A close call

Chief Engineer’s Personal Log
Stardate 891.7

That was a closer call than I would have wanted to experience. I checked the reports from the structural integrity fields, once we were out of the subspace rupture. If we’d been travelling even 0.2 faster there would have been only an expanding debris field stretching approximately 3 light-hours from the boundary to show that a ship had ever been here.

The navigational sensors should have picked up some trace of the rupture, but the sensor logs showed nothing, right up until the point that we hit the edge. There must be some way to detect anomalies like this. Perhaps some of the higher frequencies would reflect off the boundary. It is not something I can test, but we should be able to model the boundary with sufficient accuracy based on the readings we took.

My initial concerns regarding the combined reactor design were confirmed. With the two reactors sharing shielding, containment systems and cooling, a problem with one becomes a problem with both. With a containment failure, as happened when we hit the rupture, the safest approach is to scram both reactors and leave the ship on battery power, rather than scramming the primary and running on auxiliary, as would happen with other engine designs. On paper, emergency power should last 7 days, however I have found that reality seldom agrees with the design documents. I would not like to have to rebuild any major part of the reactor in such a short time.

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