Spaceship

There’s a lot going on at the moment. It’s difficult to know what I should be writing about. In fact I would go so far as to say I don’t want to write about any of it, largely because I don’t want to think about it. But sometimes you just have to sit down and write your way through the important issues of the day, month, or year, depending on how much time is ganging up on you all once on this particular occasion.

I downloaded a new computer game this week. It lets you (among other things) design and fight your own spaceships against giant alien pandas. And given the amount of time I want to spend not thinking about how I have no job, no car and no clue what’s going on, it’s highly likely I’m going to spend a fair bit of time wailing on said pandas with my supercharged spaceships of destruction.

Besides, it’s clear I’ve been flagrantly abusing the “spaceship” tag on this blog for far too long now. It’s about time I actually wrote a post that fits it properly. So here we go.

How to make a spaceship for Garry

General hull shape

Anticlimactically, this is probably the most controversial choice of them all. Naturally I decided to lead with it, in this very thoroughly researched and carefully thought out post. I’ve spent a stupid (and rather embarrassing) amount of time checking out everything that Google images throws up when you search the word “spaceship” in order to decide which spaceship design looks the sexiest. I couldn’t really get past USS Voyager from the Star Trek universe in the end.

I mean in the vacuum of space, the general sleekness of a spaceship is completely irrelevant. But Voyager still wins. If you’re going to find yourself lost on the other side of the galaxy, you want to at least look good, with reliable drive shafts while you’re doing it.

It would also be cool if it was orange instead of grey, made out of unobtainium instead of the traditional titanium alloy, and bigger on the inside.

Propulsion

Again, Start Trek’s warp nacelles are probably the standard here, although the hyperdrives from Star Wars would also work I suppose. Basically anything that’s going faster than light is going to be okay. It’s going to need it over the next few months. I’d also be interested in an improbability drive, or alternatively a temporal distortion drive from the soon to be released Samantha Triton novels.

Soon to be released, that is, if my friends ever send me my freaking feedback already.

It would be nice if you could fuel it with pasta rather than minerals or fossil fuels.

Armoury

“Damn yokels can’t even tell a transport ship ain’t got no guns on it”.

Yeah, well my ship is going to be able to blow your stupid transport ship out of the sky. Sorry Mal. I can take the sky from you. Bwa ha haaaaaa!

The planet busting laser from the Death Star would be ideal, but might be a little impractical, not to mention expensive. I’m thinking of a nice tasteful combination of photon torpedoes, EMP cannons, a picture of a bear holding a shark and a big old dalek gun mounted right up the top. As long as it makes that awesome bwoooooh-piiiuuuuuuuu noise. I don’t care if you can’t hear it in space. I’ll know.

Special Effects

Well, obviously when it lands you want the organ music from ET. And it would be cool if you could hear Darth Vader’s mask in the corridors every now and then. Oh, and I want it to glow blue and leave a trail of fire when it takes off, like the De’Lorean.

Oh freak me sideways. What was I thinking? A Flux Capacitor. Definitely we need one of those. Even if time travel turns out to be against the laws of physics and easily comprehensible plot lines, we can just have it installed on the wall, right next to the name plate that looks like a serial number but is really a bible verse.

This is going to be awesome.

Crew

Captain: Me, obviously. Why would you even ask that?

First Officer: Hmmm… would you go with Malcolm Reynolds or Commander Chakotay? I would… what’s that? Really? Well… okay.

First Officer: Kimberly Webster

Pilot: Samantha Triton. Yes, okay she only exists in my head. So does this whole spaceship. What’s your point?

Chief Engineer: The Doctor(s). All eleven of him. The ship will never go where it’s supposed to, but at least it will always get there. And if it ever explodes, we’ll take the whole universe with us.

Chief Science Officer: We don’t need one of those. We’re already on a freaking spaceship. How much more science do we need? … no we don’t. … I don’t have to do anything. … No we don’t. … Okay! Fine.

Chief Science Officer: Dr Sheldon Cooper.

 I'm hoping to have the GSS Velociraptor commissioned and ready for departure sometime before the end of June. I have no idea where I'm going, but since when was that any reason not to run away in a spaceship?

Make of that as little as possible. Or just make me a spaceship already.




Garry with 2 Rs

A Gigantic Whinge Fest

We have it pretty good in this country. I know I do. Most of us have a roof over our heads and access to reasonably useful food. And for those who don’t, there’s access to services, welfare and community aid programs. No-one in a privileged place like Australia really has much to complain about.

