Posted by Captain Jonathan McBride (CO, USS Centurion) in USS Centurion- Putting Us Through Our Paces

Posted by Lieutenant Commander Tiberius Cattaneo (Chief of Star Fleet Security) in USS Centurion- Putting Us Through Our Paces

Posted by Captain Jonathan McBride (CO, USS Centurion) in USS Centurion- Putting Us Through Our Paces

(snip)

A distress call couldn’t be that bad. But then again, he’d thought kind of the same thing about a mysterious message from a distant contact in deep space. Please tell me that this is just a simple emergency, he begged silently to whatever deity might be listening. Meanwhile he reached down and tapped the armchair controls and tapped out a message to send with priority to Captain McBride.

=^=PICKING UP DISTRESS CALL. UPDATES TO FOLLOW.=^=

Lt Cmdr Woods, CSFSO

||This is a gen- … -tress call. … crash … five moons. We’re… los- life support. Archie not.... well. I repeat… this… a general… call.||

Woods frowned. “Baker, see if you can clean that up, and get us any carrier data on the source.”

“Aye, Sir,” Baker replied automatically. He was already working on it. Filtering static and trying to get the sensors to pick up details from the ship and hone in on the exact frequency of the signal and boost power to the comm relays.

NE Baker

A few moments later, McBride stepped out onto the bridge. “Report.”

Captain McBride, Starfleet CO

Mark stood to vacate the chair. “Distress call. The transmission is broken and garbled. Seeing if we can clean it up. From what I could hear, it sounds like they crashed somewhere nearby, potentially around a celestial body with five moons. I am having NE Baker try to clean it up, and see if they were transmitting transponder data.” He paused for half a second. “I can check star charts in the meantime,” he offered.

Lt Cmdr Woods, CSFSO

McBride nodded. “Please do.”

Baker’s efforts seemed to help as the message replayed, though there was still a fair bit of interference and they would have to strain to hear the words clearly, though most were now audible. ||This is a general distress call. Our small research vessel crashed at a gas giant with five moons in the Yalk-… We’re stuck… losing life support. Archie has a head wound and is not well well. I repeat, this is the Research Vessel Sutaane and this is a general distress call.||

Of the systems nearest to them, two had a gas giant with multiple moons: The Iirroun System and the Yalkrin System.

Markus listened to the message even as he started pulling info from the latest survey data. The partial transmission narrowed it down fast, with the Yalkrin system seeming to be the winner from context clues. “Looks like Yalkrin is the system.” He frowned, pulling up what data was available on the gas giant. - Mass, gravity, orbital period, rotational period, atmospheric composition, atmospheric pressure, anything they had on it’s system of moons, and of course distance. He fed the star map onto the view screen to give them a God’s-Eye view of their potential destination while starting to crunch some numbers in his head.

Fingers dancing over the displays he focused the sensor arrays toward the system and widened the bandwidth to see if he could pick up anything beyond background cosmic radiation.

Lt Cmdr Woods, CSFSO

McBride frowned. “Civilian ship?” he asked, looking over to Cattaneo.

Captain McBride, CO

Tiberius saw the glance from Captain McBride and went ahead and began the scan of the ship. He expected the result to return to be a civilian ship but you never knew. Sometimes, enemies were known to request help being a “civilian ship” but not actually being that. He continued to look at the display until the results of the scan confirmed or denied the ship being a civilian ship.

Lt Cmdr Cattaneo
COS

Baker kept working at the signal even though they had a good deal more to work with now. “Captain, do you wish me to try and connect with them or send a reply?”

NE Baker, comms

“Yes, send a reply and tell them we’re on their way. If you can get a response, so much the better,” McBride said.

Baker wasted no time. =/\=Research Vessel Sutaane this is the Federation ship USS Centurion. Do you copy? We are enroute to your location. Respond Please.=/\=

NE Baker, Comms

The Suutane came back registered as a civilian research ship that was more or less a kitted out runabout that was registered with the Federation Science Council and conducted small independent research projects. It was listed as being under the command of Leeann Drayman and usually had 2-4 people aboard in total. In addition to an advanced sensor suite, the ship had metaphasic shielding.

The Yalkrin System was a small, uninhabited system 2.6 ly from Oed with four planets orbiting a Class A star:

Planet	Type	Distance	Other Notes
Yalkrin I	Class B	0.8 AUs
Yalkrin II	Class N	4 AUs
Yalkrin III	Class J	6 AUs	5 satellites
Yalkrin IV	Class C	11 AUs	Planetoid

The current hypothesis for the large distance between Yalkrin I and II is that there was once another planet there that was knocked out of the system.

Yalkrin III, the gas giant, was about the size of Saturn at 102 ,000 km in diameter. Its metallic core was surrounded by hydrogen (89%) and helium (11%) and with a density lower than water, a surface pressure of 140 kPa, and was 95 times the mass of Earth. It had a magnetosphere slightly less than Earth’s. It’s solar year was roughly 6989 Earth days and it’s rotational period was 16 hours.

It had 5 moons, none of which had an atmosphere and were basically all large rocks:
Moon A: 1.2 day orbit- 286 km in diameter
Moon B: 5.7 day orbit- 1,123 km in diameter
Moon C: 22 day orbit- 4,905 km in diameter
Moon D: 43 day orbit- 1756 km in diameter

“Helm, alter our course for the Yalkrin System. Warp 9.5 as long as we can sustain and then drop us to Warp 8,” McBride ordered. “What would our ETA be?”

The helm took a moment to work it out and looked over their shoulder. “Just over 10 hours, Captain. Changing course and speed.”

Jonathan nodded before opening a comm line. =/\=Bridge to Engineering. We’re responding to a distress call and we’re going to push the engines as long as we can, then drop to Warp 8. Helm says it’ll take us 10 hours. Let me know if that number can improve.=/\=

=/\=Bridge to Sickbay. We’re responding to a distress call. You’ve got about 10 hours before we reach the system. Crashed research vessel. More details to come.=/\=

OOC: Planet classifications can be found here, if you’re interested: https://www.star-fleet.com/library/bookshelf/rm/misc-planetclassification.html

Captain McBride, Starfleet CO