Sunday May 3, 2015
Book 16: Big, Dumb Objects — Part I

Transcript

NARRATOR: A battleplate is more like a densely populated military base than a warship.

JUMPSTAR PRIME (written): JUMPStAR PRi

NARRATOR: At capacity, the pods and plazas of a tricorn-class battleplate might house a hundred and twenty thousand personnel, contractors, and dependents.

It is a mobile fortress, a flying factory, a combination port and drydock, and a massive stockpile of weapons, materiel, and supplies.

A battleplate might have fifty million kilos of non-perishable nutriblocks in storage.

Properly processed, that's enough to feed a hundred thousand people for six months.

That stuff is for emergencies, however. Ten times the storage mass is devoted to super-efficient agrisystems, ensuring indefinite availability of fresh foods.

Jumpstar Prime is fully stocked, but almost completely empty of personnel.

DOOR (printed): 14

NARRATOR: Commissary Fourteen, in one of the dark pods, could, all by itself, feed her tiny prize crew for roughly twenty years.

Unsupervised, one carbosilicate amorph could consume those supplies in twenty months.

This carbosilicate amorph could do it in six.