2017-08-21 Mappy's Flight Story

Mappy takes a place up front this time as he settled in and digs out a few things from his bag. "Hi everyone! I guess I am up to tell a story tonight although I'll wait just a bit longer should more come to hear it.

Mappy gets settled on a stool up front with his wings neatly folded behind him. His mid arms hold what looks like an old book or an album while his upper arms are split with one on his knee and the other offering a wave. "Hi everyone! Wow, lots of new faces for me tonight. My name is Xho but everyone just uses my nickname, Mappy. I'm a librarian right now, but what I have done a good bit of adventuring as a cartographer for groups and for myself. There is plenty of history to draw upon from my people, but I don't think any of the conflicts could compare to the tales we heard over the last few weeks. Instead, this is a story of few curious and determined people that really changed the course of our history. In fact, I might not have been born here if not for the two people I will tell you of tonight.

Mappy opens his album and picks out a single blown up image. "I really wish this was an original, but it is a copy that has been passed down my family line." The image looks like a shot from the stratosphere featuring a large ring system and a binary star system. "Almost all of my kind want to fly higher and farther than the previous generation when we are kids. In our teens, while we change and in what is honestly the scariest time of our lives, my grandfather would tell me this story to me as I will tell it to you. This is a still image from a camera on a flight suit. The suit belonged to a woman named Thith, and it is with her that this story begins.

"Some time ago, before we were a space faring race to be certain, we still had a lot of social issues to deal with. We had three sentient species on our home world and those had multiple subspecies. That lead to a lot of quarrels and class separation that we feel shamed about enough not to repeat it. Thith was born before those changed came to be. She was a very plain moth with mostly mottled brown colors, and her subspecies never really did all that well economically. I should say though that those dark pigments mean stronger wings, so all the other rich flyboys had no chance against her in a race. Birthdays are good and all, and for us those are hatching days, but there is a day far more important than any other: First Flight. When we emerge and our wings harden, everyone regardless of class or subspecies gathers on the last day of the month, and everyone flies for the first time together. That day has more to do with our futures than any other as the bonds made then often linger and even strengthen into marriage. It was on her first flight that Thith met a fellow named Xthrr. I also apologize for the names as they can be pretty hard to pronounce. He was not a lower class moth. Blue wings shot through with green veins, he was one of the day flyers from a rather well off industrial family. As I said before though, Thith had very strong wings, and the two bumping into each other and chasing each other sparked something that would not fade with the setting of the sun or the moons.

"For a time life went on after the flight, and Thith returned to her family farm where she worked the fields. Being outside meant she could see the great zeppelins and other fairly primitive flight systems we had at the time. What hand me down books she could get on math and engineering she cherished, and after a few years of study, she had taught herself enough to get into at least a modest college. She had to work side jobs to pay for it, and she always sent money back to her family to help them. Still, as much as she learned she just did not have the connections to work on the projects she wanted to do. Thith was, after all, one of us. HIgher, farther, faster. Some are drawn to gold, but we are drawn towards breaking the boundary of the unknown. Still, you have to eat, and Thith took a job as an entry level engineer at an aeronautics company. I don't think you will need two guesses to known what family ran that plant.

"Xthrr worked in the same plant, but he had to work his way up as there were no handouts in his family, and they all prided themselves in it. Having money right off, he was some years ahead of Thith, but eventually the pair met during a meeting, and thought life had pulled them apart for a while, they both remembered the other. That was when the plans began. Thith had been trying to design a new flight system and that required both an engine and a vehicle. It was a side project she had been doing privately far before she went to college. Each time she learned something, she updated it, and it was turning into a proper engineering document at this point. Xthrr was quite impressed with it, and he asked to borrow the designs. That terrified Thith as she could only imagine the project being stolen from her. A week later, Thith was summoned into a meeting in front of the board. She was focusing so hard on trying not to shake that she missed what they had asked of her the first time around. They wanted her to build it, and they were assigning her to research and development to see that it got done! Xthrr's family valued work and wit more than money, and they were willing to give her a chance.

