NAVAL STATION CHARON, CHARON
POV: Speinfoent, Malgeir Federation Navy (Rank: Beta Leader)
Speinfoent glued his eyes to the sensors on his screen as he commanded it to search for Kaja’s elusive spacecraft. Though the modified SF-27 he was now flying did not perform identical to the ST-6 training that he had been taught (and that Kaja was now employing against him with frustrating effectiveness), the modular cockpit and interfaces ensured that the controls were similar enough for him to realize that it was him and not the controls that was the problem.
A few taps of his paw, he drew the radar to focus in on the section of space that he knew she started in: near a derelict space station that silhouetted against Jupiter’s planetary body. Technically this was cheating, he knew, but after getting destroyed twice without even seeing his foe the previous two times they ran this scenario, he’d had it playing by the rules.
Besides, he was pretty sure Kaja was even more familiar with the nuances of this training scenario than he was.
As Speinfoent was about to give up and refocus his sensors and attention elsewhere, he was rewarded by an ascending two-tone beep: the ship’s radar saw a new potential target. Accordingly, a new white square appeared on the sensor screen about 30,000 kilometers away. He selected the target with his paw and commanded his radar to keep tracking it, but the radar gave him the disappointing descending two-tone beep indicating its failure to continue tracking the target.
Unable to track. Target lost. Scanning.
He shook his ears in annoyance as he waited for the computer to reacquire Kaja’s ship while reviewing the ship specifications in his mind.
The ST-6 was around the same size and capabilities as the SF-27. Both started out as parasite fighters designed and built in the late 21st century: the SF-27 retired from Navy service and went on to become a favorite of Republic law enforcement, private security, and bandits. The ST-6, on the other hand, instead of being directly retired from service, was converted into a trainer spacecraft for the Terran Navy.
While the SF-27’s ability to carry a load of twelve anti-parasite Hummingbird missiles in its internal weapons bay was indeed impressive, it had always been treated as the unwanted stepchild of the Republic Navy in its time of service: in comparison, the ST-6 had a smaller payload, but it had a better shape for stealth operations, a steeper acceleration curve, and its sensor package was unparalleled for its time.
This particular SF-27 Speinfoent was flying, however, had some extensive upgrades: the outer surface had been plastered over with modern adaptive radar-defeating panels, the sensors had been upgraded to mount early 22nd century radars, and while all these expensive modifications slowed it down, that didn’t explain why Kaja was able to spot him and run circles around him in her outdated ST-6; after all, he couldn’t do it when he was attempting the training scenario with Kurt—
His thoughts were interrupted with another duo of beeps: the ship had temporarily acquired the ST-6 again, this time just over 20,000 km away, but the target almost immediately disappeared off the radar’s view before it could even begin automatically tracking onto its signature to acquire a weapon lock.
Speinfoent wondered whether to order his radar to forgo any attempt at stealth and simply try to burn through with a high power, single target scan, but before he could make a decision, the threat board lit up and filled the cockpit with a near steady stream of beeps.
He groaned as he saw one of Kaja’s Hummingbird tracking onto him just eight thousand kilometers from his position. On instinct he’d acquired over the past few weeks, he put his SF-27 into automatic evasion, dumping energy from his inertial compensators and countermeasures from the rear of the ship. A few seconds later, he was rewarded for his hard work with the appearance of another two enemy Hummingbirds on the threat board, tracking onto his position.
Speinfoent’s slow SF-27 barely had enough time to waste the fuel in the first of Kaja’s missiles, which harmlessly passed his vicinity a few kilometers to his port.
He got lucky with missile number two. Somehow, it passed him within visual range, his helmet marking it on his display with a red diamond as it streaked across his view. But his luck ran out with the third: his single engine took a direct hit from a slightly further proximity hit.
Bang.
The hit immediately extinguished his main thrusters. Without the engines running, the ship’s electrical systems started to shut down. The less-than-critical systems on the SF-27 began voluntarily powering down as it started to get ready to cope with full power loss.
Not giving up, Speinfoent flipped the controls to restart the engines with the stored energy in his auxiliary power unit before he ran out of juice.
