1x1 with Taikunfoo

[Kipori]

(It was quite nice to get a good grade on it for sure haha. We didn’t actually present it in the traditional way, we had to record the audio and build it into the PowerPoint? Which is probably why I got the comment on my speaking ability haha, I think if I had actually had to present it in front of people it would have gone badly or at least a lot worse than recording audio in my room where I could redo it as many times as I needed to.
Oh yeah, something similar happens there for sure, but I believe the processes are a bit different? We didn’t look into strokes to much, which was a shame but we ran out of time. From what we learned though, blind individuals do seem to have equal or better spatial navigation that sighted individuals, though it seems to depend on what age they became blind and how long they have been blind for, if that makes sense?
Aw, poor pup. Yeah my dogs also get pretty sick if they eat to much grass, though they will eat a lot of grass, throw it up then go back out and do the same thing all over again. Good to hear there has been progress on that front, and I hope things have settled elsewhere as well
Mm yeah my tablet was pretty expensive, I think the tablet, pencil, and keyboard case together ended up costing me around $800? But I got a pretty new series of tablet and I think you can get some older series ones for a bit cheaper? But yeah definitely more for a tablet with a screen than ones without, I think the one without that I was looking at would have cost me like $80? Ah well, I like my tablet and I used it as computer for note taking at school as well, rather than bringing my big laptop to class. I tend to prefer my final lines but that is probably because my sketches are a mess more often than not haha. I have a bad habit of not erasing mistake lines as I go, or just half erasing them so they still show up in the sketch which leads to a mess which I regret later. I don’t work with pencil and paper much anymore (unless its in a notebook when I was supposed to be taking notes in class haha) but I got my start there and have a whole box of old sketchbooks. I do want to do some more traditional sketching but with the tremors my hands have, traditional is rough for me.

Miles Walker
Inclining his head in agreement with the Captain’s statement about being about as comfortable as possible with the situation, Miles felt much the same. It wasn’t as if they had much of a choice really, they needed the Doctor to figure out if there were any records about what had happened with the crew and they also needed to get to engineering. Splitting up was the only way they were going to get both those things done in a reasonable time, it wasn’t ideal but it was the best solution to the problem.
“You make a good point.” He hummed as the Captain reminded him, they would only be a couple feet from each other which was probably better than they could have asked for. If something did go wrong, there would be the ability to get back to the other quickly. Still, he didn’t really like leaving the Doctor alone, he was clearly the least sure in his movements in the zero gravity but if they were lucky, he would be safely in an enclosed space with no holes or risks.
Once it was clear Dr. Kassman was safe in the room and the Captain had given the instruction to return to the hallway if he finished early, he and the Captain started moving again. Feeling a bit better now that they were nearly to engineering and as a result, a point where he could be properly useful again, Eric spoke up over the comms and put a bit of a damper on his mood.
“No pressure at all there.” He mumbled to himself, shaking his head. While they could always make a return trip if they didn’t get things done, it was not something that had been planned for and thus would not look good for them. “Well let’s hope this goes smoothly, though that would be a first.”
Nothing about this mission had been straight forward and Miles had a sinking feeling it was not about to get any easier once they got to the engineering. He could hope that things would go smoothly, but the door before had given him trouble already and that didn't boost his confidence any that the computers in engineering would be any more kind in giving up their information to him.

Zed Kassman
The lack of confidence in his ability from the Engineer stung and made Zed scowl, wanting to snap at the other man but he bit his tongue to keep the comment to himself. He had to admit to himself that there was a good reason for the man’s concern, given his performance in the zero gravity up to this point had been less than perfect, but still it rubbed him the wrong way as he pushed through the door.
“Will do.” He answered as the Captain informed him that he should wait outside the medical bay if he was to finish early rather than join them in engineering which suited Zed just fine. He would only get in the way if he joined them anyways, as it was really just the Engineer that was needed there, and the Captain of course. His presence would be of little use to anyone so instead he turned his focus of the medical bay. It was larger than the Corvus medical bay, nearly three times the size of his small work space there but given the size of the ship that made sense. His light lit up a fair bit of the room but shadows still clung to the corners and farthest wall from him. Like the rest of the ship, the space was in disarray, most of the instruments and tools floating freely around. He caught sight of a few sharp objects floating freely as well which made him scowl slightly. It was bad practice to leave scalpels and other sharps out when no one was using the space, and judging by the lack of bodies, no one had been in here at the time. Well, there was a chance they had been but escaped before the hull was breeched and oxygen disappeared. Pondering that, Zed pressed further in the room, careful to watch where the scalpels and other sharps were as to avoid them. Damage to his suit was not an option and he would need to be extra careful.

