Chapter 15: Basic Qualifications

We held two of the eight ships back from our initial 'overhaul'. All we did for Appleby Castle and Bere Castle was verify that the 18 acceleration couches worked properly, and then we used them to cycle everyone through a quick hands-on course on how to run the ships.

We started with making sure that they were safe to use as is, then we did as much live testing as we could in Jupiter's shadow. We declared Jupiter's low orbital volume from the edge of the atmosphere out to half a million kilometers, behind the shadow where it couldn't be seen from Earth, and 'north' of the rings to be a ship-handling training area, and marked the whole volume as a hazardous area not to be entered by anyone with an actual job to do. With that, we could send training ships in there and all they had to worry about was running into each other.

We still had most of the pods left over from when we converted one of the freighters to be the core of Jupiter Station, so one of them got towed over to just the other side of the rings to act as the training area traffic control center. Since that was still inside the range of the transporter pads, that was all we needed to get started, and our training area was in business. Before long, the training area had its own tugs and other small craft, but when they started out all it had was that pod for traffic control.

Using those two ships, we were able to get the core ship-handling teams -the CIC, Bridge, and Engineering watchstanders- up to speed in only a couple of days for each crew. Yes, me and my team took our turns at the 'Grinder' as the Commonwealth veterans called it.

The exercises started out simple, of course, because at first we didn't know what we were doing. Navigation exercises without moving the ship. Bringing the plant up ready to answer bells. That phrase went away, though. The veterans understood it, but new people wouldn't and we had to throw away a lot of our old cherished nautical jargon to streamline the training. If there was a civilian way to say something that made sense, a lot of times us old salts gritted our teeth and changed the way we spoke. That became 'bringing the plant up ready to get underway'.

Actually getting under way. Changing acceleration. Running the ship all the way up to 30 g's. Proving that each crewman could function anywhere in the possible range of acceleration felt. We had a lot of room to play with in Jupiter's shadow, but for some of these exercises we had to stretch the outer limit of the training area.

After some discussion with the doctors, we added another step to that: Locking the engines to no more than 5 g's, then turning the damper off and running the engines up from zero to 5 g's and back. That let everyone know that it could be done if needed and that the couches still worked, and what it would be like if they had to do it for real. No one liked it, but if we were going to use these ships in combat we needed to face the fact that at some point we were likely to have to try to escape in a damaged ship, and it was best to be prepared beforehand.

After that exercise, we didn't unlock the main engine limit until we had turned the damper back on and verified that it, and all the couches, were all working properly. Then they did the original run up to 30 g's and back exercise again to prove to their subconscious minds that it was working right again.

Changing course. Navigating to a known waypoint. By the time we had gotten to that stage, the Station had provided us with some waypoints to practice with, basically the space version of a floating navigation buoy. If you'd ever played any of those space-fighter computer games you knew what you were supposed to do.

Docking with a station. That wasn't really difficult, with the AIs doing all the actual piloting, but it was still an evolution that we had every watch team do. And, rather than take a chance on something going wrong with anything important, we had the industrial people on the south side of the rings build us a pair of docking arms. Having two of them allowed us to separate them by several thousand kilometers, and it gave us some redundancy, too, in case one of them got crunched.

Each arm was just a long tube of steel, about 10 meters in diameter and about 100 meters long when they were done. They were only 20 meters long when they were first set up, though. At each end and every 20 meters down the tube as it grew there was another smaller set of tubes like crossbars, extending out 5 meters from the central tube in four directions. Yeah, it looked kinda like one of the Aurora freighters without the central habitat ball or engineering end. That's probably where they got the idea.

Anyway, every watch team had to dock with one of those crossarms, dump a couple of 'passengers and cargo' off into the 'station', undock, go around the station, and dock with the opposite crossarm and take on their 'new passengers and cargo'.

Only after the watch team had actually done all that did we certify them as minimally qualified in Basic Castle Normal-Space Operations, or BCNSO. We figured that, once we really got going, we would have that, a 'Hyperspace Operations' or HSO qual, and then when we had the weapons systems down we would add an ACO course for Advanced/Combat Operations. Since one team could train another once they had their own ship, we concentrated on getting a single 11-man watch team qualified for each crew.

It didn't take long at all for the construction guys to start adding things to the two docking arms, turning them into real stations. The first things we added were power plants big enough to run transporter networks, along with the brains to control them. No, that wasn't the first thing. Each arm got a pod first, for people to live in and use as office space.

