Acting Captain
mib_khan has asked me to do extensive repairs on the ship, but has not given me timeframe for the repairs.
There were some specific requests regarding power consumption of the replicator units, but these were easily rectified: Under non-emergency situations, the bridge now has the ability to re-route warp core power to a factory-grade replicator that I requested from Risa. The authorities on Risa asked for confirmation and reason of the request. As a communal telepath, I have a hard time telling untruths, so I let them know exactly why: Nutritional supplement generation for Counselor Lothar, by order of Captain mib_khan. The replicator arrived in less than 10 minutes.
Because of certain design limitations of the ship and the unit, I needed to install the replicator in the cargo hold. I slaved the replicator in the non-bar to the new unit, so that any requests that are beyond the bar's capacity will be correctly relayed and transported.
Since I knew that this would require a shipwide redesign of the replicators anyway, the actual request was for a factory-grade industrial military/medical replicator, which is why the Risan authorities wanted confirmation. I tied the Sickbay, Engineering, Ops, and Security replicators in to the unit as well. Authorized personnel now have a much broader selection of materials that the system can produce for them. The doctor should be pleased, though we may have to watch those who have small-arms authority a little more closely.
I was pleasantly surprised when my first tests of the system indicated a power savings of almost 80%; I was expecting an increase of under 5%, but failed factor in the scale: small replicators consume far more energy per manufactured kilogram than large replicators, and the new unit was handling more of the requests than I anticipated. A re-check of my algorithms showed that I was more efficient than I gave myself credit for. I defined "replicator capacity" in relative rather than absolute terms, resulting in the system shunting most requests to the new unit, since it would take less energy to do so.
This makes a difference in life-support and reclamation, since replicator technology is heavily used there. I'll need to retune the system to remove single points of failure, and to make sure that the life-support replicators don't overtax the internal transporters. Point-to-point transportation of air is very inefficient, even when factoring in the cost savings of replicating it in large volume.
My best test of the life-support changes was also the simplest: I used my sense of smell. I added a pleasant minty-fresh scent to environment, and then went around the ship trying to determine where it smelled the most and least and performed some re-tuning. I backed up my nasal observations with a tricorder, just to be sure. After I was certain the balance was correct, I removed the smell from all the ship's compartments except lower engineering, which always smelled a little funny anyway.
The overall power savings was quite impressive, but again, design constraints limited what I could do with the excess. After reducing the power intake as much as I could, I shunted the excess to internal and external sensors. This resulted in about 50% greater sensitivity and range, as well as an even less noticeable radiation and warp signature from the ship. Since the cloaking device automatically compensates for this, I didn't bother re-tuning it.
Such extensive modifications required changes to the internal logging system, where I noticed that Khan had requested updates of ships in orbit. In order to make sure I didn't interfere with his request, I ran a full planetary scan with the new sensor array and compared the results.
I noticed some differences immediately that wouldn't have triggered Khan's update. At various points in the past 20 hours, several ship-to-shore transports occurred without a corresponding ship in orbit. Further analysis indicates at least two ships, possibly more.
I have alerted Captain Khan, and initiated intense scans of the system hoping to learn more information.