PSO Book 3: Universes Unknown

A planet, far far away.

EASA selected all of us to go into space, to Eeloo actually. We threw a party for Starry after her recovery and we then were chosen to go to space. We were going to Eeloo, the furthest place from the sun, and it should take only 10-20 years. All that we were really told that we were supposed to retrieve something, a foreign something from another place, interstellar, maybe even intergalactic. Fast forward to the launch.

We all boarded the spacecraft that was going to get us to Eeloo, Lyra, Bon Bon and Derpy all there. I was the pilot of the mission, who was supposed to help the captain fly, who was Starry. Why did they let her be the one to fly the rocket? She barely knew how to pilot spacecraft. I flew spacecraft for a long time now, and I knew lots of things.

The spaceplane was launched like a space shuttle, SRBs on the sides of the main fuel tanks, struts holding the 'orbiter' to the external tank. All I can say about this is that Galaxy Scouter is now a 7 pony spacecraft that was still an SSTO though, but a rocket was used for a more convenient way to get into orbit. Anyways, EASA was low on xenon gas, so that saved some too, right?

Rocket was going to launch in 10 seconds, counting down one by one. I saw the nervousness in Starry's body, slightly shivering. I was completely fine. I've been to countless moons and other planets and have piloted many spacecraft. Starry has never done any of that. Maybe that was why she felt a bit nervous or worried.

'10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, we have liftoff! We have liftoff,' The loudspeakers called out loud, so loud that I could slightly hear it in the spacecraft, the rocket engines firing at the same time.

The rocket was slow at first taking off. It had a thrust-to-weight of only 1.5, not much. The normal TWR I like is between 3-5 so I could experience some thrilling G-forces acting on me. That's very fun, but not very fun for the average pony or person as Lyra would say. What can I say, humans are real after all.

'Can you teach me how to fly rockets?' Starry asked.

'Ok,' I replied.

I can't believe Starry doesn't know any of this, and saying she doesn't know this, she doesn't know orbital mechanics. Piloting a rocket is very easy, learning orbital mechanics isn't very easy, especially orbital rendezvous. That is pretty hard to learn, and don't forget some other parts of orbital mechanics. They are even more hard to get the grasp of, such as gravity assists and whatnot.

Slamming the autopilot button, I turned it off, gaining full manual control. I have already flown manually many, many times so that didn't matter at all. I did turn on stability assist, as gaining stability is extremely hard manually. I didn't let Starry control the spacecraft by any means. She might need some real training, not the training that I gave her in like 1 minute. Then I detached the SRBs, they were now just dead weight.

Completing the gravity turn, I let the shuttle coast up, the external tank still attached. Starry took in everything I said and performed. It was like she actually cared about it. I let the engines fire until we got above the Karman line, 70000m, the same as the Equestria in my universe. I guess the planets are the exact same, the timeline is different, an alternate universe, not a parallel universe. 2 different terms, what differences? A parallel universe is another universe, different things. Alternate universes, same things, just a different timeline.

We were travelling very fast, near orbital velocity, also near space. Going to orbit was usually about 5 minutes, pretty fast I could say myself. Now I just detached the external tank (ET) from the spaceplane, the struts detaching, letting the ET free.. That tank was now also just dead weight.

Firing up the closed cycle RAPIER engine, we got into orbit after a 200m/s circularisation burn. That used up quite a bit of out liquid fuel because the RAPIER exhaust velocity is bad, I mean very bad. What I said is compared to a vacuum optimised engine, which usually had an exhaust velocity of about 3.4km/s The RAPIERs were about 3km/s in terms of exhaust velocity. The difference doesn't sound very big, but when the difference of mass comes in, the difference is very apparent.

Finally getting into orbit, I set up a manoeuver to get to Eeloo. The damn spaceship didn't even have a fucking antenna. I have the feeling that somepony is going to sue EASA again. Thank goodness I was great at playing a game called Kerbal Space Program. It had the realistic solar system and all that. Perfect game. I guess that was how I learnt how to plan manoeuvers in real life.

'Starry, look as I plot a course for Eeloo,' I said.

'Looking,' she answered.

