Let There Be Light

Posted on Mon Oct 19th, 2015 @ 3:31pm by Lieutenant Commander Ciaran McIntyre & Lieutenant Commander Horatio Hawke & Lieutenant Ryan North

Episode: Lost Property
Location: Astrometerics
Timeline: Timeline: MD01: 1845 hrs.

Ryan checked his instruments again. And then again. He made done it over what felt like a hundred times now, mostly to make sure that hadn't been some sort of error on his part. Or the computer's part. Or both really. He wasn't sure that he had a full proof plan but it was better than anything they had so far. He turned around as the doors opened.

Flanked by the security chief, the first officer strode into the astrometrics lab with his usual air of calm professionalism. As always, Hawke's uniform was impeccably turned out and not a hair on his head was out of place. His fastidiousness was well known to the crew since he took the second chair on the bridge all those months ago. He'd also been trying to cultivate a stricter reputation, with varying degrees of success.

"Mr. North," he said in a crisp tone. "What have you got for us?"

McIntyre shot North a reassuring smile - he knew that the kid had been working his ass off to bring them results but Hawke's new 'professional demeanour' could intimidate even the hardest working officers.

"Commanders," Ryan nodded in greeting. "I may have found a possible solution to our cloaked Klingon problem."

"Fantastic." McIntyre said, flashing the same smile again. He had been impressed by North's work ethic on this despite it being akin to finding a needle in a pile of other needles.

Ryan had limited interaction with his XO so far, although his style of command reminded him of his old MACO CO. The term hardass came to mind. He turned and typed in a series of commands on the astrometrics pod and a new image appeared on the screen.

"I went through all the information that Starfleet Intelligence had on the Klingon cloaking devices, which appear to have no obvious flaws. So, I decided to think creatively...instead of looking for the ships I went with a different approach. If we send out heavily concentrated bursts of gamma and tachyon particles those same particles should saturate their warpcores."

Hawke crossed his arms and studied the screen as North explained it. He wasn't going to pretend he was an expert, but he knew enough to get by. "What happens when a warp core is saturated like that?" he asked, honestly not knowing the answer.

"Here's where the ingenious part comes in," Ryan smiled, tapping in a few more commands. "Eventually, those warpcores are going to absorb so much excess tachyon and gamma energy that they'll have to reroute some of it, causing a power surge. To anyone else it will look like a sudden spike in background radiation but we'll know better. There is a downside though."

The first officer nodded; it sounded feasible in theory. When the cloaked ship discharged that energy build up, it was absolutely be detected. But he knew it had to be too good to be true. "What's the downside?"

"Two things really," Ryan said. "First off it will interfere with the torpedo guidance sensors secondly, it will weaken shield strength by about 5%."

"We should be able to compensate for that." McIntyre said without checking his facts. "Renard should be able to at least."

"He might be able to figure that out," Ryan said, with a shrug. "Honestly, guidance systems were never my strong suit. Its just with all that radiation floating around out there and the sensors scanning for the energy spikes we're going to be hard pressed to find the computing or sensor resources to throw into it. Good news, is the phaser targeting systems shouldn't really be that effected."

"That is good news." McIntyre said with a wry smile - we run into way too many things that screw with our targeting systems. "Keep at it, Lieutenant. This is great work."