Albatross_13 has stopped flying. Somewhere between Mars station and Earth, my ship has quit. My important agenda would have to wait.
I ran diagnostics but the computer came up with too many options. I thought it was the ion drive main capacitor bank. Lucky I have spare caps. Always careful not to short myself across the caps, I began unbolting the old ones. I used the cap tester to check each cap for leakage, found 3 good ones and one weak one. I had 10 more to check so I set aside the bad one, spray painting it with a marker yellow for "bad". I continued to take apart the cap bank and tested each cap out of the 10. 4 more were bad. I started swapping in the good caps I had on reserve and put the whole cap bank back together. Then I checked the remainder of the ion drive and it checked out okay.
Then I started to have mood issues. My bipolar illness was cropping up. I was feeling manic and needed to talk a calm down pill, so I did. I set the ship's audio to calming wave sounds and went to the recce area to lay on a travel couch and wait for the drug to take effect. I picked up one of my calming science fiction books that coincidently is about a guy who gets shipwrecked in outer space and has to bail himself out of a problem, just like me.
One hour later I was starting to feel better, more level and under control.
With the engine supposedly repaired and my mood stabilized, I decided to run a startup test on the engine.
I went to the captain's desk and started the startup test.
Next Page
