Chapter 41: Safety and Sloth

Star Wars had a wide variety of weaponry available. Everything from chemically driven bullets, through coilguns, railguns, lasers, blasters and various missiles. Of particular note were blasters, because I wasn’t particularly familiar with them. Blasters shot a (sometimes charged) plasma or particle. Some, designed to work only in space, were really more properly plasma-pumped particle cannons. Others, designed to work in atmosphere and in space, used electromagnetic fields to maintain bolts of concentrated plasma until it hit the target.

The reason that blasters were popular was fairly simple; they could defeat advanced materials. No matter how good your gun design, there was the simple reality that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Recoil, in other words, was a bitch. As better materials became available and body armor improved, it became more and more difficult for first chemical, then even hypervelocity electromagnetically driven slugs to penetrate body armor.

While grenades were effective, especially those with more exotic payloads, they were also expensive – especially those with more exotic payloads – and the bulkiness of the ammunition limited the user to tens or dozens of rounds instead of the thousands that military planners became used to when using electromagnetic slug-throwers.

Enter the blaster. With a blaster, it isn’t the bolt’s momentum that causes damage, but the extremely exothermic, explosive interaction that the plasma in the bolt imparts when it impacts the target and loses containment. Although prohibitively expensive and short ranged (due to poor containment degrading during bolt-flight) at first, over thousands of years technology continued to improve, increasing performance and decreasing cost until the blaster became the weapon-of-choice galaxy-wide. And with high density energy storage mediums, a blaster could fire dozens of times with a single charge pack.

That said, blasters were not created equal. Some, commonly used by civilians expecting only to deal with other unarmored civilian threats, were effectively semi-auto tasers. Others were really not much better than a modern pistol. Their shots would often dissipate due to containment failure within twenty to forty meters, sharply limiting their range (though admittedly that was the maximum accurate range for most inexperienced shots). Damage wise they caused some pretty nasty wounds, but typically cauterized to the point that prompt medical treatment could save a victim. Those were effectively the “hi-point firearm” of the blaster market. Cheap, shitty, but pretty robust and fine for emergency self-defense. You could buy one just about anywhere.

In the middle quality offerings, you had blasters that were better optimized for specific purposes but were still lacking in some way. A lot of military blaster carbines were like this, for example. Designed for shipboard or urban combat, their containment typically started to fail at anywhere from sixty to a hundred meters depending on the model. They might have high rates of fire but weak bolts, good for fighting waves of unarmored targets, or lower rates of fire but heavier bolts designed to smash through higher quality body armor or light vehicles.

Some blasters came with stun functions, great for police work. Recoil correction, shot correction computers, variable yield bolts, high speed bolts, purposefully weak containment to cause more explosion, purposefully strong containment to cause more penetration, and on and on and on. All of these were options, and many added to the expense.

To put it in perspective, a cheap but serviceable civilian model might have started at fifty credits. Standard military blaster rifles went for a thousand plus, and that’s before adding on scopes and other after-market options. That was equivalent to a ten thousand dollar gun, enough to buy twenty assault rifles on Earth. A high quality, long range blaster rifle with scopes might start at two thousand credits. Still well within my price range, though unfortunately illegal for private ownership on Naboo.

Thankfully Sola’s research license covered “blaster technology,” and after she recruited a friend of hers who worked in small-arms research we were able to navigate the procurement process and get a wide selection of infantry weapons. The Paragons, Jon and I played what I like to think of as “full contact laser tag” in a series of underground battlegrounds I had excavated with my magic.

Luckily for me and my shield spell, the typical “heavy” blaster hit with about a hand-grenade’s worth of energy. My shields could tank that pretty easily. Even a military-grade anti-armor blaster rifle, the Star Wars equivalent to a modern anti-material fifty-cal, came in at a damage level that was well within what my shields could deal with.

Starship grade weaponry was a different matter. Shields on spacecraft were designed to stop meteorites as well as enemy attacks. A basketball sized meteorite travelling at ten percent the speed of light had an energy of over six megatons of TNT. Granted, that’s a large meteorite (easily picked up on sensors), and travelling extremely fast, but it illustrates a point. Military grade starship blasters were designed to overcome not just the sort of shield used against space debris, but other military grade defenses (plus the armor beneath), and typically hit with kilotons of energy. So it was even better for me, that my shields tended to treat a contained bolt as “one attack”.

Unfortunately, my shields did not treat a sing beam, whether of laser or particles, as one attack. Rather, they wore down successive layers of shield until they penetrated. However, there was one bit of good news; particle-beam style blasters were shit in atmosphere. Pretty much useless, actually. Without the containment, they pretty much instantly interacted with the atmospheric gasses, caused a thermal bloom, and dissipated the energy. They didn’t even really heat the ground way below; considering that Texas got around 700 terawatts of sunlight at noon, or about a hundred and sixty kilotons of TNT worth every second, it was easy to understand why a spaceship’s blaster beams were ineffective.