I plotted a manoeuver that would get us all the way to Eeloo. Some great thing about the spaceplane's manoeuver planner, though a lot more advanced and precise as the one in KSP, it's harder to use. At least I knew how to use it on the go with no training. Convenient, right? Nope. These ones were a little different from the ones back home. Touch screens for manoeuvers are fucked up. I need the tactile buttons, seriously, I NEED them.

Planning the manoeuver, I realised the classic autopilot button. Turning it on, I started to relax, Starry wouldn't exactly get what I'm saying when it comes to orbital mechanics and whatnot. I went out of my seat, Starry also doing it. Time for stasis.

The others also knew it was stasis time. I had to travel across the rooms and whatnot. I mean, I even told them. The only problem was that there had to be a pony to look after the ship. One fatal problem with the damn spaceplane was that the thing didn't have any way of preventing things hitting it, which meant manual control was the only option. Bon Bon volunteered. All the others would go into cryogenic sleep.

I noticed something with Starry, a bit of a worried face. 'What's the matter?' I asked.

'Nothing, it reminds me of an incident 3000 years ago,' she answered, 'Just scared.'

'It's ok bro, it's 3000 years in the future, I bet nothing bad is going to happen,' I assured her. I said 'bro' instead of something else because I used that when I was young, the time I was transitioning from a filly to a mare. Guess I've never got rid of saying 'bro'. We all went into stasis, Bon Bon looking after the spaceplane.

'Uhh,' I thought, having a slight headache. I felt cold, very cold. I didn't know what was going on. Were we there? The others were also out of their cryogenic capsules.

Starry went up to me and screamed, 'PLANETSHINE, HELP! BON BON's NOT RESPONDING AND THE FUCKING DOOR TO THE COCKPIT IS DEAD!'

'What?' I replied, 'I have a headache, tell the others first, I'm feel like I'm going to die.'

The others were awake too, they didn't have a headache like me. I guess it was the cold. I do sometimes get headaches like that. I genuinely have no idea how I get those headaches. Rarely happens after stasis.

'HELP ME! BON BON'S NOT RESPONDING TO ME!' I heard Starry shout across the room. She seemed like she was very worried, maybe even scared. Don't know, I was just too dizzy. Anyways, speaking of dizzy, I floated to the kitchen, or where the food was kept and ate some stuff. Then I just had to sleep. I couldn't take the headache anymore, it was just too severe.

About 6 hours have passed, the others were in the dining room. I got out of the sleeping bag and went up to them. 'Hey, whatcha doing?' I asked.

'Eating and rehydrating after 31/2 years,' Flame Rider responded. 'Cockpit door is still locked, don't know about Bon Bon, we're going to slam it open later.'

'Mkay. Mkay.'

Minutes passed, time to slam open that door. Nothing special, just slammed it and slammed it with some tools. Finally got it open after a while of slamming. Slamming was the only option, as we couldn't get it to unlock. Psst, we used a bit of magic to slam it. Yes, it was Lyra doing it. Zero G was too hard to control the damn metal block so magic was the only option.

Horror struck us right in the head. What we saw scarred us for the rest of our lives. Bon Bon's dead. Dead as a doornail. All that remained was her skeletal remains. 'Holy mother of fuck,' I yelled out loud, retreating from Bon Bon's remains. Her helmet and her flight suit were still intact though, the windscreen, nope.

Retreating from the dead corpse, I tried to forget it. Won't work, couldn't forget it, it was like a core memory embossed into my brain, never able to be purged, ever. Why is this the reality, I'm going to get nightmares tonight, guaranteed. Since the memory couldn't be erased, I guess going into the cockpit again would be the most logical idea, not. I mean, I have to look at the ship's log.

3y 118d 1h 45m 54s- Enter foreign gravitational field

3y 127d 16h 29m 21s-Exit field

3y 131d 7h 29m 57s-Potential threat detected

3y 131d 8h 02m 34s-Collision detected

3y 131d 8h 02m 57s-Exterior shielding breached-Depressurising-Screen
shield retraction error

System offline-...

Too basic of a log. How did the damn system go offline? I'm used to seeing really damn complicated logs on my old Galaxy Scouter, this was just too simple. My old Galaxy Scouter would log all the gravitational influences and delta-V usage and whatnot. It also had logs such as kernel panics, which basically render the system offline. There wasn't a cause for this system to be offline. I knew computer software too ya know.

