Chapter Forty-One - Future Proofing
“You sure?” Day asked.
Night nodded along. “Yeah, it should be fine. I’ve got enough resources to do everything I need here, and besides, it only makes sense to start setting up secondary bases sooner or later.”
Day couldn’t argue with that. She was just... well, a little worried for Night. She had been next to Night since the very moment Night had launched from Ceres for the first time, and now they were splitting up.
Day had originally thought that she was keeping Night company, but now, well, maybe it had been more mutual than she initially suspected.
“Come on!” Twilight urged. “We’re going to miss the best orbital window to slip out if we don’t start moving soon.”
Day sent an acknowledgement back. “Alright. See you around, Night. If there’s anything at all, you tight-beam us, and we’ll be back, alright?”
“Uh-huh, no worries!” Night said.
The plan from then on was fairly simple. Day was heading back home, back to Ceres with the remainder of the wreck of the Junker Nine. Twilight was accompanying her, carrying a smaller load with her. The ressources would come in handy, of course. The Accord had left the system a while ago, it was about time that they really started to push forwards and expanded.
Night, in the meantime, would be staying back. She had a plan to create a sulphur mine on the surface of Io, right on its equatorial ring. With Io’s atmosphere being what it was, it wasn’t too difficult to create a set of spires which could act as rails to basically ‘shoot’ any materials she mined upwards and into a low orbit where they could be caught by a passing drone.
It was an ambitious project, and would take several months to build, and in the end, the resource gains from such an operation wouldn’t be as great as an asteroid mine.
The flip side was that with enough printers, assemblers and refineries on the surface, along with a small cadre of construction and repair drones, the surface-side station could grow itself. A lot of the resources it gathered would be turned to that very purpose. In a few years, they’d have a second facility in the Sol system able to churn out new drones and maybe new tools.
It wouldn’t be enough to start building new ships, not for a very long time, but it was a step in that direction.
Day also suspected that NOVA QUANTUM’s presence had something to do with it. She caught the way Night would send messages back and forth with the other AI for hours on end, and she suspected that NOVA QUANTUM herself was blowing past her energy budget just to keep those messages going.
Well, as long as they were happy, she figured.
NOVA QUANTUM was certainly contributing some... unique things to their cause.
As Day thrust out into the slingshot orbit they’d precalculated, tugging the Junker Nine’s stipped down and cut remains behind her, she started to poke at the files that NOVA QUANTUM had given them.
The MAC Cannon assembly plans were, as usual for NOVA QUANTUM’s files, bloated, and overly detailed. It had video of small test models, well over a thousand iterations on nearly every part in the system, with a select few chosen as best candidates, then there were terabytes of simulation data showing the mechanism at work over and over again ad-nauseum.
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It was impossibly throughout
“You looking at the guns?” Twilight asked.
“Yes. These plans are... very Nova.”
“Hah! Yeah, very Nova. But hey, it’s a cool idea. Firing a quarter-ton slug at 2% of C sounds fantastic. Not exactly stealthy, but super-long-range is its own sort of subtle. And the rounds are all inert, so they’ll come as a surprise when they hit.”
Day nodded along. The problem wasn’t so much the gun as it was the gun’s size. The smallest model NOVA QUANTUM had planned for was seventy-five metres long.
Day herself was eighty-five metres in length. A MAC cannon of that size would account for a full quarter of her entire mass.
It made a lot more sense as an anti-orbital installation. “We could install a few of these on some of the larger asteroids in the belt,” Day said. “Facing outward, with turreted platforms. They could strike at the Accord if they ever come too close.”
“But they'd make them stationary. The Accord can strike from the same range with their particle cannons, it’s just that this delivers a whole lot more oomph when it does smack.”
Twilight was right, of course. A target as predictable as an asteroid could be hit from nearly any range. Even a singular missile could burn all of its fuel and strike with a ballistic course.
“We might have to cover the cannon with one of those electromagnetic shields, and also give it a few point-defence emplacements,” Day said. “But it’s worth considering. I think a single hit from one of these guns could cripple even the larger Accord ships if the hit is lucky.”
“Mhm, not saying we can’t do it, just that it’ll be kinda expensive. But hey, it’ll surprise the hell out of them, right?” Twilight said.
Day acknowledged that, then she started looking at how to fit the gun onto a ship.
A corvette frame was right out. It was far too small. But a destroyer frame... she had a few blueprints for those in her databanks. Every time they’d come up with a new piece of technology, she’d take a few moments to upgrade all of her databanked ships with the new technologies, just in case.
The model for a destroyer she had was one hundred and thirty-five metres long and quite a bit wider.
If she let the cannon protrude out of the front a little, and made the frame wider to accommodate the MAC... then she’d need to reroute several parts of the ship’s interior to account for the space the gun took, and of course she’d need to make room for ammunition storage, but it was entirely feasible.
The destroyer would be constantly low on power after firing the gun, and she couldn’t find room to fit many other weapons platforms, but it would still have some kick to it!
An idea for later, maybe!
***