Orion's Arm Archive
Note: Numerous technical terms and references of specific meaning and context are used throughout my future history. This is intended as a quick reference guide – as the source material is vast, this should be considered a work in progress to which entries will be added as necessity requires.
Alliance, Alliance Earth:a global dystopian fascist/collectivist State.
CMOD: abbrv. Command Module.
Consortium of Moons: commonly shortened to Consortium Moons: A treaty defense organization among several thousand industrialized space habitats and surface installations – the otherwise independent city-states of the Jovian worlds left as a legacy of the Martian terraforming program, each being independent in governance – located in orbit at Jupiter and Saturn.
ECLSS: abbrv. Environmental Control and Life Support System. A life support system that provides or controls atmospheric pressure, fire detection and suppression, oxygen levels, waste management and water supply.
EDL: abbrv. Entry, Descent, and Landing.
GCNR: abbrv. Gas Core Nuclear Rocket. Gaseous uranium is injected into the reaction chamber until there is enough to start a furious chain reaction. Hydrogen is then injected from the chamber walls into the center of this nuclear inferno where it flash heats and shoots out the exhaust nozzle. Engineering difficulty is preventing uranium loss into the exhaust stream.
In theory: the reaction is maintained in a vortex tailored to minimize loss of uranium out the nozzle. Fuel is uranium hexaflouride (U235F6), propellant is hydrogen.
In some designs the reaction chamber is spun like a centrifuge. This encourages the heavier uranium to stay in the chamber instead of leaking into the exhaust.
HLLV: abbrv. Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle.
ISRU: abbrv. In Situ Resource Utilization: describes the use of resources found or manufactured on other astronomical objects (the Moon, Mars, Asteroids, etc.).
Martian’s, Martian Settlers: Humans, descendents of those men and women who founded the independent human settlement at Syria Planum on Mars.
Martian Settlement: A privately funded endeavor to place a permanent human settlement on Mars. Program preparations extend over a span of more than sixty-five years, final steps, including construction and launch of spacecraft extend over the span of a decade. Result is Syria Planum Landing, the Martian settlement, first off-world human built city, site of first manned landing on Mars.
Martian Uplift Operation: Early stage of Martian terraforming. Program requirements call for a far broader sampling of Earth-life than the initial settlement requirements of food animals and agricultural crops suitable to environment shed farming – and so a return to Earth is called for. There Martians engage in trade and a large scale operation of resource mining.
NPP: abbrv. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion. Small directional nuclear explosives react against a large steel pusher plate attached to a spacecraft with a duel-stage shock absorber system. Efficient directional explosives maximize the momentum transfer, leading to specific impulses in the range of 6,000 seconds, or about thirteen times that of the Space Shuttle Main Engine. With refinements a theoretical maximum of 100,000 seconds (1 MN•s/kg) is possible. See Orion: Nuclear Pulse Propulsion.
NTR: abbrv. Nuclear Thermal Rocket. Nuclear rockets utilize fission energy to heat a reactor core to high temperatures. Hydrogen gas flowing through the core becomes superheated and exits the engine at very high exhaust velocities. The combination of temperature and the low molecular weight of hydrogen will produce an engine with specific impulses above 900 seconds. This is almost twice the performance of the LOX/hydrogen space shuttle engines.
OTV: abbrv. Orbital Transfer Vehicle
Propulsion Module Part of a spacecraft containing the primary elements of its propulsion system.
Unification War: A 75 year program of brutal warfare, mass exterminations, and vicious subjugation by which the Alliance establishes control over the population of Earth.
RCS: abbrv. Reaction Control System.
System States: descriptive, Mars and the independent city-state space habitats in Jupiter and Saturn orbits. The Occupation of Mars spawned the establishment of a treaty defense organization; this organization is known as the System States. Signatories retain their independence. Industrial sites in the asteroid belt are economic assets individually and privately owned by their establishing entities and corporations; as such they are protected holdings of individual city-states, or Mars.
