May 3rd, 063 SDE:
The figure leaned forward adjusting the telescope to bring the object into view. It was sheer luck they’d even found it. Tracking it had proven difficult, the object was moving at 863,402,279 kilometers per hour when they found it but it nearly gave them a slip when it started decelerating five months ago.
So far the public didn’t even know they had found it, they were too busy distracted by local wars. The news there wasn’t the best however, the figure didn’t want to think about it. The lab shook, reminding her that the Confederacy was getting closer. Without turning from the telescope, she spoke up, “More bombs?”
“No, just a Confederacy bomber crashing into an old farm down the road. Looks like our fighters shot her down and the bombs went off when she hit the ground.”
She sighed, “I wish the damn diplomats would realize we shouldn’t be fighting each other,” she pointed at the latest image they’d made with the telescopes, “No natural space object moves at anywhere near 900 million kilometers per hour. Hell, such a speed is mind boggling, nothing natural or otherwise moves that fast and they certainly don’t decelerate like this thing did. I’ve certainly never seen a natural object slow down without some force acting on it and this one seemed to do it on its own.”
“Yeah I know, but try convincing our leaders. I don’t think they believed us.”
“Well they will soon enough, the object has finally slowed to reasonable velocities,” she said, marking where she found it and adding to her astrochart. With the new data, she drew a line and noted something. “Oh this is interesting.”
“What?”
“Look here, at their present speed and velocity changes, the object will enter the vicinity of Mau'sar in just six hours.”
“Mau’sar!? That’s close, think we will be able to capture our first decent image?”
“I’d say so, go get the film case and hurry. We only have six hours if we are going to record their arrival. I’m going to adjust the high-resolution telescopes. Try to capture as many...” the building rocked again, “Well, assuming the Confederacy doesn’t bomb us in the middle of the discovery of a lifetime, that is.”
A smile on her face, she started working on the telescopes. Occasionally looking closer to home but it seemed the fighting had moved away from their little lab that was by the day getting closer to the frontline than she would have liked. Mostly from long-range Confederate Bombers, but still. She just cursed the military for setting up a tank factory in the town. If that factory wasn’t here, the bombers wouldn’t be bombing the area. Only good news was that the local airbase typically shot the bombers down, but occasionally one would drop some bombs on the town. It seemed today's bombing was already over, so that was a non-factor.
Time flew faster than she cared to focus on and before she knew it they had all their high res telescopes pointed at Mau’sar, their neighboring planet. Little was known about it outside of folklore and the more recent observations via telescope. With high res magnification, the latest images revealed a large, rocky-looking world with three medium-sized moons. Beyond that and the hazy reddish orange color of the planet it was hard to say much about it.
Turning on the recorders, she gazed through the telescope and took in the image. She gasped as she took in the first somewhat clear image of the alien object. It was larger than any ship they’d built, be it air or sea. She’d estimated several kilometers across making it roughly on par in size with an asteroid. The hull appeared black in places, others silver, some had a coppery orangish color to them, but even at this distance it was hard to recognize it as a ship. Clearly they needed some kind of better telescope for a better image but no such thing existed.
Suddenly a bright stream of pulsating blue light erupted from the object. The stream shot towards the planet and after a couple of seconds connected. At first nothing seemed to happen, but then changes occurred. She almost dismissed it as an artifact when the surface of Mau’sar seemed to crack, but the cracks grew radiating out from the beam, as a red light started to roil on the surface. In several places, she saw what looked like massive bomb blasts sending smoke and fire high into the air. Volcanic eruption, maybe? They’d never been able to record one on Mau’sar before nor had one ever been recorded from the air, so she couldn’t say for sure.
Minutes passed after that before anything else of note happened. The cracks had grown wider, the ground seeming to cave in as more fire filled the gaps. The images of the surface growing ever more violent before suddenly the planet... broke apart, entire chucks drifting different ways. The alien ship stopped projecting the blue stream of light, while weaving between the large drifting rocks. “Did you see that?”
“I... I did, but what does that mean?”
“I’m not sure, yet, but we can’t sit on this. Make copies of the film, we will show it in town on the morrow.”
Richards stepped away from the console and almost bumped into the captain. He smoothly avoided that and said, “How do things look?”
“Break up of the planet went perfectly, spatial anchors and gravity nets are catching the debris as planned. Cooling spikes will be ready to deploy in twenty minutes and by tomorrow we can get to work.”
