SCIENCE: Particle Generator

Science Officer Report: Lt. Aoi.

The alien machine appears to be relatively innocuous. Never the less I have taken the precaution of zeroing all gauges prior to operating the machine. Unsurprisingly, pressing the button when all gauges are set to zero produces no result.

I will now increase the Age, Burst Delay, Particle Count, Max Speed, and Min Speed dials to 10 each. I will set the Radius to 1, as I suspect this will create objects that will not burst the lab wide open.

This has led to no noticeable result. I will now turn all other gauges to 1. Note: I am unable to adjust the angle gauges on the bottom to increments of less than pi. I will leave these at 0 for now.

I nave either succeeded or I have destroyed the machine. It emitted a single puff of gray smoke that lingered in the lab for approximately 1 second before being scrubbed by the air filters.

A second attempt reproduced the results. I believe this is a deliberate effect and not a malfunction from my efforts.

I will now increase the Radius to 5.

The puff of smoke is now considerably larger.

I have now increased the particle count to 100. Contrary to my expectation, this has made the particle larger, rather than increase the quantity of puffs of smoke. I will increase the Burst delay to 100 to see if this modifies this result.

There is no appreciable change at this point. I shall adjust the age to 25.

Again, no change.

I shall make one last adjustment to the top row. Max speed shall be set to 50.

Adjusting the max speed to 50 while leaving the minimum speed at 10 has made a change. A puff of smoke emerged, rapidly becoming an entire stream.

I have adjusted the X access of the Acceleration gauge to 10. The smoke now disappears far more rapidly, and drifts almost straight back, rather than up and to the left as before. I will reset this to 0, then adjust the Y to 90.

As suspected, the new adjustment sent the stream to the left. Clearly the Acceleration maps to an X,Y,Z coordinate system for direction.

I hope the cleaning crew can get the smudge out of the wall.

Out of curiosity, I have dropped the minimum speed to 1.

After an initial hesitance, the puff of smoke repeated the previous result. The minimum speed seems to create a slight stall.

The smudge is getting larger. I suspect the cleaning crew will be a bit put out.

I have decided to increase the Radius to 25.

Curious, I think the size of the smoke has gotten smaller, rather than larger as I suspected.

I am going to make an adjustment to the End Scale. I will adjust both settings on it to 5.

This has produced no noticeable result.

I have adjusted the Omega settings to 10 each. This has resulted in the initial starting point of the smoke to be adjusted by 10 meters in each access. Omega clearly then is the origination coordinate. I will put these back to 0, as the second stain now on the wall might still be cleanable.

I have adjusted the Z factor of the End Color dial to 125. If, as I suspect, this is a color scale similar to that of our own use, this should cause a change in the coloration of the smoke over the course of its movement.

Contrary to expectation I did not see any change. This is curious.

I think we are going to have to replace the wall.

The smoke has gone to my head and given me a headache. I shall come back to this later, I think. For now it's time to visit sick bay.