I don’t move from the bench for two days, my mind far too busy whirling with ideas and absorbing data. Eventually, I calm down and have E-SIM put me to sleep.
Good sleep puts everything in a new perspective.
I’m making dumb decisions.
I have not looked at a single mechanicus STC to compare my STC database to. I literally have no idea how good or complete the data I have is.
A query to Aruna nets me the maintenance grade STCs for Distant Sun’s components and the manufacturing grade STC for the vessel’s hull, ducts, and cabling. A day later, I have a better idea of what I have.
The difference in the first two grades is staggering, yet both pale in comparison to the potential of the engineering grade STCs within the ‘Cargo Container’ database.
Maintenance grade is similar to flatpack furniture instructions, only it tells you how to troubleshoot problems and provides possible solutions with an interactive flowchart. While limited, it is incredibly slick and easy to use. So long as you have the spare parts, there is nothing you can’t repair or replace. Its most valuable aspect is that it tells you what is within specification and what is not, and from there you can experiment until you get the right numbers if you are trying to reverse engineer a design.
Manufacturing grade tells you how to turn a handful of sand and a chunk of flint into a rocket engine. Again, it works like a flowchart. It also provides supplementary programs, allowing the user to modify parameters based on their situation and requirements and states what is, and isn’t, possible. Some software is available, but big chunks of it are hidden and can’t be edited or copied. With time, a person could learn a lot from these plans, but it still follows the ‘monkey see, monkey do’ philosophy.
Engineering grade covers both of the previous grades and also contains the documents that explain why something works as it does, explains the decision making processes of the engineers, and the programs they used to run their machines as well as the programs they used to design their software.
There are also no locks on anything, only warnings, and with the quantities of energy and materials involved, fucking up and cracking the planet your standing on is possible. The mechanicus’s glacial research division and rabid persecution of innovation makes much more sense after comparing the STC grades.
There’s a higher grade called ‘Adaptive’. There’s no data on this grade other than its name. I speculate, however, that for the first three grades you enter the solution to a problem and it tells you how to implement it, but with an ‘Adaptive’ STC you enter the problem and it tells you the solution.
While my STC has a lot of information, it isn’t the complete database of mankind's discoveries. If it wasn’t relevant to the STC, it’s not in there, or only mentioned in passing with links to databases that no longer exist, like medical data, weapons, or advanced implants, knowing that a solution to a problem does or does not exist is helpful though.
The more I compare the plans, the more nervous I get. Trading this knowledge will be like trying to flog catnip to a horde of ravenous felines while dressed in a tuna onesie.
Sure, I’d love to help my fellow man, but I’m going to have to portion chunks one at a time, slow enough that people don’t chase me, but not so slow the Imperium collapses from infighting or xenos, which it is well on its way towards already.
I take a few deep breaths and pace around the observation dome. The ‘Cargo Container’ STC offers a lot of solutions to one specific problem, many of which can be reapplied to other areas, but the Imperium already has plenty of blueprints for trains, orbital shuttles, and prefab buildings. They have a merchant navy and ten thousand years of infrastructure built for exchanging goods. What I have may or may not be better, but there is no guarantee these extras are the right tool for the job, or the savings they offer are worth the swap.
It does, however, have the right tools for the jobs I need done, and there are three of them.
The first is the microfactory, an automated, self-contained, refinery, fabricator and assembly plant that fits inside one of the big blue containers I saw in the video. They can make anything I have the STC for, spew negligible waste, and produce the equivalent of master crafted products.
On the downside, they can only be configured for one product at a time, can’t make parts or completed machines bigger than a leman russ tank, and if you were to stack them until you had a manufacturing complex equal in size to an Imperial one, they’d be building stuff a third of the speed for twice the power consumption.
For me, stuck in a ship with limited space, microfactories are a blessing. For the Imperium, microfactories are a useful addition to colonisation efforts and remote outposts, but entirely useless at the scale the Imperium produces goods as it can’t afford to lose two thirds of its production and spend twice the power, no matter how high the quality of the product, while it can afford to trash its planets and waste materials because it owns over a million worlds and can always get more.
The second boon is the Delta Pattern Orbital Transport, or D-POT, which comes in three classes, varying in size from a little bigger than a thunderhawk, to a starhawk bomber, all the way upto an absolute monster thirty percent bigger than a devourer drop ship, which is already capable of transporting forty eight tanks, a regiment of upto a thousand men, and all their equipment and supplies.
The D-POT is a civilian, delta wing, transorbital craft. It has no armaments, but has a much higher lift capacity than the Imperial equivalents, and I could always modify it if I need armaments, though it would be sluggish in a fight. It may be shielded, but with its current design, it will never take the beating a thunderhawk can, or have the firepower of a starhawk bomber. What it can do is lift thousands of tonnes into orbit, or onto a planet with no infrastructure, and that’s exactly what I need it for.
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The last major STC in the database I have an immediate use for has me doing a little wiggle dance and pumping my fist in celebration. Even if someone was here to laugh at my antics, I would not care.
It’s a void ship. An Origami Pattern Mobile Shipyard, a five by one point two kilometre, cruiser sized vessel with a front half that unfolds into a shipyard until the vessel resembles a battleship at eight point five kilometres long and two point two kilometres abeam, and can build anything upto the size of a cruiser, or work on multiple smaller vessels simultaneously.
