Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[origamiscienceguy]

You take out your pistol and fire it backwards, back towards the airport. You remember the location of the unguided missiles and fire the bullet way high up, it get's caught in a wind gust, and propelled onto the rack of missiles. You can't see this, but you know from the shot that the bullet strikes a rear fin of one of the missiles, causing some sparks to ignite the missile. The resulting bullet-hole in the fin will cause the missile to turn straight up as it burns its fuel, and when the timed fuse ignites high in the atmosphere, one piece of shrapnel gets propelled to exactly 35,786 kilometers up, geosynchronous orbit. The GAMBIT satellite, traveling at orbital velocity, will strike the piece of shrapnel at over 3 km/s, ripping a hole straight through the satellite and igniting its fuel. However, it will take a few seconds for that sequence of events to happen, so you take out your handheld laser and aim it straight at the satellite, blinding its camera. After 1 second (due to light-speed delay) pandemonium strikes. The thousands of cars start bumping into eachother, then flipping and flying through the air, causing more collisions. Instead of a charge of cars traveling towards you and your fellow horsemen at 100 km/h, it is now a wall of flying metal traveling towards you at 100 km/h. You dig your heels into your horse and prance through the wreakage. You see one of the security dudes get violently dismounted by a flying semi-truck, and shortly after, the other security dude meets the same fate. Yet somehow, you, the president, and the pilot all make it through. You stop aiming your laser, and the few remaining cars chase after you again, but then they too crash and tumble because the GAMBIT satellite had just been blown up. All in the matter of 30 seconds.

The president looks at the massive heap of twisted metal behind him and speaks. "Just a few more minutes. We are almost there. It's a good thing all those cars crashed, or else we would be very dead." You follow him once more, and you come to this small outhouse in the middle of nowhere. The president enters, and there is an elevator shaft. The elevator, however, does not seem to like the fact that you just opened the door, and it tries to close them again. The president asks. "We need to get down. How do you think we should do it?"

[StrawBarrel]

Plans:
1) Grab a big stick and try to leverage the elevator door open.
2) Try to destroy the outhouse or at least the top of the structure. Then try forcing the elevator down the shaft.
3) Try fiddling with the elevator controls or buttons.
4) Begin digging downwards. The middle of nowhere is probably made of soft loose dirt, right?

Try #1 first.

[TheBiggerFish]

WE SHOULD NOT TAKE THE ELEVATOR.

[origamiscienceguy]

Frustrated, you grab a piece of metal and jam it into the elevator doors, and wedge them open. You prop the doors open, then enter. You push the button to go downwards, but unsurprisingly, the elevator does not cooperate. So you try plan two. You go back outside and methodically tear the pieces of the roof off until you reach the metal anchor of the elevator. By connecting a few wires, you short out the motor. You then tell everybody to get inside, and the extra weight of the people slowly accelerates the elevator downward, until it jolts at the bottom. You step out, and find yourself in a low tunnel with metal lined walls and ceiling. A mechanic of some sort comes running down. The president asks urgently "Is it ready?" The mechanic replies, "We were up all night working on it, but it is ready. The president leads the way down the hallway until he reaches a room filled with turned-off monitors. He sits in a chair and tells everybody else to do so as well. He asks the mechanic, "why don't you fill them in on what is going on?" The mechanic replies, "The only way to rid ourselves of these machines is to destroy them all at once. And the only reliable way to do that is to ignite a powerful nuclear bomb high in the atmosphere. The resulting EMP will simultaneously fry all electronics on earth and save everybody from the robots. That is actually the reason why the machines have not just detonated all the nukes on us, because it would do more damage to them than it would do to us. Now, here is our problem, in order to ignite the nuclear bomb high in the atmosphere, we need someone to go up with it. We can't use a computer for obvious reasons, and a fuse would be too unreliable. This is a nuclear missile silo, and we have modified a missile to replace all it's autonomous systems with manual controllers. It is really easy to control, but do know that if you go up, I don't expect you'll come back."

The mechanic looks at the airplane pilot for a long time, and the pilot whispers through tears, "I have a family." The mechanic then looks at you.

[StrawBarrel]

"Let's do this."

[TheBiggerFish]

"Hooooold on a second, what about, like, NASA?  Aren't they good at hardware automation?  Or something?

How does one even...What is this.  IT'S A LIE IS WHAT IT IS!"

BUST OUT OF THE MATRIX!

[origamiscienceguy]

Before you accept, you ask a question. "Why doesn't somebody like NASA do this? Can't they do hardware automation?" The president looks at you solemnly, then sighs. "NASA was destroyed by a guided missile (non-nuclear) and there is nothing that they can do. We need to hurry before they attack us here as well." You answer his question then. "I'll pilot it. How hard can it be? Let's do it!" "Excelent!" The president replies. The mechanic opens a metal door and enters a large silo. A missile is in the middle. It looks mostly normal except a large section in the upper part of the rocket had been heavily modified. All the guidance computers and power generators had been replaced with a small cockpit. You climbed into the cockpit and the mechanic explained all the controls to you. He then hands you a simple radio in order to communicate. He climbs down the ladder and locks your hatch shut. No turning back.

