Post 2

Posted on Sun Jun 8th, 2014 @ 4:57pm by Captain Christina Curtis

Mission: Begin with a Bang
Location: Inspection Pod Alpha, Earth Orbit, NX-04 Drydock
Timeline: May 10th, 2155 - 0920 hours

Captain Christina Curtis looked up through the thick transparent aluminium windows of the inspection pod as she piloted the tiny vessel around the drydock facility. Above her floated the form of her true vessel: Discovery, NX-04. There was a definitive line of hull plates missing going from the strut leading to the port warp nacelle towards the rear of the saucer section - where engineering and the warp core were. The power conduits along that route had overloaded during a test last week, and had nearly blown off the entire nacelle. Thankfully it hadn't come to that, but the incident had blown out the power conduits, and left a great tear in the hull plates. The misalignment which had caused the overload had since been corrected, and the engineers had finished replacing the conduits yesterday, but the ship was still left with a series of missing hull plates that still had to be replaced.

"Make sure that the hull plates those are replaced with match the rest of the ship," she said to the young engineer who had accompanied her, pad in hand to take notes. The hull plates of the four NX-class vessels all varied slightly in composition, taking into account new advancements that had been made in the refinement process, and this gave each ship a slightly different hue to the others - though NX-01 was still the most different in terms of its shade, as her three successors each had a subtle blue tint to their hulls. Each new composition had come with improved hull polarisation technologies - Discovery's hull polarisation was 19% better at withstanding damage than Enterprise's plating was capable of generating.

Curtis tapped the thruster controls to alter the ship's direction, aiming for one of the docking ports on the outer edge of the saucer, her external inspection done for the day. The sensors were needed in order to back the pod into the docking port, but it was a manoeuvre that she had practised many times; first during the construction of Enterprise, and now again during construction of her own vessel. Locking down the controls, she swivelled her chair to stand, stooping slightly in the cramped craft. As she moved to the airlock, the engineer swapped places with her and took the pilot's seat, setting his pad to the side. Tapping the control to open the airlock, and being greeted with the much larger airlock of Discovery, she turned to the engineer for a parting word before she disembarked. "I want those hull plates in place by the end of the day. Tell the yard chief to contact me if there's going to be any delay."

"Yes, ma'am," the engineer responded, turning back to the controls to make ready for his return trip.

Cycling her way through the airlock, Curtis found herself in the familiar halls of her starship, and began striding confidently through the corridors that she had memorised. Left then right, then another right as she passed the hatch to the cargo bay. The corridor curved to the left before making a sharper left turn, putting her on a course that would be perpendicular to the motion of the ship, were it going anywhere. Another left past the port hydroponics bay, and the next right saw her on a course for the upper level of main engineering; the two hatches to which were half-way along the hall. Before she had walked a quarter of the corridor, she turned left again, and then right, into the short corridor that ended in the central-most lift shaft. There were a total of three such shafts aboard Discovery, but this was the only one that was capable of taking her to the far-dorsal sections of the ship; and the bridge.

The bridge, when she stepped onto it, was much the same as it had been the day before; that is, in pieces. To be fair to the engineering teams, the core elements of the bridge were in place, including the helm, tactical, science, communications and engineering consoles, each of them covered in plastic sheeting. The room was filled with engineers putting the final touches in place - panels into the wall consoles, the situation table at the back of the bridge, and Curtis' own chair all needed to go in before the ship could launch. The captain had wanted to make sure that the engine room was prioritised over the bridge, considering the engine troubles that Columbia had experienced. Challenger's launch had been smoother, but Christina had nevertheless wanted to avoid tempting fate. Thankfully, the two newest NX class ship bridges had also done away with the glowing EPS conduits at the back of the bridge that had been experimented with on Columbia. She had always found them to be intensely distracting, and the thought of having them right behind where she sat during battle drills made her constantly paranoid that they would explode on her if her opponent got a lucky shot in.

Deciding to leave the crews to their tasks, she made her way through the hatch to her ready room. She had to check on the status of the crew assignments she had submitted to Starfleet Command; with any luck, they had approved some of her transfer requests.