Nice , always a pleasure to read your stuff . Makes me want to find that sim for being a stardestroyer captain.Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:Thanks for reading.
Declan
Hull no. 721- a fanfic
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fractalsponge1
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There's always HW2 Warlords, but that would never do the fights in this fanfic justice.
[rant] If I may digress a little the problem with that RTS space combat sim and many others is that it's straight up attack numbers versus defense numbers; no maneuver, no EW, barely any 3-dimensionality or real tactics to the combat. It's like we're back to Age of Empires with lines of archers basting away without moving, but with ships and better graphics instead. Like the absurdity of a frigate going toe-to-toe with an Executor in warlords. Visually awesome mod, but can be pretty unsatisfying gameplay, limited by the engine and basic game concept. You could probably work wonders if you started giving ships attack and defense stats separate from gun and shield power that corresponded to behavior; model hit rates based on the attack value and experience of the unit, and translate a defense stat as actual maneuver on the map. Maybe as games start taking advantage of multi-core processing, we'll start seeing a capital ship equivalent of TIE Fighter [/rant]
Anyways, great update as always. Hoping to see some real capital ships later
[rant] If I may digress a little the problem with that RTS space combat sim and many others is that it's straight up attack numbers versus defense numbers; no maneuver, no EW, barely any 3-dimensionality or real tactics to the combat. It's like we're back to Age of Empires with lines of archers basting away without moving, but with ships and better graphics instead. Like the absurdity of a frigate going toe-to-toe with an Executor in warlords. Visually awesome mod, but can be pretty unsatisfying gameplay, limited by the engine and basic game concept. You could probably work wonders if you started giving ships attack and defense stats separate from gun and shield power that corresponded to behavior; model hit rates based on the attack value and experience of the unit, and translate a defense stat as actual maneuver on the map. Maybe as games start taking advantage of multi-core processing, we'll start seeing a capital ship equivalent of TIE Fighter [/rant]
Anyways, great update as always. Hoping to see some real capital ships later
Go and play Star Wars - Shadows of the Empire.fractalsponge1 wrote:[rant] If I may digress a little the problem with that RTS space combat sim and many others is that it's straight up attack numbers versus defense numbers; no maneuver, no EW, barely any 3-dimensionality or real tactics to the combat. Maybe as games start taking advantage of multi-core processing, we'll start seeing a capital ship equivalent of TIE Fighter [/rant]
It switches gameplay from trooper to pilot style gaming (and back).
As trooper you got to open the hangerbay doors for one.
As pilot you got to keep your YT-2400 intact from a SD and the local pirat ring.
Can even let the droide pilot the ship while you take one of the guns.
Nothing like the present.
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fractalsponge1
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Eleventh Century Remnant
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This chapter turned into a bit of a monster, took longer than I had expected.
Fractalsponge, I think you may want to skip down a bit, because the amount of gunfire the Mandator seen here uses is, frankly, minimal. It's hardly trying at all, really.
Ch 35-B
HIMS Cosmonaut Ijon Tichy was a ship with a reputation, some parts of it good, most just passing strange. He had two mottoes, one official, one less so.
The official version was “Navigare Necesse Est”- which was variously translated by the crew as ‘Fly, Fly you fools’, ‘get me out of here’, ‘why me? Well, somebody has to do it’, and ‘I thought you knew how to steer this thing.’
All of which the man himself would have recognised as bearing a certain validity.
The official unofficial motto was “More closed timelike curves than the Miss Gallifrey pageant.”
And what a crew. Tichy had been an inadvertent xenologist, and probably the greatest amateur first contact man the galaxy had ever known; his life had been one long cascade of biological diversity, and the ship named for him had a high proportion of aliens among the crew even in these unenlightened days.
Even numerous rated droids and mechanicals. The Cosmonaut had had an almost touching faith in the essential decency of computers- on record as saying “It’s comforting, when you think about it, that only Man can be a bastard.”
On current data he had been wrong, although it was possible he had had a better breed of computer to deal with, back in the dawn of the Republic.
The ship was idiosyncratic in several ways as well. The Mandator-I class was- had been- legally limited to short range hyperdrive only, for fear of what the largest and most heavily armed fleet in the galaxy might otherwise do.
There were two interesting technical issues, the first of them being, how do you build a limited range hyperdrive? In order to function at all, it has to be an extraordinarily capable and durable piece of kit.
Shaving the margins to make it capable of only a thousand light years would leave it so close to overload and unable to withstand sudden loads in normal usage as to constitute a distinct hazard to the ship and the crew.
The other problem was a legal one. Who, if anybody, was going to insure compliance with this? Asking Kuat to do it themselves was obvious nonsense, and almost everyone else who was competent to do so was also in competition with KDY, a conflict of interest so obvious that even the Senate noticed.
In the end, the problem got palmed off on the Republic Judicial Corps, who used ships whose entire hyperdrive system was smaller than one of the circuit breakers in a Dreadnaught’s engine room, and who would have found it as easy to put out a quasar by peeing on it as to bring down a renegade Mandator.
Kuat Drive Yards obeyed the law not out of respect for it, but out of consideration for their own reputation- and the balance of power that underlay the situation that made them their money.
Many of their ships probably were in technical violation, as a matter of safety, but these were local modifications, and not part of any company wide effort- and nobody could prove otherwise, officially at least. It may even have been actually true.
One of the most interesting side effects was that a lot of research had been done on hyperdrive at the margins; failure conditions and possible retrievals, stability, miniaturisation- the clone war era fighters and their booster rings owed a lot to that.
Ijon Tichy was supposed to be a Mandator-I, but in practise was very much odder than that.
When it had become politically possible to uprate them, not only did he ‘acquire’ a full range, galactic- class hyperdrive, he had the cone and pole antennae of hyperdrive and associated field projectors- a towing rig.
He could carry another craft of similar size and mass through hyperspace, retrieving a disabled sister ship or delivering a short-range version to a customer, or do stranger things- spaciobatics, they called it.
In this case, he was acting on information received- following a trail based on data from the capture of Oyadan, that was leading them towards a point not quite in the middle of nowhere. Down, and off to the left a bit.
Mandators were older ships, but they had been kept up to date, and Tichy’s descent sensors did register something there.
Emergence; and a light strike group, four Keldabe class destroyers, two old Recusant, and half a dozen frigates- a single wandering Imperator might be severely threatened, the group was a fair match for two, but for a full dreadnaught, it was playtime.
Tichy shrugged off the volley of fire they opened with, and reached out and grabbed the nearest Recusant with tractor/manipulator beams, sheared away the shielding with ion fire, and started prodding it.
Pushing and pulling with tractor/pressors, twisting it, playing grab with the engine modules and pointing them in different directions, compressing and releasing the exoskeletal flaps.
By the time the destroyer completely lost the plot and attempted to turn on a collision course, Tichy’s tractor operators had got to the stage of trying to play a tune on the exposed metal ribbing. An ion bolt below the bridge put paid to the ram.
The first of the Keldabes to engage got a rude shock when she tried to accelerate past the dreadnaught to the aft quarters and fire on the engine block.
Part of Tichy’s towing gear was the projectors and uptakes necessary to extend some shield coverage over a ship being lifted. Not as good as the main hull’s coverage, but good enough to form into a parabolic duct, and deflect the heavy bolts of the destroyer- monitor’s main guns back at her.
The pi-th dan master of Furjoto the ship was named after would have approved of using the enemy’s strength against them.
Keldabe- class destroyers boasted two very large and very peculiar guns of possible Confederate design, a hyperexcited blaster scaled up to the point where it’s ionic effects were significant; not quite as effective as an ion cannon the same size- but a lot more straightforward lethality.
The Keldabes themselves, their front end was largely girderwork, squarer and heavier- looking than they really were; unfortunately, they didn’t have the shielding or the mass to take a hit from their own main guns.
The second Recusant actually was ex- confederation, or at least the computer system was. How it had survived this long was anyone’s guess, but Tichy did a truly cruel thing to it- expanded it’s consciousness.
Included within it’s simple mental lexicon the concepts of obsolescence, cheapness, disposability. The droid ship was sub-sentient, operant modules for systems feeding into instinct and ego;
Tichy dissolved that ego by showing it the evidence of how little it’s masters had really valued it, how it had been half way to the scrapheap from the moment of it’s creation. Rammed the evidence down it’s throat, actually.
Then Tichy expanded on the other side of the equation, told it about the people it had destroyed, about the ambitions and the real potential it had squandered and the future it had helped to break.
Grief-stricken, the confederate destroyer and it’s droid working crew committed electronic suicide, leaving the flesh and blood pirates on board trapped in a slowly tumbling durasteel tomb without power or life support.
Even Tichy wasn’t sure whether that actually constituted a virus or not.
The remaining three Keldabe destroyers were afraid to engage, first of all for the reason that absolutely anything might happen.
Between the hundred-million ton xylophone and the electronic weeping and wailing from the second Recusant, there was no guarantee that their shot wouldn’t, for instance, fly into a field of complexity, achieve sentience, turn into a flock of spacebats and fly away.
Which was true enough, but then it occurred to them that they were facing a kriffing dreadnaught, and they had more than enough perfectly normal reasons to be afraid.
They had come to eliminate an errant Vigo-wannabe and conduct an assassination or five and a sector wide grand tour of bank raids, and this had not been in the job description.
They laid down a barrage- achieving nothing, swallowed up harmlessly by the huge ship’s shielding, and turned away to escape to hyperspace.
Not fast enough. The seconds they took to turn was forever in computer time, and at least the Recusant had had something resembling electronic security- not enough to stave off the complexity of attack, but at least it had tried. By comparison, the Keldabes had nothing.
It was a relatively simple matter to take control of the navigation data and amend it slightly.
Specifically, pick two ships, and give each destroyer the other’s entry point, then sit back and laugh as the overgunned, relatively fragile ships sideswiped each other at hyperdrive-entry speeds.
Tichy could have brute-forced that, fine-focusing a grav projector at the entry points to create a steep enough pull to draw them into collision, or blinded them and pulled them off course with his EW fit and tractors, but this was more elegant.
Only poetic justice, and almost as odd as what happened to the last Keldabe; the one that had been left because Tichy’s vector took him very close to the little ship, almost overrunning her.
Which might have been more merciful than what actually happened, the best description of which was probably time bombing via the towing rig.
HIMS Cosmonaut Ijon Tichy was, after all, equipped to transport craft of his own size through hyperspace, and on something as small as a Keldabe he could take it along whether it wanted to go or not.
Reeled in by the tractors and whiplashed along into hyperspace, the little destroyer experienced first, the rest of the universe speed up around it, being able to do nothing, not fast enough to matter to the reality it was accelerating and dilating away from.
Then time came back to hammer the people on board with a vengeance as it was the universe that slowed down and they were dragged through spacetime unprotected, aging and withering as the cosmos stood still around them.
That had to be some kind of a record. Six light destroyer class craft destroyed or neutralised, without firing as much as a single turbolaser shot, and only one heavy ion cannon.
The Cosmonaut had been basically a peaceful man, but never shy about doing what had needed to be done. And there were other targets to sort out.
Ord Corban, and Voracious was wondering what she had got herself into. Admonisher was laying what fire could be spared from Black Prince on the light destroyer- and hitting, mostly.
Caliphant was getting hoarse from helm orders, and trying to keep his crew organised and cheerful and up to the mark. Time had got weird on him; seconds seeming like hours, hours seeming like minutes; this was the former.
He was almost excruciatingly aware of what was happening, and starting to wonder, when does this end?
When you screw up badly enough to let them kill you, was the obvious answer. Or when they do.
Mon Evarra was firing by battery groups, slow and deliberate, timed against what of her heat dispersal remained intact; shaken, but still fighting effectively with what she had left.
About to get buried under a cloud of Imperial bombers looking for that breach in her shields, and already spitting point defence fire at them.
How likely were the rebels to remain in theatre- or at least how likely was Admonisher, if she lost the last of her squadron? As long as there was a chance to break the blockade and get anything out, they had an interest in staying.
Actually, in Admonisher’s position, Lennart would have jumped out now, waited until the Empire sent in troops to reclaim and engineering assets to rebuild, and re-entered the fight then- reaping, potentially, a handsome bonus in lives taken and assets destroyed as well as doing more to break his own people out.
He just hoped Admonisher’s captain was too target fixated to think of it.
Dynamic was more or less out of it- could still give but was in no shape to take punishment, could only safely be brought into the end game. Fist had lost most of her shielding, mostly due to Mon Evarra, but was still intact, or at least had lost nothing further in this phase of the fight.
Voracious was moving and firing very well for a scratch crew, the incidents they had seen in the run-up to this had done them a lot for good, but the numbers weren’t working for them. She simply wasn’t doing as much good against the massive Shockwave as she would against a smaller target.
Detach her to reinforce the planetary blockade, allow the fighters and small craft holding there to use her as a base station, rest and replenish ordnance? Not yet- one side of the planet still had too many big guns for comfort, and it would also mean taking too much firepower out of the Imperial line. Well, melee.
‘Voracious, this is Black Prince Actual. Go and pick on somebody your own size- manoeuvre clear of Admonisher, engage Mon Evarra.’ Lennart ordered.
There wasn’t really any more they could do than they were already to keep Admonisher off Voracious’ back. The frigates and corvettes of detached forces wave one were squalling at her, thunderstorms’ worth of green tracer, and doing well- well enough to draw counterfire.
Secondary medium and light turbolasers from Admonisher reached out across the formation, seeing who was stolid enough not to flinch and who was jittery enough to run too far, too fast.
There was a clear contender for idiot of the moment; Yeklendim in their capture, Grey Princess. He evaded too radically, and then settled back down to steady weave too soon.
‘Yeklendim,’ Lennart commed him, ‘jump out now. You’re about to become a target.’
Yeklendim had the sense, for the first time in his career, to obey as he was officially supposed to instantly and without question.
Sarlatt on the sister ship Provornyy managed to do a little better than that, by accelerating towards Grey Princess and forcing her to turn away or be sideswiped- and avoid the salvo of MTL fire Admonisher had dropped ahead of Grey Princess in anticipation.
Grey Princess made it to lightspeed, she would move clear, then plot a return course immediately. In theory. The light gun fire washed over the rest of the group, mostly resistible- the Carracks could take it, and most of the force was operating on their captains’ own judgement anyway.
Lennart did order the Marauders and Customs Corvettes to break out of the pack and draw a tangent across the rebel fighter group’s line of attack.
Admonisher had no such support against Imperial fighters, but she did have a much thicker point defence fit. Vehrec was arguing with himself what to do- duty said go in close and strafe, common sense said long range warhead fire.
Pilot ego said charge, good judgement said wait for Black Prince’s fire to make an opening then move to exploit it.
Any compromise was likely to be worse than either option pursued decisively, he thought until he realised that the ‘charge’ plan would involve taking large, slow-manoeuvring shuttles into point blank range of a ship with an extensive point defence grid.
Maybe the compromise made sense, just this once.
‘Division Two, aim for Admonisher’s engines, all remaining warhead load. Division three, with me, we’ll follow the warheads in and engage from close range.’
Olleyri on Black Prince was thinking, tennis. Royal tennis, old school, flat court, one ‘g’; or splat. Or was it actually called squash? Whatever, it was useful training for this.
Fast-moving hard things ricocheting everywhere, and trying to chase the angles and cover the positions, guide the fighters into a position they might be able to survive making a strike from.
The division of sublight fighters that had been released by Wave Two of the warships had had their first target snatched out from under them when One and Indivisible died; most of them had steered for Mon Evarra, and were about to launch on the wounded Mon Cal ship. Too many?
Olleyri identified about half of the fighters and bombers; ordered “Task Force Five, change of target.
Admonisher. Accelerate in, ripple fire rockets from a hundred thousand kilometres out, proceed in to strafe. This is the main strike mission, run down your fuel reserves. Good luck and good hunting.”’
And stay still for all this to happen to you, you bastard, he thought at Admonisher, and hoped it wasn’t listening.
Lennart wasn’t so optimistic, and had good reason to be so. ‘We’re approaching the mathematical threshold, guns group up, tensors and compensators brace for recoil from sustained time on target volleys. Her hyperdrive’s up.’
True; the target board was showing bent space and stray tachyons from Admonisher.
‘I think it’s valid.’ Brenn said. ‘Our dispersal-‘
‘Yes.’ Lennart agreed with his junior; it was possible that Admonisher was warming up her hyperdrive just to make them think she was going to move out, and trick the fighters into not launching on her until it was too late; but there were other, actually two, good reasons to move.
‘All fighters,’ drawing a catchment area on the tactical map including both the attack groups heading for Admonisher, ‘Black Prince Actual, countermand that. She’ll be gone before your shot could reach.
Fighter tactical division five, proceed to Ord Corban and reinforce the blockade there. Divisions two and
three stand by for nav data.’
To his own chief controller he added ‘Sorry, Ol, but you can’t see her hyperdrive from down there.’ and on squadron com ‘Fist, Dynamic; Admonisher is preparing to jump out to engage one of you. When she does, go full evasive- buy time for us to come up and join you.’ And to the bridge team, ‘Guns-‘
There was a flare from the underside aft, and a crunch and kick as one clutch of bolts hit shielding, a couple burst through; the ship pitched slightly, helm reported and Lennart realised ‘Secondary engine’ at the same time.
Half a second later, another set of flares, starboard side midships forward of the turret line, one penetration, vapourisation flare.
‘They’ve switched to half broadsides,’ Rythanor reported, thinking about how this would change the odds- ‘no recommendation.’
‘Sensible.’ Lennart acknowledged, meaning that it was a good move on the rebels’ part.
‘Helm'- sketching the beginning of a move they had done almost too often already, sideslip and roll to being back on target, but then extended out into a full corkscrew that broke back and out into an arching strafe.
Beware aesthetics, he thought. If it looks a smooth and beautiful curve, the enemy may see it that way too- and predict it that much more easily. We’ve both made mistakes because a move looked too right. ‘Scarify that a bit, and fifteen hundred.’
The Imperial system of giving helm orders was, for all the drive to standardisation, still damnably confusing. Object driven was relatively easy- go to, dock with, not a problem.
In combat, if an order containing a proportion was given, say ‘sixty-forty evasion’, it meant that sixty percent of the ship’s thrust was reserved to maintain the base course, and forty percent could be used for evasive manoeuvres. If one figure was mentioned it was a value in ‘g’.
Fifteen hundred was almost half Black Prince’s total thrust, especially missing one secondary engine.
Most ships wouldn’t be remotely capable of keeping their guns on target through that kind of radical evasion; she- actually couldn’t, but years of practise had taught the gunners how to fire when the sights came on, and the helm crew how to give the gunners that chance.
The wave of green smashed into the rebel destroyer dorsal midships, breaking through the shielding- there was a double flare, overload and failure, theoretically repairable, but followed by the rumbling flash of the generator itself letting go. A hard, tactically irreparable breach.
Better yet, the point of impact was the forward of the two dorsal batteries. There was a scatter of wreckage before the secondary detonation; had they been that radical- shut down tensors and compensators, purposely wrecking the turret assembly to try to prevent a clear detonation?
If they had, they had sacrificed the gun crews to protect the rest of the ship. One eighth of their firepower gone, a fifth of that which they could safely bring to bear on their primary target, and gaps in their defences now, on the bow and right in their best fire arc, which screamed ‘exploit me.’
‘Good,’ Lennart said, ‘but scan globes and manoeuvre thrusters would be more efficient targets.’
Before Wathavrah could protest, and express scepticism that anyone could think he had actually meant it, Lennart added ‘Brenn, she’s lining up on Fist. Warn Tevar and get the intercept course dialled in.’
Admonisher had turned to the best-compromise course between presenting her guns and lining up to make the jump, rotating side on.
Of her eight turret groups, two were dorsal centreline, one now gone; two underside centreline, one just aft and one just forward of the hangar complex. The other four clusters were upper surface, two either side of the superstructure.
It was a good arrangement, and the main reason Shockwave- class destroyers weren’t more widespread was that they were, in practise, overweight- too big and too slow.
In theory, they could be brought down reliably, if not exactly easily, by their own weight and cost in Imperator- class. That usually meant four ships.
