Faulty Drive

Noel's sudden resignation came as a surprise to many. Nobody really thought that Noel would just resign and go away all of a sudden.

For obvious reasons, Nova didn't publicize the reason for his resignation. He instead kept mum about everything.

Surprisingly, although everyone felt that Noel leaving would have a huge gap in the day to day operations. But it wasn't that way. Nova quickly filled up the needed positions with capable people. Together, the transition went exceptionally smooth. So much so that even Kita was impressed at Nova's efficiency.

He also expected some problems because of Noel's sudden departure. But Nova had managed to handle everything really smoothly.

So Kita sent him a thank you as he walked towards the Engineering Bay to meet with Hugo. Hugo wanted to talk about something and it needed to be in person.

Kita wasn't sure about what, but he guessed it would be about the new FTL drive.

As Kita entered the Engineering Bay, he saw Hugo and his team working on something. That was a common scene in this area.

Every time Kita came here, Hugo and his team was busy working on something or the other. Kita wasn't sure what they were working on half the time, But it didn't matter. He trusted Hugo. And seeing him work so hard even when things were relatively smooth pleased him quite a bit.

"I should give him a raise." Kita thought to himself. Although he didn't handle the salaries of the crew himself. He had long delegated this task to Nova and he just transferred the required credits to a central expense account where the crew would get paid from.

Kita decided to have a talk with Nova about giving Hugo a raise. But that could wait.

Noticing Kita entering the bay, Hugo put down whatever he was working on and approached Kita to greet him.

"Hey boss."

"Hey Hugo. What's going on?" Kita asked.

"This way." Hugo said as he began to walk towards a certain direction.

Kita followed behind him.

Hugo led him to the central monitoring station in the bay. The crew and engineering staff could monitor everything about the FTL drives, The rear thrusters and other things from here.

Hugo walked towards a terminal before he began to clear away all the clutter in the terminal. There were a lot of different metrics and performance reports open on the terminal which quickly went away as Hugo cleared them and opened up a performance report.

"Boss, Take a look at this. It's the performance report about the new FTL drive that we installed."

"Is it having issues?" Kita asked as he moved to see the report on the terminal.

"I wouldn't really call it an issue, But it's not performing correctly I think." Hugo said.

Kita read the logs and all the reports about the new FTL drive. There was a lot of data to cover, but fortunately, Hugo had already arranged them appropriately for Kita to go through.

Kita took a seat as he read through all the reports.

There was indeed something going on with the new FTL drive. It was sucking up too much power compared to the spec sheets. It seemed that it wasn't performing efficiently enough.

Although the spec sheets weren't generally accurate to a tee, but they could be used as rough guidelines to figure out how much resource or energy the FTL drive or other machines needed.

But it seemed that the FTL drive that Dr. Kbom sent recently wasn't content with the amount of energy that the spec sheet specified. It wanted more.

A Quarter of the amount more!

That was a problem. A significant one.

"Can the ship handle this load?" Kita asked.

"She can. But not for a prolonged period of time." Hugo replied. Already knowing what Kita was asking.

"I see. Have you figured out what's causing this issue?"

"I'm not sure, I've checked everything over 3 times already. Nothing is out of it's place. Nothing is wrong. I can only figure that it's the drive itself." Hugo replied.

He wasn't an FTL drive specialist, but as a trained professional he could make some educated guesses. And if he said that everything aside from the drive was alright, then Kita trusted him.

The newly upgraded power delivery system couldn't handle this much load. It wasn't designed to handle such amounts of load for so long.

Kita would either need to get it upgraded or stop using the FTL drive. For now.

Although Kita could just upgrade the power delivery system to just accommodate the extra energy load, but that didn't sit right with him.

As a research who has worked on the cutting edge of FTL drives before, he knew that it was quite common for next gen prototypes to have unexpected issues like these. But that didn't mean that they should just give up on improving it and move on.

No, they needed to figure out what was going wrong and what could be done to fix the issue.

So Kita planned on doing just that.

He turned towards Hugo as he advised.

"Get the necessary parts shipped you need to upgrade the energy delivery system. And try to finish the upgrades as soon as possible. I'll try to figure out what's wrong with it in the meantime." Kita said.

His inner researcher burned with passion as he saw a problem before him. Specially in a field that he was quite familiar with. Working with Dr. Kbom for so long had made him quite obsessive over stuff like these.

So Kita embraced his urge to figure out an appropriate solution to this problem.

Kita quickly gave some more instructions to Hugo and promptly left the engineering Bay.

He needed Hugo to send over all the Realtime and operational data about the drive back to the Lab. That way he could monitor what was going on and analyze the data to figure out the issue.

But before that, he needed to have a chat with Dr. Kbom. The creator of this Next-gen FTL drive.