Headcanon Wednesday: how not to crash your brand new cross-species spaceship
A team of six mathematicians working on the Normandy SR-1 project have a nightmare job: they have sole responsibility for converting everything into base-10.
The Normandy’s design schematics are turian, and arrive in base-6. It takes the engineering team a few days to realize this, because it didn’t occur to anyone from either species; it’s only when an intern frowns at engine output optimization and determines that those numbers would make space collapse in on itself if they were accurate that anyone gives a turian’s six fingers compared to a human’s ten any thought.
Everything screeches to a halt (which causes a minor political uproar everyone - from both species - on the project ignores). Before any real work can start, all numbers have to be converted into base-10 so the humans can understand the math and build properly.
Those six mathematicians go home with headaches every night. Sure, they could run the numbers through a conversion program and be done in seconds…but given that humanity crashed the Mars Climate Orbiter because the flight system used metric and the ground system used imperial, no one’s interested in taking chances with the Normandy.
This headcanon of Sara’s is still my favorite of all time.