He hit the emergency re-ignition key in vain, then again and again. And on the fourth try, it restarted with a sputter, roaring back into operation as the ship pushed power back into its systems.
The threat board was clear.
No ships anywhere on sensor, nor was his radar warning receiver telling him that he was being painted or locked by any target. He ran a quick self-diagnosis, hoping that the systems weren’t just damaged by the indirect missile, but everything came back green with the exception of an expectedly suboptimal engine thrust output.
He focused his radar on the empty space where he thought Kaja’s ST-6 came from, but once again, it detected nothing—
The threat board sounded again, filling his cockpit with an anxiety-inducing klaxon. He peered at the radar warning receiver, but it revealed no enemy signals.
“What’s the threat?” he queried the ship computer.
Enemy ST-6 detected on sensors, solid target.
“What? Which sensors?” he asked urgently.
Mirrors.
“What?!” Noticing something flash in his rear view mirrors, he craned his neck behind him, seeing through the ship’s structure in his helmet.
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And there she was, flying in formation with his ship a mere half kilometer to his four o’clock. That was the ST-6 he had been searching for. If he had zoomed his external optics towards it, he was sure he would be able to see Kaja chuckling maniacally at him.
Instead, Speinfoent took over the ship controls manually, dumping every last countermeasure he had left. He locked onto her ship with his Hummingbird’s infrared sensors with his high off-boresight helmet display. It gave off a steady low rattling noise indicating its attempt to track her despite her angular proximity to the background radiation from the planet below— and then saw a red diamond rapidly cross the distance to his ship—
Uh oh.
All he heard was a loud snap, and then the sounds in the cockpit became very, very wrong.
The cockpit voice warning system gave him the status updates helpfully in a dispassionate monotone, “Engine overheat. Engine fire. Critical engine failure. Reactor failure.”
Looking behind him, he noticed that the rear half of his ship was now severed: the reactor had finally had enough; the ship’s system had ejected its critical fusion core to avoid vaporizing him. As the cockpit view tumbled, he saw a large chunk of metal — it looked important — fly past his cockpit.
“Hydro system failure. Main gearbox failure. Auxiliary power failure. Eject. Eject. Eject.”
Crap.
To the credit of the ship’s robust survival systems, it automatically enclosed him in its escape pod and boosted him away from the doomed ship, which gave him a perfect view as Kaja’s ship casually strolled by.
A line of tracers stabbed out from Kaja’s spacecraft, unnecessarily stitching up the carcass of his abandoned fighter with her 25-millimeter autocannon. For good measure, she then matched the vector of his escape pod and unloaded all of her ST-6’s high intensity flares around him, the bright lights momentarily blinding his pod’s exterior cameras.
His computer opponents never did that.
Kaja always did.
“Yes, yes. Very funny, Kaja,” he grumbled at the obvious taunting into the simulator microphone as the screen faded to black again. “I’ll get you next time.”
Her voice came over the machine. “Sure. Go again?”
“No, thank you,” he said, shaking his ears. “Maybe tomorrow. I’ve had enough for tonight. At least tell me how you did that.”
He could hear the grin in her voice. “I will show you in the debriefing room once we get rid of these flight suits.”
----------------------------------------
Kaja had already finished cleaning up and was munching on a small bag of midnight snacks as Speinfoent entered the room, his fur still dripping a trail behind his shower slippers.
His stomach grumbled. “What is that?”
“Dried mangos,” she said, holding out a piece to him. “You want some?”
He took the peace offering, sniffed it once, and gulped it, letting the tart sweetness coat his tongue before he swallowed it after a few quick chews. “Not bad. Better than the bland coconut you like so much.”
Kaja nodded and wordlessly got to business. She powered up the room’s holographic projector. It filled the space between them with points of lights, taking a few seconds to resolve into the shapes that represented their two ships and the scenario around them.
“This was you,” she pointed out. “And this was me.”
“This is the last scenario?” Speinfoent asked.
“Yes,” she said as she shrugged. “But they all end the same.”
Touche, he winced. “I don’t know how you are already shooting at me before I find you every time.”
“Did Kurt not teach you about how the sensors work?” she asked.
“I think he did, but I might not have been paying attention the whole time,” he admitted.
She frowned. “Ok, do you know how your radar warning receiver works?”
