<USS Avalon> If It Was A Snake... --Ensign Kyle Fenner
- From: "Robert P Lewis" <caldfyr@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <avalon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2004 18:26:43 -0900
If It Was A Snake...
By Kyle Fenner
00400 hours saw Kyle getting comfortable at an empty table. He was stifling
a yawn when two trays were placed down across from him. Before his tired
mind thought to look up, the grinning faces of Tracy and Sara had joined
their trays in front of him.
Kyle managed a smile. "Morning, Tracy, Sara."
The girls returned his greeting, and then Tracy leaned over. "So Kyle, how
do you like the ship so far?"
Kyle made a show of thinking as he carefully selected and plopped a Swedish
Meatball into his mouth. "Hmm," he said, while chewing. Finally, he
swallowed. "Well," he began. "I love Engineering so far. After lunch I'm
going to have fun looking into how the four nacelles cooperate to create
subspace fields. Plus, I've seen two or three pretty girls so far today."
He stabbed at another meatball.
Both girls made pleased noises.
Kyle took a bite into a mushroom and craned his head to the left, looking,
and then shook his head. Then he turned and looked to the right. Tracy
giggled. "Hmm, kind of empty in here tonight," he said while looking behind
him. "Nope, I don't seem to see them anywhere."
Both girls acted hurt, and Sara tossed her napkin at him. Kyle responded
with his best grin. After downing another mushroom he excused himself to
grab a coffee. There was more giggling from his table from huddled heads as
he returned.
Kyle's eyes darted back and forth. "I seem to be outnumbered, and
conspiracies abound. Where's What's-His-Nuts?"
Sara laughed at the reference. "Der'kur?" she asked, as Tracy broke into
laughter. "He works a twelve hour shift, so his lunch isn't for another two
hours."
"Yeah," said Tracy, "Looks like we've got you all to ourselves."
"Just my luck that we're stuck in here on our lunch hour," Kyle pouted.
Tracy chuckled, "Oh, I'm sure we could get away for ten minutes or so."
Kyle twisted and pulled an imaginary knife from his heart. "Heh, I guess
you haven't heard. We engineers are made of sterner stuff." He stuffed a
spinach-wrapped fork into his mouth.
"Ooh," replied Sara with a giggle. "Inquiring minds want to know; how do
you mix Swedish Meatballs with a garden salad?"
Kyle finished chewing before answering, "I read in the Terran Science
Monthly that Swedish Meatballs, when mixed with certain salad greens, can
promote weight loss," he explained as he ate another meatball.
Tracey and Sara stared silently at Kyle for several moments before Sara,
cocking her head to the side, asked whether he was for real.
As he swallowed a rather large mouthful of salad, Kyle couldn't maintain his
composure. When the grin spread across his face he was forced to admit that
he'd made it all up. Napkins flew again. After the laughter died down,
they ate for a few minutes in near silence.
Kyle finished his plate. "You know, this is good, but I'm going to have to
use some holodeck time to cook something when my weekend comes around. I'm
thinking beef stroganoff."
That pronouncement greatly excited the girls. "No way! You can cook?"
exclaimed Tracy.
"Yeah," Kyle replied, "But I hate cooking for myself, so I rarely take the
time."
That answer only animated them further. Both girls were now waving pointed
fingers back and forth between them. "We're two other people," said Tracy.
"Yeah, and we like home-cooked food," added Sara.
"Especially stroganoff!"
"Especially your stroganoff," said a sarcastic Der'kur as he walked up
behind the girls. He had to dodge a wild swing by Sara. "Hey, Kyle, are
they treating you too badly?
"Nah, but they won't stop giggling," answered a smiling Kyle, to the
accompaniment of more giggling.
Der'kur slid onto a bench beside Sara. "Just let me know if they get outta
hand, I've got a nice cozy cell in the brig that needs occupants." He
yelped when an elbow found his ribs. "How's your first day in engineering?"
"Lots of fun, I can't wait to learn more about the ship. Plus, gamma shift
is quiet."
"Yeah, well that's going to change soon. A bunch of the crew is beaming
aboard and reporting in. I fled from the office to get away from all the
noise for a few minutes."
Tracy nodded. "I heard about the recall order. Breaking orbit at last! I
didn't sign on to orbit Earth for a month at a time."
Kyle snorted. "You're preaching to the choir," he said as he glanced at his
watch. "Hate to say it, but I've gotta be getting back to work."
Everyone else groaned as they looked at their watches. Kyle was almost out
the door when he heard Sara call his name. "Hold up, Kyle," she said.
"Tracy and I are heading that way, we'll walk with you."
* * * * *
When gamma shift ended Sara found Kyle on the upper deck, sitting on the
floor with his back to a wall. He had a PADD balanced on his lap, one in
his hand, and yet another on the floor next to him.
"You're using three PADDs now?
Kyle, scrambling from screen to screen didn't bother to look up as he
answered, "I was running out of display space."
"For what?" she exclaimed.
Kyle answered distractedly, "Calculations and um," he muttered while hastily
scrawling notes on various screens, "Calculations and notes. I'm looking
into why the designers decided to add two more nacelles to the ship when the
old Constellation Class ships didn't really see marked improvement in warp
acceleration or energy efficiency."
Sara grinned. "And what have you came up with so far?"
Kyle was still rapidly scrawling on various PADDs. "Um... the old um...
Constellation designers just had each paired nacelle in parallel with each
other. They were still of the school that thought a bigger engine driving
denser warp fields was the route to go. They caved because some admiral
wanted a ship class with four nacelles."