"The system Thith was building consisted of a flight suit with a back mounted engine. Making things that fly was not uncommon, but making something with fixed wings that flew was new. A prop engine wasn't going to work for this suit either, but Thith had some odd ideas about a new engine. In essence, she was building the first jet turbine engine in the world. The big zeppelins were fine if you wants to get around slowly, but high speed flight would change everything, and the board realized that. She made no shortage of mistakes, but she learned from each one. She kept meticulous notes, and when she was at the limits of her ability, she pushed pride aside and gained the ear of other engineers. The flight I want to tell you about is not her first. In fact, her engine prototype was being scaled up for larger vehicles. It was a later series suit that came several years later. There was a bit of a lull in research after Xthrr and Thith married, but they got back to work after the honeymoon.

"There were questions yet that had not been answered by the earlier suits. I should say that Thith was generally the pilot of these tests as she knew the suits and was a quite experience pilot by then. The suits would get unstable at higher speeds. Usually around 500 knots there seemed to be a sort of wall blocking them from going faster, and none of their engines could get past it. Flights also crept ever higher, and soon oxygen deprivation was an issue for the engine and the pilot. In the face of these issues, Thith, who had a team now as well as very proud parents, decided to start over for the better part. The compression of air in front of them was an issue, she they build a wind tunnel to study the effects of air on the suits in the lab. They could fix the nose of the suit, but the wings couldn't stay as they were, spread wide, if they were to go faster. THey needed only look to their own wings to see the answer: two-position wings. By this time, radio was becoming small enough to be used in the suit, and for the first time they had a suit with two way communication. Finally, the engine. Twin engines this time with an air intake meant to scoop in a lot more thin air and make it sufficient for thrust.

"This was the twenty fifth in the flight suits series. Thith's name wasn't a household name, but she was well known in aeronautical groups. She had an hour of fuel and more than that in breathable air. There was no head's up display in the suit. Airspeed and temperature sensors all had to be registered on the ground and called back to Thith. We have a pretty good feel for being in the air naturally, so most of the time that wasn't a problem. Communications were ready, and Xthrr was on the command deck for the flight. Practical and experienced, Thith didn't do anything too foolish. Take off was a calculated event by now, and after getting off the ground she angled her thrust and started to ascend. The weather was clear, and the suit had passed all tests on the ground, so the uneventful ascent to ten thousand feet was expected. "Thith, you are at 10000 feet and 250 knots." Standard practice was for control to call out the stats are regular intervals. "Roger that. Permission to bring engines to 40% and ascent to 20000 feet." Xthrr leaned to the mic, "Permission granted."

Thith made a wide circle around the testing site as she doubled her altitude. Her airspeed had not quite doubled, but she was stable and again granted permission to ascent to 35000 feet, the highest any of their old engines ever functioned. She was pushing up against the 500 knot wall, and at that point she swung her wings back into something more diamond shaped, like my folded wings really, and at least for a while that seemed to be fine. "Control, wing configuration change successful. Engines at four zero percent. There is minor vibration in the frame but nothing I feel will risk the structure." Everyone at their station was carefully monitoring. Right engine was slightly elevated in temperature but within safety bounds. "Wind speed 475 knots. Altitude stable at 35000 feet."

"Ten minutes in and they had already met the boundaries of their previous work, and it was at that point that throttle control was left to Thith's discretion. Carefully she inched the throttle up, balancing both the engines and the flight of the suit on her own with only calls from below to guide her as to her speed. Somewhere around 70% output, the shaking became violent enough that Thith considered shutting it all down, but something happened before she could do it. The explosive crack gripped everyone's hearts as they all looked skyward expecting to see fire and smoke. BUt there was no smoke. No debris. Just a shocked call from the fellow handing speed and altitude. "800 knots and rising!" Xthrr grabbed the mic, "Thith report." Silence for a moment and then a static filled reply, "I think I broke through....something. Shock hefty but suit is flying smooth. Continuing engine test."

