NaNoWriMo 2: Landskippers

For my novel I wanted to use the landskipper vehicle that I came up with for the science fiction themed sentence starter. When I fleshed it out it turned kind of ridiculous, but hopefully remains physically possible. Here are three technical parts about the "tiny craft." I don't know much about actual piloting, so the details here would change in editing.

Toward the front of the hangar, six familiar vessels lined up side by side, angled toward the rising sun. Below a segmented canopy of tinted glass, their snubbed and numbered noses bristled with sensors and thrust engines like tusks on an animal. The fusion engine ran along the bottom, and I saw three blast nozzles on a disc on the back so they could rotate and not overheat. On the back the vessels humped and broadened with storage space. They had small wings, just stabilizers really, off the side and a tail over the blast nozzles that looked like it belonged to some long extinct species of whale.

They looked like twenty foot long rockets with backpacks on and space for a pilot where the warhead should lodge. They were made to deliver supplies and material from one end of the sparsely settled planet to the other in three hours or less. The book named them landskippers and dangerous and erratic. As I stood alone in the Hangar South B I dreamt of flying one.


Flying a landskipper for the first time reminded me of driving my BMW, except with a stalling engine, a half-snapped drive belt, and an empty tank of gas putting everything on the verge of collapse, plus three thousand feet between me and the road.

When the engine first started up, over the sound of the three blast nozzles whirring like a gatling gun, my ears could distinguish each of the rapid fusion explosions that propelled the landskipper up over Londinium. Soon they blended into a constant humming boom, like an overamped electric guitar. Even under the motion net the force of acceleration—from dead stop to mach one in five seconds—plastered me to my seat. My pressure suit constricted on waist, shoulders, and upper thighs to keep all the organs from sliding out of place.

The sonic boom rattled my teeth, and the craft shook like all the bolts had come loose and brought all the girders with them, trailing dislodged engine parts until I had nothing but my padded chair keeping me in the skies. When that happened, when I reached equilibrium at mach one and the turmoil of acceleration came to whimpering end, I knew I had to go faster.

Slowly I added pressure to the right pedal until it tapped a steel buffer and stopped. The fusion engine’s electric guitar screeched out a Queen solo and shot forward to mach five, enough to launch right out of the atmosphere if I climbed too quickly. Everything in the cockpit shook spastically, and beyond the polarized glass mountains and wild plains flew under in fast forward.

I had both gloved hands on the joystick, but the landskipper’s jolting advance almost tore them loose. Under the pressurized helmet the water drained from my eyes and I could barely breathe through my grinning teeth. It would have overwhelmed me if they hadn’t taught and conditioned us to deal with supersonic flight.


Landing a landskipper is like playing that drinking game where you have to flip a quarter off the table and into the shot glass, except you are in the quarter and its going faster than sound. I started my approach, checked all my dials, and gritted my teeth. For a moment I considered popping the adrenal pill out of my cheek, but resorting to that would be pretty embarrassing. Crashing would be more embarrassing, but I’d probably be dead. Exodus made these things for quick jumps, not safe landings.

The cut fusion thrusters left a deafening silence, which the forward mounted jets relieved when I started a burn for deceleration. I checked the tilt and leveled out the landskipper to eighty-five degrees off the vertical, then popped out the spring-mounted skids, prayed, and forced my eyes to stay opened.

I hit the tarmac going only five meters per second and shot back into the air. I locked the skids before the heavy craft came back down again, thirty feet from the first point of impact—with a full two and a half ton load you were lucky to get five. The ground jolted the landskipper a second time, and this time the craft stopped. A perfect landing. At least from where I sat on top of it.