Posted by Cadet Mara Oxton (Engineer) in CE’s Office - Boarding Check-in for Cadet Oxton

Posted by Lieutenant Keval Vras (Chief Engineer) in CE’s Office - Boarding Check-in for Cadet Oxton

Posted by Cadet Mara Oxton (Engineer) in CE’s Office - Boarding Check-in for Cadet Oxton
Posted by… suppressed (2) by the Post Ghost! 👻
<snip>

Keval observed Oxton while she answered the question and for a few seconds longer, before suddenly standing up from his chair.

The Andorian started talking as he walked out of his office towards Engineering. “Of course, sometimes real experience is needed then an academic paper.” He hadn’t said anything else to Oxton, but clearly expected the cadet to follow.

-Lt. Keval Vras, CE

Bump

Mara sat there, thinking for a second.

“Well, yes sir… Indeed real experiences are imperative to our learning”

She stood up, making a point to stay beside Keval as she walked, her head turned to look at him as her hands were behind her back, one on the other.

“If we do not have the experiences then we might not grow, the experiences we go through in life, whether good or bad build us up into the people we are… Our personal experience defines who we are. Perhaps if my parents had been different people, then I’d be different too, therefore I might not be an Engineer cadet… Or perhaps I’d have never joined the Academy. In the end, we need that experience to grow, to be better people, to strive for greatness”

~ Cadet Mara Oxton {Engineer}

Bump

(OOC: Sorry about that. I somehow missed this post before…)

“Experience also helps us to avoid starships from blowing up as well, I have learned,” Keval said, in his usual tone. “Which is important when cadets are in charge of maintaining a continuous matter-antimatter reaction.”

He started walking to towards a console showing the warp field status. “Now, as you know, for variable warp field geometry, a Discovery-class ship like Challenger generally keeps its nacelles at what angle?”

(OOC: Hint: the information can be found in the ship specs, an important document for all ship engineers :) )

-Lt. Keval Vras, CE

(OOC: Ah it’s okay!)

Mara thought for a moment, she recalled reading about this somewhere. She always had a feeling that her bibliophilic nature would be helpful!

“If I’m right sir they’re kept at a 30° angle at a horizontal axis, though the angle isn’t static and can change depending on warp travel”

She giggled at his previous comment, that she had unintentionally put to the side to answer the question.

“Of course we never want to blow up a ship!”

~ Cadet Mara Oxton {Engineer}

“That’s the general rule,” Keval said absently. “It looks bad on an engineer’s service record, otherwise.”

His concentration on the console, he pulled up the current status of Challenger’s warp field. “The variable geometry of the warp nacelles optimizes the warp field,” Keval said, touching some buttons to bring up a simulation next to the ship’s current status.

“Here is a computer simulation of the warp field if the nacelles were horizontal. The computer can estimate the additional power required by the reactor to produce an equivalent warp field with non-variable geometry.”

Keval let Cadet Oxton approach the console. “What would be the downside if we just varied the warp field on the fly, without moving the nacelle pylons?”

(OOC: There’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a moment for you to play around with your character’s understanding of engineering and some creative use of Trek technobable.)

-Lt. Keval Vras, CE

bump

She looked at him blankly, it was as if he had completely lost her. She sighed slightly, some frustration aimed at her own poor attention span. It was a lucky thing that she heard the most important parts of the conversation though, thinking for a moment with a weird look on her face, Mara started to plan her answer.

“Well, I’d imagine that the computer wouldn’t be able to estimate the power required, which I’d guess would render the warp field sort of useless? Or even create problems that we could prevent”

It wasn’t really a secret that Mara was much better at the linguistics side of engineering rather than the actual ship spec side, and was generally confused a lot of the time when it came to technical talk.

“Say, would the warp reactor blow if we didn’t align the nacelles properly?”

~ Cadet Mara Oxton {Engineer}

“Fortunately, all those redundancies that Starfleet keeps forcing on us and I keep complaining about, actually do help on occasion,” Keval said. “The warp core wouldn’t blow, but we would have some power issues.”

“Here, see what you can do to adjust the warp field in the simulation, to make up for the power drain caused by the horizontal nacelles.”

-Lt. Keval Vras, CE

Mara looked at the screen for a second, thinking about different possibilities. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, letting her mind be open to ideas. Smiling, she finally opened her eyes and began her reasoning.

“Now if we weren’t in a hurry I’d suggest biasing the field to increase the field strength along the axes of the nacelles… But I’m a little bit of a theorist and I love overcomplicating things”

She began diverting the power from the weapons systems to the warp field, taking care to keep enough power in the weapons systems to keep them active and working. Mara then looked up at Keval

“I like far-fetched ideas. I theorise things, I’m never too good at realising at a good time that some of my ideas are a bit too high-strung”

She chuckled lightly, and assumed a calm yet awaiting position.

~ Cadet Mara Oxton {Engineer}

(OOC: This would be a good place to trim the thread a bit with a <snip>. For a two-person thread, the context doesn’t require a lot of the earlier quoted text anymore.)

“Trying out new ideas and new theories are an excellent idea. New ideas generally don’t hurt anyone. Well, not a lot of people, anyway,” Keval said. “In this case, though…”

Keval touched a button, displaying a graph of the power useage to sustain the field’s warp bubble for the ship’s simulated speed. “You correctly found that more power was needed to maintain a non-optimized field, but watch what happens if we speed up the simulation.”

Touching another button, the power-requirement graph began to quickly expand… in both directions. It was an exponential curve. An indicator started flashing. “And in two minutes, weapons are now disabled just to keep the ship moving at the current speed,” Keval said.

The Andorian turned to his cadet. “It’s the field itself. It’s no longer optimized for the ship to travel at current speeds - not without a radical redesign of the hull, anyway, and that might be beyond our powers. Putting in more power gives a temporary solution - but that increase in power to the non-optimized field also reinforces that very lack of optimization. So even more power is needed…”

Keval looked back at the simulation. “What is needed is an adjustment to the warp field itself… but as always on starship, doing it is a lot more complicated than saying it.”

(OOC: As you might have guessed, so of this I’m just making up as I go along. But it’s a useful example to build up on the engineering technobabble in star trek, and build up on some concepts in how starships work in Star Trek - which gives a lot more role-playing options for an engineering character.)

-Lt. Keval Vras, CE