chapter 41
It was a weird experience listening to an argument happening in my head through the connection I had to my bonded AIs. Right now, the ship and Bob were arguing about the best placement of cargo for better weight distribution. Lola and I simply listened, along with the few other AIs that weren’t in hibernation.
It was not an argument fought with many words, they were a bit too basic for that, but this bond of ours allowed for more than these AIs would normally be capable of. Some of them that had more personality seemed to be slowly developing it further, which was amazing to see.
The reason why we were having this problem was because we had been travelling for nearly four weeks now. Our first fuel stop wasn’t too far away, but thanks to the gravity generator that cancelled out our acceleration and the gravity caused by that, we have been able to run my workshop 24/7.
For most of that time, the 3D printers have been working on the missile interceptors, and the nano printers were constantly making nano machines meant for the power core.
Now, currently, we don’t need more of them, as our power cores fusion configuration is working better than expected. We were printing so many for the upgraded version of this ship.
Counter to what I thought, when everything was running well and I had a lot of help from others doing the small jobs, there wasn’t much to do to keep the ship running. So, what I have had time to do is design the next version of the Forward Horizon—the Mark II.
The ship was still going to stay in the tiny category, as going bigger would actually be troublesome. First of all, even with as many credits as I have, the bigger you made ships, well, the cost went up exponentially. Second were the classifications that Lola informed me of.
While cargo transports could get quite big, it turns out that most combat ships were in the tiny or small categories, especially the ones used by new space adventurers.
With the planned armaments of the Mark II, we would actually be classified as a fighting vessel and would be called a frigate. A catch-all term for all ships not in the military and below a certain size, which seemed to be 300 metres in length.
Lola looked at the actual laws of the classifications. The length as a general size indicator was just used to make things simpler.
It was basically the same rules as with the ship size categories for docking. If any of the measurements went above a certain limitation, you would be up-classified. All of that meant more costs when docking, more upkeep, and everything that came with a bigger ship.
That’s why I wanted to keep ourselves in the tiny category. The current plans were still quite rough. Currently the length of the ship was going to be around 94 metres, close to twice what it is now. The wingspan would be 48 metres, and the height of it 25 metres. The main hull itself, without the wings, was also going to be nearly 23 metres in width.
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It does not sound like that much bigger, but the area inside will be basically 34 times bigger than the current designs. It should be big enough for my current and future needs.
I will be keeping the overall osprey look, but now it will also kinda look like the first space shuttles, but it would be supersized. We’d also have side engines on the wings. Currently, I had no plans for the side engines—no concrete ones at least—but I did have an interesting idea I hoped would work.
The wings themselves would be quite thick near the hull for some extra storage for offensive weaponry. In that regard, I have currently planned out three weapon systems.
First is a small to medium turret system. Those are for point defense and close-range engagements. Second are missiles. Mainly, we would only have missile interceptors meant to take care of other missiles, but a few ship-busters would be a good idea. And thirdly, as strong of a railgun as I can fit, so we could punch above our weight.
I’m also planning on making this a four-floor ship. The first floor will be the biggest. It would be a cargo area with two ramps, on the front and back of the ship, with a ceiling crane system for easier cargo management.
The second floor would be engineering. This would be the floor where the main engines, the power core, the railgun are. Stuff that keeps the ship working and alive.
The third floor would be my workshop, with probably the computer core. The fourth one would be for ship command and living quarters.
Right now, I didn’t know if I should think about making it so that there could be more crew than just me, but designing some extra elements for more living quarters would be a good idea, just in case.
Honestly, there was a lot of design work still to be done, and a lot that couldn't be done before we arrived at our destination. I didn’t know what was available to be purchased and our overall needs. For God’s sakes, I didn’t even know what we were going to do afterwards. Also, currently thinking about all of this was hard because of the constant arguments going on.
“That’s enough,” I loudly said inside my head, which made everyone shut up.
“This is what we will do. We will move the new nano machines and just put them around the main engines, and we will just accept the occasional need to use RCS fuel to keep us from drifting away from our path. We will just have to suffer through this until we make it to our destination.”
Immediately Bob seemed not exactly satisfied, but accepting of the fact that it was as good of a solution we currently had available to us. The ship’s AI seemed worried. It took me a bit to figure out why.
“Don’t worry, I won’t be replacing you. The heart of this ship will still remain. We will just build around it a bigger ship.”
That seemed to relax it.
“We so need to refuel. We have a couple of targets we could aim for?” Lola asked while showing me a map of our planned route and our current location.
Nearly a month of travel had taken us quite far away from the station. We had already covered a good distance, but that was mainly because we were able to use strong currents, which helped us move vast distances, but now we were in a slower current only moving 120 light-years a day.
The FTL current we were in was going to be our longest, taking nearly six months to reach the next one. That one was even weaker and after that will be an even weaker FTL current until the last stretch where there will be no FTL current.
Every time we changed FTL currents we dropped out of FTL and reacquired our correct position in space. Being nearly 7100 light-years away from the Haver station was weird, as that was so much distance, but slowly I was starting to get used to traveling such distances.
I was still apprehensive to use a refueling station, but I also understood it was because of my own fear of the same thing happening. It would be safer to just choose one of the trade stations and dock there, even if it would take a lot longer to decelerate and then accelerate back into FTL.
“I think just this once we will use a refuelling station, as I want to get over this fear of mine.”
“It’s not a bad idea. Do we just in case drop out a bit further away.”
“Yes, I think so. Afterwards, we're going to use trading stations or bigger. By that time, hopefully, I will have the design more ironed out so I could go into the stations and perhaps find some parts we would need for the ship that I could fix up. No need to be stupid with credits and waste them to buy new things when we could get them cheaper and fix them.”
“I would expect nothing else. But you will still buy the best new processors available, yes?”
“Yes, Lola. Some things we will not cheap out on.”
The happy feeling I got back was infectious, which made me get back to designing.