[centre][h2]Sumiye King – Acting Chief Engineer[/h2][/centre]

[color=fff200]“Oh boy; where should I start?”[/color] Rather than sit Sumiye opted to stay standing as she addressed the room, offering a brief glance to the botanist and the astronaut before focusing her attention back on the captain; despite the ominous opening line and the attention directed her way she managed to project an air on nonchalance as she spoke, a placid look on her face. A hand reached for the screen tucked into the waistband of her half open overalls, only to second guess herself and stuff both hands into her pockets instead; she knew the damaged enough to give a report without it. [color=fff200]“Well, the good news is that there’s no threat of a reactor meltdown, so we’re not going to blow up. The bad news is that this ship is never getting off the ground.”[/color]

The acting-Chief Engineer let that sink for a moment of two before continuing. [color=fff200]“I don’t say that because we can’t fix what’s wrong with it; the Thucydides is structurally sound, there are no hull breaches and aside from the FTL drives and the underside of the ship there’s surprisingly little damage to our key systems. Life support is still online, the main engines are fine aside from a coolant leak which has already been fixed; we’re running everything on low power just to be safe, but once we run some safety tests we’ll be able to bring things back up to full. Weapons, short-range communication, sensors… all banged up but nothing we can’t fix given enough time. She took a beating but in the grand scheme of things all we need to do is buff out the dents and give her a wax.”[/color]

A simplification of matters and an understatement of just how much work was involved, but it summed things up well enough. The Thucydides was in good shape, all things considered; the problem lay elsewhere.

[color=fff200]“I say it because ships of this type were never designed to operate in-atmosphere. It doesn’t have the thrust-to-weight ratio to lift its own mass inside a gravity well; especially not one of near-Earth strength like this one appears to be. We’ve lost almost 40% of our manoeuvring thrusters but even if we repaired all of them and fired them all at once they wouldn’t move us an inch. The main engine is functional and once we restore coolant flow we’ll be able to power it up again, but even if we somehow managed to point this thing towards the sky the engines can’t produce enough oomph for us to take off.”[/color]

The days of erecting towers and pointing rockets at the sky to get things into space was a thing of the past, though maybe the Captain was old enough to remember those days. The Thucydides was constructed in space, piece by piece, from compartments built in dry docks like the one she used to work at, lifted into orbits by space elevators or short range transports and put together in the cold and empty vacuum of space. It had likely never even felt the touch of air on its hull before the crash; it was never intended to.

[color=fff200]“Which brings us to our main problem; the FTL is down. The whole thing. I don’t know why and neither does anyone on its maintenance crew; I’ve already spoken to Senior Engineer Tomlinson about it. All we know is that the drive failed all at once, kicked us out of hyperspace and left us where we are. And if that wasn’t bad enough the drive is tied into the same system as our long range communications relay, so [i]that[/i] is down as well; meaning we have no way to call for help other than to send out a regular, sub-light speed radio communication and hope someone picks it up sometime in the next few millennia.”[/color]

No Faster-Than-Light travel also meant no Faster-Than-Light communication, which was kind of a big deal considering that was how almost all communication across the vast darkness of space was conducted. Light speed was just too slow to get anything done.

[color=fff200]“In short, we’re stranded and we have no way of sending a distress call. But, if you want to send out an expedition I can divert some more resources towards getting the hangar bay and our short-range shuttles repaired.”[/color]

[@Kumbaris][@deadpixel101][@DracoLunaris]