Lead By Light

[Cathbodua]

The massive station was something few others could see for themselves. Huge ship building yards that many in the galaxy would love to have and to top it all off there it was as Cathbodua came up in the large shuttle itself. The framework being brought in, the design and function of it with the colors. They had designed the ship to serve a very large and powerful purpose, holding patients and staffed by doctors and healers. The medical droids that they were developing and working with as well as standard repair and service droids would also work. For the big concerns of crew well, biot droids could be grown quickly and live comfortably on the ship as its crew and they required very little aside from their daily feedings.

Was it the most glamous life to live maybe not but their function was to serve and be labor droids or whatever was needed. Since the jedi weren't in the business of sabotage or assassination well they could serve on the ships and provide for them as the crew instead of clones which the Silver Sanctum under its short term general had paid for several million to be made so they needed a place to go. Working and earning pay on the stations and ships was a way to do it and they could go around the galaxy if they wished to finding a new place to live anywhere they wanted to. Cathbodua herself had invited the ones who were working on and providing the ideas for the ship and how to improve it when she had asked for aid in finishing it up.

[member="Kiriko Howlingfjord"] [member="Reshmar"] [member="Lyth Meran"] [member="Jessica Med-Beq"]

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

Jessica would finally have a chance to go to the bottom of some lingering issue that interfered with her well-being. Despite being unable to use the Force, Jessica would have the lingering impression that the Force is relying on her (and on other people with similar intellectual characteristics) every time a cognition-enhancing spell is cast in her surroundings. And that her memory is one big subconscious Force-sponge capable of absorbing astronomical amounts of information. To her such people are dubbed Force-computers and she knows that she isn't alone to possess such an intellectual makeup. She was smart, mentally active, and she always had the impression that, the smarter the caster is, the less effective cognition-enhancing spells are on the caster. Plus she has no means to actually find out by herself. But she wouldn't actually ask for guidance about this just yet. And, since the Republic collapsed, she was no longer a Republican mascot, thus she might as well stay in the light-sided fold and act like it, clad in her new Jedi robe (which will definitely make her pass for an actual Jedi even though she cannot wield a lightsaber):

"Even if the ship doesn't, by itself, carry squadrons of fighters, surely it would have docking bays for emergency shuttles to get patients in and out! You know how Ringovinda StarYards would have built one such 3000m-long hospital ship: bristling with weapons, almost to supercarrier standard, enough hangar space for 4 squadrons of fighters, with rather easy ability to convert some internal space to carry the remaining 12 squadrons"

[member="Cathbodua"] [member="Kiriko"] [member="Reshmar"] [member="Lyth Meran"]

 

[Micah tol Powl]

The small, white bear cub had his nose pressed up against the transparisteel.

There was one of the space boats under construction here, and it was quite the sight to behold.

The young Beorni had no idea what he was beholding, or looking at for that matter, but it was all very interesting nonetheless. Even the glass was quite fascinating, as he'd had an opportunity to inspect one of the windows that was to be installed in the space boat. Not the brittle glass he had handled before, but a sturdy, hefty weight that was clear as the summer sky and yet rang with the song of metal.

Curiouser and curiouser, the works of the heaven-borne architects, these shipwrights who fared their craft upon a sea of stars.

He could look a thousand times at the object before him, and not see the same thing twice. There were cranes and little tiny ships, buzzing around, in a sort of ecosystem of artificiality.

He didn't understand it, but he did appreciate the majesty of it all.

The bones of the ship, still unfinished, set fire to a cub's imagination about the places it might go, the people it might see along its voyage in the Great Maw of darkness and light.

To sail the heavens was doubtless the greatest adventure of all.

[member="Jessica Med-Beq"] | [member="Cathbodua"]​

 

[Cathbodua]

[member="Jessica Med-Beq"] [member="Kiriko"]

She was looking at the two that were there with them, the woman she didn't really know anything about or have any idea who they were but that wasn't uncommon. The jedi doctor spent most of her time in the sub basement treating patients who came to you. "There are two berths for the secondary medical ships we have developed. Smaller hospital ships able to attach and transfer patients to if it is required. We have developed the triage class to be able to dock with the crucible stations but it is being designed using the same technology we have developed for the smaller medical stations. It will allow them to manufacture their own supplies for long term care. The weapons might not be impressive and it may be simple to many things but the amount of patients it can carry and transfer to stations like this is worth it. THe other important aspects like crew we have developed schools to trains doctors, force healers and nurses to staff them all."

