[centre][h2]Sumiye King – Acting Chief Engineer[/h2][/centre]

The Chang’e project was a pipe dream.

That was Sumiye’s professional assessment after looking at the project notes the captain had directed her towards. Like Almira had said, it was a scientific endeavour aimed at fixing the recurring problem that gravity presented every time humanity wanted to launch something into space; namely that several thousand tons of metal, plastic and glass was a tad difficult and prohibitively expensive to get off the ground, meaning that space ships, stations and other large constructs needed to be flown into space piecemeal before being assembled in orbit. Getting something the size and mass of the Thucydides into space the way people did it a few centuries ago, by pointing it straight up and firing the engines at full blast, would probably bankrupt whatever country had built it with the fuel costs and achieve little more than burning a very large crater in the ground. So far their solution to that was simply to turn one trip to space into one hundred, splitting the work into manageable chunks so that shuttles or space elevators could handle the load. The Chang’e project, started about 60 or 70 years ago, aimed to find an alternative method of defying gravity by, well, [i]defying gravity[/i]; that Sumiye had never heard of the project before and that it had little to nothing to show for its efforts despite the decades it had been running was down to one simple fact.

Anti-gravity was essentially pop science.

Humanity’s understanding of the universe had progressed in leaps and bounds over the last few millennia. They had turned that understanding into achievements, accomplishing things that had once been thought impossible; they’d even managed to achieve faster-than-light travel, breaking through the bounds of relativity and overcoming the limit that many thought would prevent them from truly conquering the stars. Their very presence on this planet, the predicament they now found themselves in, was only possible because of these strides that humanity had taken, the seemingly insurmountable challenges they had overcome.




Even so, they couldn’t manipulate gravity.

It was one of the four fundamental forces of the universe after all, one of the fundamental interactions that determined how their universe [i]worked[/i] on a basic level. It was the weakest of those four, sure, but not so weak as to simply bend to their will. The Chang’e project was an attempt to do just that, but [i]how[/i] they intended to do it was unclear; the documents seemed more concerned with the potential applications of the technology than how it would actually be made reality. There were two main theoretical methods being proposed; to create a device that negated the pull of gravity, unshackle the ship from its hold so that it could fly as freely in a gravity well as it could in the vacuum of space, or to somehow reverse gravity, to turn the [i]pull[/i] into a [i]push[/i] in order to have a planetary body repel the ship the way two opposing magnets would. Both of these were… interesting ideas, albeit ones that were more in the realm of fiction than reality. The report did contain so ideas on how they could be accomplished, numbers and formulas and diagrams that she skimmed through, but the whole thing seemed more like a project proposal than a fully realised idea; a submission for further funding, to keep alive a project that was as dead in the water as the Thucydides currently was.

Sumiye would not say it could not be achieved. There were a lot of things that ‘could not be achieved’ that were now achievable, but it could be achieved in the short term. It could not be achieved by her or her team; not with the limited resources available to them, not with their lack of understanding of how gravity worked as a force. For all that it was the weakest universal force, it was also in a lot of ways the most mysterious and least understood. It would take a revolution of science, the overturning of everything they understood, to make the Chang’e project a reality.

But hey, if shape shifting dragons existed, then maybe this was possible too?