The gun effortlessly traversed to the wall, where somebody had painted a bull's eye.
And the grav vortex, moving at the speed of light kept on with it.
“As you see, the vortex does not slow the gun down. Now, one shot please.”
Almost immediately, the far wall was obscured by a cloud of dust, dirt, and steam, when the snow was instantly vaporized. Only moments later, the whole container shook as if a giant had punched it, when the cloud of debris rolled over it, accompanied by a devastating boom, despite us being in a sound-isolated room.
When we were able to hear each other again, I continued:
“What you just saw was a 2m long, 35cm thick round bar of carbon-coated lead being hauled at 9465m/s.
That is 34074 km/h, or 21172 mph. Or Mach 27.58. It impacted with nearly 90 gigajoules, or the equivalent of a bit more than 21 tons of TNT.”
By then, the debris cloud had lightened enough that we could see the far wall again. Or rather where the far wall had been. By now, there was a big chunk broken out of the mountainside.
Naveen nodded when we saw the damage.
“Yes, that is quite the destruction. I would say two or three of those shots will take down any battleship.”
Michael on the other hand grimaced.
“That may be, but seriously, we can’t fire those things anywhere near our facilities. I mean, the railguns are bad enough, but the materials we build with can withstand those sonic booms. This… no way.”
Naveen cocked his head.
“Maybe if we used a bigger, heavier, and slower projectile?”
I shook my head.
“Won’t make a difference. This is a grav gun. The mass of the projectile does not influence the speed. If we make a 7t projectile, the only difference will be that it hits with 2½ times the energy. But that was just the first shot. I’ve something for the racket.”
I turned toward the weapon tech.
“Load the silverfish, please. And fire as soon as it is loaded.”
I turned back to Naveen and Michael.
“The silverfish is a bit more expensive than the inert lump of metal and carbon that we fired earlier.”
Again the pretty blue spiral appeared from the muzzle of the gun, only to blink out a fracture of a second later. This time there was no debris cloud and no sonic boom, and we saw directly the explosion where the projectile impacted the broken mountain.
“It has a small grav vortex generator and a supercapacitor to power it for up to 15 seconds or around 141km. It creates a vacuum tunnel in front of it. Negating the sonic boom.”
Again, the container shook, though not quite as badly, when the sound of the impact reached us.
“I would advise using it at more than 2km range if at all possible. And that we officially only use dumb ammunition and low-powered shots. Make it around 4000m/s. No need to inform everybody how hard-hitting this thing really is.”
Michael rubbed the side of his nose.
“How much more expensive do you say this ‘silverfish’ is?”
I shrugged.
“Well, the dumb lead-core ammo is incredibly cheap for the destruction it causes. A couple of machines can churn them out in the thousands, and the material costs are essentially what two tons of lead plus a thin layer of carbon cost.
Around $3000 per shot. And we probably can recycle the lead and carbon from the wreckage.
The silverfish on the other hand needs a NADA to make, but that is no longer a big problem. The new big one I have made can build around 2300 at once, and needs a bit over two hours to make them. And the cost, well, of course, we have the same $3000 for the lead and the coating.
But additionally, we have around $60 for the iridium, $30 for the palladium, around $40 for the electronics, and $30 for the supercapacitor.
With a generous fudge factor, we can say that the silverfish is around $200 more expensive, or around 6.67%.”
I made a pause and then shrugged.
“Of course, if we adjust the size, weight, and material of the slug, the percentage will change, but the overall cost of the modification will not.
Basically, the majority of the cost is the base material. We could make it completely out of carbon, take the 80% hit in weight and energy, and the whole projectile would cost around $500. We could use osmium, have roughly twice the weight and energy, for ‘only’ a bit more than ten times the cost.
That is for the beancounters and military to figure out where the sweet spot is.”
Maynard asked with some confusion in his voice:
“If the silverfish only adds around $200 to the cost, why would you suggest that we don’t use it officially?”
It was Naveen that answered him:
“That is actually quite simple. If anybody is planning to attack us, they will plan with the information that is publicly available or that they can get through more clandestine ways.
If they know that our grav guns can take out their battleships with one or two hits, they will use orbital weaponry to take them out beforehand. And then use multiple battleships to overwhelm the remaining defenses.
If they believe that their battleships will shrug off dozens of hits from them, they will send one or two battlewagons and expect to overwhelm us with that.”
“Oh, I see. But… I mean we have Warden. Will they really try to attack us with such numbers?”
Naveen shook his head.
“We can not solely rely on Warden. Sooner or later, somebody gets the idea that they have neutralized her as a threat.
That might be true, but more likely not. But it might also only be that Vivian is somewhere else and any attack on Enki will not threaten her directly.
No, we need any advantage we can get.”
He nodded to the destruction of the wall.
“And honestly, this is a big equalizer. Even if that is ‘all’ we have, it would be more than enough.”
“But it is not all we have. Or that I have. I have a few more toys. How about we go to the next one?”
When both Naveen and Michael nodded, I had the bots switch out the grav gun for the next one.
