The blanket covered her from head to toe as she watched the video on her tablet. Alea wished her father would get a plan that included holo, but apparently that was too expensive. Sure, VR was impossible, but just flat screen displays were way too limiting.
Still, the preliminaries of the regional tournament of Cascade was fun to watch. One of the ships was always trying to get on top of the other to avoid the beams, shooting guided cannons at the other ship's main drive, only to be shot down by a defensive array. The battle had been going nowhere for a while as they danced around each other though.
Wondering what the were trying to achieve, Alea split the screen and called up the ship type's plan. Throwing it into the site's simulator, she made the coverage of the defensive array visible. There was nothing special about the defense around the back of the ship though. Unfortunately, she didn't have the specific types of defensive weaponry the contestant was using in his ship or she could have gotten a better picture of the situation.
The battle was still going on though so she called up the display of the energy signatures. Hardly anyone except nerds cared about those and Alea usually didn't, either. Since the battle was kind of boring she had to somehow kill some time though.
Comparing the signatures with the type of the guided warheads the chat had supplied far too often already she came to the conclusion that there were six types among the 54 defensive cannons. She had to scroll around and compare the signatures quite a bit before she could give the necessary parameters to her calculator for analysis to see where the types were located. Then, she threw the results into the simulator and coloured the coverage of each type of defensive cannon differently. The intensity of the colour varied based on range, weak points and strength of each type of defensive cannon according to her manually inserted settings.
Finally, she could see a colour coded coverage of the defending ship's defensive array...and realised the attacker was an idiot.
With the frequency of their powerful but sparse guided projectiles they couldn't possibly overwhelm the tight automatic defense of the array around the back any time soon as the defensive cannons could shoot down those projectiles due to the tight net.
Around the top of the ship on the other hand the defense was stronger yet slower. Targeting one point with multiple targeted projectiles the attacker could have overwhelmed the defender's array easily.
If Alea had access to a decent VI instead of just a calculator and the free simulator she could have thrown in the energy signatures and ship types and received the same data much more easily. But since she didn't and finding out on her own had been kind of fun she didn't mind wasting her time.
The two competitors were still going at it. The defender in this round was clearly firing randomly at the attacker, who in turn kept trying to take out the main drive, going on top of the other yet never actually attacking the top. Now that she knew more it was pretty obvious neither of those two was qualified to get anywhere even in the qualifiers.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Thus, Alea switched to another match in the pre rounds. This one was more exciting. A fast corvette was going up against another corvette that looked bulkier. The fast one was firing a lot while the slow one with the greater defense was... also firing a lot? Many beams, which were notoriously good at taking out projectiles, but too weak to damage a ship's shell. Alea vaguely remembered hearing something about the conductivity of the shell material, but she wasn't exactly an expert.
Unexpectedly the fast ship slowed down somewhat as it was peppered with weak beams. And then the thicker corvette fired several smaller cannons simultaneously as well as one of its main weapons, overwhelming the fast ship's defense and allowing the big one to explode directly on the shell.
The fireworks following that big hit were great, but Alea kind of wondered who would do something like that in the real world. Ships were expensive, after all, so capturing one was much more profitable than destroying one.
Not that someone like Alea would know much about it, of course. She was just a 14-year-old girl who hadn't even seen a spaceport in person secretly watching a gaming tournament under her covers.
Her alarm for dinner preparations went off and she sighed. Reluctantly, she climbed out of bed and left her cubicle. There had been a small but decent room in this space once, but since 4 kids had to share it and they kept arguing her parents had created 4 cubicles of 1,10 meters' height as well as 2 meters' depth and width. At least Alea had one of the 2 top cubicles and didn't have to crawl on the floor to get into her space. She refused to call it a room.
With some reluctance she opened the freezer and checked what they had. After a moment of hesitation, she picked green curry. She had no idea what the meat in this curry dish was made of since it was vegetarian like most of what they got at the supermarket. Their local fruit wasn't in season and the fresh imported stuff was way too expensive, so Alea picked apple sauce and a pack of frozen crepes for desert.
The curry went in the cooker, Alea scanned the code on the packaging and set the meal time to the usual while the package went in the trash. The crepes could wait.
As a good child Alea even activated the swisher. Unfortunately, they didn't own a proper duster or she would have activated that, too. For a moment she considered dusting, but…yeah, no. She was getting dinner ready already while her siblings were probably gaming with someone who had holo.
By the time the door beeped the low note she had set the table and the plates were next to the cooker, ready to serve.
As usual, he slurped inside, grunted a greeting tiredly and sat down at the table. Alea placed the first plate in the cooker to be filled with a large portion and then served it. Without waiting for her to get her own food he started eating. He didn't say anything even when Alea sat down with her own plate to eat in silence.
When his plate was empty he unfolded his tablet to check something and started typing away.
It was the same as usual. After finishing Alea heated the crepes on the hotstone and threw the shredded frozen apple sauce on it. Sure, the sauce was meant for smoothies or supposed to be unfrozen, but she kind of liked the icy goodness on hot crepes.
Her dad got one, too, but he was busy working and ignored it.
As none of her siblings had showed up so far she set the cooker on hold and put the crepes and apple sauce back in the freezer.
Then, finally, she snuck back into her cubicle, closed the door, pulled the covers over her head again and continued watching videos. Though it was unlikely, Alea couldn't risk her mother finding out she was wasting her time, after all.
As she rewatched the video with the two corvettes she couldn't help wondering why the faster ship slowed down, so she started simulating what exactly happened and why once again.