Chronicles of Sol: The Fall

January 17th 003 SDE:

Ruri smiled as she set down the scanner. It had been two weeks since she had created Rose and tried for a child. It seemed she had succeeded, but only time would tell. She considered telling Countryman but it felt too soon, maybe another couple of weeks and a doctor’s opinion to be sure. Then again her womb was currently full of nanites and not just a budding child. They came from Countryman naturally, his body was maintained by the nanites in his blood. It wasn’t that surprising that his seed would contain them as well. She wasn’t worried about them showing up in the scan, but she did double check their programming. They would expire in another couple of weeks and would migrate in preparation to be flushed out just a couple of days before they expired. In the meantime they were programmed to monitor and maintain the health of their child.

Overall she was very happy with what she saw, and then she turned to the project she was working on today. Richards had sent back the diagrams and notations for the latest proposed iteration for Project Battlehawk. It seemed this version was updating the armor scheme.

Modern Overlord armor was limited to a maximum thickness of twelve meters, and while that sounded fairly thick it was actually rather thin when you considered the size of ships like the Enterprise. The Battlehawk was proposed to be about half the size of the Enterprise and while some groups wanted to make her outer armor much thicker than the Enterprise there were reasons it couldn’t be done. Namely having to do with AIF density and integrity when pushing overall armor thickness past twelve meters. Something she was working on solving. It wasn’t as simple as adding more generators, as generators could interfere with each other. She actually had a few ideas on that, but so far nothing had panned out.

In the meantime, she looked over the latest proposed armor scheme for the heavy cruiser battlehawk. The new scheme conformed to Overlord specifications, only it was a bit more interesting. Instead of a single main belt, this scheme proposed three main belts, along with reinforced bulkheads, and internal armor. All three main belts were proposed to be twelve meters thick with a two-meter gap between belts. Further protection would be placed around the bridge with a full armored sphere around it, and all secondary control centers. Armored security bunkers would be placed throughout the ship, and the central core where the engines and reactors are would be additionally protected by a final armored belt.

Multiple main belts and inner armor configurations weren’t entirely unheard of. Some battleships did feature an inner belt. All ships did feature additional armor and structural reinforcement to protect key areas, but what she saw here was significantly more protection than what was found on most ships. The Yamato for example only had a single inner belt six meters thick, not three with each one being twelve meters thick. That was a lot of armor plating but Ruri figured they were trying to enhance survivability as much as possible.

Sighing, she ran a simulation. Noting how all the extra armor resulted in reduced maneuverability and acceleration profiles making the simulated ship rather sluggish. The armor did make it far harder for prospective foes to score meaningful penetrating hits, but she didn’t think Countryman would much approve of this design. Speed was just as important as a good armor configuration. She knew that just as much as Countryman did. It wasn’t well known, but Countryman was quite involved in a number of ship projects over the last century not just the Enterprise. This included famous ship classes like Starlight class battleship, the Yamato, and the Shadowstalker were all ships where he was involved. Each of them had impressive service records as well.

She sent back her report, and then wrote a recommendation to reduce the armor. Without mentioning the objections she knew Countryman would have, but strongly hinting that this design wouldn’t get his approval.

Richards sighed as she looked over the report Ruri had sent in regards to the latest proposal that she and her few aides had made. The armor performed well in all simulations, but the ship was just far too sluggish with the new scheme. Much larger ships like the Enterprise would easily be able to outmaneuver the much smaller Battlehawk. Ruri was heavily recommending they scale back on the armor and honestly she had to agree.

In a human-on-human battle, the armor has always protected against energy weapon mounts and forced the battle into a duel with torpedoes. At least since the third Colonial war, although more recently cutting beams have been put into use to cut through armor. This scheme would help significantly against cutting beams, but leave the Battlehawk more vulnerable to torpedo attack. Ruri had even simulated several mock battles and they showed the proposed ship losing to older Colonial War designs, worse it was particularly vulnerable to the strategies they used against the Cathamari. The armor merely helped it stay in the fight longer, which was the purpose of it, but it was at the expense of the ship’s combat ability. Lack of agility made it especially vulnerable to faster ships. She was reminded of a saying she had often heard, “To all things there must be a balance.”