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"I'm Jessica. That's a lot of medical staff, numbering well into the thousands. A ship-wide neural net would allow redundancies into the computer equipment with each node in every room with critical equipment, and the node has the size of a medical droid's brain"

That was going to mean a lot of classrooms, hundreds of them even, if it was also to be used as a training hospital. Much like starfighter academies were stationed onboard older Star Destroyers, especially under the Galactic Empire and the First Order, this humongous hospital ship had to house thousands and thousands of sentients, both staff and patients. And, by the same token, hundreds if not thousands of nodes. While that meant it had no centralized computer core as traditionally understood, it also meant that IT maintenance was going to be that much more painful to do. But what exactly constituted critical equipment as she understood it? The main engineering systems were included as a matter of course, no one would deny that. But medical equipment? Cathbodua had a better idea than she did: she only wanted the most efficient number of nodes: too many and it would make maintenance too heavy and too few would defeat its purpose.

"Remember, since the aforementionned ship-wide neural net is a product jointly manufactured by Ringovinda Systems and Meran Mechanics, a contract with both corporations is required to actually mount this thing when in production"

[member="Cathbodua"] [member="Kiriko"]

 

[Micah tol Powl]

There were some people talking.

They were those mostly fur-less, skinny, tall peoples. With the super, really long fur on the top of their heads. And these were really, really mostly fur-less, as they didn't even have the partial fur on their faces like [member="Théodred Heavenshield"] did.

And, to be completely honest, the young cub wasn't entirely certain what language these two fur-less aliens were speaking. Noodle net? What was that? And what was a droid? Or a corporation? Or a mechanic?

He was just a baby bear from a fishing village. These were all very foreign concepts to a small town cub.

[member="Cathbodua"] | [member="Jessica Med-Beq"]​

 

[Cathbodua]

[member="Jessica Med-Beq"] [member="Kiriko"]

She was looking at the woman with the face mask on, the bodysuit she was working on made her a faceless doctor who worked in the main lab and had an a shaved head. "I am a doctor and a jedi healer, I am not in charge of contract negotiations that would be with billing. Or requisitions, somewhere. I am the one to talk with if you want to get involved in the courses to heal how to be a nurse." She stood there wearing it before looking down at the bear when they were docking and she pulled out from the pouch on her belt one of the food cubes pouring some water on it to puff it up as a cooked piece of fish stick. "And well your species is new but all kids need some food." The others were there with her when they docked opening up the ship as Cathbodua got the reports from them. "We have been working on the internal plating for the ship and internal defenses. If anything starts to go wrong or someone causes problems we can increase the gravity in an area where they are from zero to five thousand times normal to make them stop and settle down. Also will be useful in proper uses for training and rehab. THe resource modules for stocking and manufacturing ship supplies will also be there same as the modules for the crew." She was looking at them and walking with a nod of her head when they went forward into the ship seeing some of the other doctors there on the station as it was massive.

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"Ah yes, the Sasori Joshu molecular furnace, capable of recycling hazardous waste into more consumables: we already use it in other things. Clearing space lanes, clearing mines. But how many landcrawler-sized Sasori Joshu units are there?"

Jessica then turned to that white bear cub. He was confused by her talking about neural nets, corporations or mechanics. Was he one to mistake her for a Wookiee despite only having a Wookiee haircut and morphology to her name? Jessica would like to think that was not the case despite having made an Anzat Jedi making that mistake. Usually humans or Near-Humans would not make that mistake but that bear cub hasn't been around too many humans or Near-Humans. Jessica may have been dealing with a naïve newcomer. Cathbodua was someone with whom she could readily talk about the more technical aspect of designing starships. She knows that she could just have added alusteel to it without having to rely on such heavy armor, let alone triple reinforced alusteel bracing like the Ferrocarbon Condensed-Matter Composite frame. Because triple bracing would eat up much-needed space on the outer edges of the ship.

"Are you taking me for a Wookiee? It's not the first time people mistake me for one. You might be cuter than these Ewoks (or Jawas) but you seemed confused by anything I just told Cathbodua here"

[member="Cathbodua"] [member="Kiriko"]

 

[Micah tol Powl]

The bear had been confused to begin with.

Now he was confused, and not even certain of what he was confused about being confused about. A lack of context definitely helped obfuscate things in that regard.

