chapter 73
Adding in this railgun afterwards would have been a true pain. The drones were putting the finishing touches on the supporting structure built to withstand the recoil force generated when firing this beast of a railgun. As for the railgun itself, only its outermost housing was done.
It was still crazy to be able to stand on the Mark II’s second floor. Right now, I was about halfway along the length of the ship, right where the power core housing was. Currently, it was about one-sixth full of the toughest nano machines I could make. We still had a long way to go to get it half full, but we were making progress.
When I looked toward the back of the ship, it was still empty, but in the future there would be four engines there, engines that were going to make this ship accelerate at nearly 40 G. It was going to be important for the ship to be able to accelerate so fast, but damn, it was going to be painful.
That made me glance down at my right arm, which was almost still human—only a few parts of it were artificial—unlike my left arm, which was completely replaced. Before, I could feel the difference better, like the machine parts weren’t really me, but that wasn’t the case anymore.
Now, the question of should I fully replace everything has become more relevant. There wouldn’t be a huge psychological difference in changing out everything to be cybernetic, unlike before. It made logical sense, yet for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Hopefully, I’d soon figure out that reason so I could better understand my reluctance.
Only a few steps took me to the side of the second floor. With my eyes, I couldn’t detect the connections between the ship’s structure and the newly added recoil and support structures of the railgun.
Running my fingers over it, there didn’t seem to be anything to indicate that these two pieces used to be separate. This type of engineering, or manufacturing, whatever you want to call it—just made me happy from the bottom of my heart.
These supports came in at an angle, moving toward the railgun housing. About halfway, the standard structural beams turned into the thickest springs I’d ever come across. These would help reduce the instant impact of shooting the railgun would cause.
There were four beams like this, with the springs in between them. Yet nothing I could do would change the fact that with every shot, the ship would still move backwards just a bit. The important thing was to manage the violent shock of recoil and spread it out over a longer time so the ship’s structure wouldn’t be under so much stress.
The back plate of the railgun would also have electromagnetic dampeners working together with the springs.
Whenever doing something like this, it’s important to understand that you can never stop momentum. You can only slow it down and dissipate it by channelling it into a larger mass until that momentum becomes something you can cancel out easily.
Everything’s a bit tougher in space. On a planet, this would be simple enough to handle, as the mass of the planet is so large nothing you do basically matters. In space, your ship is everything. Everything you do will affect it, so everything must be taken into account. Even more dangerous than sudden acts of acceleration in space is heat.
Yes, space is cold, but the same as momentum, heat doesn’t just go away. It does dissipate, but it needs something to dissipate into… unfortunately space is really empty. That means it takes a while to transfer heat into space.
The person who came up with the heat exchanger system of turning waste heat into electricity was beyond brilliant, and I was going to abuse this technology to its utmost.
Currently, a lot of the drones were working on just that. Huge lines of extremely conductive material that could store a lot of heat would go to everything that produced even a little bit of it. It would all be pulled through these lines to the ship’s power core, where the nano machines will convert it to power.
Of course, it would be a net negative in terms of power gain, but that wasn’t the point. Getting rid of heat was. Other places where the heat production is largest have their own clusters of nano machines that convert the heat as the thermal lines are more meant for spikes of heat generation.
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The railgun would produce a lot of heat extremely fast, the same as the shields. The way shields worked, each one of those devices—and I was going to need to place hundreds of them to properly protect the ship—every time they got hit, they would produce stupid amounts of heat.
All of this needed to be managed, otherwise everything inside the ship could cook quite quickly during a fight.
Yet in the end, you would still need to radiate a portion of that heat away, as you can’t convert all the heat you generate into electricity. Physics just doesn’t work like that.
In the Mark I, thanks to the nano machines’ greater capacity to hold on to that heat, and an even greater conversion rate possible before them. The Mark I’s waste heat was easily radiated out into space over a long period using the ship’s armour.
Now we have even more surface area, yet the Mark II will have so many more heat-producing systems. We also have more room to put in more heat management solutions, like extendable radiators, armour that can handle much more heat, and finally, active heat dumping. That last one does consume gas, but it’s a great emergency measure.
The worst thing is that there are actually even better heat management systems out there. I even have some blueprints for them. The problem is, the materials needed for them aren’t actually available.
