User blog:LunaStar724/Where No Blox Has Gone Before - Chapter 2: From Land to the Stars Above

Luna Starshine (talk) 13:58, October 25, 2018 (UTC)

The following piece of literature is fictitious and may contain features that may not have been implemented into the actual game.

It is highly recommended that you read the prologue and the first chapter before reading this.

1,681 words, 9,742 characters, 56 sentences, 11 paragraphs

Following the first successful launch of the Flying Colors' first ever space rocket, the Tones of Trust immediately followed up with a rocket that used a slightly different method of propulsion than the rocket made by the Flying Colors. 20 minutes after launch, the satellites on the ground were readied to communicate with the rocketships, now known by their codenames FC-1 and TT-1. On the ground, FC-1's control panel is working on the instructions to send to the spacecraft in order for the people to safetly land on the moon of Buildboatia.

There is very little known about Buildboatia's moon. Most of its looks as perceived from the ground is a white grayish massive sphere that radiates about 2 lumens per square meter, about 8 times brighter than the Earth's moon. The spectrum of light that is generated by the moon can be split into a spectrum using the refractive properties of golded glass blocks. Further research suggests that there may be a large amount of transition metals and lanthanides on Buildboatia's moon such as chromium, which is used in the production of the stainless steel hull of boats, copper, a key ingredient in buttons and levers, tungsten, a metal which can be used to store very high temperature materials, and neodymium, a metal in the lanthanide series that enables magnets to resist demagnetization, which allows for the creation of very strong magnets that can be used in the generation of electricity. However, there was yet a voyage to find out and potentially make use of what lies under the visible surface, the portion of the moon which can't be observed from the water planet.

The voyage to Buildboatia's moon is a long and treacherous one: with a distance of about 30.7 billion studs, which is roughly about 60.8 years of nonstop walking for an average R15 humanoid. It would be impossible to get there without the advancements in technology that the Buildboatians have accomplished over the past few years. With the new advancements that the researchers of the Buildboatian planet has made, they can travel at a speed of 6.14 billion studs per hour, about 1.71 million studs per second, which is about 2.8% the speed of light. At this speed, they are able to reach the moon at a time of about 5 hours. The path is not a straight path, there are space debris scattered all over the gravitational field of the planet, just outside the atmosphere, all orbiting at a speed of about 200 studs per second. This was going to pose a much harder challenge for the rocket than for normal boats and static rocks, since there is no air friction to prevent the tiny projectiles from dealing damage to the outer hull of the rocket ship and the shuttle itself. Naming conventions for obstacles made by the International Standards of Naming Obstacles, or simply the ISNO, label the treacherous path as Space Terrain, which would soon be changed to Space Extraterrain, for the reason that the terrain is not found on the planet itself, but in the confines of its gravitational field.

Luckily, the Flying Colors and the Tones of Trust have their way of getting rid of these potentially damaging projectiles flying in the path between Buildboatia and its moon. Normal cannons wouldn't be conventional, for the gunpowder requires an oxidizer to combust and send the cannon projectile forwards, and there is no oxygen in space, and very little is known about compounds that could be used as oxidizers. And, even if they were able to ignite the gunpowder in the barrel of the cannon, the space projectiles would be travelling much faster than the cannonball, and it would fragmentate into smaller but still harmful shards of space material.

In order to get rid of this problem, the Flying Colors used a system of spring-operated sideward thrusters that enabled the ship to navigate into a path safer at a much faster speed than the space debris itself. This system would be operated by a pilot on the space shuttle and information on the surrounding space debris will be provided by satellites on the ground that detect space debris at a distance of about 3 kilometers from the shuttle itself. The cone of the rocket is protected with a layer of gold, which is (really weirdly) the strongest material block discovered in Buildboatia so far. This enabled the rocketship to smash through space debris while barely receiving any damage.

