Friday 25 February 2011

Sealing the Door room; Getting official

Apparently the problem of getting cables through a hermetically sealed wall isn't a new one. (If you squint, you can see a reference to hermetic sealing on page 162 in the third column of Electrical World from 1889.) Frank just got out one of his electronic catalogues and found what he needed, so now he's going over all the walls he just finished redoing when he built the Faraday cage. First he sealed the room against magnetic fields, now he's done the same for air pressure.

From the comments we've received, it looks like we won't need to worry about customers...once we get fully up and running. When we sent out those hunters, we thought we would be able to handle any problems. They were responsible adults, or so we thought. Boy, were we wrong. (I guess the super rich really do think the rules don't apply to them. Don't worry, they won't be investors.) The fiasco of getting them all back worried Frank, so he's really against sending out any more folks (other than Tom or any of our other employees) until we get things under control. He's even pulled in some legal help, and the lawyers don't want to do anything until we get registered and incorporated as an official company, so that's the next step. (Of course, you know how I feel about lawyers.)

Paperwork with the state takes forever, but we'll let you know how it goes.

Friday 18 February 2011

Look for us in the magazine

Well, Frank has been spending quite a bit of time with that guy from the Science magazine. They were impressed with the technology he's managed to get up and running...all without knowing how it really works. (Of course, I'd never say that to his face; he really has managed to do quite a bit without an instruction manual.) The biggest issue he's got to worry about now is the pressure differences. Frank has found that the air pressure here at our new location is sufficiently different from on the other side that there is a serious problem. Before we moved the difference wasn't as great. Frank thinks it has to do with the elevation change. He's working on figuring out how to completely seal the Door room, but we still need to get all the cables in and out.

Tom knows his stars well enough to make it across the Australian outback, but he says the stars on the other side aren't the same. He's talked to the natives about constellations, trying to figure out more about their mythology, but either they aren't saying anything or they really don't think like that. They seemed to think that Tom was confused when he started explaining about people and animals up in the sky. Next trip, he plans on taking a star chart so he can show them what he's talking about.

Any suggestions? Let us know.

Friday 11 February 2011

Power? We've got plenty

Frank has managed to up our storage capability, so we can keep the Door open for minutes at a time...and still have enough reserve in the case of an emergency trip.

We've been having some excellent luck with the natives; Tom has made quite a few friends over there, in fact, we think he may be bringing someone back with him on this next return. We'll keep you informed on that.

Short posting this time...I'll see if I can expand on more of it later.

Friday 4 February 2011

Trade? Explore? We're famous!

Last week Tom was talking about setting up a trade route with the natives. I thought he was joking, but apparently he was serious. The problem is that I don't know what they might have that we'd need. Although going the other direction, we do have plenty of glass beads and trinkets that we can send over. [grin] Seriously, at this point I'd hesitate to start transferring stuff back and forth. I want to keep Tom focused on the short term trips and getting some more exploring done. There's still a lot of territory to cover over there.

On the technical side of things, Frank has been contacted by some folks at the Science magazine who want to interview him! How they found out about what we're doing here I don't know, but it looks like we're going to be famous. (Or infamous, depending on how they slant the article.) Having an article published should really increase the number of folks who find out about us. The only problem is that the only people who read that magazine are science techies, and we already know what they think about going outside, so what would they think about going OUTSIDE to a different world. I can't see that happening. Oh, well, maybe they'll have friends who would be willing to go on a trip.

We'll let you know which issue has us in it...as soon as we find out. Next week, more news on the power source to run the Door.