It’s similar to an Imperial goliath class factory ship, but instead of scooping plasma from stars for fuel, or building stations and shipyards, the Origami is the shipyard.
It’s well shielded and armoured, with plenty of turrets, and has a couple light plasma weapon batteries. Despite its size, it’s only as resilient as a light cruiser, like the Distant Sun, and would struggle to disable a destroyer. When deployed, the expanded space can also be used to transport massive amounts of goods, or repurposed as a carrier that can chuck out destroyers instead of strike craft. Carrying that much weight makes it so slow it would struggle to escape any engagement.
While folded and unburdened, it’s as fast as an average lunar class cruiser at two point five gravities though that is a horrible generalisation as even within their class, Imperial ships vary a lot and if there were two identical vessels out there, it was more likely due to probability from the size of their fleet than an intentional act.
The Origami is stuffed full of microfactories, hangar and cargo bays, and a lot of power plants, or genatoriums as they call them in this era. Aside from its unfolding mechanisms, its other key feature is a gravity lift. This vessel, in conjunction with the fancy cargo containers it can construct, can lift containers directly to and from the surface of a planet without the need for shuttles or a space elevator.
The Distant Sun does have a lux net, a fancy solar array that can assist in repairs when deployed and provides extra power for its manufactories, but if I want to trick the vessel out enough to survive the Koronus Expanse, it needs some yard time, which means I need an Origami, and the Origami needs a couple of escorts. At minimum.
I could build the escorts, Aruna, however, has the location of dozens of debris fields and thousands of wrecks in its database, so it will be faster to salvage some, even if I have to build new ones from salvage, as scrap has much higher resource density than asteroids and rogue planets.
There are a lot of innovations in the Origami I can cram into the Distant Sun and my imaginary escorts as well, but to get started, I’m going to need a fleet of D-POTs as the arvus lighters and the lone thunderhawk in the hangar can’t lift enough material in a reasonable timeframe, and to build those, I’ll need a crew, which leads to my servitor plans.
With a sigh, I leave the ratty observation dome and return to the medicae deck. It might be called a deck, but really it's a facility stuffed into a subdeck like every other facility on this vessel.
The medicae deck is massive, a million cubic metres of space, but when your vessel has over a billion cubic metres, it doesn’t seem quite so ridiculous. Unlike the dull, dark colours most of the Distant Sun is coated in, the medicae deck is bright, with silvered surfaces, white highlights, and daylight bulbs that crank up the UV to lethal levels at frequent intervals. The air is also breathable and the temperature pleasant.
It has nine-hundred beds, and dozens of specialist rooms, enough to treat between one and two point five percent of the crew simultaneously depending on the ratio of servitor to human crew the Distant Sun is supposed to have. At one percent, it's four times more beds per person than we had back in my day for the UK, or twenty percent more than Germany who had the most beds in Europe.
Despite the mechanicus’s preparations, I know there’s never enough capacity because the medicae deck is right next to crew reclamation, much like a hospital overlooking a graveyard, for extra efficiency.
Attached to the medicae deck is a wetware facility, or STC implant manufactory, which includes the equipment needed for cloning anything from replacement limbs and organs, all the way to whole bodies for creating servitors, because even with the Imperium’s rampant crime problem, capturing flesh for conversion to mindless cyborgs provides insufficient grist for their industrial mills.
As I stride through the facility, I look through each door. Big hoppers and blocky fabricators change to strange, multi-limbed assembly lines and poky workshops glittering with tools. Twelve rooms are filled with a score of grow tanks, though only five of those rooms are rigged for whole body cloning.
Reading through the data E-SIM feeds me I discover each tank can spit out a clone every three months and I have thirty one months before I reach the rogue planet, I’m going to call it Mote, and I can run one hundred tanks at a time. By the time I arrive, that should give me a crew of a thousand.
The Distant Sun is supposed to have a crew between sixty and seventy thousand, half of which are usually servitors. On top of that, it can pack in thirty thousand skitarii, the mechanicus’s cyborg soldiers.
I need much higher production to reach those numbers in a reasonable time frame and a way to control them all. However, I don’t want to press the big green button and go with whatever horrors the mechanicus have queued up either.
Turning to E-SIM for solutions, I bring up the fancy techtree in my head. There is a whole suite of upgrades linked to the machine integration module that started the techtree: auto-taskmaster, concurrent conscious cascade, savant learning accelerator, rapid decision engine, and perhaps the most radical of all, polymer tissue replacement.
The tissue replacement multiplies the effects of all the other brain modules. Given how many servitors I will need to control, I will need it. However, it does have drawbacks. The module would likely have me labelled as an abominable intelligence by the mechanicus as my brain would be non-organic. It also comes with the warning that the module is not compatible with anything from the soul tier upgrades, but those are all corrupt and greyed out, so I’m not too worried about that.
If I want to keep my organic processing unit, as E-SIM lovingly mocks me with, and remain even remotely human, there are impressive genetic modifications available that grant hyper-intelligence, though god-like wisdom is still a distant dream, and limited multitasking, but that’s all.
The organic upgrades are still an option if I’m willing to give Aruna full control rights to the servitors and manufacturers.
I’d best get started on searching the ship for traps then.