It took less than three days to prepare the hauler as a stealth targeting platform. The transport and install of the computer from cargo bay two took another day, then it was time to drop the now stealth hauler outside the Oort Cloud away from all three entrance corridors from nearby systems.
After this task was complete it was then time to drop off torpedoes in the two entrance paths leading into the system from Howron territory. Alex, Kara, and Monty calculated that two hundred torpedoes just inside the Oort Cloud would be sufficient for the time being.
That would clear out two of their nine cargo holds of torpedoes, not counting the ones taken to install in the reload chambers of the torpedo tubes. The rest would be saved for the defense of Alandra.
Thus, eight days after work started, the Missive of Dissent was ready to depart Lynx zero zero two. Alex sat in his cockpit and laid in a course for the Alandran system. After activating the ripple drive and pushing the fusion torches to seventy five percent he verified they were cruising at 40c.
He spun his chair around and stepped out into the now forming VR environment of the ship. Kara and Monty sat on the couch eating popcorn and watching a comedy. He grabbed a beer and a bowl of popcorn and sat beside Kara.
She looked from her movie to him, “Everything ok?” She asked.
He knew she could check in less than a millisecond, she must be asking for Monty’s sake. “Everything is fine, course is laid in and set, we’re cruising at 40c. We should arrive in thirty eight days. Which works out perfectly, as the Howron ship that raided and then bombed Alandra will arrive in Lynx zero zero two in thirty nine days to a big surprise.”
Kara nodded, “Plenty of time to setup and have popcorn ready for the fireworks show.”
Alex settled down with his beer and popcorn and watched the movie with Kara and Monty, but just couldn’t concentrate, there was a ton of work ahead of them. As soon as the movie was over he walked over to his strategy corner and wiped his white boards clean.
Kara and Monty started a new movie so he had some time to himself. Time to plan a defense in depth. He pulled up a star chart of systems around Alandran, there were really only two incoming vectors into the system, one to Lynx zero zero two and one to a Type-M red dwarf star thirteen point three light years away. Every other star was stupid far from here, “We must be on the edge of a spiral arm or something.” He thought to himself.
The red dwarf system didn’t worry him much, it was pretty far away, taking the Howron ships over a year to get here and with it being a red dwarf system it was doubtful there was any planets that were inhabitable. He’d plan to put some defense in that corridor, but not waste too much time with it.
First order of business: Build up a manufacturing base. He wrote at the top of the board, then followed it up with launch all of foundries and auto factories around the largest concentration of minerals in the asteroid belt. Use the raw materials to build more foundries and auto factories for the first three months. That should take us from five of each to ten of each, doubling our manufacturing capacity.
Then we will keep the original five producing new auto factories and foundries while the newly produced ones start making the mark thirty seven mines. He pulled up the schematics for the mines on another of his monitors beside the white board. They were crude but effective, highly effective if Birmingham was any indication, they took out over two hundred Imperial ships on their own.
They didn’t use Hafnium, which required a very intricate physics package. (At least back in our universe.) They fell back on good old fashioned fusion bomb technology, almost eight hundred years of reliability. Modern vessels had left that old technology behind because of their dirty nature. The Imperial fleet wanted a universal weapon, and nuclear fusion had serious downsides.
Their dirty radiation scrambled even active sensors for valuable seconds on the battlefield, using them on planets devastated the environment, and keeping them on board vessels with biological humans risked radiation poisoning if poorly maintained. Once the Imperial scientists cracked Hafnium implosion all ships of the line were swapped over to the new torpedoes. A nice universal weapon for all theaters of war.
The rebellion didn’t keep to that doctrine. Using a Hafnium physics pack on a mine was one that didn’t go into a ship torpedo. Plutonium was much easier to refine, the physics package was much easier to produce, and the yield was much more per kilogram. The modified mines were not mines in the naval sense either. They were capable of moving extremely fast over short distances, dragging other mines with them.
This was accomplished by fitting them with mini torch drives. They could accelerate to .2c in only a few seconds, and could maintain that burn for nearly a minute. Then the magic happened, they didn’t just detonate and waste their energy in a nuclear fireball. Oh no, the rebellion found a better use, the physics pack was used as a bomb-pumped maser. This focused all the power of the nuclear explosion into a single beam of microwave energy in a very small area.
It was extremely effective at breaking through shields, and as the beams usually fired for up to a tenth of a second they would be devastating to the lightly shielded craft of the Howron. Which was just what he wanted. The also had the advantage of not needing a targeting computer, once activated by a very complex encrypted string signal they operated in an area deniability role.
