The Love Of Changing Things

Posted on Mon Feb 16th, 2026 @ 11:59pm by Lieutenant Commander Darrod Hanous & Commander Lucy Heartfilia

1,067 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Mission 6: Echoes of the Interphase
Location: USS Midway, at Earth Spacedock
Timeline: M6 MD02 (2268.10.02) 14:00

It was an interesting experience for Darrod coming back to Spacedock and knowing that the ship he'd stepped off was the ship he'd be boarding again after shore leave. The whole ship was on shore leave and light duty while they were docked in Earth's orbit. Meanwhile, Darrod had spent the week with Meredith and her family. It had cemented both his love for her and the way his confidence increased knowing that these were his engines, and his engine room. Put another way, it felt good to know where his towel was.

He also wasn't a man really suited for a life planetside, as much as he enjoyed spending time with the woman he loved no matter where. That meant after a week on Earth, he had beamed up here with an armload of technical journals. He wasn't the mad scientist that his predecessor had been, but no engineer worthy of the title could sit around and tolerate things being suboptimal. As much as he cared about and respected this ship, that same kind of impatience struck with him sitting on Earth with technical journals and the ongoing SCE letter thread between the various Starship-Class Engineers.

He stepped out of the turbolift and looked around at the dimmed bridge. It reminded him of the first time he'd knowingly seen a Federation bridge. It had been an Antares-type freighter seized by the Cartel, and the lights had been dimmed to conserve power after it was stolen and towed. He knew it was a sign that the mighty warp core was offline. But he'd already known that from the moment he beamed aboard, because the deckplates didn't vibrate under his feet. The ship was silent, operating on batteries and solar, along with the spacedock umbilicals. He'd been trying to ignore it, but now with direct evidence, he couldn't dodge it. Still, the ship was merely a snoozing dragon, not dead. He glanced around and saw the first officer in the Captain's chair with the skeleton crew around her. "Hanous reporting in. Meredith says hello."

With the basics out of the way, he gestured with the journals. "I want to run a few tests based on this, and what I know already. I want to try tying the phaser supercaps into the main EPS flow. It'll make us a little more vulnerable if we take a direct hit between decks three and five, but I think we'll have a massive jump in phaser power and control. I also want to see about re-angling the primary plasma manifolds in the nacelles. I think we might be able to generate a Cochrane field with field strength conforming to the ship, so we can increase acceleration, and potentially push our cruise speed up too." He neglected to mention that it might lead to their warp field collapsing if they were hit with a gravity well amidships (like a gravitic mine, or turning too close to a black hole or other stellar object).

He looked at her with a smile. "Captain Faust hasn't specifically approved the modifications, but you know he gives me a free hand to test out proposed uprates. Do you have any issue with the plan, sir?"

Lucy pondered forva moment. "If the Captain approves, then it should be fine." She replied giving the engineer a small smile "There's not much going on here, I can give you a hand if you'd like?"

Darrod smiled at her with a nod and gestured toward the turbolift. A second person was always good to have along on a project like this. He'd have had Meredith along, but she'd already been bombarded by Darrod's enthusiasm about the ship. Then again, the fact that he openly shared that was relatively new to him; and it was her influence that helped him believe that others would at least tolerate him being more than a gadfly when it came to improvements. "Absolutely. I'd appreciate your take on these new uprates as well."

With that, he led the two of them down to Deck Eleven, where the phaser control circuits were now sitting idle. Like the engine core itself, the phasers were at rest. The room-sized capacitors that drove them were fully discharged too, as was standard procedure at Starbase. If Darrod's idea (inspired by others) worked, the startup time would be reduced, rate of fire could be increased, and the sheer power behind this weapon could be more than doubled. There were risks to the approach, of course.

Anything that affected the core would affect the phasers, with very little backup. They wouldn't be able to recharge from the single shot stored in the caps if the power dropped suddenly (which would essentially go from serving as recharging batteries to being smoothing capacitors across the load). Transfer to auxiliary would require manual relays being thrown. On the other hand, the torpedoes weren't being affected, so Dar hoped it would be enough.

He'd seen what could be done with a ship's phaser cannon tied directly to a Raider's core when the power output had been doubled through manifold compression. Brittle systems, but they were the kind of thing that gave Orions the edge they wanted in a fight. It had nearly destroyed the firing ship, leaving it totally adrift in space until they could cold-start the engine. On the other hand, the Romulan station asteroid had been left with a hole punching straight through the bulkheads between decks in their own engine core. They'd surrendered soon after - for a price, as always.

Pushing aside the memory and the pain, Darrod looked over the giant cylinders and the wiring around them. He looked at Lucy with a smile that was a bit forced, his eyes still somewhat distant from the memory. "Have you ever directly worked on any of the EPS systems before?"

Lucy nodded. "I have actually. I may be a Science Officer, but I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty from time to time. So, where do you want to start?"

Darrod gestured to the large relay toggle built into the fire control panel. "We need to start by firing that relay into auxiliary mode and discharging the capacitors. I'd like to not be electrocuted or exploded. Then I want to rewire them so the caps are all in series. Then we'll reroute the EPS flow right into the converters."

 

RSS Feed