Posted by Lieutenant Commander Calvin Marius (First Officer) in Bridge Main SIM First contact - all BO’s to the bridge!

“I suspect that their home world isn’t too far away. I can’t imagine a nuclear powered warp drive can do much better than warp 3.”

He sat down and rubbed his hands together, an eager glint in his left eye. “I hardly remember our last first contact. It was when I was still XO and you were the COS…” he looked at Calvin. “It feels like an eternity.”
Back then when Patricia was his Captain and he couldn’t quite imagine being stable enough to ever lead a crew and captain a ship. When he had been a free, careless and very desirable bachelor and the thought of being a father had not even entered his mind. He silently shook his head. Was that really just 8 years ago?

• Julien King, CO

“It was easy for me… just had to carry the phasers… you and Patricia did all the talking.” He chuckled. “I also suspect my role will be about the same this time too.” He looked about, “You sure you want to get the first crew up, we are still nine hours out and we don’t have any information yet.”

XO

While he spoke, Julien checked the log and also saw the com message from the other ship. Calvin had failed to report that, he frowned.
He turned slowly to Calvin and raised one eyebrow with hard glint in his left eye. He had not said he wanted them all on the bridge for the whole 9 hours… and while he valued a second opinion, he also needed his XO to trust his decisions.

“I am sure that I just gave that order Cmdr. Marius.” he said evenly.

• Julien

Calvin tilted his head. =^=Alpha Shift to the Bridge…=^= He nodded and wandered over to the science station… he would glance at the readings to see what’s going on.

Dagen listened vaguely to the banter on the bridge. He was focused on the ships. He hoped that they could complete the extraction and get away from the explosion zone safely. Sure they sounded like they had it together. The trouble was that Dagen and the others here had three centuries of experience on just how devastating a warp explosion could be. He caught himself chewing on his knuckle. He knew what he would do. There were protocols for this. As an engineer they had to do a lot of that work. How were ‘they’ doing it? What were the readings? Front he scans, did they have two hours? Things could change quickly when it came to warp imbalances. All the Dagen was thinking was of just how badly he wanted to get into those ships and check it out.
- Dagen, CE

Ben was getting anxious about the extraction. He took a deep breath to calm his nerves down. He remembered the time of Commander Marius being his department head when he first came aboard. He internally debated on speaking forward for orders. He looked over at the XO in a way to inform him that tactical was ready for anything.

Park, BO Tactical/Security

As the ship neared the doomed ship, the evacuation was over in 17 minutes. Then the Admiral’s ship moved away at warp 1.2 to double the usual safety distance for an exploding nuclear device in space. After about 30 minutes after the two vessels were detected, the Magni exploded and there was a ten minute wait before the Merry moved to the absolute safety distance and sent out several unmanned probes which acted like magnets for the radioactive particles with a half life longer than 3 months. The probes were able to remove about 94% of the targeted radioactive particles. It did not move further than a specific radius, which accounted for the 6% not collected. The cleaning up process took about 10 hours. Just as the Genesis was about 40 minutes away from the location, the Merry hailed them.

OOC: Ok, 9 hrs fast forward. Let’s assume all bridge officers have been briefed and are on the bridge right now.

=/\=This is Rear Admiral Clogtho of the Global Pallas Space Corps. Please identify yourselves. We have you on our detectors.=/\=

-GM

Marishka had been dividing her time between watching the main viewer and studying her instruments. When the comm came through she was a bit surprised but pleased they would get a first contact. She put it through.

Marishka, CIO

“All right, showtime. Lt. Marishka, do they have audio only or also visual?” he asked while he checked if his uniform was sitting straight… for the case they did have visual.

OOC: First contact protocol includes a full range of various scans, tactical, biological, defensive, offensive… pls give our GM details for what you are scanning while Julien does the talking.

• Julien King, CO

“As far as I’m aware it’s audio only sir.” Marishka said checking scans again, she didn’t like to be wrong.

-Marishka, CIO

The communications was indeed audio only. The technology the alien ship had could only allow acceptable video when they were about 600,000 kilometres away when the lag time would be just over 2 seconds.