Admiral Sykes ended up detaching his aide to go stay in one of the pods to supervise the ship-handling training program. He himself stayed back on the 'south side' on F12 to supervise the overhaul and modification program. After we had enough people trained up to act as safety crews and we had some expectation that we could prevent the worst of the training accidents, that pod we were using as a traffic control station on the 'north side' got plugged into the other arm.

Both docking arms continued growing from there, eventually becoming complete space stations in their own rights, with berthing, offices, classrooms, everything we might need to run a ship-handling school. Having both arms capable of running a transporter network enabled us to quickly move personnel, supplies, and parts around as needed on both sides of the rings. There was no need for a ship to have to make the trip from one side of the rings to the other, to unload a newly-qualified watch team and pick up another batch to be run through the 'Grinder'.

Right in the middle of all this we got another delivery. As we had been told, this was only four ships. And, thankfully, this time we knew almost everything we needed to know about them when we got them. These were the freighters we had been told about that were capable of landing on a planet.

We had plans, we had schematics, we had sleep-trainer modules for them. All we had to do was select crews, run them through the training, and let them go. Of course we would have to modify them, too, before we could use them as troop landing ships, but we didn't have to do a major overhaul before they were safe to live in.

Until we had our eight Castles overhauled, we didn't need the 50-man crews we were planning on for those ships. We kept 20 to 25 men for each ship and released everyone else for other tasks. Some moved into construction, some moved to the training center, some went to the observation posts we were leaving in all those nearby systems. Four of the crews being groomed for the next set of Castles got re-directed as crews for these ships.

That meant that when these ships showed up, we already had crews ready for them. They had no experience with this class of ship, but each crew had at least one watch team that had been through the Grinder and we could at least trust them to not run into Ganymede on their way back to the station. I still got pulled out of Allie -where I was trying to reconcile the 40-meter length of a shuttle with the 18-meter length of the hull depression we had to fit our ship's boat in- to go with the shuttles to go pick them up. I pulled Billy out of the compartment rebuild effort so I'd have some company.

Actually getting the landers, the ships we ended up calling the "Mercury" class, turned out to be a lot less trouble than getting the Castles had been. These were not 7- or 800,000 year old armed patrol ships from before the Confederacy was even created. These were modern ships, no more than a few tens of thousands of years old, and they came with all the modern developments already installed when they were built.

As we got them, they already had the Confederacy's Nav Shield and acceleration compensators. They had no acceleration couches, because they didn't need them. On the other hand, that meant that these things were restricted to the same 10 or 12 g's accel that the Auroras were limited to.

One of my assigned tasks was to find out if that could be changed at all, and, if so, if it would be worth our while to rip out that compensator and put in the Castles' damper system. If these things were going to get shot at, and maybe pursued by armed enemies, getting the absolute highest accel possible to enable escape was a far higher priority than crew or cargo comfort.

Our first 'hey, that was easy' moment was when the first shuttle landed in the bay opened for it and our prospective CO for that ship went to assume command. None of these ships cared. It just wasn't a big deal to them who commanded them or who was onboard.

The shuttle said the air was breathable, so we opened the big cargo hatch in back and just walked out onto the bay's deck in our hoods. Our arm-band monitors said it was breathable, too, so I let the CO and his doc make that call while I looked around.

These ships were just a little longer than the Castles, but they were far larger in interior volume. I mean, they had a boat bay large enough to park these shuttles in. It was like the difference between a naval 'cruiser' and a commercial 'cruise ship'. They may be the same length at the waterline, but one was built for speed and maneuverability and damage resistance, control, and repair, while the other was built for comfort and cargo space with the expectation that if they ever got any kind of damage someone would come help them.

We knew from the drawings that there was a second bay the same size as this, on the other side of the interior bulkhead. If they didn't have that bulkhead, there would have been room in the combined boat bay for three shuttles, but the design kept them separate so that two different cargos with different environmental needs could be carried at once. We were going to have to experiment. Was it better to leave them like this, to have two separate compartments in case of accidents or combat damage? Or was it better to open it up and cram a third shuttle in here, to be able to land that many more assault troops in a third location in a surprise attack?

That would be someone else's headache though. Admiral Kennedy was working up a landing force organization, according to my daily emails from Diana. By the time we had these ships ready to use, hopefully we would have some kind of landing force to put in them. Not my problem, man. I was only here to look around, answer a couple of questions, and be available to help if things went wrong on us.

While the crew went to their stations to get the ship underway, Billy and I took a tour of the cargo spaces. Often, your perception of a task depends upon your experiences. On the one hand, converting all these cargo holds into troop berthing spaces would be a lot of work. On the other hand, when we compared that work to the aggravation of ripping the Castles apart to make them usable as warships, this job seemed minor.

