Weapons Go Boom! Pt 3
Posted on Fri Jul 2nd, 2021 @ 2:17am by Commander Dean House & Captain Rhenora Kaylen & Lieutenant Commander Bonnie "Bon-Bon" Durnell & Lieutenant JG Avarak
Mission:
Gamma Quadrant
Location: Weapons Lab
Timeline: Backlog
Bonnie walked over and saddled up next to Dean so that she could see his screen more easily. She studied the schematics for a moment, glancing up at the screen and then down at the coding and then back again several times. Finally after several moments she turned and eyed Dean, “So, how many joules are you attempting to siphon before you boom?” She asked seriously.
There was a glance a little to Bonnie when she got up by him, then again he did off. Not that he had any problem with it. Dean tilted his head again at her question. “I was looking at the first about 10 megajoules, and then subsequently increasing from there.”
“I have hypothesized that perhaps the issue is with the automatic detonation algorithm running a feedback loop.” Avarak reported. “However, my programming aptitude is limited.”
“That’s why I thought to call Bonnie down here, unfortunately we don’t have a bunch of Xena holos and hot pockets.” Dean smirked a bit.
She eyed him with snarky intrigue before commenting, “I was always a Gabriel fan myself.” Then she turned back towards the coding and nodded to Avarak for being on point. “If you are attempting to pull and store that much power, I trust you’ve over compensated for fluctuations in the grid with redundancy fused capacitors?”
“Otherwise, you would be overloading the firing matrix early, not to mention the feedback you’d be getting in the navigational array. You say it doesn’t go boom, I’m willing to bet it goes boom too early.” Her fingers danced around the console, checking holes in the theorem.
Dean was listening, her possible quips aside. Though now she got that same glance given from his. “Or not at all. Everything should be sound, but obviously it’s not. I know it’s put together right, it’s just what you two are finding out. The internal programming and the like are way off.”
As she focused, her butt gravitated into the seat. It was her zone to be in the code, enveloped by it. She dissected it for minutes while the people in the bay just did their own thing in the background. For a moment she could swear she heard Carlos bump his head again, not her fault this time. Finally she had what she thought was the answer, but she pulled the others in on it.
“Avarak, Pretty Boy, check this out.” She backed away so they could see, but maintained a pointed finger at the screen. “The power index was set to expand exponentially. You were starting with 10 megajoules, but the siphon rate was building too quickly, overloading your storage and bleeding into your detonation and your navigation.”
She was smiling because she understood this was something she could fix. “It basically loses focus on the target and goes boom early.”
There was a tilt of his head a little bit, in the rear with the gear came to mind when she went to sit down. Dean glanced back up at what she was doing. After glancing back where Carlos was, “We’ve got to get him a helmet…”
Back to the task at hand. “Hmm...Well the syphoning is pretty tricky. I can see how that would be completely off. So we do, what?” Looking to her, “Or you do what? Either secure the storage housing as well as the algorithm to it?”
“Well, “ she was thinking through the problem, “I can correct the power fluctuations with a limiter, and the targeting sequence so that you can detonate on command, but I would suggested a power regulator and encasing both the detonator and the navigational array in a tightly packed deuterium alloy shell. That should offset any power bleed.”
"Deuterium is in pretty short supply at the moment, anything you think we could substitute?" The Captain added, knowing how the rebuild after the war was going.
“Hmm…” Dean gave a thoughtful look and not about something else. “Why couldn’t we salvage something from the other torpedoes. They’ll have to be anyway because there’s no building them from scratch. Not with our supplies at the moment.”
“I mean, we could use Trilithium like they do in the tri-cobalt torpedo, if you want this thing to really go boom. It would be enough to increase the yield by a factor of seven, or eight.” She felt eyes staring at her, maybe it was the suggestion, but it was unnerving and made her nervous. She sat forward to the console again. “I’ll, uh, get busy on the coding while you figure out what to stuff your warhead with that can absorb the excess, okay?”
“Maybe..I don’t know how much of that we have on board, and I know we don’t have any Tri-cobalts. Maybe the quantums would work since they need to have the extra housing for the extra yield to start with.” He gave a curious look at her a moment of why the sudden propensity to shy off. Considering she was so excited earlier.
“I mean yeah, maybe.” She glanced at Avarak, and then to the Captain who had been mostly quiet since she came in. “What do you think?” she asked informally. She was still excited for the project, but growing more uncomfortable by the moment with the thought of what they were creating. She was entering a dangerous territory, in both senses of the meaning.
Dean’s attention moved to Rhenora also for the question that Bonnie asked, see what the answer was.
"Use the trilithium, if this is going to work we need to emphasise the boom. If it works well then it could be a game changer" Rhenora replied with a smile, proud of her team.
“Then it looks like we’re using that.” Smiling lightly.
“I believe if we use a quantum magnetron, it should also amplify the explosive yield of the warehad by approximately thirteen-point-four percent while also decreasing the instability pre-detonation by…” Avarak paused as he quickly ran through a series of computations on the PADD he held in his hands. “Nine-point-seven percent.”
Dean nods, “Alright then.”
“Sounds impressive,” Rhenora agreed.
“Sounds deadly.” Bonnie muttered out loud. “Smart though. Smarter if we had started with a Quantum yield torpedo first, but who am I to question the weapons expert.” She was still sort of talking to herself until she turned, “Have you accounted for the particle wave distance on dispersion? We don’t want this thing rebounding on us, right?”
“Well I did mention maybe to use that first.” Dean smiled sweetly. “ID signature sequencer and fail safe sensor so if it does head back it’ll bypass us.”
“If we’re lucky. I can’t say the same for our enemies.” Her tongue had turned sharp. Yet instead of continuing the conversation she turned back to her code, a place she was more comfortable.
There was a slight eyebrow raised for a moment, but he didn’t say anything. “I guess I need to work on the physical part now, huh.”
The Captain watched the team work seamlessly, bouncing ideas and finishing off theories. She was confident they could do this.
“I’ll leave you to it then, keep me apprised of your progress” She said before giving them an encouraging smile and heading back to the bridge.
To be concluded...