[taikunfoo]

(Being able to record things is awesome, that's definitely handy and takes a lot of the pressure off
That does make sense, as I'd imagine they're doing a lot of work to try and figure out where they are in relation to things around them. I do know that if you take a sighted person and give them a blindfold they'll go in circles though, did you touch on that at all/do blind folks have the same challenge?
Thankfully so far so good on the stomach front with my pup, he's been a bit slow over the past few days to eat his food but he did get a couple of vaccine boosters so I think that might be part of it.
That's a pretty good price for a tablet! I was just looking at some of the screened ones and they're still a pretty penny - I still want one but maybe an older one in a few years when my current one conks out! When you draw does it detect your hand resting on the surface or just the pen? I'm definitely guilty of messing up what layer I'm drawing on and going shoot I can't undo all of that. I still don't know why sketches usually look so much better for me than the final lines - I wonder if it's because I'm inferring what it should look like when it's done or where the lines should be and when it's final it's there and that's what you got? Who knows. I'm sorry to hear about your hands but on the plus side you're still able to draw using digital tools!)

Captain Tubon
Tripp continued down the hall behind Mr. Walker, thankful that Mr. Henson had given them a heads up on where they were with time. He knew enough not to screw around with the timetable given to them by whoever was handling the away team - if you came on time chances you were a touch early, if things went wrong there usually was enough wiggle room to get you off safely, albeit with uncomfortable Gs at times. He wasn't sure what kind of handler Mr. Henson was - would he be giving them extra padding and wiggle room in case something went wrong? Or was that the absolute cut-off and they'd miss the rendezvous with the Corvus if they were late? He should have asked this of him before they even left, but given everything that'd been going on he'd neglected to bring it up with the pilot.
"I agree with you - we should hope that things go smoothly but we're in a time crunch and likely things aren't going to go perfectly. Since there's two of us would I be more use to you if I started trying to get the computer system up and running, or would it be best if I started loosening the computer banks so we can pull information and bring some of the storage drives with us in case we need to?" He asked, knowing that right now he was pretty good at loosening bolts, but in case the engineer wanted him to do differently he gave Mr. Walker the option - he was the expert after all. It was also good for Tripp to plan ahead for the unexpected - either him or Mr. Walker could be working on calling up the information on the computers while the other prepared them to be hauled out in case they couldn't get the information from the recent ship's logs in time. "Is there a way of identifying the storage devices we need? Are they marked in some sort of sequential order or by which devices are full?" He asked, wondering if it would be easy to pop out the ones that likely had the newest information that would be the most valuable for them. He knew that Mr. Henson was working off of the received ship's logs which by that point were a few years behind the ship's progress, or should have been, so there was a few years of data here in engineering that would hopefully be able to tell them what happened to the ship and her crew. They approached the entrance to engineering, which naturally seemed to be a bit damaged by whatever had gone on here, but at least the doorway was open and they had a nice wide space to navigate through.

Eric Henson
As the records tracked across the screen and he reviewed ones flagged for follow-up, it seemed like everything was going smoothly. There was no reason how or why the ship had somehow jumped from most of the way through it's journey to it's starting point. He reviewed the parameters that he'd set up the search queries for and made sure they were searching the logs appropriately and concluded that he'd done a good job setting them up - there didn't seem to be anything amiss with the ~2/3 of the ship's logs and automated sensor reports that he'd gone through. He needed to think about this from a different angle - how else could he determine when they'd turned around? He couldn't use the sensor data - that was screwy, but what else could he use from the ship? He knew that there were certain kinds of different radiation that the ship would be exposed to outside of the sun's protection, but Eric doubted that he had access to those kinds of specialized sensors on the Corvus. He could tell if the ship was emitting dangerous levels of radioactivity and what general kind, but anything more specialized than that was down to guesswork and looking up the ship's specs to see what kind of nuclear core it had and it's refit history. Eric continued to mull over the possibilities as he reviewed the different ship's logs that came up on his screen.

