chapter 153
We had burned pretty hard to get away from the station and then slowed down once again. We were in the middle ring. There were three asteroid belts, all of them quite dense.
However, it was dense only compared to other asteroid belts. This was one thing that textbooks, movies, and everything else got wrong, and that was how close the asteroids are to each other. Now, not to say that there aren’t areas that can be filled with quite a lot of asteroids, but mostly they are singular and tens of thousands of kilometres away from one another.
That also meant that a lot of wrecks were quite far away from one another. We had also seen how so many wrecks actually show up here. It’s not just limping ships that make it back here, but in fact, other ships bring in wrecks.
The thing that I had overlooked the most is that the large majority don’t actually know how to properly strip a spaceship to get everything valuable out of it. Yes, the biggest selling items and anything with valuable metals is taken out, but the rest is sold to the system that strips everything even more.
Why there are wrecks leftover is pretty simple economics. You just don’t need that much base metals all the time, especially around this place, and when you do need them, the wrecks will still be floating around.
Most of us, because of that, thought that it would be quite pointless to go salvaging, because the ships should be stripped bare. FH didn’t think so. The moment she brought this up flashed in my mind.
“Captain, we have secret compartments, although now most of it is moved to deep storage. I bet you that’s why there are still so many salvaging. They are looking for hidden compartments because they’re made to deceive scans, some would be overlooked.”
That perked everyone up, because for some reason absolutely every AI I had—even Sam and Dean—had somehow inherited my desire for loot. Perhaps it was a universal thing, because finding loot was literally the best thing.
Most of us were staying in the command centre because who knows when a fight would come up. If anything happened suddenly, it’s best if FH could use her innate ability to improve our chances of survival by pulling on our affinities.
I settled into my seat to finish up some design work before I had to get out of here and actually start building. It didn’t take too long before I was in my workshop, finally building components to make hard-light turrets.
As we were flying from wreck to wreck, we were doing so pretty slowly, so the drones would have time to scan the wreck and salvage some base materials for us. Unfortunately, their scanners would not pick up hidden places, as they weren’t that good.
Sensory Acuity was not a popular skill. The only thing it did was enhance your natural sensory organs, allowing them to pick up more information and process it faster. There were better skills like Far sight and so on, but those skills didn’t seem to work with spaceship affinity, Sensory Acuity did.
And the absolute best thing about Forward Horizon was that FH wasn’t the only one who could use her skills, all of the AIs built into the ship that were under FH could as well. And they were absolutely loving their enhanced capabilities that should have been impossible with our current technology.
I even had to tone down the emotional feedback I got from the ship, as they were enjoying themselves so much, and I needed to focus on my work. It took them two wrecks to actually find something as they got used to their new skill.
Of course, our luck didn’t hold up, as the secret compartments were already cleaned out, but that didn’t matter, they still found the hidden locations using the ship’s sensors. They were already giving me information about what needed to be changed with the sensors and what needed to be upgraded.
I let them have their fun as I continued to work on the hard-light turret. Now, it would be easy to make it fire, as I had the know-how, but to design it to continuously fire and be robust enough to survive the constant vibrations the spaceship experienced and the violent shocks returning fire would cause… now that was the difficult part.
This would have been impossible to do when I was still back on Earth, but now I had access to so many more materials, each with properties that I could only dream of before.
Having a problem with overheating on a component? Just switch to something that could tolerate that level of heat. A capacitor that would blow up because it was getting too much power. I could switch out the materials, and it would work just fine. Signal getting scrambled by vibration, switch up the material to something that can handle it.
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Like this, I continued to upgrade everything. Every so often, I had Bob help me by hitting the very thing I was building to make sure that nothing would break loose. Iteration after iteration, the turret changed from a working prototype to something that could survive war.
My first real distraction came when I felt a turret firing. Immediately, I wanted to know what was happening, only to find out that the wreck we were approaching had wreck roaches. The turret AIs were making bets on who could kill one from the longest distance.
I had to roll my eyes at that, but I let them have their fun. Lola was of course, already talking with FH and Bob to get the bodies on board so she could dissect them to see if they had any valuable materials on them or something she could use later on to improve our own bio-cybernetics.
The only ones who didn’t have any side hobbies besides playing card games and gambling were Sam and Dean. But they seemed to be taking their jobs as combatants seriously, spending the most time out of all of us training.
Their squads were also now quite competent. They did have a decent amount of equipment, but for our current rank, it was far from enough. Everything took time, but first we would get the ship upgraded, then we could worry about what came next.
I remembered to take a bit of time off, so whenever we came across a wreck that had roaches, I just took my time and observed the AIs as they exterminated them.
XV57 fired using the targeting information she had gotten from the other AIs on the ship. It was fascinating to watch how they worked together, but her shot was just a bit off target. Of course, it was about 8,500% farther away than that turret’s maximum effective engagement range, but they did not seem to care about what their maximum range was.
