The Right-Hand Swagger

[WxMurray 0]

Engineering Log

Stardate 0911.11

Assistant Engineering Officer

G. Saf Murray

 

The starboard nacelle strut is a structural mess. The integrity is not sound, much of the hull plating is gone; it would be open to vacuum if not for emergency force fields...though even those are a stopgap measure preventing decompression, and the system may not hold much longer. The addition of damage to the drive plasma conduit, which has spewn drive plasma into the nacelle and into space, has rendered that nacelle useless.

 

Temporary repairs are being implemented to the best of our abilities. A team of EVA-suited engineers is reinforcing the exiting hull plating, extending braces across the damaged section to maintain rigidity, and installing portable temporary SIF generators in order to prevent the nacelle from detaching during warp.

 

On that note, I have spoken to Lieutenant Caine about the situation. Our engineering teams cannot make the necessary repairs to return the strut and nacelle to a state of “patched” repair, nor can we do a complete repair job. Thus, I have made the recommendation that we put in for repairs at the nearest available repair facility. How that fits into our current mission is beyond me, but that's not my problem. I have informed Lieutenant Caine that because the nacelle is useless, I have ordered the activation of the warp core in the Beta section of the ship. Aside from location, the alternative drive is no less powerful or useful. An engineering crew has been sent up to monitor the core at all times, but all functions have been rerouted to main engineering so that we can continue on as is without having to worry about relocating the entire engineering operation to the Beta section. The main warp core is offline. One lucky group of engineering souls gets the unenvious task of crawling inside it – if it's already offline, might as well get some maintenance done on it.

 

As an aside, Kairi was unavailable when I took these actions, off doing paperwork or some such nonsense. I hope she doesn't mind that I went over her head on this, but she trusts my judgment, and I'm sure she knows that this was the only logical course of action...unless, of course, she prefers that we crawl to a repair dock at impulse power. At which point, we'd be there in about nine months...give or take a year.