The ship was large in the readout now. A tap of a button put the schematic on the large front display. indicator lines pointed out several of the notable features of the ship, as the line drawing rotated slowly. Captain walked up close to the display, squinting at the details she already knew. eh. this is all trope. well, keep pushing. The glistening future pcitured by pop culture like star wars never really came to pass -- in hindsight it was obvious that it wouldn't… I mean 20th century airports weren't the glistening future pciture by the heyday o travel; so it's not clear why anyone expected diferent from spaceports, or [whoops, need a parallelism here, about cars getting ratty, comaring with ships getting ratty / being mundane… maybe not ratty].
She wans’t sre what she would find on the ship, even though the bidding had been interesting on the salvage rights. the bidders from earth had been cautiously enthusiastic about the lot, but ultimately the set of hauls from last Sol had left 's account flush with credits, and ultimately she'd prevailed. There were rumors that there were still crew members in stasis, but it wasn't clear how these older units would have worked after the primary systems shut down after the collision. The solar panels may have been able to eke out a tiny amount of power, but this far… her ein the kuiper belt, the sun is hardly indistinguishable from the brighter stars from outside the solar system.
“Can we pick it up on optical yet?” She asked the systems officer or whathever
“Close, I can try and get something up.” – an oddly lit spec appeared in the middle of a wide field of stars. a blink and it got larger and larger on the screen, blurry edges and roughly pixeled edges as the external camera’s CCD strugged to assemble the faint (scant?) amount of photons collected off the hull of the other ship. A set of details became listed alongside in the margins. The image wavered in the middle of the screen as the ship, rushing toward the target, struggled to keep the camera pointing at the <other ship, wtf>
“I guess we’re technically supposed to hail it…” the captain remarked.
“Affirmative” – the no-nonsense [compliance… what other types of bridge roles would a salvage ship have?] officer remarked "though in this case, I'm not sure anyone would really fault you if you didn't…" he trailed off.
only nodded. turning to face the bridge crew, she drummed her fingers on the nearby console.
// What do we want the actual hook to be here? Is it that there are potentially live people on the salvage ship? Is this an area of space maritime law they've yet to encounter? Or perhaps the crew… nix that, seems unlikely a veteran space crew wouldn't have come across some nasty shit or like dead bodies in space.
// What is this thing we're coming up to? Is it an experimental space station? A generational ship? A cult that was trying to escape the rule of law in teh solar system? Maybe an antique ship that everyone assumed had survived the trip out toward the the next star. Maybe it was an early attempt at some kind of warp drive. The crew was suppsed to have survived, when it spun up the warp drive the telemetry all looked good, and no one actually realized that there was a critical failure. perhaps as it hit warp, tia ctually hit a rock or some other kuiper bullshit and it actually just failed and now they don't know if anyone is still alive or in stasis or whatever. I like that one.
// Why have no other ships gone to warp? Maybe shortly after this disaster there was a realization… itmeline problems h ere. If there were experiments, hmm, okay, that's a bit for a later revision to figure out. but i like the idea that it failed, and eveyrone thought that the mission had succeeded, but now they're discovering that it didnt. Perhaps this crew grew up telling stories about the people who are on the ship, but they don't have any idea what kind of shape the bodies will be in.
// Next we just go and figure out how to convey all that in just the Vigenette on the bridge :)