at the average, we've

been making our way to β Hyi at roughly 1.875% light speed. With

no other adjustments, that explains our 1,297 year voyage (Sol

POV). Of course that's not the whole story. Our Peterse 773s

generate our thrust through gravity shelling & sheering that our

primary school audience will know from the frozen egg experiment.

Thanks to the intense gravity shell, our ship's space-time is

isolated and slowed relative to outer space. The Peterse 773

Overtreffen holds internal time at a fixed 1 miller (1 light year

per year) despite changes due to acceleration. Finally, thanks to

distance dilation, we only needed to travel 24.32 light years

instead of the full 24.33! It might not seem like much, but for

those of us living in the cold and dark, three days fewer are very

welcome.

Our cryogenic systems had us asleep for almost the full journey

while the Melchizedek kept us healthy and built up supplies to be

automatically dehydrated or frozen themselves. (To Tim Fletcher,

Chief Engineer of the Garnet Star, our botany bays are built with

auto-harvesters and processors.) Our food supply generated over

the course of the trip, even adjusting for the unknown state of

the forward crops, will keep the settlement well fed for three

generations while the terraforming does its work. Unfortunately

for the five light sleepers aboard, the equipment to reprocess the

food stores is not designed to be used in transit. I can't

complain too much, though. Prezzi Adeyemi has worked some sorcery

with the rations which she calls "salt" (That's a joke, kids).

One final note regarding our logs. While we are confident that in

normal space it is EY 3181, our gravity shell isolated our QEC

transmission node from normal space-time in a unique way that was

not accounted for in trial runs. It seems no one else has worked

with gravity shell drives over such distances and time debts

before to notice the offset. Our logs are transmitting as if we

had only travelled 24 years, effectively into the past.

In fitting with Sansom's Clause, "Any effective time travel is

immediately made irrelevant by its own nature," our distance from

Earth means that any insight we gain through observation will have

traveled so far as to be insignificant to the past audience we

could inform. Even so, the crew is excited to be numbered amongst

those logged on RS001 with confirmed cases of chronology

displacements. Apparently there's a button or patch we get to wear

now, once manufacturing is back online.

Back to duties.

.