And yet…

I’m having a hard time finding a job. I mean… I have a job, but my contract expires in June and there’s no funding available to keep me on after that, so I’m looking for a new one. I’ve had a couple of close calls for jobs which would have been fantastic, but even after making it to the interview stages, I’ve been denied. So that’s disappointing.

Another thing that’s annoying me more than it should lately is the NT Literary Awards. More specifically, my failure to get shortlisted for them. I don’t want to seem like a bad sport or like I have a higher opinion of my own writing than I should, but I was quite disappointed not to make the last round with a play I submitted. That’s fine. I decided to submit a request for feedback to find out what went wrong. I got this reply from the organisers:

Unfortunately, of your four pieces, only one has received written comments. It’s one of the hardships of dealing with a panel of volunteer judges, that you can’t tick them off for failing to follow orders! Please find one piece of feedback attached for Traditional English Hospitality.

I don’t want to bag the Lit. Awards too hard, because they do a great job promoting NT writing, but I do wonder how they made the decision not to shortlist me when there was no feedback on anything I’d written. Well… whatever. I’m not bitter. I’m never at home to Mr Bitterbottom.

And it doesn’t matter anyway. I’ve always been of the opinion that as long as I’ve got my keyboard and my car, there’s nothing I can’t do. It seems a strange thing to base my independence and self-confidence on, but there you have it. If I can go anywhere and I’ve got Samantha with me, we’re all good.

On Saturday night my car broke down. This is a calamity in anyone’s life, but in Darwin it’s particularly disastrous, as buses tend to come about once every fifteen years. And for me it was a double blow as I watched the otherwise faithful GSS Unity being hoisted onto the tow truck: Genius that I am I left my keyboard sitting on the back seat.

Fortunately I’m in a position where I can walk to both work and church from my house, so the loss of my car doesn’t cripple me completely like it did when I was without a car in Palmerston. But here I am in the middle of the year when everything was supposed to be falling into place for me and I can’t get a job, apparently I can’t write, and now I have no car and no keyboard. At times like this a man falls back on the only recourse left to him: Whinging about it on his blog. I mean… praying.

Fresh from last week's spectacular demonstration of things going right for me, I'm just a little frustrated at my seeming inability to catch a single break. Ah well. One Body and Happy Yess comedy are both coming up. Hopefully that will turn things around.

Make of that what you will.




Garry with 2 Rs

Too Many Biscuits Before Bed Time

My housemate makes a mean ANZAC biscuit: Crusty on the outside and gooey on the inside. Kind of like me. Of course, she negates all the awesomeness points her baking skills accrue by insisting on calling them ANZAC cookies. We’ve reached an uneasy sort of peace over this: she agrees not to use the C word in front of me and I agree not to shoot her. Occasionally I get careless and shoot her anyway, but only with a nerf gun. And she’s always awake, facing me and armed. Well… usually.

I was munching thoughtfully on one of her latest efforts the other day, considering the deep mysteries of what elements go into creating the perfect ANZAC bikkie. I should have known better than to tempt fate like that, and sure enough there was a puff of green smoke (sure, why not?) and an eerily familiar voice echoed through my bedroom.

“Do you have any fish for me?”

What the hell? I was totally expecting Biscuit Lady. She explained that Biscuit Lady couldn’t make it, on account of my having killed her off last year. But that still did not account for what Fish Girl was doing here. And how did she make my bedroom echo? That was fantastic.

It turns out Fish Girl’s television wasn’t working and she really wanted to watch Celebrity Splash. I rolled my eyes in frustration with my own generation’s insane taste in popular culture. But I had to admit the bodybuilder belly flopping off the high board was awesome.

Where was I?

Oh who cares. Cum Tacent Clament! Internally consistent plot lines since... never.

Make me what ANZAC biscuits you will.




Garry with 2 Rs

Here Comes The Bride. In a Spaceship.

What is Garry? Stunt Linguist? Raconteur? Space Pirate? Freelance revolutionary? He is all these things, and none of them.

He’s also an organist for hire, apparently.

I’ve just got home from a gig playing organ for a wedding. It’s the second time in a couple of months that I’ve been hired to play for someone I didn’t know.  It’s a nice little side project, and it means I get to call myself a professional musician. At least on a technicality.

