4-115: Travel to Witnish

On returning to the Snark it takes over four tasks to get ready to leave and obtain departure clearance.

Erin has to prep up the engines and run her systems safety checks, Alan does the pre-flight, with which Oliver assists.  Oliver is also charged with obtaining departure clearance from station, which takes some time to achieve because bureaucracy.

Dicard sits on the bridge, watching them and fiddling with his own PDA.  He issues one instruction:  Halcyon is to optimise the jump plot for system dynamics.  That is, plot the easiest jump from Zargonia to Witnish (the next destination) without worrying too much about exactly where in the Witnish system the Snark emerges.  Halcyon shrugs and bitches about current orbital configurations.

Dr Fromm grumpily disappears into Medical and Chris is snoring away in his acceleration chair in the Office.

At 211.331 BG01 the Snark departs Zebulon station and heads for the jump point.  It takes about two shifts to get there.

In N-space, Alan has the Control Room watch in Green shift, Oliver has Blue shift and Dicard has Red.

The first part of the N-space trip, Oliver is on watch.  Dr Fromm brings him some food shortly into his shift and apart from that he can work on his program.

Dicard relieves him at shift change and he can go to bed; I’ve been assuming Oliver sleeps during Red shift.

He wakes at the start of Green shift, does his morning routine, works a bit on his program and is called to the bridge for jump entry.

The ship goes into jump on 211.332 GR09.  The initial travel time estimate is about ten and a half Cycles, revised down to just under nine Cycles once in jump and jump performance is measured.  (Watching the ship’s computer’s jump time estimate is a bit like watching a file-copy dialog window – early in jump it bounces around all over the place, slowly settling down to a steady, predictable completion time once about 15-20% of the jump is traversed.)

As directed, Oliver continues working on his program for most of each day and working on his glasses for a Job or so before bed.  Initially I figure he will assemble the glasses and build the hardware then start work on the programming part.  Erin will be probably happy for him to use the workshop on Deck 9 for the hardware part of that, or at least lend him some tools and equipment he’s likely to need.

Give me a roll on a social skill to see how he goes with her; it should be as above unless he does particularly well or poorly.  Alternately, he can try doing it without talking to her using the tools he has with him if he wants to be insular…

On 211.340 at GG02 he completes his beta version of his program and tries opening up several of the encrypted data blobs.  Some of them stubbornly refuse to open, resulting in error messages from his program.

Others however, do open.  They seem to be mostly digitised copies of more notebooks and exercise books; many, many notebooks and exercise books…  There are, however, some other file types.  For example, there is at least one movie video file.

The ship is due to come out of jump about half-way into his next sleep cycle and he’ll be expected to be on watch in the Control Room for that two tasks prior.

How would he like to proceed?  Any questions?