I had left the room before the Admirals started talking. But the look on Tracy’s face when that door next opened told me everything I needed to know.

The admiral had always struck me as an immensely... Proud human. In a way that felt earned, rather than egotistical. But if there is one thing you can rely on humans for it’s having a saying for every occasion. In this case, I think the appropriate one would be ‘pride comes before a fall’.

He does... Usually the Admiral would invite me into his office if he wanted to discuss anything, but today he just collapsed into one of the sofas opposite my desk that were usually reserved for nervous ensigns or impatient Admirals waiting for their scheduled meeting.

Then he started muttering to himself.

... All that research...

... There’s nothing wrong with the design. There can’t be...

... Maybe if I had more time...

Not that morning.

But then something changed. Just as quickly as he had seemed to fall he was standing up again. That twinkle back in his eye. He took a moment to think then ordered me to send all the design change and damage report records for any Intrepid class starship through to his office. He almost ran back into his office, only stopping briefly on the threshold to turn and tell me to find Commander Deetz and that the two of us should join him in his office when I had.

When we entered he had schematics of two nearly identical sister ships on the main display. The Intrepid, as she looked prior to any of the retrofits in the classes original configuration and Voyager, the design that was finally proved space worthy with technological improvements as well as interior configuration and structural changes.

On the outside, and to me and Commander Deetz they were nearly identical. The only major external difference was that the original Intrepid had stationary, underslung warp nacelles, whereas Voyager had been outfitted with the variable geometry nacelle pylons. But both the Commander and Admiral knew that inside was where the real differences between the two lied.

Voyager had a more robust structural integrity system along with a reinforced double secondary hull, to support the stress caused by the class nine warp drive. A change that had briefly made some engineers claim that her maximum speed was also her cruising speed. Voyager also had the final implementation of the Bio-neural gel pack system, adding more gel pack relays and reducing the number of isolinear chip dependencies throughout the ship.

Intrepid also had the gel pack system, but the ship’s main computer processing was still heavily dependent on the more traditional isolinear chip circuitry. Where Voyager launched with a ‘bio-neural’ brain, I heard Deetz refer to the original Intrepid essentially having a ‘bio-neural stimulant’. He told me, to put it simply, that Intrepid was not as smart as Voyager was. The isolinear chips on the Intrepid were like a breaker box, whatever that is, in a 20th century house on Earth.

That... makes sense.

Anyway, Deetz said Intrepid relied on an overload signal that would then blow out several isolinear chips to shut down a system. Where the Bio-neural gel pack system on Voyager could detect a systems overload and either shut it down or reroute the overload through the EPS system to prevent it from taking a critical system offline.

One thing I do remember

He had this cup of Raktajino that he had replicated that morning. By the time of this meeting it was stone cold but it seemed as though his mind was putting all power into theorising. He kept taking a sip, pulling a disgusted face at how cold it was, putting the mug down and then picking it back up and taking another sip a few minutes later.

Now if I recall...

We discussed the incident report from the Intrepid see Intrepid Class Development - Incident Report