Posted by Ensign Elemirre Serinde (Engineering Officer) in Engineering - Container Inspection Results

Posted by Ensign Elemirre Serinde (Engineering Officer) in Engineering - Container Inspection Results

Posted by Ensign Elemirre Serinde (Engineering Officer) in Engineering - Container Inspection Results
Posted by… suppressed (1) by the Post Ghost! 👻
El could always tell when Lt Green came to visit when she was in the machine shop. The light from the main engineering area dimmed to a point that it was noticeable in her space. Lt Green filled the doorway quite a lot. Not content to have the materials lining the corridor on F Deck from the Vulcan containers Lt Green wanted them stored in her maintenance shop. To say it was cluttered was no small thing. She had taken great pains to organize things before even starting on the project of sorting out the stuff and seeing whether they worked. At Lt Green’s ‘suggestion’ she enlisted another engineer to help her. El had picked Rosa-Maria, plucking her off of Beta Shift to help her these past couple of weeks.

To say that it was a challenge was no small thing. Rosa had pushed her, wanting to do more. El thought she had something to prove but Rosa didn’t see that. Perhaps El was wrong, but the crewman was working to impress. El had taken the time with some ‘girl’ talk to learn some Spanish from her. It didn’t seem that difficult a language and had a certain romantic quality to it that appealed to El, but the ‘lessons’ were in between the work at hand. El sought to be methodical about the work which did not seem quick enough to Rosa, and so the push had come.

“What have you got?” Green asked. “Any luck with the Vulcan equipment? Can we use any of it without remedial Vulcan language courses?”
His tone, at least to El, had some impatience in it. True, they had kept him waiting while they checked and double checked the equipment. Without Rosa, El could have worked more efficiently and made conclusions faster, though there were clashes of methodology. “Mostly, Lt,” she answered.

Gesturing to the far wall where plasma welders sat. There were 4 of them. “Sir, only 4 of the 10 welders were salvageable. Three without much more than cleaning and some PM. The fourth needed more work and we salvaged bits from the other six to get the fourth going. Suggest that we store two in E-Deck cargo bay and retain two for use. The straps for the backpack style use needed supporting. Once back to a port we should add padding to them. What there was was crumbling leaving the metal mesh support. We’ve improvised but it needs more custom work.” She paused, took a breath and then walked Green over to a space between storage racks. On the wall were attached two obvious charging units, more elegant in appearance than their own surrounding equipment. “Of the five chargers only two were working, hence our thought to only have two units running at a time. All but one of the cells were good and we have them stored here.” Above the chargers in three neat rows were attached the cells against the bulkhead. Under these chargers and battery packs sat two of the plasma welders, hanging on hooks. The other two were separated and were squished on a rack on the far side.

Green looked at them, taking one of the cells. “They do make them look prettier,” he commented before sliding it back into its slot. “Move one of the two packs to the storage closet inside the unassigned space on B Deck so it is near in case we need one fast. The other can be in storage.” Tapping the battery packs he said, “Move four of the power cells there as well but leave the chargers here.”
“I’ll have Rosa move them,” El said.
Fingering along the strap of one he said, “Nice work on these. No, on second thought, take the spare one meant for storage and use that as a training unit. Get proficient in it then get a course set up for the rest of the engineers to use. Have Seaman Morales help you with that training. I want that set up within the week.”
“Of course, Lt,” El said.
- El, Eng

Green tapped at a smaller pack. It seemed more like a bulky side bag with a wand. “And these?”
“According to the docs with them they are hull sealant dispensers. Not too different from ours. More portable. Smaller and a bit more versatile.” She pointed to the wand. “Adjustable length and type of spray here and here. Reacts to air and solidifies in just over a second. The docs say that it can be as precise as a stylus sized hole or up to a little over a meter spray.” She seemed about to say something then paused.
“And?” he prompted.
“Well, Lt, they are okay. Compared to ours they are a breach sealant 1.2. I had expected better from the Vulcans with this.”
“They do use forcefields to seal off areas. We use emergency bulkheads. They likely just have these as back up for when their back ups fail. What are you thinking, Ensign?”
“Rosa and I were talking about this. She took the specs on this and of ours and, well, has been working on it and has come up with a kind of Franken-sealant design. Maybe for our future design models. It takes the best of what we and the Vulcans have and, I think, makes it into a 1.5. She did pretty good on that.”
“I’d like to see them,” Green said. He did sound impressed that a crewman would take that on, but then he had noticed that Rosa-Maria was very competitive in her work.
“I’ll ask her to send it along to you,” El said. “These three are the sealant capsules. There are five for each of the sprayers with one extra. I thought we’d use that one for orientation. It comes out with more of a kick than ours. I thought of having one of these every couple of decks.
“Let me know what three decks and areas you are thinking of. Remember it’s not symmetry and balance but function. What are the critical areas of the ship that would best be served by having one nearby.”
“Yes, Lt,” she said.
El, Eng