Admonisher’s ventral batteries came back into circuit, and added their fire. One salvo from Black Prince missed- aiming at the ventral batteries, on the edge of the outline, the heavy destroyer twisted the other way;
Admonisher’s fire scattered individual bolts across the starboard side, losing focus and power priority.
Her parting shot as she made lightspeed was a clean miss;
Black Prince’s, before she moved to pursue, was a solid hit- in the hangar bay, and drop ship complex, largely empty and without much left to land back on anyway.
Admonisher made lightspeed, Black Prince was five seconds behind her; the Imperial hyper capable fighters had a brief reprieve, but the rebels- they were strung out widely, under fire from the light and customs corvettes and taking losses.
Astromechs. A bad idea, for the very simple reason that they could not hold that many courses- stripped away all the tactical flexibility hyperdrive was supposed to give. The cut price navigation rig bolted into the B-wing was even worse; only able to store two or three paths, depending on how recently built.
They had no vector out, and no way to survive, unless they could kill off the Imperial escorts firing on them and buy enough time for somebody to get a plot together.
They could probably manage to do some damage- maybe not enough to survive, but there were a lot of warhead capable craft in there, and Rontaine’s customs ships were not long for this world.
Unless someone else, like a fighter squadron or twenty, decided to derive the rebels of their blaze of glory. Vehrec broadcast to his own charges ‘You know, I fancy alphabet stew. Let’s go kill them.’
Voracious and Hialaya Karu were seventy degrees apart as seen from Mon Evarra, and widening. That would have been a bad move against a healthy Mon Cal ship, against a cripple it made all too much sense.
Mon Evarra could no longer keep them both against her best arc, the relatively heavily armed and shielded bow; soon, one or other of them would be able to engage on the blasted-open starboard side, or the inherently weak port where the hangar bay was.
Of course, keeping intact shields towards them would stop being an issue soon, when they rebel ran out of shielding.
Follow Admonisher, into one giant melee? Maybe, but not with these two on her tail.
Falldess hadn’t really been that badly shot at, yet. That changed as Mon Evarra turned the bulk of her remaining effective firepower on Hialaya Karu. She was firing bursts, a few guns at a time, accurate and burning into the shields, but the Imperials had a lot more to lose than Mon Evarra had left.
What plans could the Alliance ship possibly have? Did she simply intend to go down fighting? That made no sense from the military, or rebel, point of view. Doing something insanely dumb because they believed the force was with them, that was just about believable. This? Not really.
Ah, Falldess thought. They’re waiting for one of us to get overeager and stupid. Pick off that one and it’s a fair fight again. The rebel commander appears to be a determined man- well, amphibian, then.
Done this many times, enough to believe that dead weight may set the odds but it has nothing to do with what number actually comes up.
He’ll fight it out to the last, and hope for some turn of fortune to swing things back his way- such as one of us losing the plot and deciding to sail straight and level to make a better firing platform.
Most of the fire is coming my way, because I haven’t been that heavily shot at yet, and he wants to see how jittery I am, whether he can spook me into doing something so dumb.
Voracious was here sooner, has been much more heavily shot at along the way; more likely to be tired enough to make a mistake.
‘Helm,’ she ordered, ‘bring us down to a gentle flat lateral weave, let it look like we’re being stupid, then hard turn away.’ Get the rebel to over-react and move too soon, she hoped.
Mon Evarra was not about to let a chance like that go; yawed slightly, let loose one full volley, blindingly fast. Too fast for Hialaya Karu to react.
She was still playing dumb when the salvo hit, mostly in the bow- there was a reason most destroyers carried relatively little of importance there.
Outpost emplacement materials, one hyperdrive node, main navigational shielding- the most serious problem but as long as the combat shields were intact, they could substitute.
Mon Evarra took a second shot, but too late- Hialaya darted away more radically than Falldess had ordered, the helm team taking that on themselves and quite right too.
Mon Evarra turned away, Falldess held the manoeuvre, continuing high- thrust turns while waiting for the rebel trick to reveal itself, but the stream of purple fire really did reach out for Voracious.
Playing switching games, Falldess thought, keeping us off balance, and it’s eye comes back in damnably fast each time. Two main fire control teams, keeping a running solution on each of us?
And on the lighter craft. Obdurate made the move first, Tythallin followed, a swooping curve across the rebel destroyer’s stern. Still covered by shielding, but there was always that tiny space that couldn’t be shielded, directly over the thrust stream.
Obdurate had been busy already, and it was a fairly good day to be a frigate; faced with inflicting loss by shooting at the smaller ships, or trying to damage the larger ships that had been hurting them, the rebels had decided not to go for damage and body count that would serve no tactical purpose.
Unless you were one of the few frigate types that actually carried heavy turbolasers. Then you were a viable target.
Obdurate passed at a tangent, high speed and maximum possible aspect change, firing groups of shot at Mon Evarra’s engine vents; Janduvar Tythallin followed doing the same, and both drew counterfire.
Mon Evarra could only spare the power and sink capacity for MTL at the moment, and laid down a wall of fire that looked much more impressive than it as.
Demolishers were tougher than that, it would take time to erode them away with that, but Obdurate kept moving anyway. Tythallin steadied down to be able to aim more precisely.
Not good. Some rebel fire control officer saw the easy target, made a case for it, and got the power allocation he wanted- four of the after guns fired, scoring two hits on Tythallin, eroding shields, no burnthrough, not yet.
Tythallin’s fire pattern broke up, splattering shot all across the rebel’s stern, shielding thin enough that a couple of bolts did hit structure, but landed on bracing and ablatives- one splitting open a water tank, but not a lethal matter.
The rebel’s aft guns paused, Tythallin started to curve away, then the reb lashed out again and landed a burst that did achieve burnthrough, into the forward superstructure and breaking the hangar bay open.
Obdurate had been splashing bolts off engine casings, vents, the fantail, and finally managed to land one bolt directly on target, passing straight up the ion stream- her own shields scintillating from it- into the absurdly traditional looking forcefield projector ‘blades’ of the ion turbine.
The engine blew out, exploding out of it’s housing in a burst of blue-white light; oh, they’re not going to like me for that, Raesene thought- but Tythallin was stumbling, darting jerky moves as her engines fired seemingly at random. It didn’t look like purposeful evasion, which was half the point, but she hadn’t been that good going in.
Try to catch Mon Evarra’s attention and draw fire away from Tythallin, run and leave her to it, or- no real choice, Raesene decided. Fortunately, Mon Evarra was under enough pressure from the two Imperial destroyers that she pulled the power available back to fore, port and starboard batteries.
Being sandpapered to death by a shower of MTL fire was a slightly more feasible prospect.
‘Guns, counterfire. Helm, bring us around, I want to try to snag Tythallin on the tractor beams.’
There was more than one reason to try to do that; apart from pulling a sister ship out of trouble, he could still feel the distrust being radiated at him. Not from the crew- they knew what he had been dealing with, but from the officers of the rest of the squadron.
He had played judas goat, had sold out the rest of the Starfleet or at least tried to, and at least part of the distaste radiating his way was from people who wished they had thought of it first.
Speed, in political warfare as well a actual, was vital; and they had still been gathering evidence when Lennart had moved and simply placed them both under military arrest, without a moment’s visible doubt about the practicalities and legalities at all.
How would that have played out, if it had gone the other way? Operation placed on hold; wrangling back and forth; time wasted, enough to hide the evidence at least, enough legal wrangling to abort the whole business, and Black Sun and the Moff and his profiteers could continue on their merry way.
Maybe Lennart had expected his arresting two ISB agents to be overtaken by events, either dismissed as a minor matter or buried under so many more charges relating to Adannan that one more misdemeanour was just a triviality.
Raesene had dealt with his problem, whether he had meant to or not, by passing it up the chain of command, and although he wasn’t proud of that it was the way things had worked out. He doubted Lennart could do the same.
Another reason to make the move, and it was going to have to be a high- speed pickup, no deceleration to match velocity; the strain both ships would be vastly preferable to getting hit by another burst of heavy turbolaser fire.
There was a thud as the tractors reached out and grasped the load, and the noise- starships were not supposed to creak under the strain. There were creaking noises.
It took Raesene all of five seconds to start thinking it was a risk too far and wishing he didn’t have to go through with it, but they were committed now- and besides, most of Mon Evarra’s firepower was now pointed at Voracious.
The rebel destroyer had identified the Venator as their most profitable target. Voracious had not been in action for very long on any absolute scale, but long enough to have burned off almost a third of her fuel reserve, and a higher proportion than that of adrenalin.
Still, being shot at was a pick-me-up of a sort.
Penthesilea had survived for some time under the guns of Black Prince, but that had been a staged, tactically phased bombardment, intended to allow the rebel ship time to screw up.
Mon Evarra was trying for a relatively cheap kill, the first shots of this volley splattering of the shields over the fighter bay, some missing ahead- trying for the torpedo bays, aiming to touch off the carried ordnance.
The next cheapest was probably the bridge module. Caliphant ordered more evasive moves. Always, on the holovids, the captain was able to call out something like ‘Evasive Pattern Kappa Nine’- unfortunately, it didn’t actually work like that.
Between defections and hacking, any standard pattern would quickly become known to the other side. There was no shorthand. There were set patterns, but they were individual creations, with limited useful lives.
A hard evasive undulating bank, skidding against the dominant vector, and Caliphant waited for the crunch as bits of his ship fell off; there wasn’t one, but there was a sequence of hammers as the rebel divided it’s active gun mounts into batteries almost without pause- existing organisation coming to the fore there.
The batteries scattered clusters of bolts across Voracious’ path, landing one on the Imperial ship to the port side of the main bay door, leaving a glowing hole and door machinery damage.
‘Kirritaine, do something about that?’ Caliphant called down to this gunnery officer. ‘Before Hialaya manages to steal our thunder.’
The Karu class destroyer was lashing fire into the rebel, which had decided to block and evade as far as possible and concentrate on killing Voracious to even up the odds.
What was left of the Mon Cal’s shielding was facing the smaller Imperial destroyer, with the majority of her fire going into the Venator. That was a compliment of sorts, if a back handed one.
Voracious rolled to bear as Mon Evarra was expecting; not a perfect prediction though, a near-perfect straddle, bolts everywhere in a small volume of space around the Imerial destroyer, but no actual hits.
Caliphant thought about calling their bluff and staying put, but that was too stylised to be effective- a return salvo put four bolts into the Mon Cal ship, two solid hits, one port flank, on the edge of the hangar aperture and evidently hitting the pressure curtain- a shower of loose parts, air, storage modules and deck technicians flew out of the rebel ship.
The second hit was deep in the main body, over some piece of equipment- the almost red colour of the flare said a secondary reactor, but it was no tactical loss as Mon Evarra no longer had the heat sink capacity to afford to run it.
Voracious pulled her nose up and rolled to maintain fire arc, and Mon Evarra’s immediate reply was spot on, a prediction of elegance. Sixteen of thirty bolts hit, and three burned through.
One in the base of the bridge tower- accomodation, there should be no-one there at battle stations, but another good hit there would expose the reactor. One on the port docking vestibule, blasting the door open and spilling logistics modules into the void.
The third hit was the most potentially serious, up forward only one compartment from the torpedo bay- the hull was ripped open, but the additional layer of armour wrapped around mount and magazine protected them.
Voracious lobbed a salvo in return, Mon Evarra porpoised out of most of it- three hits, two burned through the outer layer of armour to be stopped by the inner, one smashed open a gun turret; the Imperial ship tried to sideslip out of the rebel’s next shot, and roll to present her intact starboard side.
She was half way through the manoeuvre, showing her belly, when the rebel shot hit; not as many- the rebel had judged the turning point well, but fired a relatively open pattern.
Three hits, one blasting straight through the starboard wing, one impacting on the opposite side of the ship directly ‘under’ the starboard turret line, one shearing off one of the sensor globes.
Which was, absurdly enough, Imperial victory of a sort. Voracious was taking hits, heavy ones, but not enough damage, fast enough, to stop her pouring shot into Mon Evarra. It was time to leave.
The rebel destroyer turned to bring herself bows on to Hialaya Karu, and accelerated towards her.
‘Kriff.’ Caliphant cursed, captain’s poise and decorum be damned, especially now. ‘Helm, bring what’s left to bear. Evade as you can, but first and foremost bring to bear.’
Hialaya Karu hadn’t just had a main scanner shot off and the rest trying to reset themselves from shock damage; she could see Mon Evarra decide that the numbers she needed weren’t happening- she was doing much less damage than she needed to- and that it was time to get out and do as much damage as possible along the way.
‘Helm, put us athwart their course then lay us on the reciprocal. That ship is either going to ram, near-miss and scatter mines, or try a very short run to hyperspace. I want to meet them head-on.’
Alurin had to ask. ‘Aye aye, Captain- but are you taking what happened last time into account?’
‘Of course.’ She said, confident sounding. ‘Practise makes perfect.’
There was no real, sensible answer to that. Alurin confined himself to pointing out that ‘They will keep firing on us throughout their approach.’
‘I know.’
Mon Evarra was thrusting hard to bring her vector across Karu’s predicted position- have to be either a ram or a scattering of mines.
They were only a couple of degrees off head on- a relatively easy shot for both ships, and each using what thrust it had to spare- Hialaya Karu had more freedom of manoeuvre- to slide round each other’s gunsights, throw targeting off as far as possible.
Ignore the window, Falldess thought, although she could actually see molten glow of damage in the distance and the outline of an ion flare. Don’t judge by hand and eye- you can’t. Trust the map, it knows what it’s doing. Judging momentum and acceleration isn’t so very different from judging wind and tide.
Of course it bloody is, but this is not a moment to be thinking that I can’t do it, this is a moment to look and sound confident, for the crew’s sake and my own.
‘Rolling broadside.’ she announced. The newer members of the crew, Dynamic’s handoffs, looked baffled by that, but her own crew knew she meant a continuous ripple.
Mon Evarra was better at this, but she had lost a lot of capacity to give and take fire, and Hialaya Karu tearing into her from ahead and Voracious from astern were shredding her.
Karu was taking most of the rebel’s fire still, and the deck jumped as a bolt hit, but the Mon Cal ship was hitting largely intact shields- two full salvoes or as full as she could manage, both sidestepped;
one open sheaf that scattered shot all around them and left eroded shielding but no burnthrough, a few hits- portside, some real damage, but not enough to stop them.
‘Helm, when I give the word,’ Falldess said, ‘I want you to bring this ship round as fast as she’s ever answered. Main engine throttling I think you call it. Sixteen and a quarter point turn to starboard, then maximum acceleration, everything you have.’
In other words, try to break the bow off, Alurin thought, then if that doesn’t work see what can be done about ramming the engines through the rest of the hull.
‘Understood.’ He said, because the only other thing to be said would have constituted incitement to mutiny, and he didn’t think a successful mutiny could be concluded in under five seconds.
A flash of tractor beam, a flush of air, and there were a shower of objects in their path- it looked as if Mon Evarra had jettisoned the contents of their ordnance bunkers more than laid an actual minefield. This was the moment.
‘Helm, now.’ Falldess ordered; the stars blurred past and the ship howled under the strain of the flash turn, and the ion wake flowed over and cooked off most of the hundreds of payloads’ worth of fighter missiles and torpedoes Mon Evarra had released.
That and the ion wake covering the now nearly shieldless Mon Cal ship, searing off access hatchers and rangefinders, com and sensor clusters- not actually enough to stop her making hyperspace.
It was the salvo from Voracious, twelve heavy guns that tore the rebel’s port quarter apart and knocked out three of the engines, that stopped Mon Evarra running.
She fired briefly at Hialaya Karu again- and what was left of the shower of fighter weapons splattered across the Imperial destroyer- but although there were hits, there was no real damage done.
‘Helm,’ Falldess ordered, ‘Bring us back round to bear, so we can finish that off before Voracious manages to steal the credit.’
On Voracious’ bridge, Caliphant was doing exactly that. His ship had shot at one of the outworlds, shot at One and Indivisible, shot at and been shot by Admonisher, and he wanted something of his own to kill now.
‘Helm, get us closer, guns, maximum power. Let’s get her before Hialaya Karu manages to steal the credit.’
Mon Evarra may have wanted to fight on, but considering the engines were shot, the shields were down, the hangar bay was blasted part way open, the sensors were compromised, and several parts of her structure were missing, it wasn’t really a viable proposition.
Surrender? Unlikely- but it seemed to be happening; the rebel reactivated a nav beacon, flashing white, and escape pods started to pop loose.
The rebel’s reactor was still running, though, still generating full military power- and one of the secondaries had come back on line also.
What did the book say? Oh, yes. ‘Hialaya Karu Actual to Mon Evarra, shut down your power plant. We are not obliged to accept your surrender unless you are no longer generating.’
Ten seconds, no reply, and more heat pouring out of the maimed rebel ship. If they were just buying time for their people to get out, then planning to self- destruct the ship, then… ‘Main guns, one full salvo, aim for the reactor.’
Hialaya Karu was closer to the target, but as soon as he registered the fire directors pointing on again Caliphant gave the fire order to his own gun crews.
Voracious’ salvo, less the two turrets still recovering from shock damage, splashed into the Rebel ship’s hull a twentieth of a second ahead of Hialaya Karu’s.
That, finally, was enough. Mon Cal cruisers did usually have to be battered to death, and this one was no exception. Even after the reactor had ruptured, there were still large, solid pieces of wreckage tumbling away.
Fractalsponge, I think you may want to skip down a bit, because the amount of gunfire the Mandator seen here uses is, frankly, minimal. It's hardly trying at all, really.
Ch 35-B
HIMS Cosmonaut Ijon Tichy was a ship with a reputation, some parts of it good, most just passing strange. He had two mottoes, one official, one less so.
The official version was “Navigare Necesse Est”- which was variously translated by the crew as ‘Fly, Fly you fools’, ‘get me out of here’, ‘why me? Well, somebody has to do it’, and ‘I thought you knew how to steer this thing.’
All of which the man himself would have recognised as bearing a certain validity.
The official unofficial motto was “More closed timelike curves than the Miss Gallifrey pageant.”
And what a crew. Tichy had been an inadvertent xenologist, and probably the greatest amateur first contact man the galaxy had ever known; his life had been one long cascade of biological diversity, and the ship named for him had a high proportion of aliens among the crew even in these unenlightened days.
Even numerous rated droids and mechanicals. The Cosmonaut had had an almost touching faith in the essential decency of computers- on record as saying “It’s comforting, when you think about it, that only Man can be a bastard.”
On current data he had been wrong, although it was possible he had had a better breed of computer to deal with, back in the dawn of the Republic.
The ship was idiosyncratic in several ways as well. The Mandator-I class was- had been- legally limited to short range hyperdrive only, for fear of what the largest and most heavily armed fleet in the galaxy might otherwise do.
There were two interesting technical issues, the first of them being, how do you build a limited range hyperdrive? In order to function at all, it has to be an extraordinarily capable and durable piece of kit.
Shaving the margins to make it capable of only a thousand light years would leave it so close to overload and unable to withstand sudden loads in normal usage as to constitute a distinct hazard to the ship and the crew.
The other problem was a legal one. Who, if anybody, was going to insure compliance with this? Asking Kuat to do it themselves was obvious nonsense, and almost everyone else who was competent to do so was also in competition with KDY, a conflict of interest so obvious that even the Senate noticed.
In the end, the problem got palmed off on the Republic Judicial Corps, who used ships whose entire hyperdrive system was smaller than one of the circuit breakers in a Dreadnaught’s engine room, and who would have found it as easy to put out a quasar by peeing on it as to bring down a renegade Mandator.
Kuat Drive Yards obeyed the law not out of respect for it, but out of consideration for their own reputation- and the balance of power that underlay the situation that made them their money.
Many of their ships probably were in technical violation, as a matter of safety, but these were local modifications, and not part of any company wide effort- and nobody could prove otherwise, officially at least. It may even have been actually true.
One of the most interesting side effects was that a lot of research had been done on hyperdrive at the margins; failure conditions and possible retrievals, stability, miniaturisation- the clone war era fighters and their booster rings owed a lot to that.
