Antimatter Problem

Posted on Tue May 24th, 2011 @ 6:22pm by Lieutenant JG Elizabeth Jones

Mission: Kingdom Come
Location: Antimatter Storage Tanks

Of all the places to spend the first few weeks on her new home Liz found herself in the underbelly of the massive starship most often. Today had brought her to the antimatter storage container working on a load imbalance from the intermix ratio. Although it wouldn't damage anything it was resulting in decreased performance in the warp drive. Liz had already informed the bridge to lower warp speed to warp 4 until the problem could be resolved.

She had brought the one person from engineering whom she felt comfortable with, Ensign Amkreth, who was assisting with the balance effort. "Lieutenant, according to my readings the antimatter injection system is running at designed specifications. I am unable to determine where the mix is going wrong."

It always made Liz relax with the Vulcanesk way he spoke and thought "Well not everything can be determined by basic diagnostics. I have been thinking we may be looking at the wrong part of the antimatter system. Maybe it's the pre-injection system that is causing the problem, why don't we funnel enough antimatter into the secondary tank then power down this one to study the injector directly.

With a shake of his head Amkreth did ask instructed, around the two engineers a hissing sound was heard as the system switched antimatter from primary to secondary injector and then powered down the primary unit. "We are safe to proceed" Amkreth announced.

Quickly crawling under the storage tank Liz pulled a spanner out of her tool kit and unscrewed the injector. "Ahah, we found our culprit" she announced proudly holding the injector up so Amkreth could see through the assembly.

Smiling Liz tapped her combadge "Jones to Engineering, please replicate a standard class 2 antimatter injector and beam it to my location" with a quick Aye sir the line closed. A few moments later the sparkle of transporter activity announced the arrival of a new injector.

As if prompted by fate, an alarm went off on the nearby control panel. Amkreth immediately went to the panel, the secondary stores are being depleted, we have 2 minutes till we are forced to drop out of warp.

Tossing the injector to her Vulcan associate Liz grabbed the spanner and dropped to the deck under the antimatter storage tank "looks like we have to do this fast, hand me the injector and prep 2 cross connect welds." Conversation didn't take place for the rest of the operation, they installed the new injector, sealed it, and then powered back up the primary antimatter injector.

A few diagnostic's later confirmed the problem had been resolved "Good work Amkreth, let's get back to engineering. "