Deck 24 - Main Engineering

As you enter main engineering from the main passageway, you come to the 'Pool Table' where Master Systems Monitor, Warp Propulsion System console and Impulse Propulsion System consoles are monitored by engineering staff.  Moving back through the department, off to the left there is the Chief Engineer's station occupying a smallish keyhole carved out of the bulkhead.

The rear of Main Engineering is dominated by the glowing warp engine dilithium chamber and main engineering computer stack.  These massive structures emerge from the deck below main engineering and extend into the deck above, upper and lower sections are accessible by ladder access to a mezzanine.

Engineers can also access Environmental Systems on deck 25 by coming down from Main Engineering through ladder access around the dilithium chamber.

Everything seemed to be working ok after the major refit, but Norn still had years of engineering logs to go through. A good engineer needed to know every modification that had been made to this ship over time to know what the lifecycles of his components were.

Lt(jg). Norn would be spending a lot of his time here, monitoring everything that could possibly go wrong, and going over the history of modifications and any changes to the ship's systems that had ever been initiated.

Annoyingly, he also had a lot of staff to play catch up with on, and most petty officers in his department were significantly older and more experienced than he was. While Norn respected their experience, he was the chief, and it was going to be an uphill climb to get their respect and organize them.

With the ship in repair dock, engineering is remarkably quiet, the telltale pulsating hum of the engines is quiet and low vibrations of inertial dampers are both absent. Only the hum of power generation systems breaks the silence until words from a conversation between two of the crew over by the 'pool table' can be heard over the dull hum.

Sounds like there is some trouble with power transference again. It's causing power loss in the main computer trunk lines.

"Overall impact is a nominal loss in processing capacity." says on of the engineers, running through diagnostics at her workstation. "Hovering between five and eight percent right now but logs show it spiking as high as twelve. It's manageable for normal operations, but might cause a problem in auxiliary systems if they need the deflector dish or stellar cartography if they need to run any complex simulations."

"Of course it is. If we could, I'd be tempted to hot run the tactical systems and just burn out all the old transfers that are compromised. Alas, I suspect powering up a warp drive in dock and adding a month to our launch time is a flawed strategy from a safety perspective.

Note and log to the yardies.

Let's see. If it takes 5 minutes to search 30 meters of decking.... take the radius and multiply by pi... square it and multiply by Alden's number, divided by the number of the assignable crew...carry the 4.. and it'll only take our crew 10 years to find all the near-faults, and about a year for the yardies!"

Norn smiled as he considered some strategies.


"We'll begin Run a level 3 diagnostic. It probably won't find anything, but it'll look like we're doing our jobs and we might as well do this in dry dock when we have the gear.

I'm going to schedule a major project that we'll get going underway: manual checking of the wiring as we get underway. This will be a tertiary duty, to be done after regular duties. The time involved will be immense, but every faulty system we rewire will slowly get us back to proper functioning. The more we find in the dock, the more spares we'll have when we launch.

In the meantime, I'm going to recommend we use the time-honoured engineering tradition of a "kludge".  We can probably integrate additional power interruption units and some additional localized slave processors to pick up the slack. I'll inform the science officer of the problem and ask if they are interested... once we launch.


The yard chief would never sign off on that kind of weird solution in the dock, of course.

You almost expect the Crewman to begin grumbling about the loss of free time during non-duty hours, but despite all of the other problems, the crew in main engineering has always stayed exceedingly professional.  As he wanders off to check on the power fluctuation impact on the main computer stack, you realize that Ensign Belaxea Tradin may be a different matter...

Issue Orders 16:55, Today: Starfleet, on behalf of Lieutenant(jg) Sirin Norn, rolled 9 using 2d6 ((5,4)). weak success

...she begins reviewing the engineer staff's duty rosters to conduct the search and reroute power through power interrupters, "This will eat a lot of time. Free time for the crew..."

Choose:

Option 1:

"I guess they will just have to remember who is in charge around here and get used to it." she says matter-of-factly.

Take -1 forward the next time you Issue Orders

...or...

Option 2:

"Whoever puts this plan into action will get a pretty favorable quarterly review." the ambitious Bolian offers, "Perhaps it would be best for you to delegate this to me, Chief. I can bear the ill feelings of the crew if it means an early promotion."

You owe Ensign Tardin a favor.

"That is exactly the kind of attitude I like to see, Ensign Tardin.

I'll make sure this is recorded on your next performance review."

Well, assuming she didn't screw it up.


"My suggestions are to team old and new crew members and don't try and grab warrant officers or higher, at least for the next few weeks.

As per regulations, make sure everyone gets one day in seven off and 12 hours between shifts as a minimum.

I'll write up the formal orders tonight.


He thought about it for a moment and decided not to give any additional instructions. Honestly, this was something that was going to have to be done for the safety of the ship, but it was going to take literal years before it was completed, so he didn't view it as being incredibly important.

Plus, it was a good learning opportunity for the Ensign, to see how she handled people.

-----> to Shuttlebay

The comm units for Engineering staff beeped:

"Captain to Engineering. As of this moment your priority is to get Sickbay on emergency power and then work on getting them full power and working biobeds. Captain, out."

Norn jogged into Engineering.

This was getting ridiculous. Some part of him was half-convinced he was on some holodeck, running some screwed-up version of the Koyabashi Maru. What ship had ever had so many things go so badly after launch?

The Yamamoto probably, but at least they had the excuse of an ancient alien race's tech messing with their systems. This was actual sabotage... installed from a Federation starbase of all things.

He commed science. Lt. Commander Thatyil? This is Lt. Norn at Engienering. I am examining the data on the worm program now and will attempt to work on an acceptable way to purge our systems.

In reply to Lieutenant(jg) Sirin Norn (msg # 9):

"I see what you mean Sir," replies Crewman Laillalos over the networked array of workstations. "My review of the central computer confirms that Maxwell's access codes were removed according to security policy. It seems like the worm allows a local over-ride but fortunately it isn't system wide."

(Copied from Main Bridge)

“Very good Lieutenant“ Iren levellly replies to Norn.  “Do you believe that you can solve the problems within nine hours?  We have a developIng situation.”

"Hmmm.. I believe so, but I'll need to dissect the worm code first before I can give a definitive answer that will get rid of the worm permanently."

</orange> Ok, what do I roll to activate Starfleet Antivirus.sys? Have I tried turning it off and on? <Orange>
This message was lightly edited by the player at 21:53, Thu 31 Mar 2022.

Original post on Main Bridge

Iren’s voice comes over the comm system.  “Mr Norn, please meet us in the Auxiliary Bridge where we will combine our efforts against the computer sabotage.”