Chapter 8: Year 14: Getting Organized

So, back to our assault on Sol System. I wasn’t the 7th Military District Combined Fleet’s commander, I was only the non-military Governor of Beerat, but I still insisted on going. And as my ancient experience (it was only five or six years ago!) may still have some value, I inserted myself into the chain of command in the fourth position as “Rear Admiral commanding the 3rd Battleship Division” from the flag bridge on Krakatoa. Getting those battleships up and running had been my primary focus for so long that I couldn’t stand sending them out without me going with them.

No, it wasn’t just five or six years ago. It was more than forty, now. But, back then, it was only five or six years since I’d been an Admiral commanding a fleet. The war hadn’t changed that much, and I still knew how to do it. I was trying to tell you what I was thinking back then.

Our Vesuvius class was the next step in heavy warship evolution, the logical step if we wanted something better than the Kongos. We had demonstrated -twice, unfortunately- that the dickheads’ bomber-launched Plasma Torpedos could break even a Kongo if they happened to hit in just the right (wrong) place.

The Volcanos had six turrets, three on each side, each one independently driving a coilgun capable of firing a metric tonne projectile at anything they wanted every couple of seconds, enough armor to shrug off anything short of that, and the rest of the ship had enough more armor to keep fighting even if one turret got blown out. As your grandmother Sally used to say, they were ‘stupid big’.

The AI’s simulations said that one Sa’arm Plasma Torpedo hit would not significantly degrade ship integrity. The hull armor would keep one out, maybe even two, and the ships had a LOT of internal armor, too. We had the space, and we had the materials, so we put it in. Even if we got a couple of hits that took out all the armor in one area, another hit in that same area wouldn’t destroy the whole ship. We’d lose everything -and everyone- in that section, but the rest of the ship should be able to keep fighting. We’d even proved that the simulations were correct, with the prototype battleship we called “Daddy”, over in System Alpha.

Okay, losing two turrets right next to each other along with their surrounding structure would probably break the ship. So what? If you factored in the shields, what it took to knock them down, and all our backups, it would take something like ten different plasma torpedos coming in to almost the same place, all so fast that they landed before the backup shields came back up, for that to happen. Okay, it’s a theoretical possibility, but it’s not a real worry. Nothing the dickheads had could do that, as long as we kept their bombers away. And, we had worked very hard to ensure that no “free” dickheads knew how effective those PTs were, so they didn’t often press attacks.

Even if they did, between the sun-walls, the fighters, the escorts, the StarSparrows, and the PDLs, not many bombers got close enough to launch and not many of the PTs that did get launched lasted long enough to land. We were confident that the kind of coincidence chain that had led to three or four PTs landing in almost the same place in quick succession on Missouri and Lion would not happen again.

The coilguns? The original weapons, the guns that the Jupiter Yard back in Sol had developed for the “Hero” class of battlecruiser, had been railguns, just larger versions of the PDRs that all our ships carried. Dunno why they had done it that way besides being just easier to build. The main reason the rails were so long was to try to limit the wear from each shot. The weapons could have been much shorter, but the current needed to accelerate the slug would have eaten the rails that much faster.

We saw that in our PDRs, all the dinky Point Defense Railguns that each ship carried. They were only good for a dozen or so shots before accuracy started to suffer. That was okay, for those small mounts. They usually only got used in emergencies to shoot down incoming bombers and PTs, and the emergency would be over -one way or the other- within seconds, only two or three shots at the most. The rails could be easily changed out between fights. We always went into combat with fresh rails on our PDRs. If the PDRs had been used at all, the rails got replaced as part of the after-action cleanup. The old ones went into the replicators for remanufacture. When they came out again they were set aside as ready spares.

For a railgun that’s 50 meters long, though, replacement is a shipyard job. Doing that after every action was a non-starter. So, the designers had lowered the current and acceleration, and lengthened the rails to compensate. The main rails on a Hero were the better part of 150 meters long. In fact, that length was what dictated the overall size of those ships when we were designing them. The Heros were far larger than the other warships we were building at the time and they took a very large pile of resources to build. We had only built twenty or thirty before they were declared too expensive for the results, and the resources were re-directed to other designs like the Raptor and Goddess classes. And the carriers, I guess.

As powerful as those guns were, they were only rated for 50 or so full-power shots. If you got into a fight and shot more than 20 or so times with one gun or the other, you were supposed to change the rails out before going into action again. This wasn’t always convenient.

Anyway, the “Baby Hero” and “Junior Hero” guns we had developed had just been shrunk-down versions of the originals. They had all of the good points -they were devastating weapons when they worked right and hit their targets- but they also had all the bad points of the originals. We didn’t really care, at first. It wasn’t really an issue. As long as we were just defending our homes, as soon as a battle was over we could swap out whatever needed swapping out.

