Scanning for efficiency

Posted on Mon Nov 23rd, 2015 @ 8:30am by Captain Charybdis MacGregor

0 words; about a 1 minute read

Mission: Taking Chances
Location: USS Bonne Chance, Deck fourteen, Main Engineering
Timeline: 2265
Tags: bonnechance,Suval

In order to do her job, Charybdis had to find a way to work with the Chief Science Office... or simply transfer to another department. She was a science officer first and foremost, and she would definitely prefer to stay in that capacity. But in order to do that she had to learn to work with Lt. Suval, the hardline Kolinahr traditionalist. And to do that, she had to conform to his expectations, at least externally.

The one thing that did jibe with her goals, at least, was the fact that he actually expected her to work, not just to monitor the science station readings and the various telemetries from the long-range sensors, the lateral arrays and the navigational sensors to file reports. Because she very much intended to do that, and far more.

She had begun by reviewing the logs for the past three months, of which Suval had been aboard only two weeks longer than herself, she discovered. It was clear that for the most part up until now, the science department appeared to be doing only what was required of them and nothing more. Thus none of the sensors had been recalibrated due to activity or specific scan configurations, nor had any of the equipment been inspected. Said maintenance was not required more than once a year, and that anniversary was seven months out... seven months, five days, thirty-seven minutes and seventeen seconds, to be precise.

Charybdis shook her head and growled. She hated that... the obsessive calculation of timed events to the second, that immediate need to know the figures for any calculation at hand. Ideally it was the need to be the first one with the answer, she supposed, but it all came down to being forced to run an endless series of calculations through your mind just in case anyone ever possibly wanted the answer. Otherwise you risked scorn... cold, logical scorn, but for an emotionless people they certainly had a negative range of which they were quite fond. Or joy of joys they got it wrong! Then you got the chance to prove how much smarter you were by correcting them, ideally in a smug and condescending tone that was so passive aggressive it made her stomach churn.

It was one of the elements of the culture that she found particularly repugnant. It hearkened back to her lonely and frightening return to Vulcan in the Shek-Hinah, and her endless 'conversations' with Sebel as he walked her around and around the same questions over and over, examining them from every conceivable angle. He had always claimed that there was no right answer, only the truth, and that his questions were not an interrogation, but simple logic. She had beaten him at his game and succeeded to gain her freedom, but it had not been without a price. She still found herself running those calculations whenever Vulcans were present, with ever increasing frequency. She hated it, and that made her hate herself for doing it.

Vulcan had left its mark on her. And the habits Sebel had instilled refused to be ignored forever; his 'kind instruction', as he had always referred to it.

But the Bonne Chance had been through an ion storm, taken readings from a supernova, passed through two nebulas and been in at least one skirmish in that time, and no one had bothered to recalibrate the sensors, recheck the alignments or inspect the hardware... simply because no one had ordered them to do it.

Thus 0400 hours found Charybdis in engineering, unsuccessfully attempting to locate an engineer. Seeing that no one appeared to be on duty, she noted it in her log, used the computer to determine the access points, schematics and technical specifications for the equipment, copied the relevant tapes to her pdd... and she went to work.

The sensors housed in a series of eight instrument bays directly behind the main deflector were the long range sensors; to calibrate them properly required following the protocols. The first relay was on the starboard side of the ship at the Deck 17 level- easy enough to access. It housed one component of the wide-angle active EM scanner, as did all eight of the instrument bays; this was the primary circuit, the first in the firing sequence of the long-range scanners. Part of the job was to set all eight of the wide-angle active EM scanners to cycle in synch with one another, thus they had to be reset back to standard before they could be fine tune calibrated.

The next bay held the narrow-angle active EM scanner, which was reasonably easy to access... a gangway led to the access panel, and once inside the instrument bay was reasonably roomy, if a bit static-filled. Little nips of static electricity tended to leap from spot to spot, and until she realized how to ground herself out to neutralize them she was growing rather irritated with the procedure... but lesson learned, she informed the bridge that she was taking it offline while she set the narrow-angle scanner to cycle its maintenance software and perform a level 3 diagnostic. That would take nineteen hours to run in its entirety... sixteen hours, twelve minuets, seventeen seconds, she realized through gritted teeth. She could come back and check on it when it completed the cycle, she reasoned.