Dagen was intrigued and just watched. The time passed quickly for him as he watched. Everything was valuable for the engineer. After a time he reported. “They were efficient in their rescue, sirs. And have been conducting a clean up of the affected area. As an observation, sir, that shows them to be sensitive to the ecology of space. You’d not see a Klingon or Romulan today cleaning up after one of their ships blew. They moved out at warp 1.2. I’m scanning now to see if that might be their top speed.” He didn’t say that them barreling in at 9.4 was likely to send jitters up their spines, ah, if they had them.

Scans showed that Warp 1.2 was their sustainable top speed, with their engines able to take about 24 hours before it started to overheat. The actual top speed which would wipe out their nuclear engines in an hour was closer to warp 1.7.

He tried to piece through the information to what was important on his information gathering …
- what kind of warp drive did they have? How close was it to the old Cochran’s that Earth had at first.

The structure of the drive they had was similar to Cochrane’s Phoenix. However, instead of using a matter-antimatter mix to create the plasma for generating the warp field, the alien ship’s engines were using a combination of nuclear fission and fusion to generate the energy to generate the warp field. To engage at higher warp speeds, a larger concentration of energy needed to be used. The nuclear fuel that the alien ship was using was not stable enough. It was able to reach warp 1.5 at best. However to break the warp 2 barrier more effectively, a more stable energy source was needed. From the look of their technology, they had not discovered the matter-antimatter way of generating energy.

• Given the explosion, what kind of power did it potentially put out

From the energy expended by the exploding ship, it was very probable that that ship was an experimental ship that was trying to break the Warp 2 barrier. They had attempted to use magnetic fields to control the unstable nuclear fuel but were not able to. The ship exploded due to the chain reaction that could not be contained when the magnetic fields they were using began to fail.

• Structurally how put together was the Rear Admiral’s ship? How many decks? What kind of defenses did it have? Did they put up shields when the other ship blew? How fast did their shuttles that they used for rescue manage?

The Rear Admiral’s ship was composed mainly by a primitive duranium alloy. It had eight decks. The ship did not have any energy weapons, only projectile weapons that were basically very powerful nuclear missiles. According to the scans, they had about 80 nuclear missiles on board. It had very primitive shields. It had a deflector that used gravitons, but it was only projected to the fore the ship. The other parts of the ship made use of magnetic fields to deflect projectile weapons. The Genesis’s phasers would probably do short work of the side magnetic shields. The graviton powered deflector shield could be rendered useless by two or three photon torpedoes. It would seem that the graviton shield used a significant amount of resources and so they were not used to shield the ship (Merry) from the explosion, they used probes to neutralise the radiation with the use of the weaker magnetic shields. A rather thick layer of lead was found within the hull of the ship to help to protect them from the nuclear radiation.

Thor, CE

OOC: Posted again because the previous post did not separate the answers from the questions. Hope this works.

-GM

Ben conducted a tactical analysis of the ship that was trying to communicate the Genesis. “Captain the ship has 80 nuclear projectile missiles. Primitive shielding. However, I am detecting a magnetic field of some sort. It’s hull is made of a duranium alloy with eight decks. Also a graviton deflector in the bow of the ship which could be compromised by a couple torpedoes Sir.”

Park, BO Tactical/Security

Tom stood on the bridge in his accustomed spot. It was out of the pickups, not that it mattered as these people we not Federation and wouldn’t know what an IntSec officer looked like.

Tom, IntSec

“Strange… there is no value to a ‘fleet’ of low warp ships… particularly ones of size and ability to rescues. Warp 2 is insufficient to a crewed investigation of universe. It would take decades to get to the nearest star system.” Marius didn’t like strange things.

“Tactical, put the secondary phaser array on counter battery fire mode.” Nukes were only dangerous to a star ship with a direct hit… he wasn’t about to let that happen.

XO

“Aye Sir. Phaser array to counter battery fire mode.... activated”. Ben pushing a few buttons “Tactical standing by for further instructions Sir”

Park