A9 Log, SD 51808.12 - It's just like floating on your back!

[Admiral Atragon-9 0]

Open Personal Log, Admiral Atragon-9, USS Manticore, NCC-5852-A, Stardate 51808.12, Password *********  {{whirr, click}}

I guess it helps to have a direct line to the pre-alpha testing for technology that no one should know about - or probably ever use.  Of course, it's also important to have the ears (and brains) of the Special Ops Science and Engineering divisions, so they could dumb down all the wonders to Admiral-dummy speak.  I was talking to these directorates and there is a crazy idea that they floated.  Heh-heh, "floated," that's funny - but I'm getting ahead of myself.

We needed a fast way to protect the Titan dome, when it cycles back into danger just 16 days after the danger passed.  Sure, the official story is a massive evacuation, but that was more to ease the panic of the population.  There is no way to evacuate all of these people in time - not to mention the valuable societal distinctions that is the oldest domed colony in all of Starfleet.  So we all started to talk alternatives.

Seismic disruption generates an "S Wave" and if the structures on the ground cannot withstand the shaking, they are damaged or destroyed.  In the late 20th Century on Earth, a technology was developed called a Tuned Mass Dampener.  A TMD is basically a huge weight that is attached to buildings and set to counteract the motions of the quake.  This helped some large buildings at the time, but was very impractical, with some TMDs reaching weights of almost 1,000 tons as the buildings got larger and larger.

In the mid-21st Century, the old NASA, Starfleet's predecessor, came up with something called the LOX Dampener, which was a kind of Disruptive Tuned Mass.  The DTM was a container of liquid that can be tuned to the same frequency of the S Wave, not to try and counteract it.  This was successful for countering vibrations on large rockets and even found its way into ground-based architecture by the 22nd Century.  The great advantage of the DTM is that even a relatively small amount of liquid could offset the shaking.

The last piece of this puzzle is that seismic activity can create something known traditionally as Earthquake Liquefaction.  It can literally turn dirt, sand, really just the ground into a soupy liquid and then cause secondary damage to structures that could be worse than the seismic shifts themselves.

Remember that Titan, being among the original domes, was never built for movement or relocation.  There are anchor pylons and foundation systems that root it deep into the surface of Titan and this is helping to cause tertiary damage as the planetoid itself helps disrupt the dome structurally.

Right, so here's the crazy part.  We aren't going to wait for the quake to turn the ground to mud, we are going to create Liquefaction in a controlled procedure and then turn the biggest lake in the sector into a DTM.  This means the dome will simply ... float on it's back.  This way, the damage to the structure and its soft, fleshy innards, will be greatly reduced.  Of course, we need to insure the Liquefaction is performed neatly, all at the same time and in conjunction with the severing of the anchor pylons - AND we have to keep Lake Titan in a liquid state to affect its transformation to a quivering DTM.  This is why the Prometheus is in orbit along with the other specialized ships.

If all goes as planned, we will make the system's biggest swimming pool just hours before the shaking begins and we can all ride it out, keeping our back arched.  Or the Liquefaction will fail and the dome will crack and everyone will die.  Or the Liquefaction will work and the dome will sink into the soup and everyone will die.  Or the dome will float in the liquefied Titan goo and we cannot match the vibration frequency and the liquid will amplify the shaking and everyone will die.

:: Chuckle ::  Right and *I'M* the guy they want as the next Governer??  I think their brains have liquefied!

EOM, EOT {{Whurr, Cluck }}