“The next two are variants of the same idea. They are, for all purposes very powerful particle accelerators in a tight package. The first is the electron beam.”
The weapon first had a much less bright grav vortex extended and then fired a bright beam of light at the debris left by the grav gun. The effect was underwhelming though. At least to the naked eye. Only the very surface of the rocks hit was melted.
“Before you complain about the effect, everything behind that mound of rubble has been subjected to an instantly deadly dose of radiation.”
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
I had the bots put a big plate of battleship armor, though old one, in front of the gun, and some radiation detectors behind it.
During that time, Maynard asked me:
“How did you do it?”
“Do what? An electron beam is a very old technology. I just scaled it up.”
“How did you scale it up? I know it is old tech. More than 300 years old if I’m not wrong. But we were never able to make it strong enough to be used as a weapon.”
I shrugged.
“You remember that I discovered that the Kobashigawa coils create several dozen fields in addition to the gravity-bending one? This is the result of one of the few that I’ve identified. It is a field that influences electromagnetic force. I originally believed that it only worked on electrostatic, but it works on all em-forces.
At the base of it, this thing is a run-of-the-mill electron gun with a run-of-the-mill linear accelerator as the barrel. Only the accelerator is surrounded by this new device that increases electromagnetic effects by around 12000%. That gives the whole system an electric potential of 187 terra-Volt. Add in the grav vortex to push away the air…”
Maynard did not bother to answer.
When the techs fired the gun the second time, this time at the armor plate, again the surface of the plate melted away, but it did not look like much damage.
The radiation detectors on the other hand downright exploded with warning signals, before their electronics died in the shower of neutrons that had been knocked out of the armor plate.
“If we hit a grav ship with that, it will almost certainly kill the crew and most electronics, but leaves the ship mostly intact. It has its disadvantages though. The range is limited as the electrons repel each other and the beam widens pretty quickly.
But on the other hand, it is near lightspeed and pretty quickly is measured in milliseconds here. That means the electron beam can be used for up to around 100k km.
It can also be defended by a negatively charged field around the target. It repels the electrons and doesn’t let them through.
I am sure you’ve noticed the grav vortex. I just used it to shove the air out of the way, to remove backblast. Otherwise, the beam would react with the air and irradiate the weapon.”
Naveen looked pensively at the armor plate.
“I don’t know. I mean, sure, it will probably be devastating, but compared to the grav gun, it… lacks something.”
“It has its advantages and disadvantages. I think the beam function makes it good against small, fast-moving targets. The grav gun has a firing rate of 180 rounds per minute. Sure, we could make a grav gun with smaller, lighter ammo, that can be faster firing. But that still makes the shots ‘only’ 9465m/s.
Unlikely that anybody can evade such a shot, but not impossible. The electron beam moves at 99.99% of the speed of light. I would say that is impossible to evade. And as seen, anything hit by the electron beam will either be lightly armored and destroyed or whatever is behind the armor is irradiated to death.”
Naveen stood up and looked closer at the readouts of the radiation detector.
“You might be right. But if it can be easily defended against by simply having a negative ion field around the target, I don’t know if it is that useful.”
I smiled.
“That is where the other particle beam weapon comes into play.”
I sent the order for the bots to switch to the next weapon.
“I think you will find this one a bit more impressive visually. It is a proton beam, essentially the complete opposite of the electron beam. It fires a beam of positively charged protons, a bit slower than the electron beam at 98% of the speed of light, as protons have around 1800 times more mass than electrons.
The beam has the same energy levels though.”
When this new weapon was fired, again the Cherenkov radiation spiral appeared. Followed by a blinding white beam. When the beam hit the armor plate, it took a few moments to melt a hole through the plate. Considering that it was a carbon-ceramic outer layer, that alone was a testament to how hot the beam was.
The beam then moved a bit around and widened the hole, and whenever it broke through the armor, the rocks behind it were simply vaporized.
After a few seconds, the techs deactivated the beam, leaving the white-hot glowing plate behind.
Naveen looked at it with some obvious satisfaction.
“That is more like it. How long can it be sustained?”
“The beam itself never even touches the actual weapon. There is a vacuum between it and the coils. We have to be careful not to overload the energy couplings, but otherwise, it can be sustained as long as it has energy. The same as the electron beam.”
“So, what are the disadvantages of this one?”
“Unlike the electron beam, it does not knock neutrons out of the armor. That means to deal damage, it has to burn all the way through. This is a plate from the ABAS Devastator class, so, around 26 years old and the equivalent of 12m of RHA. You’ve seen that it took the beam around 2.6 seconds to burn through.
I doubt we will get many such burn times when the target is not stationary though. But we will see.
Another disadvantage is that it reacts more with the atmosphere than the electron beam. Not much, but enough to degrade it somewhat with distance. I would say that at 50km distance, it will take around 3 to 4 seconds to get through the armor.
And finally, it can be defended against with a positively charged electric field. That is why I said we will probably need both the electron and positron beam weapons. What defends against one, makes the other stronger. You can’t defend against both at once.”
