| Meeting… Bertha? |
| Summary: | Specialist Bannik introduces the new Liaison to the Heavy Raider… oh, and that Tactical guy tags along. |
| Date: | 06 Nov 2041 AE |
| Related Logs: | Heavy Raider logs: Heavy; Belly of the Beast; Got any opinions kickin' around you skull?; Comparing Notes; Faster Than Mysteries; Project Super-Secret; The Magic Cylon Substance; Think Like A Machine; others |
| Players: |
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| Repair Bay, Hangar Deck |
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| When engines need to be rebuilt or other heavy but short-term work needs to be done, this is where it happens. Large, red hand-mobile cranes are situated along the wall beside stacks of toolchests. Carts with various computers and electronics are dispersed around the area for quick access. A very conspicuous yellow locker at the rear holds a sizable amount of firefighting gear, as well. Sturdy metal stands are available to hold all sorts of parts from gun systems to the FTL drives of a Raptor. Big enough to accommodate quite a few Vipers and Raptors at once, this area see's extensive use and is usually attended by at least one crew at all hours of the day and night. |
| Post-Holocaust Day: #253 |
"If you come on back here, Lieutenants," Bannik is saying, walking the officers back into the Hangar Deck. "I can do this song-and-dance for a new crowd. I swear, I've had people interested in Cylon tech since we first recovered the Heavy Raider, but I haven't gotten anyone to actually commit to a research program since showing them what we've got." He looks — well — exhausted. Extra duty and drill and inspection will to that to a fellow. But he forces on his best smile, walking them back to where the shell of the captured Heavy Raider — all hollowed out — sits, with an approximately Raptor-sized engines up on a work bench near it.
Endymion is bubbling a bit on the edge as they enter the repair bay, but she somehow is managing to stay bottled up. Her hands are clasped solidly behind her back, fingers twining together with twisting and pulling to find a place to isolate her energy. Her dark hair is loose for once, falling in curves and curls to somewhere around the midpoint of her spine. Her deck coveralls are strangely clean, but give her sometime with them and she'll break them in nicely. "Its okay, Mr. Bannik… there's a lot of hub-bub that we'll get something going on research s—oon…" Her words drop off a bit as she comes into view of the Heavy Raider. "Wow," is all she musters in a lasting remark. Its not like these are just lying about on every hangar on every ship in the fleet.
Justinian has a clipboard cradled in his left hand, a stack of papers clipped on. He taps at the top paper with the back end of the pen in his right hand. His green eyes flicker over the Cylon craft, the tour-guide, and the other officer present, nodding once, "You want to sit down, Specialist?" His voice is soft, with an easy smile behind it, "I'm sure the Lieutenant and I can poke around if we need to—without touching anything of course." He gestures with the back of the pen toward the separated engines, "Have you been putting much attention into the capabilities of its FTL drives? Studying the affects of short-term jumps on the ship and engines could be helpful for fleet engagements." He's probably been by to see the Heavy Raider before, plus to a Tactical officer, seeing a stripped and hollowed out Heavy Raider just doesn't have quite the same impact as a fully-repaired one heading at you.
Bannik shakes his head at Justinian. "I'm fine, sir. I'll stand. The project I've been trying to get people interested in, of all things, is fuel economy. I know it's not as sexy as some people want, but the real problem is that Cylon tech is so far advanced that we don't have much chance of learning the first-principles that power their craft." He makes his way alongside the engine. "So we can't just plug Cylon tech into Colonial designs. This," he pats the engine. "On the other hand, holds promise. It runs on Tylium and seems to operate by the same basic principles as Colonial engines. So maybe we can learn something that would let us tweak our engines, use less fuel."
The dark-haired brainiac gives Justinian a loud look of indignance: he may not want to touch, but she wants to learn it by sight and touch. "I'll try not to touch," she says with a downtrodden note. She steps closer toward the Raider, and within a meter from its body, she drops into a squat. Her head turns this way and that, as if trying to find the angle to get the best view. She arches up her brows at Bannik's words, looking up with a tilt of her head. "That's an impressive project— what would be your first course of action for creating a hybrid fuel tank?" She glances toward Justinian then before turning those storm eyes back toward the streamline "skull" on the left wing.
Justinian nods his head at Bannik, making a couple of notes in his clipboard, "Fuel efficiency is good. Might give us some idea about their dependency on newly refined tylium, see how long they can keep up pursuit or flight." He looks over to Endymion then, chuckling softly as he shifts his attention back to Bannik, "Sorry Specialist, it seems we all want different things out of this project. I'm sure you have the pilots coming by asking for weak points to fire on, or Marines dropping by to details on how many Centurions it can carry."