It applied well to ship design, in this case her team had put too many eggs into protection and compromised the ship’s ability to maneuver. Making it harder for her to bring her heavy weapons to bear, she had the firepower and protection but not the agility she needed. Battlecruisers were fast and had great firepower, but often struggled in slugging matches due to a lack of armor. It was always a balancing act.

With that in mind, she started reworking the blueprint. Cutting down internal armor and structural field generators and beefing up the ship’s engines. Obviously she didn’t have enough engine power. A faster but still well-armored cruiser would likely be what they were looking for. In simulation, she noticed that most penetrating hits would be stopped by the second belt and the others seemed mostly redundant except in prolonged battles with heavy bombardments. So perhaps only the main belt and first inner belt would be needed for the external armor and one interior belt to protect the central core. She could keep the standard extra armor around key areas as well, which would cut the overall weight of the ship by a fair margin. With that in mind, she also started looking around for anything else she could remove to cut weight without compromising the new level of protection she had in mind.

Countryman set down the latest item he had been reading, and chuckled to himself. That item wasn’t the usual report he had to deal with it, but rather something Rose wrote. Telling him about her time in class so far. She seemed to be doing well, making friends and more importantly learning. The subject matters were often irrelevant, the reason she was there was to learn about children to socialize. She was a social machine, but the only way to learn how to be one was through exposure and what better place for her to learn than a school? Children gather there, they play, they learn, and more importantly, they socialize. She already knew everything he knew about babysitting, something he had done for his family before. He understood the responsibilities and what to do, but some things can’t be taught, they have to be learned. He felt confident she was learning here, at the very least it seemed she was making friends even if she didn’t seem to always realize it.

Smiling, he picked up the next report, this one for Project Phalanx, it was run by the project leader who developed the new Mark IV Powered Assault Armor. Her version had quietly been distributed to his most loyal supporters in the military. Over the next few months, it would be gradually distributed to the other security and marine forces. In the meantime, she was now working on Project Phalanx. It was technically an extension of one of Ruri’s projects, but he knew she had a lot on her plate. The researchers in question also had the right talents, and more insights was always good.

Right now she was reporting their tests of new materials they had identified several polymers and metals as being promising for a new alloy mix for next-generation armor. Titan Alloy was an excellent material, but it was also a very heavy material to make starship armor out of. Ruri was working on the systems responsible for making their armor as tough as it was. Trying to optimize them to allow a thicker belt of armor. More armor was good, but as he well knew Titan Alloy was heavy, very heavy as starship armor went. That was why he started the Phalanx project, their goal was to create a lighter stronger alloy that was just as responsive as Titan Alloy to structural fields. This would allow for thicker plating without compromising the agility of a modern starship. Right now they were still working on the mix, but he also had the team looking into Erudite, trying to produce it synthetically. Managing that would allow them to more easily employ the material in their armor and it was a very useful, if hard to find metal ore. Its addition to the Enterprise had made her markedly more resilient against attack.

There was a report on the second part of the project and it seemed they were making less progress there. The unusual metaphysical structure of the metal in question was making it difficult to replicate. It was a very unusual metal, which played a role in why it was so resistant to disruption and why it had a high heat resistance. Combined with the right combination of polymers and metals he figured it would make a great core to a new generation of armor. It was just going to take a lot of time and simulations to find the right mix. At the moment he found the report satisfactory and signed off on it before checking the next report.

The Commander studied her console. Her convoy escort had recently been completed and she was now reviewing scouting reports as she moved to the next phase of her mission. So far they didn’t have much in the way of leads, but the outpost did have scout ships in the area. They weren’t looking for the Refuge, but that didn’t mean they had no leads on them. Included a recent sighting of the Refuge fleet near Dacli, an alien trading port just thirty lightyears from here. That was a fair trip, but not too far out. Regardless she wanted more before she headed that way. The sighting merely confirmed they were in the area. Unfortunately they were likely to be long gone by the time they reached their last known coordinates. Worse, the Refuge was known for leaving few fingerprints of their presence behind. Meaning going there was likely a waste of time. It would be better to take a few guesses on their heading and send scout ships to locate their fleet.

With that in mind, she started looking at the map. Considering past sightings and correlating them on a grid. Doing so gave her a rough course and heading that they seemed to be following. Using that she extrapolated a range of systems on their apparent course and proceeded to draft orders for her scouts. It was time to locate the Refuge fleet.