Deep dive // Training

Training Regimen

Talent got him recruited. Repetition keeps him alive. The invented training life of StarTeam's EVA-1 — pool, suit, vacuum chamber, and crew drills.

The weekly shape (in-fiction)

Cass’s training week aboard the Vigil, as the lore describes it, is built around one principle: the op is the exam, so every drill is a rehearsal for the part that kills you.

• Pool days (2×): neutral-buoyancy training in the Vigil’s tank — a full-size mockup of the ship’s hull section, weighted suit, safety divers. This is where new techniques are learned slowly before they’re ever done fast.
• Suit days (2×): the Longhaul on, full duration — suit checks, tether drills, umbilical management, glove work. The fiction’s rule: if you can’t do it tired in the suit, you can’t do it at all.
• Chamber day (1×): the vacuum chamber — depressurization drills, breach response, the fizz protocols with Okafor watching the numbers.
• Crew drill (1×): the whole team — a simulated op with Voss running the board, Theo on comms, Rin plotting, Jinx flying cover. The crew that drills together aborts together.
• Rest (1×): enforced by Okafor, resented by Cass, non-negotiable. “The suit doesn’t get tired. You do.” (Invented dialogue.)

The drills that matter

The double check. Every EVA begins with the suit check run twice — once by the book, once by feel. In training, cadets run it until the second pass catches something the first missed. Cass still does both before every op; the lore says the day he stops is the day Voss grounds him.

The abort drill. The most-drilled and least-glamorous: recognizing the abort criteria and acting on them immediately — calling the scrub, coming inside, living with it. The Vigil’s EVA abort rate tripled after Cass made the roster (in-fiction), and the crew treats that as the program working.

The dead-stick. Driftline flights on partial thrust — one quad out, then two, then propellant imbalance — until the pilot can bring the rig home on whatever’s left. Cass’s dead-stick recoveries in the record started here, in the sim, hundreds of repetitions deep.

The forty minutes. Named for the SC 1212 cadet self-rescue: a suited trainee with a “failed” tether, a hot mic, and forty minutes of coached self-recovery. No touching, no shortcuts — just voice, procedure, and patience. Theo runs it; Cass coaches it; every EVA-qualified crewmember has passed it.

The long sit. Endurance conditioning for extended EVA: hours in the suit, managing air, water, heat, and attention. The Long Dark’s seventy-two hours had a training ancestor — progressively longer solo suit sits, Okafor monitoring, the crew rotating through the comm watch.

Teaching

Cass teaches the way he was taught on the Ring: demonstrate, then drill, then trust. His cadet lectures (in-fiction) are famous for being short — “The suit is the mission. Check your seals. Nobody drifts alone. Questions?” — and his practical sessions are famous for being long. The lore’s instructors’ notes describe his teaching as “patience with a stopwatch”: infinite tolerance for slowness, zero tolerance for skipped steps.

The standard he holds

The fiction is explicit that Cass is not the most talented EVA specialist in the sector’s history — he’s the most prepared. The training regimen is the point: talent got him recruited at eighteen, but the eleven minutes at the Kestrel were dock-rigger conditioning, and everything since has been deliberate practice. “Slow is smooth, smooth is sealed” isn’t a motto; it’s a training outcome.

Source notes

• All training content is invented by this site’s writers; see Methodology.
• Related: Abilities, Abilities, Explained, Team.