As you're new and this is your first post I have to congratulate you on being brave enough to do it, I took that plunge myself recently and that's why I don't like that I gave your story a thumbs down, but we all signed up for honesty so here it is.

The reason this didn't work for me is that I feel I don't have any reason to care about whether these guys make it or not. Everyone can go ahead and wave 'But these are PEOPLE!' flags at me for that, but the fact is I'm not a monster, I just want to have some kind of emotional attachment to the people I read about, and I don't have that with this story. I'm supposed to root for these guys to make it, but it's hard when I don't even know why they're in space in the first place. What's they're job? Your protagonist has a captain's rank, okay, so military or civillian?  What was their mission or are they a commercial flight? You've got a bit of background about Earth being a shadow of its former self but it's limited.

Also you've set this story in the middle of space and by the time I reached the end of it I didn't feel like I'd been there, there's virtually no description of these surroundings. Anyone can say to me 'imagine you're in the middle of space in a ship' and I can do that, but part of the author's job is to offer a description that I wouldn't have come up with myself, giving me a new way of thinking about the familiar, in a way. All the way through I felt like I wanted to tell you 'I've been in loads of space ships, give me a ride in a model I haven't seen before and take me somewhere new.'

I get the sense that you picked a dialogue-driven style for a sense of urgency and you almost get it, but I found myself skipping passages because the talking eventually described little more than routines, it didn't feel urgent to me after the first five or so pages. Hearing these guys talk was a good way to start but to run the whole story like that didn't work for me. You've got some nice ideas behind this but I would have preferred them as narrative. Here's my favourite moment as an example:

'What now?  If I drop out of FTL for the rendezvous with Storis, I blow my chances of making Thanksgiving.  But if I press on for Thanksgiving, and the hull lets go sooner than the computer estimates, then we’re all dead.  The crew will do whatever I say.  They trust me.'

Great! I'm interested in the person who says that, I feel for them, that's the one time in the whole story when this captain stirred something inside me. Draw more of that sort of thing out and you'll start to improve this story straight away, only it doesn't have to be thinking or talking. If you make that sort of comment as narrative it can be equally effective, and better still it puts some of YOU in the story. It says in your profile that you're a retired coastguard aviator, so you've probably got a world of experience in life you can draw on and perhaps some of it's situations rather like this one, albeit on Earth, and at the moment I don't get any sense that this story could only have been written by you. (Granted, a story like that's a rather big achievement for ANY writer, but we can only try!)

Sorry if I've been hard enough on you already but I can't be honest without talking about one more thing:

' “Thanksgiving, sir.  They must have discovered it on Thanksgiving day.  Or maybe it’s overrun with turkeys.  You never know, Captain.” '

I've no problem with Sci-fi comedy but that's clearly not what you're writing, and humour like that feels wrong in this story. I admit I was amused at the image of a planet over-run with turkeys, but it shouldn't go here. In a Douglas Adams style universe there would be plenty of planets with names like Thanksgiving, but this story starts off with a serious feel and a scenario which says 'This is all about the suspense.' The comedy element just doesn't belong here.

If it's any consolation I'd read a redraft of this, there's plenty of potential in it - indeed more potential for an ending other than the captain simply going down with the ship because it's their duty.

Hi,

Chacron covers my thoughts pretty well. There is indeed a lot of potential here but by the end of the story I was skipping passages. There is no tension in the second half, but if you give us details about the characters, and something more at stake (like, say, a precious cargo they need to get somewhere) the story is immediately more interesting.

The main problem is that by the second half it is just a matter of time until everyone is saved and the reader loses interest.

That being said, the story has potential and there is nothing particular about the way you write that I would say needs improving. You might want to pepper the dialogue with some of the characters' personality or describe what the captain is doing (is he pacing around? does he run to the engine room to see for himself?).

Also, no self-respecting explorer would name a planet Thanksgiving. It may have sounded funny to you at the time of writing, but it just comes off as silly.

Stick with this story, make the captain more interesting and turn the tension up a notch. 

Well, you definitely know how to edit a work.  I didn't run into anything in the story that interrupted the flow of my reading.  In fact, this was one of the smoother reads I've run into in the event.  Very good job on that one.  There were two things that bugged me though:  the source of the impending failure and the ending.

Let's start with the engine/hull failure first.  I can buy that that there is a problem and that it could potentially go undetected for a period of time.  What I can't buy is that the engineers don't find a cause or suggest they shut the ship down immediately.  If you have an engine vibration problem and you believe that the vibration problem is the cause of your hull cracking up, wouldn't the first suggested solution be to shutdown the engines?  Working from the premise that a fracture shouldn't be able to progress once the stress that caused it is removed, that should have bought them all the time they need to do an EVA and see/fix what's going on outside.  Even if that's not the case, what about the raft you mentioned latter, that had about 30 hours of air on board?  The gist of my complaint is that all of the options were not considered, which puts the captain and crew into an amateurish light to me.

Now for the ending.  I had to re-read it a several times to figure out what happened and I'm still not quite sure it's actually what it looked like.  It does seem a touch odd for the captain to be as worried about his ship being about to fall apart and then immediately jumping to FTL as soon as the crew is off loaded.  There's not quite enough emotionally tying him to the vessel in my mind.  You mention that he doesn't have any family other than the crew.  That  would tie him to the people in his crew, not the ship itself.  You have some other references to his belief that the ship will take care of him, but, again, these are emotionally flat to me.  There needs to be a sense of sorrow or something the lead up to his devotion to the vessel before he decides to "go down with the ship".  As it is, it makes no sense.

Just thought of this, who was the non-human character?

You have a great deal of talent, so don't give up!  The fact that you can churn out just short of 4000 words as immaculately as you have is amazing in and of itself.  Unfortunately, the ending falls flat on me and it looks like you were missing elements from the challenge.  That leaves me uncomfortable down voting and at the same time uncomfortable up voting.  So, I'm just going to leave a comment and wish you good luck!

Keep at it!  With skills like that, you'll churn out a good one soon enough!

I'm not sure why, but for me, this story mostly works. I personally didn't have to care about any of your characters, though you give us enough on the captain to not want him to die. Given that he's the captain, the distance I felt between him and the crew seemed to be appropriate. That he only talks to people by comm was a GREAT element. Really underlined the separation between the leader and his followers.

Did you ever consider changing the end so that the captain WAS the ship? I think with only a few changes, this would actually work pretty well.

Anyway, the captain going down with the ship is nothing new, so it's not unexpected. It certainly feels appropriate.

It was VERY easy to read, and you definitely edited your grammar well. I think you can add more excitement into the story, but I personally enjoyed it.