Posted by Ensign Elemirre Serinde (Engineering Officer) in Main Simm - Engine Room

Posted by Lieutenant Paige Garrison (Chief Engineer) in Main Simm - Engine Room

Posted by Ensign Elemirre Serinde (Engineering Officer) in Main Simm - Engine Room
Posted by… suppressed (4) by the Post Ghost! 👻
Snip
Paige stepped back so she was leaning against the wall. “Oh? And why was there a sign on the transporter room in the first place?”

Lt. Paige Garrison - CE

“Just to remind people that the transport is a cargo only device and not to try to transport anything more complex, like a person or something alive,” she said. At this juncture El thought it best to not say that the sign read, ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’
- El, Eng

“Seems reasonable. That’s quite the list you’ve got so far, anything else I should know about?”

Lt. Paige Garrison - CE

“All we’ve found so far. They did distributor node upgrades along our main and secondary power junctions, a host of software upgrades that we’re still getting used to with new layout views. An AI package is supposed to better regulate cabin environmental controls and artificial gravity/lighting to adjust when there aren’t anyone around to conserve power.”
- El, Eng

“Well that’s good to know, and I’ll make sure to have a talk with there crew chief before they step foot on the ship again. I don’t need outside help if they are only going to do half the work. Kind of defeats the purpose if our crew just have to follow behind doing the work again anyways. Don’t you agree?”

Lt. Paige Garrison - CE

“Begging your pardon Lt but aren’t you the crew chief?” El asked with a slightly puzzled expression.
- El, Eng

“Well I am a crew chief, but not the bases repair teams. I’m the Sojourner’s new chief engineer in fact.”

Lt. Paige Garrison - CE

El paused to take in this new information and then her lips made a small O .. “Uh begging your pardon, ma’am.” She paused again and took a long breath. “Belated welcome aboard. We kinda thought that, well, Lt Green would have been grandfathered in.” Her tone suggested that there was some part caution and some part relief. “Well, I suppose you just got the upgrade deficiency report.” She ended that with a light shrug.
- El, Eng

“I was surprised too after meeting him, but I long ago stopped trying to understand the minds of the senior brass. But I’m sure his day will come sometime soon.

“He has talked about the ‘list’.” She made air quotes around the name. “Said that that kind of thing has been existing since the height of English sea power where promotion was based on seniority and survival. His family goes way back in the English navy even through the Napoleonic wars so I guess he would know.”

“He did speak highly of your skills, even if they may be a bit unorthodox at times. But he also said that you’d be a good person to talk to about making sure the refit teams did their job. And so far he seems to be right about that.

That elicited a quick look of surprise on her face. “Really?” she said before she regained her composure. “Normally I’m on report for something,” she said, “which I admit I usually deserve.”

“What are you working on here?”

Lt. Paige Garrison - CE

El looked over her shoulder. “I ah, was working on inventory after our restock. I look after the machine shop. I’m pretty much it in that regard. Not too many engineers want to do that. If a tool or something needs machining for a repair, well, that’s me. We also picked up some things from a Vulcan container they jettisoned over a century ago. Found that on our last survey that was recalled almost before we started. I’ve yet to get them to different areas of the ship. Some one shot battery packs, hull sealant, cabling.” She paused. “Well, at least I was until we started running into issues and then I was tracing out deficiencies.”
- El, Eng

“I know it’s not the glitzy work that a lot of the young recruits envision, but it is still a very important skill to have, and an important job.

El was neutral on that comment. The engineering studies were more focused on the principle ship operations. The machine shop was extra credit and few wanted to do that much extra when the juicy stuff as some in the class had described it was in the main classes. For El, this was not exceptional. Her earlier life had her working with her hands a great deal. Fundamentals were drilled into her. They were the building blocks of anything. There was something more to be said for not just being able to use a piece of equipment but to take it apart and in some way replicate it and build it. To El that was true knowledge. True power.

“Does any of the Vulcan tech still work?”

Lt. Paige Garrison - CE

“Given that that had been cast away in space a couple centuries ago, yes. Given scorch marks there may have been a fire in their hold and they just jettisoned the whole container,” she said with a small shrug. “That’s just a guess.” Turning to take Paige back to a rear wall of the mechanical shop there hung a smooth device almost like a sleek hard shelled backpack. Tubing ran from it to a handle that slipped into a sheathe. “There were ten plasma welders. Of those only four worked and we needed to cannibalize parts from the six to make the fourth work. They operate off of rechargeable battery packs. Only two of five chargers worked but nine of ten batteries worked.” She gestured to them on racks to the left of the bulkhead where they and the chargers hung. “We were waiting on strapping and webbing for the shoulder mounts as that had deteriorated over that time. We have it. They just need to be applied. “When these are finished, two of these I’m thinking will go to the storage bay along with four batteries, and one other to the unassigned space on B Deck with two batteries.”

El waited for comment before moving to the next of their salvaging operation.
- El, Eng

“Those will definitely come in handy,” Paige said walking up to the plasma welders and looked at them more closely. “I’m assuming that you’ve looked into fixing the other chargers? Or any chance of adapting something we have on board to charge them instead?”

Lt. Paige Garrison - CE

“The Vulcans had rigged very delicate circuitry on those chargers. We can backward engineer them and they are modestly better than ours. The portability and precision on the welders is the superior element of them. The chargers had just too much damage on them from years at absolute zero to fix. At least here. A facility on Earth could manage it with some time to duplicate the circuitry.” She sighed and a frown touched her face for a moment. “They’ve had a lot more time at this than us. We are still at the stage of Bulk Circuitry on ships like this because it’s easier to manually replace a board than the equivalent circuits the Vulcans used even two centuries ago. It would take a lab to properly scan and work to duplicate it. We had a schedule to drop one off a week from now; we thought we had a lot more time at port than we did.”

“Adapting a charger is as simple as an energy transfer governor and an adaptor that will fit. The latter we can salvage from one of the unworking models and rig up some kind of patch cable. Simple but not simple to get the ET right. A matter of trial and error there once we log the ET on the working models. We’ve just not tried it. I suspect the Vulcan ones are more efficient than what we could do.”
- El, Eng

“It would be a lot easier if the Vulcans would just share some of their tech,” Paige said grumbling.

With a small cough, Paige raised her voice back up to a normal volume. “It couldn’t hurt to experiment with creating a second charger, even if it is not as efficient. It couldn’t hurt to have the extra charging capacity in a pinch.

“How long of use do you estimate we get on each battery?”

Lt. Paige Garrison - CE