Chapter 1: Year 8: System Alpha

Okay, who’s turn is it to get more wood for the fire? Nikki? Right. We don’t need anything big, it’s just for some light. Whatever you can find.

Now, where were we? Right, we gotta go back some. Before that last attack that destroyed our main shipyard at Ale, we had built three Auroras at the Womb for our own use. Those construction frames had been working on three more “for the export trade” is how Kevin put it. We figured that we really only needed one ourselves to shuttle between Sol and Beerat with families.

We could continue to use our two Explorers, Hillary and Beebe, to deliver “adult-only” families that just had sponsors and concubines but no children. We had our two Couriers, Postie and Ponie, on our two “management” runs, one to Brak and the other to Sol. Every once in a while we would let them swap.

Huh? Oh, back before someone a lot smarter than me invented the message torpedo, we had to have some way to send messages between systems. It took a ship, so they built about the smallest ship they could and called it a ‘courier ship’. They were basically a really small Aurora. They had a very small central shaft but it was off to one side to make room for three pods up against it. They were fast, too. If they were naked, not carrying anything, they could flat out scoot!

By now we were using message torpedos for everything we could, but the torpedos couldn’t carry people. If we wanted to move a person, we still had to use ships so we still used our Couriers. They were all named after people who delivered messages, and at the time we had Pony Express and Postman. We called them Ponie and Postie.

We allowed our Aurora’s first captain to name his ship, and he decided upon “Pride of Chanur”. No, it didn’t make any sense to me but we had said it was his decision and we had to accept it. I knew where the name came from, it was a ship in a science fiction novel, but I couldn’t see the connection between that ship and our new Aurora. Didn’t matter, there were far weirder names out there, and most of us just called it “Chanur” anyway.

We turned the other two Auroras over to Brak for the other colonies to use. Earth’s population was almost 8 billion people back then, and it was growing faster than we could extract them. Unless DECO screwed up badly, there was no chance of ever sending a ship to Sol and not having anyone to pick up.

Even if there was a delay -with several of the thousand-pod “Kilo” transport ships available and the even bigger ‘Cube’ ships that could carry a quarter-million passengers it happened sometimes- that was no big deal. The ship just waited until they had a full load before they left. It was never more than a couple of days.

We were about halfway done building that second set of three Auroras when we had that last attack that almost beat us. We couldn’t see wasting the time and effort that had gone into building them, but we certainly didn’t need those three ships ourselves! We went ahead and finished all three and sent them to Brak for assignment, then turned those construction frames over to the repair people.

Those six Auroras were the last unarmed ships we built for a long time. After we lost our original “Barton Naval Shipyard” we had to use our ‘civil shipyard’ for all sorts of things that had a higher priority than more Auroras, starting with all the equipment, materials, and modules to start rebuilding Barton Yard.

After the battle that cost us Coralsnake, Coventry, Benin, Miyuki, and Ayanami plus our whole shipyard complex, it had taken a couple months to get the shipyard back together again and building ships for us. Much longer than it had taken to originally build it in the first place, because the first time we had started with a lot of previously-prepared modules. We no longer had all that stuff.

However, all of our reasons for putting our main shipyard in Ale orbit in the first place were still valid: Plenty of room, plenty of resources, a huge HEZ to give us lots of warning if trouble came. And, still, in the end, the shipyard was expendable. Having it at Ale decoyed anyone who came looking for trouble away from Beer and the Womb.

Oh, that’s Hyperspace Exclusion Zone, where if you turn on your hyperspace bubble generator it blows up. You know that, Lily, you just like to ask questions.

We weren’t quite starting at nothing, though. We still had our small ‘civil’ shipyard at the Womb, and we still had all the miners and tugs and other infrastructure stuff we had built. And everything that Barton could take with him when he ran. And we still had our refueling setup with the two refineries and the tankers. Once we had put together a couple of small construction frames where we wanted them, the shipyard could gradually build itself again. The three Explorers could help, with their integral self-repair capabilities.

In the interim, we put together some more frames at our civil shipyard and used them to repair all of our damaged ships. Just about everyone needed at least a little work.

We had talked our priorities over and left Taffy Two and Three out and available for combat if needed until One was available for operations again. When all of One’s ships had been repaired, we pulled Adder from the Sumo Line and put her in One to give One some backbone, then brought Three in for repairs and refit.

Since Cobra was the only damaged ship in Three, we held the rest of Three in standby/reserve and also brought in any of our scouts that needed repairs or refit.

