Chapter Two Seventeen The Long March to Anchorage (Patreon)

September 8th, 008 SDE:

Felki stepped through the force field and felt a tingle go through her, along with a feeling of relief. Spotting Captain Countryman she sat down next to him, “Is there a reason you didn’t shield the whole ship?”

The man nodded, “There is, but I can sum it up with one word; power.”

“Surely running the shields isn’t that much of a drain on your reactors, we keep them active all the time.”

“No, but we’ve changed the equation. Wasn’t that hard for us.” Countryman gestured at the bulkhead. “Our armor was always designed to include an energy converter array, it wasn’t hard to modify that...”

She blinked, “Wait? You are drawing power from the storm?”

“We are, but activating the shields interferes with that.”

One of the transport captains commented, “I can imagine the fuel-saving benefits, that’s quite useful actually.”

Another spoke up, “We might be able to use that ourselves. Hmm, but it would require a complete redesign of our shield grids. Sadly we aren’t immune to Isanir radiation, but the challenge just might be worth it.”

Felki chuckled, “Well go knock yourself out, I’m sure the Refuge would be happy enough to let you use a lab.”

Countryman replied, “I don’t see an issue, so long as you share the results of your work with us. Consider it the payment for the facilities.”

Felki replied, “Sounds reasonable, but that wasn’t what we were invited over to discuss, now was it?”

“No,” said Countryman as a couple more figures filed into the room, “I wanted to discuss the recent defeat at The Lodge.”

Felki frowned, “I’m not sure we have much to talk about. They just had too many ships for us to deal with.”

“Perhaps, but I’ve always found it helpful to review my defeats, more so than my victories.

“I’m not sure this really counts as one of yours, all you did was cover our retreat.”

“Perhaps not but the point still stands,” Countryman turned, “Richards, Kaori your analysis?”

Richards spoke first while bringing up a few holograms, “I looked over their equipment, the minefields and railgun platforms were good ideas but there is room for improvement.”

Felki leaned forward, “Why look at the equipment?”

“What worked and didn’t work with your tools is just as important as your tactics,” replied Countryman, “and the railguns had the virtue of being simple. But as I saw from the recordings, they were held back by limited range. Largely due to the shell you were using disintegrating after about forty thousand kilometers, and you were already using a fairly hefty shell.”

Felki knew what he was referring to, the shells they were using weighed several tons each, and were packed with multiple megatons of explosive filler. Anything less and they wouldn’t have had the impact they did in the fight. Energy shields were very, very good at deflecting kinetic weapons unless they were very large, and very heavy. So they had been using shells with a bore of 137.2 cm and a length of 342.9 cm. That was a fairly large shell as projectiles went, much much larger than anything a seagoing naval ship would have ever fielded. Shells that had then been accelerated to velocities only made possible by being in hyperspace. “I take it you have a better idea?”

“Of course, we could draw from history,” said Countryman while Richards pulled up a new hologram, then the woman launched into a description.

“This is the DP-4, it’s a rather dated defense platform, it was first used over a century ago during a period of time now referred to as the First Colonial War. It proved fairly effective during that time period, and for good reason. The DP-4 platform is relatively cheap to deploy and easy to maintain. It uses large Gauss-style magnetic catapults to accelerate nuclear missiles to about .2C, these missiles would coast toward a target then once they get close the missiles would go active and seek the nearest ship before exploding. The DP-4 was later updated with more powerful magnetics and renamed the DP-7 but it was fundamentally the same weapon system. Of course they also updated the warheads but the newer warheads were also compatible with older DP-4s that hadn’t been upgraded.”

Felki looked it over, “I can see why you brought it up, “You think we can use something like the DP-4?”

“Sure do, your railgun platforms are a start. To improve their reliability, we should swap out the rail launchers for coilguns and trade the shells for low-cost missiles. The missiles would need to be thermally shielded, but it shouldn’t be too hard to devise an inexpensive compound for that. The tungsten was working, so if we dial the speed down that is one way to get more range.”

“Sounds like we might need some development time, but the idea is sound,” commented one of the transport captains.

Felki had to agree, but she wanted their thoughts on the mines, “What about our mines?”