[Kipori]

(For sure haha, I do a lot better when I have the ability to retake sections that didn't meet my standards and all that. Though I got sick of hearing my own voice being repeated back to me after about ten minutes haha.
Actually, there have been some studies that show Sighted people can learn to navigate by echolocation with training (about 10 weeks of it) and navigate a maze that way with more efficiency than just running into walls and turning accordingly. Of course, they still have a much lower accuracy rate than someone who is Blind and uses echolocation on the regular but it was interesting, and those who are Blind seem to have a faster learning curve as well, probably because its more important for them to pick up skills like that quickly so they can navigate the world better. I wish I had been able to study it more haha, it was a really interesting topic but I had an 8 minute limit so I had to be pretty picky about what I looked into and researched.
Oh yeah, definitely not cheap. I got mine during Christmas time as well so that probably brought the price down a bit compared to normal prices. The older versions do seem to be a bit cheaper than the newest ones, which makes sense haha. The only issue with that I found was that by buying an older version, it was harder to find things like cases and stuff that was compatible with it. But not a deal breaker by any means. I was worried it would pick up my hand yeah but it never has, I think the fact that I started in traditional got me so used to keeping my hand up off the paper to avoid smudging that I now do the same thing when drawing digitally unconsciously? That or the screen just isn't picking up any other input but the pencil I use.
It doesn't help that I do my sketches on multiple layers (usually so I can edit and shift things like hair or eyes around without worrying about messing everything up) so it becomes very easy to start drawing on the wrong layers if I forget to collapse everything which I regularly do. Totally fair on liking the sketch more though, I like my traditional sketches more than the finished lined stuff, so basically the opposite of my preference with digital.)

Miles Walker
At least the Captain was being realistic rather than overly optimistic with the chances of things going sideways again. This entire mission had been sideways from the start and it was unlikely that anything would go differently now after all. He still sounded cautiously optimistic about it but not so much that Miles felt the need to point out how badly things had gone up to this point.
"Lets hope for a passable grade for the time being." He hummed in agreement, mulling over the Captain's question about helping boot up the computers or start working on getting to the drives that they needed. While he trusted that the Captain had enough computer know how to boot up the systems correctly and not mess anything up, it would probably be better if he handled all that himself. Then if something did go wrong, not only would there only be one person to potentially blame, he would be able to diagnose the issue faster than trying to figure out if what happened occurred when the Captain was at the computers or himself.
In the time it took him to mull the pros and cons of both situations over, they reached the door to engineering, which meant he had to make a choice sooner rather than later.
"Stick with getting into the computer banks. It's best if only one person messes around with the computer." He decided as he eyed up the damaged entrance with trepidation before deciding it was safe enough to move through at the moment. "If the ship was running to code then the drives should be in sequential order starting at one being the oldest, so the newest data should be stored in the drives with higher numbers. Full drives are marked with a red LED, while ones in the process of being filled or not touched will still have a green LED, so you're best to look for where the red LED's end in the sequence of numbers and pull the next one up from that plus however many we can carry from below that. There will probably also be a separate set of drives meant for the more...sensitive information which you'll want to grab as well? They should be set aside from the other drives and should be easy to spot and there will only be a handful of them so grab all of them if you can. Make sense?"
Miles just had to hope that the ship followed the normal set up schematics but there was no telling if they did or not until they were looking at the banks properly. He had worked on ships in the past that disregarded the schematics entirely and just did whatever, setting things up in a way that worked best for them and not really thinking about recovery. It was always an after thought it seemed.
With a moment of hesitation, he really didn't like the idea of moving through the damaged doorway, Miles sucked up some courage and moved into the engineering room. His first thought was that it was much more expansive than the one on the Corvus, which wasn't really that surprising given the size difference. It was in a state of disarray like everything else on the ship which also checked out but luckily, it appeared that the engines had stayed mostly together, which meant there was no sharp metal parts floating around that could puncture a suit. Didn't mean that something couldn't come loose at any point but for the moment they seemed to be safe from that concern.
"The data storage should be right by the computer, which should be..." He trailed off as he looked around the room before spotting the computer terminal he was looking for, "right there."

