Chapter 6: Year 12: Building a Bigger Hammer

Okay, which expedition was next? Right, our 6th one. I don’t have any fun stories about that one, either. I stayed here in the Womb keeping us organized and Kevin took 2nd Fleet out to System Alpha again.

We had gone into the system we called Alpha twice before we thought that we’d done the job, then done the same in Beta, taking a lot of casualties each time. By the time we went to Gamma we had those Kongos, and they could absorb enough damage that we didn’t lose too many people, and we could stay long enough to get the job done for good. With the orbital weapon platforms our 3rd Fleet built for us, we could stay there forever. We had even set up a habitat for the OWP crews’ families, and then been shocked when the AIs called it a colony and considered “Gammaat” to be a new Confederacy member system.

Expedition Five, the one to System Delta, was just a repeat of Gamma, not worth trying to come up with stories about. We went in with the biggest fleet we could come up with -who cares if some of the crew haven’t quite mastered their station yet- and took no losses at all clearing out the orbitals. We got ships chewed up working over the planet while the engineers cobbled together some OWPs, but everything was repairable.

I think our total casualty list was below 100 again. Speaking as a human being any casualty was horrible, but speaking as an admiral and a politician, that was well within acceptable limits.

Besides, I wasn’t there. I was here talking with the Beer and setting up our latest colony at “Deltaat”.

Our 6th expedition, though, couldn’t go to the next system on our list like we wanted. System Alpha, the first one we went to, had recovered enough to be building ships again. We couldn’t have that, so we diverted Kevin to go back there again and shut them down for good.

Meanwhile, the boys out at Barton Yard had come up with a new toy for Kevin to take back to Alpha. You know that the Kents were just big fat Raptor hulls, with two huge “Junior Hero” guns, right? And the Snakes were just lengthened, scaled-up Kents with four guns, right? And the Kongos were fattened-up Snakes with enough armor to stand off a Sa’arm planet and trade shots?

Well, they had stretched the drawings again, making a longer fatter Kongo with enough room for six of those turrets, three on each side. Yeah, the earlier ships had turrets on the top and bottom. These had them on the sides. It was easier for us to visualize. As before, all six turrets held our “Junior Hero” gun that threw a 100 Kg slug at 100 Kilometers per second. And, just like the Kongos, all but the two end barbettes were built large enough to drop a full-sized Hero gun into, if we ever thought we needed it.

For now, they were just bigger versions of the Kongos, with more of the same guns and more of the same armor. We hadn’t run into anything that really needed the “Real Hero” gun, the ones that the Heros were built around. Those things threw 1000 Kg slugs, a whole metric tonne, at 100 KPS, but they were also roughly 150 meters long and would be just awkward as hell in a turret. Our design team had built in the possibility for the Kongos and done the same thing again for these 6-gun ships, but we didn’t need them and installing them would actually reduce the ships’ effective firepower.

To start with, a line-of-sight weapon can only shoot at things it can ‘see’. Obvious, yes. So, for a gun with a barrel, you need to be able to point that barrel at the target. Consider a target just barely above the hull’s horizon from the gun’s point of view. To line the bore up with that target, the barrel must be parallel to the hull. And, since the barrel -and central breech- have size, the pivot point must be high enough above the hull to allow the bore of the gun to be lowered to fire straight across.

The larger and more powerful the gun is, the larger, stronger, and heavier the breech and barrel must be to absorb the forces that happen when the gun is fired. The fatter the barrel and the breech are, the higher the turret has to stick out from the rest of the ship in order to lower the barrel and shoot at something on the hull’s horizon. And, the higher -and stronger- the surrounding ship’s structure has to be, to support that turret. Without getting in the way of any OTHER shipboard function like propulsion, navigation, or even self-defense.

