7 hours ago
==GM supplied info; sorry to them and all of yall for being slow.==
The captain's reply came in fairly quickly. [Omdor, would it be possible to route or transmit the IFF signal through a secondary vessel, such as one of our runabouts?]
It took more willpower than he cared to admit to not roll his eyes at the question. Not enough to get this old hardware working with ours at all, now you want something more. Not that he was surprised; he'd learned early that captains expected engineers to produce miracles, and it was his job to make the task happen in some way, shape, or form. "Just a minute," he said out loud and muted the channel.
He started working the console, determining precisely how the IFF was designed to function, and soon found it was really just as simple as he'd expected. The device was designed to reply to a carrier signal that the ship's communications relays would receive, and then reply with a rotating code based on numerous factors including time and position.
"Alright," he said to himself, "not the most impossible it could've been." The most important factor was simply having to get the data back and forth, which was going to require some kind of real-time link. Not insurmountable, but it would require some consideration.
He turned the mute back off. "Okay, Captain," he began. "I can do that, but it's going to require a subspace link between them and Artemis at the moment, which will be detectable by anyone else out there. We could instead move the console into a runabout, but that's going to eat up space, drop any potential crew by at least a couple of people and gear, maybe more. If you're wanting to take more than one runabout, we'll have to either transmit to both, or they'll have to transmit between themselves; that would be easier to hide, but it wouldn't be completely hidden either."
The captain's reply came in fairly quickly. [Omdor, would it be possible to route or transmit the IFF signal through a secondary vessel, such as one of our runabouts?]
It took more willpower than he cared to admit to not roll his eyes at the question. Not enough to get this old hardware working with ours at all, now you want something more. Not that he was surprised; he'd learned early that captains expected engineers to produce miracles, and it was his job to make the task happen in some way, shape, or form. "Just a minute," he said out loud and muted the channel.
He started working the console, determining precisely how the IFF was designed to function, and soon found it was really just as simple as he'd expected. The device was designed to reply to a carrier signal that the ship's communications relays would receive, and then reply with a rotating code based on numerous factors including time and position.
"Alright," he said to himself, "not the most impossible it could've been." The most important factor was simply having to get the data back and forth, which was going to require some kind of real-time link. Not insurmountable, but it would require some consideration.
He turned the mute back off. "Okay, Captain," he began. "I can do that, but it's going to require a subspace link between them and Artemis at the moment, which will be detectable by anyone else out there. We could instead move the console into a runabout, but that's going to eat up space, drop any potential crew by at least a couple of people and gear, maybe more. If you're wanting to take more than one runabout, we'll have to either transmit to both, or they'll have to transmit between themselves; that would be easier to hide, but it wouldn't be completely hidden either."