From tgladsto@sewanee.edu Mon Jun 22 23:37:09 1998 Date: Tue, 2 Jun 1998 14:56:04 -0600 From: tgladsto@sewanee.edu To: Dante Expeditionary Force List Serve Subject: [DANTEXF] USS Yorktown: Welcome Help DANTE Expeditionary Force Official E-mail BEGIN TRANSMISSION FMD 5.1210 > "Well, Commander. Throw the regs over board. We are at war and I'm >>trained in engineering. So place me where I can be of use for your staff." Retal blinked. Other officers from other departments had helped him with repairs before, the various science officers he had served with in his tenure on the Yorktown, but this officer was unprecedented, coming from this Executive Officer. Pausing for a moment, he tapped a few keys on his PADD, bringing up a quick duty list. Scanning down the available spots, he lighted on one in particular. Something not incredibly trying, but not too easy either. "Well, there's the shuttle bays. We'll be needing to have a docking center for whatever fighters we can take aboard, and the Yorktown's bays are not equipped to handle anything bigger than a runabout. Any extra help down in Bay Three would be appriciated, sir." > "Well, doesn't sound that bad. I think that won't stress my skills too > hard." he answered with a grin and noticable irony. Retal easily picked up the sarcastic note in the man's voice, and cracked a slight grin, one corner of his mouth sliding up a few millimeters. "I've got two teams, Beta and Gamma, down there. I'll inform them." > "Thanks. Gibson out." The comm badge buzzed slightly as the XO dropped the communication link, and Retal blinked, turning towards the turbolift. He almost reflexatively reached out to the Lake, then receeded from it, nodding carefully. A short turbolift ride might give him the opportunity to collect his thoughts. Tapping his comm badge, he moved quickly to the nearest lift. "Ne'telkmar to Beta leader." [Ensign Briggs here, sir. What's the trouble?] "No problem, Ensign. We're recieving a bit of help from higher-up, that's all." [Sir?] "Commander Gibson is on his way down to your bay. No special treatment, understand, and I'll be there just in case. Pass the word to the men." [Yes, sir.] Retal nodded as the link went dead, and blinked as the turbolift doors hissed open. Taking a quick step inside, he turned to the input panel and spoke in a level, unhurried voice. "Shuttlebay three." The panel chimed, and Retal felt the lift shudder slightly before beginning its descent deeper into the bowels of the Yorktown. Quietly, he skimmed the shuttle bay specs, making succinct notes onto the panel as the lift continued down, thrumming as the lights of voors passed in a blur. He almost missed the hissing of the doors as they slid open, revealing the vast interior of the shuttle bay. It was immense, with a deck the area of a coloseum, but even so, ill-prepared to house a full squadron of fighters, let alone run a continuous resupply base. The highest-caliber craft the Yorktown had been designed to hold, even after the nearly-disasterous refit, were Runabout vessels: Fast, ideal for long-distance missions, but not a craft to take into any kind of combat. The Yorktown's designers had anticipated a time for resupply after any major battle in which a runabout's small stock of weapons had to be used. With the Dalraidian crisis brewing, perhaps Starfleet would look into giving starships the ability to supply a small squadron of fighters. Hopefully, the present conflict wouldn't last long enough for new ships to be planned and created, but who could ultimately tell? For now, at least, all the deficiency of the shuttlebay design did was make his already-tired team of engineers work another several hours. With a quick scan of the bay, he located Ensign Briggs, a tall, spindly being who could have easily passed for human, if it was not for the small projections of skull at his forehead. His skin was stretched over bones and muscles as if it had been thin parchment, giving his every movement a strained look. Behind him, a small force of techs milled through the shuttle bay. Half of what would normally be the smooth, well-worn launch deck was torn up, revealing the neat gridwork of energy conduits and structural girders that were the guts of any starship. Taking care to not make a sound, he came up behind Ensign Briggs and cleared his throat. The Ensign's eyes went wide, much wider than a man's eyes normally could have, and he spun around, pupils dialating, to face Retal. "What's going on here, Ensign?" "Ah, sir, we've started adapting the bay for the fighter landing. At optimum, we can support five fighters reloading at a time, per bay." "Fifteen fighters. That will have to be good enough, I suppose." "Yes, sir. The main problem right now seems to be how we are planning to resupply the fighter's weapon stocks." "Get some ordinance from Starbase Alighieri. It should be simple enough to show a ground crew how to reload the weapons systems," "Yes, sir, but we can't hold as much weaponry as Alighieri has. At most, we can support five full cycles, then.." His too-large eyes rolled up into his head, and then returned to face Retal, pupils dialating once again to get used to the sudden change of lighting. "So, what you're saying is we can reload approxomately sixty fighters at a time?" "Yes, sir." "What if we load the ordinance in the cargo bays and transport it directly here with the internal transporters?" "That should increase our capacity a bit." "Good. If we can, let's try to get at least double our current capacity before trying to arrange any supplies from SB Alighieri." "Very good, sir." Behind him, Retal heard the turbolift door hiss open, and spun around