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Post by littlekreen on Sept 9, 2018 15:34:02 GMT -6
The words echoed for a moment longer than they ought to as consoles on appliances nearby. Each faintly repeated Sukarma's name which then spread across the others. Emergency lighting slowly flipped off in stages as the main lighting engaged as an engineering statuses started to restate themselves properly. A fusion reactor readout went from 'Licorice depth' to 'n-fold rate' as a heavy siesmic thrumm pushed through the floor. Noticeable more as the fusion impacts picked up speed.
Everything quickly returned to normal in her moment of panic skin flashing pale white, "Guh, Whaa- AHH!"
Executive processing then rose sharply peaking higher than before but still depressed as Sukarma's avatar fell from the Sarcophagus with a whump of steel. returning to blue on cyan Sukarma stood up as the nutrient spikes and other mounting hardware stowed. In one eye a bright gold cover retracted as Sukarma's hair lit up with pips of light.
Sukarma wobbled over toward Alke as the air circulation mounted executive again to roar into life, "Uh... I haven't slept that deep in a long while. Sarcophagus wakes me up so my weaker ganglions don't die. Are you okay? Oxygen... is a little low, I think. It'll go back to normal. I keep getting linked to pictures of hamburgers on the ganglion though."
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Post by demikara on Sept 9, 2018 15:42:37 GMT -6
"Yeah, apparently the air quality is hamburger, according the read outs." She was more amused than not. "I'll work on the air filtration system today, I think, see if I can get it fixed up. I can also replace a few of your weaker ganglion today so them dying is less of a concern. Do you want me to focus on your ganglion in general today? " Well, that appeared to be the plan for the day at least. She'd handle that, then head back to the list. The air system was kind of critical to her survival. She still wasn't sure if it was for Sukarma, but she had a feeling the avatar, at least, needed air.
A thought occurred to her and she smiled. "Oh! Did yesterday help much? I don't usually get to talk to the ship I'm working on, so I'm curious." She had the readouts of course, and things were better, but she wasn't sure if they were noticeably better yet. There was still a lot to do after all.
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Post by littlekreen on Sept 9, 2018 17:34:09 GMT -6
Sukarma nodded blinking her eyes some more looking at the walls rubbing her side, "The emergencies are rechargeable and analog so it might get stuffy when I sleep but you won't asphyxiate."
She flashed white for a moment, "Yeah maybe the life support could use the work I have a dedicated subsystem in the sarcophagus. I forgot about the cabin air, sorry!"
Green on yellow overtook the pale though some of the yellow lines turned black on her side, "But Yeah! I can actually remember whether or not I have things without going through the list myself. My side hurts though I think my ribs are going to torque straight soon. When I was sleeping the inventory system pulled in the new ganglion. My subconscious reassigns them."
There were indeed a lot of status messages arriving quite late mentioning reassignments of the new ganglion blades to less demanding portions of the system. The damaged but fully grown went to very needy heavy lifters. Some of the life support grid reasserted itself with an air quality subsystem the sensors now having executive to quantify on. A secondary thread happily thunked a bypass to green status as a faint scent of ozone filtered into the room. The mess PECO filters to destroy organic contaminants signaled to start up the air sensors no longer dead. However one of the units had its UV-A bulb shorted out sending ozone through the titanium dioxide catalyst instead. A small notification bar complained as sensors disagreed whether the ozone value was either too high or null. Many on the youngest ganglion blades reported things wildly inaccurate though it was better than the nothing that used to be in the air quality reports.
She popped some churning inventory searches into existence on the viewfinder of the pad's augmented reality overlay, "I'm having trouble remembering instances of cargo now though. The Vagus networking is reflecting off of all the newborn gel packs that are too undeveloped. There's corrupt code or a coprocessor broken somewhere?"
The bridge lit up casting light through to the mess via the bulkhead window, "Maybe let them grow a bit before I start getting hard of hearing. Or pass out again, heh. I'll start looking for somewhere to mine."
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Post by demikara on Sept 9, 2018 17:55:57 GMT -6
"I'll keep working then, get you up and moving a bit more. I'm glad it helped!" As for the corrupt code or co-processor, that was more difficult. She'd have to search down the co-processor. "I don't think I can help with your code. But if you can narrow down which processor I can probably replace it too." Hopefully she wouldn't pass out working though. "And we can re-inventory the cargo as needed. For now, let's concentrate on finding a good place to mine and getting you better."
