SID 23112.17

KEINMOND-CLASS MINING PLATFORM KEINMOND II

PLASMA DRILL TECHNICAL TEAM KTT-1

CT2 ARMIN SHALE

TECHNICIAN'S LOG

Okay, so I'm really not sure what happened with the plasma drill test. Everything started out five-by-five, all gauges reading blueband, plasma channeling cleanly through the manifold and into the globular matrices. No problems apparent, everything good to go. Then, right at the cusp of the ignition stage, WHAMMO: the feedback damper disengages and the plasma stream goes bugnuts. Long story short: instead of drilling a 50 m diameter hole into the test planetoid, we blew the thing to gakking bits. We turned a scale 2 planetoid into a cloud of talcum powder.

I have checked and rechecked the tapes, and I just can not see how, or why, the damper snapped back like that. We simmed the plasma drill 10 dozen times in the weeks leading up to today's test, and we never saw so much as a nm of movement in the FDS. The tracking system we had problems with, of course- repeatedly, endlessly: we finally just had to crack open the main tracking console and poke around, which is how we discovered that the holographic targeting module was wired-in upside down- but, even if we still had a tracking problem (which we don't), that wouldn't explain the FDS loopback.

So, to review, the plasma drill went apecrackers during its first live test, and we have no idea why. Glad I'm not the one who had to present the test report. Bert tells me the meeting actually wasn't too bad, though. He says the attendees (mostly Wing Commandants- but also two High Gouverneurs, for some reason) were pretty cool about the whole FDS overloop deal, didn't seem to be too concerned about it at all. Mostly, he says, they just wanted Bert to replay the test footage over and over again. Kind of weird. Also, they apparently really wanted to examine some of the planetoid fragments left over from the blast, so Bert had to send a probe into the debris field to gather up samples. So I don't know what that was all about, but, whatever.

I was planning to replace the entire feedback damper assembly this afternoon, but Bert told me to hold off. Apparently, Wing Commandant Neris wants to test the drill again tomorrow to see if the problem recurs. Bert says that the test planetoid is in the Kismy system, but I'm wracking my brain and I just can't think which object he's talking about, unless he means the Kismiti moons (ha ha).