SoP: Engineering
Duties & Expectations
The Engineering Department is responsible for keeping the installation functional, performing repairs, maintaining life support, as well as make modifications necessary to accomplish the station’s assignments.
- Maintain the power grid. Installations often consume a large amount of energy, especially for NSV/NEV-class ships.
- Maintain the atmospherics network. Nanotrasen employs a wide variety of crew, from baseline humanoids without any special tolerances, to species that require a special gas to breathe, to synthetics requiring specific thermal tolerances.
- Repair damages sustained during the installation’s operation.
- Proactively enact measures to shield the installation from damage.
- Perform temporary, and in some cases, permanent modifications necessary to increase crew productivity, safety, and morale.
Dress Code & Preparation
Engineering staff are recommended to wear uniforms, or failing that, an armband of the department’s color theme, usually a high-visibility orange.
- Dress code is not currently mandatory. It is however, recommended to be identifiable while on duty in case of emergencies.
- Sufficient protection must be worn inside Engineering, other than the break room and lobby. This means radiation suits and mesons to shield from engine emissions, insulated gloves, etc.
- It is heavily recommended to carry the follow equipment on you at all times:
- Insulated gloves (for engineers)
- Inflatables
- A geiger counter
- A full set of engineering tools
- Emergency internals and a suitable mask
- A GPS
- A T-ray scanners
- Meson scanners, or equivalent
- Inversely, it is recommended to leave hardsuits and other expensive and rare pieces of equipment in Engineering unless they are being actively utilized.
- Engineering is often not provided with enough spares of every piece of equipment for every single person. Do not hog vital equipment ‘just in case’.
Construction & Repair
Construction
- See Permits & Renovations for major modifications.
- Ensure dangerous areas are taped off during constructions, such as if a hallway has a temporary hole in it that people may fall into.
- Avoid disrupting station operations while performing construction. Try to not block hallways unless absolutely necessary.
Repair
- While performing repairs, sections that are severely hazardous to crew (e.g. hull breaches, gas leaks, inhospitable air, active emitter fire) should be taped off.
- Do not tape off sections for minor repairs; this just wastes time and lessens the expectations of what tape should be used for.
- Repairs are to be billed to the stations supply budget and supplied by cargo. Engineering does not foot the cost of maintenance while performing their jobs.
Permits
Permits are not required for minor renovations, or if a department is performing their own internal modifications without affecting public areas.
Maintenance does not count as a public area, unless a renovation would entirely cut off a pathway, as this may disrupt operations.
Permits are required to perform major, potentially disruptive work; like cordoning off hallways for projects, adding new public access wings, dangerous projects in proximity to the installations, so on and so forth forth.
Permits must be authorized by either the Chief Engineer, or the Facility Director. Barring that, send a fax for recordkeeping and inform an available head of staff. The head of staff does not, however, have automatic veto power over an engineering renovation, if they are not the two listed above.
Changes affecting a Department
The following is the chain of authority for departmentally affecting changes:
- The Facility Director
- The Head of the department in question
- The Chief Engineer if and only if the change is due to safety concerns
- The department’s staff
- Other engineering staff
- Everyone else
Engine Operation / Infrastructure
Engines
Maintaining the engine is one of the most important responsibility of Engineering. Engine failures often result in catastrophic losses.
- Do not operate engines within 500 Kelvin of their maximum safety limits unless at least one Engineer is actively monitoring operations. Some engines melt down astoundingly quickly; by the time alerts are sent, it may already be too late.
- Do attempt a best effort of keeping the Engine Room safe. The Engine Room is expected to be dangerous, and in some extreme cases, fatal within minutes without protection. However, mistakes happen - do not intentionally allow the area to become more dangerous than it needs to be.
- Do not allow untrained or unauthorized crew access to the engine without supervision.
Backup Power
If it is infeasible to set up the engine within ten or twenty minutes, set up a backup power source, like solars, to ease potential issues.
Power Grid
- Charge the master power grid to a reasonable level to provide substation and shuttle charging.
- Do not overcharge the master grid. Grid loads are hard to predict, so a few megawatts of excess power is excusable for burst loads.
- Ensure substations are set up, except in cases where bypassing them is required for peak demands.
- Leaving the bypasses on exposes staff to dangerous power levels.
- Engineers may be warned, or even charged, for negligent behavior if injuries result from the grid being knowingly overcharged.
