Lieutenant Commander Ames Defacto is the Second Officer of SS Charm Quark, Quasar 15A bomber.SS Charm Quark has now returned to Solaris for a "B Exam" maintenance session. For those unfamiliar with DDS ship maintenance let me explain. There are 4 "levels" of ship maintenance. A Exams are minor fixes and updates (software mostly) that can happen in the "field". B Exams are a bit more involved and take place at port and generally last a few days (of more below), CQ has a B Exam a couple of times a year like most ships in the fleet. C Exams are more extensive and are done every few years, finally D Exams are virtual rebuilding and major updates (CQ's D Exam was when it was upgraded to ILU standard).
So the B Exam then. It usually takes about 50 hours to complete though can take longer depending on what problems are found. First of all the reactor is isolated but remains on (it gets turned off in C and D exams). Then a technical team begins an automated software check of all of the ship's systems and while that is running then goes through the ship checking major load bearer points and key systems. Externally a maintenance drone begins a survey of the ship's exterior looking for damage. Holes in the hull down to a femtometre across can be detected though holes of this size would generally be ignored.
The checking part of maintenance lasts around 14 hours then the teams collate the findings and a plan is quickly drawn up on how to repair any issues found. This can involve going EVA to fix holes in the hull and repairing broken or worn components internally. Software updates are also applied to the ship's systems and various house keeping operations take place like rotating logfiles and reindexing the various ship databases.
Obviously how long this takes will depend on how many problems are found. Apart from software not many upgrades are given to a ship during a B Exam unless the upgrade is a new module that can easily be installed (which of course with Open Architecture 2.0 is a very simple process).
While the B Exam takes place the crew is given some leave, a skeleton crew is left aboard, rotated so everyone can get at least some shore leave (though there is only enough time to visit the orbital dock to be honest). I am currently the senior officer aboard CQ as both the captain and first officer are off-ship though in reality the head of the engineering team is in charge and the ship is fairly useless as its plugged into the orbital dock's power grid (though we can become operational again fairly quickly).
In a few hours time CQ's B Exam will conclude and CQ will be ready to return to the fleet. As yet we haven't been given our new orders but there will be a short "shake down" trip to make sure everything is working right. It is likely we will join the 1st Attack Squadron as part of the ready strategic attack force as its been a few months since our last turn.