Ijon Tichy was supposed to be a Mandator-I, but in practise was very much odder than that.
When it had become politically possible to uprate them, not only did he ‘acquire’ a full range, galactic- class hyperdrive, he had the cone and pole antennae of hyperdrive and associated field projectors- a towing rig.
He could carry another craft of similar size and mass through hyperspace, retrieving a disabled sister ship or delivering a short-range version to a customer, or do stranger things- spaciobatics, they called it.
In this case, he was acting on information received- following a trail based on data from the capture of Oyadan, that was leading them towards a point not quite in the middle of nowhere. Down, and off to the left a bit.
Mandators were older ships, but they had been kept up to date, and Tichy’s descent sensors did register something there.
Emergence; and a light strike group, four Keldabe class destroyers, two old Recusant, and half a dozen frigates- a single wandering Imperator might be severely threatened, the group was a fair match for two, but for a full dreadnaught, it was playtime.
Tichy shrugged off the volley of fire they opened with, and reached out and grabbed the nearest Recusant with tractor/manipulator beams, sheared away the shielding with ion fire, and started prodding it.
Pushing and pulling with tractor/pressors, twisting it, playing grab with the engine modules and pointing them in different directions, compressing and releasing the exoskeletal flaps.
By the time the destroyer completely lost the plot and attempted to turn on a collision course, Tichy’s tractor operators had got to the stage of trying to play a tune on the exposed metal ribbing. An ion bolt below the bridge put paid to the ram.
The first of the Keldabes to engage got a rude shock when she tried to accelerate past the dreadnaught to the aft quarters and fire on the engine block.
Part of Tichy’s towing gear was the projectors and uptakes necessary to extend some shield coverage over a ship being lifted. Not as good as the main hull’s coverage, but good enough to form into a parabolic duct, and deflect the heavy bolts of the destroyer- monitor’s main guns back at her.
The pi-th dan master of Furjoto the ship was named after would have approved of using the enemy’s strength against them.
Keldabe- class destroyers boasted two very large and very peculiar guns of possible Confederate design, a hyperexcited blaster scaled up to the point where it’s ionic effects were significant; not quite as effective as an ion cannon the same size- but a lot more straightforward lethality.
The Keldabes themselves, their front end was largely girderwork, squarer and heavier- looking than they really were; unfortunately, they didn’t have the shielding or the mass to take a hit from their own main guns.
The second Recusant actually was ex- confederation, or at least the computer system was. How it had survived this long was anyone’s guess, but Tichy did a truly cruel thing to it- expanded it’s consciousness.
Included within it’s simple mental lexicon the concepts of obsolescence, cheapness, disposability. The droid ship was sub-sentient, operant modules for systems feeding into instinct and ego;
Tichy dissolved that ego by showing it the evidence of how little it’s masters had really valued it, how it had been half way to the scrapheap from the moment of it’s creation. Rammed the evidence down it’s throat, actually.
Then Tichy expanded on the other side of the equation, told it about the people it had destroyed, about the ambitions and the real potential it had squandered and the future it had helped to break.
Grief-stricken, the confederate destroyer and it’s droid working crew committed electronic suicide, leaving the flesh and blood pirates on board trapped in a slowly tumbling durasteel tomb without power or life support.
Even Tichy wasn’t sure whether that actually constituted a virus or not.
The remaining three Keldabe destroyers were afraid to engage, first of all for the reason that absolutely anything might happen.
Between the hundred-million ton xylophone and the electronic weeping and wailing from the second Recusant, there was no guarantee that their shot wouldn’t, for instance, fly into a field of complexity, achieve sentience, turn into a flock of spacebats and fly away.
Which was true enough, but then it occurred to them that they were facing a kriffing dreadnaught, and they had more than enough perfectly normal reasons to be afraid.
They had come to eliminate an errant Vigo-wannabe and conduct an assassination or five and a sector wide grand tour of bank raids, and this had not been in the job description.
They laid down a barrage- achieving nothing, swallowed up harmlessly by the huge ship’s shielding, and turned away to escape to hyperspace.
Not fast enough. The seconds they took to turn was forever in computer time, and at least the Recusant had had something resembling electronic security- not enough to stave off the complexity of attack, but at least it had tried. By comparison, the Keldabes had nothing.
It was a relatively simple matter to take control of the navigation data and amend it slightly.
Specifically, pick two ships, and give each destroyer the other’s entry point, then sit back and laugh as the overgunned, relatively fragile ships sideswiped each other at hyperdrive-entry speeds.
Tichy could have brute-forced that, fine-focusing a grav projector at the entry points to create a steep enough pull to draw them into collision, or blinded them and pulled them off course with his EW fit and tractors, but this was more elegant.
Only poetic justice, and almost as odd as what happened to the last Keldabe; the one that had been left because Tichy’s vector took him very close to the little ship, almost overrunning her.
Which might have been more merciful than what actually happened, the best description of which was probably time bombing via the towing rig.
HIMS Cosmonaut Ijon Tichy was, after all, equipped to transport craft of his own size through hyperspace, and on something as small as a Keldabe he could take it along whether it wanted to go or not.
Reeled in by the tractors and whiplashed along into hyperspace, the little destroyer experienced first, the rest of the universe speed up around it, being able to do nothing, not fast enough to matter to the reality it was accelerating and dilating away from.
Then time came back to hammer the people on board with a vengeance as it was the universe that slowed down and they were dragged through spacetime unprotected, aging and withering as the cosmos stood still around them.
That had to be some kind of a record. Six light destroyer class craft destroyed or neutralised, without firing as much as a single turbolaser shot, and only one heavy ion cannon.
The Cosmonaut had been basically a peaceful man, but never shy about doing what had needed to be done. And there were other targets to sort out.
Ord Corban, and Voracious was wondering what she had got herself into. Admonisher was laying what fire could be spared from Black Prince on the light destroyer- and hitting, mostly.
Caliphant was getting hoarse from helm orders, and trying to keep his crew organised and cheerful and up to the mark. Time had got weird on him; seconds seeming like hours, hours seeming like minutes; this was the former.
He was almost excruciatingly aware of what was happening, and starting to wonder, when does this end?
When you screw up badly enough to let them kill you, was the obvious answer. Or when they do.
Mon Evarra was firing by battery groups, slow and deliberate, timed against what of her heat dispersal remained intact; shaken, but still fighting effectively with what she had left.
About to get buried under a cloud of Imperial bombers looking for that breach in her shields, and already spitting point defence fire at them.
How likely were the rebels to remain in theatre- or at least how likely was Admonisher, if she lost the last of her squadron? As long as there was a chance to break the blockade and get anything out, they had an interest in staying.
Actually, in Admonisher’s position, Lennart would have jumped out now, waited until the Empire sent in troops to reclaim and engineering assets to rebuild, and re-entered the fight then- reaping, potentially, a handsome bonus in lives taken and assets destroyed as well as doing more to break his own people out.
He just hoped Admonisher’s captain was too target fixated to think of it.
Dynamic was more or less out of it- could still give but was in no shape to take punishment, could only safely be brought into the end game. Fist had lost most of her shielding, mostly due to Mon Evarra, but was still intact, or at least had lost nothing further in this phase of the fight.
Voracious was moving and firing very well for a scratch crew, the incidents they had seen in the run-up to this had done them a lot for good, but the numbers weren’t working for them. She simply wasn’t doing as much good against the massive Shockwave as she would against a smaller target.
Detach her to reinforce the planetary blockade, allow the fighters and small craft holding there to use her as a base station, rest and replenish ordnance? Not yet- one side of the planet still had too many big guns for comfort, and it would also mean taking too much firepower out of the Imperial line. Well, melee.
‘Voracious, this is Black Prince Actual. Go and pick on somebody your own size- manoeuvre clear of Admonisher, engage Mon Evarra.’ Lennart ordered.
There wasn’t really any more they could do than they were already to keep Admonisher off Voracious’ back. The frigates and corvettes of detached forces wave one were squalling at her, thunderstorms’ worth of green tracer, and doing well- well enough to draw counterfire.
Secondary medium and light turbolasers from Admonisher reached out across the formation, seeing who was stolid enough not to flinch and who was jittery enough to run too far, too fast.
There was a clear contender for idiot of the moment; Yeklendim in their capture, Grey Princess. He evaded too radically, and then settled back down to steady weave too soon.
‘Yeklendim,’ Lennart commed him, ‘jump out now. You’re about to become a target.’
Yeklendim had the sense, for the first time in his career, to obey as he was officially supposed to instantly and without question.
Sarlatt on the sister ship Provornyy managed to do a little better than that, by accelerating towards Grey Princess and forcing her to turn away or be sideswiped- and avoid the salvo of MTL fire Admonisher had dropped ahead of Grey Princess in anticipation.
Grey Princess made it to lightspeed, she would move clear, then plot a return course immediately. In theory. The light gun fire washed over the rest of the group, mostly resistible- the Carracks could take it, and most of the force was operating on their captains’ own judgement anyway.
Lennart did order the Marauders and Customs Corvettes to break out of the pack and draw a tangent across the rebel fighter group’s line of attack.
Admonisher had no such support against Imperial fighters, but she did have a much thicker point defence fit. Vehrec was arguing with himself what to do- duty said go in close and strafe, common sense said long range warhead fire.
Pilot ego said charge, good judgement said wait for Black Prince’s fire to make an opening then move to exploit it.
Any compromise was likely to be worse than either option pursued decisively, he thought until he realised that the ‘charge’ plan would involve taking large, slow-manoeuvring shuttles into point blank range of a ship with an extensive point defence grid.
Maybe the compromise made sense, just this once.
‘Division Two, aim for Admonisher’s engines, all remaining warhead load. Division three, with me, we’ll follow the warheads in and engage from close range.’
Olleyri on Black Prince was thinking, tennis. Royal tennis, old school, flat court, one ‘g’; or splat. Or was it actually called squash? Whatever, it was useful training for this.
Fast-moving hard things ricocheting everywhere, and trying to chase the angles and cover the positions, guide the fighters into a position they might be able to survive making a strike from.
The division of sublight fighters that had been released by Wave Two of the warships had had their first target snatched out from under them when One and Indivisible died; most of them had steered for Mon Evarra, and were about to launch on the wounded Mon Cal ship. Too many?
Olleyri identified about half of the fighters and bombers; ordered “Task Force Five, change of target.
Admonisher. Accelerate in, ripple fire rockets from a hundred thousand kilometres out, proceed in to strafe. This is the main strike mission, run down your fuel reserves. Good luck and good hunting.”’
And stay still for all this to happen to you, you bastard, he thought at Admonisher, and hoped it wasn’t listening.
Lennart wasn’t so optimistic, and had good reason to be so. ‘We’re approaching the mathematical threshold, guns group up, tensors and compensators brace for recoil from sustained time on target volleys. Her hyperdrive’s up.’
True; the target board was showing bent space and stray tachyons from Admonisher.
‘I think it’s valid.’ Brenn said. ‘Our dispersal-‘
‘Yes.’ Lennart agreed with his junior; it was possible that Admonisher was warming up her hyperdrive just to make them think she was going to move out, and trick the fighters into not launching on her until it was too late; but there were other, actually two, good reasons to move.
‘All fighters,’ drawing a catchment area on the tactical map including both the attack groups heading for Admonisher, ‘Black Prince Actual, countermand that. She’ll be gone before your shot could reach.
Fighter tactical division five, proceed to Ord Corban and reinforce the blockade there. Divisions two and
three stand by for nav data.’
To his own chief controller he added ‘Sorry, Ol, but you can’t see her hyperdrive from down there.’ and on squadron com ‘Fist, Dynamic; Admonisher is preparing to jump out to engage one of you. When she does, go full evasive- buy time for us to come up and join you.’ And to the bridge team, ‘Guns-‘
There was a flare from the underside aft, and a crunch and kick as one clutch of bolts hit shielding, a couple burst through; the ship pitched slightly, helm reported and Lennart realised ‘Secondary engine’ at the same time.
Half a second later, another set of flares, starboard side midships forward of the turret line, one penetration, vapourisation flare.
‘They’ve switched to half broadsides,’ Rythanor reported, thinking about how this would change the odds- ‘no recommendation.’
‘Sensible.’ Lennart acknowledged, meaning that it was a good move on the rebels’ part.
‘Helm'- sketching the beginning of a move they had done almost too often already, sideslip and roll to being back on target, but then extended out into a full corkscrew that broke back and out into an arching strafe.
Beware aesthetics, he thought. If it looks a smooth and beautiful curve, the enemy may see it that way too- and predict it that much more easily. We’ve both made mistakes because a move looked too right. ‘Scarify that a bit, and fifteen hundred.’
The Imperial system of giving helm orders was, for all the drive to standardisation, still damnably confusing. Object driven was relatively easy- go to, dock with, not a problem.
In combat, if an order containing a proportion was given, say ‘sixty-forty evasion’, it meant that sixty percent of the ship’s thrust was reserved to maintain the base course, and forty percent could be used for evasive manoeuvres. If one figure was mentioned it was a value in ‘g’.
Fifteen hundred was almost half Black Prince’s total thrust, especially missing one secondary engine.
Most ships wouldn’t be remotely capable of keeping their guns on target through that kind of radical evasion; she- actually couldn’t, but years of practise had taught the gunners how to fire when the sights came on, and the helm crew how to give the gunners that chance.
The wave of green smashed into the rebel destroyer dorsal midships, breaking through the shielding- there was a double flare, overload and failure, theoretically repairable, but followed by the rumbling flash of the generator itself letting go. A hard, tactically irreparable breach.
Better yet, the point of impact was the forward of the two dorsal batteries. There was a scatter of wreckage before the secondary detonation; had they been that radical- shut down tensors and compensators, purposely wrecking the turret assembly to try to prevent a clear detonation?
If they had, they had sacrificed the gun crews to protect the rest of the ship. One eighth of their firepower gone, a fifth of that which they could safely bring to bear on their primary target, and gaps in their defences now, on the bow and right in their best fire arc, which screamed ‘exploit me.’
‘Good,’ Lennart said, ‘but scan globes and manoeuvre thrusters would be more efficient targets.’
Before Wathavrah could protest, and express scepticism that anyone could think he had actually meant it, Lennart added ‘Brenn, she’s lining up on Fist. Warn Tevar and get the intercept course dialled in.’
Admonisher had turned to the best-compromise course between presenting her guns and lining up to make the jump, rotating side on.
Of her eight turret groups, two were dorsal centreline, one now gone; two underside centreline, one just aft and one just forward of the hangar complex. The other four clusters were upper surface, two either side of the superstructure.
It was a good arrangement, and the main reason Shockwave- class destroyers weren’t more widespread was that they were, in practise, overweight- too big and too slow.
In theory, they could be brought down reliably, if not exactly easily, by their own weight and cost in Imperator- class. That usually meant four ships.
Admonisher’s ventral batteries came back into circuit, and added their fire. One salvo from Black Prince missed- aiming at the ventral batteries, on the edge of the outline, the heavy destroyer twisted the other way;
Admonisher’s fire scattered individual bolts across the starboard side, losing focus and power priority.
Her parting shot as she made lightspeed was a clean miss;
Black Prince’s, before she moved to pursue, was a solid hit- in the hangar bay, and drop ship complex, largely empty and without much left to land back on anyway.
Admonisher made lightspeed, Black Prince was five seconds behind her; the Imperial hyper capable fighters had a brief reprieve, but the rebels- they were strung out widely, under fire from the light and customs corvettes and taking losses.
Astromechs. A bad idea, for the very simple reason that they could not hold that many courses- stripped away all the tactical flexibility hyperdrive was supposed to give. The cut price navigation rig bolted into the B-wing was even worse; only able to store two or three paths, depending on how recently built.
They had no vector out, and no way to survive, unless they could kill off the Imperial escorts firing on them and buy enough time for somebody to get a plot together.
They could probably manage to do some damage- maybe not enough to survive, but there were a lot of warhead capable craft in there, and Rontaine’s customs ships were not long for this world.
Unless someone else, like a fighter squadron or twenty, decided to derive the rebels of their blaze of glory. Vehrec broadcast to his own charges ‘You know, I fancy alphabet stew. Let’s go kill them.’
Voracious and Hialaya Karu were seventy degrees apart as seen from Mon Evarra, and widening. That would have been a bad move against a healthy Mon Cal ship, against a cripple it made all too much sense.
Mon Evarra could no longer keep them both against her best arc, the relatively heavily armed and shielded bow; soon, one or other of them would be able to engage on the blasted-open starboard side, or the inherently weak port where the hangar bay was.
Of course, keeping intact shields towards them would stop being an issue soon, when they rebel ran out of shielding.
Follow Admonisher, into one giant melee? Maybe, but not with these two on her tail.
Falldess hadn’t really been that badly shot at, yet. That changed as Mon Evarra turned the bulk of her remaining effective firepower on Hialaya Karu. She was firing bursts, a few guns at a time, accurate and burning into the shields, but the Imperials had a lot more to lose than Mon Evarra had left.
What plans could the Alliance ship possibly have? Did she simply intend to go down fighting? That made no sense from the military, or rebel, point of view. Doing something insanely dumb because they believed the force was with them, that was just about believable. This? Not really.
Ah, Falldess thought. They’re waiting for one of us to get overeager and stupid. Pick off that one and it’s a fair fight again. The rebel commander appears to be a determined man- well, amphibian, then.
Done this many times, enough to believe that dead weight may set the odds but it has nothing to do with what number actually comes up.
He’ll fight it out to the last, and hope for some turn of fortune to swing things back his way- such as one of us losing the plot and deciding to sail straight and level to make a better firing platform.
Most of the fire is coming my way, because I haven’t been that heavily shot at yet, and he wants to see how jittery I am, whether he can spook me into doing something so dumb.
Voracious was here sooner, has been much more heavily shot at along the way; more likely to be tired enough to make a mistake.
‘Helm,’ she ordered, ‘bring us down to a gentle flat lateral weave, let it look like we’re being stupid, then hard turn away.’ Get the rebel to over-react and move too soon, she hoped.
Mon Evarra was not about to let a chance like that go; yawed slightly, let loose one full volley, blindingly fast. Too fast for Hialaya Karu to react.
She was still playing dumb when the salvo hit, mostly in the bow- there was a reason most destroyers carried relatively little of importance there.
Outpost emplacement materials, one hyperdrive node, main navigational shielding- the most serious problem but as long as the combat shields were intact, they could substitute.
Mon Evarra took a second shot, but too late- Hialaya darted away more radically than Falldess had ordered, the helm team taking that on themselves and quite right too.
Mon Evarra turned away, Falldess held the manoeuvre, continuing high- thrust turns while waiting for the rebel trick to reveal itself, but the stream of purple fire really did reach out for Voracious.
Playing switching games, Falldess thought, keeping us off balance, and it’s eye comes back in damnably fast each time. Two main fire control teams, keeping a running solution on each of us?
And on the lighter craft. Obdurate made the move first, Tythallin followed, a swooping curve across the rebel destroyer’s stern. Still covered by shielding, but there was always that tiny space that couldn’t be shielded, directly over the thrust stream.
Obdurate had been busy already, and it was a fairly good day to be a frigate; faced with inflicting loss by shooting at the smaller ships, or trying to damage the larger ships that had been hurting them, the rebels had decided not to go for damage and body count that would serve no tactical purpose.
Unless you were one of the few frigate types that actually carried heavy turbolasers. Then you were a viable target.
Obdurate passed at a tangent, high speed and maximum possible aspect change, firing groups of shot at Mon Evarra’s engine vents; Janduvar Tythallin followed doing the same, and both drew counterfire.
Mon Evarra could only spare the power and sink capacity for MTL at the moment, and laid down a wall of fire that looked much more impressive than it as.
Demolishers were tougher than that, it would take time to erode them away with that, but Obdurate kept moving anyway. Tythallin steadied down to be able to aim more precisely.
Not good. Some rebel fire control officer saw the easy target, made a case for it, and got the power allocation he wanted- four of the after guns fired, scoring two hits on Tythallin, eroding shields, no burnthrough, not yet.
