A Displaced Samurai

Amateurs study tactics.

Professionals study logistics.

– General Omar N. Bradley

Over the next two days, I assembled most of the Assembler Mark II and the other parts of my little fabrication complex. For the cover, I took the lazy route and ordered it from a different company.

What else could I do? The Macks did not make a convenient appearance at the moment, negating the opportunity to make some quick points.

Emergence detected. It appears to be on the other side of Victoria.

Jinxed it of course. But it was actually not convenient. I seemed to be reasonably safe where I was, but I could not quickly join the fight either if I wanted. The distance was around thirteen kilometers as the crow flies, and I did not even have a car.

Hmm. The latter could be fixed. Once the net was available again, I took a break from lugging around fabricator parts and checked out used cars offered on the net. Soon I found a modestly-sized electric van that was offered cheaply because of defective batteries.

February, Tuesday 11th, 2048

A busy week was behind me. The assembler worked and already produced a crate of ammunition per day. And I had taken a crash course in driving. Elya could have faked the driver’s license for me, but it seemed smarter to actually take some lessons.

I also had purchased the van and replaced the batteries with Mack-designed batteries I had printed myself, having extracted the design from the blueprint of the Type Three. The new ones were better than the originals ever had been.

On the bureaucracy front, the arms maker license had been issued quite fast, even without Elya accelerating things. Major Allen had actually called to tell me they had greased the wheels and expected results. Between the lines I had read that they hoped for more than just rifle ammunition.

Now, what to make for HANAF and for my own Mack hunting? Macks seemed to have little protection against artillery, I wondered why HANAF did not exploit that more often. After discussing options with Elya, I called Major Allen to ask.

“Good morning, Major. I figured I might be able to put some sort of guided mortar bomb together, but I’m not sure what artillery in general tends to achieve versus Macks. Could you point me to some information about past successes or failures?”

“What are you thinking of?"

“An 81 mm mortar bomb with camera, image recognition software and fins for minor course corrections. Against Macks that stay in one place we should get great hit rates. Such as the Type 21, they tend to dig in but without overhead protection.”

“Miss McCallan, we used to have weapons like that and they worked reasonably well. Until our supply chains collapsed because too many of the component suppliers had their factories destroyed.”

“I will be able to make them in small quantities for testing soon. The bottleneck is production capacity, if we want to use these in large numbers I will have to ramp up capacity a lot. By the way, could you lend me a mortar for the tests?”

I could only afford one blueprint for grenades at the moment. Fortunately my Kinetic Ammunitions catalog offered not only purely kinetic stuff, and I had found a blueprint for a guided rifle grenade that had a shaped charge for maximum penetration. Historically also called High Explosive Anti-Tank or HEAT. I used that as the basis for my design.

Purchased: Image Guided Rifle Grenade (Blueprint)

Point cost… 100 points

New balance… 19 points

With the CAD software in the Lorekeeper Tome Of Mechanical Engineering, I managed to remodel it into a mortar grenade for the popular 81mm caliber. Aerodynamic simulation software for fine tuning the exterior ballistics was available from the University of Victoria. Not that they knew about it. For the correct propellant, Elya managed to swipe documentation from elsewhere on the internet for me.

Such guided mortar bombs were actually not that sophisticated. As Major Allen had said, in the early 2020s Humanity had the means to make similar weapons.

Which were lost now, except to people like me with access to Protector manufacturing tech. Or the Advent, but they were extremely hesitant about sharing. It seemed that at times, the greatest weapon was a resilient supply chain. I expected that HANAF would soon show up with more ideas about requisitioning stuff. Which I really did not like. So I locked my fabricator down for my use only.

I might sell them an unlocked one, but this one would remain mine. Or perhaps I’d just tell them how to make their own on the Mack fabber. Completely withholding the technology would be a bad idea, it was needed too urgently. I would play it by ear when they showed up next.

In the meantime, I did a bit more tinkering. Over the next week I modified my van for 4WD. Elya had found most of the dimensions of the parts on the net and adding the missing details was easy enough with the CAD software in my mechanical engineering textbook. Also, I only needed to show I understood the concepts and Elya would be happy to do the details for me. Going for a wider knowledge base started to pay off. Finally, printing out the parts was quick and easy now.