Bluffing

<snip>
“We keep chucking probes at it til one finds it way through”
“We don’t have that many probes to spare” Cass said.
“Then, we remote pilot some of the old bugs and midgets in too…theres a ton on the landing bay that will fly once me, Jamie, Pancake and Solvay patch ‘em up a bit…., maybe throw in a few escape pods too…it’s not like we have a full crew, we can spare them…”
“I dunno Kat…” Cass said “We could use the shuttles…”
“Come on, we have scores of the things, for a handful of us. Most, will never be able to take people again anyway…why not put ‘em to good use huh?...And what use could be better than saving Jay?”
</snip>

"You know, that makes sense. I've already done a quick inventory of the state of shuttles here, and there are a few that would take a lot of repairs. One has a hull fracture that would vent atmosphere in minutes, and another one has a life support system that is totally shot." Jamie said, joining in.

"Are they repairable?" Cass asked, sticking to her 'we may need them' frame of mind.

"Well, yeah. Everything is fixable. But that's just a couple of the starbugs. If I rip out the life support from the one with the fracture, I can fix the one with the dodgy system. That gives us one fully working bug, and one that has no atmosphere. Perfect for remote pilot for something like this." He said.

"That's a good Idea. Consolidate our resources to a smaller fleet of higher quality ships." Katrina said, happy that her idea was holding water.

"You're right though, there are a lot of shuttles down there. Half of the midgets have dodgy bearings on the legs, and there's not enough in storage to fix everything, unless I canibalise some of the ships in worse shape. I can see where all the past engineers have tried to fix everything, but while they've done a bang up job - don't get me wrong, I'm not criticising, half the repairs are patch jobs that them through tests." He said, stopping for a breather, and to give everyone a chance to take in the idea.

"We don't have time for the work it would take for that." Cass said. "Jay doesn't have more than a couple of days."

"So why don't we launch all the probes, and we can work on making new ones with the leftover materials from rebuilding the drive room?" Katrina said, eager to get something sorted.

"I know we don't have much time to work here, but if Alex helps me, I can get four or five ships ready for this within the day. And that's only because three of those need a huge amount of work to get them spaceworthy, so can go out right now." Jamie said. "If the Roo are clever, they'll leave one or two probes to get through, to make us think its safe. They'll be able to jam the probes output anyway."

"So, what are you suggesting?" Cass asked. "If they let some probes through, won't they let a shuttle through if it has no life signs?"

"We can fake life signs. Or Jam their scanners ourselves, so they won't be able to tell that there's no one on board. They'll have to either blow it up, or call our bluff." Jamie said. "If anyone has a better idea, we'll get about 5 shots at getting ships through. For breaking a defense net, I can't think of a better plan."

<tag. Can anyone else think of a plan?>