Zed Kassman
Moving through the Infirmary was a slow and frustrating process but Zed was making ground over to the filing cabinet which he assumed stored the files he was looking for. As he went he tried to grab what scalpels and other sharps he could safely grab to get them out of his way and remove some of the risks. He knew there was no time to go around the whole room and remove every sharp thing floating in the zero gravity but he could at least remove some of the dangers as he came across them. He stored the various pieces of equipment in any container he came across, not really worrying about safe or proper storage since there really wasn't any point in worry about it anyways. There was no supervisor coming by to ensure everything was properly put away.
It took longer than he would have liked to reach the filing cabinet as a result of his slow progress but he eventually got there and was able to start checking the various drawers for information. He had to be careful to keep the files actually in the cabinet and not let them float away from him but that proved to be a fairly simple thing. What proved to be harder was the fact that some of the drawers were either locked or damaged in such a way that they wouldn't open easily. At least the people in charge of the infirmary were smart enough to keep the files mostly locked up as they should have, which put him a bit at ease about whoever had been working in here. They might not have put their tools away right, or at all, but at least they took the storage of paperwork properly. It was a bit of a pain now however, since he needed access to those files and wouldn't be able to get them easily but he shock that concern off as there as every chance they were stored digitally as well in the data the others were off collecting. He would just have to make do with the information he could look at for now and if there was time, see about getting into the locked or damaged drawers. With that in mind, he pulled one of the damaged drawers open, careful to lay his left arm over the files in such a way as to keep them where they were before beginning to flip through the various folders, looking for anything which could be useful to him or anyone really.

[taikunfoo]

(Yeah your voice always sounds so different when you're listening to it instead of speaking. That's really interesting about the echolocation though! I admit I'm curious how it works - how do you make a sound that echoes back? Is it part of training your ears to pick up smaller sounds better?
The holidays are usually a good time to pick up things on sale, like black Friday. That's a good point though about the cases - I think I have one somewhere but as I'm not really moving it around or transporting it much I don't really use it. That's good to know though about it not picking up your hand! I definitely drag my hand over the tablet surface - mine has a touch setting that I had to disable (oops). Layer management can be tricky, especially since you think it's on the right layer, then you hit undo and it takes you back to a previous layer you were working on.
How is your summer going so far?)

Captain Tubon
Tripp listened carefully to Mr. Walkers' instructions and nodded, sticking close to the other man until he pointed out the set of hard drives.
"Thank you, that was a good explanation." He said, appreciating both the descriptive instructions and sensitivity he had when mentioning the classified files that were contained in the separate set of hard drives. Every ship had them, and most contained the Captain's logs, important records, transponder codes, and a black box of sorts in case anything happened to the ship. Per the ship's specifications, this set of computer cores also stored a wealth of information any time the weapons were powered online and saved a copy of what had been going on over the past six hours when the ship's emergency beacon was activated. Hopefully they'd get enough information from the ship's logs to see what exactly had happened to the Phyxis. To have a somewhat-assured chance of recovering the data though, they'd need to get the drives off of the ship. Tripp propelled himself slowly over to the rack that Mr. Walker had indicated, sizing up the bolts that secured the drives as he used a hand to thumb through a set of tools on his belt. His gaze moved down the stack, looking for the set of lights that the engineer had described. There was clearly a wealth of data that had been stored over the years - nearly three quarters of them had been filled, but he quickly picked out the ones where the lights changed from red to green. He decided to start at the first green drive after the red one as it likely had the ship's last moments recorded, and he could go backwards from there. He unclipped the appropriate wrench and got to work, bracing himself against the frame of the databank and the floor to provide leverage so he could quickly work at the bolts. Tripp didn't pay much attention to the bolts as they went flying off, he simply let them drift away. While it was technically in bad form, he was in a rush, and they wouldn't have to worry about them to put the database frame back together. The metal frame was built sturdy, designed to keep the hard drives secure in the event of catastrophic failure, exposure to space, the ship crashing onto a planet, and a number of scenarios thought up by the ship's designers. While the hard drives were safe from just about anything short of a direct asteroid strike, it also meant that it was also a pain to access them. Tripp had been working for almost five minutes and had yet to access one of the hard drives to remove it from the frame. He had managed to strip away a few of the protective panels, and admittedly was making progress, although it was slower than he would have liked. Tripp hoped that he would have enough time to remove the first green and the last red hard drive, they needed to get that information back to the Corvus. There was a chance that Mr. Walker could access the hard drives through the engineering terminal, but given the state of the computers on the bridge he didn't have high hopes. Still, he'd leave them plugged in until they had to leave to give Mr. Walker the best chance to access them with the time he had. Mr. Henson would be able to view the data through the engineer's helmet cameras and at least get off a quick report to Jupiter Station.

