Log van Leigh 151016.2237

[John van Leigh]

Personal Log
Commander John van Leigh, TSN
Stardate 151016.2237

Defending a Hjorden outpost in the middle of nowhere can be fun, or extremely boring. For the most part, nothing happens, as this is indeed the middle of nowhere. So we’re doing sims. It’s good for training ONI people, and it’s excellent for contingency planning.

Phoenix is, by all means, a relic from the past. Her structure is weaker than wet tissue paper, her weaponry is unremarkable, and some days I suspect her designers gave a lot more thought to bowing patterns in Sibelius’ violin music rather than node placement. But, void damnit, she’s a rather though relic despite everything else. Lately, we’ve been tearing through every command group we come across. Except today.

Turns out, dealing with massive groups when the fleet began with the left foot in terms of coordination is hard. You can save the situation, but it’s a slow process and you need a lot of ships in a single area. If the map has two focal points, you’re fucked. We were slow to organize, and slow to sacrifice objectives, so we were swarmed. Thankfully it was just a sim.

Speaking of which, we need to calibrate our simulator software. Today we had a spawn with over twenty bases. After war was declared, the systems lagged so hard we crashed against a minefield. A minefield that was five kilometers away. It trascended the very idea of irritating.

Braddock was on medical leave, so we were struggling to find a helm. Donovan made a lovely job, although he suffered during the entire mission. I suppose an acting ensign is bound to be terrified of destroying the ship he’s driving for what’s not even his secondary specialty. He couldn’t be any more glad to surrender his station to Nhaima, a cadet that was bound for examination today. Her results will be announced shortly, I’m sure, but she earned my respect anyways.

For the last sim I ended up in command of the fleet. It was a weird simulation. A map with a single focal point, a Hjorden station under a pirate and Unuk attack. Given four ships, it was trivial, except for the extremely short sensor range, and the fact that we had cloaked enemies firing at us. We took a very bad hit at some point, which prompted me to reflect on how frustrating it is to command from the rear. Other than that, everything went well.

And now, this is it for the log. I’m supposed to begin reading that astrography report Slate and Dante prepared from the data on that probe. Xavier will surely want the raw data anyways, but I’d love to know what those two think.

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