Shuttle Project

Posted on Thu Aug 26, 2021 @ 4:42pm by Captain Larisna Koralova & Lieutenant Jaro Antos

Mission: Mission 1R - Vigilance Be Our Shield
Location: Captain's Ready Room
Timeline: M1D1 - 1830 Hours

He was only a few hours into his first shift as Chief Flight Control Officer of the Hornet and Antos was already immersed into the thick of work. He had a collection of padds, each pertaining to various files he was either going to need to familiarize himself with or needed attention. However, one of the tasks stood above the others not necessarily because it was more urgent, but because it was uniquely aligned with the evacuation mission that was ahead of the ship.

Antos was not new to evacuation planning on a star system wide level. Part of his Academy years, into his first year as an officer had been spent planning for and implementing the staged evacuation of affected Romulan-controlled worlds before all of that went sideways after the synth attack on Mars. In fact, it was that experience that had led him to this posting in the first place.

Arriving on the Bridge, the turbolift parted to reveal the nerve centre of the ship. The Bajoran paused only for a short moment to glance at the beautiful scenery of officers bent over consoles or discussing technical details about the mission ahead. His eyes lingered on the helm station, taking in every inch of it as a King might survey his kingdom. The Monarch class was a fairly new starship and Antos could not wait to add her to his list of starships he has helmed....but that would have to wait.

Switching his focus to the Captain's Ready Room, where he hoped to meet with his new commanding and executive officers for the first time, Antos turned sideways and headed in its direction. As he arrived, he pressed the annunciator and patiently waited to be acknowledged.

"That looks like quite a project you have going on there Mr. Antos, do you require assistance?" The Exec asked.

"Pardon the interruption Commander...Captain," he greeted and then paused as if only just realizing what the Commander said. He glanced at the collection of padds, "Oh...this, no I'll be fine. It's my fault really for having the team hand me multiple padds when I should have asked for the task file list in a more concise fashion."

He set the padd aside for now, clutching to the one he was here specifically about. "Forgive me skipping formal introductions and jumping right into the thick of things. I suspect there will be time for that later on. It has come to my attention that the flight team has been working on a short-range shuttlecraft with a modular mission payload system...not unlike this ship. The shuttlecraft is comprised of three modules, the command pod, the warp sled and a variable cargo module that can be outfitted as a transport. Given our impending mission, I thought worth flagging that this project could be useful to help boost our evacuation capabilities."

Larisna glanced between the two before gesturing to the chairs in front of her desk.

"I appreciate the forethought, Lieutenant, and we can address that as we need to, but the actual evacuation work will more be done by the Tahoe, Alameda, and Zaikov." Larisna explained, "We're mostly overseeing and standing in as backup."

"That said, though, tell me a little bit more. I wasn't aware of any work going on with the shuttles, but I tend to allow a fair bit of latitude when dealing with these things, and if there's something here, we might be able to cascade it out to the rest of the task force." Larisna said, leaning forward.

"Might be worth it to have a backup shuttle just in case. This mission is perilous enough as it is." Amanda suggested.

Antos took one of the seats that was offered by his new commanding officer. "My apologies Captain," he said as if suddenly regretting he had bothered the two most senior, and obviously busiest officers on the entire ship. "I may have jumped the gun by thinking we were taking an active role in the actual evacuation." He paused and slid the foremost padd in his hand on the table facing the Captain. "The design work on the shuttle was actually started by the flight crew that was part of the shakedown cruise, although I understand some of them elected to stay on. The crew chief and his technicians picked up where they left off, refining the specifications and schematics, which is what you see there on that padd."

Seating back he allowed himself only the briefest of moments to study the command officers he would be reporting to. He of course had read their bios - at least what was publicly available and he knew they were both excellent officers. His new Captain was not only an accomplished civilian in her own right, enough to even attempt to apply to the Trill Symbiosis Commission, she was also a decorated veteran of the Dominion War. The Executive Officer was a brilliant computer scientist of some kind and was clearly skilled enough to have risen to the ranks very rapidly. He hoped to learn much from each of them...after all, why would the Prophets have returned him back to Starfleet and guided him to this particular ship.

Snapping out of his reminiscing Antos. "On both of your respective points to have this project as a backup of sorts, I concur. The design is simple enough that we can easily fabricate the modules with the industrial replicators we have on board. The same would be true for the other ships in the task force."

"It's not out of line, Lieutenant. And I'm open to ideas, so I'm glad to see what comes you ideas. If you'd like, you can use one of the shuttles to test the idea and then share it out with the task force. We have some time and I don't want to stifle what could be a useful idea." Larisna said.

"Do you have a schematic of the design and its intended capabilities?" Amanda asked.

Antos nodded at the Captain's suggestion and turned the Commander. "Yes, I do Commander. Forgive me, I only have this one copy on the padd. But I can more formally share with you both a thorough report on potential usage for this mission. But suffice it to say, I think the benefits of this design is its simplicity, ease to manufacture at scale, adaptability for a variety of mission, including the ability to swap out modules for more transport oriented design, significantly increasing its carrying capacity by nearly four-fold."

Larisna looked it over, "I see. This was adapted from the Danube class of Runabouts to our Type 11s. Makes sense. I don't think our Type 8s and Type 18s are large enough to accommodate this, but the Type 11 could. Well done, Lieutenant. You can use one of our Type 11s to make this idea work, I'd like to keep the other working just in case. Commander, if there's anything we can do to accommodate this, let's give it a shot. If nothing else, it'll keep people busy and not antsy about what's waiting for us." Larisna said.

Antos nodded. "Very well Captain, Commander. I will get my team on this and will report on progress as they become available. If there's nothing else Ma'ams, I'd like to attend to other duties before the staff briefing later on."

"Dismissed", Commander Malloy said.

[END]