You hear a voice on the radio. "Godspeed. We are opening the launch tunnel. Ignite the engine now." You push the red button and the room explodes with noise. The cockpit starts shaking and you begin to go upwards. You clear the ground level and find yourself flying above the ground. You take a 360 degree look and your heart sinks.

The drone was back again. And it brought friends.

3 drones are heading towards you, and they have already launched missiles. There is no way you can dodge them. They were seconds away from hitting you, when they suddenly detonated before hitting you. A farmiliar voice comes over the radio. "hey, done y'all miss me? done y'all think ay'd leave y'all behind? ay brung ever'body here with me, ayn' we'll do our best ta keep y'all's way awful clear." The drones wheel around and start focusing on some point in the distance (most likely where your friends are) Meanwhile, the missile had gained lots of altitude, and a new threat emerged. Larger airplanes were incoming, passenger airlines. They appeared to be trying to crash into your missile. At least, these you might be able to dodge.

[Gwolfski]

If this is  a proper missile, it must have stages. slow down, and release a stage just as the airplanes are about to hit, accelerating at the same moment.

[TheBiggerFish]

Naaah.

Just have variable acceleration.

[Gwolfski]

well, do the above, sans dropping stage and getting killed

[origamiscienceguy]

The missile uses solid fuel, so there is no throttle. Once you light a stage, it is lit until it burns out. You see about 8 aircraft closing in on you fast, aiming for a point above you, such that you would collide given your current acceleration. You are still minutes away from ejecting the first stage, but perhaps you don't need all that fuel anyways. This missile is capable of hitting anywhere on the planet, you just need to get to the upper atmosphere. What if you changed your acceleration? It's a crazy idea, but you decide it's worth it. You stage the rocket early, then turn the upper stage fins as far as they go, and with a sickening spin, the lower stage tumbles the upper stage out of the way and continues upwards. The aircraft seem unable to distinguish which part has the nuclear missile, so they adjust to hit the continuing lower stage, while you use the control surfaces to get the rocket to stop spinning. You finally get is pointed upwards, and for the first time, you experience 0-g. You look straight up and see the most awesome explosion of your life. one of the eight aircraft hit slightly before the others, and it shredded the solid fuel booster into many small pieces, which all ignited simultaneously. The plane turned into a giant fireball which engulfed all the other 7 planes in rapid succession, with bubbles of flames marking the death of one of them. Still coasting upwards, you grab the control stick tightly and enter the inferno. You dodge the falling debris, and pop out of the fireball without your second engine, or the nuke, exploding. Only one you were well clear did you ignite the second stage. At last, you were safe. There was no way the machines could attack you way up here. You could already see the curvature of the earth, and the sky was fading from blue to black. Mission accomplished.

Or so you thought.

With the loudest noise you had ever heard, a flaming satellite flies within inches of your rocket, the atmospheric shock wave shattering all the glass on your rocket. The air escapes from your lungs. You have trouble bringing air into your lungs, but you must keep going. You must be alive to detonate the missile in a few minutes. But you could see countless more satellites forming flaming streaks in the air as they reenter the atmosphere after de-orbiting themselves, headed straight towards you. You need to find a way to breathe properly, and find a way to dodge or destroy the incoming satellites. The rocket is on its last stage, and the atmosphere is to thin to make quick adjustments with the fins.

[germanyfrance]

I never thought this story would turn into you piloting a nuclear missile into space without a spacesuit while dodging kamikaze satellites. This truley does put chuck norris to shame.

Now that the window is open, chuck random, non-essential things at the satellites. Rip out the floor panel (and chuck it somewhere) to find the rocket's oxygen tank and use it to breathe.

[StrawBarrel]

I never thought this story would turn into you piloting a nuclear missile into space without a spacesuit while dodging kamikaze satellites. This truley does put chuck norris to shame.

Now that the window is open, chuck random, non-essential things at the satellites. Rip out the floor panel (and chuck it somewhere) to find the rocket's oxygen tank and use it to breathe.

+1

[origamiscienceguy]

You grab the floor panel, and yank it free with several pops of snapping bolts. Underneath your seat, you see a complex maze of wires surrounding cylindrical tanks. You throw the floor panel like a frisbee and it completely obliterates a satellite that looked like it would come close. Two others pass by, but are far enough away to not worry you. But what you need to do is find a way to breathe. You take a guess at which cylindrical tank contains oxidizer, and you poke a hole in it with a piece of metal. The gas escapes at a rapid velocity, finding it's way through the cockpit window, but giving you a chance to breathe it in. You throw a few more piecs of metal to deflect incoming satellites until the engine flames out. It seems the engine needed that oxygen to run. No matter, you will get plenty high to detonate the nuke you are riding. You watch the barometer, watching it get closer and closer to the optimum air pressure, then, you reach it. You bring your hand back to press the button, but is this really what you want to do? Wouldn't you much rather live?

[TheBiggerFish]

Quickly!  Rig up a thing that'll set off the EMP at this height on the way down, and pull a Felix Baumgartner!  (That is, skydive, from space.)