Computer freeze

[tomcat]

Grahm and Ario walked from the bridge and out into the foyer. From there they took the stairs down to Deck Four and then followed the companionways to the back of the ship. Along the way they saw both engineering and medical teams running about working on the ship or helping fellow crewmen - others were seeing to their individual departments and Grahm was pleased. The Tactical officer knew the Columbia, though wounded, would be getting back on her feet real soon.

At last, they entered the Columbia's mammoth hanger. The two grimaced to see that a portion of the flight deck was where the dead had been brought and the number was startling.

They entered the main engineering to see Ramos staring at a massive panel. Grahm waited until Ramos noticed them before he spoke. "Didn't want to break your train of thought," he smiled. "How are things? By the way, communicators are working and Stonn is presently in command. Darkan is okay... just a little doped up."

[pgholland]

Ario smiled at Grahm, "I was just doing my duty; as we all did- I may only be a psychologist, but I also took the Hippocratic oath and other comparable oaths. I am obligated to help; my empathic pain reducing abilities can be very useful in an emergency. I only wish I had inherited more of my father's navigational abilities, they might have helped out right now.
"But I think I can be of use here, hopefully I can help with sorting out the computer core; not in any great way, but I can certainly assist the repair teams with my meagre skills. Unless there's somewhere else you'd rather I were?" he said to the Engineer.

[sdrotar]

"I'm sure we have some injuries," Ramos said. "If you could be of service there, it'd be appreciated."

He turned back to the console he had been stripping down and spoke to them while looking at it.
"As for the repairs; I'm not even certain what we're looking at yet. Some services are coming back online, but we need time. Lt. Telek is doing some of the heavy lifting, working his way through mechanical repairs. He might be able to use a hand, too."

[pgholland]

Ario sighed, he was a psychologist, not a Doctor, apparently the crew didn't understand that. Grabbing a med-kit he began to move around the Engineering Deck, looking for any crew who weren't already under the treatment of the emergency medical teams who must have already reached the area- as he sent them himself long before he even moved towards the Bridge.

[tomcat]

[OOC:] Shawn, are younot getting my Private Messages to you? I wrote a long bit about your tests and I haven't seen you post on any of it.

Let me know.

[sdrotar]

[OOC:] Shawn, are younot getting my Private Messages to you? I wrote a long bit about your tests and I haven't seen you post on any of it.

Let me know.

OOC: Crud - I didn't even see them. I have set my PMs to forward to me in e-mail - I won't miss any more. Sorry.

Ramos looked at the screen as he pondered the situation. The computer had power, but the core and all redundancies were not functioning or responding, so whatever happened affected all elements of the core.

The chief engineer began to run through the whole event from his last diagnostic test when the Columbia was hit until the mock-up ship exploded. The Romulan warp drive had gone critical and exploded... did it have enough energy? Was the Columbia in close enough range to be affected by an EMP?

Electro-magnetic pulses were well-known for wreaking havoc upon electronics, sometimes shutting down completely all functions. Products of nuclear explosions, the people of Earth in the 21st century had war plans in place of air-bursting nuclear warheads over civilized countries to eliminate all electronic functions, and thus cripple the infrastructure.

It was quite possible that that was what the Columbia was facing. If the computer core was hit with a strong enough EMP, capable of overcoming the ship's shield grid, it could have caused considerable problems. If main systems blinked out for a moment, the redundancies would be triggered and the keep the core active. But what if the instantaneous shut-down-and-restart caused the software to lock up? Did Starfleet software engineers ever plan for such an event? If that was really what happened. Could the problem be resolved with a simple re-boot?

Ramos thought about the process of shutting down the core and re-starting it. Theoretically, all the kinks should work themselves out... but what if it didn't restart?

He decided it was worth a try, and would run it by the captain... Stonn, rather - Grahm had mentioned that Darkan had been injured and the science officer was in command.

OOC: Do we have communications to the bridge yet, via personal communicator? Since they work on planets, independent of ship computers, I figured personal tech would work... unless they're fried, too...

[trgieck]

With a loud cry of triumph Telek scrambled out from inside a computer access panel. He had been crammed inside the small space for the past half hour trying to find a live comm circuit trunk. His cry of exaltation signaled for all to hear that his search was finally over. Finally extricating himself from the ships innards he signalled for his team to gather around.

"I've located a live comm node... uh... number XH3473. Anyway, it appears to be a redundant system used for rerouting, prioritizing and/or buffering incoming commands from the bridge's engineering console." Telek grabbed a data PADD from a team member and began tapping commands as he continued speaking. "I'm pulling up the locations for similar nodes throughout the ship. We should be able to link key areas of the ship and their corresponding bridge consoles through these nodes and restore ship comms." He handed the PADD back. "Get on it. I'll inform Chief Ramos."

Telek walked quickly over to where Ramos was talking to another of the ship's senior officers.

He waited to be acknowledged by Ramos and then with a brief nod to the ship's Tactical Officer he informed Ramos of his findings.

Anticipating the next questions he finished with. "Should take us about and hour to complete the repairs and have comms back up, sir."

Engineering: Systems test TN 15 (-3 for no technical support)
Roll (2d6) -3: 5,5,-3 = 7 + (Engineering Systems +8) = Total: 15

[sdrotar]

With a loud cry of triumph Telek scrambled out from inside a computer access panel. He had been crammed inside the small space for the past half hour trying to find a live comm circuit trunk. His cry of exaltation signaled for all to hear that his search was finally over. Finally extricating himself from the ships innards he signalled for his team to gather around.

