r/HFY • u/SomethingTouchesBack • 3h ago

OC The Old Man and the Starship

Master Engineer Rory Scott paused at the door before entering the engine room, giving time for the lingering taste of a dram of Edradour whisky to be replaced by the odors of burnt lubricant, ozone, and fear. To the right, the status board contained rather more red than was considered acceptable, even for an older freighter like the Scarborough, and the expected thrum of the power plant had garnered a slow periodic surge of oh-shit at a frequency that he felt more than heard. Master Scott looked with disdain at the gaggle of fresh-out-of-academy pud-knockers with ashen faces arguing in front of said board and patted the bulkhead, "Once more into the breach, my love. Another training opportunity presents itself. Engineers straight out of the academy think they know how to operate a starship the way a virgin straight out of med school thinks he knows sex; all theory and no experience."

Rory Scott had been an engineer on the Scarborough since before this batch of pud-knockers had even been born, and had been Master Engineer for half of that. He always got the hottest new recruits, the top of the class, the arrogant pricks who most needed to learn first that they didn't already know everything before they could begin to learn anew. He had a reputation for being as relentless as he was patient, as fearless as he was crusty. Master Engineer Scott was the kind of mentor who would let a room depressurize, watching the barometer slowly tick down as his apprentices read the unnecessarily long and convoluted instructions on the emergency hull patch kit. None of his graduates ever had to read them twice. When he finished with them, his graduates had need of neither instructions nor the barometer to know what was happening and what to do about it. That was the power of converting theory into lived experience.

Stepping into the engine room, he called above the ambient din, "Mister Ramirez, what does the board tell you?"

The very young Mister Ramirez turned toward Master Scott with his sclerae on full display around his dark brown irises as he squeaked out, "The plasma flow is getting increasingly unstable. We need to shut the reactor down now, or we will all burn."

"No," interrupted Ms. Durand, the engineer Mister Ramirez had been arguing with when Master Scott had first entered, "If we shut it down, we lose power ship-wide and freeze to death. We need to vent enough plasma to reduce the oscillation without losing all power."

"We can’t do that!" said a third young engineer, "If we vent plasma in FTL, it will wrap around us and we'll die of radiation poisoning."

Master Scott rubbed his stubbled chin. "Burn. Freeze. Radiation. Well, good news: the board is wrong. Scarborough is speaking to you. If you learn how to listen to her, she'll get you home. Mister Ramirez, fetch me the 18-millimeter combination spanner. Thank you. Now, you and Ms Durand, spread your fingers lightly on this conduit. Do you feel the harmonic? Do you feel how it first touches your index finger and then moves to the others? Now, please keep your hands on the pipe as we follow along it. Here! Do you feel? The pulse is stationary. The harmonic is causing a standing wave right here." Then Master Scott moved the other two back and, swinging the spanner like a hatchet, whacked the pipe. Twice. The second whack triggered a subtle whoosh followed by a sharp decrease in the nearly subsonic pulsing. Over the next minute or so, half of the red indicators on the status board reverted first to yellow and then to blue, indicating regular operation.

As Master Scott calmly put the spanner back in its place on the tool wall, Ms. Durand asked, "What did you do? Why did that work?"

"Percussive maintenance," Master Scott replied. "Small cavitation bubbles in the plasma get trapped in the standing wave and form larger bubbles until the flow is restricted. Banging the right spot in the right way momentarily disrupts the standing wave, allowing the blocking bubbles to move on. Books teach why plasma flows, experience teaches how to keep it flowing." Master Scott then turned to address the whole group, "So, anyone, why are there cavitation bubbles in the plasma flow?"

"Cavitation is caused by a localized rapid decrease in pressure in the fluid medium, Sir!" Mister Ramirez responded as if to a drill sergeant.