Did I mention that the turret and structure has to be able to absorb the recoil impulse from that gun? No matter where it’s aimed? Because the recoil is in the opposite direction. If you’re shooting ‘up’, then the recoil is ‘down’, into the ship, and that’s easy to absorb. However, if you are shooting across the hull, on the hull’s ‘horizon’, then the recoil is also sideways, and that’s a good deal more difficult to absorb. And, if you want to shoot at a target with negative elevation, below the hull’s ‘horizon’, then the recoil is UP, trying to detach the whole gun from the ship. The engineering to deal with all of this gets increasingly awkward as mass increases and firing angle gets lower. Did I mention that the barrel, breech, and all the supporting structure isn’t supposed to get in the way of any other shipboard functions?

With all of our previous ships, we had been able to roll the ship until all guns, top and bottom, could bear on a single target on the ship’s horizon if we wanted. If we installed one of the “Real Hero” guns, we had a choice between keeping the turret low so the shots went ‘up’ and the impulse was directed ‘down’ into the ship and was absorbed by the ship’s structure, or raising the turrets high enough to allow the gun to shoot at the horizon, at the cost of having to build in a strong enough barbette to absorb the impulse even when it was away from the ship.

We ran the numbers for how far the turrets had to be raised and what the reaction force would be for a full-power horizon shot and we didn’t like them, so we kept the barbettes down low. And we didn’t like what that did to our tactics.

If we installed one of our now-standard “Junior Hero” turrets, we could shoot at a target on the horizon with all six guns. If we installed a “Real Hero” gun, we had to mount it low enough that it could only fire in a cone of about 140 degrees, from straight up to 70 degrees away from vertical in any direction, leaving another 30 degrees at the horizon that we couldn’t aim at. And the three turrets on the other side of the ship couldn’t do their 30 degrees either, so on top and bottom of the ship there were 60 degrees that none of the guns could fire at. We would have to roll ship to bring one of the batteries to bear, reducing our effective main battery to only three guns. Not to mention that we would have that same 60-degree blind spot directly ahead and astern of the ships, too.

And, we hadn’t run into anything that a Junior couldn’t kill. Sometimes it took several hits to find something important, but a bigger gun wouldn’t help with that. The larger projectile would be less susceptible to counterfire, but we weren’t seeing that as an issue with the Junior guns. We were, with the ‘Baby Hero’ guns that threw a 50 Kg slug, but not with the 100 Kg slugs the Junior guns threw.

Last, we had computer-processed (actually AI-enhanced) sensor systems and fire control. The Sa’arm didn’t. We could stand off at a range beyond their ability to even see us, and pound them with any of our current guns. If some of their ships and orbital structures were big enough to need more than one shot to kill, so what? That was why we had more than one ship, multiple guns on each ship, and reload times under a couple of seconds. We could keep shooting almost indefinitely until our target did something entertaining.

So, we had reached the point where we could probably actually achieve my old fantasy of mounting a Hero gun on a turret, but there was no point to it. Life is that way, sometimes. I got a lot of ribbing about having my childhood dreams crushed. It’s okay, guys. I’ll live.

Still, we kept the option. If the Sa’arm ever came up with something that we needed the bigger gun to kill, the yard would need less than a week to change the turrets out. And, oh, hell, why not see if it really works? When we finally got around to building the first two prototype ‘battleships’, we did them both ways.

We built one with six of our usual Junior Hero guns, and we put four of the Real Hero guns on the other with the two end guns normal. Just as an experiment, to see how it works in real life. And to make the old man feel good. The two Junior guns, the farthest-forward starboard gun and the farthest-aft port gun, gave the ship global coverage. Those two guns could cover more than a hemisphere and they were installed directly opposite each other, so every direction was visible from at least one of them. If anything needed more than one slug, faster than one gun could fire, we would have to roll or turn to bring the big guns to bear.

Those two ships, as big as they were, were placed in temporary commission as experimental weapons test platforms, kinda like Big Dick had been several years before. I had their names all ready for them, but the yard jumped the starting-gun on me and they never did get their ‘official’ real names. They called the one with normal Junior guns “Daddy”, and the one with the huge ones “Mommy”. Do not anger Mommy.

