chapter 72
As I walked out of the third cave, it wasn’t a long way to the train station that would take me close to where my half-finished ship currently was.
Thoron gave me the necessary codes I needed to access the shipbuilding database. What I didn’t expect to get was another card that allowed me more access to everything, basically at the same level as any other citizen of this solar system. FH was going to have a lot of data to sift through.
The talk with that old dwarf was enlightening. It also made one thing extremely clear to me. Now I had the notice of the very strongest and the leaders of this mountain hall.
As I reached closer to the berth, my mind finally stopped being quiet as I could finally communicate with my AI’s.
“I am pretty close by now; it won’t be too long before I reach you all.”
Everything went quiet again, then I got an overwhelming amount of greetings and welcome-backs. It really felt good to once again have my mind occupied by so much. It wouldn’t be too long before I needed a break from it, but my safeguards would make sure I wouldn’t get overwhelmed.
This type of communication should be safe, but since I’m currently using a form of radio signals through our bond, I believe there might be a way for others to overhear even this kind of communication.
Now, if I’m close by and can use the bond fully, that should be safe enough, but once again, magic is unpredictable, and I do not know the limits of it.
“Let’s get back to work, no better time to work than all the time.”
This stopped the questions from my crew members and kept them focused on their current tasks. This was one of the code sentences that Lola and I had agreed upon a long time ago in a case where we might be overheard.
The troubles of now needing to be more careful with our communications drifted away as soon as I opened the door to the berth and walked in to see the Mark II.
It was already so beautiful. The near month that I was away wasn’t spent idly. The entire structure of the Mark II was built out. The wings had their structural supports fully connected to the rest of the ship in a way that would allow those wings to carry all of the weight of the rest of the ship.
It was an incredibly difficult engineering problem to pull off, but FH and Lola had helped a lot, running an incredible number of simulations. The first stage of the power core housing was finished; now we needed to add the rest of the functionality and the way to distribute the power throughout the ship.
The command centre and the crew quarters’ first stage was also finished, now waiting for everything necessary to be installed.
I could still see through the ship at some places. It seemed the focus right now was on building out the different tanks needed for all the gases and liquids to keep everyone alive and for the ship to keep moving.
The biggest change, however, was that the ship was no longer on its belly. The cargo bay’s floor was already in, and the sides of it were built out. On each side there were eight heavy-duty legs holding the entire ship up, giving about two and a half metres of clearance.
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Going with legs instead of wheels was a difficult choice. Because the ship should be able to do vertical landings, the legs came out as the winner between the two choices.
These legs gave us the option to land on uneven terrain. They also had other features, like having magnetic locks to keep the ship in place, and the ability to grip or even grab hold of the terrain underneath if needed.
Of course, the current legs would be near their limit when the ship was close to being fully loaded. They would be one of the first things that would need to be upgraded with even better materials. Right now, they would cost too much, the current ones should be good enough for our future operations.
Nearby, there was a small factory set up, where drones were working on assembling a lot of different components. One section was fully dedicated to building out all the pieces needed for the radiation shield.
This was going to be crucial, not just to help keep us safe from cosmic radiation, but from radiation-type weaponry, which seemed a common way of attacking ships.
“Captain?” I heard someone speak, and when I turned around, I saw that my crew members had lined up on one side of the door. But as soon as I saw the ship, I didn’t even notice them.
“Excellent progress. Let’s walk and talk,” I said while heading towards the ship.
“FH, I’m sending you the codes necessary to access a lot more databases, and more specifically, an entire database dedicated to shipbuilding.”
“Has this something to do with the falling-out of the different dwarven clans we’ve heard chatter about?” Lola asked.
“Yes, apparently the management problem I helped with was way bigger than I expected it to be. Some of the clans had been keeping that solution hidden from the rest. We need to keep quiet about it, but the leadership here decided to reward me anyway, even if in secret.”
We spoke a bit more about this whole thing, but to me, it was still strange that something like this would have such big ramifications.
“What about the delving?” Sam asked.
Outwardly, I said, “It will never be profitable unless we find some specific portals, or perhaps if I spend all my mana before we enter. Our current focus should be on portals that would help me get stronger faster. I hope you are up to the task of helping me, Sam and Dean?”
Fully through my bond, I added, “Everything we are saying is probably being overheard by someone, somehow. So let’s keep communications tight and focus on our immediate concerns.”
The bond should be safe, but damn it, now I was paranoid.
“Understood. We have been preparing for a while to help you clear portals as fast as possible,” Dean answered back without missing a beat.
“Captain, it’s going to take me a while to go through everything and start indexing the things we need. I have already found some blueprints that would help you make a proper railgun, as I know you were worried about not exactly knowing where to start with it,” FH informed.
“That is perfectly fine, and I expected it would take a while. As for the railgun, I had hoped that the database would help us with our missing information about them. As we might need to change the current blueprints of the ship, please focus a bit more on that. As for the rest of you, back to your tasks.”
“Yes, Captain.”
It took me a while to get caught up with everything. It was so nice to have competent help, as all the problems that had come up during my absence were solved, perhaps even better than I could have solved them. After two days of this, I finally had the chance to look over the railgun design.
The reason I wanted one singular strong railgun was so that we could punch above our weight, and railguns really were the best solution for that, unless you wanted to go into atomics, which were frowned upon, incredibly expensive, and didn’t leave much left to loot afterwards.
The dwarves really came in clutch. They had hundreds of different designs with varying sizes and configurations. The best part was that, thanks to the blueprints, I now understood how railguns actually worked.
Their power requirements are massive, especially when you size them up. There were even some excellent examples showing how different types of aiming solutions could be built around them.
“FH, do you believe that we would need more storage to save even more blueprints?”
“The current capacity is good enough,” she said, sounding incredibly busy, which she was.
Currently, I was leaning towards a 50-metre-long railgun on the second floor, where it would end up quite close to the power core. That would make delivering the massive amount of power it needed easier.
As for the size of the payload, it seemed that, if I used good enough materials, I could manage around a 1 kg projectile at maximum, with a decent amount of continuous use before repairs were needed.
This length and mass would allow me to keep up with the current recommended speed of railguns, 0.4% of light speed. This type of configuration should be able to exert a force of around 150 to 200 tonnes of TNT.
That would most definitely punch through weaker space monsters and, of course, basically every cruiser-sized ship and below. As for battleships, it should definitely hurt them, hopefully enough to let us escape.
Of course, I would lose every slugging match against those types of opponents, which is why it’s important to make our electronic warfare and stealth the strongest possible.
It’s always better not to get hit at all. While defences will still be important, we could never match the thickness of the armour that larger ship sizes could reach.
This could be somewhat mitigated—and perhaps even turned to our advantage—if we could get even better materials to upgrade our defences further. Of course, armour wouldn’t be our only layer of defence, as we would also have shields.
Just thinking about all of this made me excited to continue building the ship out and see where we could reach.