Tythallin’s fire pattern broke up, splattering shot all across the rebel’s stern, shielding thin enough that a couple of bolts did hit structure, but landed on bracing and ablatives- one splitting open a water tank, but not a lethal matter.
The rebel’s aft guns paused, Tythallin started to curve away, then the reb lashed out again and landed a burst that did achieve burnthrough, into the forward superstructure and breaking the hangar bay open.
Obdurate had been splashing bolts off engine casings, vents, the fantail, and finally managed to land one bolt directly on target, passing straight up the ion stream- her own shields scintillating from it- into the absurdly traditional looking forcefield projector ‘blades’ of the ion turbine.
The engine blew out, exploding out of it’s housing in a burst of blue-white light; oh, they’re not going to like me for that, Raesene thought- but Tythallin was stumbling, darting jerky moves as her engines fired seemingly at random. It didn’t look like purposeful evasion, which was half the point, but she hadn’t been that good going in.
Try to catch Mon Evarra’s attention and draw fire away from Tythallin, run and leave her to it, or- no real choice, Raesene decided. Fortunately, Mon Evarra was under enough pressure from the two Imperial destroyers that she pulled the power available back to fore, port and starboard batteries.
Being sandpapered to death by a shower of MTL fire was a slightly more feasible prospect.
‘Guns, counterfire. Helm, bring us around, I want to try to snag Tythallin on the tractor beams.’
There was more than one reason to try to do that; apart from pulling a sister ship out of trouble, he could still feel the distrust being radiated at him. Not from the crew- they knew what he had been dealing with, but from the officers of the rest of the squadron.
He had played judas goat, had sold out the rest of the Starfleet or at least tried to, and at least part of the distaste radiating his way was from people who wished they had thought of it first.
Speed, in political warfare as well a actual, was vital; and they had still been gathering evidence when Lennart had moved and simply placed them both under military arrest, without a moment’s visible doubt about the practicalities and legalities at all.
How would that have played out, if it had gone the other way? Operation placed on hold; wrangling back and forth; time wasted, enough to hide the evidence at least, enough legal wrangling to abort the whole business, and Black Sun and the Moff and his profiteers could continue on their merry way.
Maybe Lennart had expected his arresting two ISB agents to be overtaken by events, either dismissed as a minor matter or buried under so many more charges relating to Adannan that one more misdemeanour was just a triviality.
Raesene had dealt with his problem, whether he had meant to or not, by passing it up the chain of command, and although he wasn’t proud of that it was the way things had worked out. He doubted Lennart could do the same.
Another reason to make the move, and it was going to have to be a high- speed pickup, no deceleration to match velocity; the strain both ships would be vastly preferable to getting hit by another burst of heavy turbolaser fire.
There was a thud as the tractors reached out and grasped the load, and the noise- starships were not supposed to creak under the strain. There were creaking noises.
It took Raesene all of five seconds to start thinking it was a risk too far and wishing he didn’t have to go through with it, but they were committed now- and besides, most of Mon Evarra’s firepower was now pointed at Voracious.
The rebel destroyer had identified the Venator as their most profitable target. Voracious had not been in action for very long on any absolute scale, but long enough to have burned off almost a third of her fuel reserve, and a higher proportion than that of adrenalin.
Still, being shot at was a pick-me-up of a sort.
Penthesilea had survived for some time under the guns of Black Prince, but that had been a staged, tactically phased bombardment, intended to allow the rebel ship time to screw up.
Mon Evarra was trying for a relatively cheap kill, the first shots of this volley splattering of the shields over the fighter bay, some missing ahead- trying for the torpedo bays, aiming to touch off the carried ordnance.
The next cheapest was probably the bridge module. Caliphant ordered more evasive moves. Always, on the holovids, the captain was able to call out something like ‘Evasive Pattern Kappa Nine’- unfortunately, it didn’t actually work like that.
Between defections and hacking, any standard pattern would quickly become known to the other side. There was no shorthand. There were set patterns, but they were individual creations, with limited useful lives.
A hard evasive undulating bank, skidding against the dominant vector, and Caliphant waited for the crunch as bits of his ship fell off; there wasn’t one, but there was a sequence of hammers as the rebel divided it’s active gun mounts into batteries almost without pause- existing organisation coming to the fore there.
The batteries scattered clusters of bolts across Voracious’ path, landing one on the Imperial ship to the port side of the main bay door, leaving a glowing hole and door machinery damage.
‘Kirritaine, do something about that?’ Caliphant called down to this gunnery officer. ‘Before Hialaya manages to steal our thunder.’
The Karu class destroyer was lashing fire into the rebel, which had decided to block and evade as far as possible and concentrate on killing Voracious to even up the odds.
What was left of the Mon Cal’s shielding was facing the smaller Imperial destroyer, with the majority of her fire going into the Venator. That was a compliment of sorts, if a back handed one.
Voracious rolled to bear as Mon Evarra was expecting; not a perfect prediction though, a near-perfect straddle, bolts everywhere in a small volume of space around the Imerial destroyer, but no actual hits.
Caliphant thought about calling their bluff and staying put, but that was too stylised to be effective- a return salvo put four bolts into the Mon Cal ship, two solid hits, one port flank, on the edge of the hangar aperture and evidently hitting the pressure curtain- a shower of loose parts, air, storage modules and deck technicians flew out of the rebel ship.
The second hit was deep in the main body, over some piece of equipment- the almost red colour of the flare said a secondary reactor, but it was no tactical loss as Mon Evarra no longer had the heat sink capacity to afford to run it.
Voracious pulled her nose up and rolled to maintain fire arc, and Mon Evarra’s immediate reply was spot on, a prediction of elegance. Sixteen of thirty bolts hit, and three burned through.
One in the base of the bridge tower- accomodation, there should be no-one there at battle stations, but another good hit there would expose the reactor. One on the port docking vestibule, blasting the door open and spilling logistics modules into the void.
The third hit was the most potentially serious, up forward only one compartment from the torpedo bay- the hull was ripped open, but the additional layer of armour wrapped around mount and magazine protected them.
Voracious lobbed a salvo in return, Mon Evarra porpoised out of most of it- three hits, two burned through the outer layer of armour to be stopped by the inner, one smashed open a gun turret; the Imperial ship tried to sideslip out of the rebel’s next shot, and roll to present her intact starboard side.
She was half way through the manoeuvre, showing her belly, when the rebel shot hit; not as many- the rebel had judged the turning point well, but fired a relatively open pattern.
Three hits, one blasting straight through the starboard wing, one impacting on the opposite side of the ship directly ‘under’ the starboard turret line, one shearing off one of the sensor globes.
Which was, absurdly enough, Imperial victory of a sort. Voracious was taking hits, heavy ones, but not enough damage, fast enough, to stop her pouring shot into Mon Evarra. It was time to leave.
The rebel destroyer turned to bring herself bows on to Hialaya Karu, and accelerated towards her.
‘Kriff.’ Caliphant cursed, captain’s poise and decorum be damned, especially now. ‘Helm, bring what’s left to bear. Evade as you can, but first and foremost bring to bear.’
Hialaya Karu hadn’t just had a main scanner shot off and the rest trying to reset themselves from shock damage; she could see Mon Evarra decide that the numbers she needed weren’t happening- she was doing much less damage than she needed to- and that it was time to get out and do as much damage as possible along the way.
‘Helm, put us athwart their course then lay us on the reciprocal. That ship is either going to ram, near-miss and scatter mines, or try a very short run to hyperspace. I want to meet them head-on.’
Alurin had to ask. ‘Aye aye, Captain- but are you taking what happened last time into account?’
‘Of course.’ She said, confident sounding. ‘Practise makes perfect.’
There was no real, sensible answer to that. Alurin confined himself to pointing out that ‘They will keep firing on us throughout their approach.’
‘I know.’
Mon Evarra was thrusting hard to bring her vector across Karu’s predicted position- have to be either a ram or a scattering of mines.
They were only a couple of degrees off head on- a relatively easy shot for both ships, and each using what thrust it had to spare- Hialaya Karu had more freedom of manoeuvre- to slide round each other’s gunsights, throw targeting off as far as possible.
Ignore the window, Falldess thought, although she could actually see molten glow of damage in the distance and the outline of an ion flare. Don’t judge by hand and eye- you can’t. Trust the map, it knows what it’s doing. Judging momentum and acceleration isn’t so very different from judging wind and tide.
Of course it bloody is, but this is not a moment to be thinking that I can’t do it, this is a moment to look and sound confident, for the crew’s sake and my own.
‘Rolling broadside.’ she announced. The newer members of the crew, Dynamic’s handoffs, looked baffled by that, but her own crew knew she meant a continuous ripple.
Mon Evarra was better at this, but she had lost a lot of capacity to give and take fire, and Hialaya Karu tearing into her from ahead and Voracious from astern were shredding her.
Karu was taking most of the rebel’s fire still, and the deck jumped as a bolt hit, but the Mon Cal ship was hitting largely intact shields- two full salvoes or as full as she could manage, both sidestepped;
one open sheaf that scattered shot all around them and left eroded shielding but no burnthrough, a few hits- portside, some real damage, but not enough to stop them.
‘Helm, when I give the word,’ Falldess said, ‘I want you to bring this ship round as fast as she’s ever answered. Main engine throttling I think you call it. Sixteen and a quarter point turn to starboard, then maximum acceleration, everything you have.’
In other words, try to break the bow off, Alurin thought, then if that doesn’t work see what can be done about ramming the engines through the rest of the hull.
‘Understood.’ He said, because the only other thing to be said would have constituted incitement to mutiny, and he didn’t think a successful mutiny could be concluded in under five seconds.
A flash of tractor beam, a flush of air, and there were a shower of objects in their path- it looked as if Mon Evarra had jettisoned the contents of their ordnance bunkers more than laid an actual minefield. This was the moment.
‘Helm, now.’ Falldess ordered; the stars blurred past and the ship howled under the strain of the flash turn, and the ion wake flowed over and cooked off most of the hundreds of payloads’ worth of fighter missiles and torpedoes Mon Evarra had released.
That and the ion wake covering the now nearly shieldless Mon Cal ship, searing off access hatchers and rangefinders, com and sensor clusters- not actually enough to stop her making hyperspace.
It was the salvo from Voracious, twelve heavy guns that tore the rebel’s port quarter apart and knocked out three of the engines, that stopped Mon Evarra running.
She fired briefly at Hialaya Karu again- and what was left of the shower of fighter weapons splattered across the Imperial destroyer- but although there were hits, there was no real damage done.
‘Helm,’ Falldess ordered, ‘Bring us back round to bear, so we can finish that off before Voracious manages to steal the credit.’
On Voracious’ bridge, Caliphant was doing exactly that. His ship had shot at one of the outworlds, shot at One and Indivisible, shot at and been shot by Admonisher, and he wanted something of his own to kill now.
‘Helm, get us closer, guns, maximum power. Let’s get her before Hialaya Karu manages to steal the credit.’
Mon Evarra may have wanted to fight on, but considering the engines were shot, the shields were down, the hangar bay was blasted part way open, the sensors were compromised, and several parts of her structure were missing, it wasn’t really a viable proposition.
Surrender? Unlikely- but it seemed to be happening; the rebel reactivated a nav beacon, flashing white, and escape pods started to pop loose.
The rebel’s reactor was still running, though, still generating full military power- and one of the secondaries had come back on line also.
What did the book say? Oh, yes. ‘Hialaya Karu Actual to Mon Evarra, shut down your power plant. We are not obliged to accept your surrender unless you are no longer generating.’
Ten seconds, no reply, and more heat pouring out of the maimed rebel ship. If they were just buying time for their people to get out, then planning to self- destruct the ship, then… ‘Main guns, one full salvo, aim for the reactor.’
Hialaya Karu was closer to the target, but as soon as he registered the fire directors pointing on again Caliphant gave the fire order to his own gun crews.
Voracious’ salvo, less the two turrets still recovering from shock damage, splashed into the Rebel ship’s hull a twentieth of a second ahead of Hialaya Karu’s.
That, finally, was enough. Mon Cal cruisers did usually have to be battered to death, and this one was no exception. Even after the reactor had ruptured, there were still large, solid pieces of wreckage tumbling away.
Last edited by Eleventh Century Remnant on 2009-11-17 12:32pm, edited 1 time in total.
The only purpose in my still being here is the stories and the people who come to read them. About all else, I no longer care.
So, the Admonisher is looking for an easy mark? I think he'll find the Fist can hold him just long enough for the Black Prince to finish him off.
And I'm painting another KillMark on the bow when we get repaired.
And I'm painting another KillMark on the bow when we get repaired.
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
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Kartr_Kana
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Great fic! Can't believe I didn't start reading this sooner! I know its probably to late to get my name in this one but if there's a sequel.... I'd like a small piece ;D Anyway once again great writing and even better interpretation of the SW universe I keep wishing that this was a canon story. Trump all the bad writing and bullshit we've been seeing from authorized SW hacks... erm "writers" 
"Our Country won't go on forever, if we stay soft as we are now. There won't be any AMERICA because some foreign soldier will invade us and take our women and breed a hardier race!"
LT. GEN. LEWIS "CHESTY" PULLER, USMC
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Vehrec
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Grah, always jumping away before the fighter wing of DEATH can close to nibble range. I hate it when they do that. ;D. Also, some of the stunts pulled by the crew of the C.I.T. are remnicent of what you might see in Schlock Mercenary or a really dickish episode of Star Trek.
Loved the chapter, looking forward to more in the future.
Loved the chapter, looking forward to more in the future.
Commander of the MFS Darwinian Selection Method (sexual)-
Eleventh Century Remnant
- Jedi Council Member
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- Location: Scotland
Well, I do read Schlock...but worse than that, if you can find a copy of the Star Diaries, much stranger things than that happen. I'm not kidding about the closed timelike curves.
Seriously, it probably does constitute poor literary discipline on my part letting that one out. It was a bit of froth and fun that doesn't necessarily fit the tone of the main line- although I want to get this damn' battle fought to the finish so I can get on with boarding actions, surface assaults, planetary bombardments, court politics and other such. Call it a premature vent.
Certainly, the Imperial fighter formations have more than proved their worth defensively, breaking the rebel attempt to flee the planet and intercepting fighter attacks against most of the Imperial destroyers- theoretically, at odds of at least two to one against. Offensively, well, it's not over yet.
Tichy's brief action may be worth rewriting for tone, although the mission was carried out with economy and efficiency- one lobotomised and two mauled and ionised ships retrieved by his escorts, and one taken in tow. Consider the phrase 'poetic justice' in connection with that Keldabe and you should get a pretty good idea what's going to happen next.
KartrKana, I'll see if there's anywhere to slot you in.
Seriously, it probably does constitute poor literary discipline on my part letting that one out. It was a bit of froth and fun that doesn't necessarily fit the tone of the main line- although I want to get this damn' battle fought to the finish so I can get on with boarding actions, surface assaults, planetary bombardments, court politics and other such. Call it a premature vent.
Certainly, the Imperial fighter formations have more than proved their worth defensively, breaking the rebel attempt to flee the planet and intercepting fighter attacks against most of the Imperial destroyers- theoretically, at odds of at least two to one against. Offensively, well, it's not over yet.
Tichy's brief action may be worth rewriting for tone, although the mission was carried out with economy and efficiency- one lobotomised and two mauled and ionised ships retrieved by his escorts, and one taken in tow. Consider the phrase 'poetic justice' in connection with that Keldabe and you should get a pretty good idea what's going to happen next.
KartrKana, I'll see if there's anywhere to slot you in.
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fractalsponge1
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Eleventh Century Remnant
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- Location: Scotland
Relatively short this time, normally I'd add another couple of Word- pages before letting this one go but I'll be at the Amlwch Viking Festival over the weekend, so it's now or next Woden's-day.
Vianca, most of the ships in the squadron have taken some kind of damage- Karu a few penetrating hits, Dynamic one grumpy surveyor's decision from being stricken and broken up, Voracious pretty badly dented in parts, Fist and Black Prince moderate damage so far; they're all going to need dockyard attention.
As for further mods, taking it as a given that the Imperial/Imperator- class was a sound design to begin with, there's not that much absolute make-it-better room; most of what there is is trade- offs.
Black Prince already trades off emplacement and outpost establishment, lower endurance despite larger and more expensive to fill fuel tanks, 8.5% of peak acceleration, and most operationally problematic, almost all capability to make any kind of opposed landing.
That and she takes much more time and effort to look after, considering how far her powerplant and engine systems have been pushed out along the bleeding edge, and that wears into long- term endurance.
Previously, she was undergunned, more powerplant output than single- salvo yield, which usually got channeled through the weapons anyway in a higher than standard rate of fire. With the axial guns- more weight and strain- she is now overgunned, more weapon output than reactor output. Which can be damned dangerous, when a turret's capacitor banks get hit.
The reason I bring this up is that I reckon Mandators might be in the same situation, more weapon than reactor output, because of the spectrum of targets they have to engage- they should be able to fire effectiely at ships from their own size down to light corvette at least. That's what, nine orders of magnitude of power output?
A relatively compact and easily organised battery of extremely- heavy guns which can be combined to fire time-on-targets for burnthrough against a dreadnought or battleship, and a much more numerous battery of lighter guns for hosing and area fire against smaller, more agile targets like destroyers, possibly an intermediate stage, and a large grid of MTL, the whole weapon suite rated to maybe 1.2 to 1.3x the reactor output, and powered selectively according to the target.
Which is why I say; sheets of turbolaser fire? It would take more than one?
Anyway,
Ch 36
On the flag bridge, Adannan was still hopelessly baffled by what he saw- but could make more sense of what he could overhear being thought. Lennart himself was still a jumble, a tangle of connections and conceptions in every direction, and either he didn’t know how to shield or he was simply too busy to.
No, no, of course; that would be it. He was broadcasting inadvertently, scattering thoughts and ideas across the crew. It wasn’t a deliberate active connection, nothing was being forced, and if he was right Lennart was also, however subconsciously, listening to how they reacted.
Whether he knew it or not, the Force was with him, but not in the manner of traditional battle meditation. That constituted, as far as the dark acolyte knew, one force user dreaming of war and infusing the rest of their command with that, in a forcing out, a projection of ideas.
It could improve coordination, sharpen skills- it was a superb preventer of errors- but it did suppress by supplanting the individual will and aggression of the crew who fought under it.
Much as it pained a force user to admit it, battle meditation was not the be-all and end-all of fleet operations.
Even the current master of the form, grand admiral Declann, had lost fleet exercises;
usually to opposing commanders who took the risk of dividing their command, allowing elements to operate independently, and presenting a more complicated problem than one mind could easily grasp.
To Adannan, the solution was conceptually straightforward. Dissolve the will of some of the crew, slave their brains to your own and use them as co- processors, problem solved.
It seemed to be too complicated a task to do while actually in combat, though, and Declann had lost exercises to the complexityholic alien Thrawn, to Lord Vader who could overmatch him in the Force in any case, and to a handful of up and coming junior flag officers, among them Rear-Admiral Stephan Rawlin. Hmmm.
Lennart was sincere in his belief that he did not have the Force, he couldn’t possibly be aware of what he was doing or it would change him, his personality would be different.
So it would probably be a good idea to tell him.
Other Imperial forces? Yes, reinforcements would be welcome. They could hardly be less obedient than this infuriating man, and might possibly be of use in keeping him down.
So, how was the timing of this going to go, and when did the military element end and the political- or purely personal- begin?
Move in on the planet as soon as possible, ideally, destroy Admonisher outright, free up the ground forces. Speed was not particularly of the essence, he realised; poise was.
Adannan sighed, remembering his original plan- blackmail a line officer, intimidate the crew, steal the medical logs from the 118th fleet that were the only place, beside their dead creators and even Palpatine wasn’t that good, to learn the secrets of loyalty programming and how to subvert it.
Move out, fade away and take the time to study them in detail and decide how to use what he had.
So simple. The only problem was Jorian Lennart.
Well, and about forty-seven thousand of his friends. Sacking the renegade line officer, taking his command and his world away from him, would be a wonderful revenge, but was it really the best use?