Eric Henson
Eric continued to review the data on his screen. There was a lot to look through - he discarded looking further into the Phyxis' logs as he didn't seem to be making progress with them, and there was no way they'd be more than 2/3 of the way there and be able to turn around and make it back to the Sol system. What else was there to use? He had readings of the ship - various kinds of metals it was composed of, areas of warmth and areas exposed to space, tracking the debris that were flying around the ship, schematics of the Phyxis overlaid on his screen, different clouds of gasses, frozen water, and various other elemental readings. None of these seemed super helpful, but his train of thought was broken as an alert flared on his screen - some of the debris from the Phyxis was drifting across their projected course. A few deft keystrokes adjusted the Corvus to keep her clear of the debris, and Eric resumed his thinking. Could he use any of this to make sense of what was going on?

[Kipori]

(I'll admit I'm not entirely sure how it works. I think it has to do with the fact that the senses in a blind individual are heightened in a way a seeing person's is not so they are able to pick up the variation in sound waves as they bounce off things better than someone who can see. Something about how long the sound waves take to get back to the person based on distance and material I think but I can only imagine it takes a lot of practice and wouldn't work so well in a large or crowded place where sound doesn't travel as well. It was something I would have liked to look into more but with only an 8 minute presentation time, kinda had to be pretty surface level about stuff.
I know you can buy special gloves, or make your own, to help with drag like that but I've never had a need for one thankfully since I hate having things on my hands. I'm forever double and triple checking my layers haha, its the worst thing to realize you've messed up and have to delete a bunch of work. End up having to put up drawing for a while when that happens and pick up writing again instead as a break. Though I do that normally every couple months as my interest shifts
It's been pretty quiet and a bit boring honestly. Which is totally fine by me, I enjoy quiet more than being busy all the time. I mostly work and hang out with the dogs at home. Spent a beach day with friends which was awesome since it was the first time I've been swimming in years without hating every moment of it! And I have a friend from school coming down in a couple weeks hopefully to spend a week catching up and hanging out. How are things for you? The garden working out so far? How is the pup, doing better?)

Miles Walker
Thankful that his explanation had made sense the Captain and he seemed willing to follow the orders he was given, and wasn't it weird to tell the Captain what to do in any sort of situation, Miles pushed himself off the wall and towards the computer terminal he would need to get running again.
"If you find anything odd or anything starts beeping menacingly at you tell me." He said, not really paying attention to what the Captain was doing since he needed to focus his own attention on the computer. It was powered down, which was expected, and the boot up started with only a flicker of a screen glitch marring an otherwise normal boot up sequence.
When the screen lit up fully, boot up complete, there was still a glitch in the screen but it was likely due to damage from some flying projectile hitting it and not a deeper issue. Miles could work around a cracked screen no problem, and he started to push through various screens looking for the access point to the hard drives. Unlike the bridge, there was less red tape to work his way through as he went through the various identification screens, probably to do with the fact that this was technically a restricted access area and it was assumed that anyone down here had the right credentials to actually be here. A bit of a security oversight but Miles wasn't going to complain about an easier job when they were on a time crunch. As he worked he could hear the occasional click of metal hitting metal and assumed it meant the Captain was making some progress getting into the physical hard drives while he worked on getting them digitally. It would be much easier to get them this way rather than truck out a bunch of disks but Miles already had a sinking feeling, spurred on by the rest of this mess of a mission, that it would end up being that way in the end. Like everything else that had happened, there was no chance of this being a straight forward thing.
"Okay, I'm into the achieves for the drives." He called out when he finally managed to gain access the the worryingly extensive library of files and information. It seemed to scroll on forever and he swallowed hard at the daunting sight of it. "No chance we are going to be able to download this much information in the time frame we have. I can maybe grab....30% of the new files and possibly 60% of the older stuff if it hasn't been corrupted by time sitting around collecting dust. Pulling the drives will preserve everything as long as nothing corrupts or is damaged in transport"
Not what he had been hoping for but the size of the files was just unrealistic even with the quick transferring speed they had access too. Given how long the ship had been out in space for, collecting thousands of lines of data every moment, it was no surprise that there was a lot but it was more than Miles had even been exposed to and expected to collect in a short amount of time.
"What's the game plan do you think? Pull the newer drives and download what I can of the older stuff?" He could probably get a good enough chunk of older files before they had to pull out and retreat back to the ship but as he has said, it would be nothing close to a complete collection either way. As frustrating as it was, it was the hand they had.

