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I always thought that the SCE should or would be like a Trek era 'Fringe Division'; taking care of those weird bits of tech that are beyond the scope of other forces.
Here's a crazy idea I had; sure, the SCE handles advanced 'alien' tech, but what do they do when they found anachronistic tech, like a 22 Century warp vessel, crewed by Americans, or what appears to be a phaser, made by humans in the year 2010?:eek:
Pretty sure they'd call Temporal Investigations. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Tricky
They're not quite "fringe", but they tend to wind up there a bit. What they are is emergency engineers.
That means that when the river is flooding and the levees are over-strained and need support, they are the guys you call. That means when the natural disaster also messed up your port, the port through which relief supplies must come, so you need that port fixed NOW, they are the ones you call.
But it also means that when you find out that the massive earthquakes are being caused by a network of machines that have been buried for hundreds of thousands of years, and you definitely don't have the owners' manual for those things, they are the guys you call.
Tech Support for the universe.
The thing is, they are engineering crisis first-responders: it is their job to stamp out the fires, get life support working again, and move on to the next crisis while the regular guys put the rest of the system back together. As a result, they select people with a knack for ... innovative solutions. Their motto (well, one of them) is "Impossible takes ten minutes extra."
But they are not a font of technobabble: often the puzzle they face is more social than technical. What they thought was a malfunction might have been sabotage by a local dissident group, what they thought was a rescue mission might turn out to be a prison break, or they need to find a way to effect repairs to a planet-wide system without offending the religion of the locals.
There's also the possibility of 'competition' to think about. The Androssi are kind of the SCE's 'evil clone'. They offer technical fixes to problems... but they're motivated solely by what will benefit their homeworld patrons, and their solutions are often worse than the original dilemma.:eek:
I agree with the 'first response' assessment. Get in, find out what's going wrong, stop it going wrong... and warp out to the next assignment.