When we started going out and looking for trouble, though, taking the fight to the enemy? Suddenly all the maintenance issues with the railguns were a huge problem. Not with the initial fights to clean out the dickheads’ orbitals, that was easy. Whether we won or lost, either way the fight was over within minutes or hours at most. Each of our guns had fresh rails and the shooting was done long before rail wear became an issue.

Where it became an issue was when we had cleaned out the orbitals and had our ships hanging above the Sa’arm planets, trading pot-shots with ground facilities. We had ships shooting at least one gun every few seconds, as fast as we could identify targets. We could rotate our shots between the guns, but we still ended up with each gun taking more than a hundred shots per HOUR.

We weren’t just rotating ships in and out of the lineup for repairs from combat damage, we were also rotating ships out because their rails were so worn that our fire control systems could no longer predict where the shots would land. And we had no good way to swap out the rails in combat, for our larger guns. All we could do was make temporary repairs in place.

We ended up going back to first principles and developed the coilgun that the Heros should have gotten in the first place. For our first few expeditions, the ones to System Alpha and System Beta, all of our weapons were railguns. I think we had started replacing our original “Baby Hero” mounts with coilguns by the time we visited System Gamma, though.

Let’s see ... The first two Kongos were built with railguns, but the rest had coilguns from the start, and the first two got re-equipped when that expedition came back. By the time we went to System Delta the only ‘railguns’ we still had were the original PDRs, the short-range weapons that only got used to swat incoming bombers and Plasma Torpedos.

And, that was the breakthrough that let me have my old fantasy of mounting a true Hero gun on a turret. For any given mass and acceleration, using Confederacy technology allowed us to compress the ‘barrel’ length quite a bit for a coilgun compared to a railgun. It didn’t make any real difference in performance for our older and smaller ships with fixed or pivoting mounts, but the ships with true turrets got upgraded to weapons that did the same thing but had much shorter ‘barrels’ and didn’t have to replace those ‘barrels’ after every fight.

The shorter ‘barrels’ on the coilguns gave us faster slew rates for our turrets, if we needed that, but they also meant that we could mount larger guns. There was no feasible way to put the main weapon system from a Hero-class ship on a turret, the rails just needed too much support, but we could put a coilgun that fired an equivalent projectile at the same speed on a turret.

It wasn’t quite the same projectile, they weren’t the same design and they weren’t interchangeable, but the coilguns and their slugs were designed around the requirement that they put the same amount of kinetic energy on target as the railguns so tactically we considered them to be equivalent. And an industrial replicator could convert one design of slug to the other easily enough. The mass was almost the same. The materials were the same. Only the shape and some attachments were different. The only real drawback was that the ‘barrels’ were significantly fatter than the rails had been. That caused some trouble.

Barton Yard built a pair of prototypes for an even bigger class than the Kongos, identical in every way except main armament. One of them had six “Junior Hero” coilguns, firing 100 Kg slugs at 100 kps. It was just a larger Kongo with six turrets. The other one had four “True Hero” coilguns, firing 1000 Kg slugs at the same speed. One metric tonne of accurately aimed destruction, moving 100 kilometers per second. And the guns didn’t have to be rebuilt after firing a few dozen shots.

When Kevin started calling the ships the “Weird Sisters” I knew he was thinking about a pair of Royal Navy ships from one of the World Wars. I thought about naming them after my own sisters, but word would get back to my mom and she’d get mad. Still, I thought that maybe the Bronte sisters could donate their names, Charlotte and Emily, with Anne if we built a third one, surely those girls were weird enough, but the yard got there first.

The one with “Junior” guns got dubbed “Daddy” long before it was complete, and the one with “True Hero” guns got dubbed “Mommy” at the same time.

“You’re gonna get in trouble. I’m telling Daddy on you.”

“I don’t care if Daddy finds out. As long as he doesn’t tell Mommy.”

I think that started out as the one with the full-Hero guns getting called “That big mother” but I’m not really sure, doesn’t matter. By the time we were ready to formally name them it was too late.

When they were commissioned the Weird Sisters got sent to get their baptisms of fire at one of the Sa’arm planets we were watching, and they got to trade shots with ground facilities for long enough to prove themselves. They had enough armor to stand up to the Sa’arm ground-based lasers, and their main guns maintained their accuracy as long as they were there.

Actually, one of them lost a turret from a plasma torpedo, but when they retired at the end of the campaign their biggest problem was resupply. All of our ships went through a lot of slugs when they were on orbital duty. At least, resupplying them with coilgun slugs was a lot easier than reloading missiles was. The slugs could be moved by transporter and resupply could be completely automated. All we had to do was get our AFS ships within transporter range and get the AIs to talk to each other. They could even do the resupply while the warships were fighting.