I also got to play the super high tech digital organ at the catholic cathedral down the road from DMUC. I don’t mean any disrespect to the DMUC organ, which certainly gets the job done, and has been fighting with me a lot less of late. But to say that the DMUC instrument and the St. Mary’s instrument are both digital organs is a bit like saying that Garry with 2 Rs and Aaron Sorkin are both writers. It’s technically true, but in reality there’s no comparison. For one thing the St. Mary’s one cost about three times as much and has a whole extra keyboard. Also, while the DMUC auditorium has been carpeted and modernised and generally made more comfortable, St. Mary’s is still all polished concrete and panelling inside, so it reverberates like an echo chamber. That means when you open up all the stops and cut loose, you’re no longer just playing an organ; you’re playing the whole building. It’s pretty cool.

The strangest thing I’ve noticed about the last couple weddings I’ve played for is that the bride and groom have had no idea what music they wanted for the processional and recessional. One bride-to-be even told me to just pick whatever I wanted. I can’t imagine doing that, but then if it were me I’d probably have the music all programmed out weeks in advance, and then go looking at suits the day before. Each to his own, I guess. The couple I played for this afternoon apparently hadn’t even thought about it until I asked them. I told them my default offering is Purcell’s (Clarke’s) Trumpet Voluntary for the procession and Mendelssohn’s Wedding March for the walk out. Most people just agree to that to avoid admitting they don’t know what I’m talking about. That works for me.

Except that this time, just a week out from the service, the bride-to-be decided she’d like the overture from the Marriage of Figaro instead. And like an idiot I told her I’d learn it. I duly downloaded a copy of the sheet music and discovered it was fifteen pages long, and really difficult. Cue four straight nights of frantic practising and devious shortcut creation. In the end I managed to learn about the first three pages and the last page, and found a way to jump straight from one to the other. And fortunately it’s Mozart, so no-one could tell the difference. “Prestissimo” is your friend in this situation; go fast enough and it really doesn’t matter if you hit the right notes or not.

Well we got through alright in the end. The building helped a bit, reverberating over all the uneven quavers for me, and the friends and family seemed happy enough. The father-of-the-bride even came over and paid me in cash on the spot; slipped it to me in a gentlemanly handshake like some kind of mafia boss. That was awesome.

So yeah: I’m a free-lance organist now. And I’m building up quite a useful little repertoire

Songs that sound surprisingly good on the eight foot diapasons:

A Song of Freedom

Blessed Be Your Name

The Theme from Doctor Who

40 (The U2 version)

Bohemian Rhapsody

Aníron (Theme for Aragorn and Arwen)

The Theme from Star Trek Voyager

Highland Cathedral

Gollum’s Song

Make of that what you will.

Garry with 2 Rs

The DMUC Code

Last week there was a break-in at our church office. Thieves managed to jimmy one of the back doors, and then used a trolley and presumably some very buff arms to make off with the safe from the back office. I’m quite impressed that they managed to move it at all. Less impressed with the criminals’ ability to choose their target; the safe contained neither cash nor anything of financial value. They successfully absconded with a safe full of master keys, which they self-evidently didn’t need, and the church’s roster of baptisms and marriages, dating back to the 1940s.

Police found the safe, broken open and empty, lying at the bottom of Adelaide River. That’s about a hundred kilometres away, so I don’t know how they found it, but good on them. We haven’t recovered the registry, which is a major blow to … people who want to know how many people got married in our church in 1957. It did have a lot of sentimental value to the church members, particularly those names were in the book. I suppose my baptism was noted in there somewhere.

The really interesting part from my perspective is that ours isn’t the first church these criminal masterminds have hit; apparently the Catholics and Anglicans have had safes stolen in the past month as well. I’m not sure how many break-ins it’s going to take these geniuses to realise that churches don’t actually keep vast stores of ancient and priceless treasures locked up in the vestry.

We keep them in the bank like everyone else.

So since these guys have now stolen three church safes and have presumably not come away with anything valuable enough to be worth the effort, I have come up with two possible explanations for their behaviour:

1) They’re dumb.

2) They really are criminal masterminds, but they weren’t after money in the first place. They’re on the trail of a ten thousand year old legend, promising immortality and endless riches to whoever can break the four seals on the tomb of St. Capsicum of Guam.

The first three have already been broken by an evil conglomerate of mining magnates, kidnapped nuclear-physicists and Nazis, and now the thieves are in a desperate race against time to find a way to break the seals before the Nazis take control of the entire international ruby market.