Beam technology blasters were used in spaceships because the beam-type blasters could get faster travel speeds, which meant increased ranges. Though, to be fair, most larger ships did also have some containment-tech blasters which tended to hit harder though at lower range, sort of like a carronade from the age sail versus a canon. These blasters were intended for close in slugging matches, but also worked for planetary bombardment.

Lasers were uncommon for hand-weapons. The typical technology used was excited-plasma pumped lasers. Modern Earth had the idea for these, using nuclear bombs or reactors to pump lasers that could intercept missiles or aircraft. With better materials, energy storage, and blaster technology it was possible to miniaturize it enough to be a (particularly bulky) infantry weapon; there just didn’t seem to be much of a point, save for some extremely expensive, finicky, ultra-long-range sniper rifles for assassinations but those were as much myth as reality, like ice-bullets back on Earth.

But on the larger scale, these laser weapons were great. Space-combat, unlike ground combat, tends to start at extreme range. The cross section of the enemy, their acceleration and thus dodging, your weapon’s accuracy, targeting, fire rate, and often most importantly your weapon’s speed all determine how far away you can engage.

There were a lot of weapons designers trying to eke out that bit of extra speed or power in their blasters. Some even used lasers to do so, which led to the term “laser-enhanced blaster cannon,” often (and confusingly) shortened to simple “laser-cannon.” But ultimately, nothing was faster than light, and so true laser weaponry became a mainstay of space combat.

Unfortunately, lasers were also relatively easy to protect against. Reflective chaff countermeasures, layers of heat-absorbing liquid that would boil and expand into clouds that further reduced the laser’s intensity, and some layers of highly reflective heat-resistant materials mixed into the hull armor were all highly effective at protecting against lasers. These counter-measures could get pricy, but were common on larger dedicated warships. Meanwhile, lasers hit a relatively small area with further limited their damage and would often miss more important components, or fail to penetrate to those hidden on the inner layers of large ships.

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To make things worse, the energy efficiency of lasers was low on the weapon side compared to blasters. Energy efficiency was one of the most important factors in space combat. Ships couldn’t get rid of heat quickly enough. At rest, a ship could bleed heat via black body radiation and numerous engineered mechanisms.

In combat, running extra energy to the shields, weapons, engines, acceleration compensators, and sensors, a ship would have to store the heat in limited heat-sinks and dump it with typically limited stores of coolant. In some of the worst galactic naval engagements, it wasn’t unusual for crews to end up cooked alive by their own ship’s heat.

Between countermeasures reducing damage, relatively small impact damage, and low energy efficiency, lasers weren’t the best tool against enemy capital ships. But they excelled at taking down fast moving small-craft including fighters and smaller ships.

Capital ships were ruinously expensive to outfit with top of the line acceleration compensators. For some perspective, the Lucrehulk was a three kilometer by three kilometer by one kilometer donut shaped battleship that the Trade Federation used based on a super freighter designed for their larger deliveries. Recently, with their armament rights, they’d adapted some half-finished freighters into these Lucrehulk battleships.

The estimated price tag for one of those puppies was right around forty million credits, and that was with the Trade Federation using droid workers and asteroid mining to drive costs all the way down. They came with a class two hyperdrive, which was good for something that large. But, they could only pull three hundred G’s of acceleration.

A high quality fighter could pull three thousand. The Nabooian N1’s could pull four thousand if the pilots red-lined it. If the Trade Federation wanted their ship to be able to pull a relatively modest twenty five hundred G’s, it would raise the cost by about a billion credits. This was obviously prohibitively expensive.

So in short, the biggest ships were a lot slower in combat, and were large targets. Thus hitting them with relatively slow moving blasters made sense. On the other hand, picking off fast corvettes, fighters and missiles with blaster-turrets was often an exercise in futility. For that, ships used lasers. A capital ship would typically carry ones powerful enough to do serious damage to light frigates.

Lasers were popular on fighters and small-craft as well, since their typical threat were other fighters and small craft. In other words, lightly or unarmored, densely packed with critical components, but very fast and maneuverable. For larger targets they used concussion missiles designed to spread shock and damage electrical components, or proton torpedoes that used small anti-matter charges, some of which made explosions big enough to threaten even a capital ship.

