Saturday, August 24, 2024

Moon Town - A Lunar Series Novella



MOON

TOWN


Remembered Earth Universe

Volume 12

Lunar Series

Book 4


D.W. PATTERSON


Copyright © 2025 D.W. Patterson

All rights reserved.


First D Printing – January, 2025


Future Chron Publishing


Cover – Copyright © 2025 D.W. Patterson

Cover Image – Illustration 75022245 | Star © Pavel Chagochkin | Dreamstime.com


No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission, except in the case of brief quotations for the purpose of review. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author's imagination and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events and people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.


Hard Science Fiction – Old School

Human Generated Content


Website: https://dwpatterson.com

Email: d.w.patterson.writer@gmail.com


For Rozella


We are off! And do we know it, not just because the world is yelling "Lift-off" in our ears, but because the seats of our pants tell us so! Trust your instruments, not your body, the modern pilot is always told, but this beast is best felt. Shake, rattle and roll!”

Michael Collins



To The Reader

In this story (and most of my stories), if I use a date, I know I am using the antiquated dating system, A.D. I blame this on the book Daybreak – 2250 A.D. by Andre Norton, which I read some time in elementary school (and of which I recently bought an old paperback copy). So, I was imprinted early with that dating system and think it sounds cooler than C.E. No social, political or any other kind of statement is meant.


Science and technology are important to me and I enjoy developing them as I develop a series. However, a problem arises if I have to reintroduce the science and technology in each story as the series progresses. For a reader that has been reading all along the reintroduction must be tedious and somewhat boring. For a reader entering later in the series (and I do like for the stories to stand alone) the lack of explanation could be off putting. So, as a compromise I have included the previous science and technology explanations in a Glossary at the end of this story, it also contains other facts about the series. Probably not a perfect solution, but the only one I could come up with at this time.



Chapter 1



2042 A.D.


The Lunans were still arriving in ships of fire, that is, people were flocking to the Moon to live and work in greater and greater numbers fifteen years after they had first returned.

To accommodate, the companies providing housing on the Moon were still building. Tima in Mare Frigoris, the first commercial settlement, was expanding but slowly. It had built up somewhat haphazardly and now as it approached a population of two hundred people it was getting more difficult to add livable space.

But that wasn't true of Fontenelle, also in Mare Frigoris. Founded by the New Lunar Corporation just south of the ice-bearing crater of the same name, it had been designed to expand. Down a central corridor with residential and commercial spaces off to each side, it was only necessary to add an airlock to an already prepared location to add another apartment or shop or business.

The corridor was shaped like a half section of hose. To this “frame,” built up with Mooncrete, a building material made from an alkali binder and Moon regolith by 3D printers, was overlayed several more feet of regolith for radiation protection. Underneath the floor of the corridor was an access area for pipes, electrical, and other utilities. Each residence or business had an entrance airlock off the main corridor with an “out-vac” airlock to the Moon's surface at the other end, to be used mostly for emergencies. Typically, the airlock to the main corridor served more as a door unless there was an atmosphere breach on either side.

The town had grown to four hundred people and half as many robots, most of them involved in one of New Lunar's industries; building, prospecting, mining, or tourism. There was also a small but growing cottage industry in providing crafts for other residents and those of Tima, one-hundred fifty-two miles away.

Now, two years after its founding Fontenelle was to expand. Another main corridor was being added perpendicular to the first. At the intersection would be a rotunda like area with the largest open floor area and highest indoor ceiling on the Moon. Room for six hundred more residents would eventually be available. New Lunar believed that with the expertise they had gained with the first corridor, the new corridor could be open and occupied within six months.

The only problem with the company's plans was that the general manager for construction had rotated back to Earth at the end of his contract and he wasn't interested in returning. To ensure that the schedule would be met New Lunar had hired away a construction foreman from Lunar Limited, the company building the Tima settlement.

Thursday, August 15, 2024

QM #6

I mean, the whole idea of observers - that's a pedagogical thing. It's very convenient when you're trying to understand something to imagine doing an experiment or think about an observer doing something. But that doesn't have anything to do with physical law, that has to do with the understanding of the law. A physical law is a description of nature, not a description of observers. Using the word observer in any place in physics at all - it's irrelevant. It's never part of a physical theorem. Look, they apply quantum mechanical laws to the Big Bang! There were no observers there!


Robert Serber - The Second Creation

Wednesday, August 14, 2024

AW #5

The rise of fantasy may have been only a trend led by a best-selling trilogy [Lord of the Rings], or it may have represented the abandonment of a search for rational solutions.


James Gunn - Alternate Worlds

Tuesday, July 23, 2024

The Next 500 Years #4

Chromatin is a hybrid structure of DNA and protein that manages the complex problem of packaging 3 billion bases of DNA into a small bundle in the cell that is only a few micrometers in size. This is no small feat. The length of DNA from one cell would measure two meters in length if you stretched it out in front of you. This long

Saturday, July 13, 2024

Gravitational Waves

Besides the technical reason for preferring that binary stars should not decay in their orbits, one might speculate that another motive encouraging belief in the existence of a static two-body solution was the same as that for Einstein's instinctive  choice of a static cosmology. There is an ancient prejudice that the universe in general is static

Friday, July 5, 2024

Warp Drive Space Race

In March, for my next series of novels I decided to write about the development of a warp drive. I didn't realize at the time how much work was being done on the concept. I ran across this in the online site The Debrief.
 
An international team of physicists behind several revolutionary warp drive concepts, including the first to require no exotic matter, says that recent unprecedented breakthroughs in physics and propulsion have launched the world powers into a Cold War-style, 21st-century space race to build the world’s first working warp drive.