Chief Engineer's Log

Commander Brokkar, Chief Engineer.

Engineering Log, Stardate 78826.427.

The ship’s tractor beam arrays were installed on a Tuesday.

This explains several things.

I was not informed of this until after installation.

Had I been consulted, I would have objected.

The yard supervisors insist there is no statistical evidence supporting concerns regarding Tuesdays and major systems integration.

There is also no statistical evidence explaining why every tractor beam alignment issue I have encountered during the last twenty years originated on a Tuesday.

Correlation remains an underappreciated engineering discipline.

The tractor systems themselves are functional.

Mostly.

The port emitter continues to drift outside preferred targeting tolerances whenever power demand elsewhere in the ship exceeds projected models.

Operations insists the deviation is insignificant.

Operations is welcome to stand outside the ship and determine exactly how insignificant it appears.

The Borg-derived power transfer conduit network continues to alternate between remarkable and infuriating.

Whoever adapted the technology for Federation use deserves recognition.

Whoever approved the final implementation deserves supervision.

The conduits permit energy distribution efficiencies that would have been impossible a generation ago.

They also possess an apparent desire to reinterpret routing priorities whenever someone looks away for more than six minutes.

I admire them.

I do not trust them.

Engineering teams continue tracing intermittent fluctuations through systems that technically should not be interacting with one another.

Yet somehow they are.

The conduits appear determined to remind everyone that technology originally designed by the Borg Collective does not particularly care what Starfleet manuals say should happen.

Staffing remains another concern.

Additional personnel arrived from the Deneb Yards this week.

The official reports describe them as fully qualified.

This statement appears to rely upon a remarkably generous interpretation of the word qualified.

Several engineers demonstrate genuine competence.

Several others demonstrate confidence.

These characteristics continue to arrive in separate individuals.

I am attempting to correct the situation.

Progress remains measurable.

The number of mistakes requiring immediate intervention has decreased from alarming to merely irritating.

This constitutes improvement.

I received a subspace message from my partner, Thalek, this morning.

The message began with the phrase, “Before you argue, the decision has already been approved.”

This is never encouraging.

Our son apparently informed one of his instructors that spending a year aboard a frontier assignment would be educational.

The instructor agreed.

This was unfortunate.

The situation has since progressed through several layers of administration and become reality.

He will be joining us aboard Kepler.

He is fourteen.

Fourteen-year-olds possess an extraordinary talent for locating engineering spaces they have been specifically instructed to avoid.

I anticipate several months of vigorous disagreement.

Which, admittedly, is preferable to not having him here.

The ship continues to change.

More officers arrive every week.

Families are arriving.

Children are arriving.

Personal effects have begun replacing cargo containers in crew quarters.

The corridors sound different than they did a month ago.

The ship remains unfinished.

Yet each day she looks slightly less like a construction project and slightly more like a starship.

I am not prepared to admit this observation to anyone in Engineering.

End Log.