Kapitel 5: Day #4 [Ice, Air, Airlocks?]

We all wake up at a much better time today, it is just after 9 am so we will have more time to work on the ship and hopefully reduce our stress as we work and be able to get more done each day. While we are eating breakfast I look over the damage report from the previous day and have set the computer to generate a new one each day at midnight so we will have a better understanding of what is going on with the ship. We have reached the point where we now have to start going outside of the main engineering bay to do repairs so I make sure everyone stays in pairs just in case something happens. I want us to start with the o2 system so we can try to extend our supply as much as possible. At 10 am we all go out and I see that the temporary airlock works better than the main ones on the outside of the ship so I tell George to start working on designs to make it a permanent part of the ship and add the upgrade to the list of work to be done. As we are looking over the air supply system I find that most of it is intact with mostly minor leaks but the tanks need a lot of work. Since we are limited on supplies I decide to scrap the empty tanks for parts and use those to repair the 2 good tanks. We are lucky that all of the tanks can be accessed from outside the ship (except the emergency ones that are inside the medical bay that was destroyed a few days ago). Once we manage to repair the 2 good tanks and the rest of the air supply system I reset the computer to default settings for the tanks. and notice the extra labels after each system on the damage report that leads to a more detailed diagnostic. I ask Arrica and Abbie and find out that Abbie had altered the program to allow us to see this extra bit of data while streamlining the overview to make finding issues much faster. After all of this work I find that we are severely lacking on o2 reserves. From now on we will be limited to 6 hours of actual work outside the ship per person per day until we can get the o2 farms back up and running. We will also be limited to decompressing the airlocks to 3 times a day. As for the crew they are doing fairly well given the ship status. Abbie is doing better than the old mechanic ever did (rest his bones). George ended up having to get stitches in his left arm after it got cut while working inside of the starboard solar array disconnecting supply lines to be used on other parts of the ship while the rest of us were taking one of the o2 tanks apart. He is very lucky that the suit has an auto seal system installed since I got them second hand from a military surplus store. I ordered him to early sleep for the next 2 days and not leave the engineering bay while also performing reduced physical labor to help with the pain, keep him sober, and to save air. I have also found that we are out of ice so not only can we not refill our ship's o2 reserves but we can't even activate our h2 power or thruster systems (the exhaust of the power system feeds into our water tanks and this in turn lets us not only drink this but also lets our other power systems turn it into o2/h2 for reuse). As soon as we get back inside Arrica starts running scans to try to find a good source of ice to replenish our o2 reserves but this is very limited since our sensor arrays are all damaged in some way. I also asked her to scan for other ores to allow us to finish repairs since we have started running out of supplies. While I start refilling our suits I have Abbie start trying to figure out ways to stretch our o2 supply since it will only last about a week at best. I also ask George to go ahead and start doing what he needs to so that we can make the airlock a permanent part of the ship since it is currently our life line to anything outside of this room. I also have everyone start making plans to add airlocks to every doorway on the ship for in case of hull breach in 1 area or another. The ship already has a bulkhead system in place for this but in order to leave from 1 good area to a breached area we have to decompress an entire room rather than just a small airlock. While the old method wastes a lot of air and time (because our o2 tanks can't hold all of the air so some gets ejected into space), the new system it will not only save our air but also save time and lives in the future. This kind of thing is only found on the newest science research ships since they have chemicals that could eat through most doors. After we finish our evening tasks we all grab some food and strap in so we can eat and get some sleep for the next day of work. I can already see that we are going to be very busy from the next couple of months.