Chapter 1: Future Warfare
I was at my computer screen building my newest design, the Bulwark Mark 7. It was shaped like a hammer but backward with large missile pods inside of heavily armored plates that rotated horizontally towards the main body. The main weapons are gravity weapons. But, rail-guns and coil-guns are secondary weapons. They are lined forwards to back from the top and bottom of the main section with some of them on the hammers heads on the side. The Bulwark Mark 7 is moved by a combination of gravity plates, ion thrusters, and hydrogen boosters. It turns by mostly gyroscopes but gravity plates help accelerate the turning process.
Its bridge is located right next to two large fusion reactors capable of outputting most of the power needed to move and fire the guns. I copied armor plating around the reactors in a square pattern and added extra plating around critical parts. This was technically the Mark 4 in long-range control but it still needed a couple of people to man it. Since I’ve researched FTLC or Faster-Than-Light-Communications most of my space fleet and other branches have this tech built-in.
‘Future Warfare is a game I play in. As the name implies it’s in the future! Or about a thousand years into the future. There’s still navy, air, army, and the new space! Plus, this game is around Fortnight in popularity. I was the number one player in all those categories. Although, I didn’t have much land and Wow, I can’t believe this is the same game I fell in love with around 5 years ago. I started with around a subdivision of land and with the most basic of weaponry. 3 four-wheel jeeps with a machine gun strapped on top and a small patrol boat. The game has mostly stayed the same with minor updates to the tech tree and graphics.’
‘Around me are three screens. One with Derpcord but nobody is connecting to my channel and the other has some music playing. Right now it was some Irish mixed in with Viking or something. On the main screen is the game Future Warfare. And in the game is my ship. Or an almost completed design. I’m using it to attack the aliens or any other faction that tries to destroy me. The aliens in the game didn’t attack you until attacked. Passive-aggressive. And they generally have some good loot or resources. Stop wandering off Lucas. Focus on the frigging ship I say to myself. I add some hallways to the ammo compartments and add some heavy blast doors. Near the Bridge, I add all they need to survive. There’s only going to be 3-2 people manning the ship so it doesn’t need much. Plus most of the pace is going to be filled with metal rods or just metal bullets. No explosives, maybe the missiles or the hydrogen tanks. Wait, I should make a system that saves you from dying. Hmm, the ship is far in so maybe armored tubes with repurposed missiles. I would want just one small enough to fit one person and some cryo stuff.’
‘There, that should be it. Only a bit of lighting, antennas and all that stuff you need to make it look cool and bang! There it is, a General-Assault-Light-Cruiser or GALC. Wait, that´s a pretty cool name! Ha, yeah! Although it technically is a heavy or just a cruiser I have different standards than the rest of the factions and that name is way too good to be changed. But, before I finish I should make sure it’s all good to go. There, a conveyor for ammo that would be blocked. Fixed! This looks all good to go. All I need to do is add my crest on it and it’s ready. And plus add it to my private discord with some of my friends.’
‘My crest is somewhat of a weird one. A cross between a Nazi and Russian flag. With the Nazi symbol on the right and the Russian symbol on the left with both their colors. And in-between is a 2D drawing of my old Mark 1 Cast which was a space battleship and the first design I ever designed. I’ve designed a ton of everything and I’m pretty much the number 1 design dealer. Many factions use my ships of course but at a cost. First is money, and they have to join my alliance which is a group of factions. I built the Bulwark because many newer factions were trying to invade me, and I was getting pretty angry.’
‘So, I designed a ship that can annihilate lower level units. And what do you know?! It’s great against the aliens because they use a lower level or just a lower tech. Also, they have a significant amount of armor and mass produce ships. That’s why I have the bunker buster missiles and it's mostly galvium steel and just a tiny bit of HE to clear out the aliens on that deck.’
‘Galvium steel is basically what the aliens and many lower tech factions use due to its robustness. But when a high-velocity galvium missile hit it. Well, it reacts the same way when a gravity plate overloads and blows a giant hole in it. Soo, I rush them and board the ship, so I can take it and recycle the entire body. Superior weapons and robots make it much easier. Plus they only use real people on their ships to man them instead of automated systems. I made the boarding ships fast so they can act like a harpoon and a boarding ship. And without it, you get hailed by the amount of car-sized steel bullets and you’re dead. But, there’s a limit to how fast you can make a ship go. I use mostly hydrogen because then I can pick up people on the ground and I use gravity plates to go faster. But, when you need to go faster than LS or light-Speed then gravity plates are your best bet. I can’t fit many hydrogen tanks on it since it needs to carry troops and kinda be smallish so it can fit on the Bulwark and other ships. And when you try to go faster with hydrogen the amount of thrust you get from pumping that stuff out gets lower and lower. But, when you go into FTL or Faster-Than-Light with gravity plates there's this thing called a rebound.’
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‘Lesson time! So, when you need to go light-speed you use gravity plates to do that and propel it there are three methods. Or rather two if you count switching the direction of gravity another method. One if firing a wave of gravity and riding that wave. The wave is so powerful it bends spacetime and space itself. And to ride that wave you need to power it and use your own gravity plates to stay in line or else you get set into another direction and get ripped apart by the G-force which is bad.’
