Greetings

Sorry to trouble you all again, but once my brain gets ticking over...

In our last session Jim C caused me to reflect afterwards on whether I'd spent too much time on a segment for his character. I don't think I did, it was his turn in the spotlight, the others get their turn (Loyd and his ladies, Fred and his toilet rolls), but it made me think perhaps I should give our engineer/mechanic her turn next time. Her character bio says she likes puzzle solving and I think that it's in the nature of her player as well (who is also a computer and particularly a comms specialist in real life [1]).

So, the weekend has seen me completely distracted from actually writing any 'plot' because, this:

My aims:

1) to look pretty and interesting and vaguely realistic. YMMV on the first two but can anyone see any problems/omissions? (This really isn't my expert area!)

2) not to be *too* complex (I've looked at some real wiring diagrams!), this is supposed to be fun and take a few minutes of game time not the entire session. There could be whole other pages on water systems [2] etc and the subsystems represent boxes of more complexity I'm not aiming to show.

3) but is it complex enough for what I really want and that's some kind of little puzzle for the engineer which this will help solve (rather than just look pretty)? I've not come up with such a puzzle and it could be done with a Task, but it would be fun if it was a real world conundrum as well. So:

4) any bright ideas on such a puzzle? (Not *too* technical! I've got to run the thing with my bear of little brain and it would be nice if it were more generally usable by any Traveller "layperson" rather than only my specific player.

(Please note that it's possible there will be enough adventure surrounding this scene that it might one day see light of day as a publication. Please don't contribute if you wouldn't like to see it used like that as I can't really offer much more than a credit. Not a Credit! Or at least be very clear you'd only want to see an idea used in game.)

[1] She keeps threatening to write some *proper* Traveller comms rules as none meet her idea of any kind of even science fictional reality. I keep encouraging her to do so.

[2] Oh no, now I've put the thought in my head...