She could talk to the ship and it could talk back. This was wonderful. Actual feedback that she was helping the other was rather nice to receive. The woman nodded. "You'r ganglion will need time to grow yeah. But I can do some basic repairs on the ones that aren't too damaged as well, so the more mature ones are better functioning." The ship was still in bad straits, even if she could limp.
alke hoped that by the time they had a full cargo hold of minerals the ship was mostly, if not completely, repaired. It would involve busting her ass though, that was for sure. She'd need to work on the mining equipment as well, make certain that they could actually mine what they found. Otherwise, there was little to no point in finding it. It had seemed like that was mostly dust issues though, which would involve taking it apart and cleaning it, and replacing any worn parts, but that was about it. She could handle those easily.
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Post by littlekreen on Sept 9, 2018 19:29:32 GMT -6
A series of log entries listed Vagus segments entering the executive space. Each acting as monitors to try and figure out where the data storm was coming from. A small set of labeled pips with periodically reorienting segments. The data window clear to Sukarama ran through its data far quicker than the tablet could reasonably update in AR. As her avatar's eyes darted to look at empty space one pip would vanish and another pop into existence.
She nodded returning to her cyan on navy blue by focus, "I'll try and figure out where the noise is coming from but it'll take a while to find a good place to see the data parallax from."
Finger-gunning at the tablet it popped up with an inventory window showing details on a splicer kit. The location helpfully proclaimed with the chinese character of Mu with a quantity of ℵ0 the growing ganglion involved unable to properly express 'I don't know' and 'more than zero' in an conventional fashion. References did link to a manual in deep storage and another inventory page on a nutrient cylinder which was thankfully more helpful on their location if not a terse quantity of 'Yes'. Some of the sensors were helpfully joining in providing nearby new ganglion with badly referenced data, a model number of 293 Kelvin. Older nodes kicked out data every so often with the correct versions and thankfully were winning and the lower priority inventory system was the most frequent victim of 'almost' data.
Sukarma bounced up and gave Alke's midsection a hug though clearly minding her strength, "Thank you! You don't know what it's like having to sleep for ten minutes at a stretch for hours so you don't die. I'll be listening but my avatar will be in the bridge looking at the starmap!"
With that she turned at left Alke behind as the room sprouted camera arms tracking Alke's movements passively. The mining arms were stored in the undercroft in the midsection between bridge and mess. A huge reinforced tool rack had seen better days and there was a clear series of explosions that had coated the room in various sets of ash. There were series of emitters set up all over and 'Reserve FE Bulkhead' appeared over several small units wired into the floor. The substrate had purged itself of metals but some still adhered to other surfaces near the toolhead egress. The actual area had a pressure-sealed heavy bulkhead unlike the rest of the undercroft. The door lock, one of many low priorities served by growing ganglion, proclaimed 'HAZARD SEAL: small breather stabbies'.
In a different section of the ship the life support system had the telltale rhythmic clunk of shot bearings. A painfully high pitched noise of cracks in refrigerant lines and the ozone of a heating element with arcing spars. Several fans were just whirring in one direction then whirring in the other direction. The processors shot and the power supplies unable to decide what polarity they wanted to supply power in. One whirring madly as it was the only fan that still worked to carry the load. However the power supply proved unable to regulate its load. Emergency air scrubbers had several backup and conditioning systems bleeding off of a wide set of taps. It quietly churned away at its regeneration cycle for when they were next needed. Nevertheless it still quietly maintained as self-regulation ganglion pivoted and clunked baffles stabilizing the ludicrous behavior of the oscillating fans to maintain a functional atmosphere without the emergency.
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Post by demikara on Sept 10, 2018 5:18:23 GMT -6
Alke got to work on the life support first, though she had needed to stop in shock when she saw how bad off the system was. Was that a spark? Oh no, that needed addressed first, and then she could smell the refrigerant and ozone in the air. She stepped through the doorway carefully, only after making certain that she was had on some rubber gloves to deal with the sparking she had been able to see. This may actually take all day. They were in bad shape judging by the look of it. Shot bearings by the sound, refrigerant leaks...
The mechanic took a deep breath. "Right. The ship needs this to work first thing. For both our sakes." What had happened that the ship was in this bad of a state! The concern clear, Alke set to work getting the life support fully operational rather than on what seemed like emergency status. The drills and mining would have to wait on her working on this.