Simply put, if you showed up in that area, they attacked. Which was just what they needed at the moment. Checking the schematics, each auto-factory could build and assemble a mine with no need for valuable nanite construction every five hours. Figure in some failures and he could expect a little over one hundred per day after the first three months. From there, production will go up geometrically as more foundries and auto factories come online.
Clearing the monitor showing the entrance corridors to the system he brought up an overhead showing the known asteroid field and its deposits. Setting up with the best concentration of necessary materials would empty that part of the field in ten months, at which point they would need to use the Missive to move production to another site, which would take time.
He ran his hand through his hair, this was going to get complicated. By that time they would have twenty of each auto factory and foundry, and only twelve cargo holds to haul forty units. So four trips to move them all at once, or he needed to start moving them at the six month mark right after the second set of auto factories and foundries are produced. Yeah, that was the best way to go.
He continued to plan and make notes for the next two hours. Kara and Monty finished their movie and joined him at the strategy corner to see what he had been up to. Kara was the first to speak, “Ok, you have been busy. If we are going to start making auto factories and forges in system that will kind of tie us to there for years.”
Alex sighed, “I know, but these people will never get out from under the Howron’s claws if they keep them technologically backwards. They will be slaves to them forever, because the fur balls have dozens of planets for resources, plus wherever they get the living starships from allows them the ultimate high ground. I know there may be other humans here past the pulsar nebula, but I can’t stand by and let these people continue to suffer.”
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
Monty looked towards the bottom of the board. “You want to bootstrap up to a shipyard?”
Alex turned to the board and nodded, “It will be three years out, but I don’t see any other choice. The Alandran people will have to eventually help protect their planet, we can help them get their technological base up enough to do that, but we also can’t stay here forever.”
Kara looked over to Alex, “We have schematics for the Missive, but no other ship, Monty might have schematics for the Montana, neither of which is a warship. We will have to come up with a new ship design on our own, completely untested.”
Alex smiled at Kara, “That is not entirely correct.”
Kara suddenly received a ping, indicating Alex was sending her a file. Confused, she opened it to find the schematics for an Imperial stealth frigate. “Alex, where did you get this?”
Alex shrugged, “Admiral Ribiki gave it to me as part of the need-to-know package. If the rebellion failed, I was to take the Missive to the unknown regions and begin bootstrapping up for starship construction. I was in charge of the stealth divisions, since I somehow gained a reputation for being sneaky.”
Kara continued looking through the schematics, “These are quite old, this class of frigate was decommissioned over a century ago.”
Alex nodded, bringing up the schematic in one of the screens to the side of the white board, “That was why command decided to use them. Compared to modern starship construction these are small and easy to construct. With the modification schematics they can be run with either ship AI and crew, or ship AI and replicant. Finally, they can house a cloaking field generator.”
Kara pointed to the board, “You’re putting the cart in front of the horse, we need a particle accelerator to make the exotic materials for the generator.”
Alex nodded, walking over to the board and adding the particle accelerator to the board after the ship yard. “That is true, but having a cloaking field generator isn’t a top priority, they take a ton of power from this ships fusion reactors and most of the internal space of vessel. It would be much easier to equip them with stealth field generator and reallocate the power and internal space to more useful endeavors.”
Monty nodded, “That does make more sense, the ships the Howron use can’t even detect a ship in a stealth field as they don’t have active sensors. I see one of the files even states NON-CLOAK VERSION.”
Alex poked at the screen and the wireframe schematic changed, showing the huge central device that was the cloaking field generator removed, in its place were twelve additional torpedo tubes to compliment the eight of the original design and extended living quarters and storage for the crew or a single cargo hold for replicant crew. He pointed to the schematic, “This is the model I think we should focus on when we get the infrastructure up to finally build starships.”
Kara scrolled out to see the overall ship, “It will need more point defense, those pine cone ships have a tremendous amount of firepower, and while this ship with be fast, much faster than the Missive, it will be sorely lacking in defenses.”
Alex nodded, rubbing the back of his neck, “Yeah, can you and Monty put your heads together and figure out how to best go about modifying these designs, there is a ton of problems to overcome and we have to keep the schematic simple and quick to build.”
Kara looked to Monty, who nodded back to her. “Yes, we will have to model the ships and decide where we can put point defense cannons. The ship doesn’t have the power output of the Missive, so the stealth field will be weaker, as will be the shields.”
Alex nodded, “It would take the shipyard six months to build another Missive, and that would be in its original configuration, we can forget trying to build a Kugelblitz reactor here. Getting the infrastructure up to build things that complex is more than a century out, maybe more. The point to this is being able to churn out a usable starship every thirty days. It has to be a simple and effective design, and this is what we have to work with.”