A clue to the fourth seal is rumoured to have been transcribed by an eccentric parish councillor in an undisclosed church in Darwin City, and hidden from the outside world in a secret code written across time into the very fabric of the baptisms and marriages registry, which is really a cipher for the charter of a top-secret para-church organisation known only as “The Disillusionati”. The race is on to find the right registry, crack the code and niggle St. Capsicum before it’s too late.

With the DMUC registry located at last, the criminals are currently zooming across the Philippine Sea in a hot wired speed boat, with angry Nazis in hot pursuit in hovercrafts armed with machine guns.

As an extra insurance policy against a double cross, the mining magnates have abducted the thieves’ girlfriends and taken them to a top secret lair on the outskirts of St Petersburg. But unbeknownst to them, the girlfriends are ninja pirate alien zombie librarian vampire robot kung-fu masters. And they’re ready to kick some Russian Nazi arse.

Meanwhile, our church has to have all its locks changed, and do something about shoring up the door that apparently only needed a fairly token effort to force it open. Thanks for nothing St. Capsicum.




Garry with 2 Rs

Standard Australian English

I like words.

I spent five years studying linguistics, and I still get a kick out of the way humans can use language to impart so many different shades of meaning. And, at the risk of sounding like a crazy old man (indeed, I increasingly am one) it makes me mad when I see linguistic expression being squashed to make way what is supposed to be easier communication.

I’m always being asked to simplify my language use at work. A lot of the time it’s because the people I’m writing for have low literacy level, or a non-English speaking background, or both, and that’s fair enough. But this week I co-wrote an article for publication in the NT Law Society bimonthly magazine. My boss sent it back to me for editing because apparently I was using technical language that wouldn’t be accessible to the readers.

Language too complicated for lawyers?

The thing is I wouldn’t have said I use particularly complicated English. The odd sentence does get away from me every now and then. But seriously, we’re talking about a profession that produced the following:

For the purpose of smooth transmission of legal cultures and legal thoughts and avoiding unnecessary misunderstanding and cultural conflicts, it is of great importance for us to carefully study the textual structures of laws and especially accurately comprehend the long sentences in the English legal texts, based on which this article attempts to take linguistic characteristics of legal English as the starting point to explore the features of legal translation, especially the difficulties in translating long sentences.

And speaking of legal English, for some reason I’ve started watching Boston Legal again. Last time I got stuck in this series, I started producing language that really was incomprehensible. I’ve managed to avoid that this time around, and instead I’ve started giving some thought to what will happen to me when I do finally cross that hazy line between ‘delightfully eccentric’ and ‘bat-crap crazy’. It’s often assumed that I’ll wander around like Denny Crane, spouting right-wing nonsense and shooting people. But I think, in the end, I’ll end up more like Alan Shore, stalking the halls with all the appearance of a man in control, all the while gradually becoming more and more unstable and yet more and more unstoppable at the same time.

In fact there’s some circumstantial evidence to suggest I may have crossed that line last week some time.

Anyway, I’m sure it’s all perfectly safe. Next weekend Doctor Who comes back. That will be just the balancing influence of sanity I need to get me centred again. I can go back to being a mad man with a box. Without a box.

Alternatively, I could do something other than watching television. But I still have two episodes of Burn Notice waiting for me.

What was I on about again?

Oh yeah: Standard Australian English.

I speak it, bitches. Make of that what… hey look! An anti-cancer themed plush volley ball!




Garry with 2 Rs

Just Beneath the Surface

I’ve been doing some thinking lately about what faith looks like. I’ve decided it looks like uncoordinated British tourists in Bouly Rockhole. I expect the metaphor is clear enough, but just in case I’ve made myself a little too obscure, allow me to elaborate. Or you could get over it and go read XKCD instead. Whatever.

Bouly Rockhole is a popular swimming hole in Litchfield Park, just outside Darwin. In the wet season, the current gets quite strong, but in the dry there’s still enough water going through it fast enough to make it really pleasant and not too cold. It’s a series of large rock pools, linked by small cascades and it’s one of my favourite places in the world when it’s not packed with loud tourists. Unfortunately it almost always is.