Not because I’m not allowed to buy them, but because they’re simply so rare that they are almost never on the market. The only way to get them would be through auctions, or if you’re lucky enough, buy them from someone who got their hands on some truly rare drops.
Then there’s the side of refining those monster parts into usable materials. Fortunately, doing that on a smaller scale is doable. If you want to do that on a larger scale, well, you need to go into the business of making megastructures, like the forge built around this solar system’s sun.
The shipbuilding database has truly been an eye-opener. While there aren’t any truly top-of-the-line blueprints that the dwarven military uses. Basically, everything you can order from the shipyard itself if you were a customer is available to me, and some of the things are quite high-end.
Those blueprints being available to me truly surprised me. Yet now I know that the ship I’m currently making, while not being at the low end, is definitely not even close to the middle of the pack for established space adventurer’s ship capabilities. If I’m not stupid and don’t go into a medium or high mana area, we shouldn’t run into those monstrous ships just yet.
Now I also understand the reports of most truly strong adventurers not even having cruiser-sized ships. Upgrading everything on a larger ship would cost way too much, and you might need decades, or even hundreds of years, for enough of the required materials to be collected to fully upgrade your ship.
I can’t even imagine the cost of those kinds of ships, but salvaging one of those wrecks seems to be one of the most profitable things you could do. There is a lot of media about adventurers stumbling onto wrecks like that, but the reality of it is much scarier, because that means there’s something out there that managed to take down one of those ships.
The fact that there are space monsters that can actually do that is damn scary.
The video of those adventurers fighting that space monster I saw a while back. Those were just low-end ships and a weak space monster. Those ships were in the tiny category and should have never been in that type of fight.
This is also the reason why FH is working so hard right now. We have access to so much data, and knowing what you’re up against is so important. That’s why I’m also spending a lot of credits getting the best sensors I can for the Mark II.
My credits are disappearing quite fast. Just the shields alone cost me nearly 150 million, and while they aren’t the most basic ones, there are even better options available to be purchased here. The current best shields I could buy would cost nearly 8 billion.
Regular cargo transport definitely wouldn’t make a dent in this type of expenditure. At least those shields wouldn’t be low-end, but they also wouldn’t be at the high-end.
No wonder regular militaries wouldn’t be able to field thousands of these kinds of ships. Their economies couldn’t handle it. This also doesn’t take into account how the prices for such materials would rise.
FH did find some places where the Mark II could really shine and make a lot of credits. We still need to do more research, but if this turns out to be viable, we would also need more point defences.
If this universe wasn’t already a scary enough place, if a planet is in an area with enough mana density, it could easily be overrun by thousands upon thousands of monsters coming from portals that have not been cleared.
Everyone seems to call places like that tomb planets. They are one of the most dangerous places you could go, but also one of the more profitable ones, especially planets that have not truly fallen yet. Having a ship capable of landing and resupplying those pockets of civilization through hordes of flying monsters… well, yeah, they get paid the big bucks.
All of us agreed that this should not be our first destination or mission, but we should still try to work ourselves up to it. It would also put me close to unsupervised portals. With my looting ability, that could even make running supply missions to tomb worlds look like pocket change.
*******
“Anything new to report?”
“It seems that Remi Graves and his crew are contemplating resupplying yet-to-fall tomb worlds.”
“That ship design should work well for that. What about delving? It’s been a month, has he still not gone down to the planet to clear one?”
“No, sir. They seem to have waited so they could purchase multiple delve slots around the same time. They’re aiming to spend as little time as possible on the surface so they can focus more on building the ship.”
“Keep an eye on everything, but give the Purple Division a rest. They are needed elsewhere, and if they were going to share any important secrets through their bonds, they would have already done so. I assume it’s still impossible to technologically monitor the communications?”
“Not without them noticing, no.”
“Well, I guess I’m not disappointed, we don’t want him to be that incompetent. Keep a full schedule of magical surveillance going for another two months. After that, we’ll lower it to periodic checks as usual. Also, did he save the special blueprints we made available?”
“Yes, all of them. If any of them show up on the open market, we’ll know we can’t trust him.”
“A small price to pay to get a measure of a person. Excellent job so far, keep it up.”
“Yes, sir.”