Zed Kassman
It should have been expected that the paper files would hold very little in terms of real data or information that could be useful but Zed had been hoping for something of use as he skimmed through the various pages of hand written and typed out notes which looked to have been printed out at one point or another. Most of the papers were copies of prescriptions, the cursive writing difficult to decipher but once he had bore nothing of use. Knowing what medication a random crew member was taking for their insomnia wasn't going to do them any good in figuring out what had happened to the crew as a whole. In fact, going off what he was reading, and assuming there was nothing hidden away on the digital files, everyone on the crew was in peak health and fitness. There was the odd injury, mostly in the repair crews, and some illness in the early months after they left for the journey but otherwise nothing seemed to be amiss in the reports he was reading. What more, none of the illnesses were anything serious enough to wipe out the crew, even in space a common cold was only going to send a crew member to bed for a few weeks, not result in a ship devoid of life. It definitely didn't offer any insight as to what had caused the physical symptoms they had seen on the one body they had found thus far.
Shaking his head, Zed slide the file he had been perusing back into place. He had exhausted the drawer and was tempted to not bother with any of the other files since it didn't seem like any where going to offer useful or relevant information. It was becoming increasingly clear that whatever had caused all of this destruction and lose of life was a sudden event which didn't leave time for them to react at all. That was something they already suspected, but what he was finding seemed only to confirm the theory more. What that could have been, well Zed was at a lose there. He didn't know enough about space and its hazards to come up with a suitable scenario which could have caused such destruction in such a short amount of time and provided no prior warning to the crew.
Begrudgingly, he clicked his com on. "Mr. Henson? Do we know of any phenomena that could occur rapidly and cause this much destruction?" While he hated asking someone, especially the Pilot, Zed had little choice without bothering either the Captain or Engineer who were doing something quite important at this moment, "Nothing in the records indicate that they suspected something was about to go wrong, no signs of an illness among crew or passengers, no preparation notes for an oncoming catastrophe. Nothing at all. So either everyone was sleeping on the job or they got hit by something that no one saw coming which I was unaware could happen on ships of this caliber."

[taikunfoo]

(Huh I never knew that those gloves are a thing, although I'm sure they probably have some kind of setting to only recognize a pen (at least the drawing tablets, I'm not sure about the handheld tablets). I've messed up the layers many times, I definitely agree with how they're set up, I just wish computers had more memory to go back and undo things. Hopefully as they improve we can do something like that to work around it. I find I'm usually drawn more to drawing (ha), and I need to make time to write. Some of my friends and I have a creative writing club going that meets a couple of times a week, but depending on my focus it can be hit or miss for productivity. I'm glad you got to enjoy the beach with your friends! Hopefully you had a good time and enjoyed the week with your other friend as well The garden has gone pretty well so far - I got a lot of corn but it didn't get a ton of good pollination. We had a pretty wet summer so that might have been part of it. Haven't picked the watermelon yet but I had two cantaloupe dissolve on me that I had already picked so I'm a bit bitter about that. Got a ton of potatoes and tomatoes too which was fantastic. The pup is mostly doing better thankfully - no throwing up and he's been a bit better eating his meals but he's been doing a lot of licking and swallowing lately which stinks since I don't think he's 110%. I just want him to be happy and healthy rather than some vague something might be wrong with him. How are the dogs on your end doing? How big is the puppy now? Anything you're looking forwards to with the fall weather?
Also on a side note I just realized if they get a copy of the data and the drives and then go into the wormhole without transmitting any of it the aliens just cleaned up the whole alien involvement mess up. No one will be any wiser as to their involvement in things because there will be no evidence!)

