Volume 16 Tower of Babel Chapter 981 Landing on Alpha Planet
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"Scavenger, the duty from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. is now on you. Let's go have a meal and take a break." Lu Dan said to Ke Lan. When Ke Lan took "Scavenger" as the code name of the Fool, the "beep" sound that other people used to call the Fool in this memory was automatically replaced with the three words "Scavenger".
"Okay, got it. You guys go ahead." Ke Lan responded casually.
He didn't need to concentrate on the operation. As long as he subconsciously "forgot" the existence of his hands, his hands would quickly click or swipe on the touch screen as if they had self-awareness, controlling the robotic arms to cut up the meteorites or other things that hit them.
Ke Lan has now basically understood the rules of the memory world: as long as he does not actively interfere, this memory will be "played" along the predetermined trajectory like a recorded video; and if the development of things deviates from the original memory content due to the interference of himself as the "protagonist", then it depends on the magnitude of the deviation.
If the deviation is not big and will not affect the original plot direction, it will be compensated according to the common sense in Ke Lan or the Fool's memory - for example, Ke Lan suddenly said to Lu Dan, "Today is Crazy Thursday, V me 50", Lu Dan will most likely touch his head with a smile and reply, "I have been eating synthetic food for more than ten years. Like you, I miss the fried chicken on the Ark." Then he will act as if nothing happened and continue to do what he should do.
And if you smash the mirror directly like Ke Lan did in the locker room before, then the memory world will force the affected part of things to go back to their original appearance.
Just as Ke Lan was thinking about how to obtain more intelligence from other members of the advance team through "compliant" means, a shrill alarm suddenly sounded in the control room.
"Warning! Warning! An asteroid with a diameter of 5.7 kilometers has been detected on the preset route. It is moving towards the shuttle and is expected to collide in 60 seconds!"
"Sixty seconds?!" Ke Lan was stunned. Logically speaking, an asteroid so close should have been discovered by the shuttle's detection equipment long ago...but its appearance was very abrupt, as if it had rolled out from a space crack and fell onto the shuttle's route.
Before Ke Lan could do anything, Lu Dan and others who had just left the control room came running back. As soon as they entered the room, before they had time to look at the screen, they shouted to Ke Lan, "What happened?"
"There is an asteroid with a diameter of 5.7 kilometers on the route. It will collide with us in one minute." Ke Lan said concisely.
"To be precise, it's fifty-two seconds later." Ke Lan took another look at the countdown on the screen and added.
"An asteroid with a diameter of 5.7 kilometers?!" The little girl wearing glasses rushed to the console and made a pulling motion with her right hand in the air. A virtual keyboard made up of holographic projection was pulled out from the "void" and placed horizontally in front of her.
"Forty-nine seconds, forty-eight seconds...it's too late to change the route!" said the girl with glasses anxiously.
"How come we're too late?" Lu Dan asked, "There's still more than half a minute left. A diameter of 5.7 kilometers isn't that big, right?"
"Modifying and recalibrating the navigation requires detailed calculations by a computer. The one on the shuttle will take at least two to three minutes." The bespectacled loli said seriously.
The computing power of computers in this era is much lower than that of the era when Ke Lan lived. Many computers used in cutting-edge equipment are not even as good as the civilian machines in the civilian market a hundred years later.
"Can't we switch to manual operation?" Lu Dan looked at the countdown and said anxiously. The number at the beginning had jumped from "4" to "3", and the asteroid finally entered the visible range of the naked eye and was rapidly enlarged in their eyes.
"A living person can't be suffocated to death by urine!"
Lu Dan tapped a few times on the touch screen, and a cover under the console slowly slid open, revealing a joystick similar to a racing car handle.
Lu Dan reached out and grasped the joystick, took a deep breath, but did not perform any substantial operations.
Manual operation is not as simple as imagined.
First of all, the shuttle is different from fighter jets and mechas. It has neither vector engines nor so many posture control nozzles, which makes it very difficult to operate. Secondly, the position they are in is actually very dangerous... Without computer assistance, if the altitude exceeds the critical value, the shuttle will be uncontrollably pulled to the ground by the gravity of Alpha Star. In the case of manual operation, the shuttle's angle will easily exceed the dangerous altitude if there is a slight deviation.
But Ke Lan was not in a hurry. He did not participate in the argument, but just watched it all quietly... Anyway, it was just a memory, no matter what the outcome was, it would not have any impact on him. What's more, the Fool returned to the Ark , which meant that the advance team should have successfully resolved this wave of crisis.
The asteroid was getting closer, and there were only twenty seconds left in the countdown... Lu Dan bit his lower lip hard and carefully pressed the joystick down little by little.
The shuttle began to shake violently, causing a brief commotion in the control room. The little girl wearing glasses slipped and fell to the ground.
The shuttle's avoidance direction is toward the outside of the orbit - moving in this direction will increase the distance between it and Alpha Centauri, so there is no need to worry about being captured by Alpha Centauri's gravity. It just needs to be careful not to crash into the outer space junk belt.
In ten seconds, the shuttle had completely deviated from its original course, but the collision alarm was still not lifted.
In five seconds, the shuttle had been pulled to the edge of the asteroid, and the asteroid, which was so close, had occupied the entire field of view transmitted by the camera directly in front.
"Three, two, one..."
With Lu Dan's roar and the joystick being pressed to the limit, the shuttle finally avoided the asteroid narrowly. But just when everyone breathed a sigh of relief, the shuttle shook violently again and a muffled sound was heard from the rear cabin.
