Making Starships, Part 1

The ore is quarried on a metal moon. The moon is called Blue 23. The 23 is pronounced “two-three,” and comes from the moon’s relative position in the Epsilon Eridani system. It is the third moon of the second planet. The blue color comes from a high concentration of the metal Eridanite, which is the primary material used in Starship construction.

Eridanite ore pours from a pit on miles of belt. The belts emerge from hundreds of shaft entrances that ring the bottom of the pit like the arches of The Colosseum. Deep within each shaft, squatty machines feed the belts. Human miners steer these flat beasts.

These workers wear yellow gloves and matching hard-hats. Oxygen masks hang down from the hats. The masks have large clear lenses, which create an insect appearance. The bug faced miners also wear khaki shorts and heavy work boots but, little else, because the mine is sweltering. It bakes the workers and the dust flours them. The powdered ore billows through the mine’s caverns like gas in the trenches of Owen’s war. This toxic dust and the miners’ own sweat form a stinging blue varnish. The workers call it “Digger’s Burden.”

The dust is made by a hundred thousand hammer-drills. Every drill is dependent on an air hose. The hoses mingle and tangle like snakes, and are designed to never kink. They must feed the drills, the drills must feed the trucks, the trucks must feed the belts, and the belts must not stop.Conveyors dump their pillars of wealth into the Foundry. It is framed with I-beams and clothed in miles of pipe. Beyond the fur-like plumbing, massive doorways show the building’s innards, and let out an intense glow. The orange light shines out on blue mountains. From adjacent peaks, the Foundry is a black jack-o’-lantern with too many eyes and teeth. Inside, godly robotic ladles lift and pour metal that looks like magma.

This melt is poured into either an ingot mold or a bloom extruder. Red-hot ingots and blooms are scanned by photo eye for quality assurance. An extraordinarily high percent of the castings are good, and go on to more processing. The particular process depends on the product, but always includes some type of rolling or drawing. Amazingly, the Foundry only makes ten different castings.

The castings cool as they ride a ski-lift type conveyor from the Foundry to the Moon Factory. This factory machines some castings into structural members, and others become massive rolls of sheet-metal and more. The Moon Factory produces everything needed by the Module Factories which are discussed later.

Like the Foundry, the Moon Factory does not use human labor. In fact, the entire foundry/factory complex is run by five technicians in a remote command center. This booth looks much like a mobile construction office. Inside, the technicians man banks of monitors and controls. Sterile fluorescent bulbs pierce the temperature controlled air and shine in spectacle reflections and silky hair highlights. One monitor shows a steady flow of finished parts riding another ski-lift out of the factory.

That lift takes the parts to a very tall red and white painted metal structure called the Launch Tower.  Technicians at the base of the tower (The Breach) use huge robotic arms to remove parts from the ski-lift and pack them into special containers called Bullets. The Bullets are loaded into The Breach one at a time. The Launch Tower employs thousands of hyper-electro-magnets in sequence, which accelerates the containers up the super-structure (The Barrel), through the moon’s thin atmosphere, and into space.