Figuring Things Out

Posted on 27 Jun 2018 @ 6:24pm by
Edited on 01 Jul 2018 @ 2:12pm

988 words; about a 5 minute read

It was the first evening back on the ship, while the captain had given them their orders and they were going to be underway in the morning. Nicci sat on the floor of her quarters, clad only in pyjama shorts and a small tank top that had her almost hanging out of it due to the size of her bust. She ignored it as she was concentrating more on the explosion of LEGO bricks all around her. She was sitting in the middle of a mass of plastic bricks. As she worked with the toys, she recorded her personal log on the computer.

It helped her think. She took a 4x2 brick and attached it to the walls on her flat panel, completing a mini engineering for her LEGO figures, as she jiggled a little without her brassiere. Her mind went blank while she finished putting the little clear red disks together to finish making the top of the warp core, and stuck a little silver 'crystal' in the little-hinged box, acting like dilithium.

"Personal log, whatever today's stardate is," she said in a louder voice than she used to talk to herself. She'd edit the log later to remove extraneous remarks. "We're about to leave the starbase, and most repairs are finished. But you never know what they're going to do with the ship when you trust starbase techs to fix to a spec."

"There you go," she said, with a smile, placing it right in the middle of the model engineering deck. Right in front, there was a little curved black railing, with a little computer panel on it, like some Starfleet ships had. She put an engineering LEGO figure in front of the panel to 'monitor' the core. She then hooked up the 'plasma transfer conduits' from the core, blue clear plastic tubes she connected to the core and the wall.

"They don't know what each ship goes through," she continued. "Each ship is unique, like each member of its crew. What works on one might work on the rest of the class, like one German and ten Germans, or one Canadian and ten Canadians, but each ship is its own thing."

On another plastic panel, she put two half hemispheres together and put the finishing touches on her model of the Bussard monitoring room that the Galaxy and a few other modern ships had in their warp engines to monitor intake of interstellar hydrogen.

"Maybe we should treat each ship like an individual," she said to the log recorder. "Tweak each fix to each individual ship."

"But why are the PTCs here," she said, pointing to the back of the model LEGO room, "going through three junctions and five computer banks when we need two and four?"

She lifted the model of the room and looked at the back area. "We already have the backup and secondary backup..." she said aloud to no one else in the room, "...but it's that final bit there...everything's clean with the power until there. PTCs run better on a clean, uniform waveform but something in there's gotta be messing with it..."

She looked and she got it. Everything clicked. Nicci stood up and carefully walked out of the circle of LEGOs, and picked up an engineering kit she kept in her quarters with a few extra tools she had adjusted herself.

She walked out of her quarters, walking briskly, and the few crews walking the corridors stared a little longer than usual since she was in her pyjamas, and they didn't leave much to the imagination, and she was quite well equipped, shall we say.

It took a few minutes but Nicci made her way up to the port nacelle Bussard room, which was only remotely monitored after 2200 hours from engineering. She climbed up a ladder and saw a PO3 staring up at her from under the catwalk. He had quite a view.

"Petty Officer...stop staring up my shirt," she said, looking down.

"Yes ma'am!" he said, giving a smart salute, as he quickly walked away, embarrassed.

She walked over to the corner of the room, where the Bussard system flowed into the first, then second, then the third system. But she traced the flow to the final portion, and she pointed to it.

"Gotcha!" she said with a smile. She broke out her kit and started making modifications. It took a good fifteen minutes, removing an isolinear chip or two, editing a few kiloquads of code in her own handheld PADD, then putting it back into the isolinear bank. She then shunted a few power connections and clamped in a small box across the small PTCs there, then reestablished the connections. When they booted back up, her little modification worked like a charm. The power was clean and the waveform was practically perfect.

"Now to fix the other side," she said as she hustled down the ladder. She caught the Petty Officer's eyes quickly looking back at his station.

"You're lucky it's late and I'm in a hurry," she said only a little playfully. "Don't go checking out your superior officers."

After she finished with the starboard side of the ship's Bussard collectors, she walked to the upper area of the main engineering and finished doing a diagnostic.

"Plasma Transfer Conduit waveforms are within .0025% of specification. Alterations improved efficiency; usage lifetime improved by 5.9%," reported the PADD she used, which had a voice resembling that of a predecessor AI to the computers used by Federation ships called "Cortana." Nicci liked it better so her PADD used that voice over the standard.

"Heck yeah," Nicci said, pumping her fist in celebration. "Now, to finish my LEGO bridge," she said as she proceeded to walk back to the turbolift, clad in her version of pyjamas. She mused to herself. "Maybe I'll fix the captain's chair next," she said with a chuckle, that came out more like a giggle.

 

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