if you can't welcome it and aren't ready for it, you will spend a lot of time in uncomfortable positions, possibly bleeding.
For me, though, this sort of thing is pretty much as natural as breathing. The hand rail becomes a ladder, with evenly spaced cross bars to serve that purpose, and I hardly feel any vertigo at all.
Not that I don't let it stop me from cursing in the name of our captain, may he be triple-damned for flinging me around like that – but that's nothing out of the ordinary for me. I spend a fair amount of my day doing nothing else.
The turret compartment is a mess, and I know Shorty is going to carve off a big slice of my butt for dinner when she sees what Pauli and I did to the place. Access hatches are all undogged, various parts and pieces are scattered around, nothing is shiny and operating-theater-clean, as she requires.
Unfortunately we don't have the luxury of time at the moment, so I have to try to see past the worst of it, and get it operational.
I am not a weapons specialist like Shorty, so there's really not much I can do to calibrate the turrets. Hopefully Janis can shift fire and adjust for accuracy, though I am not at all confident that will be possible. Janis is unbelievably good, but turrets that aren't calibrated and zeroed out would compound the error as they translate through their azimuth and altitude, and then to base ballistic calculations from a flawed platform... well, I don't understand enough of it to even know how hard it would be.
The challenge in front of me though is pretty straightforward. The wetnet is connected, and it looks like Pauli did his typical perfect job with it, so my first order of business will be connecting power leads.
These are modular systems, which greatly help with upgrades, but the Archaea was built a long time ago, in a time where connections were wired up rather than plugged in. Luckily, I've done a ton of work upgrading her power backbone, and can pull voltage where I need it, at the right amounts, just about anywhere.
I'd like to fabricate new connectors for the turret sockets, but given our time crunch, I'm going to have to hot-wire them. Shorty will definitely see red when she gets an eyeful of this work, but I just don't have time to do much more.
Once I have the power lit and the turrets energized, I started on the next challenge, to fabricate a new loading rail between the ammunition ovens, and the firing breech of the kinetic railers.
Again, I am faced with the type of engineering challenge I know I can do, but not necessarily one that I can do well. As I grind and mill on the parts I need, I am afraid none of this work will reduce the chewing I am going to get from Shorty.
“Gene, I am standing by, waiting patiently for you to give me the good news that we're going to be able to defend ourselves out here in the great big scary galaxy.”
“I'm very close Dak, very close... I need to machine a loading rail, but it's a pretty straightforward job. After that I need to plumb in the cooling harness, and then calibrate, though I am hoping Janis can work some sort of offset to handle that, as it's really a job suited for Shorty.”
“How much more time are we looking at Gene? I am currently closing with the target, but without those guns, I am afraid I won't have much to convince them to slow down and listen to us, beyond my unmitigated capacity to blow smoke up their stern tubes. Of course, to add insult to injury, we've been going all day long and I have hardly had a single drop of coffee. You know that makes me a little edgy. I hardly remember what it tastes like at this point.”
“Dak, it's going to take me about 10 minutes to machine the part, and maybe another 10 minutes or so to install it. Whether or not it will work at that point is also up in the air. I'm not Shorty, you know... these damn things terrify me. Once that is done, I will have at least another 15 minutes or so for the cooling harness.”
“Gene, I'm sorry, I
For me, though, this sort of thing is pretty much as natural as breathing. The hand rail becomes a ladder, with evenly spaced cross bars to serve that purpose, and I hardly feel any vertigo at all.
Not that I don't let it stop me from cursing in the name of our captain, may he be triple-damned for flinging me around like that – but that's nothing out of the ordinary for me. I spend a fair amount of my day doing nothing else.
The turret compartment is a mess, and I know Shorty is going to carve off a big slice of my butt for dinner when she sees what Pauli and I did to the place. Access hatches are all undogged, various parts and pieces are scattered around, nothing is shiny and operating-theater-clean, as she requires.
Unfortunately we don't have the luxury of time at the moment, so I have to try to see past the worst of it, and get it operational.
I am not a weapons specialist like Shorty, so there's really not much I can do to calibrate the turrets. Hopefully Janis can shift fire and adjust for accuracy, though I am not at all confident that will be possible. Janis is unbelievably good, but turrets that aren't calibrated and zeroed out would compound the error as they translate through their azimuth and altitude, and then to base ballistic calculations from a flawed platform... well, I don't understand enough of it to even know how hard it would be.
The challenge in front of me though is pretty straightforward. The wetnet is connected, and it looks like Pauli did his typical perfect job with it, so my first order of business will be connecting power leads.
These are modular systems, which greatly help with upgrades, but the Archaea was built a long time ago, in a time where connections were wired up rather than plugged in. Luckily, I've done a ton of work upgrading her power backbone, and can pull voltage where I need it, at the right amounts, just about anywhere.
I'd like to fabricate new connectors for the turret sockets, but given our time crunch, I'm going to have to hot-wire them. Shorty will definitely see red when she gets an eyeful of this work, but I just don't have time to do much more.
Once I have the power lit and the turrets energized, I started on the next challenge, to fabricate a new loading rail between the ammunition ovens, and the firing breech of the kinetic railers.
Again, I am faced with the type of engineering challenge I know I can do, but not necessarily one that I can do well. As I grind and mill on the parts I need, I am afraid none of this work will reduce the chewing I am going to get from Shorty.
“Gene, I am standing by, waiting patiently for you to give me the good news that we're going to be able to defend ourselves out here in the great big scary galaxy.”
“I'm very close Dak, very close... I need to machine a loading rail, but it's a pretty straightforward job. After that I need to plumb in the cooling harness, and then calibrate, though I am hoping Janis can work some sort of offset to handle that, as it's really a job suited for Shorty.”
“How much more time are we looking at Gene? I am currently closing with the target, but without those guns, I am afraid I won't have much to convince them to slow down and listen to us, beyond my unmitigated capacity to blow smoke up their stern tubes. Of course, to add insult to injury, we've been going all day long and I have hardly had a single drop of coffee. You know that makes me a little edgy. I hardly remember what it tastes like at this point.”
“Dak, it's going to take me about 10 minutes to machine the part, and maybe another 10 minutes or so to install it. Whether or not it will work at that point is also up in the air. I'm not Shorty, you know... these damn things terrify me. Once that is done, I will have at least another 15 minutes or so for the cooling harness.”
“Gene, I'm sorry, I
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