Most of the rock holes aren’t very deep. The deepest ones are maybe a couple of body lengths for an adult. But because of the way the water rushes, if you keep your head above water you don’t actually see how close you are to reaching the bottom. So every time I go there some stupid English woman swims out into the middle of the current, feels it start to pull against her and then panics. She kicks her legs around like an electrocuted cane toad, but can’t quite touch the bottom, so she gets swept toward the lip of the next cascade. By the time she reaches it, she’s run out puff and can’t do anything to stop herself being swept arse first over the waterfall. It makes me laugh every time.

The thing is, if she would just duck under the water, she would realise that she’s only a foot or so from the bottom. She could kick off from there to the side of the pool without any trouble and save herself some embarrassment and a bruised scapula.

That’s what real faith in a secular culture is like for me. When I’m getting yelled at by all three of my bosses because the three things they’ve asked me to do at once aren’t being done fast enough, I tend to freak out and start kicking around like I’m out of my depth. In the craziest parts of my day, it’s easy to feel like God, the rock, is miles away.

However, I am no stupid English woman. If I pause for a moment and go deeper, just below the surface, there He is, like He always is. I can set my feet, push off and start swimming again. No sweat.

It’s not a perfect metaphor. For instance, periods of intense reflection will not cause you to suffocate after three minutes. Also, living for more than forty minutes won’t necessarily cause the skin on your fingers to wrinkle up. Although I suppose that does happen eventually. Furthermore, in the great rock pool of life, whether you are sitting on the bottom or falling over a waterfall, there are no spaceships. And that’s a problem for me. My comparative philosophy demands more spaceships, both metaphorically and … aquatically?

Shut up.



Garry with 2 Rs

Conduit

I'm sure we've all had times in our lives when a certain word or phrase seems to be following us. Like when you learn a new word while listening to a radio interview and then hear the same word three times in the next two days despite never having heard it before. Or like that time you couldn't stop yelling 'trousers' while you were supposed to be giving the valedictory address.

I've been going through one such experience recently, except it has been going on for two and a half months now. In some ways I brought it on myself; living the lifestyle I live in the questionable linguistic environments I do I suppose it was only a matter of time before I attracted the attention of some of the less reputable lexemes around me. But I never believed it would come to this.

I'm being stalked by the word 'conduit'.

It started back in November while I was writing that crazy Nanawrimo project. In the course of focussing on nothing but a single science fiction story for a whole month it was inevitable that some words would pop up repetitively; words like 'Cavalier' 'calibre' and 'lizardy'. But I was utterly unprepared for the frequency with which 'conduit' jumped in to fill the void whenever I needed a spaceshipy sounding noun.

I realise this doesn't really count as stalking. It's just me taking the lazy, uncreative route around writer's block and not having the time or inclination to go back and fix it.

Furthermore I think I've figured out where it came from. Last week I got in one of my 'bored with the world so I'll lose myself in an entire series or two of some escapist American television program' moods. Unfortunately the season of Boston Legal I'm up to wasn't available at the DVD shop, so I diverted to another old favourite of mine: Star Trek Voyager.

Yes. I have diverse, eccentric and obsolete taste in conduits. I mean TV shows. God damn it.

The thing is while I might have overused the word 'conduit' in my writing, those Voyager crewmen had conduits coming out of their ears. Power conduits; energy conduits; subspace conduits. If there's a made up physical phenomenon, it's got a conduit. But I'm sorry. Even if you live on a spaceship on the other side of the galaxy in a universe that includes telepathic two year olds, sentient nebulae and omnipotent continua with suicidal tendencies, there is no referential framework in which 'temporal conduit' could possibly mean anything sensible.

If all that wasn't enough (and I can see how you might be of that opinion, come to think of it) the next encounter came from a source completely disconnected from science fiction. My old friends the Newsboys put out their first post-Peter Furler album last year and I recently picked up a copy. Imagine my surprise at hearing the Newsboys - now fronted by Michael Tait - sing the following lyrics:

What will people think when they hear that I'm a Jesus Freak? What will people do when they find that it's true?

This has nothing to do with conduits. I just need to get this off my chest. There are some songs that you just shouldn't cover because they can't be improved upon. This goes double for a band that already has several perfectly smash hits of its own.

There again, if we're talking about a vessel, substance or catalyst through which another substance or energy flows, then I suppose you could think of the whole universe as being one big temporal conduit. But it still doesn't make sense in the context of just one localised spaceship.