“Well, simple and effective, they certainly made a big boom. Mines aren’t that complex afterall. Of course, we could sell you our mines. We’ve got plenty of experience with mine warfare.”

“You have mines?”

Countryman brought up the diagram this time, revealing a disk-shaped object. Richards described it, “This our standard anti-ship mine, designed to utilize a high-yield photon warhead, this little mine can cripple a battleship, several of them will sink one. Each mine also carries a shield penetrator, a small array of sensors, and a leap thruster. When a target is found, the mine will throw itself at said target and explode on contact. Each mine is also sensor shielded to make it harder to avoid.”

“How many do you have?”

“We left port with thousands, but that was eight years ago, we only have a few dozen left, but they are fairly cheap and easy for us to make. With the warheads you gave us, we could make hundreds of them in just a few days, thousands in a month.”

“There is the obvious issue of transport, but they could be quite useful. Our own attempt at defensive minefields made a good showing of their use. Of course it helped that we had your patrols alert us to their coming.”

Countryman leaned forward, “I’ve had some thoughts on that, you use patrols as well, we just got lucky. It was just as likely that they would slip by completely unnoticed and if we hadn’t spotted them things would have gone differently.”

A few hours later, Felki leaned back in her chair. They’d been talking equipment and tactics for hours, reviewing everything that had gone right and what hadn’t gone well in the battle. Now however they were moving to another subject; repairs.

“The Stormwolf took quite a beating,” commented Richards. “I took a look when I had a chance yesterday and spoke with her chief engineer. The vessel is going to require a full refit at a yard, the hull plating is completely shot, we will have to replace the armor, all of it. Her shield generators are also badly damaged, a few generators are salvageable like the number four generator, but some of them will need to be replaced entirely. We’ll break down the scrap and put them to use fixing other things on the ship. Throw in the hull damage, weapon replacements, broken power conduits, damaged and shot systems, I estimate it would take a month and a half to fix the Stormwolf.”

“What about the heavy cruisers?”

“The two Drifter cruisers also took a pounding but the most time intensive task would be repairing the hull plating, we could have them fixed a little sooner, three, maybe four weeks.”

Felki sighed, “I knew we had taken a pounding but a month and a half is a lot of time.”

Richards sighed, “Best we can do. The damage is quite severe, and with all the other ships we are running into bottlenecks, namely the need to replace entire modules. All of that work has to be done on the Enterprise, we don’t have any module foundries on Anchorage yet. If we had more than fifty of the things we could get it done faster.”

“Faster? You serious?”

Countryman nodded, “We use nano-fabrication technology combined with robotics. Parts are built by nanites to exacting specifications and then robotics assemble them into larger frames, workers monitor and supervise the process and do quality checks. The process is very effective and allows us to build entire ships in fairly short order. The Enterprise is fully capable of manufacturing her own fighters and shuttles, replacing combat losses in the field so long as materials are available for it.”

“Right, that reminds me I didn’t get a good look, but you did seem to take some damage covering our retreat, how many did you lose?”

“Thankfully all our pilots made it back, but we did lose a few fighters. Some of our fighters are damaged enough that it’s easier to break them down for parts and build new ships to replace them. Something we are already doing,” said Countryman.

“That is certainly useful, we just might consider contracting you for ship construction,” said one transport captain.

Another spoke up, “If they are using nano-fabrication? We should definitely contract them for ship construction, it would bolster the league with quality ships.”

“Right, and with the war we could use as many ships as we can get.”

“That is a point, the real question is what would be the fair compensation rate for this?”

Countryman sensed opportunity, “Hmm, I think there is plenty of room for negotiation there. Not to mention we have time to chat about it, we are basically limping home.”

“So we do, how much would you want for it?”

“If we are building ships we will need materials to expand our facilities, we aren’t set up for building anything bigger than a shuttle. The only place that can do it is Enterprise and she needs to be at Anchorage for that. Wouldn’t be good to tie up our only capital ship with ship construction.”

Felki had to admit that made sense, “Logical so what’s your starting price?”

“Cost plus 30 percent, we will want plenty of titanium...” started Richards as she listed out materials.

Felki countered and the two groups delved into a long discussion on what would perhaps be the most significant trade deal of the war.