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shaker_e"Starship pilot who’s flying blind" - Make Up a Starship Pilot
The deep space vessel Long Stepper has external visual sensors, but they're all disabled by default within hours after leaving whatever berth the ship might have been at. The fact is, even when moving in system, the distances and speeds involved make looking out fairly pointless except to take in the view. If there's anything close enough to actually see nearby, the ship will either pass it or collide with it too quickly to respond. All of the ships real sensory business is done with radar, with tightly focused feeler beams, and with antennae listening in all directions for traces of other ships, of debris, of radiation. Everything is displayed neatly on screens for the crew.
Except that doesn't help anyone in the early stages of transition to high speed, since the entire crew at that point are puddles of red and yellow pastes filling their resurrection pods. And the pilot won't have functioning eyes again for months, once his body has been successfully rebuilt and his consciousness reinstalled in the wetware.
Long Stepper's pilot M Singh has tried many times to explain what the data feeds are like to others who haven't had their consciousness uploaded.
"It's like the information is related to me in the form of itches, someone drumming their fingers on my back, individual hairs being plucked. I guess? Like that. They wrote the software to hook into the simulated part of the brain that handles tactile information. So I don't use the sensors to 'look' outside the ship. Instead it's like, uh... Imagine each of your fingers was twenty thousand miles long and you were groping around a massive empty space, trying to find anything larger than a pea. And you have two thousand fingers, and they're all constantly in motion, so you can cover as much area as possible."
People just don't understand.
M Singh's visual receptors are more or less unused. He initially tried to stream entertainment programs or video games on his first trip, but stopped almost immediately - it was like having a screen the size of all creation directly in front of him, a little overwhelming. Now he prefers to spend his flights with his "eyes shut", simply turning that stream of information off.
He felt the "hairs" on the back of his "hand" rise up as the system clamored for his attention. One of the feelers had picked up on a small piece of debris that was near enough to the flight path to be a risk. After a moments consideration he initiated a series of micro burns which lasted only fractions of a second - but would result in flying forty kilometers wide of the debris in a few minutes. He could correct back to the initial path once Long Stepper was clear.
The ship AI notified him that he need not have bothered, it would have done so itself - and with considerably more efficiency.
Don't sulk, you'll have the entire rest of the trip to fly.
He placed a temporary mute on the channel before the inevitable reply that it was IMPOSSIBLE for it to sulk and that it was simply informing him blah blah blah.
He rechecked the course one more time. Two months of constant acceleration in the dark. Then once a stable speed has been reached, two weeks of regeneration for the entire crew. Then one week of all-hands activity to ensure all systems were operating perfectly, followed by three real-time years of working in month long shifts, each crew sleeping two months for each they worked. Eleven years time debt. He used the ships intercom to sigh, his digitally reproduced voice echoing through the empty passageways, and resolved to see what the job market looked like when they reached destination.