“Wonderful,” commented Countryman and he meant it. Planet-scale mining of this degree wasn’t something they had previously attempted, but after surveying the system they’d discovered that the local asteroid field was sparse with some materials they needed being clear across the system. The third planet had everything they needed but the richest deposits were deep in the core. If they had been closer to the crust they could have tried shattering just the crust and lifting the materials up. Turning the planet into a debris field did however have another benefit. Once they started work on the Enterprise, large sections of the ship would be rendered uninhabitable; as such they needed a place to construct temporary housing and place the industrial modules they’d be removing from the ship. A planetary fragment would be as good as any, being close to a connected work site would suit them just perfectly.
Turning to Misaki he asked, “Any good-looking fragments?”
“Several meet the parameters, but they’re all core fragments; we can’t touch them till they cool.”
“In that case, we are done for the day,” said Countryman turning to Richards, “Now then you and Smith have been holed up in the design lab for months, what have you got for me?”
She sighed and walked over to the master strategic display in the middle of the bridge. No one was really using it, but the bridge was a little sparse at the moment. Eri had run off to join the shuttle flights the moment she wasn’t needed and Kaori was off teaching a class in starship tactical systems. Besides there wasn’t much for her to do during a mining operation, unless they needed to defend themselves, and they were missing roughly 40% of their weapons array and a proportionate amount of their hull plating. Not exactly ideal, and it meant they would lose any peer-tier match-up; even inferior foes would give them a challenge they could ill afford. Thankfully, they had other options for keeping would be attack ships away.
Countryman couldn’t help glancing at the empty tactical consoles on the port side, or the empty helm at the front of the bridge. Even his chair up on the command balcony looked a little lonely. Greyman was however quite busy at the moment with a personnel review.
Richards pulled up some blueprints, centered herself and switched to presentation mode, “We’ve been hard at work finalizing the refit blueprints for the Enterprise. Final blueprints for Projects Battlehawk, Sabre and Hammer are in as well.”
Countryman blinked “and here I thought we’d never finish those designs.”
“Yeah I didn’t either, but we have. Project Kingdom is lagging behind, but Smith and I are confident we will have something presentable in a few months.” She took a breath and brought his attention to the blueprints for the Enterprise. “Taking advantage of the dual space frame construction, we are going to split the Enterprise along her horizontal longitudinal axis. With the dorsal and ventral frames separated, we will then build a new third space frame to fit between them. This will allow us to increase the length of the ship to seven thousand five hundred and thirty meters in length, the longer hull structure will also require the span of her to widen out to five thousand seven hundred meters, and the new structure will provide us room for an additional ninety seven decks.”
She opened a series of projections for the interior, “Our primary engineering spaces will be moved into these new sections, including our main engines and all eight currently existing fusion reactors. We will be adding two additional reactors to this count and increasing the size of the engines. The number will remain unchanged as five engines proved to be an effective balance.” She turned the focus to the nacelles, “The same can’t be said for the nacelles, we will have to lengthen them from sixteen hundred meters to twenty-four hundred. This will give us space for the larger warp engines our new mass will require, but also space for new subengines. Ten more per nacelle to be specific. Using Ruri’s revised warp theories, we have also completely redesigned the interior of the nacelles, allowing for smoother, more efficient generation of the warp field. Our cruising speed will remain unchanged but now we can maintain warp five for extended periods with less power. If our simulations are correct, we might also be able to reach warp six for brief periods. Current calculations show the engines would have to be shut down to cool after about 18 hours, and they’d need about two hours to rest after a full-length sprint at warp six. “With all those changes, we are going to replace the entire secondary hull with a larger, improved and better-designed superstructure, with room for 45 decks and space for two antimatter reactors. Far more power than we might need, but the additional reactor space would future proof the ship for later refits. I’ve also consulted Ruri, and a cadre of specialists she recommended for a full redesign of the ship’s beam arrays. We will be increasing from two arrays to eight full arrays. Each with dedicated micro fusion generators, and a direct high energy line to allow for rapid recharge of the capacitor banks. Turret layouts have been adjusted as well to accommodate new particle cannon mounts. We will have another four banks of heavy particle cannons in quad turrets, and an additional eighteen medium banks in dual turrets. We will also be increasing the Electro-lance emplacement count to eight hundred, and our photon missile turret count to 1200. Finally we will be adding one hundred and eight banks of light particle cannon turrets across the ship. They'll be dual modal turrets capable of firing rapid fire focused particle streams, or particle flak bursts as required. Each turret will carry two cannons. She refocused the blueprints on the hangers, “We will also be expanding the hangers, the original capacity proved a little light, so we found room for one thousand five hundred auxiliary vehicles. That includes space for six hundred SF-1204s, and three hundred SFB-1208 sparrows. Our count of X-1205 assault shuttles will increase to four hundred thirty ships, we will keep the count of vulcan dropships at 20 and the number of Arctic Class cargo shuttles at fifty, which leaves us room for a planned one hundred corvettes.”