So, for our sixth expedition Kevin took 2nd Fleet back to System Alpha for the third time. We held him back until the “Weird Sisters” as Kevin was calling them were ready. When he went he took the two prototype battleships, seven Kongos, about fifteen Snakes, and the usual supporting cast of smaller ships. This time, Joey sent his “3rd Fleet” in first, as soon as we decided to go back to Alpha, and started building his orbital platforms and repair facilities as fast as he could without attracting any attention.

This time we were going to stay; we didn’t want to have to do this every couple of years. Besides, if the AIs were going to declare this to be yet another colony “Alphaat”, that changed a lot of what Joey was going to build. Instead of building the absolutely minimal habitat for his people, they were going to go ahead and start with the permanent structures that the colony would want. It took longer, but as long as the Sa’arm left him alone it wasn’t a problem.

We never understood why the Sa’arm didn’t go for space industry the way we did. That gave us a huge advantage, and they had to have realized that. Sure, they built all their big stuff in orbit, but they usually did it, as near as we could tell, using resources extracted only from the planet they were living on. And that was hard on the planet. They certainly didn’t act like they had the EPA on their backs about waste disposal and pollution.

We had access to all surviving records from that four-ship expedition that Dothan had sent out a few years before, 150 or so lightyears behind the front, to find an abandoned Sa’arm planet that the Marines could explore in hopes of understanding their tunnel complexes. The expedition wasn’t prepared to fight; it was a shoe-string research project with something like a company of Marines for security. They had found several abandoned planets and they all looked like industrial wastelands.

It turned out that the Sa’arm apparently never completely abandoned any of their planets. The expedition landed on a Sa’arm planet, started to explore the empty tunnel complex they found, and got their asses handed to them by some we-thought-you-weren’t-home dickheads. And, that was on a planet where they thought nothing could live any more.

Clearly, the Sa’arm had lower quality of life expectations than we did. There weren’t any ships in orbit and nothing alive on the surface, but there were still plenty of dickheads somewhere. Most of the exploring party didn’t make it back to their ships, and some of the ships didn’t make it back to their base, either.

Anyway, we were pretty sure that the Sa’arm wouldn’t suddenly get a yen for space-based industry. As long as no dickhead ships happened by, they wouldn’t be discovered, and the sooner his crews started working, the sooner we’d have those orbiting weapons platforms in place and we could stop worrying about System Alpha. The best-laid plans, right? The Weird Sisters got rather more of a combat test than we had figured on.

Anyone who says that the Sa’arm can’t learn is an idiot. We had been getting message torpedos that the Sa’arm in System Alpha were rather more active than we had seen elsewhere.

The dickheads apparently had concluded that their ships had something wrong with them, as they had stopped launching courier ships. And, it didn’t look like they could build any of their larger ones on the planet. Instead, they were only launching smaller ones, not much larger than their bombers, and they were using them to rebuild their orbital presence. And, there were too many of them for our PBYs to take on.

If they built a courier ship and it headed out for the HEZ, one of our bombers could kill it with a missile. However, there was nothing our boys could do about the flock of dickhead bombers that came back down the missile-track looking for them. All they could do was run for it, and go get another missile for the next attempt while another PBY took over the watch.

And that was getting harder to do safely. In fact, the dickheads seemed to be doing periodic sweeps of the whole system, using their bombers and other small ships they apparently had built down on the planet. It was like they were looking for us or something. It was bad enough for our PBY team, watching for outgoing ships, but at least they could move around and avoid the sweeps. It was going to be very difficult for Joey’s people to build any kind of infrastructure that they could hide from the dickheads and still let them do their jobs.

Third Fleet’s ships could easily stay clear of the patrols. They were maneuverable enough and had better sensors. However, within a few days it was clear that they weren’t going to be able to get anything done that way. Either they continued to play keep-away, or they shrugged, ignored the patrols, and started building their shipyard in full view of the dickheads. They didn’t think they could get anything done while fighting them off, either. Anyway, it wasn’t their decision, one of their message torpedos said.

