The Privateer/Life Aboard

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I might speak ill of my time aboard the Orenomah - and really, it deserves to be spoken ill of - but there were a lot of things I learned. The most obvious of those is that the Solar Liberty Coalition can't solve every problem, and isn't equipped to help everyone. Sometimes, they don't want to, and sometimes, that problem is one of their own. But there were other things...jury-rigging was a very important skill, as was salvage. Reading the debug logs on a broken MFD isn't the sort of thing a regular pilot will necessarily need to know, but it became important to the crew of the Orenomah. The old hardware in the ship's computers was slowly dying, and graphical interfaces soon gave way to low-capacity Safe Modes and even debug terminals. The ship's chief engineer, actually one of the only people I'd call a friend on that ship, taught me how the memory values were stored and read on the radar system. We might not have had graphical radar display anymore, but that didn't mean we were blind. It just took a bit more effort than usual to identify threats.

Not that there were many of those. Maybe a desperate pirate with nothing to lose, trying to pick a fight with a ship many times their size. Often times, we couldn't do much to fight them off. Sometimes they'd join us. Like we needed another mouth to feed...but sometimes their skills helped. Pirates are good at spot-repairs and unusual fixes, because a lot of times, they can't just pull into a station and use their facilities, especially not one run by the Coalition. I was good at dealing, though. A few lucky souls with nowhere else to turn wound up getting unofficial pardons in exchange for a spot on my senior staff. One such soul was my chief engineer.

The one thing I learned, above all else, though...is to always, always log your conversations. There's no guarantee you're going to remember exactly what someone told you last week, let alone half an hour ago, and it helps to be able to cross-reference that with your tasks and information. Hell, I've never been that great at remembering exactly how things were said. Fortunately, technology in general has come a long way since the last war, and we have reasonably good auto-transcript software, especially on PDAs and other wearables. Coalition pilots have headgear that does that, and a lot of other things, but officers don't tend to wear it when they're not flying a mission. A handheld PDA, hidden in a uniform pocket, though? Nobody's going to notice or care, and you don't look like a doof wearing a monocle and headset.