“I understand. And with that logic, yes, if we use these beam weapons, we will need both. But honestly, I am still tending to standardize on the grav gun. Maybe make the smaller version you talked about to get several thousand projectiles into the air per minute.”
I just shrugged.
“You are the military man. I can only offer the options.”
“We will see. I’ll have to play it through with my people. Nonetheless, I would call that a very successful test.”
I chuckled.
“I would do as well, but I am not finished. The next one… is a bit of an outlier. Honestly, I had thought it to be just a fantasy posing as sci-fi technology, but here we are.”
I instructed the bots to install the last gun into the mount. It was quite a bit stubbier than the others and had several thick bulges in regular intervals on the barrel, which was actually an open framework.
At the same time, the big bots replaced the armor plate in front of the mount.
When the weapon charged up with a whine that was audible even in the several hundred meters removed container and an incandescent light emanated from the bulges. Then it fired, this time without the grav vortex.
The tech moved the mount as I had instructed him, and a thin line moved over the armor plate the same way. Just for not quite a second later the corner of the plate falling off. Cleanly cut.
Naveen looked at the test with interest, Michael just shook his head, while Maynard jumped up.
“What the fuck… what was that?”
I smiled.
“This is a different way to use the electro-magnetism influencing coils. Essentially, it creates a region where there simply is no negative electric charge. You as a scientist know what that means to solid matter. No more valence bonds, no more van der Waals forces, nothing to keep the matter actually solid.
On the contrary, the remaining positive charge will drive the atoms as far away from each other as they can get. For all purposes turning the matter in the field into mono-atomic dust.
It has several names in the various sci-fi universes it appears. Disintegrator is I think the most numerous, but personally, I like Molecular Disruptor, or Disruptor the best.”
“But… but… that is impossible.”
I shook my head.
“No, obviously it is not. Unlikely, I give you that, and to be honest, if Warden had not included it on the list of sci-fi weapons, I might not even have looked into it. Thank her for bringing it to my attention.”
Naveen on the other hand nodded.
“I assume this thing has some significant drawbacks, otherwise you would not have bothered with the grav gun or the particle beams, am I right?”
I shrugged.
“It is extremely short-range. So far I have not found a way where the simulation says it can go further than two or three kilometers.”
Naveen sighed.
“I feared something like that. So, it sadly has virtually no purpose. At least not as a weapon.”
I shook my head.
“I think you are wrong, but that’s ok, you do not have all the information yet. Continue with the cone mode.”
Again, the whine of the weapon started, and again the light danced around the weapon.
Unlike the first test, with a tightly focused beam, this time, a broad cone of destruction appeared. The whole plate was simply… gone. As was a large swath of the ground and the mountain behind it. A roughly half-cone-shaped swath.
“Unlike the other weapons, this one can be used as a cone. The cone can reach an aperture of 120°. That means at the two km distance, it covers an area of 37km² or 14 square miles.
Or a volume of 25 cubic kilometers will be simply gone. As far as I know, virtually every single shipborne weapon is still a projectile weapon. That means that it uses physical projectiles. If those fly into this cone… they are simply no longer there. We will have to be very careful about the firing lanes, but I think that thing is an amazing defensive weapon.”
Naveen was just staring at the… well destruction was maybe not the right word but it was the best I could find, as were the others.
After a moment, he snorted, shook his head, and softly said:
“I should have known better than to challenge you… and yes, I think that thing will make a very good weapon.”
“It will also be quite good for construction, digging a foundation or a tunnel, or mining. Keep in mind, the material is still there. It is just now powdered.”
Michael now said with a shaky voice.
“Do… you have more? I don’t know if I can take much more…”
I shrugged.
“One thing left. But it doesn’t need the mount. And to demonstrate it we need one of the skimmers. So let’s look at it first.”
The bots opened one of the containers and moved a roughly 2m long, 30cm diameter cylinder into the open.
“In essence, this is my modernized take on the fire-and-forget missile technology from before the big war.
Yes, I know, FaF missiles have gone out of fashion for a reason. And that reason was stealth. Grav ships don’t have a big afterburner that an IR-guided missile can look for. And when big ground installations have problems seeing the grav ship on their radar, nothing that can be squeezed into a missile can.
But we have Palantír. It can lock on the individual frequencies of the grav-coil, and do so from around 100km away. After that, well, I guess the next generation of warships will include anti-missile point defense systems.
Also, it does not have a rocket motor, the other reason why missiles went out of favor, but is a 1.5m long 3000 Keppler main coil with small 150 Keppler maneuvering coils. The core of the coil is hollow, so it can be loaded with quite a variety of payloads. The simplest is just a ton of lead, but we can use explosives, a GPW, a plasma charge, or my favorite, a disruptor charge.”
Michael took a deep breath.
“And what will this thing cost us?”
“At today’s prices for iridium and palladium, about $1500. Without the payload of course. And again, the big NADA can churn them out by the thousands. About 3000 at once, and it will take about three hours to do it.”
Needless to say, after that we tested the efficiency of those weapons against moving targets. That only stopped when all the skimmers were reduced to their constituent materials.