14515/Tuning it up under the hood

Tuning it up under the hood
Date of Scene:	27 March 2023
Location:	Labs - Titan's Tower
Synopsis:	Nadia, Shuri, Valeria and Caitlin get together in Titan's Tower to solve a safety problem in the Tereshkova.
Cast of Characters:	Nadia Pym-van Dyne, Caitlin Fairchild, Shuri, Valeria Richards

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Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
    There is rarely a dull moment with the young ladies of GIRL around, when Earth isn't providing enough SCIENCE! mysteries to crack half the time they just go galavanting off into space. Recently on a routine joyride around the solar system, they came across an odd anomaly that tried to pull the ship through what seemed like a tear in the fabric of space/time. The Tereshkova's shield energy was dissipated by extra-dimensional energy waves from the tear and it was only through some absolutely harrowing flying and more than a little luck that the team managed not to get pulled into who knows where.

    While the GIRL team may have escaped safely back to Earth, that dangerous anomaly still remains. What's more the group conscensus was /of course/ they should figure out a way to study it and maybe if they could boost and augment the shields they could even see where it goes!

    The process began at GIRL, both at the Headquarters on the PymTech campus in New Jersey and the Tereshkova's super secret hangar in upstate New York. Unfortunately they were hitting a dead end, that is until Nadia noticed something in the data, a similarity to readings she remembered from another anomaly a few years back that had consumed four of her friends. And so it is that a field trip was planned to the Titans Tour labs to consult one of those same friends...

"Cait! Hi Cait! Do you remember Val and Shuri?" Nadia bursts into the Titans labs ahead of her friends. Of course it's not a complete surprise, they did have to go through security. And Nadia remembered to call first ...probably. "Cait, do you still have data from when Warworld sucked you guys into that strange pocket galaxy?!"

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
Caitlin very considerately headed down to the lab as soon as she got the alert, donning her lab coat and glasses (safety first, people) and warming up the various telemetry arrays and sensor equipment. When Nadia bursts in, Caitlin 'yaaays!' and gives her a big hug, hoisting the smaller woman off the ground.

"Yes! Hi! Hi Val, hi Shuri!" she tells the other girls; both get offered slightly less exuberant hugs. Caitlin's strong as all get out but she's very careful not to hurt anyone in the process.

"What's going on with the Tereshkova?" she asks Nadia, obligingly booting the data up. "Your text didn't make any sense." She squints at her phone. "I don't know how you even got it to send those equations."

Shuri has posed:
Shuri doesn't get over to Titans Tower that often, so the chance to get a look at some of their stuff again is always worth it. She's been splitting time between Wakanda and the States already, and being out here made connecting up that much easier.

She foregoes a lab coat for the time being, dressed not so much in her finest Wakandan attire, but still something that speaks to the style and culture of her people. Tribal colors, bare arms, comfortable leggings, footwear that doesn't make a sound with her footfalls.

"Ah, Caitlin. So nice to see you again." The smile is genuine, the hug brief and professional, if not all warm and familiar. Jerking a thumb Nadia's way, she cracks a joke. "She brought me along to help make it make sense."

Valeria Richards has posed:
Hugs are given with as much hug as a squishy twentysomething young woman can manage. Val kept her uniform and all it's fancy thing suit strength enhancements and forcefields deactivated and kept hidden in the two rings on each middle finger. The outfit actually worn just a tee with the GIRL logo on the front and some comfy bluejean and white sneakers. "It took some extra coding to get everything parsing enough to be sent and editable after the fact. No way something like this gets relegated to sending like a selfie!" she states and grins.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
    Nadia returns Caitlin's hug with enthusiasm, hugs never get old for her. "If it made sense we'd probably have already figured it out!" she laughs. "I mean, it probably /does/ make sense. We just haven't figured out /how/ itwe makes sense yet, but that's SCIENCE!" She grins.

    "Anyway I saw something in the data that kind of reminded me of the data we found in the wake of when you, Donna, Vic, and Terry went missing, so maybe there's something in that which could be helpful? The energy that thing was emitting just sort of /ate/ our shields, just slurped them up like noodles, we can't even get near it without risking getting pulled in in a very bad way. So the thought was maybe something in the old data and what you guys found inside that strange pocket whitehole space could give us some insight into how we can stabilize the shields against whatever sort of cosmic radiation that tear was emitting. Or maybe you have some ideas how? Since we definitely need to investigate it more, for SCIENCE, and to make sure nobody gets hurt." Definitely not just due to insatiable curiosity.