‘That’s why factions or well people and aliens don’t like those kinds of FTL since humans and aliens like to mass-produce them, and they don’t have FTLC, so they have to man them. And mass-producing things makes imperfections in the gravity array which makes warping impossible and does the same thing if you don’t ride the wave right. I use that method and make my ships nicely and not quickly and I use mostly robots to help make them quality.’
‘And there’s the other method. This one is slower and has one disadvantage: rebound. When you are using this method and you go above 3 LS you get rebound. And when you go to that speed and at a certain distance you get rebounded with around half the force as the bubble collapses outside your ship and sends you the opposite direction of where you came from at around half your speed.’
‘Yay, my Mark 7 is complete. This should protect my cargo fleet heading to another system. But, all I need to do is construct it. And luckily I was building it as I went along so it only needs around a minute or so to add the rest and test fly it. All I need to do is load all the mining and other equipment onto the cargo ships and head them to a system so I can get resources. This ship was built on an analog for Ceres and there are two cargo ships already loaded with all that stuff so when it finishes let’s go. I don’t want to give anybody ideas and I need to keep this secret for a month or so. And that’s because I need to work out all of the bugs’
I move my screen over to the analog Ceres and look at the Mark 7 that’s almost done ‘Time is usually accelerated to around 24 seconds in Future Warfare per 1 second in real life so it’s pretty fast. But when you arrive in a new system is changes to 1 to 1 until you make a port.’ The body of the ship and everything on it is almost built. Small construction drones are spraying paint onto the body and larger ones are putting steel girders and small cosmetic antennas in place.
I look over to the cargo ships. ‘They are like a large 3D triangle with a rectangle at the end to hold all of the propulsion and everything you need. The entire front was meant to hold much cargo and to hold equipment for whatever you needed. The size of the Argos is 500 meters for and a width of 100 meters and a height of 150 giving it ample room. Argos was mostly powered by gravity plates because it needs to go fast to carry stuff back and forth. With all of the stuff at the full load of 5,000,000 tons, it can go up to 500 LS and that's insane!’
‘Ooh, yes, it’s finished. It’s about the size of a Mark 1 Cast but has a tone more firepower and speed. At 750 LS this thing mops the floor. It is 25% larger than the cargo ships for good reason. A single volley will destroy, well everything smaller than a battleship class ship.’ Beautiful spikes of red and blue come out of the hydrogen thrusters why the gravity plates emit nothing but force. Both of these kinds of thrusters pull the Bulwark Mark 7 out of the construction bay and into the fleet including 1 Bulwark Mark 7 GLAC, 2 Argos Mark 6 HCS (Heavy-Cargo-Ship), 3 Facil Mark 6 LDF (Light-Defense-Frigate), and 12 Anglos Mark 5 HASFB (Heavy-Assault-ships-For-Boarding).
‘Where should I send this fleet? There’s a bunch of stars that haven't been explored around 5 LY away. And that takes around 1 second. Whoa, I didn’t realize how fast my ships are… And why haven't these systems been explored? Oh, wait, 5 LY is further than the 5 LS limit when you’re using the non-wave method so you can’t go there without being rebounded a bit and then you have to do it again which takes a lot longer. Plus, there are not many wave method ships out there not including me.’
The fleet which was in a triangle formation starts its short jump to the closest system in that 5 LY bubble. The large gravity plates on the propellers start to spin and the ships accelerate. My screen moves with the ships on the “UP.” axis even though there is no “Up.” in space. In a few seconds, the screen moves with the ships and a small box says “Done with the jump. This is system U+2650 ♐. Please click “Okay.” to continue.” ‘Well, duh.’ I click the “Okay.” Button and then look around using the camera. The ships are currently near a large asteroid belt with two sides. Four gas giants in the outer system and four rocky planets on the inside. The third one caught my eye though.
I moved my ships closer to the planet close to a moon-like satellite orbiting it. And then I looked at the planet and moon. ‘The moon looked like, well, the moon! It has mostly light-gray spots around it but some dark-gray around small little craters in the surface. Well, there are a bunch of them!’
‘But the planet looks like Earth. The landmasses and continents are there, and they are the same shape! Oh, well, nice discovery. At least the devs had some brain and put in Earth and Sol so, cool. This could make this a nice tourism spot and other things. But, let’s not share this right now. I do want to savor my discovery a bit. But, this is the end for now. It seems like this is a good spot to end and maybe think this when I’m watching TV or something.’
I shut down Future Warfare and then the other apps I have open. Then I click shutdown in the start bar and watch it turn off. The screens flicker and then go completely dark while the PC under the desk stops humming. ‘Good thing this is after my work shift, so I have a ton of time before I go to bed. Might as well just watch some TV and then go to bed. I wish my designing in the game will pay off everything but that won’t happen. Ugh, I remember when I was a child and I played this game a ton. Well, I’m 19 so that doesn’t matter. Plus, I better grow up since I’m an adult.’
I walk downstairs and turn on the TV in my living room while sitting down. Then I turn on my favorite TV show. (Timeskip: After 3 EPs of that show.)‘ The show was great. But, there are two plot hangers to fix. That show ended way too soon since I watched the last episodes of it. Well, no crying over it. And that system that I found in Future Warfare. The thing I found can wait for tomorrow so the main thing is the news. And that’s to see what was happening today or see what the weather is like. No harm is done because I still get 9 hours of sleep before I have to go to work if I watch another hour.’ I turn off Flex and then click on my “News.” macro.