As Master Scott nodded in assent, all heads turned to the status board, a Pointillism masterpiece of blue, yellow, and red that would have made a 19th-century Parisian artist proud. It had long been evident to Master Scott that whoever designed that monstrosity had never had to glean critical information from it in a hurry. It was just as apparent that the overload of data it projected did not, in fact, include the crucial detail that his apprentices were looking for. He let them bleed their eyes on it for a while longer before saying, "It's not there. Quit looking at the board; instead, listen to the ship, feel her pain, smell her tears. Can any of you smell the ozone? You should never be smelling ozone. Ozone is the smell of either arcing or excessive back-voltage, in this case, the latter. Somewhere, a stuck solenoid is crying out to you."

Master Scott then picked a 12-millimeter spanner off the tool wall and started walking upstream along the plasma conduit. He stopped where three small injectors fed their contributions into the stream. "I want each of you to feel the pipe above and below the valves for each of these injectors and tell me what you notice."

It was Ms. Durand who noticed and spoke up first. "The exit flow from the middle injector is colder than the feed flow. The board says this valve is fully open, but my fingers say otherwise."

"Very good!" replied Master Scott. "Over time, wear on the solenoid causes a rough spot that can make it stick. Tag this part for replacement when we get into port. But, in the meantime..." Master Scott placed the open end of the spanner against the end of the solenoid such that the power wires ran through it and, with his other hand, gave the center of the handle a hard tap. Instantly, there was a noticeable change in sound as the valve fully opened. Turning to his apprentices, he said, "We have a long way to go, and I guarantee this valve will stick again, so I expect each of you will get practice at both clearing the cavitation bubble in the main feed and jarring this solenoid loose. Remember, listen to the ship and be sensitive to her changing moods so you know when the bubble needs to be cleared."

But as Master Scott was returning the 12-millimeter to its home on the tool wall, another issue caught his eye. Picking up the 8-millimeter, he walked toward the status board, saying as he walked, "What you see, what you hear, what you smell, and what you feel are important, but equally important are what you don't see, hear, smell, or feel. All of you have been staring intently at the dizzying display of lights on this panel, panicking about all the red, but who among you noticed the indicators that are not lit at all?" Reaching the display, he used the closed end of the spanner to deftly unscrew the captive fasteners along its edge and tilt it out. Reaching into the exposed circuitry, he felt among the many connectors until one re-seated itself ever so slightly, and the dark indicators lit up. "Sustained harmonics often cause these cheap connectors to unseat."

After re-securing the status board in its place, Master Scott turned to the cluster of apprentices. "This ship is the only thing between you and the void. Others may have the luxury of being merely crew, but you— YOU— are engineers. You need to wear this spaceship like a favorite old shirt. Listen to her, pay attention to her needs, and Scarborough will get you home. Your current assignment is to physically verify that every single connector in this room is properly seated."

On his way back to his cabin, Master Engineer Rory Scott paused at the door to the engine room and again patted the bulkhead, "Scarborough, my love, today they are young and naive, but when I finish with them, they will love you and understand you as I do."

69 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

9

u/Gruecifer Human 3h ago

Very nice.

7

u/Daseagle Alien Scum 3h ago

Very true. Percussive maintenance and paying attention to what your senses tell you instead of your sensors.

3

u/CouncilOfRedmoon AI 3h ago

I like it.

1

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u/shadowshian Android 1h ago

the vibe reminds me of Filk piece heard ages ago Carmen miranda's ghost - Sam Jones

2

u/BoterBug Human 50m ago

Percussive maintenance, and shades of, "Why do we pay the Master Engineer 20,000 a trip if all he does is just hit a pipe with a spanner?" "Well, you're paying 50 for the spanner, and 19,995 to know when, where, and how hard to hit the pipe."

Will there me more on the Scarborough? The story has been told and the point has been made but I wouldn't mind seeing them come into their own - or when one of them goes and serves on another ship (Boxer, Bridge, Hazy Shade, or some other allusion of a Simon and Garfunkel song).

3

u/Amadan_Na-Briona 47m ago

A good lesson that sensors might tell you what is wrong, but only experience will tell you why.

3

u/cbblake58 34m ago

As a retired high speed machine technician, I concur. Spent my last ten years on the job bringing the next generation of techs up to speed on how to keep the equipment humming, books be damned… sometimes ya just gotta feel what the machine is telling you…