That was me overreacting, though seriously, I do know computers and I do know how to resolve system failures and things like kernel panics or even worse, the fucking hardware melting down. Ok, maybe the hardware melting down needs replacement hardware, but whatever, I've made my own computers.

Wrapping the next few days up, we fixed up the windshield, yay. I also taught Starry how to fly an SSTO, but I forgot to lecture her on orbital mechanics. Quite important for a captain to know. I'm not a teacher on orbital mechanics and orbital rendezvous. That's for another pony to teach her. I'm an expert at it, though I'm not a qualified teacher. I also did some fine tuning so that the route would be safer.

Next few years was just stasis again, yay! This time nopony watching over, boo. Hey, the stasis chambers also had an option to download your mind onto a computer, so you can in theory live in the computer. All we did was made a scenario that everything was utopia. Hey, none of us aged, perfect.

Eeloo.

We were at Eeloo. All of us went out of stasis, me going in the cockpit with Starry. Coasting to the closest approach. The hyperbolic trajectory was in the normal direction, which was 100% not what we wanted. We wanted to be in an equatorial orbit. Once we were mostly to the point of the closest approach, Starry got us all into an orbit. She knew what to do, setting the the nose retrograde and burning to get into a very elliptical orbit.

Now we just needed to get the orbit equatorial. This was one thing I took over with. Starry didn't really know all that much on how to change orbital inclination. Since the spaceplane was travelling in the normal direction in a perfect 90 degree orbit somehow, I don't know how, but that was the situation. This was extremely easy to change the orbit inclination, just need to do it at the apoapsis, which is where the orbital nodes are.

Firing up the ion thrusters, we got the orbital inclination very close to zero. Not the best way to find something but at least that thing that we were supposed to get was very close, if not directly on the equator. After 2 orbits, the exact coordinates of this foreign thing was located. It was only a slight bit off the equator, but close enough that we could hike there without many problems.

Starry, Flame Rider and I boarded the lander, which was a bit large considering it was stuffed inside the damn spaceplane. It unfolds out to become a full fledged lander, engineering at its finest I must say so myself. The lander was aerodynamic with an aerospike engine. Aerospike you might ask? It's just better than a normal rocket engine, better efficiency in all atmospheres really.

The lander was a bit squished, quite normal for a lander. I'd much rather be on an SSTO that descended down to Eeloo's surface, but the NERVAs were too inefficient in the thick atmosphere. Eeloo, having a thick atmosphere, situated very far from the sun. Sounds reasonable to me. I guess global warming is a real thing, scientifically, not magically. This is science, not magic that's making Equestria cold as fuck.

Descending was easy, retrograde burn, enter atmosphere with a heat shield that would absorb heat, jettison it, land using a lot of parachutes. Heat shield you might be asking? Yes, even in a freezing atmosphere, you need a damn heat shield, who said that cold atmospheres were safe to enter without one.

Landing it perfectly, I was the first one to bust out. Starry next and Flame Rider last. Guess I'm always the first one to step hoof on other planets and moons. I mean, the others were checking everything, I just busted out like I always do. The others weren't very happy with my lack of knowledge in safety and whatnot. I know I'm not reckless, mostly not reckless that is, sometimes very reckless.

The hike to the location was only going to be about 5 hours. The oxygen tanks, though small held a crap ton of highly compressed oxygen, and with me, I had an oxygenator attached to one. The flight suits kept us perfectly warm outside the lander, which was about -200 degrees Celsius. Oh yeah, they were more like spacesuits than flight suits.

Looking around, snow was falling from the sky, the place reminded me of somewhere, somewhere far away, in a galaxy far away. Seemed like that white place in PONY-WARS, great movies. Loved them. I had with me my phone and a pair of earphones. I needed them as you can see. I like music. The others had fucking tesla coil guns and jetpacks. Why jetpacks? I don't know. It was just like extra weight, useless because we could fly with our wings because of something called an atmosphere. It really works, I've tried it.

I noticed something, a robot, a droid if I was going to describe it correctly. It was a replica of the R2-D2 droid in PONY-WARS. How do I know? I've watched those movies when I was in my teen years. I wasn't a big fan of them, more fiction than science. Nothing with mass can travel faster than light, and the spaceships in there travel faster than light. What the fuck is that? Not science fact of course.

