Thinking from engines, part two.

19-11-2012

Hey blog readers, I hope you liked the last part I wrote, because I have decided to build upon the last iteration. Here is the second part. I have tried to listen to more neutral music so that it wouldn’t influence my writing that much. This time I have listened to “Deep Space” by Redux. And as I grew tired of the looping, I switched to the Mirror’s edge soundtrack. As I read the last part I realized that the piece was a tad to emotional for my taste and I received some great advice and feedback from friends. If you have some of your own or found some spelling/grammatical errors please inform me! Though try to keep it constructive. One final word, enjoy!

Most of the time he just wanted to get rid of the thing as soon as possible. The whole armor was heavy, clunky  and the climate system was just good enough to be bearable. These guys may be geniuses, but ergonomics was a term they surely had never heard of.  I couldn’t blame them, the suit was as safe as it could be. It withstood many plasma beams and laser shots that were fired at him often during his missions. If it weren’t for them, he wouldn’t be standing here thinking about all this. It did what it was set out to do, just not everything he would have wanted. Nonetheless he always removed the thing as soon as humanly possible.

What was handy, is that the suit was modular. He could swap any of the parts that malfunctioned or got damaged in a firefight. He also had some parts which were tailor made for certain weather conditions and temperatures on certain planets he visited. Another nifty advantage that the modular system had over a static suit is that it was very easy to put on. It only took me about three minutes tops to get everything in place at normal pace. At an emergency I almost needed about a third of the time. I was sure that, with enough practice and competitive impulse I would be able to achieve times below a minute. But as a commander of a space vessel I had no time to waste on things like that. I had other duty’s like checking our status; keeping up with recent updates; talk with the crew and most of all, make sure that everyone did their jobs and nobody slacked off.

Most of the time everyone was as professional as I would like them to be, but once in an while I found someone chilling in a maintenance area or service shaft. These were mostly the same guys, and if I hadn’t seen or heard from them in a while, I knew were to find them. Usually they weren’t clever enough to look for new hiding spots, and wen they did, it didn’t take me too long to find them. It really was like a sport, but for little children. Hide and seek, just like the old days. I sometimes wished I could fire them, but I simply couldn’t kick them off in space and leave them for dead. The vacuum of space would kill the guys in an instant. Poor blood veins.

I had to admit, I kind of liked the way they behaved. It broke the repetitive rhythm, which was everyday business. Wake up, shower, dress up, check upon crew in the command room, check upon flight captain, do calibrations, work out, get lunch, check upon everyone again, do calibrations again, do research in my room, clean my armor, put it on, look cool, lose the suit again, get in touch with the people working at the ship, walk around and so forth. As generic as it could get. I almost knew my crew so well that I didn’t have to talk to them to know how they would feel. What I did found interesting was  which relationships were formed and broken up since last time I spoke with the man. or the woman for that matter. It may come as a surprise to some, but the crew was pretty diverse in gender. Some would think that the best of the best in keeping a ship like this running, would mostly consist of man, but they would be wrong. The male female ratio was around sixty to forty. Which is beyond average for a space ship crew. It almost seems like man are a better average, but woman are better at exceeding each other. I didn’t care, as long as the crew was doing what he asked them.

He trough that it wasn’t necessary to put the best crew on the world on his ship, they would be better placed in the warzone that was Orb-e’s atmosphere. That was were ace pilots and ace engineers would be utilized to their full potential. Not on some random ship that would never encounter real danger, ever. Space had been as empty as people portrayed it. He had only found that one facility that was extracted from that beacon. He was still surprised that the coordinates hadn’t led him into a trap set by the enemy. Which, in his opinion, totally would have worked. Their inferior firepower and number would have decimated them within seconds. He protested against the investigation of the coordinates several times, but jet again the scientists assured him that their was no chance that this beacon was send by the enemy. For the technology used in the beacon was light-years beyond the technology used by the attackers. Eventually he gave in after his superiors were convinced. As they had always done.

For the past few years, almost every major find in technology led to another strategy. War had changed several times because of this. Technological advancement was one of the major sources of hope for the human race. This was especially true for this one. For the enemy had no advancement in technology whatsoever. We were still far behind their levels of knowledge, but we gain up slowly but surely. This growth was mostly caused by the phenomenon named reverse engineering. It had become the name of the game; steal their technology by studying their broken ships, troops, cannons; everything we could get our hands on, and improve. Most of the systems destroyed all of their data and internals before we had the chance to study, but in some very rare cases, that piece of equipment failed. At times like these, when a warzone is like a goldmine for these kind of scientists, it’s especially hard to get your hands on something useful. Some even tried to recreate the original object, by assembling thousands upon thousands of broken instances. Most of the time resulting in failure. But it is always the single successful story that leads to a breakthrough in technology. It has been the drive to many scientists, semi-scientists and ambitious students. It is an interesting time for highly educated individuals indeed. Sadly, as war has always been.
Most of the time I like to see the positive side of things. When I look at technological advancements I picture all the good it could do, and at the elevated chances of survival it will bring. Many things we take for granted these days, like medical gel, liquid metal patches, pulse rifles, space jump drives and holographic displays have found it’s origins in war some way or another. And I can’t imagine us surviving in the situation we are in now, without ‘m.

And as all these troughs passed, my emotional state eased a bit. Just enough to go to bed.

(end of chapter)

 Because that’s how I role!