It would be the work of most of the day, Alke having forgotten lunch entirely as she focused on the system that was meant to keep her alive. By dinner time, she was finished and starving and she stumbled to the mess to fix a meal. "I should have handled that yesterday. Sorry about that." The ship must be in a bad enough state that it couldn't figure out which systems where fully functional and which weren't. She was definitely going to be working hard here, given it felt like this was basically going to be a near complete overhaul of most of the systems.
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Post by littlekreen on Sept 13, 2018 14:35:29 GMT -6
Sukarma also tended to forget about food as well needing less due to the sarcophagus supplanting her needs. At the long projection table in the bridge it took her a while to pull all the astrometrics data out of deep storage. The forward tool bay squeaked and shifted as toolheads loaded for a compact radio telescope, and a specialized telescope with spectrograph equipment. There was a small bump every now and again as Sukarma re-targeted things she didn't have composition data for. Which was quite a lot. She couldn't really read much more than the really basic spectral lines but it would have to do.
Most of the life support's damage proved to be a failure of seals and lubricant breakdown. Radiation exposure pitted and reacted with much of the interior despite its robust mechanics. The interior ganglion blade of the power supply suffered from dysregulation. The backup had shrapnel through its supply line and was on emergency power and filtration. While grayish and wrinkled each wasn't bad off and could recover on their own. Most of the bearings were high quality ceramic and sturdy alloys. Once parts were disassembled salvageable with replacements for fractured bearings,lubricant, eroded seals. The actual business end of the oxygen exchange was an inverted tube thickly filled in stubby filaments. The ship's bright cyan lung but writ in reverse. Much why it worked in both directions blowing a gust of fresh air at Alke whenever fans scarred vanes of dark blue fleshy valves changed airflow.
Sukarma was in the mess checking in on Alke periodically noticing when the engineer wrapped up her own work. The AI wrapped up her own work some hours earlier after producing a list of stellar objects. The rest of her time was poking through a service manual trying to get her oven starting again. A haphazard patch and replaced fuses later though with a mess managed to get her 'oven' started. More an emission stabilizer than heating element the AR would show a dense cloud of small specks heating food and fluid moving by lucent blue planes applying motive force and air circulation. A fairly large amount of executive processing power went into properly thermal cooking the material in micro-gravity. Her false G didn't lend itself to a wok so well. When Alke came in Sukarma peaked her executive a little trying to concoct a response and swirling fields distended.
The spheroid turned a distended oblate but recovered with the jerk of tentacle hair turning stark white around silver metal, "Ah that's... eee! Stay in there!"
She spun it down as a small bowl projection accumulated some reconstituted vegetables and actual cooked chicken. It was added to a deep-welled plate where a bit of dark-colored quinoa and a small cup of green basil pesto. Her hair-tentacles extracted the metal utensils helpfully handing them down to her upstretched hand.
She offered the plate as the oven spooled down erratically but correctly, "I made you some real food! The pesto is thawed I have to grow fresh still. You're doing great I haven't slept that well in weeks!"
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Post by demikara on Sept 13, 2018 16:33:18 GMT -6
Food! Oh man the other had made something. Working directly for a ship turned out to be a great idea. "Thanks! I'm starving." She accepted the plate and the utensils, pleased and took a bite. "It's good too. You're a good cook." she hadn't expected that, but hey, it worked out nicely and it was much better than ration bars, which she half thought she'd be having as she hadn't gotten to any fixes the kitchen needed yet. Alke took another bite and took a seat at the kitchen table, ravenous now. The dark quinoa wasn't bad either. Who knew? Pleased, she looked up from her food.
"Life support should be completely fixed now. The damage wasn't nearly as bad as it could be. Some of the ganglion are a little damaged, but the books say they can heal from that amount. There was some shrapnel, and I had to replace the supply line." She considered what else. "I'll need to measure the radiation there soon, make certain the damage isn't so bad that I need to take those radiation exposure pills." she'd have to start wearing one as she worked, given that seemed to be a significant portion of the damage.
Still, the other would be able to have a deeper sleep tonight too, so should begin to heal faster as well. Rest was important for healing after all.
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Post by littlekreen on Sept 13, 2018 20:55:33 GMT -6
Sukarma sat with Alke while she ate retrieving a small metal container with a large-diameter straw from the freezer which was currently a fridge. Green on purple took over her coloration with a sigh she eyed the food she couldn't eat. A sigh escaped and drank her quinoa smoothie instead. The avatar couldn't digest much more than the starchy grey gruel more multivitamin this altered strain may be. At least this now had something different a flavor since she bought some sugar and whatever spices she could find to go in it. Cinnamon didn't seem to be a thing she could get her hands on so it was this odd anise honey material she'd forgot the name of.