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
Caitlin sits down in the lab chair built for her. It's an overbuilt kneeling chair and looks surprisingly comfortable. "Uh... yeah, I can do that," she says, putting her safety glasses up on her red hair. "Our telemetry isn't great, we were kind of, um, exploding at the time," she admits. "And the ship was barely functional for most of the trip. We were drinking deuterium at one point because the potable water was gone."

She starts breaking it down into chunks. "Okay, let's see. Uh... here we go. Shields failed, jump drive went into catastrophic overload, a hypergate opened with an erratic vector and then we experienced a mass shunt before it all went black."

She frowns and throws the data up onto the big monitor for everyone to see. "Ok so that's the first weird thing. How can a hypergate *move*?" she asks the other geniuses. "It's formed relatively to a static gravimetric point, right?"

Shuri has posed:
Shuri makes sure to get as much of the information as she can, intending to review it for anything she could make out from it that may prove useful. One never knows where inspiration will come from, or when it will help out. "I remember that. Very fortunate you found your way back."

She rests her hands against a desk, listening to Caitlin while going back to the monitor. "If there's one thing I've learned, it's that absolutes are not always absolute. I've found things I could do with vibranium I didn't think possible, just as one example."

"They only call it science fiction until it becomes science fact," she adds with a half-smile.

Valeria Richards has posed:
Mentioning what happened to the shields has Valeria pouting. That much of a drain just bugged the hell out of her and it's visible. "This is stuff that makes what happened to my family look lightweight. And most of my attempts at the solve are bouncing at either not enough for what we can do. Or too much and we're still in danger just differently. No Val, you can't install that, it'll and then rants about how multiphasic energy sources from outside this instance of the time space coninuum with make the ship fly but leavs us behind or it'll just turn everyone into Uncle Ben. Which I am trying to avoid!" she states and hmms

There is a brief wave of her arm an d her wrist computer when Caitlin mentions the lack of potable drinking water. "We probably need to consider installing some kind of matter replication like the Shi'ar have. Set it to basic foods. Water, mac and cheese, keep it on a separate power supply from the main ship power. And portable." perishable foods only go so far, and potable fluids take up room. Easily distracted Valeria.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
    "Deuterium does not sound delicious!" Nadia concurs with Val, who apparently isn't the only one easily distracted. "Viv usually cooks our rations, she's gotten pretty good at it, though a replicator could be super handy, like what they had in Space Trek." Eventually she does remember what she's supposed to be talking about and stops herself. "But! First we need to figure out this shield problem. Val is right, if we all turned into rock people it would be a fashion disaster. I think even Janet would have trouble making clothes for us if we were rock people!"

    "Anyway!" She turns her attention back to Caitlin. "Exploding is a problem, we definitely don't want to do that. Jump Drive overloading.. we can probably avoid that due to the nature of our drive, though if it did overload that would be really bad..." She pauses for a moment, that feeling when she knows something is right in front of her but she can't quite figure it out. I don't think hypergates are supposed to move... unless the fabric of space/time around that gravimetric point moved too..." Now she really has her thinking cap on, brows furrowed in thought. What is she missing...

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
Caitlin nods at Valerie in agreement. "I mean, we were on an exploding alien dreadnought, but yes, food's an issue. Water moreso. I can go a few weeks without eating but even I will croak if I go a couple days without water." She makes a face. "In my case it doesn't even have to be fresh, but... gross."

Caitlin drifts over to look over Shuri's work and frowns. Then she walks over to Nadia's notes and frowns. Then she stands between them and frowns.

"Shuri, does vibranium do weird things to inertial estimators? Because the gravity strain on the warp core is like... an order of magnitude more than what the dampeners are recording on the bow."

Shuri has posed:
"I'd rather have a lot of other things first," Shuri says in a dry tone, regarding Deuterium. She leaves further talk of food, replicators, and all that to those more inclined to consider such things. She's got a tablet up that she's running some calculations and formulas on, tapping here, sliding there, a studious look upon her face.

