The DDS have confirmed rumours that the crew of the Solaris 37C HCS SS Velocity were lost when the radiation shield around the reactor array suffered a complete failure. The entire crew died within seconds as vast quantities of radiation were released. An automatic reactor shutdown did occur but by then the crew were dead.
The ship was retrieved by DDS Engineering and then towed to Liberation for decontamination and analysis. Although this incident occurred around a month ago the DDS have only just reported it (though families of the dead crew were informed earlier). As a precaution the entire Solaris fleet was taken out of service to examine the reactor shielding but the ships were returned to service soon after because telemetry analysis from Velocity indicates crew error was the cause of the failure. Procedures have been revised for the DDS fleet in general and a software patch to help prevent such an error resulting in a catastrophe will be released within the next few days.
SS Velocity is expected to return to service in August. The DDS are now looking at secondary radiation shielding to kick in to help prevent such an incident reoccurring even if the primary shield fails again.