Sukarma nodded not taking her eyes off of the food as it disappeared though smiling that Alke liked it, "Oh, I forgot! I'm so sorry! While I'm stabbed in the coffin I'm hardlinked to the oxygen. You should be okay with radiation they used some sort of nanite cloud to remediate all the uranium dust. Let me know what you find though? I'm not really that good with anything but the clicky geiger counters. Um, use the suit to handle the stuff embedded in my substrate though! I can feel the nodules."
A window appeared over the table showing an external view of earth central among a deep multitude of interlaid data flows. Sukarma's personal viewpoint at an earlier point in time. Audio was cut out though there was another window indicating a communique labeled 'Sol-Earth-NASA-Houston-Dtr.Cisewski'. On the external window of the blue marble appears a red indicator of an incoming projectile. The time index froze.
Sukarma sighed after draining her smoothie, "You should know why. The radiation is worst underdeck behind the superstructure layer near the outer hull on the one side. I was busy servicing my sub-luminal engines before I got in this part of the universe. Somebody shot a nuke at me and it's not like I could dodge. I spooled up my slipspace engines wherever they pointed and took off just as the missile detonated. I ended up derelict a few hours later after being stuck in slipspace bubble of non-linear time with a thermonuclear blast wave. Ashen found me and gave me a traders license in trade for a copy of everything in deep storage. Their nanites ate like the top layer of everything and cleaned me up but I've still got plutonium, uranium, and casing shrapnel in the walls."
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Post by demikara on Sept 14, 2018 15:19:24 GMT -6
"You got hit by a nuke and survived?" Wow, yeah this ship was built to take some serious damage. Still, it was annoying the Aschen hadn't done more than get it barely functional. Surprising, no, but it was annoying. That was fine, she could repair most of it, it seemed. "I'll have to wear the suit for the walls then." She said simply. That was that. For her own safety, she'd want to be shielded from it. "But I'd want it on anyway, in case the shrapnel went all the way through." She didn't want to even think about what would happen otherwise. Suffocating in the dark was not her idea of a good time, at all.
She finished her meal and stretched, full and content. that had been delicious, even if she had downed it probably too fast. Still, she had been hungry. she'd have to set a timer so she didn't forget lunch too often. The woman smiled, pleased with the work she had been doing. "Life Support should be at nearly one hundred though. It'll hit one hundred once the ganglion have completely healed up. I don't want to replace too many of them at once, given it may cause more strain on your systems." She'd have to look into it. Still, she wanted to be cautious with the ganglion over all. "So you found a place to mine?"
Did the mining equipment work? If not, she'd have to get on that right away. There was no telling how much damaged they had either. The entire ship was definitely suffering though, but she'd do her best to get her better as fast as possible.
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Post by littlekreen on Sept 15, 2018 12:47:12 GMT -6
Sukarma's hair busily clasped itself, "Well yeah Mom built me for deep space exploration after congress formally acknowledged trying to kill her. I can survive 4kg impacts of 7 kilometer per second orbital debris and solar flares. My outer substrate is reinforced to a foot thick. Getting both nearly killed me. Any of my old crew not in suits definitely would have died. They were earthside. The suits are rated to 1cm aluminum sphere at 10km/s and could take the rads I think."
A little white all over she added looking at Alke, "I don't want to have to find out."
A damage report schematic from archival appeared showing the engines in various states of melted or damaged. Everything in it had double or triple redundancies the burn patterns on newer parts matching their mates indicated parts were repaired while the engine was still running balls-out. There were several names in the activity log showing engineers logged in to remotely service the magnetoplasma engines. By the chat they were mystified that the technology even existed but had mostly repaired the engines to specification. They remarked on improvements before others found the fabrication facility couldn't make the parts. Very particular architecture ensuring everything could be repaired on board even if convoluted and inefficient. Most improvements instead went to physical robustness of material thicknesses and design.
Sukarma sighed explaining while Alke ate, "NASA didn't have the spare ship to go out and get me if I got hurt so I guess it ended up okay. They barely just got a base on Mars that Mom got me out of drydock to rescue their guys from. My brand new engines and I had to run them at 150% to get there in time. I can build all the parts to make new ones from scratch but the refurbished ones don't feel like they hurt. Just really sore and one is heating up quicker than the others but not by too much. I've tried not to run them over half just to be safe."
