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Razor
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« on: July 20, 2009, 12:12:53 AM » |
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Kobayashi Maru Vol. 21
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This edition of the Kobayashi Maru is brought to you by joshua_ezell. Good luck!
Quote:
You are in command of an Excelsior class vessel. Your current assignment is to render aid to a world devastated by earthquakes.
You have an away team on the surface helping rebuild and another in a cave formation trying to determine the reason for the earthquakes. Your tactical officer tells you a subspace wave is about to hit the ship. Your science officer tells you that at its strength, it will kill anything on the surface of the planet that is exposed to it, including one of the away teams. He also tells you you that you may have enough time to get the team and a few hundred people on the ground to safety by beaming them aboard the ship. However, with your shields up, you’re guaranteed to weather the wave and keep the people on the ship safe. If you lower your shields to beam anyone up, you leave yourself open to the wave.
The subspace wave has enough power to destroy your ship if the shields are down. What do you do?
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(Note before I begin: This was originally a short 3 paragraph thing, but I kept thinking and adding to it and in the end it made me laugh, so I figured why not post the whole thing? It's a long read, but hopefully the ending is funny.)
Based on the conditions of the scenario I will make two assumptions about this incident that are absent in the description.
1: I have minutes to act. I'll assume 10 minutes.
Why: This is a Kobayashi Maru scenario. These are training exercises meant to push a captain in training to the absolute limit AND force them to fail. It is therefore highly likely that I have a very limited timeframe. Enough to save an away team and perhaps a few hundred locals if I time it right.
2: The local population does not exceed several thousand. I'll assume 20 in this case.
Why: Merely for the sake of narrative and to make the scenario slightly more believable. Even if my ship were a Galaxy, Sovereign, or other similarly sized vessel, it would make no sense to send a single starship to assist a world with millions or especially billions of people with a burgeoning planetary industry of their own to draw upon. It would be impractical at best to send a ship of a few hundred to assist reconstruction efforts on a planet wide infrastructure--something that was clearly specified in the scenario.
In the first minute I drop shields and warn away teams of the approaching danger then give them instructions. The first team, helping with reconstruction, will sound a general alarm among the populace and get them into as small a space as possible--preferably underground or thick walled buildings--but even packing themselves into the streets if need be. They must also leave a clearing in the center just large enough for the belly of an Excelsior class vessel to touch down. The second away team is too far away to do any good. Their job is to save their own lives and book it to the surface to await transport.
The next two minutes are spent launching all shuttlecraft and deploying as many armed photon torpedoes as we have time for directly above the colony in a low orbit. The shuttlecraft are abandoned with their small warp cores set to overload just after the wave passes them.
All remaining time (hopefully 7 minutes, give or take 30 seconds) is spent closing in on the colony. During this time we will attempt to recover the away team in the caves. If they cannot be recovered on our approach then they are unfortunately lost.
The Excelsior class is not designed to land. The approach and touchdown must be done as carefully as possible. I do not expect the ship to ever fly again, but my duty is not to the ship--nor even the crew. My duty is to the citizens of the federation and, whether they are members or not, the civilians of this colony. While it contains an immense amount of sentimental value, the ship is thing. A tool. It can be replaced. It is expendable. Internet trolls notwithstanding, people are neither of these things.
As the ship approaches the colony, probably breaking the sound barrier as it slows to a stop, the vessel will attempt a vertical landing. It needn't be gentle, just not powerful enough to demolish the city. Triage can take care of bleeding ears, broken bones, and cuts from shattered glass later.
All power is diverted to shields--ALL POWER. Life support, warp power, inertial dampers, weapons, everything except bridge consoles, the main computer, and antimatter containment. The shields are extended in a hemisphere as far as possible, without compromising their ability to weather the attack. If the away team was successful most if not all of the population should be in an area the shields can cover, even if they have pack themselves into the streets and buildings like sardines.
With luck no is crushed when the ship touches down--20 or 30 human (or alien) pancakes under my ship's fat posterior is preferable to 5,000 sticks of charcoal, though--and we remotely detonate the photon torpedoes just before the wave hits them. With the luck the combined destructive force of torpedoes will add to the half dozen shuttlecraft's breaching warp cores. The torpedoes will probably do nothing, but the subspace energy released by the breaching cores should hopefully weaken the subspace wavefront in the local vicinity, providing an increased chance of survivability for the colony under the stretched shields.
Possible outcomes:
1: The Chips Maneuver.
Casualties are minimal or nonexistent as the wavefront passes over the shields, devastating the planetary surface but leaving the protected section of the colony intact. The worst of our troubles now are calling in rescue ships on subspace comm. and dealing with injuries and minor casualties (or none at all.) Starfleet is disappointed to learn that my ship is trashed, but rebuking a captain for saving 20,000 people by sacrificing his ship is hardly a sound political move. Commendations are handed out, but instead of a snazzy new ship I get a snazzy new desk job to prevent me from pulling something like that ever again.
2: A valiant court marshal effort.
Casualties number in the hundreds or thousands as many people didn't make it into the safe zone. A clearing could not be in the center of the panicked mob and nearly 140 people were smashed when the Excelsior hit the ground, killing 300 more from the shockwave. Although nearly 13,000 people survived, Starfleet command determines my actions were reckless and in addition to everything else, cost me my ship and away team in the caves. I am court marshaled and expelled from Starfleet, but 13,000 people are still alive, instead of the mere hundreds I could have transported aboard had I stayed in orbit.
3: Popcorn shrimp with a side of burnt pancakes.
Weeks later as survey vessels investigate the sudden silence of the colony and the ship dispatched to it they discover the planet to be charred lifeless husk and the scattered remains of an Excelsior class ship among the colony's former location.
It is later determined that for some bizarre reason the Captain apparently rammed the colony at several times the speed of sound, utterly destroying the colony and splintering the ship into several large fragments, after which a previously undetected subspace wave hit the exposed warp core, causing it to explode and unleashing the destructive power of the ship's entire remaining antimatter fuel supply.
Captain Chips forever goes down in history as the worst commanding officer ever. Historians will debate just what the hell he thought he was doing for centuries to come. Incidentally a new Kobayashi Maru scenario is devised years later and posthumously named "The Chips Incident," wherein cadets attempt to stop an insane captain from ramming an unsuspecting colony on the borders of federation space.
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