Kara bit her lower lip as she thought, “This design is certainly easier to manufacture, twenty torpedo tubes will be more than enough firepower for a ship this size, even if it doesn’t have any reloads. I just don’t see any way to have more than twenty point defense cannons. These older shield projectors are simple, but they won’t stop more than a few torpedoes.”
Monty spoke up as well, “The fusion reactors are as simple as can be made, but their size and output isn’t that great, installing more would give more power to the projectors, but not enough to make it worth while.”
Kara waved them over to the holo-tank, then pulled up the same wireframe in a better 3D environment. She then expanded the ship, and highlighted the reactors. “Monty is correct, these reactors would have seen normal service when she was still active in our original universe, they are crude and simple. Easy to make, easy to maintain, but large and lacking power output. There are six of them in this configuration of the vessel.”
She then plucked the reactors out and dropped in four reactors of similar size to the originals. “These four are more modern reactor designs, like what we have for our backup reactors here on the Missive. They are more complex to build, but are reasonably easy to maintain, and they put out over double the power output of the original reactors.”
She then dropped in two shield generators in the place of the reactors she removed, “That would free up space and would allow for the additional power needs of a secondary set of shield generators, which could take maybe another torpedo hit.”
Monty reached in and spun the vessel around, “What about using chaff as defense? I noticed the Howron torpedoes are pretty crude, they are chemically propelled, and the navigation computers can’t be that sophisticated.”
Alex nodded, “Interesting, chaff hasn’t been used as a deterrent in well over a century due to the simple AI’s most missiles are manufactured with being able to see through that little bit of trickery. But maybe it will work with the Howrons.”
Monty pulled up a wireframe of a Howron torpedo, “This is from one of my many active scans while I was trapped in the hulk of the Montana. The torpedo itself seems based on the design of an Imperial Slugger class, probably a dud from the bombardment of Arlerus by the Conqueror. It has been upgraded with a Hafnium warhead, though crude compared to the ones aboard the Missive.”
Kara reached down and picked up a muffin from the table, “The AI on board that class of torpedo was still silicon based, its capabilities would be very minimal. The nose sensors seem to be of the fire and forget variety.”
Monty nodded, moving the wireframe around to the nose cone, “That is correct, the targeting computer somewhere in the vessel takes a snapshot of the vessel, and sends that information to the torpedo’s AI, which uses the infrared sensors to match to the target.”
Alex looked over the table himself for a snack, “Just infrared sensors? Nothing else?” He asked as he settled on a corner sliced club sandwich.
Monty reached into the wireframe and spread her hands, expanding the diagram, “Those are the only sensors I could detect with the active sensors I still had operational. Although I don’t see anything else in the nose cone.”
Kara finished her first bite of the muffin, “So if we could blind the infrared sensors from a distance, we could blind the torpedoes coming in, then the ship could take evasive maneuvers to stay out of the blast radius?”
Monty nodded, “Yes, we need to figure out the best way to do that. Maybe modify some of the onboard torpedoes to act as chaff?”
Alex finished swallowing a huge bite of sandwich, “I was just looking over the mine schematics and they use bomb pumped masers, what if we used their weapons pack on some torpedoes and widened the range of the maser beams?”
Kara thought about it for a moment, “Microwave lasers are good for focused beams, not so good for wide areas, we would need to go much cruder, just a simple laser, but with a huge beam splitter in the nose cone.”
Monty bounced at that idea, “Oh, that’s good! A simple bomb-pumped laser with a crude fusion bomb core that fires through a beam splitter to spread the angle to what, thirty degrees?”
With that, the girls were off to the races, coming up with ways to modify torpedoes into countermeasures. Alex finished his sandwich and watched them bounce ideas off each other and making calculations that would take his matrix forever to figure out. In the end they had a plan, a plan so good he decided they needed to implement it in the Missive as well.
The original eight torpedo tubes would be filled with the new chaff torpedoes, used to dazzle the incoming enemy weapons and hopefully causing them to detonate prematurely or at the very least, far enough away from the ship to cause little damage. The twelve new torpedo tubes would be populated with modern Hafnium torpedoes.
With a well trained crew, this should allow a small fleet of the tiny frigates to go toe to toe with a Howron ship and have a chance at survival. While the torpedo compliment could be outsourced to the auto factories to manufacture, the new reactors would add to the completion time of the new vessels, one every forty days or so.
As he watched Kara and Monty modify a new schematic into the holo-tank for future construction he thought to himself. “All this planning is moot if we can’t protect the system for when the Howron show up. We’ve got a ton of work to do.”