"I've located a live comm node... uh... number XH3473. Anyway, it appears to be a redundant system used for rerouting, prioritizing and/or buffering incoming commands from the bridge's engineering console." Telek grabbed a data PADD from a team member and began tapping commands as he continued speaking. "I'm pulling up the locations for similar nodes throughout the ship. We should be able to link key areas of the ship and their corresponding bridge consoles through these nodes and restore ship comms." He handed the PADD back. "Get on it. I'll inform Chief Ramos."

Telek walked quickly over to where Ramos was talking to another of the ship's senior officers.

He waited to be acknowledged by Ramos and then with a brief nod to the ship's Tactical Officer he informed Ramos of his findings.

Anticipating the next questions he finished with. "Should take us about and hour to complete the repairs and have comms back up, sir."

Engineering: Systems test TN 15 (-3 for no technical support)
Roll (2d6) -3: 5,5,-3 = 7 + (Engineering Systems +8) = Total: 15

"Outstanding. The sooner, the better."
Ramos went over his EMP theory with the young engineer; perhaps together, they might find enough evidence to prove it... or disprove it.

[tomcat]

OOC: Do we have communications to the bridge yet, via personal communicator? Since they work on planets, independent of ship computers, I figured personal tech would work... unless they're fried, too...

[OOC:] Hey Shawn, yes, communicators are operational and can be used ship-wide. Most systems are 'operational', just stuck... if you know what I mean.

I will post again with some more story stuff for you guys in just a little bit.

[tomcat]

[OOC:] Good RP'ing guys - keep it up!

Tom I love your post. I like the way you are going outside my story box and creating results for your tests - keep that stuff up. I will only change it if it makes an impact in story that I want more tests for.

As far as its going now, I still want a little more character interaction here so you guys can decide what next to do.

Most repair tests that people are performing were an hour in length, modified by the DOS of their rolls; just remember that Stonn had detected ships a while back that were roughly an hour away.

I will add more story after you guys RP amongst yourselves a bit more. 

Have FUN!

Grahm looked to Ramos, as the trio stood watching the Andorian excitedly direct his team in the re-routing of comm nodes. "Well Juan, I am sorry but I have little to no skill at putting this stuff back together. I just wanted to get down here so I could find out some news to take back to the bridge, or at least let you know that we can report via communicators." John continued, "If you need help with fire suppression though, I can certainly assist you there."

The shipmates looked at the Ship's diagnostic panel, frozen as it was since the lock up of the computer. It displayed areas in red where fires had been reported prior to the explosion.

[sdrotar]

Ramos turned to Grahm.
"If you'd like to take command of the fire suppression teams, I'd welcome it," said Ramos.
"The geology lab is at risk of being cut off, and even though we have backups, any life support machinery is a critical component. Obviously."
He noticed that Grahm gave him a sidelong look and tried to ignore it.

"I'm working on a theory here... I think a system restart would do the trick, since the real damage is limited. However, I wouldn't want to try that in open space unless we had some sort of support vessel, just in case the computers didn't come back online."

Ramos had no idea that the B'rels were still closing, or whether they'd be able to provide the support they needed, but Stonn did, and after hearing the engineer's theory, he thought that the Klingons might be willing to assist, assuming the Gr'Toth could convince them that they had helped to stop a galactic war.

[pgholland]

Ario looked up from the crew-member he was attending to, "Sir, what if we try something that we did when I was a child on the Potemkin. We suffered a computer crash- nothing would work, and we couldn't risk shutting them all down because we were in deep space. Instead we partitioned the systems off and shut down sections of the computer at a time- life-support, shields, navigation and so on. That way we only ever had a small part of the computer offline at any one time.
"I don't know whether that's even possible, but I thought it might work." Ario turned back to another injured crewmember, looking to provide emergency first aid with the little skills he had.

[sdrotar]

Ario looked up from the crew-member he was attending to, "Sir, what if we try something that we did when I was a child on the Potemkin. We suffered a computer crash- nothing would work, and we couldn't risk shutting them all down because we were in deep space. Instead we partitioned the systems off and shut down sections of the computer at a time- life-support, shields, navigation and so on. That way we only ever had a small part of the computer offline at any one time.
"I don't know whether that's even possible, but I thought it might work." Ario turned back to another injured crewmember, looking to provide emergency first aid with the little skills he had.

"It's certainly worth looking at if we can get the system running just enough to create the partitions, but at the moment, I'm not sure if we can even do that," he replied. "It might be all or nothing." Ramos considered it, however, and filed the notion away as another possible solution.

He wondered if Zantz and his team on the Gr'Toth were running into the same problems, and hoped that Telek (and Zantz) could get each ship's communications systems up and running soon.

[pgholland]

"But that's just it we wouldn't need the computers operational to run the partitions- simply open up the consoles and remove the connecting chips- that way the individual sections would be running independently."

[tomcat]

[OOC:] Now computers are something Grahm knows!



Grahm thought for a moment after hearing both Ario's and Juan's input. He knew what the engineers worries were, that if he shut down the core for a re-boot it might not re-start, and that would be a serious problem for the ship. The other problem was the re-boot time. It could take hours while the core read through the millions of files that it did on start up. But what if...

"Juan, what if we wrote a patch on a PADD or in a tricorder that would initiate only a primary file re-boot? Essentially only re-start the core enough for us to get the ship's primary systems re-networked and responding and then bring other files and systems online as we can get to them? Basically what Ario is saying, without having to pull all the boards."

All present knew that once the computer core shutdown and then re-booted, the ship systems that were active would have a temporary down time that could last 2 minutes to 15, as the computer re-initiated itself. Thus they would lose environment and lights for that time period, but if they prepared properly it would only be a couple of minutes of distraction - the ship's air supply would cetrainly last and the entire crew had all been given at least minimal training in weightlessness.

Grahm looked at Juan wondering if his ideas were sound.