She scoffs. "Yes. Exploding: bad. Shields failing: bad. Jump drive overloading: bad. We could probably work up some alterations and safeguards that would lessen that chance..." The young woman trails off, clucking her tongue at something before Caitlin comes over for a peek and moves along.

"Vibranium does a lot of weird things. I can't say that it does in this case, but I also can't say that it doesn't. Not without more specific testing. Much of the time, the properties of what it does can change with very minute differences in how much is used, and how."

Valeria Richards has posed:
"Well if you take a close look. Everything in the universe is moving. Just perceptually really, really slowly, and yet infinitely fast at the same time. The existing tech like hypergates, boomtubes, warp drives and the astrogation needed to plot courses has to account for universal drift, stellar, continental drift." valera points out and hmms.

"Maybe we could keep seeing what alloys we can make with vibranium. Ingredient ratios. Cooking times and temperature. We've got way more access to thing beyond Captain America's shield or adamantium these days." she goes on. "Why mess with the hields when we can physically reinforce the bulkheads and hulls?"

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
    "Unfortunately Riri has been crazy busy working for Tony. She tricarbontanium alloy that makes up most of the hull was her metallurgy brainchild. But maybe it could be improved upon." Nadia taps her chin, listening and thinking simultaneously as ideas zip about in her brain.

    "Gravity strain on the warp core... wait wait wait, it could be the core itself. The Pym Drive works by using Pym Fields to expand and contract space/time. Vibranium components are what lets the ship withstand those stresses at all. What if that very process is interacting with this strange energy from the anomaly leading to that increase in strain, it could also be having other effects like what drained the shields..."

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
Caitlin scratches her head. "Golly," she mutters, sourly. "I started trying to map that out in my head and I think I had a mini stroke." She pulls over a whiteboard and starts drawing on it. Though she's not anywhere near the physicist the other girls are, Caitlin's no slouch as an engineer and has a good instinctive handle for mechanical systems. Sure enough, in short order, she's got a basic sketch illustrating the competing shearing forces, and points from the illustration of the warp core to the relative distance of the field collapse point.

"Unless my math is way wrong, then the gravity distortions are so heavy here that they went into negative values," she says, and looks back at the others. "Right? I mean this is where the field collapsed, and we can scale the stress curve from--" she draws a long, curving line at the underside of the picture. "So the gravimetric strain is asynchronous once it's larger than the hull."

Shuri has posed:
"Vibranium has a number of different properties depending on how it's used," Shuri explains, looking between each of the other three. "There are very good reasons we are secretive about this except with people we trust, but one of the common properties is its ability to absorb certain types of incoming momentum and convert it to a release of energy once it reaches particular levels. Even my footwear absorbs enough that you can't hear my steps, but it doesn't build up to that kind of level."

She clears her throat upon having a glance at whatever it is Caitlin's drawn up, reminiscent of what might be a smiling face. "So, yes. Vibranium could be used to reinforce, but it could also be used to redirect if the strain can be harnessed and collected. We would simply need to find a safe way of releasing it, or storing it for other benefits."

Valeria Richards has posed:
"So what else is good for dealing with weird energies nobody understands. Sounds kinda liike magicky bullshi..." Val ponders. "Nth Metal Vibranium alloys! Thanagarans use it in their ships. Hell they probably make teeth fillings out of the stuff. Use that in the core. Extra reinforcement of shields in synch with what we do know of the weird energies. Inside the ship around it keeps those of us not already enhanced or altered by being affected by the Nth-Metal. Hopefully the Vibranium further mitigates negative effects and vice versa.

Valeria sometimes has a habit of over thinking a problem. And sometimes sidetracking into turning something benign into a doomsday weapon. The holodoggo service animal simulations have luckily not gone sideways yet. Probably because of Vivian.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
    "Val Val Val, Magic is just sufficiently advanced technology that we can't figure out how it works. There's got to be something here, we just have to find the pattern." Nadia watches Caitlin map out all of the equations on the whiteboard and nods to Shuri. "That's part of the Tereshkova's energy conservation system, but that too might be getting overloaded. Okay, I think we're going in some interesting directions. You know what will help us think even better? Pizza!" She says turning in the direction of the lab door. "And I already ordered some, in fact it should be arriving just about.." There is a tower proximity alert. "Now. Let's go eat and then come back with some fresh ideas!"