Shuttle Project

Posted on Mon Oct 11, 2021 @ 2:43pm by Lieutenant Jaro Antos

Mission: Mission 1R - Vigilance Be Our Shield
Location: Shuttle Bay
Timeline: M1 Day 2 1023 Hours

Antos had read up on everything Chief ch’Thranne gave him on the shuttlecraft project, which was now greenlit by the Captain. What may have started as a pet project, now had obvious benefits to the ship and crew, particularly given the current context they found themselves.

In truth, it was more than a pet project. Antos had reviewed more of the previous log entries of his flight team and now knew that this shuttle project had an educational component to it. The flight crew of the Hornet had come up with a design that retrofits a type-11 shuttle as a multi-purpose, short-range interstellar shuttlecraft. In the process, the project had and continues to teach technical skills to the shuttle bay technicians involved in the project.

The anticipated fabrication of the shuttle, with the help of the industrial replicator on board the Hornet would serve to enhance the capabilities of an away team and would be able to support a variety of mission types ranging from diplomatic to troop transport, or even to cargo transport.

The design changes to the type-11 shuttle was fairly simple as it took advantage of modular design capability of the shuttle. The project ahead of them was to create a variant of the type-11 shuttle that would have three components: the command pod, which housed the ship’s control systems; the warp sled, which as the name suggested housed the warp engines- as well as the impulse engines; and a multi-purpose third module, which could accommodate a cargo, transport, hospitality, or medical module.

A lot of work had gone into the design of the shuttle and its technical specifications. This included the simulated field tests that had occurred so far. All in all, it was rather impressive – so much so that Antos found it currently the most interesting part of his role on the Hornet, so far.

To date, the analyses of the project suggested that the shuttle project was viable and there was a solid proof of concept, which enabled the project to move to the next stage of a plethora of rigorous testing.

And it was here that Antos, against perhaps what was good judgment for a department head, had volunteered his piloting skills. Jazmine had tried to talk him out of it, noting that it would be difficult to joggle the responsibilities of a department head with that of a test pilot, but Antos had disagreed. He was genuinely intrigued by the project.

But this new phase was not without challenges. The early simulations had discovered some strange technical readouts that were concerning, but not necessarily sufficiently serious to discontinue the project. One of the bigger problems was the fact that during simulations, whenever the impulse engines were engaged, there seemed to be power fluctuations from an unknown source that eventually led to a cascade of system failures.

This was going to be the first, and biggest problem, this phase of the project will try to resolve. To solve it however, meant trying to isolate the problem by initiating, in a carefully sequenced and orderly manner, the actions that was known to lead to the power fluctuations.

Antos’ role in the project seemed straightforward enough, as far as he was concerned. He was for all intents going to be a test pilot, flying the craft through a series of designated maneuvers...all simulated of course. While he did that, the techs would pour over the sensor readouts to hopefully identify the cause of the anomaly.

Simulations were the safest means for now as a live test was too dangerous. That aside, there was also no time to take the shuttle out for a flight test given the ship's current mission.

For the time being, the flight team would have to be satisfied with simulations and Antos had a fair amount of reading to do to ensure he was familiar with as much information on the shuttle as he needed to know in advance of when the simulations start.