"So as I said, faster and higher, and so Thith pushed onwards and upwards. She made it nearly ten miles in the air at a speed of over 1200 knots by the time she felt she should come back down. They had a new speed and altitude record set with this suit already, so she went to throttle back and found herself lurching left sharply. NOw she was afraid because she knew what that meant. Only her left engine was responding to throttle, and she was cruising at 90% output. IF she throttle back, her right engine would turn her into a frisbee and tear everything apart. Control was calling back with an anomalous temperature on the right engine as well. She couldn't slow down and she couldn't just keeping flying until she was out of fuel because the reason her right engine was running wild was because somewhere the linkage to the throttle body had overheated and fused. "Control, engine two has run wild. I can't shut it down." Xthrr grabbed the mic, "Thith, there has to be something we can do." She was quiet for a moment and reported back calmly, "I'm going to climb."

"Thith took all her speed and aimed upwards. Xthrr knew what she was doing, but he had no idea how far up she could have to go to starve the new engines. "75000 feet. Engine still hot. Airspeed 1350 knots." Thith pushed onward, and in the event she suit landed and she didn't, she started taking a few photos with the nose mounted camera. "85000 feet." Still the engine refused to die. The sky started to look strange. The color was bleeding out of it as if night were coming to her. She passed 100000 feet, creeping into our stratosphere, and only then did the power start to fall off. By the time she started to fall back, she had reached a finally altitude of 120000 feet, but that was not what we all remembered. Around the time this photo was taken, they heard her on the radio. "Stars don't blink and I can see them all." There was no great speech, no huge fanfare to what had us all clamoring for the stars later. They were the words of a woman most would have thought to be a goner.

"Thith started back down in freefall with no engines to help her. Thankfully the wing mechanism had not jammed as well, and that allowed her to glide. By the time she made it back to the ground, she was exhausted and Xthrr was ready to tear the suit open just to get to his wife. "Stars don't blink" ended up becoming a phrase that had all of us moths looking beyond our home. Thith was the first in supersonic and stratospheric flight, but that would not be the last of her firsts. She remained as a experimental test pilot and engineer for almost a decade, but then she started to train pilots and engineers. She was invited to take a position as the head of a new air a space division in the government that she did indeed accept. She was always a modest and sound voice in debates, and no one there however colorful they were would look down on that brown mottled moth. She lived long enough to see some of our first rockets, and though she had a family of her own with Xthrr, I can't claim to be in that lineage as cool as I think that would be. Thith's flight to me is an inspiration to always push the boundaries and not let anything keep you down. Kind of a hero to me really, so perhaps as modest as her tale is compared to some here, I hope you enjoyed it.

Mappy chuckles, "For the record, I took a pilot examn and... let's say there is a reason I am a navigator and cartographer by trade."

Mappy nods, "The new stuff has too many buttons! But that is what simulators are for. Then again, most pilots can't handle exploration like I can

Mappy smiles, "I might like that, Bleu!"

Mappy "My grandad had the best stories though he used to say that his grandad's were better than his. That gets back far enough when my family was still in space.

Mappy hmmms, "Good question. I guess that far back they were in a lot of things. I'm not all that colorful compared to most, so we here kind of middle class I guess. Some were soldiers, some factory workers. No one in aerospace that I know of. They say I get my memory and my sense of direction from my grandad's side, so maybe back home someone was a scout Mappy looks to CHarlotte, "Oh the ship is still out there! Some of us settled here is all. That big ark ship is probably exploring new places now.

Mappy nods to Kachi, "Yeah. There is a lot of push to find a way to get out planet somewhere safer. That binary system is going to go supernova someday . Mappy smiles to Bleu, "If I found a trip there it would be my first time there too!

Mappy chuckles a little, "Yeah. The other races are less kinda nd just say we're all nuts. I suppose it is a little true though. We just gotta know. I've heard moths of other places are attracted to flame and and up getting killed. I suppose our flame is when we see something and we need to explore to see what lies beyond that.

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