Accomplishing my assigned task was another one of those 'gee, that was easy' things. All I had to do was ask the ship's AI. The installed propulsion plant was capable of driving the ship at 20 g's if equipment lifetime was not a concern. Doing so long term would lead to reduced lifetime of the machinery, of course. The plant could push the ship at 15 g's indefinitely. Yes, either way the occupants would all die horribly when the compensator failed.

Yes, it was possible to install the damper system that the Castles had. The ship had plenty of excess power available for additional equipment like that, and it wouldn't take much space, either. No, the two systems could not be used together. Neither system could be started when the other was in use. The one in use would have to be shut down before starting up the other or they would probably both fry.

That would allow the crew and embarked troops to have the best of all possible worlds. When not in a tactical emergency, they could use the original compensator, keep acceleration below 12 g's, and enjoy free access anywhere in the ship with normal Earth gravity 'down'.

When necessary, the ship could put everyone in their beds or acceleration couches, cease acceleration for a few seconds, shut down the compensator, bring up the damper, and take off at 20 g's. It would probably be wise to just keep the damper on any time the ship was in an enemy-held system in case emergency maneuvers were required.

When the ship was no longer in a combat zone, they could again drop accel, swap to the compensator again, and go back to enjoying normal Earth gravity.

What happened in reality was that those four ships got sent out pretty much 'as is' at first with no mods that affected the ship itself, as soon as the cargo holds had been converted to troop berthing compartments and we had breathing bodies in those compartments. The bunks and lockers and weapons storage facilities were easy, that was pretty much just sheet metal fabrication and installation and it was faster for human crews to install them after they were built somewhere else than it would have been for the ship's internal systems to build them in place.

We needed to get this war moving. We didn't know what the enemy was like, we didn't know how far away they were, or how fast they could move. Getting something out there as fast as we could was more important than building an immense fleet that would be ready for combat in ten years. We needed both, yes, and we would work on both at the same time, but until we had established where the Sa'arm were and how well they fought, it was more important to send out something now.

Still, during my 3rd class cruise, the 'summer vacation' that the Navy sent all midshipmen on between their first and second years of college, I had spent a month on one of our oilers. The middies at Annapolis got the warships. Us Aggies got the support ships. These were the huge tankers that took fuel to the warships so that they didn't have to return to port for a fill-up. By huge, I mean that we refueled the Wisconsin once while we were out there. Yes, I'm that old. I've seen a battleship at sea. As a kid I'd been on one of those old battleships moored as tourist attractions somewhere, and they were pretty big. As an adult, though, the battleship looked pretty small, looking down on it from our main deck on the oiler.

The ship I joined was one of the oldest ships we had. Seriously. It was commissioned during WW2, and it was still doing its job in 1988 during my 3rd class middie cruise. A bit slower, and a lot uglier, but as long as it could get fuel out to the warships there was no reason to spend shipbuilding dollars on a replacement.

The point here is that Caloosahatchee still had a pair of 3" mounts on either quarter. They had been installed in 1945 to shoot at incoming kamikazes and never removed. These were both twin mounts. They were electro-hydraulic, meaning that if electric power was available then pressing pedals would spin the mount or elevate the guns, but fire control was completely manual. Aiming was still done by lining up a pair of crosshairs, one in front of the gunner and the other several feet out in front of him. In 1988! The mount also had several wheels that the gun crew could spin to aim the mount if we lost power due to combat damage.

Every time the ship went out they would have gunnery practice. Have you ever seen the horror movie spoof "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes"? The Deck department would throw out several ten-foot diameter red balloons and the Captain would get on the 1MC and rant about General DelMonte and his ravenous hordes of rampaging killer tomatoes, and the gunners would shoot at the floating balloons until they hit them. Great fun for everyone, and there was even a point to it.

Those four guns wouldn't do anything to fend off a Soviet missile or torpedo, or even the radar-controlled 3" guns on the back of a Krivak, a floating pile of crap that would die within seconds of being noticed by any of our warships. Even the Soviet doctrine had considered them disposable and treated them as decoys that had to be given attention, thus allowing more effective ships to live that much longer. However, any pirate who tried what was shown in "Captain Phillips" would get blown out of the water long before they got in AK-47 range. No one intent on piracy closes on any ship painted grey. Even the old ones that can no longer make more than 8 knots are suicide to approach without permission.

The point is that these ships needed guns too. Not to go cause trouble with, but for self-defense. They needed something that could convince bad guys to leave them alone. Nothing special, nothing that they could use to attack enemy commerce with, just something they could use to hold off enemy shuttles with. I had a bad feeling about sending these ships out completely unarmed.

