Navigational Sensors

### Its a bird, Its a Starship!

A terrestrial bird, a living organism, is aware of its surroundings and uses its senses to find its way from one point to another, frequently guided by stars in the night sky. The comparison of the USS Solstice to the bird here is an apt one. In much the same way, the Solstice system constantly processes incoming sensor data and routinely performs billions of calculations each second, in an effort to mimic the biological solution to the problem of navigation.

While an equivalent number of Solstice sensors and simulated neurons (and their interconnections) within the main computers are still many orders of magnitude less efficiently designed than the avian brain, nonetheless the Solstice system is more than adequate to the task of traversing the galaxy. Sensors provide the input; the navigational processors within the main computers reduce the incessant stream of impulses into usable position and velocity data.

The specific navigational sensors being polled at any instant will depend on the current flight situation. If the starship is in orbit about a known celestial object, such as a planet in a charted star system, many long-range sensors will be inhibited, and short range devices will be favored. If the ship is cruising in interstellar space, the long-range sensors are selected and a majority of the short-range sensors are powered down. As with an organic system, the computers are not overwhelmed by a barrage of sensory information.

### Sensor Assemblies

The 350 navigational sensor assemblies are, by design, isolated from extraneous cross-links with other general sensor arrays. This isolation provides more direct impulse pathways to the computers for rapid processing, especially during high warp factors, where minute directional errors, in hundredths of an arc-second per light year, could result in impact with a star, planet, or asteroid. In certain situations, selected cross-links may be created in order to filter out system discrepancies flagged by the main computer.

Each standard suite of navigational sensors includes:

* Quasar Telescope
* Wide-Angle IR Source Tracker
* Narrow-Angle IR-UV-Gamma Ray Imager
* Passive Subspace Multibeacon Receiver
* Stellar Graviton Detectors
* High-Energy Charged Particle Detectors
* Galactic Plasma Wave Cartographic Processor
* Federation Timebase Beacon Receiver
* Stellar Pair Coordinate Imager

### Processing Considerations

The navigational system within the main computers accepts sensor input at adaptive data rates, mainly tied to the ship's true velocity within the galaxy. The subspace fields within the computers, which maintain faster-than-light (FTL) processing, attempt to provide at least 30% higher proportional energies than those required to drive the spacecraft, in order to maintain a safe collision-avoidance margin.

If the FTL processing power drops below 20% over propulsion, general mission rules dictate a commensurate drop in warp motive power to bring the safety level back up. Specific situations and resulting courses of action within the computer will determine the actual procedures, and special navigation operating rules are followed during emergency and combat conditions.

Sensor input processing algorithms take two distinct forms, baseline code and rewritable code. The baseline code consists of the latest version of 3D and 4D position and flight motion software, as installed during starbase overhauls. This code resides within the protected archival computer core segments and allows the starship to perform all general flight tasks.

### Programming and Coding

The Solstice has undergone two complete re-installations of its baseline code since its first dock departure. The rewritable code can take the form of multiple revisions and translations of the baseline code into symbolic language to fit new scenarios and allow the main computers to create their own procedure solutions, or add to an existing database of proven solutions.

These solutions are considered to be learned behaviors and experiences, and are easily shared with other Starfleet ships as part of an overall spacecraft species maturing process. They normally include a large number of predictive routines for high warp flight, which the computers use to compare predicted interstellar positions against realtime observations, and from which they can derive new mathematical formula.

A maximum of 1,024 complete switchable rewrite versions can reside in main memory at one time, or a maximum of 12,665 switchable code segments. Rewritable navigation code is routinely downloaded during major starbase layovers and transmitted or physically transferred to Starfleet for analysis.

### Maintenance

Sensor pallets dedicated to navigation, as with certain tactical and propulsion systems, undergo preventative maintenance (PM) and swapout on a more frequent schedule than other science-related equipment, owing to the critical nature of their operation. Healthy components are normally removed after 65-70% of their established lifetimes.

This allows additional time for component refurbishment, and a larger performance margin if swapout is delayed by mission conditions or periodic spares unavailability. Rare detector materials, or those hardware components requiring long manufacturing lead times, are found in the quasar telescope (shifted frequency aperture window and beam combiner focus array), wide angle IR source tracker (cryogenic thin-film fluid recirculator), and galactic plasma wave cartographic processor (fast Fourier transform subnet). A 6% spares supply exists for these devices, deemed acceptable for the foreseeable future, compared to a 15% spares supply for other sensors.