Blue Star Enterprises

The production of the new printer bots went off without a hitch, but Alexander would be lying if he said the first use of them went as smoothly. In the first ten minutes of building the first of the two new smelters, ten collisions had taken place.

There was some margin of error built into the bots' field generators used to lay down the material, but not enough to make up for the bots being knocked around by impacts. The print had to be scrapped and started over; thankfully, it hadn't gotten very far.

The second attempt fared a little better. The control ship learned from the previous incidents and worked with the bots to adjust their courses more efficiently, even if print efficiency suffered slightly. Only two collisions took place in the first ten minutes, but by the end of the first hour, over forty more had been logged.

It seemed that adding more bots too quickly taxed the control ship's ability to monitor for problems. Alexander also realized he had made a mistake in the calculations he had given the research core when it initially created the flight paths.

Sending the entire project back to the computer to adjust for his mistake would cost them a week, so Alexander didn't bother doing that. Instead, he slowed down the addition of new bots as the print grew, which allowed the control ship to handle the rest. That allowed the bots to focus on their assigned tasks with what little processing power they had in reserve.

The third print was now five hours in, and there had only been a single collision. The deviation was acceptable for a smelter, but Alexander made a note to be much more careful when implementing ship prints.

At the sixth hour, an old problem reared its ugly head, and Alexander had to pause the print. Being able to pause and restart without having to realign everything was another fantastic advantage of the printer bot swarm. It also made swapping to another print mid-print a non-issue, as the bots could go right back to the original project without stopping or resetting the print bed.

As for the issue that cropped up, it was the same one he ran into when he first developed his ring printers. Dust was being flung into the print surface, causing defects.

Alexander had assumed, mistakenly, that the bots' deflector fields would be enough to keep the area clear. He should have known that having that many overlapping fields so close together would become a problem. It was the reason he had redesigned the deflector fields for his ships in the first place. Well, that and to increase their energy efficiency.

The solution was easy enough to implement, but it annoyed him that he overlooked it. He had the bots turn off their deflector fields, and he deployed a series of deflector field satellites around the print area. Enough to cover the print space and the control ship, without causing too much overlap.

That delayed the print by a further six hours as he moved satellites around, but it also helped solve the issue of the bots colliding.

Yeah, that thing he had overlooked when submitting the information to the research core to generate the pathing was the bots' static fields, causing them to move slightly when other deflector fields activated nearby.

Alexander thought giving each unit its own deflector fields was an obvious idea, considering they were already getting field generators to print with, but he was proven wrong.

After the bugs were worked out with his new process, the rest of the print went smoothly, leaving only a slight deviation in the structural supports of the smelter, which were quickly brought back into spec.

The deformation was annoying, but it wouldn't have any impact on the machine's ability to process materials, so there was no point in removing that section and starting over.

That thought did give Alexander another idea for a mobile deconstruction bot capable of doing the same task as a smelter, but on a much smaller scale, mainly for repair purposes. He had his construction bots, and they were capable of cutting away broken sections or removing entire components, but if he could simply remove the damaged area of, say, a structural beam, and then rebuild it using the print bots, that would save a ton of time and effort.

A multipurpose bot might be even better. Especially to replace the bots aboard the fleet and mobile construction yards, where space was a premium.

He was about to get started on designing the bot when Yulia strolled into his workshop with a girl he didn't recognize.

"Alex, can I bring Serina to my workshop?"

Surprised she had even asked him, it took him a moment to respond. When he did, he turned toward the girl and smiled. "Manners, Yulia. Why don't you introduce your friend first?"

His daughter rolled her eyes. "Serina, this is Alex. Alex, this is Serina."

Alexander chose not to comment on his daughter's introduction skills. He held out his hand, and the girl stared at it a moment before accepting it. "Nice to meet you, Serina. Are you a new arrival?"

After giving the girl a delicate handshake, he let go, but the girl stared at her hand a moment in stunned silence. That was a first for him, but he wasn't surprised that she had some sort of reaction to his presence. Most people were shocked when they met him for the first time.

Yulia bumped the girl with her shoulder, eventually knocking her out of her stupor. "I came with my family aboard the Gravitational Solutions ships."

"Ah," he said. "Well, welcome to Eden's End."

"Alex," Yulia cut in.

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"Right. Yes, you can bring her to your workshop." Alexander was curious to ask the girl more, especially considering he was experiencing that same distortion that he felt when Rush was around, but Yulia dragged her new companion away before Alexander could even ask.

Alexander could head down to her workshop and bother them, but he thought that was a bad idea. He had noticed that Yulia didn't spend time with a lot of the kids she used to since returning. The fact that she seemed to have a new friend her age was a good thing. Even better if the girl were interested in engineering and design like Yulia, since he knew that Sarah and Claire were not interested in those things.

Then a horrible thought struck him. What if Serina were like Yulia? The last thing he needed was two teenagers who broke rules so they could try to build a fusion reactor, or something even more dangerous. Perhaps he needed to have a conversation with Rush.

That could wait. The print queues in Yulia's workshop were monitored and sent to him, so there was no way they would get very far on building something without him realizing it. He pulled up the print queue window on the holo so he could monitor it in real time, just in case.

