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[Thread] "This is not a Tool of Honour"
[Thread] "This is not a Tool of Honour"
#1
Rock. Beats Handwaved super-Laser.

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To: Blackrider@roughriders.fen
From: Jet.Jaguar@Frigga.fen
Subj: This is not a tool of honour.

Hey Ben,

You said you've been working in some rad' areas and we have a little - ahem - experience with that. I know when I mentioned first it you said you'd be interested in one.

I can't take credit for it. It's been sort of fiddled over by a dozen people here who were sick of having their phones cooked, accreting useful features the way planets form, but this is the final version. It's started off as a modified clone of a Seagull ST19, printed off locally. The only fancy part on the workings parts are the hairspring and balance.

So, how you use it.

That's a 24-hour watch face, giving you local time in space. You set that with the 1st, centre lug on the right. You'll have to use it to wind it up, but it'll run for around 30 hours off a full wind.
On the top strap lug, that's a 3-stage radio-phosphorecent indicator. Green == Some Radiation. Yellow == Dangerous Radiation. Red == Potentially Lethal Radiation. It gives you an idea what you're facing.  As for why they're Hello Kitty-shaped
On the bottom lug as your quartz fibre rate-meter with an attenuator if you're getting into a strong radiation field.

Top right button starts and stops the chrono'. Bottom right zero's the chrono' and triggers a piezoelectric reset of the rate meter. It's a bit heavy because you don't want to do either accidentally.

Anyway, the basic way to use it is to use the rate meter - either over the space of a minute for low radiation fields, or direct for high radiation fields - to figure out the dose-rate. Reset the chronograph, and time your exposure to estimate your total dose. It's most accurate around 1000uR/s - it's not great, but it's not terrible either.

Top left knob sets the warning dose limit, using the fourth hand on the display. The bottom left knob lets you set the warning chime to be off,  triggered by the hour hand, the minute hand, or the second hand - depending on how strong the radiation field is.

The case, dial and back-plate are made of iron scavenged from an old power transformer that caught fire, and with a silicon hairspring you can get pretty close to an active field magnet on one of our reactors without upsetting it. Glass is just domed lucite - easy to fix.

We sent one into the ruined reactor hall on the end of a drill bit. It survived radiation that killed anything with a battery and a chip - although all the luminescence was cooked. We set one on top of a field coil on a running core and it kept ticking. Not even Jupiter can kill them.

It's a bit fat. It is not elegant. It's no Patrol Watch.

Might help if you want to know what time it is in the middle of a Carrington event, if you're swimming in a spent fuel pool, or need to know how much time's left on the countdown to a Genesis detonation while you reset the mains.

Let me know how it goes for you, or if you know anyone who might have a use for them.

-Jet.

I love the smell of rotaries in the morning. You know one time, I got to work early, before the rush hour. I walked through the empty carpark, I didn't see one bloody Prius or Golf. And that smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole carpark, smelled like.... ....speed.

One day they're going to ban them.
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