The third bay was at the 'top of the clock' as it were, and it required some climbing and positioning to access it. She strapped on a safety harness so that she could clip herself to the handholds while she worked, and it would give her the opportunity to work hands-free on the circuitry and focusing apparatus for the 2 meter diameter gamma ray telescope that projected from the front of the deflector dish. She shook her head... it was giving inaccurate measurements that could cause serious miscalculations in mapping astrocartography, plus it was currently set to operate solely in low resolution mode, to conserve energy and maintenance.

Charybdis noted a recommendation in the science log that scheduled maintenance and realignment of the gamma ray telescope should be changed to monthly at the outside, with extended duty astrocartography missions requiring it on a daily basis. There was very little wear in the lenses and emitters in the telescope- as it had been only used at low resolution it was practically brand new, which she also logged into her report.

It was at this point, dangling above Engineering at the aft-most bulkhead that she finally found engineers. They had begun to gather below her, making small talk up at her and asking if they could help. Most did not particularly seem to want to actually help- as soon as she started asking them to fetch tools or run diagnostics for her, they seemed to find something else to do. They did seem interested in looking up while she was working above them, that much was certain.

She somehow was unsurprised by this, as she had resorted to using a powered winch attached to the harness to keep her able to work with the control panels in Engineering, change out tools and contact the bridge to coordinate efforts with her alignments. As the whine of the winch indicated her arrival or departure she noticed the Engineering crew taking note, and she showed off a bit by working upside down as well as winching down, braking quickly, then zipping back up after grabbing what she needed.

That stopped when she hit her head on one of the bulkheads winching back up while grinning at a crewman. It was a solid enough impact to leave her seeing stars for a moment, and while she did delight in the attention, she had work to do. Showing off would have to wait for another time. She traded in her depleted tricorder battery for a fresh one, placed the old one on the charger and pressed on.

The fourth bay held the variable frequency EM flux sensor. It was not nearly as sensitive as the gamma telescope, and between it and the fourth in sequence of the wide-angle active EM scanner (which she was definitely getting the rhythm for calibrating now) she was done in a few moments, which surprised her. The EM flux sensor's diagnostic subroutine took such a short time that she decided to do a level three diagnostic on it while she worked on the wide-angle EM scanner, only to realize that the sensor just was not that complex. This prompted her to note in her log that it would be a good training exercise for inexperienced crewmen needing to learn how to properly calibrate.

The irony of the fact that she herself was an inexperienced crewman teaching herself how to manually calibrate the sensors was completely lost on her.

An ensign who seemed particularly enamored of her had strolled up for the third time in... however long she had been at this. She had lost track of the time, and frankly didn't care. As he once again tried to make small talk with her while staring up her skirt, she decided that she had endured enough inanity from one horny engineer, and she 'accidentally' dropped a spanner on his head. It did not knock him out, but his shipmates took him to Sickbay, and out of her hair.

What WAS that thing in Sickbay, anyway? All tentacles and eyestalks and oozing... who let that creature on a Federation starship? Was it part of the crew? She didn't know, but she certainly hoped not.

The fifth bay marked her halfway point, and she stretched and unkinked her muscles now that she was back on Deck 17 level once more, taking the time to restore her circulation while checking her readings. She yawned, surprising herself... she had slept sufficiently the night before, so the sign of fatigue surprised her. She had long since become engrossed in her work and hadn't been paying attention to her surroundings, consumed by the technical readouts of the tasks she was performing. As she stood bent at the waist, instinct caused her to pick her head up to look around, then suddenly a half dozen humans in red shirts she hadn't seen in this area previously found somewhere else to look.

Except for one who kept staring until his shipmate poked him and, jolted from his reverie, shook his head and muttered "I gotta transfer to Science..."

The lifeform analysis instrument cluster was a powerful piece of machinery, and she once again had to contact the Bridge to get permission to take it offline as she once again traded out tricorder batteries. Otherwise someone might activate it while she was inside it, and her own biosigns would wreak untold havoc on the delicate sensor. She calibrated it, which took... a long time. If a random Vulcan wanted to ask her the amount of time they would get to have their smug moment, because she had completely lost track of time at this point. She had to take a break halfway through the job to climb back up to the the narrow-angle active EM scanner in bay 2, because she heard the diagnostic finish and she needed to restart it.

