Thursday, December 06, 2018

New Story!

     A new vignette at I Work On A Starship:

     "Of course, it took one of the Power Room electricians to find it.
      And of course, it was the ternary degausser.  The degaussers don’t run very often but they’re absolutely essential. ..."

     What's a ternary degausser?  Well, it's got three parts. but they're all the same.  And if you don't have one, eventually it gums up the stardrive. That would be bad.

7 comments:

B said...

So what method do you use to detect ice?

Just curious.

FrankC said...

Being picky (reading OldNFO's fragments), but you've got contRactors being released. Not fair on non-staff members.

Roberta X said...

Well, let's just say it's a magnostrictive oscillator and a PLL....

Ice formation on the magnostrictive solenoid housing detunes it, sends an "icing" signal to the controller, and runs a small heater on the solenoid housing until the thing returns to the normal frequency. If ice forms again, the process starts over. It's clever as can be. You can't get the PLL IC any more, so when it goes, I'll have to either adapt an aircraft ice detector, or do what most terrestrial installations do, infer ice formation from temperature and moisture sensors.

Roberta X said...

FrankC, thank you -- Spellcheck and I get into fights. I wrote this on a $150 used MacBook Pro that's pretty new to me.

JohnMXL said...

Troubleshooting...the more things change, the more they stay the same.

B said...

Interesting. I wondered

Robert said...

"Is it off?"
"Should be".
The last words too-trusting souls may hear.
Why, oh why, isn't tagging out the breaker and logging it enough? We didn't have the ability to physically lock out the breaker at that time...