This is heavily based-upon and influenced by STARSTRUCK's earlier CLARENT Quest, which itself was inspired by my Doppleganger Damacy quest before that. I was considering a new Doppleganger Damacy, but he suggested something like this, and others seemed to think it would be the best way to go, so I'm gonna give it a shot.--
You're awakened by the violent shaking of your vessel emerging from a warp bubble, pain flashing through you as your body registers the damage to the ship using sensory input. You slam a hand against the console, disabling the sensory input subsystems - if it weren't for fail safes preventing such an occurance, you'd have died of shock. The ship is running on low power settings, the visual displays taking their sweet time in flickering to life, your commands going ignored as you attempt to pound them in.
"Atlantia, are you online?" You ask, mashing futily at a console,
"Damnit, Atlantia, report!"You're unable to get any visuals on the exterior of your ship, but the thumping of asteroids against your hull is not particularly reassuring. The consoles have frozen up completely now, every attempt to enter a command being countered with "
Command rejected: Error 521".
Error 521 was the AI override command. The ship's AI has informed your vessel - the experimental Adaptive Nanocore CAL-83 - to reject all pilot input. You could feel the ship moving, thrusters slowly accelerating, could hear the adaptive mechanisms at work. For you to be able to hear it is bad. Last you remembered, the core of your ship had been buried in thick tungsten and ceramic plating, a beast of a ship nearly half a mile in length.
"Atlantia, report." You mumble one more time, half-heartedly, kicking the console in frustration.
Suddenly, a screen flickers to life, displaying an external video feed of your ship, from one of your many camera drones. You stare in disbelief,
"What the fuck..."
The picture quality is shit, but the repair-drones will fix that up soon enough. More troubling iss the fact that it seemed your ship had lost more than 95% of its mass. Hardly any of it was left, and what it did have - the power core, weapons, even most of the hull plating - was just scraps that it seemed the AI had collected to get the ship into a semi-functional state. Sure enough, the ship was taking your commands now.
"Atlantia?" You ask again, hesitantly.
"Not pretty, is it? I'm sorry, sir, Atlantia was irreperably damaged by the dimensional rift that nearly destroyed your vessel during a routine warpjump." Comes the response, the holographic image of a young girl appearing to your right, perhaps fourteen, with curly blonde hair and a white summer dress,
"I'm the backup AI, Caliburn."You sigh,
"Don't call me, 'sir', Cali," you mumble, while looking over the schematics of what little of a ship you have left.
Over the next half-hour, the two of you talk while passively examining your surroundings. You're in the middle of a reasonably well populated asteroid belt, which is a good thing. Caliburn was able to scavenge a few bits and pieces from old wrecks and derelicts. There's plenty of radio chatter and some FTL communications in the area, much of it encrypted, some not. What you can pick up is in no language you recognise, and Caliburn has no record of any of it, but her translation software was able to decipher the alien language in short order, and you're able to learn that there's quite a bit of piracy in the area.
It's up to you how to progress. Right now, the asteroid belt is hiding you from passive sensors, but it's also hiding everyone else from your own passive sensors. You're picking up a mining base roughly twenty thousand clicks away, but other than that, you're flying blind unless you use your active scanners, which is problematic, as they'll give away your position as well. You probably won't have anything to worry about against one or two pirate ships, but any more of that would definitely fuck you up in your current state.
And to make things better, the stars don't conform with any of the 14 galaxy maps in Caliburn's data banks. You could be fucking
anywhere. While you're trying to decide what to do, you stare in frustration at the technical readout of your ship's current equipment.
Quote:
Various Damaged Sections
(1000kg)
Light Fusion Core I
(1200MW output, 1,500kg)
Light Mining Lasers x 2
(120MW, 800kg)
Medium Thruster I
(100MW, 6,250kgf output)
Active Scanning Array I
(50MW, 200kg)
Passive Scanning Array I
(40MW, 200kg)
Light Solar Collectors
(300Mw output, 120kg)
Displacement: 4,220kg
Total Thrust: 6,250kgf
Energy Usage: 310/1500MW
Max Velocity: 148ms-1*
Turning Speed: 0.51°s-1
Acceleration: 4ms-2*
TAPS Setting: 400m, Normal**
*Velocity and Acceleration are displayed as SM values x100. Thus, your current Speed is actually 1.48.
**TAPS (Tactical Automated Positioning System) Setting is the distance and orientation your ship will normally maintain from its target in battle. A TAPS reconfiguration can be requested at any time.
Alright, Wyrd, how do you progress?
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