cargo concerns

Standing up after a short discussion with both Lieutenants Scott and Brie, his Chief engineer and chief of ops, Kheren spoke, once he got a nod of aknowledgement from the Fleet Captain.

"Sir, the Artemis has seven cargo bays available; but if we are talking about warp cores of various size from different civilian ships, most of them cargo ships, and taking into account their magnetic bottle and containement housing, we, the largest ship in the fleet, might not be able to carry much more than that same number... and the other ships being much smaller, maybe none at all. The average starship warp core is between five and ten decks high."

Before anyone could frown at the problem, he offered his solution:

"However, this starbase has many hundreds of warp capable shuttlecrafts, all using a standardized format of micro warp cores only a few meters in lenght. Cannibalizing them could provide all ships with much more power cores for our purpose; the Artemis and certainly the Spectre could then carry hundreds of them and even the McKenzie could bring at least half a dozen herself."

After looking around at his fellow starship commanders, the Andorian brought back his four eyes to Allen Samji to finish his proposal.

"The detonation control would be here, at the starbase and, with the thousands of technicians here and on each ship, we can implement this very quickly. If an evacuation becomes necessary, all the deprived shuttles would still be able to operate efficiently at impulse. Since the anomaly can close in as fast as a a subspace signal, their warp capability would not make a difference anyway... but many cores detonated between here and the Azimuth Horizon would shield their escape at worst... and at best, allow us to mine the entire area of the anomaly and contain it all the more efficiently... not to mention help deter any... interference... along the way."