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The basic outlines for the new Cutter Hulls were done quite quickly, and the work had begun before Max even had time to get all of the crews arranged to start training on the new systems.
These ships would use a translated version of the navigation system on Terminus, which was of a higher quality and resolution than the ones in most of the vessels available to the Reavers, so there would be some adjustment time needed before they would be ready to actually take it into space.
Then there was the crew who actually had to maintain and repair these vessels, assuming that the theoretical numbers held true and they didn’t discover any flaws during initial testing that would require another round of extensive overhauls.
Max expected that there would be at least some work that needed to be done to them after the initial tests since they were breaking new ground in space travel for their quadrant of the Galaxy, but after the Mecha testing with Uncle Lu and his team, he had pretty high levels of confidence that they wouldn’t be absurd to the point of a full redesign.
The man was eccentric, but his work was amazingly grounded in reality and not in theory, so Murphy’s Law never seemed to bite him too hard. Little things, like breaking the first hull, were the sort of negative probabilities that he ran into, not like most design teams who missed a variable or two and failed dozens of times before they realized their mistake and managed to compensate for it.
The graceful curves that marked the outside of Terminus were also going to be used on the new Cutters, though the shape would be very different, keeping the diamond shape of the previous cutters to maximize cargo space.
That would serve the secondary purpose of making them more agile inside an atmosphere since Cutters were often deployed for planetary combat operations and didn’t carry drop pods for any mecha troops that they might be carrying. They weren’t even designed to accommodate them.
While they finished, Max had to spend his days doing interviews with potential applicants. Nico and Major Miller had vetted them before they were sent to him, so he had a good feeling that they would be capable, but finding a personality match for each Battalion Commander was also important.
Therefore, all five of them would be in the room with him and Nico when they did the interviews for Cutter Pilots, which were normally a team of four, either all on duty for combat or taking solo watches in six-hour shifts.
The ship design could take a larger crew without crowding, but even sorting out twenty Pilots in one hiring was going to be a nightmare, Max didn’t want to try to make it twenty-five or thirty if he didn’t have to.
They had all been arranged to arrive at once so that everyone in the Command Staff could see how they interacted, and how they got along with the Commanders.
The first part of the interview wasn’t a formal interview, for that reason. Instead, Max had arranged a lunch buffet and told everyone to get to know each other, in case they would be working together in the future.
A lot of them already did know each other and had grown up together, but that didn’t always mean that they would make a good team together, or even a better one than with people that they had just met today.
They let them mingle for half an hour before Colonel Lucci, their only female Battalion Commander, sent Max a message to call four applicants in for testing. She liked their chemistry and wanted to see how they would work together as a team, and how fast they could adapt to the new system with only the VR simulations guidance tooltips.
The simulation was very good, Max had checked it himself, so he called the four to go to the testing room, and the energy in the waiting room spiked. Since the Commander had called four at a time, and nobody else had left yet, it must be the first round of preliminary testing, in the opinion of the applicants.
Major Miller was the next to call for a group, and then the others until finally, Colonel Klinger called four very shocked young women from the corner of the room, where they had snuck a whole tray of snacks and were splitting a bottle of Rum.
Those were his type of people. They cared enough to show up when they were told and they could clearly work together, but everything else was just a waste of energy. They would all get called eventually. That was just how interviews worked.
Coordination in the meeting room didn’t always translate to chemistry in the cockpit though, and in the second round of tests, once these Applicants had been tested in random groups of four would rearrange those who didn’t have great initial scores into teams by their personality profiles, as determined by the AI, a benefit of having Major Payne around.
With her they could see everyone’s Skills, and have Personality Types analyzed on the spot, making this task much easier on Max’s patience.
Once everyone had been tested in groups, Max left them waiting a while before the second round, to see how they did under stress. These were all children of Reavers, but some of them were likely coddled all their lives and only sent here because their parents wanted them to do something more productive than work a retail shop front in the city, or whichever random job they had managed to find, despite their training.
The second round had the teams rearranged, and five short simulations were done by each team, one each by the Battalion Commanders to test them. Each was a disaster of some sort. An asteroid, a botched enemy firepower analysis, mechanical failure, and most interestingly, Major Miller had set them up for a rescue boarding action, which involved extremely skilled piloting to dock with the enemy vessel and get the Mecha deployed without getting destroyed.
“Did everyone find a team that they are happy with?” Max asked the Command team once the tests were done and the applicants were back in the waiting room.
“Yeah, though there are a couple of others who I think could be very capable teams, if the others don’t take them.” Colonel Klinger agreed.
“Alright, mark your top three on the data tablet and we will see what we get.”
The initial team that Klinger had picked ended up on everyone’s top 3 list, and not everyone got their top pick, but in the end, they did find five teams that everyone could agree were very capable Pilots, suitable for training to take Command of the new Cutters.
“Were any of the other Companies looking for Pilots for their smaller vessels? I know a lot of them are refurbishing the reclaimed ships from the battle.” Max asked.
“More than I can conveniently count. There are a lot of uncrewed vessels in the system right now.” Nico informed him.
“Good, send the test results of the ones that we’re not hiring to everyone else who needs Piloting teams. It should be a good reference, none of the applicants was actually bad at the job.” Max ordered, glad to finally be done with one more round of hiring.