Once we had all of our ships’ black eyes and skinned knees being fixed, we put together some more frames and finished all of our refugee hulks. This wasn’t really hard since we knew exactly what each ship needed. We just had to build the missing parts and get them to the frames. By this time the Womb had a lot of extra construction stuff so none of this was hard. It just took time.

While Cobra was in the frame we also pulled her turrets off and did the fix for their mounting problem. That involved modifying both the turret and the socket, what we would call a ‘barbette’ on Earth. After her trials demonstrated that everything was working right on both top and bottom no matter what we did, we pulled the other six in, two at a time, and fixed them also. Our second set of Snakes didn’t need this; they had the fix installed while they were building.

By the time we had Barton Yard back up and running again, we had decided what we needed to do next. As I said, we had a couple of months to think it over, and we had decided that we needed five different types of ships built.

More Snakes, yes, but with our first run’s problems all fixed during construction. We also lengthened them just a little, and added a battery of eight 55 cm shipkiller missile launchers in their nose. Adding missile launchers gave us more options than just having the guns. Putting them in the middle where we had originally planned would move the turrets farther from the center of mass and add stability problems for no good reason.

We thought about giving them even bigger missiles. Central Command had developed some huge missiles they called FTL torpedos. They were two meters across, and CC had designed an improved Raptor class to carry them. The first one built, CNS Raphael Semmes, could do amazing things with them. They were basically a cross between an anti-ship missile and an FTL message torpedo, and could do both at once. Semmes could launch a torpedo in one system and have it pop out of hyperspace in another system where it could attack a target.

Me, I couldn’t see that as being helpful. We didn’t want to harass the Sa’arm. We wanted to surprise them, come in with overwhelming force, and wipe them out before they could come up with defenses against us. Sending them harassing attacks would only make them more alert and speed up their defensive building rate. We put two of those launchers in just about every large ship we built from the Snakes on, but I’m not sure that we ever used them. They were a just-in-case weapon system that never was needed.

The missiles didn’t impart any significant recoil on the launching ship, so they could be all the way out at the end without causing any ship-handling problems at all. And, since we expected their use to be mostly disruptive -to cause trouble before the main battle- having them fire forward was fine.

We still put eight more launchers behind the magazine, in case we needed to fire at someone who wasn’t in front of us. They were on the sides, four port and four starboard, so as to not interfere with the guns which were above and below. The ship was large enough to allow that. We didn’t think we needed those launchers, but it was better to install them than not. They all fed from the same magazine, which was twice as large as the Kents’, holding 120 missiles. If all launchers were full, each of our third-flight Snakes could carry 136 missiles. That was still fewer missiles than Harpy, though.

And, when it was all said and done, adding those spaces -the launchers and the magazines for both missiles and torpedos- actually decreased the construction time since it split the bow of the ship into a separate subassembly that could be built in a separate frame and then mated, armor and all, with the rest of the ship.

As it turned out, we never used those missiles for their intended purpose. They were less destructive than the guns, and using them at long range would only alert the Sa’arm that we were coming. They would all start moving and evading, and launch all their small craft. The only use they would ever get was if we wanted to fire at someone too far away for the guns and already maneuvering. Since we generally attacked from outside of the Sa’arm range to detect us, we ended up never needing the missiles. And the only time we used any of the FTL torpedos was when one of our forces ran out of message torpedos and they used a couple of them to check in with us at Beerat and ask when the next supply ship was coming.

We wanted more Kents. They were smaller and cheaper than the Snakes and allowed us to build more hulls from the same resources. Sometimes you needed concentrated firepower and armor, and the Snakes were the ships to send. Other times, it was better to be able to spread out some and do more than one thing at a time. The Kents were better for that.

The only thing we didn’t like about them was that they couldn’t survive a close encounter with a Sa’arm capital ship. Well, duh, that wasn’t their fault! I shouldn’t have sent them in that close. We had learned our lesson, and in the future we wouldn’t send them in that close.

More of our “Improved Shiro” class, too. What? Yeah, we started by calling them the “Shiro-Plus” class, then that got changed to “Shiro-II”, then to “Improved Shiro”, and that got shortened to “I-Shiro”, or even “iShiro” if you used to use computers back on Earth and you had a sense of humor. It’s all the same design, though.

Should I talk about how we named ships? Sure, it’s my campfire, I can talk about whatever I want. The original Shiros had all been named after Japanese castles, as the original 60 Castles had been named after English castles. There weren’t that many castles, though, and after those first groups they all started using whatever names were available. For the Castles/Ainsworths, most of them were named after destroyers and other escorts in the Allied navies of WW2.

