Part 33: First Day on the Bridge
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Yup…based upon my own personal experience that sounded about right. Good Blog article. Unlike the previous, long gone and NOT lamented, so called “professional” news organizations, the Main Stream Media, today’s bloggers tended to be very careful and thus more accurate. They knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if they got a bad reputation they would be blogging to no one. Reputation Verification, historical data base and hypocrisy checkers was the norm today. If a blogger told a lie, or was even known to be constantly inaccurate, it was widely know very soon.
News read, coffee drank, cigar smoked, I’d get something to eat later. It was time to “light my fire.” Metaphorically speaking I saddled up and we hit the road.
Time to face the day.
Time to climb a very steep get-on ramp and get on the bridge. Time to really start moving…no more of this piddly goat trail stuff.
For reasons that I have never looked into…the first few get-on/get-off ramps, near the ThunderFog, are fricking STEEP. I swear it’s a twelve percent grade or steeper, to the ICE deck. To the lightning deck it appears damn near vertical. It takes a careful hand and attention to engine oil heat, engine coolant heat, differential heat, transmission heat , manifold pressure, and a dozen other details to even get an ICE truck up the ramp. It’s much, much worse if it’s loaded heavy and carrying any weight. Heaven help the fool who tries to shift gears after he starts climbing. Nine times out of ten that’ll snap the drive line. Getting onto the ICE deck this close to the ThunderFog is HARD. Further away the ramps aren’t anywhere near as steep and it’s no where near as difficult.
In fact it’s easy.
In a normal ICE-Truck (internal combustion engine) it’s a long hard pull.
For Trog…not so much. We pulled onto the get-on ramp.
Faster than the eye could track, the crawler tracks were raised, (yes…Lightning Trucks have retractable landing gear), lightning began to snap, crackle and pop between Trog’s hull and the bridge material..and we damn near LAUNCHED. We did launch. We went up that get-on ramp like a rocket on rails. That’s pretty much what we were. Trog’s exciter fields had engaged the drive fields of the linear induction accelerator coils built into the…
Well never mind.
It get’s fairly technical. Let’s just say we accelerated going, what felt like, straight up, and kept going up. We didn’t even slow down as we passed the ICE deck. Then we damn sure WERE going almost straight up. Up and over and down. We hit the lightning deck going over a hundred miles per hour.
We stayed in the far right acceleration lane and continued to …er…accelerate. That why it’s called that… that’s what it’s there for. At about three hundred or so she eased off. We were going about the same speed as one of the old NHRA top-fuel dragsters of my youth. The Fueler could do it once, for a quarter mile, and then it’s engine, oft as not, had to be torn down and rebuilt.
We could maintain this speed for untold thousands of miles.
We had reached cruising speed..…
To Be Continued
The Next Episode is
Part 34: Stop for the night
The Previous episode was
Part 32: First Day on the Bridge…
the first episode was
Part 1 : Winter Storm
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@everittdmickey
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I write
SPECULATIVE FICTION
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Sometimes I also comment on the news
Sometimes it's hard to tell fiction from the news.