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Diagnostic Instruments

Originally posted: 2023-09-14, Cohost.

Cohost writing prompt: @make-up-a-starship-pilot — Starship pilot who tunes their main drive like an orchestra

“It’s like early electric cars, right?” Nim says. “Negligible actual engine noise makes it into the crew compartment, but the tech curve that got there was so abrupt that people reacted badly to ships that were too quiet. This baby’s from the transitional period where the manufacturers wired the cockpits with ambient sound generators and piped in fake engine noise, scaled proportional to main thrust and shaped in accordance with manoeuvring.”

“So you—”

“So I remapped the sound generator inputs to take decoded data from the diagnostic bus, and replaced the soundbank with musical instrument models!”

“It sounds fucking awful.”

“Yeah!” Nim flings arms wide, beaming. “Hear that dissonance? That’s a fuel feed problem!”

”…You couldn’t afford one of the fifty-buck Astroduino-based diagnostic readers?”

“I’ve got, like, five of ‘em in the junk drawer! But this is cooler.”

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