For the Shiros, after they ran out of Japanese castles they used Korean forts, Chinese hill-towns, anything oriental-sounding that ever had soldiers defending a wall. We were naming our I-Shiros as a kind of combination of those sources. Our I-Shiros were all named after escort ships in WW2’s Imperial Japanese Navy, the IJN.

The only name we rejected was ‘Kamikaze’. There really was an IJN destroyer named Kamikaze. It was built in 1922 and it survived the war. That was something not many Japanese warships could claim so maybe it was lucky, but none of us were willing to assign men and women to a ship with that name and send it out to fight. Call us superstitious, but we weren’t doing that.

We named the first four ships -all I-Shiros- completed at the ‘New Barton Yard’ Ayanami, Miyuki, Maiden Castle, and Majorca, in memory of the smaller ships we had lost here in Beerat. We continued that with our larger ships, with the first three Kents we built there named Kestrel, Coventry, and Benin, and the next Snake named Coralsnake. Except for Ayanami, Miyuki, and Coventry, the new ships were all bigger, more powerful, and better defended than their namesakes, and we hoped that we would never have to use a name a third time.

Anyway, as it stood we were pretty happy with our Snakes, Kents, and I-Shiros, and thought that just building more of them was the best way to continue our success. However, we weren’t just here to hold Beerat. Eventually, we were going to have to take the fight to the enemy, and that led us to the other two things we built at Barton Yard, bombers and barges.

A scout’s job is intelligence. Go gather all the information you can and return to base with what you learned, right? The best scout would be the smallest ship you could build, because that had the best chance of not being noticed and it let you build lots of them.

However, none of us liked sending unarmed people out to face the ‘forces of darkness’. Even the Ainsworths, the updated and improved version of the venerable Castle, weren’t anything we wanted to put our people in. It was far too large to be a good sneaking spy, and far too small to win if it got caught.

What we came up with during our bull sessions was a two-part weapon system. First, a patrol bomber. It would carry a crew of three and be able to stay out for several days, maybe even a week if necessary. It was large enough to allow the Pilot/Commander to get up and walk around, and even sleep while his SensO and Gunner kept an eye on things, but beyond that it was as small and stealthy as we could make it. If it was a training mission, they could even bring three conks with them, but we promulgated policy that we would not do that on a combat mission. Besides, they were small enough to get pretty crowded with six people.

Actually, that was a pretty sexist policy. Female conks would not be risked on a combat mission. Male conks, if desired, could accompany the crews. As a practical matter, it wasn’t a concern. The vast majority of our Volunteers were males with two female conks, and those two conks were invariably young-and-beautiful baby factories. They may not have been young-and-beautiful when they were picked up, but by the time they’d made it out here to us they were.

For offense, we gave the craft a single 55 cm shipkiller missile, like the old torpedo bombers, and added a light Particle Beam mount for close-in defense. Okay, the PB mount was really just there to make the crew feel better, and they knew it. The Sa’arm didn’t have anything that that weapon could knock out, except maybe their own bombers and the Plasma Torpedos that the dickhead bombers were armed with. We also gave them the Confederacy’s old ‘nav shield’, the original shield we had started with before we figured out how to improve it.

That old type of shield was actually what the Sa’arm used for their own ships; they captured a working example from the Confederacy before we got involved, and as soon as they figured it out they integrated it into their own ships. That old shield was all the bombers had power for. We called them ‘PBYs’ after the old patrol aircraft from World War Two.

The missile didn’t come with a launcher that could give it a starting velocity. To keep the craft as small as possible, it was mounted in a recess on the bottom of the hull. The crew would have to make a tactical decision whether it was better to launch it from long range so it could build up some speed, or if it was better to creep in as close as possible for surprise, and accept that the missile wouldn’t be moving very fast yet when it hit.

Second, we came up with a mother-ship for eight of those patrol bombers. No way were we willing to call it a “Carrier” like everybody else was using. It was supposed to stay safely out of sight and provide a home with a hot meal, a clean bed, and a bedwarmer for each bomber crewman. It carried 16 spare missiles and could do some service-station type maintenance, checking the oil, washing the windows, and maybe changing a flat tire, but no major repairs. It was just a portable forward base that let the patrol bombers stay on station for as long as needed. It had a large central space that opened from below and was large enough to hold two bombers, if someone decided that they needed a higher level of maintenance than could be done out in the vacuum.