[] "Captain will do." You threw away your old name, and you don't need a new one. Your identity to your crew is The Captain. [Winning on tiebreaker]
[] Have her familiarize herself with the computer systems and optimize them if she can.
[] Read the documentation for the ship.
A/N: Sorry about the amount of exposition. You did select the info dump option.
You look at the door the Kirikou had just vanished through, worried he might need a hand. He didn't ask for any help though, so maybe you should just trust him.
Right. He is the chosen mechanic of the best pirate who ever lived! No use doubting yourself. You had doubted your ability to take the job exam with a cold, and had taken cold medicine. You had doubted the medicine's efficacy, and so took more of it. And in the end that had all resulted in you becoming a pirate. Where were you going with this again?
You give yourself a shake to recenter yourself, only to find Sarah still on the bridge, staring at you. Part of you wonders if she just tries to be unnerving on purpose, while another part of you wonders if she is even human.
"Ah, Ms. Wells, please familiarize yourself with the ship's computer systems, set them up, optimize them and such while our mechanic is making repairs," you command, as you start bringing up your own console.
"You're not having me help with the repairs?" she asks, tilting her head quizzically. You frown for a moment, before you realize she's referring to your earlier comment on her working with Kirikou.
"Nah. I was just messing with you," you say as you return to fiddling with your console. You know there has to be a user's manual or some information on your new ship somewhere. Sure, most of the controls were pretty obvious, but you didn't want to miss anything special or cool. You realize that Sarah never replied, and when you glance up there's no sign of her. You hadn't heard her leave, but you don't really pay it any mind.
You find the ship's documentation a few minutes later, and you begin to read the overview. The Icarus was proposed as both a test-bed as well as an exploratory ship, meant to use it's superior drive to experimentally prove the math behind it, as well as investigate systems deemed too perilous or any other number of scientific endeavors.
The ship was relatively small, about the size of a Human Defense Force Frigate, built for a crew between 3-6 members, depending on the mission parameters. It had a small internal cargo bay, which could double as additional space for missions which required a larger science team. There were mentions about zero-g beds and other luxuries which were all crossed out and labeled "funding denied."
There were three separate, but small living quarters, and a small mess hall/dining/lounge area on the lower level, with an attached refrigerated storage room for food supplies.
You continue scrolling through, and see there was supposed to be laser canons installed, chaff dispensers, and even a missile launcher to supposedly deliver torpedoes with a "scientific" payload. The funding for all of these were all denied, which hardly surprised you. Space was pretty safe in human territory, so why would a science vessel need lasers?
Though, that might change once you got going.
The original design called for five dark energy inertia-less drives, but funding was only approved for two. They only worked in a gravity well, and generally were only used to get a ship clear of a planet so it could just use its jump drive. Since the entire point of the Icarus was to use a jump drive in a gravity well, five did seem a bit wasteful. Though, your escape would have been a lot easier if the Icarus wasn't almost as slow as a hover car.
Surprisingly, you find that funding was approved for two reaction-engines for emergency maneuvering, but you can't help but laugh when you see the funding for the fuel was denied. It seems to perfectly highlight the malaise that has seeped into human society. Things are done because they seem like the thing to do, without consideration as to their actual effectiveness.
Long term power is provided by two large flywheel banks in the rear of the ship, which are automatically charged after every jump. Nestled between them is the real reason the Icarus is so ground-breaking. A custom, state of the art jump drive that somehow managed to jump from deep inside a gravity well. Reading between the lines of science gobbly-gook, it accomplished this by some sort of...slow jump. The jump energy that was produced and needed to be stored increased dramatically as gravity increased, getting to a point where it wouldn't just flow into supercapacitors, but into other ship components, or the air, or crew members. Best case scenario is a gutted ship with all hands lost. Worst case the ship would arrive at it's destination only to catastrophically explode.
The Icarus had some way around it though. It started absorbing jump energy
before the change in location, and used this energy to externalize the vast majority of this energy to the space surrounding it's initial location, though it still resulted in a lot more energy than normally expected in the inside of the ship. A ship of the Icarus's size normally carried only half-a-dozen or so supercapacitor banks. Instead, the Icarus's original design specifications called for
thirty two, which explained why the living quarters and cargo space was so small.
They were split into a ventral and dorsal bank, each of which would consist of two rings. The inner ring of three capacitors would absorb the pre-jump energy, while the outer ring of 13 super capacitors would absorb the rest. Each node then dumped it's energy into four "wings," which would concentrate the energy into a torus, for eight wings and two halos of energy, bracketing the ship.
Normally, a ship wants to maximize it's surface area to radiate as much energy as fast as possible. Depending on the configuration, most ships radiate the energy in thirty minutes for the smallest, fastest courier vessels, or up to two hours for a cargo hauler without it's radiators extended. Concentrating the energy would be counter-productive...but the Icarus's second ground-breaking design, you realize, is pretty much undocumented. There's a section detailing normal radiators which was approved for funding, but the section detailing the wings has no such approval.
Your best guess, from your advanced physics class in high school, is that they're upscale matter creation rings, often used in physics experiments. The energy is converted to matter, which then absorbs even more energy, and then is expelled from the ring of energy. Normally though they take support equipment the size of a desk to create a ring six-inches across, exactly how your former employer managed to get them form at such relatively immense sizes is beyond you, and beyond what the documentation reveals.
It does detail their capabilities, however. With more capacitors the efficiency of the rings increase, able to radiate a jump's energy in a projected
ten minutes with a full set. The estimate for your current number of capacitors isn't included, but it was about thirty minutes as best you can remember, long enough that you didn't realize just how fast your ship could potentially be. Also, a schematic is included to reproduce a wing, so you should be able to repair them if they are lost...though you will not be able to perform any modifications until someone is able to figure out exactly what the equipment is actually doing...
