Sunday, July 19, 2009

Multiple DataKeyNames in GridView

I like to post links to programming tips I find helpful so here is one for a problem I was having today.

http://graciesdad.wordpress.com/2007/05/07/multiple-datakeynames-in-gridview/

and in VB Dim SID As Integer = StudentTextbooksGrid2.DataKeys(StudentTextbooksGrid2.SelectedIndex).Values("SID")

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Death

My grandmother died last night. I am going to miss grammie.

Monday, July 6, 2009

Nebo Station - Part 5

Right after I realized we were going to loose the ship, the captain gave me an order.

"Pilot, do whatever you have to do to break away from this battle to give us some space to launch the escape pods safely. You have forty minutes before we launch the first pod. I am going to be organizing the evacuation of the ship. I'll order engineering to keep the engines running as long as they can at the expense of every other ship system, even life support if they have to. Just get us to a safe distance from this battle to launch the pods!"

Then the captain was gone to oversee the evacuation and I was spinning the ship, as much as it is possible to spin something that big, to avoid another attack, and looking for a vector with a somewhat clear path to some open space. A few minutes later I heard the order go out for a phased abandon ship. Non-essential crew would head for the life pods first, then any fighter pilots who made it back in time, then the weapons crews would fire every missile they could back at the enemy and set the ships guns on auto, with orders to shoot at anything that did not read as a life pod. Then the damage control crews, engineering, crews, and lastly when everyone else was off the captain would set the ship to self destruct and the bridge crew would be the last to leave the ship.

That was the plan. Nothing in war ever seems to go according to plan. We took a three more solid hits right about then and we lost engines for a couple of minutes and were holed to atmosphere on several decks. However, I found that piece of open space the captain wanted, and the remaining capital ships in the armada covered our retreat as I pushed what was left of our engines past their max to get us some distance. After the damage control crews along with everyone else who could help, rescued all the people they could from the holed decks, most of the rest of the evacuation went according to plan. Right up to the point where the captain set the ship to self destruct and the computer reported that at some point in the battle the control lines to the over half of the ships self destruct charges had been severed. It probably happened during that last attack when the ship was holed, but right then we had a problem.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Nebo Station - Part 4

In the end the battle lasted a little over five hours for us. We fought hard but our ships were in no shape for a battle at that moment. We should have been having a complete re-fit at a space force orbital shipyard, not doing voyage repairs at an out of the way piece of supposedly safe empty space. I never found out if it was just luck that they attacked right then or if they had timed the attack somehow for when the ships would be in the worst possible condition for a fight. How they knew where we were was a question that bothered me for years afterward, but the answer to that question belongs to another part of the story.

Mothership class carriers never actually traveled alone, there were eight other capital ships traveling with the Durement Nebo along with the fighters and small freighter sized missile carrying Mosquito Boats we carried. Only the presence of those other ships kept us fighting as long as we did. We were down almost half our complement of fighters at that point in time, and three of our five assigned mosquito boats.

We took a lot of hits early in that battle. There just wasn't any way to avoid fifty incoming missiles from one direction, and twenty more plus the ships that were firing them coming at us from another. I know they didn't from the three other capital ships we lost in that battle, but the enemy seemed to be targeting the Durement Nebo almost exclusively. No matter where we turned, no matter what we tried, no matter how hard we fought, the enemy was always there pounding us.

A little over four hours into the battle we knew we were going to loose the ship! I remember looking over at the captain and seeing this look of such utter despair on his face and at that moment I knew. Up until then I had been too busy piloting to realize how bad a shape we were in.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Nebo Station - Part 3

We had seen nearly constant battle for the last month and a half. Fifty-four days with only a handful of those not having seen some conflict. According to the SF news our side was supposed to be winning this war. According to the battles we had actually fought in, nobody seemed to be winning. We killed a few of their ships, they killed a few of ours. We seemed to be fighting a war of attrition with the key question being who would run out of ships, ammo, or pilots first.

Hoping for a few days break to calm frazzled nerves and make some critical repairs, we had jumped to some empty space, chosen seemingly at random for no other reason than that it was empty, with no stars, planets, space stations, or most importantly enemy ships.

It was two days into our planned week long repair sabbatical, just about the time the repair crews had things taken apart and were starting to put them back together again, and I had just come on shift as the duty pilot when everything went to hell. The first warning came from the jump sensors, alerting us to first one, two, four, then a dozen incoming ships. Then the weapons sensors started blaring, "incoming missiles . . . incoming missiles" the sensor tech on duty muted the alarm only to parrot its message.

"Incoming missiles, multiple tracts, inbound from the ships that just jumped in. I am also picking up a bunch of hi-velocity stuff at extreme sensor range coming at us from the opposite direction. Those hits are not accelerating at this time, but size and shape are consistent with more missiles. There must be over fifty of those out there."