Once that was done, Alexander pulled up the printer bot and the schematics for a smelter. Merging the two together was going to be a pain. It would have been easier to merge his nano-stripper than the smelter, but the speed of the stripper was too slow to make it worthwhile for any large-scale application. Besides, he didn't need that level of accuracy for ships. If he ever decided to make a mobile computronic printer, then he might consider it.

The first thing Alexander did was strip out the unneeded deflector field generator. That freed up space and power aboard the bot. Once he had the space, he modified the components of the smaller smelter to fit within or as close to it as he could. The bot was going to need to be larger to encompass the smelter component, but that wasn't a problem. He left that part for the moment and moved to the front of the bot.

The issue with smelters is that components had to fit inside them to be ground down and reduced to their base materials. The Maw had large arms that fed material into it to keep that process going.

Alexander could do that with his bots as well, but he needed to take it a step further. Since the bot's whole purpose would be to remove and restore damaged components, it needed a way to remove the material and only the damaged portions.

Laser cutters were the obvious choice, considering his construction bots already had them, but they left behind slag, requiring additional tools to correct.

Alexander pondered the issue for a bit before he hit on a rather ingenious idea. Since a ship deploying these types of bots would likely be heavily damaged, it would need to power down certain systems while repairs were made. If Alexander made shutting down gravity plating in those sections a requirement, he could slap a single small gravity plate in the bowels of the robot and focus it toward the work area. Then, a pair of laser torches, along with a smart application of the print field generator, to form a sort of virtual grinder, would be able to pull the weakened material into the smelter opening.

He was pretty sure he could make the field behave like he wanted, but he would need to test it before he printed the new bot. Since GS was on the planet now, having access to gravity plating to play with was less of a concern.

If Alexander could convince Rush to explain how the plates functioned, maybe he could even do some fun things with gravity or anti-gravity. Being able to remove the bots' ion drives and replace them with a gravity-assisted drive would save a ton of space. Then again, the GS ships used standard modes of locomotion, so maybe his idea of anti-gravity wasn't feasible at all. He made a mental note to ask again anyway, even though he was pretty sure Rush would decline to answer. It never hurts to ask.

As he completed the bot, the end result looked more like a large mechanical beetle than the spider-like forms that his construction bots and Dog took after. Most of that likeness was due to the bot having a larger rear area where it needed room for the smelter, gravity plate, and material storage, but it also had a set of mandibles in the form of the laser torches.

There was a small, removable material container, but since the bot was designed to work on the areas it was deconstructing, most of the material would come from those areas. The material in the container was there to make up for missing or lost material caused by damage.

He tested his field idea, and it worked, sort of. The material needed to reach a certain temperature before it was malleable enough for the field to break it apart. That wasn't really a downside, however. It meant all the bot needed to do was control the temperature when removing material, which it would be doing anyway for replacing damaged sections.

The first new multifunction bot came off his workshop printer and promptly collapsed under its own weight. Alexander sighed. As the poor thing scraped its legs across the floor to try and stand up, he walked over to it and lifted it off the ground. He suspected that might happen, so he disconnected the legs and replaced them with beefier ones designed to work within gravity.

Once those were in place and the bots' onboard computer was updated to recognize the new system, it was able to finally stand and move about. It wasn't the fastest on the ground, but it still moved over to a truss member that Alexander had mangled with a laser torch and his hands.

The bot quickly got to work removing the damaged parts and shoving the material into its smelter. A few drops hit the floor, but considering they were on a planet, it was doing remarkably well at containing most of the material within its print field.

Alexander already knew how long a normal construction bot would take to cut away the damaged section. The dedicated construction bots were much quicker. That being said, a construction bot would then need either a second bot with a replacement piece waiting there, or it would have to go fetch one. It was more likely that the bot would signal the nearest printer to make a piece that fit the specs of the original component that was removed. Then it would be forced to retrieve the replacement once it was done, or another bot would bring it while it moved onto the next area it was assigned to.

There wasn't an exact comparison that Alexander could turn to, but he had enough logs of ship repairs to make an educated guess on how long that process would take. The multifunction bot was able to complete the repair in nearly two-thirds of the time, and it was still learning.

Alexander was pretty sure that a fifty percent reduction in repair time was within the cards once the multifunction bot gained some more experience. It was such a huge improvement that he sent a Union-wide update out to notify those captains who had the older bots of the upgrade. If they went ahead with it, the ships would automatically replace most of the older bots with the new ones. He did include in the report that ships would lose two bots on average to store the larger multifunction bots, but it was a tradeoff he thought was worth it. In time, he would be able to condense the systems and reduce the bots' size back to the original construction bots' dimensions, but that was not high on his priority list.

The only reason he was working on the bots at all was that he had made a breakthrough in Lund's gravitational folding drive. At least that was what he hoped. The academy's research core was crunching the math in the background to see if Alexander's solution was viable or not. If everything looked good, he may just have figured out a way to significantly reduce the power requirements needed to fold space. That didn't mean he had a power plant strong enough to produce the required power, but it was a step in the right direction. A few more of those, and the Nova Drive may just become a reality.