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Jim Kirk enters the Nexus in a mild daze, still a little stunned at the news he's just received from Command. He doesn't look like he's shaved for a few weeks, but his black Starfleet Academy instructor's uniform is clean and his hair is neatly combed, so it's not like he's been letting himself go or anything.

He gets a cup of coffee on autopilot, before finding a seat to really think over what the hell just happened, a look of hopeful disbelief on his face, like he's been told something that's too good to be true.

"Have you ever had a dream job you never expected to get?" he asks after several minutes, looking up. "For those that haven't, if you knew you wouldn't be home for a couple years, what would you not leave without?"

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"'Better to have and not need than to need and not have,'" Jim agrees. "Starfleet generally does a good job of prepping cadets for all kinds of emergencies, but it never hurts to have extra tools in your arsenal, either."

"Ha!" Shade-Seeker laughs. "My philosophy exactly! And the tool which one has may be turned to unexpected purpose, while the tool which one has not can do very little, indeed."

"Exactly. Creative thinking might be the most powerful weapon a person can have, and it's something Starfleet's kinda lost focus on. Even if the only thing that cadets learn from my lectures is how to use what they have creatively, then I've done my job."

"I am curious--I know little of sailing, and less of these star-ships, but how may one fight creatively with one?"

Jim smiles a little, more than fine with elaborating on the idea. "The most basic thing about starship combat that a lot of species forget is that you're operating in three dimensions, not two. Unless a species evolved to fly, most people we've met tend to favor flat, horizontal planes of movement. A starship can move in any direction, and come at an enemy vessel from an unexpected angle."

"There's also a tendency to only count your actual weapons as weapons. Every starship in the Federation has what's called a warp core at the heart of its engines. It's a very powerful reactor, and without it, you're not going anywhere in a hurry. They can also be manually ejected, if there's a breach and the core's going to explode or something. So while you can only use it once, every starship has a potentially powerful explosive that can be jettisoned in the path of an enemy craft."

"There are creative defensive options, too. We have energy shields to protect the ship from damage, but they can only take so much before they fail. If you're taking torpedo fire, a lot of those kinds of missiles are heat-seeking, so venting plasma from the warp nacelles can confuse the targeting and draw the torpedoes away from the main body of the ship."

There's another aspect that immediately comes to mind, although the memories surrounding it are a little less casual than what came before. "Boarding another ship's usually done by transporter, which is a kind of mechanical teleportation, or flying over in a shuttlecraft. On my last mission, I had to board an enemy ship without use of either, to try to take it over from the inside. So I suited up, had my ship line up with their airlock a few kilometers out, and got jettisoned out the garbage chute. A living person isn't a typical target for starship sensors to pick up out in space, so they wouldn't have been able to lock on and shoot me down before I made it over."

"One might also swim in three dimensions," the amphibious academic adds. The thought does lead him to questions, though, as most new ideas do. "Where do star-ships hide, that their approach may be unexpected? Among the clouds?"

"Would it not be wise to carry a second of these cores, in case the first should fail? Then, also, it might be a weapon without being a last resort."

Some ideas, Shade-Seeker grasps easily given his backgrounds, but others inspire inquiry. Shields he understands as a mage, and when the present questions have been sorted, he might ask about kinds of shields, and whether starships attune themselves to the threat the way mages must.

Jim nods in agreement. They haven't run into too many aquatic sentients, particularly not spacefaring civilizations, but the point is well taken. The question about clouds, however, makes him a pause a moment. Maybe Tamriel's understanding of astronomy is a little more primitive than he thought? (Oh, Jim, if only you knew.) "Well, there are sort of clouds in space, called nebulas. They're not terribly common, but you could use one to hide in, and they can mess up sensors so you might not be detected. I've also heard of ships putting a planet or moon between them and their opponent, then changing their orbit to be perpendicular for a faster intercept. There are rumors that the Romulans have developed a cloaking device recently too; that'd make their ships invisible."

"The psychological part of it's a little more minor, but it can be enough to momentarily throw someone off," he adds. "There's a reason it's common courtesy to adjust your ship's orientation to match whoever you're interacting with. Humans can find it weird to talk to someone that we perceive as upside-down, or fight someone while our belly's turned towards them." Whether it works the same for other species, of course, depends on the species, but maybe that's something the Saxhleel will have in common. They are bipeds developed for life in gravity, so that does tend to indicate a preference for physical orientation, usually.

The question about the warp core is a little more complicated to answer, and Jim takes a moment to decide how he wants to answer that. "It's... possible, but not really feasible. Are you familiar with radioactivity?" Something Jim does not like to think about, these days, but now that he's had a few months to adjust, it doesn't make him twitchy just by talking about it.