On the other hand, we didn't have anything to arm them with. There was talk of converting some NATO armaments like shipboard or aircraft missiles, but the AIs had a fit any time the subject came up, and I wasn't sure any real work had been done on that anyway. For now, they were completely unarmed transports. All we could do was hope if they ran into the Sa'arm the ones they ran into were just as surprised as we were.

That done-by-hand berthing installation was especially important, since each troop berthing space needed its own replicator-recycling-bathroom system. The ship pretty much had to do that itself, much as the Castles had had to do their hull modifications themselves. That kept the ships' internal maintenance systems pretty busy until they were done. Doing all the structural and sheet metal work ourselves got both jobs done at the same time, using materials provided by our growing industrial facility.

Anyway, moving the four freighters back to Jupiter Station didn't cause any trouble at all. Each crew had enough people who had been through our training program over on the north side of the rings that the movement went smoothly.

Meanwhile, our modifications to the Castle class ships were coming together and they would be ready for service soon. It was time to take the next step. We had been discussing where to put a live-fire range to learn how to use the weapons on those ships and coming up empty. There just wasn't anywhere in the solar system to do that if we wanted to avoid detection from Earth and all the satellites, telescopes, and other instruments they had learning the secrets of the universe. Our 'Advanced Course' would have to be somewhere else, but still as close as we could get it.

Alpha Centauri was nice and convenient, but at the same time it didn't have a lot of resources. Alpha Centauri was a distant double with -A and -B that varied anywhere from 10 to 30 or more AU apart, and stable orbits for objects of less than solar mass weren't easy to come up with. Yes, we could construct some if we spent enough time playing on a computer, but no mindless mass of leftover debris was going to find them without help. It was for sure that no planet could survive in the liquid zones for either star.

Worse, it was really a triple system with the brown dwarf Proxima Centauri (as the system's third star it was officially designated "Alpha Centauri C") far enough out to disrupt the system's Oort cloud. The whole volume surrounding the system for about a lightyear was clean. The only useful item in the whole system was a huge rock about a quarter the mass of Uranus in orbit around the main star but roughly in Mercury's orbit. It had been cooked clean of anything volatile billions of years ago. The lightest element we were going to find on that planet would be something like sodium. It would be a great place to find things like gadolinium, mind you. If we ever needed that in mega-ton lots. And didn't mind wading through molten lead and iodine to get it.

Proxima Centauri, on the other hand, when the survey gave it a close look, was just surrounded by rocks. Most of the debris in or near the triple system had been swallowed by the three stars, but everything that avoided that did so by finding a stable orbit around P Centauri. It had a LOT of stuff in orbit. That would be a great place to build a shipyard. We could truck in volatiles from Jupiter and her sisters.

Barnard's Star, on the other hand, wasn't good for anything that we could think of. It simply didn't mass enough to have collected enough debris to produce planets. On the other hand, it was a gravity well and massive enough to have collected the same debris you would find orbiting any normal star. We decided that we would reserve the entire Alpha Centauri system for future use and designate Barnard's Star as our first live-fire range.

We had the Darjee take one of the Auroras to Alpha C and another to Barnard's Star and wait, just in case we had trouble. Each ship had several men we could use as crew replacements if needed.

We took Appleby and Bere out for our first hyperspace jumps under human control. We weren't really up to synchronized fleet movements together yet, but their assigned crews -not the trainees they usually had doing things but the men formally assigned to those two ships- had been practicing. As long as they didn't try to do things too close together they wouldn't get in each other's way, and until we had some kind of lifeboat we wanted two ships to stay together in case one of them had a problem. I got asked to supervise the exercise, so I turned Allie over to Dickie as acting Captain and I went on Appleby Castle while Billy took Bere Castle.

I had no problem leaving Dickie in charge of Allie. I still thought of him as the Captain-to-be for Allington Castle, the guy who would take over once we were done with our training and development program. Or, maybe they'd leave me in command and give him a different ship of his own. He was wasted as my XO.

We'd have to see how busy I could keep him on this small ship. If there ever came a time when we had more ships than people -like right now, for example- these ships would probably start losing extra crew to man the others. For now, though, Allington Castle was serving as a school ship, just like the ones on the North side of the rings, and had extra people assigned. And, not only extra people, but many of those we had were grossly over-qualified people, actually. Admirals Sykes and Andrews had given me every possible advantage here. Hopefully, I would never need them.

There wasn't any reason to stress the equipment, so when we were ready we boosted at 20 G for our jump point. It took us an hour and a half just to get outside of Jupiter's HEZ.

