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Sounds like a good idea. I'd like to have a read when you're done.

hmmmmnn. then I'll have to finish up the dialogue piece then...no wait, that was the short story I'm working on..... I'll post something on monday...seems I left my flashdrive with all my work at school in my locker....

I am very impressed. Your writing style is beautiful. You're incredibly knowledgeable of the mechanics behind the machines (Or atleast to the untrained eye you are). You inform, but you don't confuse. The perfect style of writing in my mind. I love your dialog too. As I said. I'm impressed. Thoroughly. If you think that sucks, I'd love to read something that you're pleased with.

May I ask where you learned so much about the workings of the machines?

question its good? biggrin wow.....and I found out the details from Pandorapedia.org, and from watching the movie way too may times, both in theater and online as streaming video.... guess That means I should complete my Pandora "short" story....anywho, heres what I have so far for the "short" story.


Pandora
Febuary 3rd, 2153
RDA ISV vessel Longhaul
Inbound to Pandora
ETA: 2 days, 15 hours, 30 minutes
Elapsed flight time: 5 years, 12 months, 12 days


-I hate Cryo….-
The feeling of cold, the weakness, the nausea- all of it unpleasant. Unavoidable, though; the journey out from earth was a six year slog. The Longhaul was set up for hauling cargo, not people. The personnel being shipped to Pandora were put into cryo for the journey, and woke up feeling like crap.
“Goddamnit”
Hitachi Yokomo opened his eyes for the first time in six years, and looked up at the roof of his cryopod as the various IV’s that had kept him asleep and fed for the journey retracted. Hitachi felt a lock release, then the pods bed slid out into the Cryobay . Hitachi looked around as the rest of the personnel tubes slid out, their occupants all looking just as weak and sick as he did. An orderly, floating from station to station in the null gravity of the bay, pushed off and floated over to him.
“How you feeling, buddy?”
“Weak, and sick. The usual.”
“You’ve been here before, I take it?”
“No. I’ve just traveled a lot”


And wasn’t that fun….His job with RDA, the biggest mining corporation on earth and one of the few remaining with off world colonies, had meant he had had to be shipped around the galaxy, and he’d probably clocked up as many years in cryo as he had while awake. He’d been involved with RDA’s science division, investigating the various worlds that RDA was on. This assignment, though, was more along the lines of a permanent one, or at least one that would be longer than the usually six year stay. Pandora was the gem of the RDA crown, and the main source of revenue, due to its deposits of the insanely pricy Unubtanium.
-twenty million a kilogram, or so they tell me, and that’s raw unubtanium. And the Longhaul will be shipping at least a dozen tons of it back to Earth. That’s over a trillion dollars…No wonder RDA is anxious about any problems...-

The orderly unclipped the straps that held him down, and patted him on the shoulder before floating over to another tube. Hitachi shook his head, and pushed off from the wall, heading for his locker.
“You’ve been in Cryo for five years, four months, and twelve days. If you are not now, you will be hungry. You will most certainly be weak. And, please, try not to gag. If you need to throw up, please use the sick bags that are clearly labeled around the bay, as cleaning up vomit in null gravity is not part of my job description, nor is it something I want to do, but will have to if you do throw up.”
Hitachi gently impacted with the bank of lockers and braced himself before flipping upside down to see the cryo bay boss was giving the usual “waking up” speech. The husky Japanese shrugged, and opened his locker, grabbed his clothes, and pushed off towards the corridor leading to the habitation sections of the ship. As soon as he entered the corridor, he felt gravity return, and slowly dropped to the deck; the gravity was at around .8g, about twenty percent lighter than earth standard, enough to keep muscle atrophy down for the conscious crew during the voyage. Hitachi entered the change rooms ringing the shuttle docks, and swiftly changed.