In Tamriel's cosmology, the sun and stars are literally holes in a spherical sky, and their light is the glow of the magic-energy plane leaking through. It's crazy as far as space travelers are concerned. At Jim's description, Shade-Seeker nods thoughtfully. "For the most part, like open water, then, with the occasional chance to hide among fronds or duck around a rock. Invisibility would be a powerful advantage in such circumstances."

"I would think it prudent to direct your vessel's smallest aspect toward the enemy, if that is practicable; a display of trust might involve just the opposite. Hmm." Whether Saxhleel are naturally inclined toward a common orientation, Shade-Seeker is at least clever enough to consider the implications of three-dimensional space.

"Radioactivity? Ah, I believe that you have mentioned it before, in unfavorable tones," he offers.

Jim hasn't thought much about starship orientation in those terms, but it isn't inaccurate. "That's true, although I'm not sure the Constitution class was designed with that in mind. A head-on position gives a potential enemy less to shoot at, and paralleling another ship as an escort exposes the entire length of the ship."

Right, he did bring it up at some point. "Starships need a lot of energy to operate efficiently, and the more powerful types of reactions - in this case, nuclear fusion - give off radioactive energy as a byproduct. We have the technology to contain it," he manages to say without wincing too noticeably, "but it's dangerous stuff. It can't be heard, seen, smelled, or felt, and even just a short exposure can make most species very sick or kill them outright." Something he has an uncomfortable, quietly horrifying experience with now, far more intimately than he ever wanted to know. "Its lethality does gradually decay over time, though if left alone, that can take thousands of years for it to be safe. Containment breaches are really rare, and so is needing to eject the core entirely, so it's not worth the risk of doubling your chances for something going wrong."

Shade-Seeker listens, a corner of his mind contemplating how to detect this undetectable energy, and how to harness it--not as a weapon, he has plenty of those, but Jim's people are apparently able to sail among the stars. There must be other ways to utilize it, as well. "This core is poisonous even when dormant? That would complicate the idea," he admits.

Jim nods, trying to decide how else to describe it to someone without a background in nuclear physics. Assuming Tamriel hasn't discovered such a thing, which seems likely, if radioactivity is a new concept to Shade-Seeker. Besides, magic probably has some way of doing something similar more safely, so it seems even more likely that they'd discover that first.

"There are protective whole-body suits that we use to work with it safely at lower levels, like when the core is shut down, but even then there are still time limits before it makes you sick." Assuming one has time for such a thing... Jim sometimes wonders if he would've survived entry into the warp core if he'd had the time to suit up first. Probably not. He probably would've just lingered on longer before death took him. He can't focus on the what-ifs, though; he's alive now, and there's nothing else he could've done at the time.

"Earth humans call this sort of thing a double-edged sword," he adds. "If you know how to handle it, you can use it really effectively and safely, but there's still a risk of harming yourself, no matter how small."

Shade-Seeker chuckles. "I am familiar with double-edged swords. We have our share of them in Tamriel."

"I see, then, why a replacement is not carried. What is to be done if this heart of power is lost, unlikely as it may be?"

Jim hadn't been worried about a lack of familiarity with actual double-edged swords, so much as the accompanying metaphor, but it's nice to know that translates just fine.

"There are a couple things you can do, depending. The Federation has starbases at fairly regular intervals in explored space, and without warp, a starship can still use sublight impulse engines to start heading towards the closest one. It's very slow, but it's better than nothing. Like if you had to row a sailing ship." Even though Shade-Seeker said he's not a sailor, Jim feels fairly confident the Saxhleel knows enough to get the gist of it, at the very least. "We can also contact other ships over huge distances, so if communications are still working, we can call the closest starship and ask for help. Might have to wait a bit for them to get to us and give us a tow someplace where we can get repaired, and towing at warp is tricky business. The Enterprise had to get towed back to Earth after her maiden voyage and it took about two weeks to get there."

He nods thoughtfully at Jim's explanation. "Then your travels are not quite so isolating as I had imagined. That is well. I have trod a solitary path in battle, and while it has certain aspects to recommend it, still does it come with attendant regrets."

"Not so far," Jim agrees. "The five-year mission will take us into completely uncharted territory, besides picking up supplies every now and then. We could end up months away from help, or we might run into new civilizations that can give us a hand with repairs. We really don't know yet but I'm pretty stoked to find out."

"I will wish you the very best of fortune, on that voyage," Shade-Seeker offers, holding back advice to nonetheless prepare for the worst. It would be condescending to say it, and to assume that Jim doesn't already know, and condescension isn't generally in the young archmage's bag. "May all you meet be friendly."

"Thank you. I hope so too." Jim certainly does know that not all people are friendly, and the Federation borders two such empires already. But he's also optimistic about what they may find out there, and the possibilities are endless, just waiting to be discovered. After all, how will they know unless they seek?

((This seems like a good place to leave off. Thanks for the roleplay.))

[Agreed. Another good thread. Thank you!]

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