"Your generation ship plans rely heavily on claiming... Any complex machinery, especially if it experiences heavy wear, comes with a maintenance burden. Still handy though."

“I meant to focus on the economic elements, not the engineering. You'd hardly want to rebuild your ship in flight, no.”

"I'll make sure to read it." She closes her virtual eyes and makes a 'hmm' pose.

Teytis does not interrupt this indicated thoughtfulness. Her side has plenty of thinking to do at merely collaborating-humans speed.

Eventually, "Teytis, would you mind producing a small item with your claiming for the purpose of seeing if it continues to exist the same way in my world? A variety of tools and devices could be made more efficient or more redundant in various ways if the patterns you impress hold there, I'm potentially interested and would try to find something worth trading for it."

“That's no trouble at all. We have standard test devices for the purpose. And,” link, “here's a guide to various applications of what we can provide.”

A white flat bit pops up from below Teytis's side of the table, flies over to the door, pulls it open for a second, then zips back to the table carrying a small object.

The object is a dense cube with a display currently reading “All normal.” on one face, and an electrical jack of some sort on another face.

She starts chewing on the documentation in the background. "...Battery? Or just useless test thing?"

“Useless test thing! It's a set of sensors — or you could say, physics experiments — that are designed to check that our other artifacts will function as expected. Of course, there could be some weird result we've never seen before that this doesn't catch, but it's the best tool we've thought up so far.

“All you need to do is carry it into your world and if it can detect any change it'll report that. In principle there's a chance of a destructive failure, but it's been designed to have very little energy so it shouldn't do worse than make a loud noise. The detailed sensor data is available on the port, and if you want to decode that outside of Milliways you'll want this protocol spec…”

"Sensible that if you're going to give things away they be both informative and not worth stealing." The droid grabs it with a robotic arm. "I can rig something to read that data spec, but not here, in my workshop. Unless you want to save me the trouble and make an adapter to xBus or xPlus format-" [transmit specs] "-But those are synchronous packeted methods, probably more trouble than it's worth and it's not really your problem."

“You're probably as fast as we are at software but I can do the physical layer adapter easy. Give me a minute and I'll at least have it encapsulated in xBus if not native.” She buys some components from Bar, and metal and plastic form into a compact plug-in device with obviously temporary wires plugged into her avatar.

“But back to an earlier subject — another reason to be cautious about introducing tech. If you bring home any devices that are obviously unusual, they're not just irreproducible; people will want to know how you got them. And if people learn from that that there is the possibility of leaving the ship in flight —”

"Mm, hardware layer's the hard part, yes. I'm considering that as well, yes. As for the other thing, as much as information suppression and lies are - unpalatable - if they end up being necessary to the safety of the ship I am not above these tactics. But that's risky in addition to going against my code of ethics, so hopefully I can settle on a set of technologies and resources that don't make it necessary."