The outcome was never in question. Baron-Captain Thenroy had set his sights on a glorious battle, and insofar as a completely one-sided battle could be deemed glorious, the Rosax force was his means to achieve it. The ships on the far side of the gas giant made an escape, of course, but those nearer the Sharshana had no chance of escaping the wrath of a heavy cruiser; some of the debris went hurtling out into space, while the rest - tiny bits, for the most part - was set on the slow gravitational path of joining the planetary rings.

The Sharshana remained on station for the next two weeks as the race participants made their way through the system. Their numbers trailed off toward the end, but there were no chances being taken: there were too many involved relatives of important people for that. Only then was the Sharshana set on a course to return home - a course that involved several more jumps and therefore well over a month of travel time.

Time in which the senior officers would be expected to finalize their reports on the mission. Reports that would no doubt be subjected to the critical scrutiny of both the captain and the admiralty. No pressure...

Jacqueline tapped her pen against her cheek as she considered what she would write. The Astrogation part of her report had gone in a flash. But she hated this part of the job; making judgements on how everyone else did their jobs. It reminded her too much of her father, and his endless disapproving looks. Her mind wandred as she thought about what to say. She tapped the communications system. "Iita, what do you think happened to those rebels on Beaxon?"

"Those poor folks? I had forgotten about them!", comes the voice. "Well, the government was corrupt, and with the money they embezzled, they bought more guns... I'm afraid the government just killed their prisoners - except those they could ransom - an hour after we jumped...

At the time, I did an extensive report on the abuses committed, and sent it to the Baron, with the hopes that he transmitted it to the Duke, with the hope that the Duke would do something. That's the problem with our job: we're always moving, we can't settle in one place a long enough period to make a difference... we were lucky - well the planetary government was lucky - that we were in the place at the decisive time, and that the rebels attacked the only place that was in our jurisdiction: the starport.

Really you should leave that Beaxon part out of the report - rating the marines is not even our prerogative - and focus on our mission: test the Sharshana. Tell if it astrogates well!

I'll send you my report, thus you'll see it's more easy to focus on your domain is."

---

I'm pleased to report that the naval shipyard engineers had done a very good job getting the ship ready, upgrading its machinery and filling it with the latest technologies. Zeng shipyard chief Kaj Ayerich lived up to his reputation and is commendable, though his reputation is already spotless.

    NEWEST BC2M INTERFACE

The replacement of the M-Drive wiring module TRTL-08 X-ar with a new BC2M (Bridge Commands To Motors) interface GRYH-14 Y00 fulfilled its promises and more during the battles. The ship was more agile and responded better and quicker to the pilot's commands, for all maneuvers. Lieutenant Standarsson's report shall provide more details and his personal impressions on the interface.

Already, it is the advice of this Chief-Engineer to recommend the interface GRYH-14 Y00 to be vastly deployed and developed further - it couldn't be used at every part of the trip, for some reason the manufacturer did not share.

    F-FS

After life tests, and contrary to our initial perception, the improvements brought to the fuel-feed system did not have any significant effect. A meeting of Engineers recommended to drop the efforts in this fruitless direction (See appendix B).

    S&S INFRA

- the ship's infrastructure was sound and solid.
- extensive repairs were made - here the leadership must be praised, since the captain Baron Thenroy Reziilka understood the requests of the engineering team regarding the need to fully stop for works, and agreed to delay the voyage by two full weeks.
The captain understood the objectives of the mission and took the appropriate decisions, as expected from his position, and beyond.
- 18420 incidents tickets were opened, leading to the correction of 5435 bugs.
- generally, the infrastructure was streamlined.
- reliability improved (lots of graphs and statistics before/after here, to support the statement)

    EMERGENCY DAMAGE CONTROL

Has not really been "tested" in desperate conditions, but we have reasons to believe it seems functional. [note to self: sounds too unsure?]

    MORALE

The crew, and the Engineering Team in particular, have been supportive and attached to the ship.

The rate of equipment breakdowns and faults has fallen by 80% been divided by 5.

---

CONCLUSION

The ISS Sharshana needs another stay in the shipyard, to do the works detailed on Appendix C. After that step, it will be ready for action. The Engineering Team - provided the improvements above made - give their seal of approval for this cruiser to be actively deployed on the front lines.

-- IITA TSETSEGMA - Chief Engineer, ISS Sharshana
This message was last edited by the player at 10:48, Tue 26 Sept 2023.

Jaqueline's report would have been difficult to comprehend, dealing extensively with jump physics. She noted in particular extra half a day in jump space suffered entering Mtensic, and the lengthy jump intervals in general during the early voyage. But she concludes from the picture-perfect Taomina jump that the ship was not suffering any specific flaws to its jump drive, and also commended the crew on their fine work with the refueling system, which also appeared to function without issues. She gave the assistant astrogator a strong recommendation. Actually, she didn't like him very much, but she knew that was not because he was bad at his job but because his presence was an intrusion on the isolated world of perfect mathematics in which she liked to calculate her are. It was an adequate report, but... "The only people who will pay attention to this report except the Jump Space mathematics wizards like me. I... I don't know, I feel like I should say something important. I've seen so much of the sector, it seems wrong to leave it with just a few remarks on multi-dimensional calculations." It was rather unlike her, as Jaqueline avoided attention. "Well, I guess it's hard for Lady Jaqueline to remember she's just a regular person in the Navy."