Top to shoulders her head flooded cyan on yellow with a beaming smile as Alke finished, "Good, the suits will keep you safe while you work! I'm glad the life support is good now. You may get weird outputs from the nonessential systems until the new ganglions heal up. So I might be a little drunk tomorrow but I won't have to worry so much. If you can get your arm processor connected to the suit ganglion maybe you could feel the exterior. You'll have to tweak the sensory input I mean I won't even feel a blowtorch to my outside."
Another window popped up a list of locations with attached spectra a thick red line circling the output she recognized. Though a digital document it reacted to her note-taking as if a paper she could write on. Most were iron-nickel asteroids others had spikes the system said were high density materials. The actual contents list was dubious given she clearly had no idea how to set parameters but it certainly had something of note in them.
She turned a little green as the hair-holding started again, "I think I have a few that should have the rare earths for the alloys you'll need, yeah. I'm running out of some things after making your parts. Um, but the last channel breach filled my forward hold full of asbestos. There's not much radiation damage in the toolhead since I have a bulkhead airlock up there. The suit spalls off dust like my substrate does."
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Post by demikara on Sept 15, 2018 16:55:17 GMT -6
Congress? What was congress? Molly skipped over that. Whoever they were tried to kill someone and that someone built a ship because of it. That was all she needed to know. She smiled to Sukarma to reassure her. "We won't have to find out. There's pills in the first aid kit for if I'm exposed to radiation. They bind with it and it flushes out of my system." That was the important part. Still, it sounded like Sukarma had been abandoned by a new FTL society who had only just managed it. Alke didn't fully track what all the other was saying, but she got enough to know that the other had been worried and alone and that was all she needed.
"I don't think I've tried to get my arm connected to anything other than the computer I use to run maintenance on it." She admitted, more amused than not. That particular port was hidden too, so it wouldn't be obvious. From the sound of it her next task was obvious though. "So forward hold needs cleared out? We can try spacing most of it, and I'll get the rest." She offered. It was a hold, it should open out to space. "Assuming there's nothing in there that we need to recover, of course." That would change the plans greatly. She wasn't entirely certain what to do with a hold full of asbestos other than to make certain she was in the suit when she dealt with it.
Mesothelioma was not something she wanted to think about, especially given there was no ship's doctor, just her, the ship, and Harold and Alfred who would be no real use during an emergency. They were good little things, yes, but useful? That was another thing entirely.
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Post by littlekreen on Sept 15, 2018 19:57:48 GMT -6
Sukarma turned a bright violet on yellow as tentacle hair pointed forward, "You have medicine to purge radionuclides? I had to take courses for basic science stuff all across the board but I don't know how to run the meds stuff in the ops wall. That's neat! That's one thing I don't need to worry about!"
With a smile she turned to her normal cyan on dark blue, "Yeah, I blew the plasma channel trying to run the drill but there's nothing of real value in the toolhead plasma channel when it blew. The mining lance itself is okay I hit the safety in time on the asteroid. The inside has glassy stuff in it from cooling down the plasma but I bet you can probably blow that out easy. I can open one of the forward substrate vents if you need."
Sukarma tossed the empty milkshake container over her head which flipped through the air and landed with a hard stunk beside the dishwasher. Another small pip of blue forcefield pushed it into an opening gap.
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Post by demikara on Sept 20, 2018 16:31:59 GMT -6
"It's pretty standard where I'm from yeah. You can possibly replicate it?" She offered and shrugged. "I bring my own cause not all ships stock them." She considered things carefully. "We'll need some sort of medical attendant though. I can probably make a simple nurse bot once you're all fixed up, it would take me a bit though. I've never done anything like it." But it was important to have someone who could take care of medical emergencies. And a nurse bot may be able to help with any damage to the ship's avatar.
She was just glad they had some sort of a med ops. Still, she needed to keep working, didn't she? "Right. Go ahead and space whatever is in there, and I'll clean the rest out. We can see what needs work in there too." It was kind of important after all. They needed to be able to see all the damage, even the stuff on the outside. She finished off her meal and took the plate to the dishwasher. "Tonight though, I think I'll clean out my arm, if you don't mind. It needs regular maintenance, and I've given it a hell of a workout lately."
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