Date of Play : May 14th 2022
TBR Session #044
Lieutenant Commander Carl Hedley Executive Officer
Lieutenant Alexander Artopolis Chief Medical Officer
Lieutenant Reeza Ral Chief Operations Officer
Lieutenant Johnny 5 Chief Tactical Officer
Lieutenant JG Geoffrey Danielson Chief Flight Control Officer
Apparently there are some stairs in the office? Leads down to a generator/tube about 2 metres on a side. With a flashing red light. Means there’s some kind of emergency going on, apparently. Who knows, the thing’s made of some kind of material that cheats, so there’s no way to scan it from outside.
Borg boi plugs into the computer, finds a single running program. Turns out it’s a detonator. And it’s counting down. Maybe ten minutes left? Should probably try to disarm it before it blows the planet and all life within light years to kingdom come. Turns out to be relatively easy to suspend the countdown, then it can just be dumped into the sun. Easy enough.
Time to go investigate those coordinates. Push the warp drive to plaid, arrive pretty sharpish. Got some uninhabitable planets, a big lad shielding from interstellar shrapnel, and a watery planet sitting in the goldilocks zone. Pretty much just a bunch of islands on the equator, with a couple of moons. One massive moon, one little tiny one. Probably a pretty decent holiday destination. Also a white dwarf off in the far reaches of the system. With a ship orbiting it.
Turns out it’s got a ridiculous, physically improbable asteroid field around it which is somehow too dense for the Potemkin to fly through, so time for runabout. Looks like the target ship got in there in what might be called a precipitous manner, and got real messed up in the process.
Easy enough to get there, though. Looks like it’s pretty messed up. Starboard side has been completely ripped open, so that’s fun. There does seem to be one room with atmosphere, so save that’n until last.
Bridge seems like a sensible place to start, so into the front of the ship we go. By random coincidence, that’s where we turn up! Handy. No power, though. Plenty of computers on the bridge, but that’s why we bring batteries, and Ral gets things online easily enough, not really paying attention to the console as she does so and picks up a couple of log entries.
Navigation Log:
We have been drifting now for several days. We are in-between stars, our last jump was blind. We didn’t have time to lock in our target. I had to guess, i guessed wrong. We jumped with our last remaining light speed energy and fell short by 15810 AU’s. Almost a quarter of a light year. We expect to cover this distance in no less than 900 days, but there are other problems we face.
We’re getting some energy from the local star but unless we take desperate measures we will run out of power before we get close enough to draw what we need.
Captain’s Log
It was decided today that we would be leaving the colony behind. The colony has decided that they want to forgo the old way and live a nomadic life. While they would keep some technology, maybe even continue to develop better ways to live but they would never again venture into space or draw attention to themselves. So the ship will depart, we could have sent the ship off into the local star to destroy it, but the crew is comprised of people who didn’t want to live in the woods!
We are going to spend a few months in the system to make sure that there was nothing which could threaten the colony before they could spread out.
Then the computer lets out its magic blue smoke and dies.
Have a wander round the ship, find a loading ramp leading to space, a mess hall, some crew quarters, desks, not much of interest. Couple more corridors, doors into space, then a hangar! Still pretty boring, nothing but a ruined shuttle, but hey, it’s interesting to space archaeologists, probably.
Further aft there’s some kind of industrial room, life support, recycling, things of that kidney. Pretty boring, really. Then some engineering gubbins, engine rooms, generators, and so on. Ral messes with the computer and works out that these engines work off solar plasma, so that’s kinda neat. Then the heat from that was used to power the ship.
Then all that’s left is the pressurised room. It’s decently big, pressurised, filled with plants and greenery and stuff. All fun zero-g biology, probably pretty interesting to a botanist. Seems to be animal and insect life, too. Small stuff, but fascinating. Make a note, send it to Starfleet.
Conveniently, the survey team has found something now. Who’da thought it? Pax refuses to tell us what, but we’ve got a pretty good guess. Turns out we’re right! There’s 5,000,000 people living down there! Pretty primitive, as expected, wood buildings and animal skins and stuff. Much as you’d expect, really.
Looks like they didn’t quite give up on technology, though; looks like they’ve got transporters for long distance travel and such. A lot of the settlements are empty, too, looks like they’re pretty migratory.
Off with a spy satellite to have a gander and see if we’re actually allowed to say hi. Looks like they’ve also got communications on the level of a mobile phone network, using relay towers and such on big mountains. Looks like they’ve all got quantum computer archives, too, which is handy.
Much as everyone wants to take a peek, we’re in a bit of a grey area prime directive wise, so it seems like the sensible choice is to hang around for a while and see what happens. Boo.