Enorryma allowed herself an Andalite eye-smile while her face was turned away.
Clever lad. She turned back toward him and sent the next set of scenarios for him to pilot through, a mild challenge of divided attention while they spoke. This particular set of scenarios would include ambiguous and specific hostile forces and would allow him to learn to control the shredder cannon and other weapons arrays from helm.
<Piloting the ship is typically a role where we receive orders instead of issuing them or relaying them, and frequently this will take off the pilot's shoulders the responsibility of determining the next action, allowing your whole focus to be committed to the task itself. Sometimes, however, the captain will need to invest more of his command and attention on what the fighter fleet are doing, or on other situations pertaining to the operation and defense of the ship. In these situations, the helm officer will generally be the
first person the captain trusts to carry out his duties semi-autonomously, and while you might not be giving direct verbal orders to navigations and weapons, they
will queue off you, and depend on you to orient the ship so that sensor, shielding, and weapons arrays are pointed in the right directions. The kind of easy camaraderie and comfortable rhythm that passes between helm, navigations, and weapons can only truly be acquired from working with those officers in the middle of action, but once it is acquired, it can last throughout your career, and on the bridge it is roughly equivalent to what fighters experience with their wingmen, and what warriors experience with the people by their sides. When you do not spend all your time on the bridge, it can be easy to take the "safety" of the ship for granted, but not being on the front lines the way fighter pilots are, does not mean that the mothership itself is a purely safe place to be during hostile engagement. I expect that at some point, and likely more than once while working the helm, you will realize just
how closely we bring the ship to its total annihilation, and you will develop utmost appreciation for the Andalites on either side of you... even beyond the respect afforded according to rank.>
She saw the scenario going fairly nicely, so she adjusted it to increase the number of hostiles, one or two more arriving in the demonstration every thirty seconds. This would give him a more acute sense of the slight time delay between reviving damaged shields and charging shredder cannon blasts, and would force him to periodically make a decision of one or the other- shields
or offense, but not both at the same time.
<The most common major problem you are likely to encounter is engine damage or diminished output of some other form, forcing you to make difficult but rapid decisions about where to invest limited power. You have several options for redirecting power away from other systems on the ship: the environment in the dome, for instance, can survive quite well with the artificial lights and water currents disabled temporarily, and in select areas of the ship, it is also safe to temporarily disable the local artificial gravity. You can also shunt power away from life support, using the system's waste heat to restart failed engine reactions, or leeching power directly. Remember above all that the life support systems are flexible but completely vital; you can only adjust the settings so far before we freeze or asphyxiate, and both of those things can occur so fast that you do not realize they are happening until it is nearly too late. If you ever find yourself less than totally lucid and alert at the helm, double check the life support to be sure it is receiving adequate power. Sudden drowsiness or slow reaction times can be a sign of contaminated or thinning atmosphere- a failure in the filtration and ventilation, which is the most energy-intensive of the life support functions. Radiation poisoning is also a possibility, if the anti-rad layer of our shields is taken down for backup power, but there is more of a tolerance for error in this case: the hull itself is incredibly resistant, and only stellar clusters and nurseries, primitive nuclear weaponry, and certain types of Z-Space anomaly emit enough radiation to cause significant immediate health risk. That and failure on engine containment, that is, but if engine containment fails, there will not be enough of the ship left, for radiation to even be one of our concerns.> This last part was virtually common knowledge, used here for a bit of collegial humour, and she quirked her stalk eyes to indicate the joke, knowing that he probably wouldn't see it as focused as he was on his task.
<Now for the matter of combat- I am going to send you a demonstration which will involve you taking full control simultaneously of helm, weapons, and shields. You will notice that the arrangement of the shield and shredder cannon are such that the ship has "good sides" and "bad sides" to be positioned relative to the enemy. This is part of why we maintain a tail-fighter fleet: to cover our "bad sides" and to receive cover from our much heavier weaponry and much stronger shields. Dogfights are not exactly rare, as more and more of our potential enemies will have access to the same generation of tail-fighters we have, so keeping the jockeys close to the mothership means a better chance for their survival and safe return and repair, at the cost of tending to attract enemy pilots closer to the mothership. Even here we have an advantage, as this class of vessel has better maneuverability than most of its size, and it can drop into Z-Space faster and more precisely than larger vessels in the same generation. Per-weapon, our offenses are not the strongest nor the widest in spread, but we do have
more of each type of weapon, aimable in more directions, with less hazard of firing across our own hull. Whether or not you have full control over weapons and shields during a battle, you will always need to consider your position, the position of our fleet, and the enemy and enemy fleet positions. Strive to keep our "good side" pointed toward the largest enemy, and to keep our "bad side" oriented in such a way that our tail-fighters can come between us and enemy jockeys. When you
do have full controls, take special care not to fire through a cloud of our own people.> She frowned at this last thought.
<Friendly fire is never a good thing, but this is an especial concern for us, this far from home, this lacking in friends and support. If we lose pilots, we do not have enough trained up to replace them quickly. If our fighters sustain too much damage to stay on the move, we do not have the resources to rebuild them from scratch or to create new ones. Right now, we have a surplus of ships to fighters, which is a good problem to have, because the extras can be used on training exercises... but we cannot depend on our most reckless crew members to be cautious the way we are, or to keep themselves inside the shields we project. I know, because I have
been the reckless idiot who brought her tail-fighter back to the mothership with a cracked ****pit and missing half its stabilizer fins.> She chuckled and winced at the memory.
<Claxter, at the helm, often unbeknownst to those jockeys, you must be the shepherding mother to them. They are their own unique type of geniuses, and never doubt it, but in so many other ways they are simply too stupid to survive without mothership support. I never appreciated or respected this myself until my first tour on a dome ship's helm, and it was eyes-opening. Most of the time, your job at helm will be incredibly simple and straightforward, but during those conflicts, you are going to have the power to save all our lives several times over, and much of that will be without receiving orders, but only acting on the intersection between training and instinct.>
