Making up for lost time

It came to my attention today that time on Earth and time on Zircon are vastly different. By my calculations, it's been a week or so on Earth since my last post. On Zircon? One day. That doesn't usually happen, just when the warp drives due to stellar flares cause time dilation. It's an advanced AP Physics J subject. Regardless, that's what happened.

As for the astrophysics competition, it was crazy. The machine we'd set up was all ready to go. We had checked and double checked every component, multiple times, but still, we knew there was a chance something could go wrong.

Of course, something did. It was those darn space pirates again, eager for revenge. My teammates and I moved quickly to our attack fighters, eager to get our chance at the fight.

We spread out and entered attack formation. Our primary objective was to defend the machine; there were plenty of Zirconian vessels to finish of the pirates. So, we activated our proton torpedoes and open fired.

We managed to take out their foremost frigate with the first round. We doubled back to prepare ourselves for for another go-around. We were just turning around when the cavalry arrived; several Zirconian cruisers had arrived as scared off the attacking pirates. The astrophysics competition had been saved.

It was finally time to let our machine run its course. We set it in motion and everything ran perfectly; not to mention we'd defended it ourselves. However, there was one slight problem. One of the warp thrusters in our machine was a K-837 class warp thruster, and the judge deemed it illegal; only K-8 class warp thrusters were allowed. That cost my team its chances; we were disqualified for that event. Fortunately for us, that was only one of 23 events; giving our team an excellent chance at interplanetary level competition.

When the time came for the awards ceremony, I saw my dad. I told him about the problem with the warp-thruster; he's a high-ranking designer of Zirconian military spacecraft. He told me that he had spoken with the judge, overhearing that he had docked a team for using a K-837 warp thruster and wanting to correct them. See, a K-837 warp thruster is a specific type of K-8 warp thruster. Not knowing that our team was the one that had been affected, he argued with the judge for 20 minutes, pointing out that he was an expert in the field. He said he didn't know if the scores had been changed, but he tried.

The awards ceremony came, nothing had been changed. We had lost that event, but fortunately, the rest of our team pulled us into the interplanetary competition. That was exciting, but simultaneously upseting. There was no option to appeal, but we vowed to get the rules clarified so that we couldn't be disqualified again.

And then Lynn came home. Goodness was that exciting! She arrived back, and we had an opportunity to visit the astroid belt togehter and read. It was wonderful.

In addition, I've also been able to mess around with a few space combat simulators and doing my homework. Life is good, there is no question. Of course, on the planet Zircon, you never know what will happen next.