Future Imperfect - Starship Engineering

Starships are amazing feats of technical brilliance, but without the sweat and toil of those tasked with maintaining her, any ship would cease to be so useful quite quickly. Like many aspects of Future Imperfect, these rules will attempt to abstract away the mundane, and yet highlight enough detail to make the engineering role interesting and challenging to play. As with everything else, the rules framework should be customizable enough to allow each Crew to play the game they want.

A starship is a massive and extremely expensive technological marvel, and it is the role of the engineer to keep her spaceworthy. The duties of engineers vary greatly from ship to ship, with crews of smaller ships requiring more broad skillsets, while members of larger engineering teams can afford to be more specialized.

Areas of Responsibility

Where do the duties of the engineers extend, and conversely where do they stop? For the purposes of this section, all engineering responsibilities will be outlined, and roles may be defined for specific tasks. Depending on the size of the vessel the same individual may perform multiple roles.

In general the engineering team is responsible for the following areas of ship operations: hull integrity, terminal connectivity, physical terminal maintenance, power plant operations, data and information security, maneuver drive operations, FTL drive operations and computer operating system integrity. While engineering is a technical team, it is not the only technical team on the ship, and therefore they do not perform the role of subject matter experts (SMEs) on technical subjects outside of physical hardware and operating system software. The engineering team is responsible for all physical hardware, and the software necessary to provide functionality to necessary systems. It is not responsible for those systems.

Hull Integrity

Few things are more important to the individuals on a spacefaring vessel than the integrity of her hull. A single breach could mean death for all if not properly managed and repaired. Hull integrity is the responsibility of the engineering team because it is physical hardware, not because the engineers are the most qualified to bolt a patch to the interior wall. During a hull breach (or potential breach) the engineering team will work to route systems away from the damaged area and shield off the compromised area to prevent destructive decompression.

On larger vessels, especially those with security or marine contingents, the engineering team will partner with an outside group to provide support and consultation on repairing breaches, while the security/marines will do the actual patching. Breaches of any size must be repaired at spacedock (or similar facility).

Smaller vessels, of course, do not have this luxury. In those cases anyone who is available will assist the engineers to effect the patch. In effect, the old saying “hull integrity is everyone’s responsibility” (to paraphrase) is the reality on ships with crews under 30 or so.

Terminal Connectivity

Starships have at least one main computer core. Some terminals are “dumb” while others are fully interactive. Dumb terminals connect to a larger, shared system and utilize the computing resources there, while interactive terminals have their own dedicated resources.

The engineering team owns the connectivity of the terminals to the main computer core(s). This includes the physical hardware such as cards and cabling, and also the connection protocols that establish the trust relationships between the machines.

They do not own the functionality of the software on the terminals themselves. Why?

The simple answer is because engineers are engineers, not pilots or astrogators or weapons officers. Knowing how to support and troubleshoot the software is the purview of specific technical teams. Often, each discipline will have a designated subject matter expert (or more than one) who owns the software support.

How does this affect the game and why do I care? If there is a problem with the FTL piloting terminal, but the engineers can verify connectivity to the terminal, then this is likely an FTL terminal problem, which should be solved by the pilot (or appropriate SME). The pilot character would use his skill on this issue.

Of course, it could be that the engineer has time and wishes to help. That is great! The main thing this allows from a game perspective is to split the spotlight time between characters, even during a technical repair scene. Sound operations principles actually help us keep all of the players involved!

Physical Terminal Maintenance

The engineering team owns the day to day maintenance of physical hardware, including computers. When a screen goes dim, a keyboard stops responding or memory needs an upgrade, the engineering team handles the request.

But, as before, this only goes so far. When a piece of physical hardware stops being a terminal, and starts being a piece of specialized equipment, it could be argued that the responsibility of the engineer stops as well. Given the nature of this discussion, this type of determination can be made on a case by case basis.

Why do we care? This is a lot like above. When the weapons turret controls go bad, have the weapons officer fix it, if that is how to keep him involved in the story. If the engineer hasn’t done anything in a while, send him up to the turret in the midst of the action to inject some fresh eyes and help the weapons officer stay on task while the terminal is fixed in parallel.

Power Plant Operations

For a ship to go anywhere it needs power. For a ship to remain spaceworthy, it needs power. For an atmosphere to be maintained, so the crew may live, the ship needs power. Essentially, the ship needs power, and that is all that needs to be said. The power plant provides this.

Starfaring vessels have three choices for power plants: fission reactor, fusion reactor and AMC (anti-matter conversion) reactor. For ease of system, they all use the same skill (Starship Engineering – Power Plant).

Fission reactors are the power plants that propelled the first starships into space. They are large and bulky, and require water and uranium (or Thorium) in large quantities to operate, as well as functional cooling rods. Their maintenance procedures, while antiquated, are well understood and only moderately time consuming. Their inefficiency related to bulk makes them incapable of powering the largest starships, for at some point there just ceases to be enough space to make the plant able to produce the necessary power.

Fusion reactors are the next step in starship power plant evolution.