- If there is insufficient power to maintain the entire installation, prioritize crucial infrastructure like life support, telecommunications, and command subsystems over vestigal areas like civillian lounges.
Atmospherics Network
- The atmospherics network should always contain the standard air mixture breathed by the crew.
- The Distribution and Scrubber layers must never be repurposed, other than in a well controlled, and enclosed, area. Accidentally mixing lines often results in immediate danger to the entire installation, especially when involving gas research experiments.
- It is recommeneded to not overpressurize the distribution line, as it makes emergency flushes difficult and time consuming.
- Ensure the scrubbers line is not backed up. Air scrubbers suffer increasingly worsened efficiency as the network builds up in pressure. On planetary installations where air is readily available, it is far more preferable to dump excess air if processing it is impractical.
Shields
Most installations come with shielding. Shields should be operated as follows:
Bubble / Hull / Matrix Shields
- Hull shields should be maintained for ships, as well as any sections exposed in orbit for stationary installations.
- Airlocks contain shield diffusers that automatically deactivate upon detection of meteors or other inbound projectiles.
- Shields should not be used ground-side outside of necessity.
- Ground-side shields may block crew movement and pose more of a hazard than a protection.
- It is acceptable to energize ground-side shields to low power to deflect small nuisences, like local wildlife.
- Never use a shield’s overcharge function without clear warning to the crew.
- Overcharged shields are highly dangerous; Operators are held liable for any injuries or deaths as a result of negligent and unannounced shield usage.
- These guidelines do not take effect during active emergencies or codes.
Voidcraft Shield Systems
((OOC: This is not implemented yet. These are not the tile ones; these are the ones that project around an entire overmap entity. This is just here for completeness.))
If equipped with vessel-grade projectors, such shields should be extended to a requisite distance around the ship and kept on at all times, at a reasonable power level as necessary.
The shield should be lowered, or temporarily dropped as circumstances demand, but optimally remains up at all times to act as a kinetic and energistic screen.
Triage
Under normal operation, it should be practical to prioritize repairs by importance, and for more minor issues, convenience.
In an engineering emergency, however, where there is a lack of staff to fix all high-priority issues, triage may be needed to minimize loss of life or resources.
Here are the recommended priorities for repairs:
- Stabilization of any devices whose failure would result in catastrophe, including, but not limited to:
- Engine / Reactor Cores
- Ship shields if at risk of impact
- FTL systems while inside transit bubbles
- Propulsion systems and navigation subsystems if installation is at risk of collision
- Any other control subsystems vital to engineering’s operation
- Sealing hull breaches and restoring power to triaged areas
- Prioritize from inside to outside if there are no pressing matters, like needing to get a department online to handle an emergency. It is harder for the interior to re-breach.
- Life support cannot be maintained without power. Fixing all the breaches on the installation’s exterior while ignoring the power grid being severed will not do anyone favors.
- Move unprotected or injured crew to triage sections. Maintain triage sections at all costs, prioritizing setup in interior areas for shielding and separation. Life support should be prioritized immediately; there should always be a backup set of sections which can sustain unprotected staff.
- Life support cannot be maintained while breached. Do not focus on repressurizing, other than for above reasons, until the room itself is no longer leaking air. Standard airmix may be in short supply if on a ship.
- Restoring life support in now-patched areas.
- Prioritize repairing airlocks and other dividers. Repressurizing is not effective if it simply leaks back out.
- Repair the pipe network as you go, spreading air around as necessary. Remember that natural airflow will assist in the process once breaches are fixed.
- Prioritize making an area survivable before making an area comfortable. Most species can survive down to around 40 kPa of air, but can only survive a few degrees below 0 degrees Celsius without the protection of a coat. The crew does not have to be comfortable to survive.
- Exception: Designated triage spots should be given priority and quality treatment, even at the expense of other sections. Patients whom are suffering the effects of exposure are often weakened, and cannot recover without a proper environment.
- Restoring departmental capabilities after, as well as during, the repair triage.
- Prioritize by necessity. The medical bay being nonfunctional is far more severe than not having a working kitchen.
- Anything vestigal to survival, like the bar, should be ignored until crew survival is no longer a risk.
After these four stages, it is usually safe to go back to non-emergency procedures. At that point, trivial concerns such as cosmetics and comfort may be addressed.