He would make a damned awkward apprentice. Kill him and blame him for…ah, that would be good. A clean, satisfying solution. Murder him, shift the blame, take the secrets and run.
Or, for that matter, eliminate the entire ship. The Empire wasn’t exactly short of destroyers, he could afford to squander one or two.
The timing was going to be critical. While the first ground assault was in progress would be best.
That might take a while yet to arrange. Fist did have enough sensor capacity in working order to spot the incoming Rebel, and decided to make a stand. Run? Delaying action? They were a destroyer, a fighting ship. No.
Most of Tevar’s crew were behind her in that decision, now that they had tasted blood. Was her ship not of the same class as the flag, the mainstay of the Imperial fleet, ton for ton the best the Empire had to offer?
She had no intention of running. Not now, not again.
Fist’s sensors registered the inbound as a blur of curdled space, between EW and deliberately running the drive rough to obfuscate the emergence point.
‘Helm, he’s trying to fake us out. Let’s not make it easy for them, I want to meet him bows on, so bring us about.’
They could get behind that at least- as long as Admonisher hadn’t added an extra layer of deception, and was screening a false entry point. Doublethink.
Against the squadron flag, they would certainly have gone that far. Against Fist- why would they miss a trick?
They didn’t. Project a false drop point, make it look just a shade too good, as if they could be planning to come out of it anyway. Fist had turned away from that, pointing her bows insystem, expecting that it was a trick; and it was, a triple trick.
The fake was a fake after all; it looked too good to be true because it was true. The heavy renegade destroyer emerged from the burble of curdled space exactly where it had seemed to be about to, outsystem of Fist.
Both ships were stern-on to each other- Admonisher had been expecting that, Tevar hadn’t but her Imperator was far more manoeuvrable.
If Captain Tevar had been following instructions as given, she would have accelerated away, zig-zagging to avoid fire until the flag was there to support her, but confidence and adrenalin said otherwise.
Fist swung round hard on the thrust of her secondary engines, and stared into a blindingly bright cloud of jamming; Admonisher dipped her nose and yawed, making a move like a half turn of a helix, close to the edge of her manoeuvre envelope in bringing her dorsal arc to bear.
Black Prince and the rebel heavy had both tried their best to fake each other out with electronic warfare- the term was crazily insufficient in this day and age, but it still applied- neither ship had actually managed much in the way of deception.
Each could read the other’s moves too well, and the kind of subtlety they were both attempting functioned much more effectively when they weren’t simultaneously charging in guns blazing.
Here, Admonisher hoped to sow enough chaos on the first exchange to land disabling hits quickly enough to put Fist out of the fight, cripple her now, finish the flag and then turn on her.
It was actually the loyalist who got the first shot in- a string of four tracking across the big renegade, one landing on unshielded hull. Wreckage and damage, ploughing in to the right of the blasted-out turret cluster, spilling molten metal and air, but not penetrating deep enough to reach the vitals.
Admonisher fired battery groups, eight hundred and forty teratons each- and two managed to connect. One widely enough spread that the shields took it, one concentrated enough to burn through, dismounting two axial defence turrets and smashing open the forward superstructure- living quarters decks.
That was the opening. There would be worse to come; Tevar knew that a stand- up fight with the much larger rebel destroyer was, on the face of it, a losing plan.
So fight it out here at close quarters and hold long enough for the squadron to arrive, or-
The rebel ship flared her bow steering thrusters, the sensor crew though it looked wrong, too wide, flat and hollow. They weren’t fast enough to stop sensor interpretation sending that to fire control.
Admonisher’s engines vented a billow of hot ions that went nowhere, no stream, and Fist’s crew couldn’t stop their automatic systems making the mistake Admonisher wanted them to. Gunnery assumed Admonisher was going to turn, predicted and laid the guns on accordingly, and missed wildly. Admonisher capitalised on that by landing another set of bursts.
One hit the starboard brim trench quad, It exploded, the capacitor banks let go, and Fist was shoved to one side by the blast. Helm started to stabilise out, but Tevar yelled at them ‘No, roll with it-‘ and she was right. Fist extended out into a diving spiral that took her clear of Admonisher’s followup converged sheaf.
If that salvo had hit it would have torn out their central main engine, at least. Fist stabilised out and started to return fire, Admonisher swiched to sequential fire. Surer, with a higher average hit rate, but it meant they were no longer trying for the cheap kill.
That meant- what? Their opinion of her had gone up?
Infuriating bastards, Tevar thought, then realised that they would be trying to play with her head, too.
Practically speaking, her advantages were? Speed, for a start. Fist was over a thousand ‘g’ faster- that value had changed as bits were blown off both ships, but it was roughly so.
She was also a smaller target- 60% of the length, and differently proportioned, leaner and a much smaller target cross- section. That should be a factor, that and Admonisher had higher physical, but couldn’t have unlimited mental endurance.
Considering that she had been basically held in check by Black Prince, been unable to pin down any others of the Imperial squadron long enough to inflict critical damage, they had fought very hard for very little, and they had to be feeling at least a little drained and depressed.
They would probably welcome a straight up pounding match, the sort of hammering work that she was tempted to give them- but which the molten crater in the side of her ship and the jangled mess visible from the bridge windows argued against. What would work?
Opening the range, and moving out to at least a medium- range, high speed manoeuvring battle, keep running Admonisher ragged, waste the renegade’s energy literal and psychological.
The Imperator- class took a lot of stick from amateur analysts who didn’t understand why their turrets were mounted in two rows one either side of the superstructure; it was for range control.
A side-firing ship has the advantage of being able to literally fly circles around it’s target, closing in or widening out as the situation dictated.
A ship with only forward weapons can’t do that; it has much less freedom of manoeuvre, has to close the range, has to be predictable.
The ideal solution was probably a centreline- dorsal and ventral battery, which was- another flare of shot around Fist, and a stream of response- a worry for another moment.
‘Helm, base course RA+11.24.17.’ Tevar ordered, Out, at a tangent to the planet’s orbit, eighty degrees off Admonisher’s bearing. Crabbing out sideways, probably the best option to keep Admonisher in play- and keep them from killing her- until the flag arrived.
That was going to be an interesting move. Admonisher would be very wary of being faked out again, would immediately attempt to counterambush; Lennart, of course, was aware of that, and so the doublethink went.
Admonisher detected the curdling of space that went with a high relativistic mass just the far side of the light barrier; preparing a very high speed reentry, was he? Had to be faked. It was in the wrong place; when all doublethink failed, ‘How will this serve my purpose?’ was a good yardstick.
That entry point would put Black Prince out of mutually supporting range with Fist- enable the flag to give crossfire, maybe, but not what they were expecting. Which of course made it possible, but- ah. There was a trail away, a move on towards Fist. That made more tactical sense, and Admonisher rolled to cover that approach.
One wrinkle in the brain too many, or was it too few? Admonisher couldn’t be everywhere at once, couldn’t cover all the possibilities. She was sold the dummy dummy that she was expecting, the fake was indeed a fake- and the false trail, the projection? Decoy.
Black Prince emerged from hyperspace through the ripples of warped space, dragging her back, straining the ship’s systems- it would have been called a botched entry in any other circumstances, grounds for an enquiry, but Lennart was trading off stress for position, and got the advantage he wanted. Low and astern on Admonisher.
The rebel knew what Black Prince had done with a firing position like that before; started to turn hard towards the Imperial ship, minimal forward motion, spinning on main engines in place, not fast enough.
There was only one possible fire order, and Lennart thought it, it had got as far as his tongue, but there certainly had not been time to have it issued or acted on when it happened anyway.
The Imperial destroyer’s guns crashed out in a converged sheaf, time on target salvo at Admonisher’s point of turn.
Good, Lennart thought, intelligent anticipation in action. He also thought he heard a faint scream from the direction of the flag bridge, but no matter, not now.
‘This should be the endgame,’ he said before the salvo had even hit, ‘call the squadron in, 120 degree arc around Admonisher, us as centre, Fist as one endpoint, not too precise.’
He was still talking when the salvo hit Admonisher starboard and aft, the direction she had been swinging in, smashing into the armoured skin over her engines.
The Shockwave class had five main engines, slightly staggered to take account of the superstructure, and eight secondaries.
The outer starboard main engine blew apart, blasted open the bulkhead and sent splinters and concussion through the inner starboard wrecking it, obliterated two of the secondaries and wrecked two more.
Admonisher was lamed, unable to turn to starboard, unable to accelerate away and pick her fights, unable to manoeuvre out of the way of incoming fire.
Unsurprisingly, she lashed out in return, pitching and trolling to bring all seven remaining turret groups to bear- and receiving a volley in the nose for her trouble that overpenetrated to the forward secondary bay-
but landing two sets of bolts on Black Prince, one aft on the side of the superstructure- beneath the bridge tower- and one upper starboard side adjacent to a previous hit, and to the forward end of the starboard turret row.
Starboard-1 was hit directly, knocked out, possibly repairable, starboard-2 was wrenched off the mounting, definitely fixable but not in combat. It was a fair enough trade- ideally no trade at all, but that was what had happened.
Lennart took note of it, fed it into his estimates of the situation, didn’t need to direct damage control, already on their way.
Fist was moving outwards to a more balanced attack range; Admonisher was still turning slowly, her manoeuvre jets trying to stop her, and her guns came on to bear.
Tevar feinted starboard, initially a level turn, then dipped the port wing and firewalled the starboard engines to shove the bow down and over, and then brought port up to speed.
Admonisher fired a single pattern that Fist just got clipped by- one more hit in the axial battery, one forward on the upper hull over the secondary hangar.
Tevar winced as the hits went in, and ordered an extended S- turn, as Admonisher stabilised herself out, firing off a volley into empty space for the sake of the recoil.
The heavy renegade stabilised with her bow facing between the two Imperial destroyers.
Correction, five, as the rest of the squadron arrived on Brenn’s beacon signal and lined up to engage.
The Imperial fighter elements had reduced down to two groups now, both mixed, one orbiting Ord Corban and occasionally lobbing heavy rockets down to try out a new trick they had invented.
Lob a heavy warhead at the ground at the edge of a theatre shield bubble. Fuse it for delay detonation.
Watch as the fountain of dirt and rock the subterranean detonation threw up splattered all over the shield bubble- and stood a good chance of bringing it down from sheer volume of impact.
Not exactly reliable, but a much better chance than firing the thing directly at the shield.
They were enjoying themselves playing with that, and the other team was clustered around what was left of the rebel fighter force from One and Indivisible and Admonisher, where the site of the first clashes had been, and there still was a little drifting wreckage.
The Imperial force was engaged, and in free chase, when
‘Group Captain?’ Vehrec got a com call from his ad hoc chief of staff. ‘We detect a burst transmission to the Alliance fighters, looks like a set of nav codes. We have a point of origin and, wait one, order coming through. Pursue and destroy.’
Vehrec started to swear, then said ‘Wait. This is an antiship strike? On a target that actually has a reason not to move, and just might hang around long enough for us to nail it?’
‘I believe so. Elements are to detach- Black Prince’s Starwing and Hunter squadrons are to detach and rendezvous with the squadron for precision strike work, but otherwise it’s a go. Course uploading now.’
The rebels had to fight their way clear, the hyper- capable Imperials didn’t. They could turn and go, leaving a cloud of /ln and /Int to finish the Alliance light forces.
The rebel ‘retrieval carrier’ was simply the largest ship they could acquire on ‘everything’s going to stang’ notice, and it was escorted by the ship they had sent to capture it, a Quaestor- class medium corvette more commonly seen nowadays as a prison ship.
Decent light weapons fit- comparable to a Nebulon-B, from a fighter’s point of view. Their LTL were a bit heavy for antifighter work, and they carried a battery of ion cannon.
For a fighter squadron, an interestingly challenging opponent. For twenty? Not really.
The carrier itself was a KDY Super Transport- the largest of the medium freighter types, and not a ship that usually went unescorted- although in the sector, that was not a given.
A few ion scars, main loading doors open, and a handful of small craft- it’s own container managers and load lifter tugs around it, waiting to retrieve any damaged rebels.
The actual attack promised to be simplicity itself. The few moments of confusion aboard the carrier were enough for Vehrec to order ‘ATRs, target the escort, all others the carrier, maximum rate ripple launch, go.’
The Quaestor immediately opened fire, spraying ion and laser fire across the Imperial formation, a blind area shoot at first- back to normal for most, but there were still some two hundred Imperial craft, an overwhelming weight of fire even if most of them did only have a few torpedoes left.
Actually, their main problem was each other- avoiding sideswiping each other while trying to line up a shot, avoiding launching a warhead that hit one of the bombardment stream ahead of you, leaving each other enough room to evade targeted fire- that was a problem, and not everyone got it right.
One wide burst, hitting three and near- missing thirty, then the rebel ion cannon paused for a second, and swung onto the targets they identified as Imperial leadership. A sensible move, although once the rounds were away one that had more to do with revenge than survival.
Vehrec’s ESM screamed at him, he rolled and dived, trying to outjink their predictors, zigged upwards, trying not to overrun the wave of heavy, slow warheads in front of him and hoping the fighters behind him remembered their procedures well enough to stay out of his way- one of the ion bolts aimed at him flew past and hit an Avenger.
The weapon powercells split and detonated, and Vehrec felt the thump and saw the wash of red light in the cockpit as a lump of debris- probably a gun barrel- hit one of his engines.
Stang, he thought, but I can cope with this- reached down to turn off the autoeject with one hand while trying to stabilise and keep dodging with the other- too slow. The system disagreed with him that he could manage the problem, and punched him out. The cockpit blew out and the seat fired.
Well, thank you very kriffing much, he thought on his first tumble as it brought him back in sight of his fighter; one engine smashed, wing partially melted, but still there.
It occurred to him that he was floating, in a light standard- issue flight suit, in open space not very far away from what was about to be a multi- teraton detonation.
Oh, kriff, he thought and curled up into a ball. Why does the Empire have to use black flight suits? Four TIEs flashed by him, uncomfortably close.
The rebels have the right idea there, bright orange, then I might not get splattered like a mynock on a windshield by one of my own pilots, or roasted in an engine trail.
Better yet, he thought as his tumble brought the reb improvised carrier into view, how about flash- reflective white?
The corvette protecting the carrier tried to manoeuvre into position to physically intercept the stream of warheads- a sacrificial defence; but not effective.
The Imperial fighters had too large a sensor baseline, too many electronically capable small craft backing them up, and the carrier was only a merchant class target.
The wave of heavy torpedoes parted and flowed around the corvette, of the hundred or so warheads aimed at it directly sixty hit.
No possible explosive could be powerful enough to threaten a capital ship in small enough doses to fit into a warhead capable of slipping through point defence and actually hitting one.
Proton torpedoes cheated their way around this limitation with considerable elegance; they used an exploded.
The actual charge in every torpedo head was a stasis- locked flask of particle soup, similar to the state of the universe about two to three seconds after creation. Proton scattering, indeed.
As a handling security measure, the stasis generator around the charge was itself locked in stasis when it left the factory. If the manufacturer was at all reputable.
The yield of a warhead had only a loose relationship with the physical size, but a linear relationship with the cost. The reactor chambers to compress down the particle soup in the first place and the stasis gear to handle it safely were damned expensive.
Actual yields could vary by budget, but the Imperial Starfleet concentrated on four points. Service Standard A, single to double digit megaton, small craft like assault transports up to light corvette and agile enough to be some use against heavy fighters and bombers.
Service standard B, multi-hundred megaton, equivalent to a pure antiship LTL, good for killing medium and heavy corvettes. Service standard C was usually referred to as ‘make your will before breathing too hard’, multi- gigaton light MTL equivalent, a frigate killer. In sufficient numbers.
Service Standard D was usually not issued to bomber pilots at all, but reserved for assault transports and special operations forces- they were often referred to as heavy rockets, reached single digit teraton yields, and employed for the likes of wing and group scale attacks on enemy destroyers and larger.
What was going in against the rebel medium corvette and light frigate equivalent carrier were standard C and D torpedoes. About four hundred of them.
Lennart had drained down the squadron’s ordnance bunkers and violated half the safety regs in the book, issuing the big ship- killers to half trained bomber pilots who had barely even read up on such things and attack fighter pilots who had never flown with that kind of load.
He seemed to be getting away with it this far.
By the book, two squadrons of /Sa Bomber loaded with standard B would be enough, stand off and ripple fire them at the prison-ship corvette, a near three hundred round rollback that should saturate the defences and put enough through to literally peel off the outer surface, and even if there was no outright kill render the thing hopelessly vulnerable to bombing and strafing.
The sixty heavy heads that actually hit rendered that phase of the operation moot. It was pointless to bomb and boringly easy to strafe an expanding cloud of vapour.
The rebel carrier took over two hundred. It was physically much larger, and the rebels hadn’t taken off the cargo; as the hits and the heat pounded in, the mounds of ingots in the freighter’s belly absorbed much of it; mitigating factors.
The end result was, that for a few seconds anyway, there were large enough blobs of molten wreckage to show on a targeting scope.
Around the lamed, at-bay Admonisher, the five battered Imperial destroyers and their escorts formed a firing line.
‘Ol, recall all transports and shuttles to their parent craft, tell them to load up with assault troops. Signals, record for transmission;
“All ships with ion cannon, form into a tactical division with Fist- Tevar, lead that lot clear and organise them. Squadron general instruction; I want that ship. Sandpaper her shields down and eliminate point defence, but avoid major structural damage.
Vessels will take component shots only as directed by the Flag.” ’ Lennart thought about the order- the point of recording for transmission, to let him edit the order if it was inappropriate. Seemed good.
‘Right, transmit that- and block all outgoing signals from or authorised by the Imperial suite. Cut Kor Alric out of the loop, on my authority.’
It was only to be expected that Com/Scan, of all departments, would be well up on the ship’s ambient rumours. As plumbers by appointment to the scuttle-butt, they played the major role in rumour control, and rumour creation from time to time.
They knew roughly what was up, knew that Adannan had made nothing but enemies, and while they may have boggled at their commander’s boldness in issuing that order, they obeyed it.
Only just in time. There was an outgoing signal burst, channelled to Lennart’s flatscreen; one of the disadvantages of holos is that everyone in the room- on the bridge- can see them. Signals thought he might want to keep this one to himself, and they were right.
It was an order absolute, a decree of the privy council, no less, by the hand of their special agent here present; the traitorous Admonisher was to be obliterated, nothing to remain, and no further action was to be taken against any target until additional Imperial units arrived.
The message included a demand for them to come at once- and Lennart himself was to report instantly to the Imperial Suite.
This is it, he thought, the political payoff, the personal battle on top of the official. Why the kriff didn’t I let Admonisher blow the bridge tower off? Well, there’s always plan C.
‘Remember that possibility we discussed?’ Lennart said, almost conversationally, to the command team. As an order he added ‘Evacuate and lock down the upper bridge tower, seal all hatches, let’s try to keep our resident maniac in check until the purely naval side is done. And give me shipwide PA.’
Once that was rigged, he said to the crew, without preamble, ‘You recall that I said this operation was going to get unpleasantly political; it has. As an operation of war, you have justified my every confidence, but we have the last lightyear still to go, so no mistakes, not now.
You are probably aware that Kor Alric has not exactly shown himself to be a paragon of leadership; it goes further than that. I have evidence from the horse’s mouth that he plans to turn renegade.’
Adannan and his retinue were trying to break out of the suddenly closed down Imperial suite; they could hear all of this, and if the fury of the dark side alone would have worked, he could have melted out the door and all the way down through the reactor vessel.
‘Not rebel,’ Lennart continued, ‘simply intending to abuse the result of this operation for his own personal gain, and to what I reckon will be the detriment of the Empire. And no, I’m not gloriously happy to have to call him out on it, but it beats the alternative.
You know what you’re capable of; most of you, I’d prefer if you didn’t put yourselves at risk by getting personally involved in this, but some of you, you know who you are, I will need your help.’
Vianca, most of the ships in the squadron have taken some kind of damage- Karu a few penetrating hits, Dynamic one grumpy surveyor's decision from being stricken and broken up, Voracious pretty badly dented in parts, Fist and Black Prince moderate damage so far; they're all going to need dockyard attention.