A transmission came from the orbiter, a rover was coming down. Perfect, we didn't have to hike there, less energy wasted if I say so. We waited, waiting for a long time. The rover was dropped about a kilometer away, the wind carrying it 76 km approximately, though it landed near us.

Hiking there was easy, not hard. It only really took 15 minutes, all that time Starry leading the way while I was listening to music. Sia's music were all on my phone, I sorta miss her. She apparently existed in this universe, and the songs were all the same. Miss her and Rainbowshine, my friends. I never forgot them.

Minutes passed, not there. I got out my calculator, doing the dumb thing of smashing it and attacking it until it was dead. I used to do that when I was back in school. Even though it definitely works, I've destroyed about 100 calculators in my entire life. Quite the amount eigh? This time I was figuring out the date and time, but I broke that piece of shit because I smashed it too hard.

Rover was just ahead of us. We were finally there. Starry did some examining and inflated it. It was good in the inside. The interior was insulated and the outside was made with perfectly good titanium. What could absolutely go wrong with a rover like this. Roving to the location, I smashed Starry out the driver's seat once and did a stunt with a little hill that was coming up. Did a backflip with the rover. The others were mad at me but at least it was a success, even R2-D2 was fully intact.

We could all see the strange foreign thing. Looks more like a spacecraft to me than anything else. UFO maybe? I can say the definitely exist, I was riding a UFO when I entered Equestria here. I say UFO because for them it was unidentified, for me it wasn't, it was my own spaceplane. I need to build another one, a better one, and especially a more aerodynamically stable one, that was the main priority. The last one would have problems with stalling and instant pitch-ups.

'What in the name of Celestia is that?' questioned Starry, looking at the unidentified flying object.

'Umm, who's Celestia,' Flamerider asked.

I facehoofed, can't believe she didn't know Celestia and the other princesses. It's been 3000 years though, and things like this could well be lost to time. 'No time,' I responded, 'That's an alien spacecraft.'

'Holy shit!' exclaimed Starry. She seemed a bit excited though also a tiny bit nervous due to her facial expression.

Silence, pure silence, absolutely no sound for about a minute. We were all gazing at the alien spacecraft. It wasn't like the round ones that most sci-fi books described them. It was more like an SSTO, a small one, beautiful, absolutely beautiful. It seemed like the alien race that constructed this piece of pure engineering was very high tech, maybe even higher tech than us. We couldn't completely guarantee that this was true, but close enough.

'I'm going to talk to mission control for now, I'll be doing some excavating later,' Starry said to us. Flame Rider and I started the excavating. All I know about what Starry was doing is that she was talking to the space center with very, very low latency. I don't know exactly how, but that was the case with what I could perceive. How could radio waves travel faster than the speed of light? Honestly, I don't know as nothing can travel faster than light, including all waveforms.

We brought shovels along. I can't be an alicorn with a helmet, so guess it's time to dig up this piece of crap using a shovel manually by hoof. Flame Rider was able to use her flamethrowing capabilities. She can do firebending, but she had to stuff herself with food to do so. I guess physics are a part of magic. She needs a type of fuel to do some flamethrowing with her hooves, physics!

One day has passed, had a lot of meals and relaxing time. Good thing was that the place didn't have any snow for now. Digging the thing up was hard, but worth it. A little problem was that there was some sticky substance on the top of the thing, but no biggie. This feat of research and development could be extremely valuable to everypony in Equestria, maybe essential to live longer on this dying place.

Now it was just hooking that huge thing onto the rover. The damn rover was actually able to tow the spacecraft. Don't know how, something like that didn't make sense to me, it broke the laws of physics. Oh well, the thing was attached via strong neodymium magnets, the electromagnet type. It was fused with iron and there you go, a neodymium electromagnet.

Then we got the rover all the way to the lander, which the two then fused together. Fusing together meant that we could get off the ground. The aerospike engine was a little weird. Instead of being a fuel and oxidiser engine, it used fusion propulsion. The NERVAs were normal, and they were reasonable, but fusion engines were a little strange at first glance. How did they make them? How are they so small? Nuclear pulse engines were fucking huge and they need to resist a lot less pressure. Mr. Physics, going to the bar and getting drunk again?