Bannik takes two copies of a report from a clipboard next to the engine and hands one to each of the Lieutenants. Yes, it's like he has a stack of these that he just hands out to visiting officers. It's been a few months. "Here's a copy of our initial report on the Heavy Raider," explains the Specialist. "And yeah, that's just about right, Lieutenant Justinian. Everyone magically expects us to get a super-weapon able to crush the Cylons. It doesn't work like that. It's not some Sci-Fi pulp novel." To the liaison: "It's not so much the fuel tank but the engine. My problem is that I'm more of an electronics guy. I need mechanical help to get a start of this particular project."
Endymion accepts the report— and her eyes graze over the paper with a flash to and fro of her gray eyes. She flips a page, reading the final note from Bannik. She slowly begins to rise to her feet, straightening to her unimpressive height. She twists up the report in a tube, looking back over to the specialist. "When I was a graduate student, I was working on a proposal to begin a project on a new strikefighter protoype. It took us six months to get funding, but that didn't mean we sat on the project for six months. This report was submitted back in April, Specialist… I can't imagine that you have just been sitting on this project since then." She raises her brows up together. "So… what have you gathered since then? Even if its just in your own head, Mr. Bannik…"
Justinian takes the paper, smiling faintly before he digs two sheets down in his clipboard and pulls out another copy, "It made its way through Tactical, Specialist." In fact, this copy looks rather well-loved, with underlines here and there, and an exclamation point next to the first use of the term 'goo.' "So if you're an electronics guy, what about jamming of some sort. Doing to them what they did to us on Warday?" The Junior TACCO seems more curious than anything else. He looks over to Endymion as she speaks, smiling faintly before he nods his agreement.
"The problem with the electronics is that the Cylon electronics so advanced that I don't even know heads or tails on them." Bannik sighs, looking down at his copy of the report. "We were able to use some of the goo found in the wireless compartment to smuggle Eidolon through Cylon lines on Leonis, but that was more luck than understanding how it works. And — " He focuses on Endymion. " — well, I mean. There's been a lot of stuff in the interim and I've been cycling through engineering liaisons like burnt-out circuit boards. So not much has happened."
Endymion bobs her head again with the words of the Specialist, and she frowns a bit. "Hopefully I'll last a little longer," says the new Deck-Engineering Liaison with a bit of a pursing of her lips. "I'll have to talk to Damon, he was going to walk me through some of the project concepts." She puffs out her cheeks before she looks at Bannik, and her head tilts her head a bit. "Is it difficult?" She asks him with a slight frown. "Having to work so closely with it?" She pauses, looking toward Justinian as she shoves her hands into the pockets of her new deck coveralls.
Justinian nods slowly at Bannik's words, "We all get busy with stuff, Specialist." He steps away from the pair then, moving over toward the Heavy Raider itself, to where he can look inside the 'passenger' compartment. "Lieutenant Daeras, Specialist, do you think it would be possible to put this thing back together?" He taps the back of the pen against his lips, frowning into the Cylon ship, "I mean, if a humanoid's supposed to fly it… couldn't we use it to sneak a small team to one of the more heavily-defended colonies?"
Bannik looks over at the shell of a Heavy Raider, then back at Justinian. "Oh, gosh, no, sir. We tore the whole thing apart, 'wiring' and all." Note the quotes around the wiring. It's more fleshy-stuff. "Besides." Bannik takes up a folder, showing Justinian a shot of the cockpit read-outs. "Can you decipher that?" Then back at Endymion: "Hard? Why? No. Just — you know. Lots of stuff to bag and tag and index. It was a huge project."
Her shoulders roll, as if something should be spoken but kept neatly unsaid. She stares at the Raider for a long moment before she twists at the inner seam of her pockets. She regards Justinian with a nod of her head. "Rebuilding it would serve its purposes, but I'm not sure… what we would do with it…" She frowns, looking toward the Tactical officer before regarding Bannik once more. "Did we keep any of the wiring?" It sounds very much like a question she already knows the answer to, but someone must have taught her to ask these kind of questions from time to time based on the tone of voice she uses.
Justinian frowns slightly, but makes another note on his paper. He meanders back to look at the picture of the cockpit readouts, studying it intently and soberly for a good sixty seconds, and then announcing cheerfully, "Nope!" Looking over to Endymion, he chuckles quietly, tapping one temple with his pen, "My mind is awhirl with the possibilities, Lieutenant." He shrugs over at Bannik, "But I'm sure we'll get plenty of information from taking it apart, Specialist, and most of what we could do with a whole ship — even if we could figure out how to drive it — would be one-shot deals."