Captain Tubon
Tripp processed the engineer's words, trying to figure out their best option. If they pulled the drives then they'd have everything, but there was a risk that they would be damaged or corrupted leaving their whole trip here fruitless. If Mr. Walker copied the data over and they didn't get the information they needed, whether it was the first 60% of the Phyxis' journey instead of the last 60%, or the new files being the oldest 30% or the newest 30%. Even if they copied the data there was also a chance of making their whole trip here fruitless, so what they needed was redundancy. How could he get the best of both options? Tripp paused his dismantling of the drive structure, hooking a boot under one of the railings and leaned/floated backwards, thinking.
"Why can't we do both?" He asked, his thoughts starting to churn as he worked through the problem. "Can you start copying what data you can, and I'll prepare the drives for transport without disconnecting them? That way we'll get a good chunk of the data copied while also having the physical drives. In case we don't get the data we need from the copies we'll have the physical drives, and in case something happens to the physical drives we'll have the copy." He said, tapping his tool against the metal housing of the drives. While it was still possible for them to copy the wrong data and to have the physical drives get damaged, Tripp felt a bit more comfortable knowing that they had some redundancy. While waiting for the engineer's response he went back to work, feeling a little silly that he had been floating and thinking instead of unscrewing the drives. He wasn't sure how much time he would need to actually disconnect them, and whether or not Mr. Walker would need a heads up before he pulled the plug on them either - would it corrupt the files that were being copied?
As Tripp worked he didn't pay much attention to the various pieces of hardware floating off - the screws were small enough and didn't have enough speed to them to cause much damage, but out of habit drilled into him through training he did try to minimize their velocity where possible. He listened to Dr. Kassman and Mr. Henson speculate as to what had happened to the ship, albeit it was mostly speculation from the pilot's end of things. To be fair his asteroid theory was a good one and was along the lines of what he had been thinking, although it didn't explain all of the weird stuff that had been going on with the ship.

Eric Henson
Eric welcomed the speculative 'what happened to the ship' question, even if it did come from the doctor. It gave him a chance to talk his way through his thoughts, and hopefully he would figure something out that could help them figure out what had happened to the Phyxis.
"Well first thing that comes to mind is an asteroid strike of some kind - it's possible that they flew through a debris field that they didn't pick up on their sensors, which shouldn't happen, or debris came at them from a weird angle moving quickly enough that they couldn't react to them, which also shouldn't happen. As the debris are scattered across the ship rather than being focused at the front, it's likely that whatever hit them they didn't fly through, it came to them if that makes any sense..." He trailed off, thinking, as he compared some of the entry and exit points he'd mapped through the ship.
"Hmm the damage is focused on the bow and trailing across the port side, so it's possible they were going to fly into it but tried to correct at the last moment? The Phyxis was moving pretty quickly so it would be hard to make any corrections, although I'm a bit surprised at some of the damage - if they tried to pull away from the asteroid debris then some of their communication antennae should have been damaged..." He said, trailing off as he filtered the various data that was showing on his screen and frowned. If they had just clipped the edge of some asteroids there should have been damage across the full port side of the ship at the rate of speed they were moving, but there was only some partial damage. Sure it was possible that debris could have been moving at an angle just right to intersect the flight path of the Phyxis, but he'd never heard of asteroid debris moving near the speed of light before, which would be needed to actually have them impact the side of the ship to this much damage, otherwise all of the damage would have been concentrated on the bow rather than the side of the ship.
"Basically this looks funky for an asteroid strike based on the speed of the ship - the asteroids would have to be moving near the speed of light to do this, but this also doesn't explain the scorching on the side of the hull. Normally when asteroids damage the exterior of a ship at high speeds the metal kind of splashes upwards into a crater with no scorching, but there's a lot of heat damage around the holes and they seem...different, I'm not sure how to describe it but the holes in the hull don't quite look like asteroid strikes." He paused, shrugging. "Then again I'm not an expert in extrasolar asteroid strikes either, so it's entirely possible that something like this doesn't happen inside our solar system." He said.

[Kipori]

(Ah, sorry I thought I had answered this one as well but apparently I forgot to finish it off and send it. Sorry bout that.
A creative writing club sounds fun, though I can agree that having the productivity to write can be fairly hit or miss haha. I tend to think up ideas or plots but when it comes time to sit and work on them, I can't put them down on paper in a way that fits my vision. So I end up spending a lot of time staring at a blank screen trying to figure out how I want to go about it. Are you planning to do nano this year?
Spending a week with my friend was lots of fun! We didn't get to do everything we wanted to but there will be other times for that and it was just fun to spend time together and catch up before they had to start up classes again.
Ah, seem that the corn is once again the problem child of the garden haha. I didn't know that cantaloupe could dissolve? But I am glad to hear that some of it turned out well and that the pup is doing a bit better if not 100% yet. My dogs are fine, the little one had a cyst above his eye that we had to deal with which then caused an eye infection but he's fine now, just had to put him on some antibiotics and eye drops for a month or so. The puppy is huge haha and he seems to keep growing but he's the sweetest thing when he isn't being a menace to society. Not much that I am really looking forward to in particular, besides the fires that we get to start having soon once the weather cools off just a little more.
You're totally right haha. The aliens are really going to get off lucky with the transmission not happening, the humans are just going to hand them the data that shows they were there on a silver platter. They didn't even have to do any leg work to get it.)

