Bravo Fleet
Summary
Lieutenant Commander Robert Briggs, Starfleet, is the Chief Engineer of the Norway-class light cruiser USS Montrose. A product of the rough-hewn frontier colonies, Briggs grew up in an environment where technology rarely worked as intended and survival meant figuring out how to fix it yourself. His upbringing forged an officer with an instinctive feel for machinery, a deep distrust of theory without application, and a refusal to accept “impossible” as an answer to the universe’s challenges.
Appearance
Briggs stands at 6’0″ with solid, broad shoulders. His dark blond hair, usually unkempt, is streaked with silver. His steel-gray eyes have the restless, assessing look of someone who is constantly troubleshooting something.
There is usually a streak of plasma residue or grease somewhere on his uniform, and a plasma spanner within reach. A jagged scar along his left forearm, the result of a conduit breach he contained with his bare hands, speaks to a career spent in places where procedure gives way to survival.
Personality
Briggs is an unrepentant pain in the ass. He questions orders, mocks bureaucracy, and has been known to throw a spanner across Main Engineering when someone uses the word “optimal” without understanding what it means. Beneath the profanity and impatience lies a fiercely loyal officer with a near-mythic talent for keeping starships mission capable.
Briggs is allergic to bullshit. If your plan will not work, he will tell you so, loudly and in front of everyone. He has no patience for careerists, and he despises officers who hide behind their rank rather than their competence. Yet, he is also deeply protective of the Montrose and its crew.
History
Born in Port Ellison on Vega IX, Robert Briggs grew up where scarcity was a fact of life and nothing worked quite the way it was supposed to. His father maintained atmospheric scrubbers, his mother repaired cargo haulers, and by the time he was sixteen, Briggs had rebuilt half the power grid with parts salvaged from scrap freighters. He learned engineering the hard way—not from textbooks, but from things that broke when lives depended on them.
He entered Starfleet Academy on his second attempt, scraping through the entrance exam and spending most of his first year on academic probation. Theoretical warp dynamics baffled him, but hands-on repair challenges were where he thrived. By the time he graduated, Briggs had earned a reputation as a field engineer whose solutions worked even if they made instructors cringe.
As an ensign aboard the USS Nadir, Briggs rerouted power through a damaged warp manifold during a Gorn ambush, saving the ship but violating half a dozen safety protocols. As assistant chief aboard the USS Callisto, he devised a method for stabilizing degraded structural integrity fields mid-combat — a technique later added to Starfleet’s engineering manuals. Aboard the USS Durance, he kept the ship operational for 27 days behind Breen lines after a catastrophic warp injector failure, an act that earned him the Grankite Order of Tactics, Class of Excellence.
By the time Starfleet tapped him to lead Montrose’s Engineering Department, Briggs had long since become known as the miracle worker you would hate to work with.