Establishing Communications

Posted on Thu Jun 30th, 2016 @ 11:49pm by Captain Tim Williams & Lieutenant Commander Jean Reynard & Lieutenant Griffen Tanol

Episode: Lost Property
Location: USS Highlander - Engineering
Timeline: MD04

The captain strode through the doors of main engineering as they opened before him and Jean, and immediately looked around to find his chief engineer. "Grif? Have you caught up on the data we copied to you?"

"Here!" Grif said as she stuck her hand out from the main console nook by the warp core. "Just finishing up reading now... It's pretty fascinating information if you ask me... a ship stuck in a subspace bubble of sorts that can still interact with our own plane, but only in specific areas."

"Yeah, the long and the short of it is that we think the De Salle was duplicated by some sort of divergence field around the time it was thrown off-course, and that there is someone still alive over there. The other ship is slightly out of phase with us, which is why we can't see it, but the systems must still be linked somehow. We need to figure out a way of communicating with them."

"Well... my first question is have we figured out who we might be talking to? Will we be talking to the descendants of the actual crew or the crew themselves?" Grif asked as she pulled up a display of how the computer figured the two ships must be intersecting. "Anyways.. uhh... I want to suggest some sort of subspace beacon, but the problem is our subspace systems have gotten vastly more complex and powerful since the NX days. We might blow out their receiver and make it impossible for us to communicate."

Grif pursed her lips as she thought it over, "Figuring out what plane they're on first is what we need to do, from there we could possibly send a probe out, get it to their phase, plane whatever, and use it as a relay to chat. Our systems can interact with a subspace probes systems in whatever phase or area of subspace it's in to a degree, if we could make it so the probe could then communicate with the De Salle we'd have our line of communication."

Tim shook his head. "We don't know who we'd be talking to yet. It's possible that with the way that the ship was thrown away from the initial incident, the crew may have experienced effects of relativity. It's also possible that their descendants are crewing the ship, though I don't know how they'd of been able to keep going this long without resupplying."

"Can you determine what their phase shift is?" the captain continued. "Adjust the scanners somehow, or send probes through a range of phase shifts, scanning each until they find them?"

"Lt. North and I were running simulations to determine how the De Salle got all the way out there," Jean said, "and I went back over the data we'd compiled from both our sensors and theirs. There's only a limited number of phase bands - a hundred and twenty-seven, discounting our own - that they could have ended up in. If we equip a probe with a type-seven phase discriminator and a subspace isolation field, it could safely rotate through a band a minute, giving plenty of time for scans or comm checks."

"That should work..." Grif crossed her arms and let her hip stick out the side, thinking over the Operation Officer's suggestion. "But it would take forever to hit all of the spectrum. We could use the astrometric's sensors to scan the varying levels of phase. It would take some alterations to the system, but now that we know they're out there we should be able to settle on a specific set of variances to scan. We already know that there are a set few levels of phase that a human ship and humans can live at before things got too weird and they became unrecognizable, since we can recognize them we know they'd be pretty close to our own level of phase. A level that the astrometrics sensors should be able to detect with modifications. We could actually even pair it with Reynard's idea, one starts at one end of the spectrum, the second at the other. "

"Do it," the captain said. "Both of them. Even if the astrometric sensors find them, we may need the phase-shifted probe to be able to open a comm-link with them. So long as it is in the same phase as they are, they should be able to detect it and receive a hail via it."

"How long do you need before you can start the scans?"

"For the sensors, it's mostly a matter of cross-connecting some phase modules into the astrometrics array and writing an algorithm to process the data, which shouldn't take long," Jean said. "Modifying and programming a probe won't take along either, since it's all off the shelf components." He shrugged and looked at Grif. "I'd say we could be testing it all by the end of the hour, tops."

"About that." Grif shrugged, "After we confirm it'll work... maybe another hour or two before we can home in on the right plane. Depends on just how close to our plane they are." She pressed her lips together and lolled her head to the side as she thought, "Say four hours max for everything at worse. Opening a communications line though... I don't think I can say until after we've found them."

Griffen's face broke out into a wide grin, "North's going to hate me for hotwiring the astrometric sensors."

"Well, he just needs to have faith that the ship's technical staff aren't going to break anything," Jean said. "Besides, he should be thrilled at all research potential a find like this has."

"Well since the specs for the astrometric sensors come from the folks on Voyager hotwiring a whole panel of sensor arrays, I'm sure he'll be able to live with it," Tim said. "Keep me updated, and let me know as soon as you find them."

"Will do Boss man." Grif said with a nod as she started to envision some of the modification she wanted to do to the subspace sensor array. Looking over at the operations officer she jerked her head towards the door, "Probe shouldn't take long shall we head to astrometrics first?"

Jean nodded. "Agreed. Once we write the software patches needed to make the sensor rewiring work, we can save time by applying that to the probe guidance systems."