Max pulled the Innu back to the Cutter and away from the party for a much more exciting pastime, the analysis of research data, while the majority of the crowd was busy making deals for whatever they had planned in the immediate future.
Almost all of them were focused on technological developments, while some of them were focused on quality of life improvements on their worlds after they had been attacked by the Great Enemy, but at least at this point it seemed that nobody had forgotten the threat that they were likely to return at any time.
That was enough assurance for Max to focus on the task at hand and follow Nico and the research team in to the Cutter so that they could start analyzing the data that had been collected by the test vessel.
There was a bit of interference on the last sample due to the intensity of the explosion, but almost all of that came after the majority of the event was already over and the shockwave hit the ship.
They could live with that, and from what Max could tell, all the earlier samples were perfect.
"So, where do we start?" Max asked as he locked down the lab to prevent spying now that all the authorized personnel were inside.
"We should start at the weapon side. Fluctuations and variability outside the parameters, differing energy usages for different frequencies, and any sort of anomaly." Nico decided, and began to pull up all the relevant data for the team to go over.
In this scenario, having as many eyes on the data as possible was paramount to ensuring that they didn't miss anything, and even Commander Yuri and Ranarth had open files on their data tablets, though neither of them specialized in the topic.
Max sighed as the pulled the power output graphs up in an overlapping diagram. The power pull rates and spikes were all over the place, there was no modulation at all, and it was somewhat surprising that they hadn't managed to overload the weapon entirely and cause it to fail to charge.
It had come close on the third test, and the initialization sequence seemed to have hung for at least 300 milliseconds before recovering, which didn't seem like much, but it was a fraction away from having been a catastrophic failure.
Not one that would have destroyed the weapon, but one that would have prevented it from firing on the target, which would have been a huge embarrassment for the research team which had designed it and checked out the specs and tolerances for the prototype.
There didn't seem to be anything wrong with the construction of the weapon according to the design schematics, so there must be something that they were missing in the design itself.
In a high output energy weapon, there was always an energy bleed, either as radiation, heat or light, and that could interfere with the other functions of the weapon in unexpected ways. If it was a light emission, that was easy, a sealed casing would hide it. Heat could be dissipated once you tracked down the major sources of it, but when the problem was various wavelengths of radiation, especially in a variable frequency weapon, it was guaranteed to be a nightmare.
That appeared to be what had happened here. Changing the frequency of the output interfered with various components, and because they were changing it with every shot, it interfered with a different one every time, which was going to make it difficult to track down the problem component to find the origin.
That part of the job was best left to the professionals, but the gathered laymen could provide some useful insights, given their varied backgrounds.
Commander Yuri pointed at an anomaly in the data set and brought up another section of the data.
"When we were working on the new shielding prototypes for our ships after the Arisen first attacked, we ran into this same issue. That particular wavelength of radiation passes through almost all metals as if they didn't exist.
Shielding against it is a nightmare, and though I don't know if our researchers ever came up with a solution, I can tell you that it will have interfered with all of your other energy relays during this test." He explained.
"Oh, that is good to know. We will make a note of it because I'm sure it's going to come up in multiple other tests as well. It's one of the little joys of creating new energy weapons, right?" Nico joked.
Max brought up the overlay graphs he had made and displayed them on the holographic projector for the room to see more easily.
"These might all look random, but there is a pattern to them. They all have different peak levels, but they all have the same number of spikes, so there is something in our generation frequency or feed capacitors that is causing a surge.
It seems to vary based on the wavelength, but it's not due to interference, it's something innate to our design."
The Innu all sighed. Smooth power delivery was almost as big of an issue as radiation shielding. They had thought that it was sorted out, as the design was very similar to other energy weapons that were proven to work already, but if there was something in the design that was creating a rhythmic pulse, they had to find a way to modulate it.
The pulse wouldn't necessarily be bad if it was a different type of weapon. It was an essential part of Ion Cannons when it was modulated properly, creating the different travel speeds that bunched up the Ions for a more compressed shot, instead of being one long stream, but that wasn't what they were going for here.
"Anyone else want to rain on the parade?" Nico asked.
Ranarth laughed at her pessimism. "Well, on the bright side, it did actually fire. But on the not so bright side, I have identified a total of forty-seven major energy inefficiencies that should be addressed, and this circuit did not function at all during any of the tests. It looks like it's working, but it's not actually doing anything but passing energy through."
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