"What's a Wookiee?" the small cub asked, quite honestly. There weren't any Wookiees on Midvinter. That he knew of, anyway. "And why would I want to take you to one?" the boy inquired, completely missing her actual meaning.

[member="Jessica Med-Beq"] | [member="Cathbodua"]​

 

[Cathbodua]

[member="Jessica Med-Beq"] [member="Kiriko"]

There was a look at the woman while she was pushing some fo the ideas over on the datapad that were being displayed with a small look and a grin came to her face. She was looking over more of the things that had been developed for everyone here with her. The small bear seemed confused by what the woman was saying and she understood that while listening. She wasn't sure who the woman was talking with or if she was making sense when more of the biot droids came to meet them and in tow were the new models. Trained and specialized in staffing the largest medical stations they had developed. "Ah good they are here, may I introduce something special for us. Our medical biodroids that have been developed for staffing our hospital stations and ships."

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"Medical biodroids... how are they different from, say, the IM-6 or the 2-1B?"

She was most familiar with the IM-6 or the 2-1B: these were the droids that treated her back on Kashyyyk and Alderaan respectively. These were old but cost-effective, hence why they were kept in production for almost 900 years. Medical (bio-)droids tended to evolve only in their medical databases and not necessarily in their programming. And Jessica was shown the biodroid, alongside the bear cub.

[member="Cathbodua"] [member="Kiriko"]

 

[Micah tol Powl]

The tall people were talking about bio-floyds.

Did that make any sense?

No?

It didn't make sense to him either. These tall, fur-less people sure were confusing. They had space boats, and light swords, and all kinds of things that the small bear from a primitive fishing village was still trying to comprehend or make sense of.

Including, apparently, bio-floyds.

[member="Cathbodua"] | [member="Jessica Med-Beq"]​

 

[Cathbodua]

[member="Jessica Med-Beq"] [member="Kiriko"]

"They do not require memory wipes and are lower cost to make. Plus the addition that they are able to be programmed to handle the needs and adapt over having just a standard programming." She had been working with them to test out the droids and it helped that they were able to work with the better equipment they developed. For now though while she was walking over and through the station the jedi looked down at the bear and stopped for a moment as she grabbed some of the food. "Now you are you able to eat these?" She was wondering, there was some jelly beans that were tasty but she also had one of the packs of jako beast force a'bacons strips. "All of the food a growing cub needs yes."

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"Interesting: usually droids touted as not requiring memory wipes are droids whose programming contain some periodic memory cleanup routines. I assume common-sense programming is in use"

She even mounted one such algorithm inside Hammurabi, of which she wrote the thesis almost in its entirety for regulatory purposes. She doesn't curse its creation, even less her participation: after all, it was one of the main things that proved to her just how brilliant she was. But she can readily trace back the origins of her malaise to that piece of technology she created almost all by herself. And such implements as periodic memory cleanup routines were common in common-sense programming, which is assumed to be in use in these bio-droids. But when she heard about memory defragmentation rendering droids functionally unstable, she would call poodoo: the Confederacy's defragmentation routines in use during the Clone Wars were deeply flawed if it caused a specialty program to be erased. Might have been quick, cost-effective but she isn't a Confederate. Technically, the Techno Empire was the successor of the Confederacy, but the Confederacy of just a few years ago bore little resemblance to the Clone Wars incarnation other than the extensive use of battle droids.

"At what frequency is memory defragmented or scanned for unused junk files? Also, how are unused junk files defined?"

[member="Cathbodua"] [member="Kiriko"]

 

[Micah tol Powl]

The tall ones were fascinating.

They were obviously communicating on a very high level, yet the small cub could not even distinguish the words they were uttering. The vocabulary was simply missing from his understanding of Basic.

Obviously, whatever they were talking about kept them both quite animated.

And then the one tall lady had food, which she offered the cub. Could he eat those? "Let's find out!" the boy chirped brightly.

"For science!" he declared, before gulping down the bacon.

It wasn't seal jerky, but it looked like bacon. And bacon was always a close second to seal jerky.

[member="Jessica Med-Beq"] | [member="Cathbodua"]​

 

[Cathbodua]

[member="Jessica Med-Beq"] [member="Kiriko"]

She raised an eyebrow under the mask and biot droids were.... She spoke while having the food for the other padawan. "THey are biot droids, there is no need for files. If they learn something they learn it and if you want to wipe them then you load up another flash course for them to train with." She stayed there while more of the biot droids were walking around and they had their medical droids. A number of new improvements were going into their ship as it was being designed and one of the smaller droids rolled up with its small boxy frame while looking at the two of them. "Ah do you have the information that we need." She looked at the droid when it brought up the display of the ship for them to all see the internal tram and lifts being set up and installed, the living modules for the rooms and manufacturing equipment so they coudl develop and produce their own supplies or grow the biot droids.

