chapter 82
“Forward Horizon, clearance granted,” came through the speakers. Thoron and I had already had our goodbye, but it seems like he wanted to get the last word, so to say, as I could recognise his voice giving us final clearance to leave.
There is a chance that I might need to get back here if our ship experiences some troubles, but I hope that didn’t happen. Outside, the lights went dark. I went over the readiness list, seeing that everyone had listed their station green.
All of my crew members were on the bridge as we were heavily short on personnel. We needed everyone to continuously check that everything was going smoothly. Technically, FH should be able to run the ship entirely on her own, but even she is a novice at all of this, like the rest of us.
The sensors now indicated that the outside of the ship was near vacuum, and not a moment later the large hangar doors above us opened up. For the first time the Mark II was greeted with the vacuum of space.
The warnings went off as they should to indicate that we were now surrounded by vacuum. The RCS thrusters fired as the undocking calculations completed. We could feel the acceleration even if it was incredibly tiny. This still took an enormous amount of fuel, as the ship was quite massive. Right now the weight came in at 988 tonnes.
Without the extra cargo we would be 450 tonnes lighter. I’m still amazed at how light we actually managed to make the ship, but it was an important goal to still be able to land on a planet. The constantly updating view of the surroundings all around me was a thrill to experience as we rose up, clearing the berth this ship was born in.
Soon the sun was shining on the armour. The small spike in radiation was detected, but it was still negligible this close to the planet. We no longer had to worry about the armour getting irradiated, as it was high enough grade that it would take a tremendous amount to start affecting it.
We also learned from the principles of how the radiation-absorbing fabric I bought long ago from a space station on our way here worked. Nano machines have mostly finished modifying the outer surface of the armour plates to mimic that fabric so we would have more protection, and it’s such a shallow change that it didn't affect the defensive properties of the rest of the armour plating.
As we got further away from the shipyard, instead of using RCS thrusters we switched to our manoeuvre thrusters. They started spinning, getting their RPMs up, yet nothing happened. The blades were yet to be energised, but slowly the power was being brought up.
This was the first time we could test it under proper conditions, so everything we were doing we were doing slowly and observing as much as possible. Hundreds of other systems were going through the same procedures. As the energization continued to ramp up, we started to move, adjusting our position.
We had a bit of a special route. It was not the fastest way out of this solar system, but a pathway to allow us to test all the aspects of our ship except for weaponry. That was still not allowed, but that was understandable.
Perhaps we could have gotten permission to test our lasers, but no one wanted more space debris flying about, so the more traditional guns were definitely off the table for that discussion. And because most of our weaponry was projectile, it made no sense to try to test it out here.
We tested all of our manoeuvre thrusters in every direction, even had them fight against each other. We pushed them quite hard, but we did not do any proper red line testing as we wanted to keep our true capabilities hidden, and the tests we were running would allow us to approximate, which would help with the red line tests later.
As we reached the proper location to start accelerating and not just manoeuvring, it was finally time to test the side engines.
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Were they over-engineered, probably pointless engines that I could have made using simpler and better electric engine designs. Certainly, but as they roared to life, the vibrations they sent through the ship were smooth and quite pleasant. I would not replace them for anything.
I wondered how they would truly sound, but that I could only truly find out when we landed on a planet. At the moment the propellers didn’t spin as the gearbox wasn't in gear just yet. As we wanted to test the movement of the engines, letting them go vertical and horizontal multiple times.
As they moved, they shifted our mass, but the power core filled with nano machines compensated. Seems like the programs we wrote out worked perfectly to keep everything in sync. Of course, this was the easy challenge, but now it was time to engage the gearbox.
The propeller started to spin. Seeing it from the captain’s chair was quite amazing, as I only needed to turn my head left and right to have an experience like I was directly looking outside seeing them spin up. The propellers spun in opposite directions to counteract their own force, keeping the ship stable.