That was something to think about. There were so many ‘critical’ areas and El felt that no matter what she picked and where she would get them wrong, at least to the Lt, but she would try. Green had moved to the lower shelf farther along the wall and knelt. His knuckles rapped at one of three large crates. “And these?” He asked, looking up at her. El thought in that moment that this was the first time she had ever looked down at the Lt.
“In each of these crates,” she said, pointing to the three of them, “are a battery. They are pretty impressive. They don’t look it but they can run nearly a whole deck for a couple of hours, or a smaller section for up to 4 hours.” She paused, seeing the Lt’s eyebrows rise.
“Really,” he said, looking at them again and ran a hand over the top of them. “That would come in handy.” He maybe noted something in El’s voice and looked at her again. “What’s the catch?”
“They are one shot operation. They have no charging capability.” She continued. “We checked the components of the battery and they are not adjustable. They were built for a one shot. We can’t reverse engineer it to be multi-use. But we did take scans and have the make up of them to generate our own.” She shrugged. “They are just batteries. If we asked they might just give us an updated one to replicate.”
Green made a hmmmph sound in his throat and rose. “Unlikely, but good spirit there. Again these should be in notable areas. I’d say the bridge is one. Sickbay is another and engineering a third. If we need power those are the areas we’d need it if we got ourselves into a pickle enough to need it.” He looked around. “Any more?”
El, Eng

“One more thing, Lt,” El replied. “Well two. There were a number of chipsets and scanners, storage data units, diagnostic and maintenance sets. Science took those. On first glance it looked like they were only compatible with the Vulcan duro-chip based systems. Unless science could see their way to figuring out how to make that compatible they might be pretty useless to us. But these,” she said, reaching up and pointing to four boxes. “These are useful and could be useful now to us. You remember when we were investigating that new world and the creature knocked out systems on the bridge?” She waited for his nod. It came with a slightly furrowed brow along with it.
“Go on,” he said.
“We didn’t have cabling to run to replace it and had to improvise. In here are high data cabling, cable running kit and, even better micro-sensor circuitry sensor units that would catch breaks or damage in cabling. This could have fixed us up if we had it then. These boxes contain about 450 meters of cabling. We’ve done some tests on them, sir. They are more efficient than our own cabling for data transfer and …” She took a stool and climbed it, opened the snaps on one crate and pulled out the end of one of the cables. “… and the lines are sleeker than ours taking up less conduit space. Given that our vertical distance from the bridge is some 30 meters and the lateral distances somewhat more depending on what systems we want to connect it with, we could run these now and improve our response times in key systems from the bridge.”

“That’s good,” he said, his head nodding in thought. “Very good. Plot out the amount of cabling it would take to run helm control, weapons and science - and still leaving in reserve enough cable to fix the longest run of these.”
El added that to the list of things to do on this find. The cabling may be an on the way back from the survey event but that still allowed a lot of work from the other things including training, use, and the engineers just knowing where the things were. “Yes, Lt,” she said. At least in this regard she had done well. Perhaps too thorough and took longer than what might be considered normal to get all of these catalogued, scanned, cleaned, researched and tested. It was a window into how Vulcans thought, and that in any respect, was important to her.
Green turned to go then halted in the doorway. El noted that he liked to be there. Perhaps it made him feel larger than normal as his bulk filled the doorway. “Overall good work Serinde. This was a good find. Use crewman Morales to help you position those units that need to be distributed. Oversee that as well as the recabling on our return journey. Plot our your work so any downtime for operations are minimal.” With that he turned and left. At least she had her machine shop here to work on the hooks and attachments that would be needed to secure all of these units on the different decks.
- El and Green, Eng

OOC: Rob.. regarding the “sizable amount of micro-circuitry sensor units used to catch breaks or damage int a cable run” .. are these mobile units to test cabling or physical attachments set periodically along cabling to sense breaks/damage? If the latter, what is sizeable and would that be only for the 450m we have from the Vulcan stash? Is that sensor unit something that can be reverse engineered? I take it that we might have something kinda similar? How much better is it? Thanks!
Gene

Green turned to leave then said, “Unfortunately our survey mission was canceled and we are returning to Earth. On the upside it will give you enough time to distribute these things and run a training series on them. As all of these in some way relates to your position you will be the subject matter expert, Serinde. And Gagarin I’m assigning additional role to being in charge of the damage control teams in the event of an emergency. He needs to be up to speed on them as much as you.”

“Yes, Lt,” El said. There was lots of time to do these placements. Drills and training shouldn’t take that long. They used similar things. These were just different and a bit better than what they had. If only she could tweak those generators to be rechargeable or convince a Vulcan to divulge their new battery tech. Yeah, fat chance on that latter thing.

“Oh, and Serinde. I’ve told the rest that we’re returning to Earth. Sasha was not looking too happy about that. Any ideas why?” he asked, again filling the doorway, his face in some shadow that made his shovel like beard appear menacing.
“Will we be getting shore leave, Lt?” she asked. “He didn’t find his mother last time he was at Moscow. Maybe he’s worried about her?”
“Hmm,” was all Green said before turning. She could hear him calling, “Mr Fawkes! Front and center!” before El turned back to her long list.
- El, Eng