Hiding in plain sight

Posted on Sat Jul 30th, 2011 @ 9:54am by Walter Jones & Jan Valentine

835 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Session 5: Rush
Location: Engineering

Jones made his way down to engineering to find Jan. He had some ideas that he wanted to run past his engineer to see if they could be done on the shoestring that he knew they'd have to work on.

He poked his head into the engineering bay and looked around."Jan you in here?"

Jan whipped around a corner with a pistol drawn, but was taken aback when he realized it was Walter.

"Oh, sorry...thought you were someone else." Jan said, holstering his gun.

"I'm used to it, really old girlfriends and the like." Jones smiled at him. "I've got an idea that might help us when we pull into the next port or out on the lanes until things cool down a bit. I just need to see if we got the juice to do it."

"Sure, what do you have in mind?" Jan asked.

"Well, I figure faking a transponder ID, or and our registry, but what about our physical ship. I think we need to find a way to hide our ship in plain sight from people. Make us look different."

"Well shit, that's easy! Just throw some paint on the hull here and there and we can change our appearance. We should also change our hull markings, we still have some Cardassian markings on us, and that makes us easy to ID. I can do just about any custom designs on the hull, just sketch some ideas on this padd. Keep in mind though, we have limited colors, and I don't carry tons of paint." Jan said.

"Hmm, I could also change up some of the exterior lighting...break a light here, change the color on one there, yeah, that could work." Jan said.

"That is a good start, but I had a something a little bit bigger in mind. Do we have any portable holoemitters laying around?" Jones had pulled out a small notebook he had been doodling in. "What I'm thinking is, do the paint scheme, but also, use some holoemitters to make us look like something less like a freighter." He handed over the crude drawing, to Jan to inspect.

"I don't think this 'design' will help us blend in." Jan said, looking at the terrible drawing of a sleek spacecraft.

"As for portable emitters..." Jan said, scanning through the inventory on his eyepiece.

"We do have a few, but they're not particularly good. I suppose I could tie them into the deflector dish, but we'd have to disguise the ship as something with roughly similar proportions." Jan said.

"We could disguise ourselves as a Klingon variant of the Groumal, it's longer, wider, and has some slightly altered hull elements. And since we're using holo-projection, we can make the ship look as clean, or as ugly and battle scarred as we want, no limits on paint. I'd still like to modify the hull of the ship anyway, we can't run the holo projections forever, and it might come in handy to be able to pull a superhero quick appearance change." Jan said.

"That sounds good." Jones looked around the engineering compartment,
"Think that is going to have a strain on the power grid at all? I'd hate for it to take us out when we need something like life support."

"I'll have to keep an eye on the EPS conduits, but the projectors shouldn't pose too much of a problem." Jan said.

"Good, good, how long do you think it will take to rig? While we have the relative safety of space I want to make sure we get it up and going." Jones smiled. He didn't think it was going to be this easy."

"I can have it rigged up in a couple of hours, and we can do a test on it by tomorrow morning. I've also been able to restore the main computer, fortunately the back-ups were functional and the separate engine computer kept us from losing total control." Jan said.

"Any idea how he was able to get in so easy? I know we have a patchwork of systems and such, but he seemed to just be able to patch right in."

"Well, my guess is the patchwork of firewalls didn't hold up. Probably exploited one of any number of holes in the programming. I'll have to completely re-write the security protocols. That's going to take at least 3 to 4 days to set up." Jan said.

"I'd hate to wake up and find myself gasping for air because some cheeky bastard decided to fuck with our computer again. Maybe when we get to a reputable port, I'll kick in the money to have all this crap ripped out and put in new systems. I think it would make us safer don't ya think?" Jones looked at his aging freighter. "Poor old girl." he patted one of the walls. "If you need some help grab doc, I doubt he's doing anything."

"Right, I'll let your know when I'm finished with the hull." Jan said.

 

RSS Feed