chapter 77
“Are we ready?” I yelled loudly so everyone could hear. A moment later, I got confirmations through my bond, which made me realize that I didn’t need to yell anything out.
“Hold onto something, the engines are heated up!” I yelled once again, because that felt so much better than just communicating silently through a bond.
The engine bay was incredibly loud right now. We still had a lot of assembly left to do on the engine that would make them much quieter and safer for long-term use, but we needed to do some tests that required us to fire them up.
Taking a deep breath and grabbing hold of the engine’s mountings, I pressed the test activation button. There was an immediate response. The engine started kicking, with the magnetic locks on the legs barely holding it in place.
There were another five seconds until the end of the test, but already some figures were red—and not the good kind of red that would indicate the engines were performing better than expected.
My finger hovered over the button to shut down engine #3, as its power cycling was way off. The five seconds elapsed, with the engines cycling down and shutting off, but it had felt like an eternity.
“Looks like we need to open #3 up to see what’s wrong.” Already I sent the nano machines in to start getting an idea of what could be wrong.
Almost everything on this ship had been redesigned at least a little bit. The reason being nano machines.
They needed pathways to move safely, and they were the best tools to make small repairs and diagnose problems. Yet they couldn’t get into everything without using destructive measures, so redesigns were needed so they could basically get into anything on the ship.
They now had their own airlocks and pathways all over the ship, through which they could move.
“The power lines held up easily with no deviations detected, although the umbilical cord did sustain some damage, but we expected that,” Lola informed me.
The ship’s power core still wasn’t on, but we were getting close to having enough nano machines to activate it. We were still using the Mark I’s power core, but it was having a difficult time keeping up. Even with this test, it needed to store power; it could never generate enough to actively power these engines.
It took us three hours to replace the misbehaving parts of the 3rd engine. The next test we ran a week later didn’t show any new problems. We all wished we could run further tests, but this just wasn’t possible inside the berth. We needed open space to properly test quite a lot of the ship’s systems.
What we could test were the gravity generators. We simply needed to turn off the gravity of our berth. The way they designed the shipyard made it possible to do so in a way that we wouldn’t interfere with any other gravitational fields. The cost of these things was high, as we needed three identical devices.
Just like that, nearly 82 million credits were gone. We could have gotten all of this for barely anything if I had just copied the device I already had for the Mark I. But no, I wanted something better, so now we had gravity generators that could still be used while the ship was under 6G of acceleration.
All of these devices that interacted with the space fabric had upper limits of how much acceleration they could tolerate. It was weird why only the acceleration counted at low speeds and not your actual travel speed. From what I understood it was something to do with the flexibility of space fabric.
The ones that manipulated gravity had the lowest tolerance. The propellers and devices that could actually push you through space had the highest tolerance. While the shield-type devices came in somewhere in between those two.
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For example, if we were to accelerate the Mark II at 40G, the shields would only be about half as effective, with our main type of shielding being in the middle of the three types of shielding in terms of effectiveness at high acceleration. The best shielding devices for high acceleration were the ones that created a mirror-like surface, designed to counteract laser-type weaponry.
But we also learned that the shield devices that somewhat countered missile-type weapons weren’t actually that useful. Only truly big ships could make effective use of them, as their more powerful devices could project further away from the ship, which would help, but still, they were the least used shield type.
The upper half of our shields was already installed. FH was currently running combat simulations so that we could determine the optimal positioning of the shields and which angles would be the best to deflect incoming damage from certain directions.
This was the benefit of not going with the cheapest options. We now had the capability of actively changing the angles and even where the shields were manifested, up to a limit of course.
There was a lot of work to do, and some of it needed to be kept hidden, but we had multiple layers of shields so that almost every part of the ship could have up to three layers of coverage for about a square meter or two. That came with the disadvantage of then having some locations without shield cover.
That reason was why FH was spending so much time simulating different shield configurations. It’s so we could get some standard configurations that could be used in an engagement.
If we needed to actively change the shield configurations, it would require someone constantly managing it, and doing it for the whole ship would push the crew numbers up by at least 30 or more.
