Posted by Captain Julien King (Captain) in Bridge Main SIM First contact - all BO’s to the bridge!
(snip)

=/\=This is Rear Admiral Clogtho of the Global Pallas Space Corps. Please identify yourselves. We have you on our detectors.=/\=

-GM

Marishka had been dividing her time between watching the main viewer and studying her instruments. When the comm came through she was a bit surprised but pleased they would get a first contact. She put it through.

Marishka, CIO

“All right, showtime. Lt. Marishka, do they have audio only or also visual?” he asked while he checked if his uniform was sitting straight… for the case they did have visual.

OOC: First contact protocol includes a full range of various scans, tactical, biological, defensive, offensive… pls give our GM details for what you are scanning while Julien does the talking.

• Julien King, CO

“As far as I’m aware it’s audio only sir.” Marishka said checking scans again, she didn’t like to be wrong.

-Marishka, CIO

Julien nodded.

The communications was indeed audio only. The technology the alien ship had could only allow acceptable video when they were about 600,000 kilometres away when the lag time would be just over 2 seconds.

Dagen was intrigued and just watched. The time passed quickly for him as he watched. Everything was valuable for the engineer. After a time he reported. “They were efficient in their rescue, sirs. And have been conducting a clean up of the affected area. As an observation, sir, that shows them to be sensitive to the ecology of space. You’d not see a Klingon or Romulan today cleaning up after one of their ships blew. They moved out at warp 1.2. I’m scanning now to see if that might be their top speed.” He didn’t say that them barreling in at 9.4 was likely to send jitters up their spines, ah, if they had them.

Scans showed that Warp 1.2 was their sustainable top speed, with their engines able to take about 24 hours before it started to overheat. The actual top speed which would wipe out their nuclear engines in an hour was closer to warp 1.7.

He tried to piece through the information to what was important on his information gathering …
- what kind of warp drive did they have? How close was it to the old Cochran’s that Earth had at first.

The structure of the drive they had was similar to Cochrane’s Phoenix. However, instead of using a matter-antimatter mix to create the plasma for generating the warp field, the alien ship’s engines were using a combination of nuclear fission and fusion to generate the energy to generate the warp field. To engage at higher warp speeds, a larger concentration of energy needed to be used. The nuclear fuel that the alien ship was using was not stable enough. It was able to reach warp 1.5 at best. However to break the warp 2 barrier more effectively, a more stable energy source was needed. From the look of their technology, they had not discovered the matter-antimatter way of generating energy.

• Given the explosion, what kind of power did it potentially put out

From the energy expended by the exploding ship, it was very probable that that ship was an experimental ship that was trying to break the Warp 2 barrier. They had attempted to use magnetic fields to control the unstable nuclear fuel but were not able to. The ship exploded due to the chain reaction that could not be contained when the magnetic fields they were using began to fail.

• Structurally how put together was the Rear Admiral’s ship? How many decks? What kind of defenses did it have? Did they put up shields when the other ship blew? How fast did their shuttles that they used for rescue manage?

The Rear Admiral’s ship was composed mainly by a primitive duranium alloy. It had eight decks. The ship did not have any energy weapons, only projectile weapons that were basically very powerful nuclear missiles. According to the scans, they had about 80 nuclear missiles on board. It had very primitive shields. It had a deflector that used gravitons, but it was only projected to the fore the ship. The other parts of the ship made use of magnetic fields to deflect projectile weapons. The Genesis’s phasers would probably do short work of the side magnetic shields. The graviton powered deflector shield could be rendered useless by two or three photon torpedoes. It would seem that the graviton shield used a significant amount of resources and so they were not used to shield the ship (Merry) from the explosion, they used probes to neutralise the radiation with the use of the weaker magnetic shields. A rather thick layer of lead was found within the hull of the ship to help to protect them from the nuclear radiation.

Thor, CE

Ben conducted a tactical analysis of the ship that was trying to communicate the Genesis. “Captain the ship has 80 nuclear projectile missiles. Primitive shielding. However, I am detecting a magnetic field of some sort. It’s hull is made of a duranium alloy with eight decks. Also a graviton deflector in the bow of the ship which could be compromised by a couple torpedoes Sir.”

Park, BO Tactical/Security

Julien nodded again, trying to get started on answering …

Tom stood on the bridge in his accustomed spot. It was out of the pickups, not that it mattered as these people we not Federation and wouldn’t know what an IntSec officer looked like.

