The Terran Sea class, the current production type of frigate for the DDS, has had some problems discovered with it's software. This has forced the DDS to cease all operations with the 6 ships already in service and the 2 on trials. The problems have been found in the engine management software and potentially could cause the engine to exceed safety limits for heat when operating at maximum output. A DDS engineer said that if the problem had not been found a ship would have exceeded the limits sooner or later and the subsequent engine failure would be catastrophic.
The problem was found during testing of 3207 North Sea when the engine exceeded the heat safety limit. The engine was shut down immediately by the engineering staff. All ships have been "grounded" until a full audit of the EMS software is undertaken and the bugs discovered and remedied. One ship is on the middle of a patrol and has been instructed to hold station.
The loss of the ships from the available Patrol Pool has forced the DDS to reassign two frigates from the Combat Pool. Also a Pulsar cruiser has been assigned to the Proxima-Solaris patrol. The DDS say that the code audit should be completed by the end of the week and after testing the roll-out of the code to all Terran Sea frigates (which can be done remotely to ships not at port) by the mid-part of the week afterwards. The EMS of the Isometric class is different but the code for that is also being examined to see if any similar potential problems could occur.
