Friday, April 5, 2013

True Engineering

  Seeing as you may very well have never seen a true engineer at work, it appears that my duty is to describe what exactly a true engineer does.  An engineer requires little or no knowledge of something to figure it out.  The best engineers can examine an obscure object and determine what it does and how it does it.  The best flavor of engineers had ADD or ADHD, allowing them to be more creative and to flourish when doing several things at once.  Such engineers cause total efficiency to be greater than the sum of its parts, meaning that doing everything simultaneously takes less time than doing one task after the other.  Finally, true engineers are capable of making things into something you never thought they could form.  They are inventors and problem solvers, working with what they have to make what they need.  This is where devices like the potato clock and the Raspberry Pi come from.  All this taken into account, RoboRabbit knew just what to do next.
    "Time to fly," he said as he began heading back to the vehicle which brought him here.  Unfortunately his head soon started to hurt so, rather than heading back, he decided to simply walk back.
    After arriving at their respective vehicles (aside from Bloopanda, whose vehicle was disrespective), they had taken off in a general that way direction (the direction in which I am pointing).  RoboRabbit had given the controls to Megano while he worked on some sort of project, but as they approached the edge of the galaxy he moved his project over to the turret controls so that he could access both at once, for there was a blockade blocking them and their aides from crossing the blocking blockade.
    Now RoboRabbit began shooting every which way with his turret, but not any warlock ways.  Every shot hit its target as they got closer and closer to the blockade.  Soon enough, Killer Kangaroo rook up the other turret's controls and began blasting away.  Than RoboRabbit remembered that he has a 20-page report on urchins to write, so he fashioned some spare parts into a typewriter with one hand while he worked on his other project with the other hand and took over the turret controls with his feet, all the while never missing an opportunity to destroy an enemy ship.
    But then his feet slipped on the controls, messing up his entire rhythm.  He dropped his tool in one hand and paused the writing of his report as he centered himself and, one at a time, began doing each task again.  The blockade was to thick that, with only one individual manning a turret, a path through the enemies took twice as long to make, so their ship had to slow to a crawl.  Its lack of appendages made such a feat nearly impossible, so it was really more of an inch or perhaps a slow slither.
    RoboRabbit placed his feet back on the turret controls and slowly got back up to speed, shooting the enemies.  With the ship completely surrounded and completely stopped, they were no longer forging a path but fighting to save their lives.  Then RoboRabbit had an ingenious idea, not than such a description really makes sense.  I mean, have you ever stopped to think about the word "ingenious"?  I'm not saying that the idea was not genius, because it certainly was, that's the point.  So where are we getting the "in" prefix, which typically means something along the lines of "not"?  One might conclude from this that the inventor of this word was not the sharpest carrot in the field, which is ironic because of the alleged meaning of the word.  RoboRabbit, however, was the sharpest carrot in the field, as demonstrated by the idea he just thought of and started implementing.
    While still controlling the turret very adeptly, he began dismantling the controls and altering them.  After various manipulations and additions of doohickies and thingymabobs, he remantled the controls and, once they were fully mantled again, then he programmed a few functions into the system.  All this he did while shooting down* every ship in sight, one by one.  Once he was finished programming the controls, he stopped controlling them, yet his modifications caused them to continue shooting ships with accuracy and precision at approximately the same speed he had been shooting them at.  This freed up all of his appendages to work on his project and report, which he made short work of.  Then RoboRabbit activated his project, which was some sort of complex device.  It took a few seconds to boot up, then a shield coalesced around the ship.  At the same time he wrote the last sentence in his report.

*This takes significant skill as there in no down in space.