The propellers would run in different RPMs depending on the situation. Another set of tests and finally we started to energise the blades. Even just a little bit of energising pulled the ship forward, so we lowered the propellers’ RPMs to be quite low.
The tests took quite a while, but we were now constantly accelerating, although at varying intensity, on our path to leave this solar system. It didn't take long for us to find the limits.
Fast RPMs and low energisation gave us a smooth acceleration, but not as strong as we were expecting. This would probably be better for combat situations, where the side engines would mainly be used to help adjust our position instead of giving us more straight-line speed.
At lower RPMs but strong energisation, the ship really started to move. We could get to our target of 5G acceleration relatively easily, with Lola calculating that we could most likely push the side engines to an acceleration of about 7 or 8G. That was more than we were expecting. As always, theory could only take you so far.
This was also the perfect time to test out the gravity devices. All of a sudden the 5G acceleration we were feeling disappeared as we were weightless once again. Then a moment later slowly the gravity ramped up again, but this time in the correct orientation. It was exhilarating to see that we were still accelerating so quickly, but we no longer felt any of that.
Everything continued to run quite smoothly, although there were some problems that popped up, mainly to do with programming. Some bugs needed to be fixed, but Lola and FH were good enough to do that as I continued to execute test after test.
The lack of personnel was quite concerning, as everything took time, and in a combat situation that was just not going to fly. That problem should, however, be fixed during our travel to the new destination.
“The ship has flown now for 24 hours. Anything non-critical to report?” I asked everyone, as everything critical had already been taken care of.
“I think the chairs could do with some redesigning. I will leave the report in the suggestion box,” Dean said. I wondered what he came up with. A moment later FH spoke up.
“All of this is a bit overwhelming. I am barely keeping up, but I don’t think more processors would help.”
“Don’t worry, I believe I already have the solution. I will explain everything during our next meeting when we enter FTL.”
No one else had anything to say, so we continued. In the next few hours, the tests we were running finally started to peter off, but that was only a momentary break as we had finally reached a runway where we could accelerate more.
We picked the 20G acceleration runway, and for the first time went through the ignition start of the four main engines. As everything came back green, the engines roared to life on my command. The artificial gravity turned off, as we did not want to damage those devices. Acceleration quickly climbed past 10G.
Once again we were incredibly busy. There seemed to be an interesting interaction between the side engines and the main engine. It seems that faster acceleration did affect how well the side engines performed. It seems the faster we were accelerating, the less thrust they would have, which was quite curious but something that in the end didn’t matter too much.
In fact, it didn’t take too long for us to reach nearly 20G even as we were taking things slowly, so the side engines were de-energised but still kept spinning so if we needed their thrust we could get it at a moment's notice.
Now we could get up to the limit of 20G of this runway only using our main engines. The number of diagnostics we were running on everything and the observation of it all took a lot of processing power, taxing our system quite heavily. This was also excellent to see how well we managed to handle the generated heat of the ship.
We were also constantly running the shields, which ever so often slightly flared with heat as we hit some space debris that normally our armour would have taken care of. Before we knew it, we had been up for quite a while and finally reached the 7.7% of light speed needed to enter FTL.
We cut our main engine thrust, energised the side engines, and adjusted their acceleration to 2.5G. As this ship was large enough, we had two FTL devices. They worked simultaneously as I hit the button for us to transition into the side dimension as we reached the proper speed.
Just before that FH finished sending our goodbyes and the information about the similarities of a few animal species that seemed to share common ancestors that both our home planet seemed to have to that old dwarf.
The transition went off without a hitch. The side engines continued to work, although they needed to exert a little bit more effort than before, which was expected. Otherwise, everything seemed to be going smoothly.
“FH, run a final scan for any listening devices.”
“No listening devices detected,” she announced a few minutes later.
“Excellent, because I have so many things to tell you all. But first, let's adjust course. We need more time than our current route will give us, so FH, please take us on a scenic route.”
“As you command, Captain.”