Notes on "Digger Man" and the Ringerra Mosaic in progress

Ever since I began work on Endgame (and, later, the Woman at War / Triestarra Nebula universe) I realized I wanted to make my science fiction stories as realistic as possible. Sure, there’s some willing suspension of disbelief involved—mostly around Galactic Velocity travel and how quickly people could get around planetary systems. (It’s a hell-of-a-lot easier managing travel times of 31 hours versus 31 years.)

To that end, in real life, it bothered me whenever I’d see depictions of certain events in enormously popular sci-fi franchises (which I shall not name, here, thanks to the legal industry). How do the technological marvels of those worlds do what they do, if not for a bit of laziness on the part of the storytellers? For example, if we are shown a 2-mile-long space cruiser simply floating in atmosphere with no discernible thrust, are we to assume that it’s just magic keeping the thing up there?

That’s the type of question at the heart of “Digger Man” and other stories regarding the military base on Ringerra.

In Destruction, the second book in the series, I touch on the process of constructing the Army’s Special Forces backup base. But returning to it with these stories has forced me, in a healthy way, to consider how such monumental tasks might be accomplished. Though the overall settings for these stories include much better technology than we enjoy, now, there are still issues like mass (measured in bars or heaps) atmospheric conditions and the sturdiness of dirt/soil (in this case, referred to as bunk).

Living in the Ring of Fire (Seattle) has given me an appreciation for all things seismic and the consequences of being dismissive about what’s underneath our feet. These questions are always relevant. The 2001 Nisqually Earthquake permanently damaged the Alaskan Way Viaduct (leaving the whole thing leaning 4 inches at one end). It was a 2.2-mile double-decker concrete structure. The engineers agreed: It had to come down, one way or another. They dismantled it safely.

As of summer 2026, San Francisco’s 58-story Millennium Tower is leaning a couple feet to one direction because construction crews didn’t secure the foundation in bedrock. Fortunately, the collapse has been temporarily frozen. What could the impacts be—to life, livelihood and property—if the situation deteriorated toward its natural conclusion when the city wasn’t ready? The 645-foot building dwarfs the world-famous Leaning Tower of Pisa, after all.

In “Digger Man,” the protagonist’s goal is to get the site ready to become an Army base. (Spoiler alert) Since the bulk of that base will be made up of a decommissioned frigate which measures 1,950 feet by 750 feet (650 x 250 legs in the Triestarra Nebula universe parlance), the challenge was to come up with estimates for what a vessel like that might actually weigh. Confession: I do not currently have blueprints and structural plans for a vessel such as the Aldahambra. Also, I’m not an engineer.

To solve this problem, I scaled up dimensions of the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier and used a multiplier. Modern Navy vessels are largely made up of steel, as are spacecraft, so it just made sense to work off the figures of a submarine or aircraft carrier.

Preparing the resting place for such an immense object is no simple task. Unlike all those movies and cartoons of eras past, you couldn’t just land the ship on a flat space and call it good. Chances are, you couldn’t even do so with a ship whose underside is completely flat—and these vessels never are. Any soft pocket in the compressed ground means part of the ship cracks when the ground holding it up sinks. That’s a minor disaster, at least. What crane could come along and hoist up 10,000 tons of tilting spacecraft?

The next story in the sequence is about the process of bringing down my imagined frigate from orbit. The heroine is a one-of-a-kind pilot. For “Digger Man,” I felt the titular character, Chorgun, needed to be a grumpy, regular Joe with a history of yelling at people. Not a hero, nor even a particularly nice person, when we meet him. But, as a lesser archetype, he fits the needs of the job. Imagining how a bitter construction boss like that might change (even soften) over the years gobbled up by such a huge project—as he approaches the sunset of his life—gives me hope.

I’m fortunate to have surrounded myself with educators, food-bank staff and volunteers, and (through soccer) left-leaning family guys. Hoping for the best, even if we sometimes have to prepare for the worst.

To me, it means that we, like Chorgun, don’t have to become grumpy old men (and women) in the end.