Member
Elite Minor
Foster
Phase
GalaxyRaider
rush99999
Dion
Uncertain Tea
The Fool*
"NAVOPCPU-6234-773, respond."
Cake was not fond of Advanced Navigation Computers. Their responses were too simplistic, they had zero emotion and were annoying to deal with. They were cheap though, and that's why various freighters and other civilian ships used them over full shipboard AI. After all, why would a company pay for a human navigator when a computer could do that for them for a cheaper long-term cost? In some cases, all a freighter needed was an Advanced Navigation Computer to take the ship from point A to point B. On safe routes, it could definitely save a lot of money for interstellar shipping companies, but even out here it helped with calculations or just meant the crew could focus on other tasks, such as maintenance. They even coordinated their own docking sequences, and could run communications and data between ships and stations. The pirate ship probably even had one. The only problem was that Moray's one wasn't communicating.
That could mean one of several things. It could mean that the communications array of the Moray was down or disabled, it could mean that the navigation computer had been disconnected from the communications array, or it could mean that the navigation computer had been disabled entirely. Cake began to knock through the possibilities, starting with the communications array. It seemed that the pirates had decided to go the manual route, as some of the major communication nodes had been not disabled but entirely destroyed. Most likely the pirates had told the Moray to drop shields, and then nailed the nodes to keep her from squawking. That alone told her that communications had to still be up, if spotty, but she had to be sure. The ship didn't have a lot of power as it was, so Cake had to play it safe. She tapped the few remaining nodes very gently and quietly with minuscule pings, and getting just as quiet pongs in response. Each node she pinged sent an individual response to her, the sending device's address differing each time. That confirmed to her that the Navigation Computer was down entirely - if it was up, communications, even pings, would have been routed through it in case it was a ship or station navigation query. As it was, each node she was pinging had defaulted into maintenance mode, and was responding via their own programming. She stopped her efforts, wishing to conserve the tiny scraps of power that the ship had left.
Cake could also tell the Navigation Computer was down by the fact that the Moray was making no attitude adjustments whatsoever, but that was easy. She had to look smart somehow.
As she worked, Cake kept an ear on the briefing by the Captain, having manifested herself in the Situation Room as a hologram that drifted around slowly, listening to the senior crew's plans in order to generate her own tasklist to support them in the field. Astrid's plan appealed to Cake greatly, and she added in her own thoughts and discoveries. "I'd be happy to give the Moray a joyride. I've never owned a racecar before," Cake chirps, an obvious bit of sarcasm - Moray was anything but a racecar. "Okay, maybe it's not a racecar, but at least I'll have the space whales swooning. There is a minor snag however, which Lieutenant Faust has already alluded to."
Cake brought up two diagrams of the Moray - one top down view and the other side on, and presented them both on the screens. She overlaid these diagrams with a series of green dots, each with a corresponding number next to it. "Moray uses a COMSPOKE type communication system. These are all of the transmit-receive nodes on the ship's hull, thirty seven in all. Silly number, silly system." She proceeded to turn thirty-one of the dots red, leaving a measly six dots green. "The pirates hit most of them to stop Moray from squawking, likely with point defence so they didn't do too much damage to the ship itself. While the remaining six are functional, the connection with the ship will be spotty at best. This wouldn't be too much of a problem if the Navigation Computer wasn't offline. It could handle the micro adjustments while I handle the big picture. If it hasn't been torn from it's housing, it'll should be an easy fix when the engines come back on and start feeding the ship power."
