LF Friends, Will Travel

Enjoying Terran improvements

Pirates and Purchasing power: A ship captain's memoirs.

Originally Published on 54 PST (Post Stasis time) by Hatil Author "Brian H Thompson"

Chapter 5: Lessons learned on Terran 'Improvements'

One of the main double-edged swords in hiring Terran employees is the tendency for them to provide 'improvements' to your ship. Whether that is her engines, processes, or even the coffee maker, the primates from Sol will have an opinion about anything and everything. No matter how stable a system or environment is, no matter how much of a guarantee you give that your current way of doing things has been tested, they will continually face the desire to tweak and mess around with their immediate surroundings.

Sometimes this is just to be seen to be doing something. For a species with the power that they hold within the galaxy, Terrans are generally, as a rule, bundles of anxiety pressed into the vague shape of a man. Imposter syndrome is rife amongst them, and if they're not seen to be doing something there is fear that those in charge will notice their inadequacies and take some form of action, so action from them must be taken before such a thing happens.

Other times it's a stubborn desire for control, to be beholden to no rules, whether they're the laws of man or physics. Sometimes through arrogance, always because of stubbornness, often just because someone told them that they couldn't do something.

Then there are the engineers, the academics who don't even realize what they're actually doing, the demand to make things better at all times becoming a compulsion. That without constant stimulation they must be doing something at all times, regardless of how useful this may be.

The Terrans, all for a variety of different reasons are well known for their near constant desire for improvements, and one of the most important lessons I've learned in my 30 odd years being the captain of a merchant vessel that hires Terrans is the ability to harness it when you can and avoid its many pitfalls.

I am reminded of the first time I learned of this trait, very early in my career. Terrans were still new and exciting at this time, bringing with them a major technological leap after we lost the war we started against them, so I hired as many as I could afford on the meagre 20-person cargo ship I'd scraped the funds together to buy.

The engineer I'd hired was an eccentric young woman, who offered an 'off the books' modification to the warp drive: to increase its speed and efficiency by a whopping 20%. Considering the tiny margins most merchant vessels run on, especially when starting out, this seemed like too good of an offer to miss out on. And it worked! Running far past manufacturer settings at a reduced cost! Everything was going great.

Until it wasn't.

It was during our third ever trip when the warp drive failed, dumping us back into slower than light speeds and stranding us in the middle of nowhere. It was then I learned the changes the Terran had made had a 'chance' that 'totally never happens, this has never happened before' of burning out the warp drive. It took a month, a month of shouting at the stupid Terran, a month of being stuck with just emergency rations, before someone picked up our emergency beacon. The delay and cost nearly bankrupted me at the time, and taught me a valuable lesson.

Unfortunately, my learning wasn't complete, as I took from the experience the incorrect lesson of "Never allow a Terran to tinker". While it made absolute sense at the time, in retrospect not allowing a Terran to be a Terran makes one wonder why you'd hire them at all. I learned the correct lesson a few years later into my career. At this point I ran what I considered to be a tight ship, now in charge of a crew of 50 and making longer, more dangerous trips. Our security officer at the time repeatedly made the suggestion to upgrade our weapons capacity in order to be able to pierce the heavily armoured ships that the Kiraba pirates tended to use in this part of the galaxy.