Meanwhile, in a different song on the same album:

When the 'boys light up you know
Who gets the praise. Who owns the show.
When the 'boys light up it's on
And we ain't stopping 'til we're done.
We ain't nothing but the conduits
He's got the power. He'll flip the switch.
Leaving the dark behind
Light up and let it shine.

See? It's everwhere I tell you. And ... Because... I...

Okay, look. I know this one's not very funny. To be honest I'm struggling to come up with a punchline as I watch extended news coverage of South East Queensland slowly going under water. My phone beeps periodically as my friends in Brisbane let me know they're alright.

I considered not posting this at all on grounds of lameness, but let's be frank. No one other than my family and maybe K.Kim is going to read this far anyway. I'm too distracted to self-censor at the moment, so I guess I'll keep typing and wait to see what tomorrow brings as I use Blogger as a nervous energy conduit.

God damn it.




Garry with 2 Rs

The Price of Freedom

One of the things I had forgotten about my beloved home town is how abysmal the public transport situation is. Even on weekdays during peak hour, the buses are just a little too infrequent to be really classified as useful. And if you’re living out in Palmerston, you’re pretty much grounded unless you’re content to wait for forty or more minutes in order to get anywhere, especially on the weekends.

Yeah. Basically anyone in Darwin who can own a car does. And after a week of getting up at a quarter past six in order to get to work by half past eight, I decided they’ve all got the right idea, and set off to find me a car loan.

Now the thing about personal loan information brochures is that they’re always all about the benefits and the freedom you can buy (?) with your new money. I found them all really annoying, because I was already sold on getting a loan. I just wanted the necessary information on interest rates and repayment schedules. Apparently those data aren’t the sort of thing you want to include in an “information” brochure (notice my experiment with using /data/ “correctly” as the plural of datum. That’s classical styles, baby. I’m still not sure if it works in the new millennium, though. Thoughts?).

Eventually I stuck my head out and asked for an appointment with a bank … consultant? Assistant? What do we call these people? My bank … lady’s card just says “customer service specialist”. I think that’s a bit pretentious, but then, I use data as a plural, so I’m in no position to judge.

At this point the flood gates opened and I got so many facts and figures that I was drowning in them. It took me a week to get over it and figure out exactly which among my plethora of options I wanted to go with. I made up my mind and got myself a pre-approved loan just in time for the weekend. Tony Barber appeared from behind a nearby bougainvillea bush and exclaimed

“Let’s go shopping!”

And then disappeared again. Weird.

I spent the following Saturday shopping around the various new car dealerships in Darwin. The trick was that they were spread a fair way apart, and the bus system, as I mentioned, is not really an efficient way to get around. I started my mission at half past eight in the morning and had collected all the information I needed to make my decision by half past four that afternoon. I signed on for my brand new car, and got ready to take the forms to the bank on Monday.

At this point I hit my first snag. In order to fund the loan for the car, the bank needed to know the insurance details. In order to insure the car, the insurance company needed to know the registration details. And in order to register the car, the car company needed to receive confirmation that the loan was funded. It was a cyclic impasse the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the great frequent flyers calamity of ’07.

I let the customer service specialists battle it out between them, and eventually we got the loan funded, but not before I discovered the insurance company had created a policy under the wrong name, and the car dealership needed three extra days to treat the paint and tint the windows. Finally, after a three week ordeal, here are the specs for my brand new spacesh… I mean… car.

Model: Ford Focus CL Sedan
Doors: 4
Transmission: 5 speed manual (better than automatics for dropping down a gear and overtaking a road train)
Allegiance: Autobot
Power: 107kW
Torque: 185Nm
What those numbers mean: No freaking idea. A kW is a kiloWatt, and an Nm is a Newton metre, but I’d need to find my high school physics books to figure what that means. And that’s not going to happen.
Colour: TARDIS Blue
Average fuel consumption: 7.1L/100km
CO2 emissions: 169 g/km
Dimensions on the outside: About average for a small sedan, I guess
Dimensions on the inside: 15 decks, with accommodation for 560 crew, mess, cargo bay and holodeck.
Top speed: Well, the NT now has a blanket speed limit of 130 km/h (so stupid…), so obviously I won’t be going any faster than that. However according to the specs it can get as fast as warp 9.75
Armoury: articulated transphasic photon torpedoes, frequency modulated phaser blasters and a picture of a bear holding a shark.

Woah… sorry, I got confused between my new car and the USS Voyager there at the end.

Um…

Far from home




Garry with 2 Rs