As for further mods, taking it as a given that the Imperial/Imperator- class was a sound design to begin with, there's not that much absolute make-it-better room; most of what there is is trade- offs.
Black Prince already trades off emplacement and outpost establishment, lower endurance despite larger and more expensive to fill fuel tanks, 8.5% of peak acceleration, and most operationally problematic, almost all capability to make any kind of opposed landing.
That and she takes much more time and effort to look after, considering how far her powerplant and engine systems have been pushed out along the bleeding edge, and that wears into long- term endurance.
Previously, she was undergunned, more powerplant output than single- salvo yield, which usually got channeled through the weapons anyway in a higher than standard rate of fire. With the axial guns- more weight and strain- she is now overgunned, more weapon output than reactor output. Which can be damned dangerous, when a turret's capacitor banks get hit.
The reason I bring this up is that I reckon Mandators might be in the same situation, more weapon than reactor output, because of the spectrum of targets they have to engage- they should be able to fire effectiely at ships from their own size down to light corvette at least. That's what, nine orders of magnitude of power output?
A relatively compact and easily organised battery of extremely- heavy guns which can be combined to fire time-on-targets for burnthrough against a dreadnought or battleship, and a much more numerous battery of lighter guns for hosing and area fire against smaller, more agile targets like destroyers, possibly an intermediate stage, and a large grid of MTL, the whole weapon suite rated to maybe 1.2 to 1.3x the reactor output, and powered selectively according to the target.
Which is why I say; sheets of turbolaser fire? It would take more than one?
Anyway,
Ch 36
On the flag bridge, Adannan was still hopelessly baffled by what he saw- but could make more sense of what he could overhear being thought. Lennart himself was still a jumble, a tangle of connections and conceptions in every direction, and either he didn’t know how to shield or he was simply too busy to.
No, no, of course; that would be it. He was broadcasting inadvertently, scattering thoughts and ideas across the crew. It wasn’t a deliberate active connection, nothing was being forced, and if he was right Lennart was also, however subconsciously, listening to how they reacted.
Whether he knew it or not, the Force was with him, but not in the manner of traditional battle meditation. That constituted, as far as the dark acolyte knew, one force user dreaming of war and infusing the rest of their command with that, in a forcing out, a projection of ideas.
It could improve coordination, sharpen skills- it was a superb preventer of errors- but it did suppress by supplanting the individual will and aggression of the crew who fought under it.
Much as it pained a force user to admit it, battle meditation was not the be-all and end-all of fleet operations.
Even the current master of the form, grand admiral Declann, had lost fleet exercises;
usually to opposing commanders who took the risk of dividing their command, allowing elements to operate independently, and presenting a more complicated problem than one mind could easily grasp.
To Adannan, the solution was conceptually straightforward. Dissolve the will of some of the crew, slave their brains to your own and use them as co- processors, problem solved.
It seemed to be too complicated a task to do while actually in combat, though, and Declann had lost exercises to the complexityholic alien Thrawn, to Lord Vader who could overmatch him in the Force in any case, and to a handful of up and coming junior flag officers, among them Rear-Admiral Stephan Rawlin. Hmmm.
Lennart was sincere in his belief that he did not have the Force, he couldn’t possibly be aware of what he was doing or it would change him, his personality would be different.
So it would probably be a good idea to tell him.
Other Imperial forces? Yes, reinforcements would be welcome. They could hardly be less obedient than this infuriating man, and might possibly be of use in keeping him down.
So, how was the timing of this going to go, and when did the military element end and the political- or purely personal- begin?
Move in on the planet as soon as possible, ideally, destroy Admonisher outright, free up the ground forces. Speed was not particularly of the essence, he realised; poise was.
Adannan sighed, remembering his original plan- blackmail a line officer, intimidate the crew, steal the medical logs from the 118th fleet that were the only place, beside their dead creators and even Palpatine wasn’t that good, to learn the secrets of loyalty programming and how to subvert it.
Move out, fade away and take the time to study them in detail and decide how to use what he had.
So simple. The only problem was Jorian Lennart.
Well, and about forty-seven thousand of his friends. Sacking the renegade line officer, taking his command and his world away from him, would be a wonderful revenge, but was it really the best use?
He would make a damned awkward apprentice. Kill him and blame him for…ah, that would be good. A clean, satisfying solution. Murder him, shift the blame, take the secrets and run.
Or, for that matter, eliminate the entire ship. The Empire wasn’t exactly short of destroyers, he could afford to squander one or two.
The timing was going to be critical. While the first ground assault was in progress would be best.
That might take a while yet to arrange. Fist did have enough sensor capacity in working order to spot the incoming Rebel, and decided to make a stand. Run? Delaying action? They were a destroyer, a fighting ship. No.
Most of Tevar’s crew were behind her in that decision, now that they had tasted blood. Was her ship not of the same class as the flag, the mainstay of the Imperial fleet, ton for ton the best the Empire had to offer?
She had no intention of running. Not now, not again.
Fist’s sensors registered the inbound as a blur of curdled space, between EW and deliberately running the drive rough to obfuscate the emergence point.
‘Helm, he’s trying to fake us out. Let’s not make it easy for them, I want to meet him bows on, so bring us about.’
They could get behind that at least- as long as Admonisher hadn’t added an extra layer of deception, and was screening a false entry point. Doublethink.
Against the squadron flag, they would certainly have gone that far. Against Fist- why would they miss a trick?
They didn’t. Project a false drop point, make it look just a shade too good, as if they could be planning to come out of it anyway. Fist had turned away from that, pointing her bows insystem, expecting that it was a trick; and it was, a triple trick.
The fake was a fake after all; it looked too good to be true because it was true. The heavy renegade destroyer emerged from the burble of curdled space exactly where it had seemed to be about to, outsystem of Fist.
Both ships were stern-on to each other- Admonisher had been expecting that, Tevar hadn’t but her Imperator was far more manoeuvrable.
If Captain Tevar had been following instructions as given, she would have accelerated away, zig-zagging to avoid fire until the flag was there to support her, but confidence and adrenalin said otherwise.
Fist swung round hard on the thrust of her secondary engines, and stared into a blindingly bright cloud of jamming; Admonisher dipped her nose and yawed, making a move like a half turn of a helix, close to the edge of her manoeuvre envelope in bringing her dorsal arc to bear.
Black Prince and the rebel heavy had both tried their best to fake each other out with electronic warfare- the term was crazily insufficient in this day and age, but it still applied- neither ship had actually managed much in the way of deception.
Each could read the other’s moves too well, and the kind of subtlety they were both attempting functioned much more effectively when they weren’t simultaneously charging in guns blazing.
Here, Admonisher hoped to sow enough chaos on the first exchange to land disabling hits quickly enough to put Fist out of the fight, cripple her now, finish the flag and then turn on her.
It was actually the loyalist who got the first shot in- a string of four tracking across the big renegade, one landing on unshielded hull. Wreckage and damage, ploughing in to the right of the blasted-out turret cluster, spilling molten metal and air, but not penetrating deep enough to reach the vitals.
Admonisher fired battery groups, eight hundred and forty teratons each- and two managed to connect. One widely enough spread that the shields took it, one concentrated enough to burn through, dismounting two axial defence turrets and smashing open the forward superstructure- living quarters decks.
That was the opening. There would be worse to come; Tevar knew that a stand- up fight with the much larger rebel destroyer was, on the face of it, a losing plan.
So fight it out here at close quarters and hold long enough for the squadron to arrive, or-
The rebel ship flared her bow steering thrusters, the sensor crew though it looked wrong, too wide, flat and hollow. They weren’t fast enough to stop sensor interpretation sending that to fire control.
Admonisher’s engines vented a billow of hot ions that went nowhere, no stream, and Fist’s crew couldn’t stop their automatic systems making the mistake Admonisher wanted them to. Gunnery assumed Admonisher was going to turn, predicted and laid the guns on accordingly, and missed wildly. Admonisher capitalised on that by landing another set of bursts.
One hit the starboard brim trench quad, It exploded, the capacitor banks let go, and Fist was shoved to one side by the blast. Helm started to stabilise out, but Tevar yelled at them ‘No, roll with it-‘ and she was right. Fist extended out into a diving spiral that took her clear of Admonisher’s followup converged sheaf.
If that salvo had hit it would have torn out their central main engine, at least. Fist stabilised out and started to return fire, Admonisher swiched to sequential fire. Surer, with a higher average hit rate, but it meant they were no longer trying for the cheap kill.
That meant- what? Their opinion of her had gone up?
Infuriating bastards, Tevar thought, then realised that they would be trying to play with her head, too.
Practically speaking, her advantages were? Speed, for a start. Fist was over a thousand ‘g’ faster- that value had changed as bits were blown off both ships, but it was roughly so.
She was also a smaller target- 60% of the length, and differently proportioned, leaner and a much smaller target cross- section. That should be a factor, that and Admonisher had higher physical, but couldn’t have unlimited mental endurance.
Considering that she had been basically held in check by Black Prince, been unable to pin down any others of the Imperial squadron long enough to inflict critical damage, they had fought very hard for very little, and they had to be feeling at least a little drained and depressed.
They would probably welcome a straight up pounding match, the sort of hammering work that she was tempted to give them- but which the molten crater in the side of her ship and the jangled mess visible from the bridge windows argued against. What would work?
Opening the range, and moving out to at least a medium- range, high speed manoeuvring battle, keep running Admonisher ragged, waste the renegade’s energy literal and psychological.
The Imperator- class took a lot of stick from amateur analysts who didn’t understand why their turrets were mounted in two rows one either side of the superstructure; it was for range control.
A side-firing ship has the advantage of being able to literally fly circles around it’s target, closing in or widening out as the situation dictated.
A ship with only forward weapons can’t do that; it has much less freedom of manoeuvre, has to close the range, has to be predictable.
The ideal solution was probably a centreline- dorsal and ventral battery, which was- another flare of shot around Fist, and a stream of response- a worry for another moment.
‘Helm, base course RA+11.24.17.’ Tevar ordered, Out, at a tangent to the planet’s orbit, eighty degrees off Admonisher’s bearing. Crabbing out sideways, probably the best option to keep Admonisher in play- and keep them from killing her- until the flag arrived.
That was going to be an interesting move. Admonisher would be very wary of being faked out again, would immediately attempt to counterambush; Lennart, of course, was aware of that, and so the doublethink went.
Admonisher detected the curdling of space that went with a high relativistic mass just the far side of the light barrier; preparing a very high speed reentry, was he? Had to be faked. It was in the wrong place; when all doublethink failed, ‘How will this serve my purpose?’ was a good yardstick.
That entry point would put Black Prince out of mutually supporting range with Fist- enable the flag to give crossfire, maybe, but not what they were expecting. Which of course made it possible, but- ah. There was a trail away, a move on towards Fist. That made more tactical sense, and Admonisher rolled to cover that approach.
One wrinkle in the brain too many, or was it too few? Admonisher couldn’t be everywhere at once, couldn’t cover all the possibilities. She was sold the dummy dummy that she was expecting, the fake was indeed a fake- and the false trail, the projection? Decoy.
Black Prince emerged from hyperspace through the ripples of warped space, dragging her back, straining the ship’s systems- it would have been called a botched entry in any other circumstances, grounds for an enquiry, but Lennart was trading off stress for position, and got the advantage he wanted. Low and astern on Admonisher.
The rebel knew what Black Prince had done with a firing position like that before; started to turn hard towards the Imperial ship, minimal forward motion, spinning on main engines in place, not fast enough.
There was only one possible fire order, and Lennart thought it, it had got as far as his tongue, but there certainly had not been time to have it issued or acted on when it happened anyway.
The Imperial destroyer’s guns crashed out in a converged sheaf, time on target salvo at Admonisher’s point of turn.
Good, Lennart thought, intelligent anticipation in action. He also thought he heard a faint scream from the direction of the flag bridge, but no matter, not now.
‘This should be the endgame,’ he said before the salvo had even hit, ‘call the squadron in, 120 degree arc around Admonisher, us as centre, Fist as one endpoint, not too precise.’
He was still talking when the salvo hit Admonisher starboard and aft, the direction she had been swinging in, smashing into the armoured skin over her engines.
The Shockwave class had five main engines, slightly staggered to take account of the superstructure, and eight secondaries.
The outer starboard main engine blew apart, blasted open the bulkhead and sent splinters and concussion through the inner starboard wrecking it, obliterated two of the secondaries and wrecked two more.
Admonisher was lamed, unable to turn to starboard, unable to accelerate away and pick her fights, unable to manoeuvre out of the way of incoming fire.
Unsurprisingly, she lashed out in return, pitching and trolling to bring all seven remaining turret groups to bear- and receiving a volley in the nose for her trouble that overpenetrated to the forward secondary bay-
but landing two sets of bolts on Black Prince, one aft on the side of the superstructure- beneath the bridge tower- and one upper starboard side adjacent to a previous hit, and to the forward end of the starboard turret row.
Starboard-1 was hit directly, knocked out, possibly repairable, starboard-2 was wrenched off the mounting, definitely fixable but not in combat. It was a fair enough trade- ideally no trade at all, but that was what had happened.
Lennart took note of it, fed it into his estimates of the situation, didn’t need to direct damage control, already on their way.
Fist was moving outwards to a more balanced attack range; Admonisher was still turning slowly, her manoeuvre jets trying to stop her, and her guns came on to bear.
Tevar feinted starboard, initially a level turn, then dipped the port wing and firewalled the starboard engines to shove the bow down and over, and then brought port up to speed.
Admonisher fired a single pattern that Fist just got clipped by- one more hit in the axial battery, one forward on the upper hull over the secondary hangar.
Tevar winced as the hits went in, and ordered an extended S- turn, as Admonisher stabilised herself out, firing off a volley into empty space for the sake of the recoil.
The heavy renegade stabilised with her bow facing between the two Imperial destroyers.
Correction, five, as the rest of the squadron arrived on Brenn’s beacon signal and lined up to engage.
The Imperial fighter elements had reduced down to two groups now, both mixed, one orbiting Ord Corban and occasionally lobbing heavy rockets down to try out a new trick they had invented.
Lob a heavy warhead at the ground at the edge of a theatre shield bubble. Fuse it for delay detonation.
Watch as the fountain of dirt and rock the subterranean detonation threw up splattered all over the shield bubble- and stood a good chance of bringing it down from sheer volume of impact.
Not exactly reliable, but a much better chance than firing the thing directly at the shield.
They were enjoying themselves playing with that, and the other team was clustered around what was left of the rebel fighter force from One and Indivisible and Admonisher, where the site of the first clashes had been, and there still was a little drifting wreckage.
The Imperial force was engaged, and in free chase, when
‘Group Captain?’ Vehrec got a com call from his ad hoc chief of staff. ‘We detect a burst transmission to the Alliance fighters, looks like a set of nav codes. We have a point of origin and, wait one, order coming through. Pursue and destroy.’
Vehrec started to swear, then said ‘Wait. This is an antiship strike? On a target that actually has a reason not to move, and just might hang around long enough for us to nail it?’
‘I believe so. Elements are to detach- Black Prince’s Starwing and Hunter squadrons are to detach and rendezvous with the squadron for precision strike work, but otherwise it’s a go. Course uploading now.’
The rebels had to fight their way clear, the hyper- capable Imperials didn’t. They could turn and go, leaving a cloud of /ln and /Int to finish the Alliance light forces.
The rebel ‘retrieval carrier’ was simply the largest ship they could acquire on ‘everything’s going to stang’ notice, and it was escorted by the ship they had sent to capture it, a Quaestor- class medium corvette more commonly seen nowadays as a prison ship.
Decent light weapons fit- comparable to a Nebulon-B, from a fighter’s point of view. Their LTL were a bit heavy for antifighter work, and they carried a battery of ion cannon.
For a fighter squadron, an interestingly challenging opponent. For twenty? Not really.
The carrier itself was a KDY Super Transport- the largest of the medium freighter types, and not a ship that usually went unescorted- although in the sector, that was not a given.
A few ion scars, main loading doors open, and a handful of small craft- it’s own container managers and load lifter tugs around it, waiting to retrieve any damaged rebels.
The actual attack promised to be simplicity itself. The few moments of confusion aboard the carrier were enough for Vehrec to order ‘ATRs, target the escort, all others the carrier, maximum rate ripple launch, go.’
The Quaestor immediately opened fire, spraying ion and laser fire across the Imperial formation, a blind area shoot at first- back to normal for most, but there were still some two hundred Imperial craft, an overwhelming weight of fire even if most of them did only have a few torpedoes left.
Actually, their main problem was each other- avoiding sideswiping each other while trying to line up a shot, avoiding launching a warhead that hit one of the bombardment stream ahead of you, leaving each other enough room to evade targeted fire- that was a problem, and not everyone got it right.
One wide burst, hitting three and near- missing thirty, then the rebel ion cannon paused for a second, and swung onto the targets they identified as Imperial leadership. A sensible move, although once the rounds were away one that had more to do with revenge than survival.
Vehrec’s ESM screamed at him, he rolled and dived, trying to outjink their predictors, zigged upwards, trying not to overrun the wave of heavy, slow warheads in front of him and hoping the fighters behind him remembered their procedures well enough to stay out of his way- one of the ion bolts aimed at him flew past and hit an Avenger.
The weapon powercells split and detonated, and Vehrec felt the thump and saw the wash of red light in the cockpit as a lump of debris- probably a gun barrel- hit one of his engines.
Stang, he thought, but I can cope with this- reached down to turn off the autoeject with one hand while trying to stabilise and keep dodging with the other- too slow. The system disagreed with him that he could manage the problem, and punched him out. The cockpit blew out and the seat fired.
Well, thank you very kriffing much, he thought on his first tumble as it brought him back in sight of his fighter; one engine smashed, wing partially melted, but still there.
It occurred to him that he was floating, in a light standard- issue flight suit, in open space not very far away from what was about to be a multi- teraton detonation.
Oh, kriff, he thought and curled up into a ball. Why does the Empire have to use black flight suits? Four TIEs flashed by him, uncomfortably close.
The rebels have the right idea there, bright orange, then I might not get splattered like a mynock on a windshield by one of my own pilots, or roasted in an engine trail.
Better yet, he thought as his tumble brought the reb improvised carrier into view, how about flash- reflective white?
The corvette protecting the carrier tried to manoeuvre into position to physically intercept the stream of warheads- a sacrificial defence; but not effective.
The Imperial fighters had too large a sensor baseline, too many electronically capable small craft backing them up, and the carrier was only a merchant class target.
The wave of heavy torpedoes parted and flowed around the corvette, of the hundred or so warheads aimed at it directly sixty hit.
No possible explosive could be powerful enough to threaten a capital ship in small enough doses to fit into a warhead capable of slipping through point defence and actually hitting one.
Proton torpedoes cheated their way around this limitation with considerable elegance; they used an exploded.
The actual charge in every torpedo head was a stasis- locked flask of particle soup, similar to the state of the universe about two to three seconds after creation. Proton scattering, indeed.
As a handling security measure, the stasis generator around the charge was itself locked in stasis when it left the factory. If the manufacturer was at all reputable.
The yield of a warhead had only a loose relationship with the physical size, but a linear relationship with the cost. The reactor chambers to compress down the particle soup in the first place and the stasis gear to handle it safely were damned expensive.
Actual yields could vary by budget, but the Imperial Starfleet concentrated on four points. Service Standard A, single to double digit megaton, small craft like assault transports up to light corvette and agile enough to be some use against heavy fighters and bombers.
Service standard B, multi-hundred megaton, equivalent to a pure antiship LTL, good for killing medium and heavy corvettes. Service standard C was usually referred to as ‘make your will before breathing too hard’, multi- gigaton light MTL equivalent, a frigate killer. In sufficient numbers.
Service Standard D was usually not issued to bomber pilots at all, but reserved for assault transports and special operations forces- they were often referred to as heavy rockets, reached single digit teraton yields, and employed for the likes of wing and group scale attacks on enemy destroyers and larger.
What was going in against the rebel medium corvette and light frigate equivalent carrier were standard C and D torpedoes. About four hundred of them.