Still smiling, Sara crossed her arms, "Go on," she told him, then glanced
back to see that Tracy was also amused.
"It wasn't until recently that we've experienced breakthroughs in warp
plasma coil efficiency, hence, the decrease in nacelle size. The problem
with maintaining high warp speeds is maintaining the ever increasingly
faster pulsed subspace field without overwhelming the cooling system." Kyle
paused for a moment as he studied a display. "I'm not a big fan of the four
nacelle design, but that's purely for aesthetic reasons. For awhile tonight
I thought that standard sized, or even slightly larger nacelles with
alternated coil firing could create the same effect that this modified
Intrepid creates, but I discovered that while you could maintain speed for a
little longer, the gains from it pale in comparison to two added nacelles;
the cooling system on any two nacelle ship will eventually fail."
"Why?" asked Tracy. The sound of her voice started Kyle enough to break his
attention from his work. Gathering his PADDs, he rushed to stand.
After a moment to compose himself, his face reddened by Sara's giggling, he
found his voice. "Lieutenant Hodges, how was your day?"
"My day is going nicely, Ensign. I believe you were about to answer my
question?"
"Oh. Yeah, sorry," he began before beginning to look confused. "The train
jumped its track, a whole village wiped out."
Tracy snorted. Sara reminded him where he was, "nacelle cooling failure."
"Oh yeah!" he exclaimed, growing excited. "When a ship is maxed out, the
coils are rapidly firing to maintain a super rapid pulsing field, right?
With large amounts of power flowing through the coils almost continuously,
things really heat up and the cooling system loses efficiency when it runs
out of "cool" coolant to use. Eventually the engine overheats and performs
an auto-shutdown. With an alternating coil design you're not pushing as
much power through each coil, since they alternate pulses. But in a two
nacelle system, with the close proximity of the coils they would have to
share a good portion of the cooling system. With paired nacelles, the
cooling problems are much easier to deal with."
Tracy nodded absently, "That make sense."
Sara cocked an eyebrow at him. "You did all that work just to figure that
out?"
Kyle's face paled, "No no no no," he stammered, "I was trying to reason out
how long this ship could really maintain maximum warp." Sara still looked
unimpressed so he continued. "Here, look at my figures," he said while
spreading the PADDs out on a console. The first rule of engineering is to
slightly understate capabilities, right?"
"Uh-huh."
Seeing Tracy's quizzical expression, Kyle quickly explained, "Partly for
safety, partly so miracles are easier to perform." He continued,
"Lieutenant Raelin, how much does the ship actively cool the impulse drive
systems when we're at warp?"
Sara sounded deep in thought as she slowly answered. "Hardly at all,
they're relatively cool when in stand-by."
"Of course, it's more efficient that way. Why cool something that doesn't
need it, right? But the impulse and warp cooling systems share the same
coolant reservoir..." Kyle looked at Sara expectantly.
Sara's face was tight in concentration as she picked up where he left off.
"There's all that conduit and coil that's hardly being used, and it's all
being actively cooled, itself, by the auxiliary system..."
Tracy cocked her head to the side, "Why do you need to actively cool the
active cooling system?"
Sara looked up at her friend. "The impulse drives create stupid amounts of
heat, so there's an auxiliary cooling system to help maintain lower
reservoir temperatures. It wouldn't do much good to be zipping along at
three-quarter impulse just to gimp your maximum warp right when you need to
flee from a Borg Cube."
"Oh," replied Tracy. A moment later Kyle saw the light bulb go off just
before she spoke again, "So you want to run the impulse cooling system at
full capacity so that the auxiliary cooling system that cools the primary
cooling system will help keep the reservoir temperature lower, and we can
stay at warp nine-point-a lot of-nines for even longer?"
Kyle and Sara answered simultaneously, "Right."
Sara continued, "The heated coolant can be run through the impulse drives,
which themselves will become a little warmer in the process, but who cares,
they're on stand-by. When the coolant leaves the drives it will go through
the auxiliary system, and reenter the reservoir at a considerably lower
temperature." Sara was still going from PADD to PADD, looking over Kyle's
work and making notes of her own. Kyle and Tracy watched her work for
several minutes while she mumbled to herself.
Tracy eventually asked another question, "Why don't you have a similar
cooling system for the warp engine side of the house?"
Kyle answered almost before she finished asking, "Space is a commodity in a
nacelle, and there are not a lot of circumstances where you need to go crazy
fast for stupid amounts of time, so the designers didn't worry about it.
Tracy seemed to be enjoying the brainstorm session. "So why didn't the
designers come up with this solution?" She asked.
Sara, hastily scrawling on a PADD display, answered, "Designing a ship is a
massive undertaking. The research project we're heading, how many people
are working on it?"
Tracy's brow scrunched up as she thought for a moment, "Half a dozen, and
all on their own piece of the puzzle..."
"Exactly."
Sara tossed down a PADD in frustration while Kyle laughed. "The damned
thing locked up! These stupid things don't have the computing power to
model that, Kyle. Let me schedule some time on the main computer and we'll
see what we can come up with." She patted him on the back, "Great work, by
the way."
Kyle's face reddened when Tracy ruffled his hair, but he managed to reply,
"Thanks!"
"You know Sara," Tracy said, "It looks like we've got a new genius engineer
onboard."
"No kidding," laughed Sara, "I'll have to stop coasting if I wanna keep my
reputation. Come on, shift's over. Let's get outta here."
PADDs in hand, they left the discussion behind them as the doors slid shut.
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