Stardrifter 09: Spacer -- A Day In The Life
a brief excerpt from the next episode of "Voice From The Void"
So, yeah, it happened at last.
We got COVID in our house. We're all vaxed-up here in LnB Towers, but as everyone knows, the vaccination doesn't prevent you from getting the disease, it only helps you survive it. In our case, my wife had what seemed equivalent to a nasty head cold; my son had the sniffles; and I never felt a thing. Not bad at all, considering.
Still, my productivity took a hit. I did make progress on the next short story, "The Prince of Ramador", but frankly, not much else. I'm gearing back up now. We're getting there, I promise.
Anyway, let's jump in to this. Again, it’s just a preview, short and sweet.
A Day in the Life of the Average Spacer
The title is a bit of a misnomer, seeing as there's no actual day or night on a spaceship. The vessel and the minutiae of the cruise must be attended to at all times. For the sake of this article, though, we should choose a shift…the work schedule to which our typical spacer is assigned.
When we go to that, however, we'll need to know something about the ship, the cruise its on, and the average spacer in question.
The starship is a Tottenberg cargo frame hauler. I choose this one because it's what you are probably all familiar with by now, assuming you're reading the "Tottenberg" newsletter. This sort of ship works in pairs to move one or more large skeletal frames filled with cargo boxes, each, packed to the brim with raw materials, finished goods, machine parts, and pretty much everything else imaginable for delivery to distant star systems. Such a ship is hired by trade brokerages to get products safely from one place to another in a timely fashion.
The ship in our example is called "Waterford", and this leg of the cruise takes place in the Alliance, running from Tyree star system to Greenbelt. The dominant industries of Greenbelt are agriculture and food processing, so let's assume that the bulk of the cargo is for those things. This makes it important to Greenbelt, even vital, but not especially valuable on the black market. "Waterford", and its companion vessel, "Margaret's Choice", are unlikely to be seen as tempting targets by pirates or transit pilferers (opportunists best seen like pickpockets, who abscond with cargo boxes when a ship is on or off-loading at jump points, using remote-controled thruster drones). Plus, both Tyree and Greenbelt have permanent AIN Fleet detachments in-system, to further discourage criminal depredation. In other words, this is a safe, routine sort of cruise, to and from star systems that are highly developed, and well-trafficked.
Our example spacer will be a 27 year old female cargo hand named Warona, or just Rone to her shipmates. Since it's a day-in-the-life, we'll say her work schedule is 1st shift, covering 04:00 to 11:59hrs, Galactic Time (GL). We'll cover time and time-keeping in the Stardrifter universe in a future episode. For now, it's only important to know that GL is universal across settled space. Granted, the subjective time of starjump adds a bit of complexity to the mix, but not even as much as, say, Daylight Savings Time does for us, today.
And that's all for this one. Just a tease, heh-heh-heh...
Be sure to catch the next episode of "Voice From The Void", to find out what it might be like in this future time, cruising from star to star, living a life in outer space.
Until then, please take care.
-David