Meet Lydia! She is a Terran member of the Red Raven crew, serving as the team's warp drive engineer. Lydia is shy and reserved, prone to fumbling with words when she's put on the spot, unless that spot happens to be talking about her field of work, at which point she will almost stumble over her own tongue trying to gush about the technical details of spacetime geometry and theoretical science. When she is posting on the Holonet, however, she becomes quite bold, typing out scathing posts in defense of her favorite shows when she happens across a bad post on her forums. Lydia is a big fan of all kinds of television series but has a particular interest in Terran supernatural dramas, often letting a long series play on a setup in her work space while she's tinkering away at her latest project. She wears a very puffy coat to stay warm in space, and when she pulls her hood up all the little snake faces in her hair like to peek out from the fur lining around her head. It is extremely cute when they do this.
Warp theory is extremely intricate, complicated and dangerous. It's not fully understood, even by modern professionals, and is one of the great hurdles in expanding the reach of the Federation of Planets beyond the Sol system. Modern warp drives allow ships to travel at near-light speeds by harnessing the dimensional currents at the edge of spacetime, a bit like Terran ships of old catching a tradewind but infinitely more complicated. Lydia's job is to make sure the Jackrabbit's warp drives are intact and deploy successfully without tearing the ship to pieces. On long flights she works directly with Haley, the pilot-slash-navigator, in order to work out the precise calculations to maneuver their ship safely through mostly-empty space, which is still quite dangerous because of that "mostly". While Amy is helpful as an extra set of hands and mechanical insight, she doesn't really understand warp theory herself, so she just wrenches under Lydia's instruction to help get things working more quickly.
Lydia isn't an ordinary warp drive engineer, however. Of course she isn't! Lydia is special because she's been researching and developing what she calls "The Pocket Drive", a piece of technology that harnesses theoretical pocket space, or the space between dimensional planes, by poking an entry and exit hole into the fabric of spacetime, connecting distant points in the way a sewing needle threads a fold of cloth. Thanks to her Terran peculiarities Lydia enjoys the benefit of a distributed network of cerebral cortexes, effectively using her many snake-hair brains to maintain several threads of thought at once through her central brain. The objective of the pocket drive is to spend as little time as possible outside of spacetime, a bit like a fish leaping briefly out of water, in order to safely arrive at a destination point. Not all of Lydia's test probes have emerged at their destination points, but she is confident her technology is currently stable for ships of about the Jackrabbit's size. Because of this the pocket drive is not suitable for towing large vessels back to their destination, although it does make escaping a hot location quick and easy. Well, mostly-easy.
The crew actually came to meet Lydia by way of their unlawful side-hustle. Amy likes to talk with the stardock workers in the off-hours, and she got some good info in exchange for a smoke and a light. Word was an unmarked transport ship refueling at Titan Garden was enroute from Terra to Neptune carrying an extremely valuable data chip for Delta Astronautical Solutions, one of the Sol system's big tech corporations. The team of Amy, Haley, Keera and Slug combined their talents to sneak aboard, find the chip and replace it with a same-model data chip recovered from a recent salvage job which mostly contained junk data and image files. As it turns out, one of Delta's lead engineers was working on a breakthrough theory just before she was fired, and her research notes were being moved to the company's central lab on Neptune. Delta never found out who swapped the data chip on that starship but a net-savvy engineer with no job and a lot of free time on her hands sure did. When Lydia showed up on Titan Garden a month or so later and explained, shyly, who she was, the crew were happy to return her notes, which were heavily encrypted and mostly useless to them anyways. Grateful to be reunited with her life's work, Lydia was offered a spot on the crew, as Red Raven does a lot of traveling, and so offers a lot of opportunities to test her warp theories. It works out for the best this way, since Lydia had some deep concerns about mass-production pocket drives poking Swiss-cheese holes all over spacetime, if it was just her and her latest team of misfits doing it the long-term results might not be so bad as they could be...