Another unfortunate thing about shields was that they worked both ways. While they protected you from incoming attacks, you couldn’t fire through them from your side. This meant that if we ever wanted to fire our railgun, the shield in front of it needed to be restricted enough so that the railgun shot could get through.
The worst effected was point defense. If you had an incoming missile swarm, you would need to lower your shields to deal with it, but that would then make you vulnerable to laser and projectile-type weapons. Everything seemed to be a careful balance of choices, and if you picked the wrong ones at the wrong time, you lost.
For point defense, we finally settled on a design for the small point defense turrets and the medium defense turrets.
The smaller ones had a system similar to the FH-02 rifle. It seemed to be an incredibly cost-effective design to get a lot of penetration, rate of fire, and bullet speed out of such a compact system.
Lasers were simply not good for this size, as they were too weak. And while you could make railguns that were a meter and a half in length that would be able to do a lot more damage than the design we went with, the problem with railguns was that even at this size they required a long time between each shot.
At best, the rate of fire was something like 60 shots a minute. That simply wasn’t enough to deal with fast-moving small missiles and other fliers.
The statistics were kind of crazy on how many bullets point defense guns missed, so volume became incredibly important.
Of course, there would be exceptions, so from the 26 point defense turrets, six would still be railguns, as sometimes you just needed that pinpoint accuracy and as much damage as possible. The same went for the medium defense turrets, of the 12, four were railguns.
The medium defense turrets were more varied than the point defense turrets. Their barrel length ranged from three to five meters. The non-railgun variety had two barrels with the same system as the FH-02, but they also had a strong laser, as they were big enough to mount a laser weapon that was actually effective.
Then we come to the last size of the turreted weaponry. We ended up going with four assault turrets. They were double-barreled railguns with barrel lengths of 10 meters.
Two of them were at the top of the ship, while the other two were at the bottom. Unfortunately, the bottom ones had worse angles to shoot at, as the sides of the ship—where the legs were—came down a bit. But these turrets would mainly be used to engage tough targets on the surface of a planet, although they could still be somewhat useful for ship-to-ship battles as well.
All the turrets had a flat design, although they could be extended quite a bit so the larger turrets could fire over the smaller ones—or, in the case of the assault turrets, over each other if needed. Of course, that would put them in more danger of incoming attacks.
We also had a decent number of different-sized missile ports. There were also drone ports, with two big ones at the back of the wings, quite close to the hull.
Drone combat was important in ship-to-ship fighting during cleanup, so we still needed ways to get drones off the ship without creating weak spots in our defenses by opening up one of the two ramps.
Almost everything needed some sort of supplies to keep firing, so we needed dedicated power, gas, and ammo lines to each weapon. It was a lot of extra work, especially because I wanted all the systems to be somewhat isolated so that one lucky shot wouldn’t cripple a large number of turrets.
We could test the point and medium turrets to some extent, which Dean and Sam were quite happy to oversee. We needed quite a few iterations before we were happy with how they performed. The factory we had built here started to produce the parts for the final design we went with.
As the weeks went by, the attack capability of the ship rose, alongside its defensive capabilities and overall functionality. Four months before the deadline to finish the Mark II, the ship was completely dark as the umbilical cord was cut, with even FH being powered down.
I was surrounded by my crew members as we gathered at the power core. We finally had enough nano machines to properly activate the power core.
Already, the power core was powering up as it had nearly a ton of radioactive materials inside it. We would need a lot more to passively run the ship’s passive systems, but hopefully we would eventually get there.
The percentage of stored power slowly climbed until it reached the 100% needed to activate fusion. With a mental command, the fusion reaction triggered.
The power production spiked. The power distribution console sections lit up one by one as the ship’s lights turned on. The hum of machinery started next as different systems came online. About 30 seconds later, I heard not through my bond but through the ship’s speakers FH’s voice.
“Critical ship systems online. Ship’s power reserves critically low. Estimated time for all ship systems to be fully online: 4 minutes and 23 seconds.”
While there was still a lot to do, the Mark II was finally alive.