The fact that her shot missed only by 8 centimetres was something incredible. Some of the other AIs consoled her while others said they could do it better. All of those were called out, and so they took turns shooting at the wreck roach that was moving from one wreck to another, along with a few dozen others.
That one shot had truly been lucky to even get that close, as we needed to close in a lot more before any of the shots actually started to hit. Soon after, there were no wreck roaches left alive.
That was one of the advantages projectile weapons had. Even my hard-light weapons would never reach that far. They had a pretty long engagement range, but eventually the bolts of light, after they travelled about 8 to 10,000 kilometres, would simply disperse.
Because of that, they were a lot cleaner to use than projectiles, as they would not continue to fly about endlessly inside the system, but it also meant that they had an upper limit to their engagement range.
Most of the time, long-range engagements were useless, especially against ships, as a ship would never stay in the same place for so long for you to actually hit. But stationary targets were a different story altogether.
That’s why I think most of the turrets will be changed over to hard light, but not all of them will be. I will even be keeping a few regular laser turrets. While most of the time they will not be useful, there were still situations where they were the best choice, so some would stay.
Anyway, it was time to get back to work as the entertainment was over. We had a three-month wait to get a berth that FH was satisfied with, but one month was already over. Looking at the table, I only had to put some finishing touches on this prototype that I now deemed almost ready for war.
During all of this, I learned so much and actually had a crazy idea. The main railgun we had could be converted to shoot hard light, which would increase its damage output quite a lot, but not to a degree as smaller weapons. Because of that, I didn’t actually want to change it, but that’s where the crazy part came in.
The railgun was built in stages, and I could actually make the first stage—the one that the projectile rested in—movable, or more specifically, rotatable. It would allow us to slot in everything required to fire hard light. Just imagining being able to switch it up like that… it was simply way too awesome.
The problem was I was missing some high-end crystals that needed to be big enough to actually make it work. That, however, will be a problem of time and circumstance. Eventually, we will get what we need, but right now it was time to focus back on upgrading the turret.
Another day and it was finished. It was a point defense turret with a double barrel. Now I knew the theoretical destructive power it had when it fired, but would the reality meet up with my calculations? That I didn’t know.
“Bob, it’s time.”
As soon as I sent this message, our entire bond network flooded with excitement, not just because of Bob, but everyone else. Good thing I had set those limiters, otherwise the emotions would be overwhelming.
Soon Bob and I were suited up and exiting the ship using the deep storage access to the outside. Between us, made into a temporary drone, was the turret itself.
It took us a bit of time to remove the previous projectile turret. The way I had designed it was to be in two parts: the upper part and the lower part, where the actual AI was. The lower part of the turret was responsible for movement and aiming—it was the brain of the turret—while the upper half was the business end.
I had purposely designed everything to be upgradable. We still needed to make changes to the lower part as well, as this was quite a different type of upper half. We no longer needed the pathways for the projectiles to move, but instead we used them to deliver more power.
It took us a couple of hours, as working in outer space was a lot more difficult, but also a good experience. We’ll be needing to do this more just to get better at it.
When all was said and done, the new turret was in place. We didn’t leave immediately, as there might still be something wrong, so we watched as the turret started to move, the AI going through diagnostics.
We needed to make two further adjustments, both of which were basically just adjusting stuff a few millimetres, but afterwards the AI was satisfied. There were no wreck roaches around, but we still had plenty of objects in space we could fire at.
“Fire at will,” I said, and a moment later the double barrels produced a brilliant blue light as the bolts flew through space, blowing up the target almost 1000 kilometres away.
“Damn, that was a lot of destruction,” Bob said through our communication channel, admiring the display of power that had just happened.
Once again, we needed to wait for diagnostics until another pair of bolts screamed through space. Of course, it was silent, but I wondered if they would make any noise in the atmosphere. We’ll need to wait to figure that one out.
This was a point defense turret, but its destructive power now jumped up to be between the mid and the large projectile turrets we currently have. That was about where I expected, but actually seeing it with my own eyes was still surreal.
Then finally came the fire rate. We watched as it started to fire, never stopping. The barrels also started to overheat as I saw the heat-dissipating channels starting to glow. It still managed an almost 5-minute continuous fire rate before it reached its limit, with a fire rate of almost 550 rounds per minute.
That destructiveness was unreal. It would need to take more breaks so as not to overheat, which dropped the fire rate down to about 100 a minute, but it was still more than enough.
“Don’t push it over the breaking limit, but still push yourself as hard as you can, be on the edge for as long as you can,” I said to the AI as we were now back inside the ship.
We needed to gather as much data as possible, and this particular prototype was basically going to be scrapped by the end of this testing cycle, but that would allow me to improve the next one even more. The power output and the fire rate would not be improving much, but its survivability sure would.