Lennart had drained down the squadron’s ordnance bunkers and violated half the safety regs in the book, issuing the big ship- killers to half trained bomber pilots who had barely even read up on such things and attack fighter pilots who had never flown with that kind of load.
He seemed to be getting away with it this far.
By the book, two squadrons of /Sa Bomber loaded with standard B would be enough, stand off and ripple fire them at the prison-ship corvette, a near three hundred round rollback that should saturate the defences and put enough through to literally peel off the outer surface, and even if there was no outright kill render the thing hopelessly vulnerable to bombing and strafing.
The sixty heavy heads that actually hit rendered that phase of the operation moot. It was pointless to bomb and boringly easy to strafe an expanding cloud of vapour.
The rebel carrier took over two hundred. It was physically much larger, and the rebels hadn’t taken off the cargo; as the hits and the heat pounded in, the mounds of ingots in the freighter’s belly absorbed much of it; mitigating factors.
The end result was, that for a few seconds anyway, there were large enough blobs of molten wreckage to show on a targeting scope.
Around the lamed, at-bay Admonisher, the five battered Imperial destroyers and their escorts formed a firing line.
‘Ol, recall all transports and shuttles to their parent craft, tell them to load up with assault troops. Signals, record for transmission;
“All ships with ion cannon, form into a tactical division with Fist- Tevar, lead that lot clear and organise them. Squadron general instruction; I want that ship. Sandpaper her shields down and eliminate point defence, but avoid major structural damage.
Vessels will take component shots only as directed by the Flag.” ’ Lennart thought about the order- the point of recording for transmission, to let him edit the order if it was inappropriate. Seemed good.
‘Right, transmit that- and block all outgoing signals from or authorised by the Imperial suite. Cut Kor Alric out of the loop, on my authority.’
It was only to be expected that Com/Scan, of all departments, would be well up on the ship’s ambient rumours. As plumbers by appointment to the scuttle-butt, they played the major role in rumour control, and rumour creation from time to time.
They knew roughly what was up, knew that Adannan had made nothing but enemies, and while they may have boggled at their commander’s boldness in issuing that order, they obeyed it.
Only just in time. There was an outgoing signal burst, channelled to Lennart’s flatscreen; one of the disadvantages of holos is that everyone in the room- on the bridge- can see them. Signals thought he might want to keep this one to himself, and they were right.
It was an order absolute, a decree of the privy council, no less, by the hand of their special agent here present; the traitorous Admonisher was to be obliterated, nothing to remain, and no further action was to be taken against any target until additional Imperial units arrived.
The message included a demand for them to come at once- and Lennart himself was to report instantly to the Imperial Suite.
This is it, he thought, the political payoff, the personal battle on top of the official. Why the kriff didn’t I let Admonisher blow the bridge tower off? Well, there’s always plan C.
‘Remember that possibility we discussed?’ Lennart said, almost conversationally, to the command team. As an order he added ‘Evacuate and lock down the upper bridge tower, seal all hatches, let’s try to keep our resident maniac in check until the purely naval side is done. And give me shipwide PA.’
Once that was rigged, he said to the crew, without preamble, ‘You recall that I said this operation was going to get unpleasantly political; it has. As an operation of war, you have justified my every confidence, but we have the last lightyear still to go, so no mistakes, not now.
You are probably aware that Kor Alric has not exactly shown himself to be a paragon of leadership; it goes further than that. I have evidence from the horse’s mouth that he plans to turn renegade.’
Adannan and his retinue were trying to break out of the suddenly closed down Imperial suite; they could hear all of this, and if the fury of the dark side alone would have worked, he could have melted out the door and all the way down through the reactor vessel.
‘Not rebel,’ Lennart continued, ‘simply intending to abuse the result of this operation for his own personal gain, and to what I reckon will be the detriment of the Empire. And no, I’m not gloriously happy to have to call him out on it, but it beats the alternative.
You know what you’re capable of; most of you, I’d prefer if you didn’t put yourselves at risk by getting personally involved in this, but some of you, you know who you are, I will need your help.’
Last edited by Eleventh Century Remnant on 2009-11-18 04:11pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Kartr_Kana
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Can't wait to see the final show down between Adannan and Lennart. The last paragraph was a little jarring though, didn't really sound like lennart. I think this possibly the best SWs fic Cannon or Non-Cannon I have ever read. Keep up the good work!
"Our Country won't go on forever, if we stay soft as we are now. There won't be any AMERICA because some foreign soldier will invade us and take our women and breed a hardier race!"
LT. GEN. LEWIS "CHESTY" PULLER, USMC
YAY!! The Fist SURVIVES!
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
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Vehrec
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An exploded what now? This little error threw me off when I was reading though the first time, but then it came back to haunt me this morning when I let my thoughts drift in this direction.No possible explosive could be powerful enough to threaten a capital ship in small enough doses to fit into a warhead capable of slipping through point defence and actually hitting one. Proton torpedoes cheated their way around this limitation with considerable elegance; they used an exploded.
Commander of the MFS Darwinian Selection Method (sexual)-
Eleventh Century Remnant
- Jedi Council Member
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- Location: Scotland
Ah, that was fun. Sunburnt to blazes, mildly dented, and wobbling slightly from hangover and sleep deprivation- great. (Driving four hundred miles back up the road on the evening of the second day was interesting, too. That may have been a mistake.)
We lost hideously, incidentally- six fights over the period, we won two of them. Ish. For a given definition of 'won'.
General ramblings in reply;
yes, strange things are happening in Jorian Lennart's head. There's a line in there somewhere about so many very stupid operational decisions being made for personal reasons back in the clone wars, because the Force seems to plug you into a more personal relationship with the universe as a whole, skewing your perspective.
That's basically what's happening. He's just arranged the excuse, and now he's looking at it not as an Imperial Starfleet officer, as the commander of a warship and an agent of authority, but as a bloke. A man, standing on a deck, breathing slightly oily, electric air, about to challenge another man to a brawl with his soul as the stake.
Which is arguably unprofessional, not to have him done in officially- which is what Adannan was planning after all- but he's taken care of that side of things. The other ships of the squadron will be getting that message, with added highlights from the backscatter recordings; self- incrimination for fun and profit. Politically, he's done.
What Lennart needs to do now is to take up that personal challenge. See if he can keep the Force, and especially the dark side, out of his head, or at least get it to sign a binding tenancy agreement. See if he can face Adannan down, and kill him, and manage not to turn into him in the process.
He can't ask the crew to help him with that, officially. Not give a formal order and actually get an answer to the visceral question. What he can and did do is ask them for their help as people, to voulnteer to take his side because they think he is worth helping and backing up, not because he happens to be set in authority over them.
Which is a new departure for him, actually- it is in part a deliberate risk, making a bet with himself that he is right. Blame the force. He will, later, although how long for is open to question.
That bit about proton torps is simply my best guess as to how you can get warship- endangering yields out of something that small, and that is said to work through 'proton scattering.'
It's just a linguistic flourish, exploded as opposed to explosive; take a relatively normal fusion plasma (ha bloody ha), compress it down in a modified hypermatter reactor chamber to the temperatures and pressures of a few seconds after the big bang, and trap it in stasis. Quickly. Huge amount of energy, relatively small space, fundamental problem solved. How many others thrown up along the way, though...I'll have to do a bit more thinking on this one.
Oh, group Captain Vehrec is about to get the worst suntan of his life. Yes, I know he's wearing a flight suit. Still going to sting a bit.
We lost hideously, incidentally- six fights over the period, we won two of them. Ish. For a given definition of 'won'.
General ramblings in reply;
yes, strange things are happening in Jorian Lennart's head. There's a line in there somewhere about so many very stupid operational decisions being made for personal reasons back in the clone wars, because the Force seems to plug you into a more personal relationship with the universe as a whole, skewing your perspective.
That's basically what's happening. He's just arranged the excuse, and now he's looking at it not as an Imperial Starfleet officer, as the commander of a warship and an agent of authority, but as a bloke. A man, standing on a deck, breathing slightly oily, electric air, about to challenge another man to a brawl with his soul as the stake.
Which is arguably unprofessional, not to have him done in officially- which is what Adannan was planning after all- but he's taken care of that side of things. The other ships of the squadron will be getting that message, with added highlights from the backscatter recordings; self- incrimination for fun and profit. Politically, he's done.
What Lennart needs to do now is to take up that personal challenge. See if he can keep the Force, and especially the dark side, out of his head, or at least get it to sign a binding tenancy agreement. See if he can face Adannan down, and kill him, and manage not to turn into him in the process.
He can't ask the crew to help him with that, officially. Not give a formal order and actually get an answer to the visceral question. What he can and did do is ask them for their help as people, to voulnteer to take his side because they think he is worth helping and backing up, not because he happens to be set in authority over them.
Which is a new departure for him, actually- it is in part a deliberate risk, making a bet with himself that he is right. Blame the force. He will, later, although how long for is open to question.
That bit about proton torps is simply my best guess as to how you can get warship- endangering yields out of something that small, and that is said to work through 'proton scattering.'
It's just a linguistic flourish, exploded as opposed to explosive; take a relatively normal fusion plasma (ha bloody ha), compress it down in a modified hypermatter reactor chamber to the temperatures and pressures of a few seconds after the big bang, and trap it in stasis. Quickly. Huge amount of energy, relatively small space, fundamental problem solved. How many others thrown up along the way, though...I'll have to do a bit more thinking on this one.
Oh, group Captain Vehrec is about to get the worst suntan of his life. Yes, I know he's wearing a flight suit. Still going to sting a bit.
I think he's referring to the "Proton torpedoes cheated their way around this limitation with considerable elegance; they used an exploded." They used an exploded what? It just ends awkwardly; something's missing.
Otherwise, nice chapter as always... though I do have to ask; how the heck do you keep everything straight in your head while you're writing this?
Otherwise, nice chapter as always... though I do have to ask; how the heck do you keep everything straight in your head while you're writing this?
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Eleventh Century Remnant
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Partial update- my schedule has become a little crazed of late, so this is what would have been the first half of 36B, basically catching up on what's happening in the rest of the sector.
There were many different ways the rRasfenoni could play this, and part of the responsibility of the flag officer’s staff was to game it out, see what the enemy could do with what they had, and plan accordingly.
Admiral Lord Nathanael Convarrian on the Tichy had come to the conclusion that the most effective thing the seven- limbed aliens could do would be to simulate a small civil war.
Appear to fall out among themselves over what they had done, dissociate part of the race from the rest- it was about the only way they could expect to get away with shooting at Imperial ships on one hand, and look innocent on the other.
It might even be true. It was unlikely the majority of the race knew what had been going on; they were insidious, they got everywhere- colonies and settlers and outposts dotted the sector- but if the briefing material that had been scraped together was anything to go by, they had done a lot of and were proud of their part in disaster relief work.
The fact that special detachments of their own armed forces had been responsible for many of these disasters had apparently not sunk in to the general consciousness.
At any rate, the greatest contribution the rRasfenoni armed services could make to the survival of their species now was probably to start shooting at each other. Create a cloud of chaos and confusion, blur the lines of responsibility.
Use that opportunity to start lobbing shot at the Imperial ships, see what they were up against and if any kind of defensive victory was actually possible; if not, the murderers who had besmirched the name of their race- or a reasonable imitation thereof- would be handed over, and a certain amount of disarmament would occur, complicated by the usual maze of lies that it was the intelligence services’ job to see through.
The days when a world or group of worlds could hope to be more trouble than they were worth to hold were over; the practise of backing out of operations that involved no tangible return had been a security disaster, a significant encouragement to a generation of rebels and pirates.
Never mind the enemy; the Empire had come close to being done in by it’s own accountants. The policy had been an artefact of post clone war reconstruction, less out of real need to economise than a kind of dazed austerity- at-all-costs, whatever-it-takes thinking had simply gone out of fashion.
Well, now it was back, and welcome. A policy of parsimony- normalisation- had proven to be extremely expensive in terms of officers’ careers, and most were glad to see a more energetic policy.
The rRasfenoni could not conceivably expect to fight and win against what the Empire could bring to bear against them. What they had done would leave them no allies they could call on, military or political, and was enough to justify taking their worlds by force and a complete change of government.
There was no input from higher authority; the sector governor- a full Moff- was under arrest, and the special assistant to the privy council had been caught doing something he ought to be arrested for.
The Ubiqtorate hadn’t reacted to that one yet; they could surely intercept the com pulses between ships of the support group, had noticed that a line officer had somehow managed to catch a high official proclaiming his intent to commit treason, and hadn’t done anything? Lag, perhaps, time to verify, time to play the political game.
Or sheer disbelief, there was always that possibility. Still, Lennart had made enough noise that surely something would happen.
It hadn’t yet, so far there had been no directives forthcoming from higher authority of any kind, so this was going to be a purely naval operation. The chief object of which was to crack the rRasfenoni home and major worlds’ defences fast enough to prevent them destroying enough of the evidence to protect the guilty.
As such, the job was time critical. First Battle Squadron would disperse into it’s subunits and target the eight largest and most probable colony worlds, begin assault if the shields were down and blockade if not.
First Battlecruiser Squadron were the heavy interdiction element, and they would orbit the trade lanes, intercept rRasfenoni mobile forces and any rebels still moving in or out-sector.
Tichy himself would strike for the rRasfenoni homeworld.
Sindavathar were a heavy outfit, they were very low on the list for recieving a new- build Executor because there were many other lighter formations that needed the reinforcement much more.
BS1 consisted of two of the horn-prowed Corellian built Aquila class battle carriers, two balanced standard-heavy kuati Temperor class with their distinctive oversized comms and sensor domes rising out of the cortex, four bristlingly-armed heavy corellian Prolocutors; diverse, but effective.
BCS1 was more homogenous, four bulge- bellied Procurators, designed for long range, open space search and destroy, two compact, heavily armoured Praetors which filled out the other part of a battlecruiser’s duties, fast manoeuvring wing to the fleet.
Battlecruiser designs tended to come in pairs; the previous generation had been the Ultor and Adversor classes, the Ultor the fleet flanker and Adversor distant hunter-killer.
The very latest were the Vengeance, known unofficially to most as the ‘scarecrow’ or ‘ooga booga’ class- huge in dimensions, terrifying in appearance, but almost hollow- very little mass and power to show for their size.
Ultors were the same length- give or take a couple of hundred metres- as the standard Sector class heavy cruiser, but they were a classic wedge hull, solid shapes solidly built as opposed to the Sector’s thin prime hull and humpback superstructure.
On average, an Ultor would take a Sector class cruiser out reliably, it would be closer than their designations suggested but that was the way it always worked out on exercise.
A Vengeance class so- called battlecruiser could not reliably do the same, had difficulty handling the medium Admiral class cruisers, and would be torn apart by the main force Ultor which was two thirds it’s length and one sixth the target profile.
They were notoriously combat- unworthy, a personal commission of a man high in the Imperial hierarchy who knew much about impressions and intimidation, and very little about warship design.
They were, in theory, fast hunters. Their fleet- wing counterpart, though, looked to be something distinctly successful- a potentially much more effective design.
Anyway, those were the pieces, and the battle-play could begin.
The battleships and their escorts emerged first, and simultaneously. All but one to find raised planetary shields and alerted defences; the single exception was the Aquila class Goshawk, over the colony planet Plr’lanilthre- at the root of one of their minor trade routes, a junction world and major port- and that lack of shields was instantly suspect.
Still, the instructions were clear. If they seem to offer you an avenue of attack that’s too good to be true, spring the trap. There was enough firepower in the rest of the squadron to come and break them out.
There were a handful of orbital facilities, minor, large groundside ports- here they could be kept safely under the shield bubble. A lot of small orbitals, colony cylinders and spheres, most of which were moving away under station keeping thrusters- but far too many satellites for a world with any decent technology. Disguised minefield? Likely.
Goshawk blasted out at the surfaceside shield generators- of seven immediately within reach, three died, the other four saved themselves by getting some kind of energy barrier up fast enough to take the opening volley, but the partially raised shields vented so much heat into the planet there were now four lakes of lava with raised pinnacles in the centre.
There was a gap. Enough to send transports down to ground through, enough to start an assault on the rest of the planet- although dealing with those four shield generators was going to be interesting.
Landing barges had enough heat resistance to float on lava, and suddenly there was the concept of AT-ATs punting their way across the molten sea.
The planetary defence batteries returned fire, an interesting mix of autoblasters, ion cannon, kinetic accelerators and conventional turbolasers- a defence weighted far above the usual, expectable destroyer scale attack, but not enough to deal with a heavy carrier.
The Aquilas were actually a lot closer, functionally, to qualifying as battleships than the huge open- undersided Conducor class the Starfleet rated as such; half sisters to the heavy, minimal- bay Prolocutor class, they were thoroughly hated by most of their pilots.
They had kept most of the internal bracing and framework, their hangar bay was notoriously cramped, subdivided and awkward to fly through, and traffic control within was a nightmare.
Above the usual six squadron Imperial Wing, it ran Group, three to eight wings, Command, four to twelve groups, Force, three to eight commands- a minimum of two hundred and sixteen and a maximum of four thousand six hundred and eight squadrons to a Force, usually around the low thousand mark, thousand and eighty being the most common.
Huge variance, but it allowed for radical differences in individual quality, in terrain controlled.
Aquila class carriers took a complete Command under an Aerospace Vice- Marshal, ten Groups each of eight Wings, four hundred and eighty squadrons.
Not the end of it, because further back in the landing stage ridden bays they managed to give room to the landers, armour and logistics of a sixty-four division Army Group.
‘Aerospace force? I feel more like an air molecule, trying to figure my way out through the alveoli’ had been one test pilot’s comment, and even if not consciously inspired, the design of the bay was certainly reminiscent of the human lung.
In theory, that was enough deployable ground and air power stored in the convolutions to take the planet, and they had a gap in the shields to make the attempt through.
That was the intention; right up to the moment when the floating low-orbit shields activated. The planet didn’t have a second course of shielding- few could afford protection to that degree- but it did have backup generators ready to switch in to the main shield bubble, most of them in low orbit and some way disguised.
The effect was to cage Goshawk, below the outer reaches of the bubble, isolated from her support group and easily contained, easily accessible to the surface guns and the swarm of atmospheric fighters- thousands, tens of thousands- coming up at her.
She would need all of her fighters to hold that lot off, and help do enough damage to the planetary shields and defence batteries to let Goshawk break out- the big ship felt literally like a fish in a barrel, only about twenty times her own length from surface to shield bubble; or to let the escorts break in to support her.
If the rRasfenoni did reinforce, and there was a suspicious lack of presence that indicated their mobile forces were being held back for such an opportunity- improbable as it seemed, were they actually trying to pick and win a fight? Take on the Starfleet?
There was a certain elegance to their military plan- apart form it being politically insane, of course. Unless they actually thought that by putting up a competent fight against the regional support group, they could look good enough to recruit rather than kill off.
It was unlikely that their past crimes would be overlooked- but was it impossible? Uncomfortably, no. Anyway, for the moment, Goshawk would have to survive as best she could, until a detachment- a Battlecruiser division, probably the Praetors, could arrive on the other side of the shield and start breaking Goshawk out.
Or possibly Tichy might be able to do it, if all went well. The dreadnaught’s attack plan presupposed raised shields; it would get very messy otherwise.
The escorts actually emerged first, trigger the tripwires, get whatever trap they had arranged to begin it’s play.
Tichy’s support group was the Sector class heavy cruiser Validusia, the Starburst class heavy cruiser-carrier Lyrae, the Urbanus- class light cruisers Mount Helicon and Lindowal Bay, two Proelium heavy destroyers and eight line destroyers- relatively credible for an attack in their own right.
The planetary shields went up- typically, some of the most heavily shielded worlds in the galaxy were those that least needed it, but happened to have the money to hand to spend.
Coruscant was the only really major world whose shields got a regular workout. Most of the planets that really needed heavy shielding, in the turbulent mid and outer rim, were exactly the ones that had trouble affording it.
Here? Suspiciously heavy- overweight, which was evidence of no worse than a slight racial tinge of paranoia. In theory.
The escort group began to deploy for a slow, time consuming probing bombardment, over one hemisphere, leaving a conspicuous hole in the centre of the formation.