Our first jump had been carefully planned and practiced. As a first test, all we were going to do was go straight out from Jupiter until we were past the HEZ, go into hyperspace, wait two seconds, and pop out again to look around at where we were.

We had originally proposed 5 seconds, but that just wouldn't work. The drive was too fast and we'd be out in the Oort cloud by the time we counted to 5. The drive could be tuned, of course. It actually used the normal-space attitude jets to emit a small amount of ions out through the hyperspace bubble, and the reaction of those ions with normal space made the bubble -and everything in it- scoot like a scalded cat with no inertial effects that could be felt by those inside the bubble. Those few ions returning to the normal universe also made a trail that could be tracked, if you had the right instruments and an AI to watch them and you happened to be in the right place soon enough.

These drives were supposedly set to go just under 20 lightyears per day. To be a little more precise, it was about 7100 times the speed of light. In those five seconds we should have gone about 35,500 light-seconds. Divide by 60 for light-minutes, divide by 60 again by light-hours and you are just under 10. In those five seconds we should have gone just under the distance light would travel in 10 hours.

If you prefer AUs, an AU is about 500 light-seconds, so in those 5 seconds we should have gone about 73 AU, or two and a half times further than Neptune is from the Sun. And, we were already at Jupiter when we started. Well, way past Jupiter, by the time we reached the edge of the HEZ. Once we ran the numbers we scaled that first test back to only 2 seconds. That would only put us out another 30 AU past Jupiter, out at the outer limit of the traditional solar system where Pluto was.

Once we had verified that the two-second jump had done what we expected, we were going back into hyperspace for the second part of the test. This time we were going to immediately circle around the system until we were outside of Neptune, then head in and try to pop out close to Neptune's HEZ and in its shadow from Earth. Not complicated, but I still didn't really understand how the ship could navigate in hyperspace. Steering, or making the ship go in a particular direction, was easy but navigation, which was looking around, seeing where you were, and determining which direction to steer, was still hazy. We chose Neptune for this test because it was behind us, relative to the solar system, and getting close to being behind the Sun from Earth. No matter what happened, Earth shouldn't see us.

If everything went right, we would only be in hyperspace for six or seven seconds. This drive was just too fast to use inside the system. On the other hand, that shuttle trip between Earth and Jupiter was up past 23 hours now and surely we could do something about that with these ships.

Again, once the course was set, the AIs did everything for us. We were just passengers.

This time we let Bere Castle go first. There wasn't any "one giant leap for mankind" stuff. Every one of us had gone out in the Auroras at least once, doing those surveys. Going into and out of hyperspace was no big deal. Some of the guys said they could feel it, but I couldn't.

Oh, I felt something. I could tell we had shifted, but in or out I couldn't say. Being in hyperspace wasn't any different than being in normal space if you weren't using your main engines. If you woke up from a good sleep, you'd have to look out a window to tell if the ship was in hyperspace going 7100 times the speed of light or just drifting in normal space doing nothing. If we were using the main engine, we could tell that and know we were in N-Space, but if the mains were shut down there was just no way a human's senses could tell without looking out a window. And, the only windows these ships had were on the bridge.

We were keeping 500 Km separation from each other and when we got to the calculated jump point Bere Castle stopped accelerating and then just disappeared. There wasn't anything to tell us where she went. Supposedly, if we got close enough to her entry point we would be able to detect the faint ion trail that we already knew about, but we were too far away for that. We would have to practice following that trail later, when we had more experience.

We waited the agreed 60 seconds and followed her. After two seconds, we popped out into normal space again. I was in the Fire Control Center with a couple other guys, and we had two of our consoles set to repeat the CO's and the Navigator's consoles. We had a screen showing the view behind us when we entered hyperspace, and we could compare it to the current view. In the 'before' screen, Jupiter was still visible to the naked eye with no zoom. In the 'after' screen, all we could see was a bright star, the Sun. Jupiter was too far back to be visible from here.

Determining our exact position was a job for the Navigator and the AI. From those two screens, though, it was clear that we'd moved out pretty far. Within a couple of seconds, we had an updated plot that showed the solar system and our position, way out past Pluto's orbit. The small-scale tactical display showed a ship 8,000 Km away from us, identified as "Bere Castle". For a first try, that was good.

However, that made it clear that synchronized maneuvering was going to be out until we got all the ships tuned up to the point where the drives and navigation systems all did the exact same thing, for any specific maneuver, on every ship. If we couldn't stay in close formation for two seconds, how were we going to do it for a week when we started sending fleets out to attack systems a hundred lightyears away?