Miles Walker
Tilting his head in thought at the Captain's suggestion to just do both methods, he eventually nodded his head. "That should be doable, might take an extra minute or two since it's more data to transfer but I'll see if I can set it up to filter out useless junk and duplicate files that wouldn't be worth taking. That should keep us on track to evac on schedule."
It would be hard to know exactly what fell into those categories and he didn't have the time to screen everything but he could at least set up a basic filter to remove duplicates, that was simple enough.
With the new game plan sorted and the Captain's concerns taken into consideration, Miles turned his attention back to the screen and got to work with copying. It didn't require much input from him, just a constant eye to make sure that the process wasn't at risk of overloading the systems and that things were still running smoothly the entire time. Setting up the filter only involved a few additional inputs from him to get running and while it wasn't perfect and there was a high likelihood that some duplicates would get through, he felt confident that he was at least weeding out a few here and there. It would be better than nothing, though he once again was left wishing he had more time to do things to proper way and not with patchwork code that was faulty. While he kept his eyes on the progress bar and the constant stream of copied files, he kept half an ear on what the Captain was doing and another half on the conversation happening over the coms between Dr. Kassman and Eric. It was weird to hear the pair talking to each other willingly but Miles shrugged it off since it was better than them arguing like they had the entire trip so far. He had a feeling it would only be a matter of time before they started to argue about something since that was the trend for them but he preferred to hear the discussion in his ear to them yelling at each other and distracting him more.
Glancing over at the Captain to see what progress he had made, he noted where he was in the process of getting at the drives. A bit behind where he thought but the Captain hadn't been working on it while they discussed what to copy over. "You should be safe to pull the drives, the system usually stores the files on a smaller independent server for at least 2 hours after a drive is pulled in case of damage or maintenance needing to be done. A fail safe basically but not one that will be a concern since they will auto delete the files after that time if the drive hasn't been replaced or restored. It might get overloaded though if you pull to many at once since it's not designed to handle much data at once so don't just yank everything out in one go."
Miles had no idea how big the backup server would be on a ship this size but he could estimate it would hold enough data that nothing should get lost at the rate he was currently going. A file or two might go missing but that was going to happen either way, things got missed, it happens.
"I'll warn you if you start pulling them faster than the copying can keep up." He offered, not able to give a concrete speed the Captain could pull the drives at but at least knowing he would get a warning if the backup server was reaching its maximum capacity. That would have to do for now.

Zed Kassman
Even with him asking in a professional way, Zed had half assumed the Pilot would ignore his question but the man seemed more than willing to discuss with him about what might have happened to the ship. Well, discuss might be a stretch since the man started to ramble on almost immediately but Zed didn't bring attention to that, instead listening intently to Mr. Henson's theories. Most of what he postulated was dismissed in the same sentence as being improbably which did nothing to ease Zed's concerns about the strange nature of the whole thing. He had hoped that Mr. Henson would have some logical explanation for what had happened to the ship but he seemed to also be stumped by the damage pattern and lack of evidence that the crew had any idea what was happening. That only made him more concerned that they were getting themselves into something that they had no business being involved in. He had signed up to be a doctor on a rescue craft, not be a detective looking for clues to explain why a whole crew went missing without any evidence that there was anything amiss among the ranks.
"So an asteroid is unlikely the culprit then." He hummed, "Or at the very least is not the sole cause. One still could have played a role, but you believe something else caused the hull damage?"
Of course it couldn't be that simple, nothing about this mission had been simple.
"An asteroid wouldn't explain the lack of people or bodies either." He pushed the drawer he had been searching through closed and slide the next one open, though he was barely bothering to look through them at this point. It was clear that there would be nothing of importance among the papers. "And what of the people? There was no evidence of anyone evacuating correct? So why haven't we found more bodies, or anyone alive in one of the remaining pressurized zones?"
There was a chance that most have been ejected through the hull during the depressurization but there was no way that everyone had been in a zone that lost pressure. They had found one such person but one a ship this big, there should have been more people. It didn't add up and it was driving Zed insane trying to make it all fit logically in his head.