Character Concept (A Quantum Mechanic)

[The Yosemite Bear]

yes, a regular old working class joe, who happens to fix time machines, and FTL capable vehicles, yes I know the title is a bad pun, but what level of power would someone have if their technology represents the abilty to fix such vehicles, like a redneck with a 50s through 70s american muscle car?

[Simon_Jester]

That depends. The problem is that time travel and FTL are technology indistinguishable from magic as far as we can tell; if they work at all there's no way to tell how much energy it would take to make them work.

Now, if we're talking about relativistic spacecraft, or craft with some kind of weapon or defense that has measurable effects we can calculate the energy requirements of... then we'd be cooking with gas.

[Shroom Man 777]

Perhaps leave the technology the Joe uses to fix the magical supertech shit also vague and magical and supertech? He might not really even understand the shit, or he might just be so damn lazy and casual in his description of his techy stuff.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

It's not new- David Gerrold used it as a naval rating in the Star Wolf series.

Third Class Engineering Apprentice Gatineau, reporting aboard, is sent on a wild goose chase for a left- handed moebius wrench; it's a good literary device for a tour of the ship, meet the cast sort of thing. It is also, I understand, a,long and (dis?)honourable tradition.

It's an interesting ship- the crew are unionised, the navigating officer's a licensed warlock, the captain's dead in a tank of alien food preservative apart from the cyber implants, the security-officer-acting-exec is a renegade genetically superhanhanced killing machine- it's all very strange.

Eventually he figures it out, qualifies as a second class quantum mechanic and goes on to be moderately heroic. Anyway, we are basically talking about highly skilled blue collar work here, in clean room conditions dealing with insanely complicated things, tools and object being worked on, that are usually part of some installation or other.

Problem solving skills and knowledge of physics, yes, but there's probably a real limit to how much of their work a quantum mechanic can take home, unless this stuff is so extremely common, spaceships as available as cars, that it isn't all that special being a quantum mechanic anymore.

[Cykeisme]

I'm a little lost in this thread here, I'm not sure what anyone is referring to.
Yosemite, what do you mean when you ask "what level of power would someone have"? Is it a question about the potency of their abilities (knowledge and expertise) or do you mean the literal amount of energy they can do work with, with the machines at their disposal?

Assuming it's the former, I'll also assume you mean hard sci-fi.. and then give a response from soft sci-fi anyway.
Does Han Solo tinkering with and hot rodding the hyperdrive on the Millenium Falcon count as an example? A lowlife smugger having a working applicable knowledge of a machine capable of hurtling a craft at 20 million times the speed of light by (as far as we know) converting all its matter into tachyons, and making it work better than its manufacturer's specifications, seems to be pretty crazy by present-day standards.

[Sarevok]

A good analogy would be star wars. Personal spacecraft seems almost as common as automobiles. Most people in the star wars galaxy also treat their starships like cars. They don't really understand the maths and physics behind faster than light travel. Just like most of us can't describe an internal combusion engine with engineering drawings and equations. But they can still modify stuff, plug and play addons and so on. Take Hans Millenium Falcon for example. He was a good for nothing two bit smuggler. But that does not stop him from making modification to a craft that to us is extremely advanced.

In terms of power ? Well civilians can mount blasters and light lasers on their ships. Joe Redneck from a rim worldwith his pick up truck equivalent YT-1300 could easily devastate a 20th century tech level planet.

[Galvatron]

Parker from Alien would qualify, I think.

[Patrick Degan]

It's a pun at least as old as the movie Forbidden Planet —Chief Quimby uses it to compare his work on the lashed-up klaestron relay transmitter to the best work any of that class of engineer could manage.