The Tones of Trust had a different solution. They really liked explosives. They used the same concept of a golded tip for the rocket, but instead of using navigational maneuvers and ground-to-space communication to avoid the debris, they chose to use powerful TNT cannons that used the propulsion force of a single TNT block to shoot another TNT block at a very high speed towards a target. The target is located by glass radar on the shuttle itself, which was in itself quite problematic since the shuttle was travelling at 2.8% the speed of electromagnetic waves and the map of debris that is generated through this method is slightly warped on the directions colinear to where the shuttle is travelling. It would use a winter thruster coated barrel to fire a TNT projectile at its target, obliterating the target into the molecular level, too small to harm the ship itself. This posed some problems, as there was the danger of an explosion occuring too close to the ship and changing its course.

The Flying Colors' shuttle was travelling at about 1/3 of its desired speed in its first 2.5 hours of travel, taking its time to analyze the background radiation of the outside of Buildboatia's atmosphere. In about 3 hours, when the craft has travelled 1/5 of the distance to the moon, the satellites of the Flying Colors on the ground detected something way faster than the average space debris projectile. The shuttle immediately avoided the unknown projectile, but another projectile started heading for the shuttle, at nearly the same speed. It was sooner that the control panel on the ground realized that these were not normal space debris, but a form of TNT that was made to travel at high speeds through space. They were not able to detect a source that was only 3 kilometers away from the shuttle itself, but they were able to detect a barrage of similar projectiles heading for the rocketship itself. The only long range weapon the FC-1 had on it was a neutron gun, which was unable to do physical damage to space debris, but was able to annihilate every single explosive compound it was pointed towards. The neutron gun that was used to charge the isotope battery for the main thrusters of the ship was temporarily mounted outside, and a remote control system on the ground aimed the neutron gun at incoming projectiles, almost instantly making them explode. After a few minutes of getting barraged by very fast explosive projectiles, the barrage stopped and a large explosion was detected from the general direction that the explosive projectiles were coming from.

The source of the projectiles came from the rocketship of the Tones of Trust. Their glass radars were able to detect objects up to 20 kilometers away. It detected the ship of the Flying Colors, labeled it as debris, and a pilot on their ship started firing rounds and rounds of hyperaccelerated TNT bundles at the ship. After about 22 minutes, the systems detected major damage on two of the five TNT gunners that the ship was equipped with. After a third gunner module was taken out, a wild neutron stream from the neutron gun was able to penetrate through the mystery blocks that were in charge of the generation of TNT for propulsion. The mystery blocks generated an extremely dangerous amount of TNT, and the explosion caused by the TNT destroyed the propulsion system of the main rocket, sending a gigantic wave of debris around a 100 kilometer radius. The shuttle and all of its personnel received tremendous amounts of g-forces as the craft was abruptly accelerated to speeds 60% that of the speed of light. The glass radars failed with 4 panels shattering from the extreme force applied to the shuttle. After about 10 seconds, the gold tip of the craft blasted through the moon of Buildboatia in a split second, causing the gold tip to break and the main control panel room on the front of the shuttle to receive an intense shock that disabled all shuttle systems for a while. The shock activated the respawn technology equipped by the TT astronauts, sending them back to the space station spawn plates. The shuttle survived, but all of its systems were shut down and it has no method of propulsion to allow it to accelerate.

The Flying Colors still had an estimated time of about 1 hour before arrival at one of the craters on the moon of Buildboatia. The neutron gun was brought back into the propulsion module of the rocketship to power the isotope battery. All systems went back to normal, and they were trying to piece together a possible correlation between the TNT projectiles and the Tones of Trust.

The headquarters of the Tones of Trust heard of the news that the shuttle blasted a hole through the moon at more than half of light speed, and they've started reworking the shuttle to get rid of its vulnerabilities. They've lost about 28 million gold coins in the production of the 2 failed shuttles, and they're using the people's taxes to fund their next project. The researchers are also working on a safer method of propulsion, ever since their propulsion engine sent the people on the ship to extreme speeds.

The FC-1 was approaching its destination and the landing phase of the shuttle is about to begin. The population on the ground were cheering over the success of their first launch to space. The Flying Colors were the first union of nations to safely set foot on the moon of Buildboatia.