“Yeah, it tells me when you’ve locked onto me, right?”
“Not quite,” she said. “Radars basically work by sending high frequency signals out towards where other people are and trying to get a response. The warning receiver detects radar signals: every time you get scanned by a signal, it makes a single beep. When it’s beeping slowly, that means you’re being occasionally painted by a radar. When it’s beeping rapidly, it means someone is locking onto you and actively getting your position every second… so they can hit you.”
He nodded. “Kurt covered that.”
Kaja continued, “So then we made radars that are harder to detect. Lower-probability-of-intercept radars. They use long pulses, oscillating frequencies, irregular scan patterns et cetera. That way they can blend into the background and make it seem like you aren’t being painted when you are.”
She pointed at her ship, and then at Jupiter. “See? I am between you and the planet. The planet gives off radiation, lots of radiation. The satellites in orbit give off radiation. The space station near me gives off radiation. So, if I scan you slowly with low power, my signals may blend in enough with all the other radiation to fool your RWR. Not all the time, but enough of the time.”
“Ah,” he replied. “So that’s why I couldn’t see you. But if you try to lock me—”
“If I try to target lock you, my radar will beam you twenty times a second. There is no hiding that from a modern RWR,” she said, pointing at her ship once again. “But I am sitting here, slowly scanning you with a low scan rate and with just enough power to get a return. And once I see a signal come back, I shut it down.”
“I see,” he said. “And then you wait for me to come closer.”
She nodded. “Exactly right. It’s not accurate enough, but I know about how far you are, I know how fast you are, and I know where you’re going. So I just sit and wait a little while. Every once in a while, I turn on my radar and do a scan to adjust.”
“That makes sense. That’s how you know I’m in range, but you still can’t lock onto me without me realizing, right?”
“Who said I had to lock onto you?” she said, grinning. “My radar never once locked onto you.”
She fast forwarded the hologram to halfway through the dogfight, where she launched a single missile at him. She pointed at the icons. “See? My radar is not even on.”
“You fired… a radar-guided missile at me… without a radar?”
“Yes, that’s how the SF-27 got you when you were in the ST-6 too. This is launched in what we call mad-dog mode,” she explained. “I know roughly where you are, so I just throw one of these in your general direction. The missile goes for a while until it’s far away from me, then it activates its own radar to start searching for you. So when you look at the direction where the missile is coming from—”
“—you’re not there anymore,” he completed her sentence.
She nodded as she operated the room, speeding the scenario up. “Once my first missile locks you and relays that information back to me, I know your exact position and vector. So here comes number two and three.” Another two missiles headed out from her ship. “I never needed to use my own fighter’s radar to lock onto you. My missiles did that for free. Need to see the other two scenarios?”
“I know how the rest goes,” Speinfoent shook his head. “So this… mad dog mode. That seems like it could be useful in general.”
“Why yes,” she smiled back at him. “You’ve just discovered the contours of late 21st century fleet battle doctrine: big ships launch fighters, and fighters launch missiles to find the enemy. ‘If you can see it, you can hit it. If you can hit it, you can kill it.’ Is that so different from your doctrines?”
“Who? The Navy?” Speinfoent asked. “I was the tactical officer of Sixth Fleet’s flagship for years and I never even knew how to adjust the radar’s— well, our sensor operations are a little less sophisticated than yours. We don’t even have low observability ships. Speaking of sensors, is that the sensor playbook used by your new ships too?”
Kaja made a wavey gesture with her hand. “Kind of, but our newer ships mainly use gravidars for long range detection.”
“Ah… Wait a second, you said late 21st century doctrine. What changed?”
“The Navy decided to skip the step in the middle and just launch longer-range missiles and sensor buoys instead of parasite fighters, but the fundamentals and the math haven’t changed that much.”
“More math,” he groaned.
“Actually, if you look just a little harder, your ship computer can be programmed to do this almost automatically.”
“Of course it can,” Speinfoent said. “Another one of its hundred functions. Next you will tell me the fighter’s computers can make me a sandwich.”
“Not this one. No,” Kaja shook her head, chuckling. “But District 21’s patrol fighters have tea brewers. Just ask Beth.”