A Man, A Plan, A Headache

[WxMurray 0]

“Right. So what now?”

 

“I want to work on a plan to get the shuttles back on the ship without making us too vulnerable.”

 

Dickinson turned and gave Murray a quizzical look. “You sure like coming up with plans, don’t you?”

 

Murray shrugged and smiled. “Meh. It keeps me busy.”

 

Dickinson moved to a seat across from Murray at the pool table and sat down. “What about your transport plan using the ship’s three independent power systems.”

 

Murray nodded. “It’s a good idea, but I’d like to refine it more.”

 

“More?” Dickinson raised an eyebrow. “It sounded pretty good to me. What’s wrong with it?”

 

“Well, even though that plan minimizes the exposed surface area to just Secondary, a hit there could be disastrous. The Secondary warp core is the ship’s main warp engine. While we would have two others to use, a hit to Secondary could eliminate our ability to go into MVAM.”

 

Dickinson nodded absently, wishing he’d just tell her what he had in mind.

 

“So I was thinking, how could we get the absolute minimum exposed surface area?”

 

Murray paused, awaiting a response.

 

Dickinson sighed and humored him. “How?”

 

“Well, if we could create a form an area of the shields into sort of a conoid then we could place it such that the shuttle could enter the bay. In another situation we could set it up to isolate the transporter emitters to beam people up or down. The nice thing is that we can set this up anywhere on the ship for use for anything.”

 

Dickinson nodded. “Sounds good. What sort of work is involved?”

 

“Well, we’ll need to do some calculations for the dimensions of the cone. We’ll also need to do the calculations to get the shield generators to form it properly. We should have Crewman Snyder come up here to give us a hand with that.”

 

Dickinson shook her head. “Snyder is in sickbay, remember. She has an amyl-something-or-other.”

 

“Amyloidosis”

 

Dickinson looked quizzically at her superior. “Uh…”

 

Murray smiled. “Amyloidosis. It’s a disorder where a waxy, almost transparent protein deposit, the amyloid, builds up due to the degeneration of tissue.” He rolled up his sleeve to reveal his arm and the slight scarring that remained. “I had amyloidosis after my arm was nearly severed on an away mission aboard the USS Susquehanna runabout.”

 

Dickinson nodded, not really interested in the details. “So…what do we do then.”

 

Murray smiled and tossed her a blank padd. “I hope you remember your shield mechanics and forcefield geometry.”

 

Dickinson groaned as she took the padd. “Lucky me.”