The rRasfenoni, looking at that, would- should- think something else was about to emerge there, the tactics fitted a torpedo sphere, and prepare against it. That was what Convarrian wanted them to do.
There were signatures moving beneath the shields, atmospheric and near orbit fighters waiting to be given an opportunity, and a worryingly large number of currently inert satellites in close orbit.
The Empire sprung their trap first. Instead of the new contact emerging in the centre of the formation, Lindowal Bay sprinted for that gap, sidestepping the charging dreadnaught that descended from hyperspace.
Tichy wasn’t aiming for the centre, that would have been suicidal; he was aiming for a skin- kissing flyby of the planetary shield bubble, cutting it to kilometres’ distance, at half lightspeed.
Two volleys of light and medium turbolaser to clear the orbital space- a number of the satellites went up in a manner that indicated warheads or energy weapon capacitor banks, none managed to survive that kind of firepower.
Then Tichy performed a backflip, swinging his stern in towards the planet at closest approach, rolling to face back along her previous course and present alpha gun arc to the other side of the planet.
As the bow came up, the tractor and manipulator beams of the towing rig used that to slingshot the under- tow Keldabe down towards the planet to smash into the shields, and accelerate it on it’s way.
The light destroyer hit the planetary energy bubble with a kinetic energy equivalent not far short of a thousand petatons, followed immediately by full converged sheaf fire from the escort group.
The impact sent a translucent bluish-violet ripple around the skies of the world, flaring red-green-gold auroral displays where the ripples of the impact pushed the shield down into the upper atmosphere.
The shielding screamed, flared and wavered trying to take the load; if the escort group could turn that into an actual breach, excellent- there was a significant possibility, it was not a small shock, momentum transferred to the shield generators could rip them apart, momentum transferred through them to the planet would spawn earthquakes not seen since coalescence.
The energy requirements for that were gargantuan; so had the impact been.
It was actually the ripples Tichy was interested in. The planetary defence command would be frantically trying to bleed off and stabilise the shielding around the impact point; but the antipodeal point, on the other side of the planet where the shock and distortions converged…
Dropping something heavy on a planet, flying past and striking at the contre-coup was a new trick to most; it had been born in the clone wars, had moderate success only and never really reached widespread notoriety. If the rRasfenoni had ever heard of it, they reacted too little and too late.
Tichy identified the weakest point relatively easily, under such stresses it was obvious. His full array of heavy turbolasers lashed out, burned away a hole in the energy envelope- started spraying the planetary surface underneath, superheavies thrashing into and peeling back the shield;
the rRasfenoni were still trying to work out what had temporarily driven down one panel of the shielding when the generator complex died. Then another six.
The ripples from that hole being carved in the defences reverberated around the planet again- and the escort group managed to tear their gap after all. Wide open, two gaping holes and wrecked generators under them.
The disadvantages of the operation had been understood and accepted; the speed the projectile had to be delivered at, the deploying ship could not possibly remain in the area.
It was a one- shot deal that left Tichy outbound at half the speed of light, useless to even try to decelerate in tactical time- but the planet hopelessly vulnerable and shock damaged, ripe for invasion.
The escort group between them could muster forty divisions, sixty-six fighter wings. Should be enough,
which left Tichy the option of making another firing pass on the planet and cleaning out more of the orbital space, or proceeding to Plr’lanilthre to back Goshawk up.
If that was their designated point of resistance, where they were making their maximum effort to convince the Empire that they were capable enough to be useful and shouldn’t be exterminated after all, while the other worlds- and there were indeed reports of fighting coming in, crossfire between rRasfenoni forces- played the political game, then it was clearly Tichy’s job to go there.
Redirect the battlecruisers to back up the invasion effort over the mainworld, fFenar, then go to this colony world and break their back and make them pay.
Footnotes; Prolocutor (loudest voice, last word), is the class title I'm hanging on what was previously sighted as Giel's star battleship in the marvel comics and Anon Star Battleship #1 at SWTC,
the Aquila class is the half-sister seen in the same run and as Anon Star Carrier,
the Temperor class are Anon Star Battleship IV, class title translates as one who moderates and controls- indivative of a flagship function,
the Conducors (one who draws together, the hirer or assembler of a team) are Anon Star Battleship III, because with that huge gouge out of their underside I wonder if they carry fighters at all, or just skip straight to the IPV stage and a few Golans spare for use as very large mines.
Incidentally, Fractalsponge, any objections if I assume that your Bellator ("Something Big") is the fast fleet wing counterpart to the Vengeance class?
There were many different ways the rRasfenoni could play this, and part of the responsibility of the flag officer’s staff was to game it out, see what the enemy could do with what they had, and plan accordingly.
Admiral Lord Nathanael Convarrian on the Tichy had come to the conclusion that the most effective thing the seven- limbed aliens could do would be to simulate a small civil war.
Appear to fall out among themselves over what they had done, dissociate part of the race from the rest- it was about the only way they could expect to get away with shooting at Imperial ships on one hand, and look innocent on the other.
It might even be true. It was unlikely the majority of the race knew what had been going on; they were insidious, they got everywhere- colonies and settlers and outposts dotted the sector- but if the briefing material that had been scraped together was anything to go by, they had done a lot of and were proud of their part in disaster relief work.
The fact that special detachments of their own armed forces had been responsible for many of these disasters had apparently not sunk in to the general consciousness.
At any rate, the greatest contribution the rRasfenoni armed services could make to the survival of their species now was probably to start shooting at each other. Create a cloud of chaos and confusion, blur the lines of responsibility.
Use that opportunity to start lobbing shot at the Imperial ships, see what they were up against and if any kind of defensive victory was actually possible; if not, the murderers who had besmirched the name of their race- or a reasonable imitation thereof- would be handed over, and a certain amount of disarmament would occur, complicated by the usual maze of lies that it was the intelligence services’ job to see through.
The days when a world or group of worlds could hope to be more trouble than they were worth to hold were over; the practise of backing out of operations that involved no tangible return had been a security disaster, a significant encouragement to a generation of rebels and pirates.
Never mind the enemy; the Empire had come close to being done in by it’s own accountants. The policy had been an artefact of post clone war reconstruction, less out of real need to economise than a kind of dazed austerity- at-all-costs, whatever-it-takes thinking had simply gone out of fashion.
Well, now it was back, and welcome. A policy of parsimony- normalisation- had proven to be extremely expensive in terms of officers’ careers, and most were glad to see a more energetic policy.
The rRasfenoni could not conceivably expect to fight and win against what the Empire could bring to bear against them. What they had done would leave them no allies they could call on, military or political, and was enough to justify taking their worlds by force and a complete change of government.
There was no input from higher authority; the sector governor- a full Moff- was under arrest, and the special assistant to the privy council had been caught doing something he ought to be arrested for.
The Ubiqtorate hadn’t reacted to that one yet; they could surely intercept the com pulses between ships of the support group, had noticed that a line officer had somehow managed to catch a high official proclaiming his intent to commit treason, and hadn’t done anything? Lag, perhaps, time to verify, time to play the political game.
Or sheer disbelief, there was always that possibility. Still, Lennart had made enough noise that surely something would happen.
It hadn’t yet, so far there had been no directives forthcoming from higher authority of any kind, so this was going to be a purely naval operation. The chief object of which was to crack the rRasfenoni home and major worlds’ defences fast enough to prevent them destroying enough of the evidence to protect the guilty.
As such, the job was time critical. First Battle Squadron would disperse into it’s subunits and target the eight largest and most probable colony worlds, begin assault if the shields were down and blockade if not.
First Battlecruiser Squadron were the heavy interdiction element, and they would orbit the trade lanes, intercept rRasfenoni mobile forces and any rebels still moving in or out-sector.
Tichy himself would strike for the rRasfenoni homeworld.
Sindavathar were a heavy outfit, they were very low on the list for recieving a new- build Executor because there were many other lighter formations that needed the reinforcement much more.
BS1 consisted of two of the horn-prowed Corellian built Aquila class battle carriers, two balanced standard-heavy kuati Temperor class with their distinctive oversized comms and sensor domes rising out of the cortex, four bristlingly-armed heavy corellian Prolocutors; diverse, but effective.
BCS1 was more homogenous, four bulge- bellied Procurators, designed for long range, open space search and destroy, two compact, heavily armoured Praetors which filled out the other part of a battlecruiser’s duties, fast manoeuvring wing to the fleet.
Battlecruiser designs tended to come in pairs; the previous generation had been the Ultor and Adversor classes, the Ultor the fleet flanker and Adversor distant hunter-killer.
The very latest were the Vengeance, known unofficially to most as the ‘scarecrow’ or ‘ooga booga’ class- huge in dimensions, terrifying in appearance, but almost hollow- very little mass and power to show for their size.
Ultors were the same length- give or take a couple of hundred metres- as the standard Sector class heavy cruiser, but they were a classic wedge hull, solid shapes solidly built as opposed to the Sector’s thin prime hull and humpback superstructure.
On average, an Ultor would take a Sector class cruiser out reliably, it would be closer than their designations suggested but that was the way it always worked out on exercise.
A Vengeance class so- called battlecruiser could not reliably do the same, had difficulty handling the medium Admiral class cruisers, and would be torn apart by the main force Ultor which was two thirds it’s length and one sixth the target profile.
They were notoriously combat- unworthy, a personal commission of a man high in the Imperial hierarchy who knew much about impressions and intimidation, and very little about warship design.
They were, in theory, fast hunters. Their fleet- wing counterpart, though, looked to be something distinctly successful- a potentially much more effective design.
Anyway, those were the pieces, and the battle-play could begin.
The battleships and their escorts emerged first, and simultaneously. All but one to find raised planetary shields and alerted defences; the single exception was the Aquila class Goshawk, over the colony planet Plr’lanilthre- at the root of one of their minor trade routes, a junction world and major port- and that lack of shields was instantly suspect.
Still, the instructions were clear. If they seem to offer you an avenue of attack that’s too good to be true, spring the trap. There was enough firepower in the rest of the squadron to come and break them out.
There were a handful of orbital facilities, minor, large groundside ports- here they could be kept safely under the shield bubble. A lot of small orbitals, colony cylinders and spheres, most of which were moving away under station keeping thrusters- but far too many satellites for a world with any decent technology. Disguised minefield? Likely.
Goshawk blasted out at the surfaceside shield generators- of seven immediately within reach, three died, the other four saved themselves by getting some kind of energy barrier up fast enough to take the opening volley, but the partially raised shields vented so much heat into the planet there were now four lakes of lava with raised pinnacles in the centre.
There was a gap. Enough to send transports down to ground through, enough to start an assault on the rest of the planet- although dealing with those four shield generators was going to be interesting.
Landing barges had enough heat resistance to float on lava, and suddenly there was the concept of AT-ATs punting their way across the molten sea.
The planetary defence batteries returned fire, an interesting mix of autoblasters, ion cannon, kinetic accelerators and conventional turbolasers- a defence weighted far above the usual, expectable destroyer scale attack, but not enough to deal with a heavy carrier.
The Aquilas were actually a lot closer, functionally, to qualifying as battleships than the huge open- undersided Conducor class the Starfleet rated as such; half sisters to the heavy, minimal- bay Prolocutor class, they were thoroughly hated by most of their pilots.
They had kept most of the internal bracing and framework, their hangar bay was notoriously cramped, subdivided and awkward to fly through, and traffic control within was a nightmare.
Above the usual six squadron Imperial Wing, it ran Group, three to eight wings, Command, four to twelve groups, Force, three to eight commands- a minimum of two hundred and sixteen and a maximum of four thousand six hundred and eight squadrons to a Force, usually around the low thousand mark, thousand and eighty being the most common.
Huge variance, but it allowed for radical differences in individual quality, in terrain controlled.
Aquila class carriers took a complete Command under an Aerospace Vice- Marshal, ten Groups each of eight Wings, four hundred and eighty squadrons.
Not the end of it, because further back in the landing stage ridden bays they managed to give room to the landers, armour and logistics of a sixty-four division Army Group.
‘Aerospace force? I feel more like an air molecule, trying to figure my way out through the alveoli’ had been one test pilot’s comment, and even if not consciously inspired, the design of the bay was certainly reminiscent of the human lung.
In theory, that was enough deployable ground and air power stored in the convolutions to take the planet, and they had a gap in the shields to make the attempt through.
That was the intention; right up to the moment when the floating low-orbit shields activated. The planet didn’t have a second course of shielding- few could afford protection to that degree- but it did have backup generators ready to switch in to the main shield bubble, most of them in low orbit and some way disguised.
The effect was to cage Goshawk, below the outer reaches of the bubble, isolated from her support group and easily contained, easily accessible to the surface guns and the swarm of atmospheric fighters- thousands, tens of thousands- coming up at her.
She would need all of her fighters to hold that lot off, and help do enough damage to the planetary shields and defence batteries to let Goshawk break out- the big ship felt literally like a fish in a barrel, only about twenty times her own length from surface to shield bubble; or to let the escorts break in to support her.
If the rRasfenoni did reinforce, and there was a suspicious lack of presence that indicated their mobile forces were being held back for such an opportunity- improbable as it seemed, were they actually trying to pick and win a fight? Take on the Starfleet?
There was a certain elegance to their military plan- apart form it being politically insane, of course. Unless they actually thought that by putting up a competent fight against the regional support group, they could look good enough to recruit rather than kill off.
It was unlikely that their past crimes would be overlooked- but was it impossible? Uncomfortably, no. Anyway, for the moment, Goshawk would have to survive as best she could, until a detachment- a Battlecruiser division, probably the Praetors, could arrive on the other side of the shield and start breaking Goshawk out.
Or possibly Tichy might be able to do it, if all went well. The dreadnaught’s attack plan presupposed raised shields; it would get very messy otherwise.
The escorts actually emerged first, trigger the tripwires, get whatever trap they had arranged to begin it’s play.
Tichy’s support group was the Sector class heavy cruiser Validusia, the Starburst class heavy cruiser-carrier Lyrae, the Urbanus- class light cruisers Mount Helicon and Lindowal Bay, two Proelium heavy destroyers and eight line destroyers- relatively credible for an attack in their own right.
The planetary shields went up- typically, some of the most heavily shielded worlds in the galaxy were those that least needed it, but happened to have the money to hand to spend.
Coruscant was the only really major world whose shields got a regular workout. Most of the planets that really needed heavy shielding, in the turbulent mid and outer rim, were exactly the ones that had trouble affording it.
Here? Suspiciously heavy- overweight, which was evidence of no worse than a slight racial tinge of paranoia. In theory.
The escort group began to deploy for a slow, time consuming probing bombardment, over one hemisphere, leaving a conspicuous hole in the centre of the formation.
The rRasfenoni, looking at that, would- should- think something else was about to emerge there, the tactics fitted a torpedo sphere, and prepare against it. That was what Convarrian wanted them to do.
There were signatures moving beneath the shields, atmospheric and near orbit fighters waiting to be given an opportunity, and a worryingly large number of currently inert satellites in close orbit.
The Empire sprung their trap first. Instead of the new contact emerging in the centre of the formation, Lindowal Bay sprinted for that gap, sidestepping the charging dreadnaught that descended from hyperspace.
Tichy wasn’t aiming for the centre, that would have been suicidal; he was aiming for a skin- kissing flyby of the planetary shield bubble, cutting it to kilometres’ distance, at half lightspeed.
Two volleys of light and medium turbolaser to clear the orbital space- a number of the satellites went up in a manner that indicated warheads or energy weapon capacitor banks, none managed to survive that kind of firepower.
Then Tichy performed a backflip, swinging his stern in towards the planet at closest approach, rolling to face back along her previous course and present alpha gun arc to the other side of the planet.
As the bow came up, the tractor and manipulator beams of the towing rig used that to slingshot the under- tow Keldabe down towards the planet to smash into the shields, and accelerate it on it’s way.
The light destroyer hit the planetary energy bubble with a kinetic energy equivalent not far short of a thousand petatons, followed immediately by full converged sheaf fire from the escort group.
The impact sent a translucent bluish-violet ripple around the skies of the world, flaring red-green-gold auroral displays where the ripples of the impact pushed the shield down into the upper atmosphere.
The shielding screamed, flared and wavered trying to take the load; if the escort group could turn that into an actual breach, excellent- there was a significant possibility, it was not a small shock, momentum transferred to the shield generators could rip them apart, momentum transferred through them to the planet would spawn earthquakes not seen since coalescence.
The energy requirements for that were gargantuan; so had the impact been.
It was actually the ripples Tichy was interested in. The planetary defence command would be frantically trying to bleed off and stabilise the shielding around the impact point; but the antipodeal point, on the other side of the planet where the shock and distortions converged…
Dropping something heavy on a planet, flying past and striking at the contre-coup was a new trick to most; it had been born in the clone wars, had moderate success only and never really reached widespread notoriety. If the rRasfenoni had ever heard of it, they reacted too little and too late.
Tichy identified the weakest point relatively easily, under such stresses it was obvious. His full array of heavy turbolasers lashed out, burned away a hole in the energy envelope- started spraying the planetary surface underneath, superheavies thrashing into and peeling back the shield;
the rRasfenoni were still trying to work out what had temporarily driven down one panel of the shielding when the generator complex died. Then another six.
The ripples from that hole being carved in the defences reverberated around the planet again- and the escort group managed to tear their gap after all. Wide open, two gaping holes and wrecked generators under them.
The disadvantages of the operation had been understood and accepted; the speed the projectile had to be delivered at, the deploying ship could not possibly remain in the area.
It was a one- shot deal that left Tichy outbound at half the speed of light, useless to even try to decelerate in tactical time- but the planet hopelessly vulnerable and shock damaged, ripe for invasion.
The escort group between them could muster forty divisions, sixty-six fighter wings. Should be enough,
which left Tichy the option of making another firing pass on the planet and cleaning out more of the orbital space, or proceeding to Plr’lanilthre to back Goshawk up.
If that was their designated point of resistance, where they were making their maximum effort to convince the Empire that they were capable enough to be useful and shouldn’t be exterminated after all, while the other worlds- and there were indeed reports of fighting coming in, crossfire between rRasfenoni forces- played the political game, then it was clearly Tichy’s job to go there.
Redirect the battlecruisers to back up the invasion effort over the mainworld, fFenar, then go to this colony world and break their back and make them pay.
Footnotes; Prolocutor (loudest voice, last word), is the class title I'm hanging on what was previously sighted as Giel's star battleship in the marvel comics and Anon Star Battleship #1 at SWTC,
the Aquila class is the half-sister seen in the same run and as Anon Star Carrier,
the Temperor class are Anon Star Battleship IV, class title translates as one who moderates and controls- indivative of a flagship function,
the Conducors (one who draws together, the hirer or assembler of a team) are Anon Star Battleship III, because with that huge gouge out of their underside I wonder if they carry fighters at all, or just skip straight to the IPV stage and a few Golans spare for use as very large mines.
Incidentally, Fractalsponge, any objections if I assume that your Bellator ("Something Big") is the fast fleet wing counterpart to the Vengeance class?
Last edited by Eleventh Century Remnant on 2009-11-18 04:20pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Vehrec
- Jedi Council Member
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So, we're looking at multi-billion cassualties, assuming no humanitariain relief? Probably several score million rRasfenoni dead already, but Star Wars Tech might negate the trickle-down effects of bombardment. If it's deployed fast enough, this might even be a clean operation, despite the use of an enemy ship as a projectile.
Commander of the MFS Darwinian Selection Method (sexual)
It's certainly efficient to drop the enemies' ship on his own world to cause shield failure - saves a lot of energy.
Accounting will be proud
I take it you don't like Jerec very much
?
Accounting will be proud
I take it you don't like Jerec very much
?"In view of the circumstances, Britannia waives the rules."
"All you have to do is to look at Northern Ireland, [...] to see how seriously the religious folks take "thou shall not kill. The more devout they are, the more they see murder as being negotiable." George Carlin
"We need to make gay people live in fear again! What ever happened to the traditional family values of persecution and lies?" - Darth Wong
"The closet got full and some homosexuals may have escaped onto the internet?"- Stormbringer