Tom, IntSec

Audio only communication wasn’t Riley’s favorite. His own empathic abilities were limited by range and the visual cues provided in regular comm channels helped quite a bit. With only audio feed his ability to tell truth from lie was reliant only on intuiting tone and inflection. Needless to say this compromised his accuracy. It was a relief the Pallas seemed to provide little threat. Perhaps the Genesis was about to conduct a friendly, uneventful first contact. That was an exciting possibility.

Dekker, CNS

“Strange… there is no value to a ‘fleet’ of low warp ships… particularly ones of size and ability to rescues. Warp 2 is insufficient to a crewed investigation of universe. It would take decades to get to the nearest star system.” Marius didn’t like strange things.

“Tactical, put the secondary phaser array on counter battery fire mode.” Nukes were only dangerous to a star ship with a direct hit… he wasn’t about to let that happen.

XO

Julien had just drawn in a breath, but stopped and nodded at Calvin.

Marishka had been observing quietly.

“We will be able to have visual contact within 600,000 kilometers sir.” she said.

Marishka, CIO

“Mhmm.” Julien murmerd, getting slightly impatient.

“Aye Sir. Phaser array to counter battery fire mode.... activated”. Ben pushing a few buttons “Tactical standing by for further instructions Sir”

Park

“All right, but nothing more. This is first contact not a hidden attack, although the gods know we had our share of those lately, but we can’t let that mess up first contact protocol.” he said in a firm voice.

Thomas was silently observing the goings-on from the back of the Bridge as well, though in a different way from the enigmatic Mr. Jarvis. He did note the apparent lack of transporter technology, but after the debacle over Cait he wasn’t about to let anything as simple as an “apparent lack” get past him.

Guards were posted in all critical spaces, in the case of the Bridge they were at the back like him, between the turbolifts. He had tapped into the internal sensor feeds and was monitoring them from a PaDD he was carrying.

After all, when in uncharted space, it was prudent to assume that any encountered species would be hostile… and in the case of this species, try to board the Genny to acquire her advanced technology.

COS

Dagen had the data open to all so wasn’t surprised when they reported the tactical information. With their speed he was sure that there was no issue with defense. Just to be safe he did a speed analysis of the probes they used and likened them to the speed of the nukes they had on board and then computed a safe tactical distance that would give them ample room to respond. “Sir, recommend we drop speed. They are only out of the nest and are haven’t broken the warp 2 barrier. With us barreling in at our top speed that could be unnerving to them.” It would be to him! “They use a mix of nuclear fission and fusion to power their drive. To do better they will either need to develop matter anti matter or, find a better way to contain the reaction with shielding. I would suspect that they would likely develop something closer to the Romulan singularity drives than what we have in time.” That was his guess anyway.
- Dagen, CE

Julien again had gathered himself to reply, only to be disrupted by Dagen. “That is a wise precaution, we don’t want to show them something they’ve apparently just failed at. Helm, lower speed as we approach their sensor range to warp 1 and then impulse. I’d also like some science scans please, as soon as we’re in short sensor range. And now please give me 2 minutes to answer the good man!” he said to all of the with a half-smile on his face.

The hail from the Merry came, on all frequencies, again, =/\=This is Rear Admiral Clogtho of the Global Pallas Space Corps. Please identify yourselves. We have you on our detectors.=/\=
-GM

Sage entered the bridge just in time to hear the voice of Clogtho asking for identification.

—Sage

Julien gave her a quick nod and showed her his boyish ‘I’m-so-excited’ face for a second, then he looked forward to the screen again that showed their fast approach and cleared his throat, nodding to Marishka to open the audio channel.

=^= Hello Rear Admiral. I’m Captain Julien King of the Starfleet ship Genesis, from the United Federation of Planets. We come in peace. We are explorers and we received a distress call from the ship you also tried to save, that’s why we came. I’m sorry for your loss Admiral. =^=

• Julien King, CO

Here we go. Aevin thought. He kept his hands prepped on the helm controls like he was preparing to fly a fighter, despite the Genesis’ large size. First contact, as wonderful as it had the potential to be, made Aevin uneasy. Too many unknowns. And if it came to the worst, tactical and helm are responsible for the survival of the ship.

-Ensign Aevin, Helm