She then ran a test, sweeping the ship for lifeforms and observing the readings, then matching the readings against the crew manifest. She did not recognize a number of the readings, with her sparse xenobiological knowledge, but the numbers and the readings matched to previous readings, so she was reasonably satisfied and forwarded them to the Bridge science station for analysis. She pointed out that she was unsure if the readings were accurate in the log and moved on, the wide-angle EM scanner calibration now like a fun chore she saved for last, timing herself to see how quickly she could manage that task.

She climbed down into the tube of the sixth bay to find most of it empty, with only the W-AEM and a small scientific package that apparently comprised the parametric subspace field stress sensor. As small as it was she assumed that it would be an easy job... and she was sadly mistaken. As she finished, the diagnostic that she had started on the lifeform analysis instrument cluster completed, and she rebooted it as well, informing the bridge once more that the relevant systems were now back online. She asked that diagnostics be run on the bridge control instrumentation as well to insure proper communication and functioning, then winched herself down into bay seven.

Charybdis noted that whomever had laid out the scanner scheme had left the sixth bay as the one that carried the majority of the open pallets for experiments, which was highly inefficient to her mind. If it were the fifth bay, it would be at engineering deck level, and would be far more accessible than down in the shaft of bay six. Also less likely to incur damage during installation or removal.

The gravimetric distortion scanner, the passive neutrino imaging scanner and the W-AEM were designed to be accessed from above, but by someone aligned with the ship's artificial gravity. Charybdis was starting to get tired... she caught herself yawning often now, so to keep the blood flowing she wrapped the safety harness around her ankle, trading off ever so often to leave her dangling upside down while she worked. Curious, she thought to herself, how quickly these tricorders seemed to run out of power working down here. These tasks were complicated, mentally taxing and exhausting, but she was determined to learn them... she had never performed a maintenance such as this on so complex a collection of machinery, but she could do it. She had to do it. Suval had to see that while he might not respect her, he had to respect her work.

More engineers were interested in helping her now that she was hanging upside down again. She imagined it was the uniform with a skirt. Plus the fact that it kept riding up higher and higher as she worked, but she honestly didn't care. A few of the Engineering staff stuck around to pass her tools or work the auxiliary control panels topside for her, so she was getting some help now, which she appreciated. She was prideful and vain, but she just wasn't working as fast as she was when she had started. She couldn't remember the last time she ate anything, and a pack of water and a protein bar from one of the JG engineers was quite welcome, and restored some of her clarity.

The last array was just the last W-AEM scanner, which of course was more complex than any of the rest save the first. But she had calibrated the first, so she now reversed the calibration for the last to make the cycles run seamlessly into one another. She realized that there was a six second window between scan cycles every ten point.. ten point one seven five three minutes, and she saw a way to reduce that 'blind' window down to four seconds, and she enacted it.

The thermal imaging array was in this bay as well, she realized with a groan as she snagged her uniform on it and got stuck- she could get free from it, but likely at the cost of her uniform. She ran the diagnostic, calibrated the sensor and coordinated with the Bridge to perform a test sweep, and it still seemed off. She finally had to move to access a panel out of reach, and committed to the decision. Her uniform held together at the top, miraculously losing only the midsection down, so she just wrapped and tied the torn shred she could free from the sensor around her waist as a skirt and continued working, opening the access panel of the thermal couplings to determine where the problem was. As she instituted a level two diagnostic to determine why the array was returning faulty readings, she closed her eyes for just a second.

At 0400 Lieutenant Charybdis had stepped off the turbolift to Engineering... two days ago. At 0632, after considerable debate, it was decided by the consensus of the enlisted and junior officers present that if the excitable Vulcan lieutenant wanted to take a nap curled up around the thermal imaging array, that was her business. They weren't about to disturb her... and none of them wanted to risk her waking up in a bad mood while they were pulling her out.

Best to just let sleeping Vulcans lie.

 

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