on one heel, moving calmly, with a measured precision. His eyes rested upon Michl Gibson, striding quickly into the room. The other was respectfully tall, barely under two meters, with curled brown hair and cloudy, steel-coloured eyes, the light glinting off their depths. He was in duty uniform, with a tech's equipment pack slung over one shoulder. Gibson stopped almost as soon as he had entered the room, blinking as he poured over the scene before him. Openly grinning, Retal turned from Ensign Briggs and took a few quick strides towards the XO. "Good afternoon, sir." The other nodded slightly. "Good afternoon, Commander." His eyes still rested on the bay, paying significant attention to the protion of the substructure revealed by the missing deck plates. "It looks like a big job." Retal nodded, a small light twinkling in his eye. "That it is, sir, that it is. Feel up to it?" That snapped the XO out of his reverie. "You've got it, Commander. Where do we begin?" "Follow me." It was not a direct answer, but it was necessary for Retal to see how much the other remembered of his acadamy training. Carefully keeping stride with the man, he spoke in a low, calm voice. "How long has it been since you've done any engineering work, sir?" "About since the acadamy." "Well, then now's a good time to get started." He stopped, indicating a group of techs who were a bit farther along in their work then the rest, already erecting the frame for the refueling tower. "Right now, we're modifying the shuttle bay to fit Fleet fighter craft. At optimum efficiency, we can start moving five fighters at a time through this bay, in rotation. We need five refueling kiosks, each one linked in to the main power grid." "So, where do we start?" Retal led him over to one corner of the bay, where most of the deck plating had already been torn up by the refit crew. Casually, he slid off of the infrastructure girder and into the thick of the Yorktown, carefully avoiding getting himself tangled in any of the large groups of cables strewn seemingly haphazardly around the York's innards. He laid a proud hand on a humming power conduit. "First, we need to tap in to the main conduit from here, then worry about conversion. If you'll come down here?" Mike jumped down, landing with a soft thud behind Retal, before turning. "Now, get out a hydrospanner and come over here." Nodding, the XO searched through his tool kit for a moment before locating the plasteel oval of the 'spanner, and then walked up next to Retal, almost tripping over a low-set group of cables. "So, in order to access the power in a usable form, we've got to set up a converter matrix on the interface panel, here." "But, won't we have to use some type of transtater to get the energy ratio right?" Retal cracked a grin. "You remember something, at least. Engineering's advanced a bit in the past few years, and we've managed to work the transtater function into the conversion matrix. It's fractionally more energy-efficient then the old duo-mechanism design." "Ah... yeah, I can see that." "Good." Retal took a quick breath and snapped the matrix onto the interface unit, then turned and grabbed a metal rod from a small pile next to the conduit. "Now we need to start the substructure tower. As long as the atrix is in place, we'll have the power ready, but what we need is a method to get it directly into the ship." "A microwave beam could do that, right?" "Yeah, but we'd lose some of the power as radiation, and we need all the time we can get for these fighters to be refueled. We're going to have to hardwire the tower." He sighed. Michael took a long, slow breath. "Where do we start?" "First, we need the substructure in place before we can set up the hardwiring." Placing the metal rod on one of the girders that spiderwebbed the underside of the shuttle bay, he touched his hydrospanner to it, triggering the mechanism. A recoil shot through his arm as a short burst of energy was released by the hydrospanner's nozzle, raising the temperatures of the girder astronomically. When he withdrew his hand, the rod was firmly fused with the structure. He turned to Michael, placing one hand on the now-firmly rooted metal rod. "We need to get six more of these set up, so we can start the kiosk. I don't care what it looks like, as long as it will refuel the fighters." "Got it." The XO was already setting up another rod, exactly paralell with Retal. Grinning, the CEO grabbed a third lentgth off the pile and proceeded to the next girder, nodding slowly. ******************************************************************************** "Don't worry, I'll have it all figured out by the time we reach the Frontier." BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP "What's that?" "The Frontier." --The Last Starfighter ******************************************************************************** All: Sorry I haven't posted for the past few days, I've been caught up with exams, parties, etc. Birthday was five days ago, more parties, you get the picture.... Anyway, I'm free! No more exams! Heheheh... Mike: Just a bit of a backpost. I hope I got the MD's right, if not, feel freeto mess with them. I tried to keep the post in line with your storyline. Speaking of FMD's..... 5.1210 Retal recieves offer from Gibson [Tom] 5.1220 Retal meets with Ensign Briggs [Tom] 5.1240 XO Gibson arrives in Bay 3 [Tom] 5.1243 Construction of refuelling kiosk begins [Tom] Lt.Cm. Retal Ne'telkmar CEO, USS YORKTOWN NCC-1717-E Indigo Fleet Dante Expeditionary Force This message sent by an official member of the Dante Expeditionary Force Are you also posting your messages to the newsgroup?!!! END TRANSMISSION