The Longhaul was not a pretty ship. From her massive impulse engines, fuel pods, and crew sections that narrowed down to the long central spine that led to the solar shield at the bow, shuttle docks, and the cryopod bays, she was purely functional in design and look. For Lance Corporal Shezomi Brown, the massive vessel was the most pretty thing he’d ever seen as he drifted along the hull in a armored environmental suit. He tapped thrusters and drifted to a stop in front of Fuel Pod One, sandwiched in between the massive louvered engines. The Marine unclipped his toolkit and tapped the suits forearm control panel.
“Longhaul, Brown. I’m at the pod.”
“Roger that. You should be about fifteen meters vertically from the damaged panel”
He tilted his head back to look up the surface of the multi-hundred meter high pod, and spotted the long black score mark. Apparently, while he’d been slumbering in cryo, a micrometeorite had hit the ship fairly early on in the voyage, and damaged a number of pipes and the actual containment vessel holding the millions of gallons of liquid hydrogen, deuterium, and oxygen used by the engines. The damage had gone undetected until the Longhaul had done her flip over, pointing the engines towards the planet it had been accelerating towards for so long, and beginning her two week long braking burn. The engines were running at half capacity from the auxiliary tanks until the damage could be fixed, as using the tank could cause the containment to fail, and having twenty million gallons of volatile oxygen and explosive hydrogen floating around were they could be ignited by the engines was not a fun thought. Brown had heard of the St. Marice Incident, as had practically everyone born before 2120. The St. Marice had been a colony ship, transporting colonists to a new world, escorted by several RDA warships and the other ships hauling the equipment needed to form a functioning human colony. About a week before she had been slated to enter orbit, her main fuel tanks unknowingly sprung a leak, from substandard manufacture of the tank or micrometerorite impact, it had never fully been figured out how. The St. Marice’s crew had found the leak just as they were firing the engines to slow the ship, but had shut them down too late to stop the tank from rupturing. The volatile mix of hydrogen and oxygen had mixed in space, and ignited when it hit the engines. The ship was engulfed in a massive fireball, and when it faded, over half the ship was unrecognizable, a molten, twisted mess. Over twenty thousand people had died in the accident, and although the Longhaul was carrying less than a tenth of that, Shezomi had no intention of letting another St. Marice incident happen on his watch. Brown pushed off from the hull and snagged a convenient pipe before hauling himself hand over hand towards the damage. He clipped his belt safety cable to a stanchion, and looked the pod over. The micrometeorite had to have been big; the furrow in the hull was over a foot wide and stretched about ten feet long. Shezomi turned his helmet lights onto high intensity and drifted over the impact site, letting the helmet cams get a good look at the damage for the engineers on the Longhaul’s bridge.
“ allright guys, what do you think? Fixable now or shipyard required?”
“ Looks fixable. We’re sending a drone up with the parts you’ll need.”
“Roger that”
Shezomi leaned back and caught sight of a massive blue gas giant, the one their destination orbited. He upped the magnification on his visor and saw the moon they were decelerating towards. Pandora; it glittered in the black of space like a green and blue gem. It was around the same size of earth, and looked like it as well, except that the continents and oceans were all different. Brown had grown up hearing about it; the most Earthlike of the planets found, and the only one so far with sentient life. He’d read up on the planet when he’d learned he’d been posted there. Atmosphere toxic to breath but not toxic enough to require anything more than a breath mask, massive jungles and lower gravity than was comfortable for humans, but you could live there under domes, and the biology was even compatible to some degrees; you could eat the fruit without fear of dying from shock or disease. The natives, the Na’vi, were also interesting. Humanoid, but with feline characteristics; pointed ears, yellow eyes, tail… there were pages and pages of information to read through. He considered himself privileged to be selected to go there; it wasn’t something that happened often, and was most likely a once in a lifetime posting. The pay was the icing on the cake; RDA hired out Marines and airforce pilots, and offered them substantial wages to become hired guns for six years, the average posting length on Pandora. You had to serve for the six years, but you could choose to stay there for another tour is you desired. Shezomi hadn’t heard of many soldiers staying; Pandora was like Vietnam had been for the twentieth century, except without the public awareness or concern. Brown caught sight of the drone as it puffed thrusters to rise over a pipe, and waved at it. The robot obediently floated up to where he could grab the materials, and waited. Shezomi pulled a pristine hull panel off and swiftly removed a damaged panel, handing it to the drone, which slipped it into a cargo container for later smelting and recasting. Working as fast as he could without causing a accident, he soon had most of the hull replaced. He was just beginning to remove the last panel when he felt the ship shudder.
“Longhaul, Brown. The hell was that?”
the ship shuddered again, and he down at the long spine to see one of the habitation modules on the end of the centrifuge that had been stabilizing the ship and creating gravity bloom into a silent fireball. The force of the blast made the spine flex back and forth, and Shezomi grabbed the drone and hunkered down behind it as the spray of shrapnel from the blast reached him. The drone shuddered and jerked as metal splattered against or bounced off its casing, and Brown waited several seconds after the impacts had stopped before rising and looking at the damage. The centrifuge at the front of the ship was slowing its rate of spin as either crew or automated damage control programs powered them down. One end of the arm was a flaming, molten mess were a module used to be, and the huge, reflective surface of the solar shield was pocked with holes were shrapnel had smashed through. The cryobays were leaking atmosphere into space as well, but the shuttles seemed to be okay.
Shezomi tapped his wrist again.
“ Longhaul, You seeing this?”
“ uhhhh…yes we do. Be advised that the blast did some serious damage to the central spine, and we cannot reach the bow of the ship, the personel corridor and lift tubes are warped beyond use.”
“so….what do you want me to do?”
“ patch the leaks in the bow, or else the crew and passengers there will die.”
“ no pressure, then.”

These are both really fantastic pieces. As previously stated by others, I can easily follow the plot and events of the story, despite knowing nothing about the workings of the ship. Your style is very fluid, it doesn't linger and bore me in one area for too long. Also, I quite often find dialog in books to be very unrealistic, written too much like the narrative, but in your first story it is very distinct and seems more true-to-life.

For the short story, the only criticism I can currently think of is a slight lack of character development; I can see the mechanics in the story clearly, as well as the plot, but the main character seems a little gray. Of course, this is just a beginning and character development usually takes awhile to build up. We did just meet him, after all.

Overall, this piece was wonderful and I look forward to more. Sorry if I rambled, I took a Creative Writing class last semester and we frequently did such reviews of work. Your writing style is really top-notch in clarity and makes me crave more. :]