Development continued, and after the two Weird Sisters got all their kinks worked out the yard started building quite a few ships to a modified design that had, supposedly, all the quirks corrected. They were going to take forever to build, but when they were completed they would all carry six “True Hero” coilguns. I think they laid down eight at first, then when they finalized the design they started two more sets of eight. I was the one who put a stop to that, since we couldn’t even crew the first eight. There wasn’t any point in building more. We continued building all 24 that we had started, but we didn’t start any more.

Both Kevin and I spent a lot of time asking Brak for more men. Brak spent a lot of time telling us they didn’t have any to give us.

I was taking Hannah with me, so we left Tina as Acting Governor of Beerat with a “Strong Suggestion” to do whatever Bill told her to do if there was a military emergency and no one was there except First and Third Fleets. I pulled rank and insisted that Hannah bring LaRhonda with her. If I needed sleep, I would requisition her services. I would bring Joannie, of course, for stress relief. Jilly and Laura and Monique and Hannah’s Sylvia would stay behind and help Tina.

Eric continued doing his fine job as Mayor of the Womb. If everything went well, his most critical task while we were gone would be to ceremonially drink the first glass of the first run of whatever lager or pilsner or IPA our micro-breweries developed next, and officially declare it fit for human consumption. Or not, as the case may be. He, at least, was a beer guy. I couldn’t tell you what the difference was between a pilsner and a lager, just whether it tasted good or not.

Jack commanded the entire expedition from the flag bridge on Vesuvius, which was the only BB we didn’t put in a division of four battleships. Kevin wore three hats as 2nd in command of the expedition, Vice Admiral commanding Task Force 2.2, the bombardment group of 12 BBs, and directly commanding the 1st BB division from Santorini. Rear Admiral Sally Goode commanded the 2nd BB division from Kilauea, and I had the 3rd division from Krakatoa.

“Junior” Podalski got Task Force 2.1 -the carriers- which we similarly divided into 4-ship groups and was 3rd in line for fleet command if anything happened to Jack and Kevin. He planted his fat ass in Botha. Anneke got TF 2.4, the “Flying Squadron”, which we hoped would be the only task force to get any real fun or excitement, and she was 5th in line for overall command if the rest of us were killed.

Jack and Junior were both senior officers sent to us to see how we did things and try to smooth over our differences. Jack had come from Brak some years before, and Junior had come over from Jutland with their carriers. They were both fine officers with fleet command experience and we trusted them because they didn’t have the headquarters expert mentality.

When they didn’t know what they were doing, they were willing to shut up and listen instead of bluster and insist. And, when they fucked up, like we all did, they admitted it and took their lumps. As far as we were concerned, they were both one of us. Or however you say that.

Jack probably would have commanded Betio, anyway. For our last two operations, he had been Kevin’s second in command.

Junior was coming along nicely, too, and had helped manage the orbital bombardment phase of our last operation for us after the space-side action was all done. That was set up by Kevin, thinking about the long term, running operations like the one we found ourselves in now. Kevin had done that just to prove that Junior could operate without any fighters if he had to. Kevin and Anneke had been with us since we had originally left Sol for Beerat, of course.

For any political decisions that needed to be made after the shooting was over, Jack would turn to me and I’d put my Governor’s hat back on. Woomie had already warned me that the Womb’s average ‘man in the tunnel’ was also calling me ‘Caesar’ in addition to that ‘Imperator’ crap. Some days I thought about asking Woomie to track down everyone who spoke Italian and kill them all.

This scam, claiming to only be a Rear Admiral, caused some angst among the AIs. I was Governor of the Womb, the human enclave in Beerat. Similarly, the First Father of Beer was the Governor of that planet, at least as far as the Confederacy was concerned. Once the Beer developed their own space presence -and we were helping them, slowly- we’d have to rethink some things. Still, as long as they were restricted to their own planet by their own choices I was by default also effectively the System Governor, too, responsible for the safety of all citizens of the Confederacy throughout the whole system, Human AND Beer.

Now, the ‘System Governor’ position was a human invention. The AIs were pretty sure that each colony needed its own Governor but there was no reason for any higher level of management. On the other hand, different colonies could possibly have cooperation issues, and that was not acceptable in a system that may have to fight for its life on very short notice. Any system with more than one colony also had an SG to make the Colony Governors get along.

The SG was almost strictly a military position, just like the District Commander. He (or she or it) didn’t necessarily give social orders, but any military forces not specifically placed to defend a specific spot belonged to him.

A Governor, whether Colony or System, had far too much power, but this was at least partly mitigated by prohibiting me from leaving the system and causing trouble. I wasn’t a Governor, anywhere else.