And unlike unconstrained blaster beams, lasers weren’t so affected by atmosphere as to be useless against targets on the ground or in-atmosphere. Blaster containment got very tricky at high speed, which meant dual-role fighters capable of both atmospheric and aerospace dogfighting often used lasers rather than blasters, with optional missiles or torpedoes to deal with armored ground targets.

Long story short, something capable of damaging a frigate could easily penetrate my projectile shield, and something designed to target fighters pulling four thousand gravity evasive maneuvers wouldn’t have much problem targeting me either.

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Thankfully, designing an anti-laser shield wasn’t difficult. I just needed something that would perfectly reflect away incident light over a certain intensity, and a thermal shield behind the reflector that would prevent the heat from building up. It was a simple twist of spells that I already understood within White, and something I could incorporate into my Projectile Shield enchantment. To avoid letting people paint me with a targeting laser, I even set the shield to reflect in a diffuse manner with a gap where the laser originated from.

Then, as a backup, I figured out how to change the path of a laser using Red. Underneath the reflectance was now a redirect that would have the laser bend around the projectile shield before continuing its path behind me. With all of the different layers of shielding, each one first reflective, then redirecting the laser, I felt sufficiently secure. It wasn’t perfect, and there was some energy drain, but tests with Sora showed that, assuming there were no other incoming types of damage, I could resist the combined weight of a capital ships’ laser weapons pretty much indefinitely as my shields would regenerate at about the same rate they were drained.

Somewhat inspired, I decided to design the anti-particle beam shield right afterwards. There were three main threats with a particle beam, or unconstrained blaster. Some, by far and away the most common, caused damage with extremely high velocity, typical fractional-c, beams of high energy particles. Others, a very small minority, less than a fraction of a percent, fired beams of very small quantities of antimatter. Anti-matter was expensive, difficult to contain, and dangerous to the ship if the turret was damaged, but it also caused fairly extreme damage, and was highly compact and energy efficient compared to other weapons of similar yield.

Between these, there were three primary threats my ship would be faced with by particle-beam technologies: the kinetic energy of the particles, the inherent (thermal, ionic, etc) energy of the particles, and possibly the anti-matter potential.

With a few quick experiments, I found out that it was actually much more efficient to turn an attack’s energy against itself. After all, an incoming attack didn’t just cause damage, it released energy which whatever it hit couldn’t deal with, the result of this energy being damage. If I could store that energy, or translate it into something useful, then no more damage.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t translate that energy to magical power, then use that. Nor could I get that energy translation to be free. But, very small amounts of magic could translate large amounts of energy.

Better yet, translation turned out to be a very stable structure where most of the magic went to establishing the transfer path rather than actually effecting the energy. Sort of like building a dam, once that structure was in place the energy would flow naturally, with only a small extra magic for maintenance.

Eventually, when I had proper auto-targeting enchantments, I planned on the defensive enchantment gathering that energy and using it to counter-fire and destroy whoever had the temerity to attack me. However, those targeting enchantments were scheduled for after the first round of my battle-yacht’s upgrades as I planned to test them against distant targets in space. For the moment, I had to be satisfied with turning the force of the attack into a shield.

Best of all, I could tie this enchantment into my projectile shield enchantment. Instead of being attached to each individual layer of shield, it was the new first layer, a ditch formed from the full power of the projectile shield enchantment to catch any incoming attack’s energy. If the energy was too much, it would over-fill the defense, saturating it but not damaging it before continuing on to impact the projectile shields.

I even managed to get a module on the enchantment functioning with phase-shifted light that could destructively interfere with incoming laser attacks. Inspired, I added anti-hostile-magic shielding using a similar concept. A strong enough will (for actively controlled magics) or previously unknown magical attacks might defeat it, while the redirection and control of foreign magical energies would be much more costly, but it was a massive improvement. I attached a bit of Blue analytical magic to auto-update the shield to react to magics it was overcome by, so that any holes in the defense were automatically patched, and so that I could learn those magics myself.

All of this cost about two percent of the shield layers, and there was a fraction of a percent of the incoming energy that bled over. But in return, all non-magical incoming attacks were reduced by a defense that was about a thousand times stronger than my previous total combined shield strength.

It took an attack on the tune of fifty kilotons of tnt to overwhelm that initial shield layer when we tested it on a Science! animal.

Then there were still over a hundred conceptual shield layers below that defense, each of which were good to block a single impact of just about any magnitude, and needed about a half-ton bomb’s worth to break in a single blow.

Over time I would be able to improve the general anti-laser modules, and my shields would naturally improve in strength and number. I was feeling pretty secure, especially since on a ship, where I could anchor a much larger enchantment, the defense that would be that much stronger.

And thus I felt comfortable to descend into sloth, reading fantasy, watching holovids, and eating the finest foods.

It was glorious.