"Oh! We have all of it." This, Bannik says quite cheerily to Endymion. "Every single bit. It's all indexed and bagged and labeled. You see —" He picks up another folder along the side and flips it open. "Here's the indexed list by location. And then — by function, or at least guessed function. And then by type." He hands it over, reaching for another one. "And here's the schematic that shows where each range of numbers came from." Yes, this was Bannik's little OCD labeling and disassembling project.
And Endymion beams with pride at Bannik. "Wonderfully organized, Mr. Bannik. I commend you for that." She wanders toward him, leaning over a bit to take a look at the data in the folders. She glances toward Justinian with a nod of her head. "Just make sure the head doesn't whirl straight off," she says with a small spiral gesture. Then she smiles toward the Specialist. "Is it okay if I spent some time in here, just looking over everything you have? I can wait to do so with you and Damon if you prefer."
Justinian arches his eyebrows at Bannik's words, blinking once at Endymion and then chuckling and nodding, "I'll give advanced warning before any extra-body cranial travels, Lieutenant." He stops a moment, then digs back down two sheets on his clipboard, scanning down for a moment before he nods, "I'm sure you've already checked on this, Specialist, but that white disk found in the cockpit ceiling, it's been contained in something that would block transmissions, right?"
Bannik shakes his head. "I don't mind. Just make sure it all goes back where you found it and sign it out on the logbook that's next to all of the storage bins. It's the only way we can keep track of it." He then turns his head towards Justinian. "The disc? Oh, those got used on the Eidolon op. They're both toast."
Endymion brightens considerably at Bannik's permissions to poke at the files, and she lifts her shoulders up toward her cheeks pleasantly. "Thank you," she says, her voice bubbling over with some kind of excitement. Then she takes an instinctive peek at her watch, and her eyes widen. "Oh, Gods, I'm late!" She looks up toward Bannik and Justinian. "Thank you for the information, Mr. Bannik… nice meeting you both." She nods toward Justinian before she turns and starts moving rapidly for the exit with strides that seem longer than her legs should be capable of.
Justinian nods his head, digging a couple pages further, "Right. Sorry." He shrugs a little helplessly, "Haven't had to look at these in a while." He blinks at the exclamation from the other officer, just managing to keep from chuckling as his eyebrows rise up on his forehead and he watches her rush off. Sketching a half-mock salute in her wake, he shakes his head slightly, "I'm guessing Reserve. Or maybe ROTC." Calming his features, he taps at the paper stacked on his clip-board again with the butt of his pen, "So you've spent a lot of time around this beast, Specialist… what ideas have you had for what we might be able to get out of it?"
"Nice — meeting you, too, sir," murmurs Bannik as Endymion rushes off. And then to Justinian: "Uh. Well. Like I said, sir, the engines are the most promising aspect. I'd like to work on those first before we did anything more crazy than that."
Justinian nods his head, "The less dependant we are on tylium, the better, I suppose, Specialist." He offers a faint smile then, "Sorry, I suppose I was hoping for a superweapon myself, if a tactical one rather than a physical one." He shrugs a little helplessly, "I'll get out of your hair. Thank you for the briefing and the tour."
"Not at all, Lieutenant. Glad to have some people take an interest. Just hope that Lieutenant Endymion sticks around this time, huh?" Bannik shuffles his papers back into the folder next to the Cylon engine. "But hey — we'll see if we can make this stick, and we'll see where we can go from there."
Justinian clicks his pen closed and tucks it into his breast pocket, "I think we can learn a lot from this thing." He stops a moment, then grins, "So what do the deck apes call it?" Gesturing with his free hand toward the Heavy Raider, he specifies, "The ship, that is. Always gotta have a name that the officers don't know about." He grins then, "I won't tell."
"I. Uh. Uhm." Bannik shrugs his shoulders. "I don't know. I think Lieutenant Trask has a name for it — Bertha? Or something?" He glances over at the ship. "Sorry. I'm not really 'in' down here. It's not my thing."
Justinian chuckles softly, "Bertha?" He looks over the stripped ship, abruptly holding up his clipboard to hide half of the Heavy Raider, "Shouldn't we put something on her? Her parts are showing." Nodding his head upward then, he flashes another smile, "Anyhow, I was letting you back to work. As you were, Specialist."