One Million Tons of Starship

"So you're after a crash course in MAST engineering?"

He paused enough on the word "crash" that he was evidently hoping I'd spot the joke; not really my kind of humour, but I needed to keep this guy happy and move on.

"Ha, yes, good work. But yes, I have around 35 hours to understand enough for my first trip."

He nodded, apparently happy that it was possible.

"Well, the basics will take minutes, not hours, to get your head around. Modular Aggregated Star Transport - MAST. It's all in the name, really."

I tried to hide the fact that I had never really known that MAST was an acronym, but felt quite embarrassed and it probably showed, because he smiled and turned his head in some odd way.

"My work so far has been quite people-oriented..."

He interrupted, presumably to save my embarrassment, and I started warming to him.

"No problem - different people know different stuff! Each one is a cube, maybe thirty metres or so on each side, and the outsides are basically all the same, excepting for a few cosmetic differences like windows and colour."

Now I had to interrupt. "'Windows'"?

"Not really - that's just we call the bits that let things in and out. Docking ports, loading ports, all the ports. But things go in and out, and by and large engineers treat them all the same, so 'windows'."

"Ah, okay. Makes sense. But what I'm really after, I guess, is how they fit together?"

"All standard really - not sure what level of detail you want, but unless things go really badly wrong, you're not going to be messing with anything or changing stuff, so really you just need to know that there are nine ports on each face of each MAST - when they're facing outwards we call them windows, but when they're attached to another MAST, they pretty much vanish and we use them to walk around. Most of the time it's hard to spot that you're moving between MASTs, and you likely don't care."

I thought about this for a moment, really just trying to see if I was in trouble with needing to understand all of this, but he carried on.

"Honestly, there's not a great deal to worry about. You usually travel in one of these, and every now and then you stick two together for big cargo hauls."

Okay, now I felt like I was somehow in the lead...

"Two of them... But you could do more? I mean, you say "Modular Aggregated", so..."

I trailed off to see how much he would admit.

"Well, yeah, technically you could do more, but they're enormous. If you were transporting people, you'd probably go for something more comfortable, but 30 metres cubed is huge, so one MAST could carry... something like a few hundred, anyway. And how often are we sending hundreds of people on one trip?"

I breathed deeply, mainly to show off - I liked this guy, but I also wanted to feel like I knew something that didn't.

"This vessel has twenty-seven of them."

His eyes widened, and it seemed almost like a caricature of surprise.

"But... that's a lot. I mean, really?"

"Have you been briefed on the Rover's cargo?"

"No, we don't get that kind of thing. Design the vessels, build the vessels, every now and then brief some astros on the vessels. We know that stuff goes inside, but that's pretty much it."

"Well, if it helps, neither have I, and I'm going to be on it. But I do know that it's big. Biggest cargo we've ever sent out into inter-stellar space, by a long, long way. Hence twenty-seven MASTs."

I'd always been impressed by engineers, but he recovered particularly quickly.

"Well, twenty-seven of them will have a mass of... well, around a million tons. Just over, in fact. There's no real limit on mass with interstellar transport, but... I think you''re going to need to speak to some psychologists."

Now I had no idea what he was talking about, and my face gave the game away.

"One MAST is like a ship, right? One thing - you board it, you travel, you get off at the other end. There's a nice human psychology thing going on, because we've done this, or something very like it, for thousands of years."

I nodded. "Yeah, okay. So how is two MASTs different?"

"It's not. Well, two isn't. We've even had that in the past - catamarans were basically two ships stuck together. But when you start sticking lots of these together... well, assuming you're going for a three by three by three cubic formation..." I nodded. "Physically it will all hold together fine. But whoever gets to work in the middle is going to feel that, mentally."

He smiled. "When are you leaving again?"

Okay, this could be a problem.