The lander's aerospike engine started up, the fusion core bursting particles out at 250 km/s. The launch time wasn't very optimal to get a rendezvous with the Galaxy Scouter, but whatever, I know all the transfers and whatnot. Getting into orbit, we circularised at a very low altitude, right above the atmosphere, which was also our phasing orbit.

Waiting for a few minutes, we were ready for the rendezvous approach. All I did was a bi-elliptic transfer, nothing special really. Approaching the Galaxy Scouter, we went docked everything in, other than the foreign spacecraft. That thing's docking port was too large for the Galaxy Scouter, though it could be easily securely attached to the spaceplane. Now it was time to go home. Also went in the alien spacecraft, nothing, other than dried blood in the cockpit. Absolutely nothing.

Boarding the spaceplane, we ate some food, later going into stasis, downloading our minds to a computer. At least we get to have fun with no way of dying or anything, great if you ask me. Doing those things were fun, like really fun, especially setting ourselves on fire. I could feel the fire but it didn't kill me or anything, it was just fun.

4 years has passed, Starry and I were the only ones out of the stasis chambers. I forgot to mention this, but Derpy was supposed to keep the spaceplane safe from asteroids and whatnot. Speaking of Derpy, a hibernation chamber should be free, but the free chamber was taken up. Taken up by an unknown pony. It was an orange unicorn, complete with a floofed up tail and a cutie mark with 2 lightning and a star.

I also realised that there was another spacecraft docked to the Galaxy Scouter, so we quickly released all the other ponies, a bit nervous at what the absolute hell that mysterious pony was.

'Maybe leaving it in the cryogenic capsule would be better,' I said out loud everyone.

All of them nodded their heads, so leave it in the cryogenic capsule in stasis it is. We all had no idea who this pony was, or what its potential was. Was it able to cast magic so powerful that it could destroy this universe? Well, nopony knows other than the pony itself.

Speaking of the spacecraft that was docked to the Galaxy Scouter, it was disturbing in there. Blue blood was splattered on the floor, all dried up in lumps, fur straightening sounds haunted the place. It was like Galaxy Scouter, but with absolutely no luxury or anything, just control panels. The cargo bay only really had a lot of books about humans and shit like that. Just spooky, who lived in here, and how is it docked to Galaxy Scouter? Can't undock now because of the broken airlock. We'll just have to live with it.

'Forgot about Derpy!' Starry exclaimed, worried about the grey pony.

We all floated across the spacecrafts, ultimately crashing into the cockpit. The yellow maned grey pony was fine, just sleeping with food on the ground. Everypony was extremely happy that she didn't die. Mysterium cleaned up the place in only a few seconds, dumping all the rubbish into deep space. Now that I think of it, Kessler syndrome might occur.

Oh well, I plotted a slower but more safe course back home, reentering at a slower speed than 4000m/s. The Galaxy Scouter couldn't handle such heat like that. Never gone into stasis for the next year. I mean, the detour was sorta needed, or we would be dead.

'This is ESS reporting to GS, do you copy?' the Galaxy Scouter radio said out loud, 'All spacecraft rendezvous with the Equestrian Space Station, Direct orders from Hudson, proceed with Hohmann transfer rendezvous.'

Hohmann transfer rendezvous, I do bi-elliptic ones nowadays, Hohmann ones are a little to error prone. Guess we have to do that, Equestria's fucked up with ash clouds and whatnot. After some rendezvous fine tuning and whatnot, we were finally on a course to rendezvous with the ESS.

Approaching the ESS, we realised that the place was congested with a shit load of spacecraft, and docking with it was a no no, so we did a vote and came up with the decision to go to the Hudson Space Center. Starry was the captain here, doing a small retrograde burn and following all the reentry procedures.

Coasting along the thicker parts of the atmosphere, we reached the space center. Releasing the landing gear, we touched down gently and turning on the wheel brakes and the airbrakes, the tires screeching made me almost deaf. We halted to a stop, this mission was complete and a complete success, other than the fact that we forgot to plant a flag on the surface of Eeloo. How could we absolutely forget that?