A Phantom in the night ... Continued

Posted on Wed Nov 29th, 2017 @ 12:44am by Lieutenant Reno “Reno-gade” Van Straten
Edited on on Wed Nov 29th, 2017 @ 12:46am

Mission: Mission 0: Everybody Has A Story
Location: USs Phantom
Timeline: 1 Day ago

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[USS Phantom]

Reno spent the next day and half pouring over the engineering PaDDs for the specifications and capabilities of the modified Defiant class vessel. He learned her official title was simply Hull DC-077-V2-M-SSD Which translated as Defiant Class Hull Number Seventy-Seven, Variant Two - Modified - SlipStream Drive

The main Hull would have been number seventy seven of the planned production run, it was a second variant of the design, with modifications made after the Dominion War and it had been modified for it’s current role. The crew referred to it as The Phantom

The modifications included increased speed and better defensive capabilities, as well as a highly advanced sensor and communications system. Then there was the cloaking device, which he learned was a specially reengineered version of the Romulan original.

In addition to it’s cloaking ability the ship also had a series of holo-emitters mounted around the hull, along with some adapted sensors, which could project both the image and standard sensor readouts of a wide variety of other ships. The Phantom could look like a Klingon Bird of Prey and the adapted sensors could mimic the energy signatures of one too. It wasn’t a perfect system and close scrutiny would reveal the ship’s true nature, but at a distance and under normal conditions the Phantom could pass for just about anything from a Breen cargo barge to a Romulan battle cruiser.

All of the improvements had been traded off for a slightly reduced offensive output. It could still deliver a heavy punch but it was not designed to go specifically looking for trouble, just to be able to hold its own, survive, then get away fast and intact.

Automation was a big part of the system, which reduced the crew compliment. As did the specialized role, which removed the need for many of the usual functions and personnel. A Defiant in the regular Starfleet line had a compliment of around fifty, this one ran with just twenty eight.

The biggest change was the Quantum Slipstream Drive. Which calculated out to 2.63×106 times the speed of light, or roughly 300 Light-Years per hour.

The Drive functioned by routing a high amount of energy through the ships oversized main deflector, which then created a quantum field ahead of the ship, allowing the vessel to penetrate the quantum barrier and slip stream along within the field's edge. In order to maintain the slipstream, the phase variance of the quantum field had to be constantly adjusted, or the field would collapse, violently throwing the ship back into normal space, probably with catastrophic results.

It was a derivative of technology that Starfleet had seen in use by the Borg and brought back by the USS Voyager from the Delta Quadrant. The Voyager had used the smaller Delta Flyer shuttle as a van guard, flying ahead of her to enable better calculation of the quantum variances, even then the drive had not functioned reliably.

Exactly how Starfleet had finally managed to get the drive to work, and work well. was not covered in the reports, indeed several sections of the reports were omitted completely, replaced with just one word - Classified

His studying over, he spent another two hours being grilled by the Engineer, Lieutenant Branston, who questioned him on all aspects of the ship and her systems before he was given approval to take the conn.

He settled himself into the pilots chair. It was a modified Valkyrie fighter seat and came with a set of dual controls that duplicated most of the usual ones set up on the panel before him. He had hand-sized joy sticks on each chair arm that could be configured for thrusters, maneuvering, impulse and main engines; then vector, attitude, roll, pitch and yaw, as well as some of the phaser and torpedo controls.

A Head-Up-Display could be projected across his vision, from a stubby arm on the headrest, which could be tailored to show anything from propulsion levels, navigational data, sensor and tactical readouts, through to images from external hull monitors.

“Once you have it set up the way you want it” Warrant Officer Monica Delantez, the Phantom’s other pilot, told him “You can assign that configuration a number and it will automatically go to that when you login to the helm. I have several set up, one for regular warp, one for slipstream flight, one for landing or docking and one for combat” She showed him her versions ‘”You can try those out, change what you want and save them under your ID”

She ran over the rest of the controls with him for a few minutes then stepped back “All yours Lieutenant, try her out”

They were currently travelling at Warp 7.2, under her higher than class cruising speed of 7.8. Reno tinkered with the display and took hold of the left joystick. He set the ship into a helix roll at six kilometers off the center of their flight vector. The ship drifted effortlessly into the spiral and he increased power to 7.4, the ship rapidly accelerated. He held the roll then push the power up again to 7.6 and decreased the diameter of the helix, coming down to a three kilometer spiral. The ship answered the helm flawlessly and he upped the power to full cruising speed at 7.8.

After few minutes he gradually began to tighten the helix, bringing the ship in closer and closer to the center of the vector within five minutes he had it down to just ninety two meters. Almost as though the ship was spiraling down an invisible tube less than two hundred meters in diameter. The star-scape on the viewscreen rotated as the ship completed each revolution, roughly every thirty seconds.

Keeping the ship at full cruising speed he increased the rate of turn, tightening up the spiral until they were completing a revolution every twelve seconds. The ship handled each correction with ease, the only indication of the helix flight being circling stars on the viewscreen.

“Nicely done Lieutenant but I’m getting dizzy watching those starts spin around” Branston called to him.

“Understood” Reno acknowledged “Let’s try going ballistic” While up and down are only relative terms in spaceflight, to Reno going ballistic always meant pulling the nose up and he hauled back on the joystick while pushing up the thrust. The ship broke out of her spiral, he bled off the rotation, leveled her yaw rate and slid quickly into climbing curve, pulling the pitch back until the ship was flying off at ninety degrees to her previous vector. He held that course for a couple of minutes then deftly pushed over into an outside loop and lined up a course for the original heading. Now he increased power still further 7.9…8.2…8.4…8.6…

The ship dived back towards her previous course, there was barely a tremble in the deck as it screamed along at Warp 8.8. The vector rapidly approached and Reno dropped off the power, swung down under the original line of flight, pulled back and completed a full loop, up and over, before leveling out exactly back on course at Warp 7.2.

“Nice going” Delentez smiled

“Thanks” Reno replied “So when do we use the slip stream drive?”

“Not often” Delentez explained “So far we’ve only tested it twice, just short jumps and we had to go way-away from regular space lanes. They are concerned about somebody picking up the weird energy signatures it leaves. Don’t want to cause a panic about Borg ships roaming about!”

Van Straten spent the next couple of hours just familiarizing himself with the ship and controls, they were mostly standard Defiant class with improvements and he picked them up easily enough.

He handed back to Delentez and walked back to talk with Branston. “Hey Chief, there was one thing in the specifications I wanted to ask you about. “What’s that?”

He pointed to a small black dome that was at the rear of the bridge, up near the ceiling. It was only a couple of inches across and he had not noticed it on his first tour of the Bridge. But he had found it on the deign specifications on one of the Engineering PaDDs and he knew what it was, a multi spectrum sensor, commonly used by starship Artificial Intelligence systems. But the Phantom did not have an AI.

He had also followed the circuit and power diagram and knew that the dome was linked to a miniature computer core located in a small compartment aft of the Bridge. The odd thing was that the core was completely isolated from the rest of the ship, no inputs from sensors, communications, engineering, nothing. It had no electrical connections to any ship’s systems, not a single one. It was a completely closed system, just the core and the one dome, it had its own separate power supply, which was also totally isolated and that was it.

“It’s for an AI program” Branston explained “That has not been installed”

“But it’s totally isolated, any AI installed on there would be effectively electronically deaf and blind, unable to control any of the ships functions…” Reno was baffled

“Trust me, you would not want the AI that was designed for, to be in control of anything” Branston replied cryptically “And that is all I will say on it, you’ll find out once we get to our destination:”


To Be Continued

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