Having gotten through the overview, you start reading through the detailed specifications, the explanations of the internal wiring, and how the computers hook together (everything is run through the Captain's command console), and other, boring, detailed things.
It's not your fault that you fell asleep. You had a long day. Anyone would fall asleep!
Still, you wake up with more than a little annoyance at yourself, having fallen asleep in the captain's chair. Someone draped a blanket from somewhere over you while you slept, to your surprise and mild embarrassment, though when you look around, no one is in sight. After a moment checking how long you slept (about nine hours) you force yourself to stand with a groan, muscles stiff from not having the good sense to sleep in a bed.
You're first order of business is to head down to the living area to freshen up a little bit, glancing in each of the crew quarters, finding them all empty. You continue your search, heading up to the cargo area, which is empty except for Sarah's suitcase. You head back into the engineering section and you finally hear evidence of the others. You climb up into the dorsal capacitor room, to find Kirikou sealing up one of the capacitor's casings. He's rolled up the sleeves of his button up shirt, and there are a few grease stains on his hands, but otherwise he looks just as clean-cut as when you first met.
"Good morning, Captain," he says with a wave, "Pretty much finished up. The safeties that are supposed to disconnect failed capacitors didn't kick in, so every time we jumped we kept losing more. I managed to patch a few of them back up to working order, but four of them are lost causes. I just finished moving this one from the ventral node, to balance things out."
Huh, that was faster than you thought. Did he work through the night?
"I didn't think a capacitor or two made much difference since the two wing systems are coupled together," you say, glad you now know enough about your own ship to not just nod at everything Kirikou says.
"Ah, it doesn't. I just thought it was neater, and I needed to kill a bit of time until you woke up," he says with a shrug, "We have 22 capacitors left, but I don't know if we need more or what. There's space for-"
"Thirty two, yes, I was reading up on the documentation last night. What caused the original failure?" you say quickly. You're not embarrassed that you were sleeping while he was hard at work, nor are you wondering if he was the one who covered you with the blanket. So you're certainly not trying to cover any embarrassment up.
Kirikou shakes his head disapprovingly, "The supercapacitors we have don't all match. Nineteen of them look like standard stuff, three of them are an older model, one is a top of the line, all the bells and whistles type, and three of them look like they were kludged together from spare parts. Now, I'm just speculating here, but it looks like there was an instability between the top of the line capacitor and one of the cobbled together ones, which caused both of them to fail. When we jumped the next two times it caused the failure to cascade. We lost another of the crap ones, and one of the older models. There is still some potential for instability between the different types, but I figured you can decide what to do about that later."
[] Disconnect the one built out of spare parts. (21 Capacitors remain)
[] Disconnect the older models. (19 Capacitors remain)
[] Disconnect all but the standard types. (18 Capacitor's remain)
[] If they're all working, might as well use them all. (22 Capacitors remain)
"Sure, you're the Captain," he says with a wink, "I think I'm going to grab another nap soon, though."
A beep from the control console, draws your attention. You open it up to find the background has been changed from the default blue to a picture of a provocatively posed anime character in a red and white striped bikini, with long red hair. It takes you only a moment to realize how she superficially looks a lot like you, just as a message box pops up covering the background. You don't even try to suppress your irritation as you read.
|
Hello, Captain! I have finished integrating myself into the ship, and it is fully optimized. You should tell Kirikou to lighten up a bit. He refused to tell me if he even liked the new background! Since that didn't take me very long, I also poked around the net a bit and found us something interesting. Since Mr. Grumpy Mechanic was complaining about needing a shipyard, I found him one. There's a military shipyard that is nearing completion in this very solar system! The Yutani Corporation has finished most of the construction, and just has a small tech team finishing things up, while the military wont take formal possession until next month, so there's only a skeleton crew on board right now. A dozen tops. More personnel and supplies are being shipped to it near the end of the month, but if we go right now we should have plenty of time to do whatever we want! I know a dozen people sounds daunting, but you're a host unto yourself! Let me know what you decide for our next target, but I really think we should hit the shipyard while the going's good!
|
The first thing that strikes you is that she is surprisingly expressive in text, considering her near complete lack of affect in person. The second is that she has to be messing with you, but you're not sure which parts are jokes and which parts are true. If any of it is true. Kirikou admits a shipyard would be nice, and that placing them on the system's outer limits is normal, but he's not shy about his distrust of Sarah. And when asked about the background, he insists he hadn't noticed.
What do you pick as your next target?
[] The Shipyard (2 day travel time)
[] Look for a ship in the space around New Haven
[] Raid a location on New Haven
-[] What do you want to achieve?
[] Look for a ship in the space around Rura Penthe (1 day travel time)
[] Raid a location on Rura Penthe (1 day travel time)
-[] What do you want to achieve?
New Haven is your home planet, Rura Penthe is the second habitable world in the system, currently being terraformed.
If there is travel time, what things do you work on? (You can pick as many as you like, but the more you do the less time for each thing)
[] Take care of Kirikou's internship paperwork.
[] Try to find where Sarah is hiding.
[] Try to "de-optimize" the computer system a bit.
[] Set up one of the crew quarters for your own use.
[] Help Kirikou fix some of the impact damage on the outside of the ship (Requires an EVA)
[] Get some practice in with your weapons
[] Socialize with Kirikou
[]
Socialize Text with Sarah.
[] Write-in
