Posted by Commander Eric Holmman (Executive Officer) in CE’s Office - Boarding Check-in for Cadet Oxton

Posted by Cadet Mara Oxton (Engineer) in CE’s Office - Boarding Check-in for Cadet Oxton

Posted by Cadet Mara Oxton (Engineer) in CE’s Office - Boarding Check-in for Cadet Oxton
<Snip>

Mara looked at the screen for a second, thinking about different possibilities. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, letting her mind be open to ideas. Smiling, she finally opened her eyes and began her reasoning.

“Now if we weren’t in a hurry I’d suggest biasing the field to increase the field strength along the axes of the nacelles… But I’m a little bit of a theorist and I love overcomplicating things”

She began diverting the power from the weapons systems to the warp field, taking care to keep enough power in the weapons systems to keep them active and working. Mara then looked up at Keval

“I like far-fetched ideas. I theorise things, I’m never too good at realising at a good time that some of my ideas are a bit too high-strung”

She chuckled lightly, and assumed a calm yet awaiting position.

~ Cadet Mara Oxton {Engineer}

(OOC: This would be a good place to trim the thread a bit with a <snip>. For a two-person thread, the context doesn’t require a lot of the earlier quoted text anymore.)

“Trying out new ideas and new theories are an excellent idea. New ideas generally don’t hurt anyone. Well, not a lot of people, anyway,” Keval said. “In this case, though…”

Keval touched a button, displaying a graph of the power useage to sustain the field’s warp bubble for the ship’s simulated speed. “You correctly found that more power was needed to maintain a non-optimized field, but watch what happens if we speed up the simulation.”

Touching another button, the power-requirement graph began to quickly expand… in both directions. It was an exponential curve. An indicator started flashing. “And in two minutes, weapons are now disabled just to keep the ship moving at the current speed,” Keval said.

The Andorian turned to his cadet. “It’s the field itself. It’s no longer optimized for the ship to travel at current speeds - not without a radical redesign of the hull, anyway, and that might be beyond our powers. Putting in more power gives a temporary solution - but that increase in power to the non-optimized field also reinforces that very lack of optimization. So even more power is needed…”

Keval looked back at the simulation. “What is needed is an adjustment to the warp field itself… but as always on starship, doing it is a lot more complicated than saying it.”

(OOC: As you might have guessed, so of this I’m just making up as I go along. But it’s a useful example to build up on the engineering technobabble in star trek, and build up on some concepts in how starships work in Star Trek - which gives a lot more role-playing options for an engineering character.)

-Lt. Keval Vras, CE

(OCC: Oh jesus did I do that right? Is there any right or wrong way to use technobabble? Like, what if something that is said wasn’t the correct wording or wasn’t the correct technology?)

Mara looked at the simulation and nodded, she understood and was thinking in her head before turning to Keval.

“How would you go about adjusting the warp field? And how do you know if you’ve adjusted it enough to sustain constant power throughout?”

~ Cadet Mara Oxton {Engineer}

{Bump}

(OOC: There’s not necessarily any “right” or “wrong” answer since a lot of this is made up and improvised. But there are some good sources for playing an engineer - although you’ll need to improvise a bit to fill in the gaps:

-Memory Alpha (https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Portal:Main)
-STF Engineering Course (https://www.star-fleet.com/library/bookshelf/textbook/textbook-engineering.html)
-STF Tech Manual (https://www.star-fleet.com/library/bookshelf/tm/index.html)
-TNG Tech Manual, if you really want to show off and have access to a copy (I occasionally blow the dust off of mine if I want to do some impressive engineering role-playing - but it is also getting a bit dated because of changes in ST tech in Voyager and Picard)
-whatever nonsense I can come up with that is consistent with canon :P

Hope that helps)

“Changing the warp field while the ship is actually at warp…” Keval trailed off. “Well, lets say that you should be in dire straits before even considering that. You could throw the ship out of warp and require a number of repairs just with one miscalculation. Worst case scenario, you could cause a power imbalance in the warp core itself that the coolant system cannot compensate for, and your reactor blows…”

“But that’s why we use the variable geometry of the warp pylons. That allows us to optimize the warp field without actually having to make changes to the field itself,” Keval explained.

“You’ll never know from a single glance if you are using too much power for your warp field - that comes from a combination of simulations and being familiar with the quirks of a particular ship. But if you ever see the power start to climb like we just in that simulation, get out of warp immediately and find out the problem. Your captain might yell at you, but that’s what captain’s are for. Better to have an angry captain that a captain that exists as separate free-floating particles.”

-Lt. Keval Vras, CE

Mara let out a small giggle and nodded.

“So… Best not to make a miscalculation? I think I can get by that” chuckling, she thought for a second and continued “If you do something terribly wrong, what’s the worst thing a captain would do to you?”

A strange addition to her conversation, Mara was always scared of repercussions… Would the captain throw her in the brig? Expell her from the academy? Kill her? Or worse… Expell her from Starfleet?

{OOC: thank you!}

~ Cadet Mara Oxton {Engineer}