“What about personnel shuttles?”
“I didn’t include them in the count but our secondary hangers could house a couple hundred shuttles.”
“Nice, and about those corvettes. How is the design project coming?”
“Waiting for the completion of the Microwarp drive. We drew up the design requirements and general size of the vessel. But beyond that, we can’t do much more without the specs for a warp engine small enough to fit on the ship. Last I checked, Ruri planned to use some of our 1205’s as a test bed for her prototypes but it might be a few months before we see any work.”
Countryman nodded, he was familiar with the project. Ruri had started the theoretical work about two months into their eight year trip to this system. After years of being able to really use their fighters, they didn’t want to give up the ability to move ships at faster than light speeds. Miniaturizing their warp engines to fit on a fighter however looked theoretically tricky. So they were working towards a slightly easier task, making them small enough to fit on a large shuttle like the X-1205. They’d already worked out a way for the X-1205 to carry three fighters at once. It would involve adding extendable mounting struts to the ventral and both sides of the shuttle, or they’d have to give up the port and starboard turrets. Modified airlocks could be installed to allow transit of crew between shuttle and fighter. Add a warp drive into the mix and they could deploy a half squadron of fighters at range from the carrier, and since the shuttles were much smaller they were harder to detect. This would make long range carrier operations infinitely more viable and expand the operational envelope of their carriers. “I can live with that. “
She went back to the blueprint. “Now what Smith and I are most proud of is the rework of the residential and industrial spaces. We redesigned the ship to have twelve primary residential hubs built around a central market and park space. With each hub being designed to comfortably house two hundred and fifty thousand residents. Which gives us space for three million souls on the Enterprise. Factor in the military quarters, and secondary residential spaces and we can house another half a million souls.” She paused to show him the upper decks, “We converted the upper decks into dedicated governmental residences and military quarters for high ranking personnel. Not to mention we built in a proper dedicated council chamber for the Council to use. Along with offices nearby for them to conduct their jobs outside of their duties at the meeting table.
Countryman listened along and nodded as she showed him every detail. Every rework, the computer upgrades, the new water systems, the expanded aquaponics deck, the massive deck wide facilities for the ship’s marine contingent to conduct their wargames and the complete redesign of the industrial deck. They’d have more and larger nanofabricators and disassemblers. It was a real city ship from the ground up, not the series of makeshift modifications they’d worked with for decades and it would solve some of their overcrowding, at least for a time. They would need more ships, but that was why they were building a fleet.
Finally she focused on the hull itself, “Right, and one more detail. Ruri’s new fourth gen armor schemes solved our previous issues with thicker plating, so we will be expanding the main belt to one hundred and twenty meters thick, with a secondary inner belt of sixty meters, all of it made of the newer Titan II alloy which should keep the weight of the heavier plating down enough that our ability to maneuver won’t be significantly impacted. In fact, we should be even more agile than before, despite the increase in mass and size.”
“Neat, now what else do you have for me?”
“Well there is the Battlehawk and Sabre. But first I want to show you our plans for a second cityship, we based her on the original design of the Enterprise but we fixed all the problems we ran into when we used her as a city ship. From the start she’ll have dedicated residential hubs and the proper facilities expected of a city. We also expanded the hangers, and added light particle cannon mounts for screening against small ships and increased the armor shell to sixty meters thick with a secondary inner belt of thirty meters. Basically a smaller version of the new Enterprise with a proportionally smaller capacity for new residents, about two million souls total.”
“We shall build her as soon as possible then. But I’m most interested in your Project Hammer.”
“Well as you know the idea was to design a dedicated industrial vessel able to build anything we need, including starships to that end...” she began while bringing up the blueprints for her new Hammer Class Yardships, which were basically warp-capable mobile shipyards.