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"Biots are more like organics than they are droids then"

There was one thing that other Jedi Healer that administered the last Force-sensitivity test she took couldn't touch with a 10-foot pole: designing non-medical shipboard systems. That healer once told the Design Triumvirate that point-defense quad lasers were overkill, Nealuquad armor was also overkill, if they were mostly using it for blasting navigational hazards. Suffice to say that these suggestions did nothing to endear Tey to the Design Triumvirate, and certainly not Jessica. A 3000m-long ship would need 65 point-defense emplacements or so she thought, even when deprived of anti-capital weapons. Ringovinda StarYards would have built this thing with as many capital guns as was possible for a non-combat ship. But there was this new device that she designed in part with a certain [member="Dune Rhur"]: the waste heat recovery device attachment to capital ship engines. Here the battlecruiser version is in use.

"You do understand that reactors and sublight engines generate a lot of waste heat? Enough to power the disinfection circuits, water heating, kitchens and, if a steam turbine is installed, even more systems? Like this ship-wide neural net"

[member="Cathbodua"] [member="Kiriko"]

 

[Micah tol Powl]

The bacon was a tad salty.

There was definitely a certain quality added to the meat by it having been cured. As a connoisseur, he'd have to say it was a seven. Maybe an eight. Delicious, yet not ravingly so. He liked it, but he wasn't in love with it.

The jelly beans were just congealed sugar with flavoring. Tasty, yet hardly satisfying. Normally he'd have given it a six, but he probably needed to subtract a point for having no nutritional value.

Now, the discussion had turned to economical uses for waste heat. That was something the bear could begin to comprehend. Heat was a precious commodity in the arctic. Maximizing its use was something every Beorni home was designed for.

[member="Jessica Med-Beq"] | [member="Cathbodua"]​

 

[Cathbodua]

[member="Jessica Med-Beq"] [member="Kiriko"]

She was listening to the woman and raised an eyebrow but knew how to work with it. Providing a few ideas when she lead the way itno one of the medical suits of the station. Nurses, doctors and jedi healers were roaming around as she spoke holding a hand out to the wall. "Nysillin IV bag." The rebirth AI was there looking at her for a moment as it made it from the converter and there was the sounds of the machinery. "Waste to power the different systems may be helpful but I am not in charge of the final designs, I am the doctor and our advanced medical equipment is what is important and why we are using the gincho reactor and experimenting with the sleg we found on the one world. It exponentially increases the power output. The rest we leave to some of the Silver Jedi's starship designers. Medical stuff and my healers will be able to work in here with me." She was looking at some of the doctors while walking through it and there was the information from the others who were bringing it and the equipment to the ship while it was being constructed. "Our advanced labs for producing our own supplies will allow it to function without restocking for years which is the hope and the technology to sustain for food with the patients will let it keep everyone fed."

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"Unless one of those Jedi healers is going to be in the engine room at all times, Gincho reactors produce waste heat and the second law of thermodynamics holds. Not that I am doubting the power yields of the Ginchos, but how many reactors are there? How many sublight engines are there?"

Jessica knew that violating the second law of thermodynamics would mean that the Force is somehow involved. Most of the time mechu-deru it was, but she has no idea as to how powerful a Jedi needed to be to do such a thing. As was suggested by both Summer and Teynara, perhaps she was using mechu-deru [or the Force in general] without knowing it. Plus mechu-deru was historically reputed for being easy to hide, especially for geniuses of her variety. Plus the number of Sabrina waste heat recovery devices to be mounted on a ship depends on how many waste heat-producing devices there are, hereby defined as engines and reactors. By now she realized Cathbodua was not a starship designer but Charzon would have done it rather differently, too: with Charzon it had to be bristling with weapons. It got the Ultima-class narrowly rejected by the regulatory authorities as a cargo ship, and now a new chief process officer has been brought in to recondition a freighter into a carrier, based on the aforementionned Ultima-class.

"Sasori Joshu units are at the core of these labs..."

[member="Cathbodua"] [member="Kiriko"]