"Damn it! The thrusters were hit by the asteroid again!" Lu Dan quickly checked the status of the shuttle. "Thrusters 1, 2, and 3 are all scrapped, and only thruster 4 is still alive... but it can only last for 30 seconds at most, and this last thruster will also shut down."
"What should we do?" The team doctor frowned. "Can you fix it?"
"It can be repaired, but it will take time." Lu Dan said in a deep voice, "If we go out of the cabin to repair it now, we will crash into the space junk belt due to inertia, and the situation will only get worse... It is very likely that we will lose the opportunity to land on Alpha forever."
Lu Dan paused, and then continued, "We have another option before us, which is to rely on the last power of the No. 4 thruster to complete the turn and fly directly to Alpha."
"The survival chances of the two choices are actually pretty similar." Lu Dan said, "I would rather choose to take a chance...it depends on what you decide."
"I choose Alpha," the team doctor said without hesitation, "Our mission is to explore Alpha. Even if I die, I want to die on this planet."
"My choice is the same as the team doctor's." Another female team member said. She was a plain-looking Chinese woman, about 25 to 30 years old. She usually spoke very little and had little presence, so much so that in the Fool's memory, he didn't have much impression of this female teammate.
Three of the five people have already expressed their opinions, and they all made the same choice. According to the rule that the minority obeys the majority, the remaining two people actually no longer have the power to choose.
"Lu Dan is right, let's take a gamble." Ke Lan nodded. He knew that no matter what he chose, he could not change the direction of the plot... He was just an outsider, a "bystander" from the protagonist's first-person perspective.
But then again, if it was Ke Lan instead of The Fool standing here, Ke Lan would most likely have made the same choice as Lu Dan and the others.
"Theoretically, we have a better chance of survival if we choose to go to Alpha." The bespectacled loli nodded. "The reverse thruster at the front of the shuttle is not damaged, so we still have a chance of landing successfully. If we plunge into the garbage belt... there are more celestial bodies in that place that are larger than the asteroid just now, and it will take at least two days to repair the thruster. We must ensure that we don't hit those things within two days."
"Come to think of it, since there is a reverse thruster at the front of the shuttle, why can't we turn the head and tail around and use the front thruster to replace the damaged tail thruster?" Ke Lan asked suddenly.
The expressions of the little girl with eyes, the team doctor and the passerby with a low sense of presence all fell into a brief daze. This was not because they were shocked by Ke Lan's question, but because this sentence did not exist , so it triggered the self-correction mechanism of memory.
"It's useless." Lu Dan replied to Ke Lan, "The reverse thruster at the front of the shuttle is used to slow down and buffer when landing. It is not connected to the same power reactor as the main thruster at the rear. It cannot be compared with the main thruster in terms of power or sustainability. It cannot be replaced."
While saying this, Ludan's eyes were in a lifeless state, and all the movements of his hands stopped - not only him, but everyone else also stood there motionless, even the numbers jumping on the screen were frozen.
It was as if Ke Lan had released time stop, the only difference was that the stagnant world did not fade away and turn into black and white.
This stagnation was fleeting, and everything around returned to normal. The members of the advance team continued with the previous topic, as if Ke Lan had never asked that question.
"I'll control the shuttle, and you figure out the landing trajectory." Lu Dan said to the bespectacled loli, "It doesn't have to be too detailed, just make sure we land on an open plain, and don't fall into the sea, and it's best not to land in the mountains... This shouldn't be difficult for you, right?"
"I'll try my best." The girl with glasses nodded and began typing rapidly on the virtual keyboard with her hands.
Through preliminary surveys by drones, the advance team already knew that the ocean on Alpha was very dangerous. Not only was the seawater toxic and corrosive, it also carried strong radiation, but there were also many strange things about the ocean itself - from a safety perspective, the ocean was definitely a restricted area within a restricted area.
The second are the remains of the Alpha civilization and the endless mountainous areas… There is no need to say much about the former, but if you fall into the latter, it may not be easy to get out of the mountains.
Alpha is full of radiation areas and chaotic electromagnetic fields. Props like compasses are useless, and drones will also be severely interfered with... The complex terrain of the mountains is enough to trap the advance team to death.
But the good news is that the open plains on the surface of Alpha Star account for more than 50% of the entire planet's area. Even if they choose the landing point randomly, they have more than 50% chance of landing on the plains.
The bespectacled loli quickly completed the calculation and input a series of data into the console. Lu Dan continued to make adjustments based on this data, reversing the shuttle's course little by little.
Finally, as the icon representing "Thruster No. 4" on the screen changed from yellow to red and then slowly went out, the shuttle completely lost power.
Fortunately, the course adjustment has been completed. Next, the shuttle will slide towards Alpha under the action of inertia, and then continue to accelerate under the pull of gravity.
The process of crossing the atmosphere was uneventful. The shuttle itself was designed for landing on Alpha, and its own defense performance was still strong enough. Only two of the six layers of ablative coating were consumed, and it successfully broke through the atmosphere and arrived above a plain somewhere on Alpha.
"Altitude 11,000 meters!" Lu Dan said in a deep voice, "Reverse thrusters, number one, two, three, four, all activated, start decelerating!"
The front end of the shuttle, which was falling straight down, suddenly emitted four tail flames several dozen meters long. Driven by this powerful force, the shuttle's falling momentum suddenly slowed down.
"Parachute, open!"
Along with Lu Dan's low shout, a huge parachute was pulled out from the tail of the shuttle. The moment the parachute opened, it was slowed down by the air flow, and the shuttle's falling speed was slowed down again.
"There is a plain below, and no suspicious objects were found visually." Lu Dan stared at the screen and said, "The cushion is ready, and it is expected to land in 135 seconds."