Well, they were right there, it wasn’t. And, it wasn’t really Kevin’s or Joey’s, either. Screwing up here could lead to us losing control of the outer system. That, in turn, could lead to something even worse: these guys breaking free and telling all the other Sa’arm that someone was fighting back. We were going to have to go back into System Alpha and take those dickheads on again, and this time we may not get surprise.

Kevin asked if he and his staff could talk to the colony’s council about policy on this subject, and we were happy to oblige. Aside from defending ourselves and the Beer, going out and causing trouble for the dickheads was our highest priority, and System Alpha was our nearest neighbor. I mean, that’s how it got designated as ‘System Alpha’ in the first place. We followed the reverse of the course some of our early attackers had taken to reach us, and we found a system full of dickheads, busily building invasion fleets.

The Confederacy was fairly open-minded about how a Governor organized his government, and I had farmed out as many responsibilities as I could. My Governor’s Council had seven seats: Bill, Kevin and Joey for the official Confederacy military side, and Hannah, Tina, Eric, and LaRhonda for the unofficial ‘people’ side.

Bill and Kevin had been with me since the Beerat Denial Force was first formed back in Sol System. We knew and trusted each other implicitly.

General William Atsuke was my “Minister of Defense”, and held direct responsibility over our First Fleet and all of our fixed defenses. His job was defending the system. He had subordinates commanding various sectors like the outer patrol, Ale, the Womb, and Beer, and they often attended these sessions if their posts were concerned.

Admiral Kevin Bagsworth, on the other hand, was listed as my “Minister of Offense”. His job was everything outside of the Beerat system. He commanded our Second Fleet, our very small Marine formation, the various strategic scouting groups, and our planning offices.

Brigadier General Joey Witherspoon was in charge of all our development and production groups. His primary assistant, if we had to point at one, was the AI which lived in our only remaining K’treel Explorer. When we had started our first shipyard, Barton had asked if he could stay and manage it, and no one would argue that there was a better-run shipyard anywhere in Confederacy space. The Darjee AIs that we installed in all of our warships may consider him old and obsolete, but none of them could do that job. Invariably, they would claim that they were unable to take responsibility for such a task; it would have to be a human. Tell me again what makes you more modern and capable?

Eric Chung was the Mayor of Womb, our main colony here in the system. To CC back in Sol, he was just another one of Bill’s grunts, seconded to the Civil Service, but we needed someone to run the colony and I needed that someone to not be me. Having a light colonel pretending to be a Tribune run the Womb worked great for everyone.

Eric, Tina, and LaRhonda all worked for Hannah, who served as my Assistant Governor and Minister for Personnel Issues. She had Tina to handle issues with our conks, and she had LaRhonda to handle issues with the kids.

I’d had all of them except Eric forever. Hannah, Tina, and LaRhonda had originally left Earth with me as my concubines. Actually, Hannah and I had been together even longer, since she was my wife before that. We had had the usual ex-wife issues, but I wasn’t about to let her go no matter how bad it got, and eventually she had accepted that she had to share to keep me and things started to get better again.

Tina had finally passed the CAP test after years of trying, but she didn’t want to be a warrior and go kill things. She was more of a nurse or nurturer. Well, it just so happened that I was at that very time trying to assemble a do-it-yourself colony, and we needed a CS rep to deal with all the conks and kids. I asked if she’d be willing to herd conks for me. She accepted, and suddenly instead of my conk Tina Williams I had my assistant Signifer Christina Hernandez. Over the years I had had to promote her several times, just to keep up with her responsibilities. By this time she was a Legate and Hannah’s primary assistant for concubine affairs.

Hannah had actually passed the test the first time she took it, here in Beerat. The problem had always been that she wouldn’t take the damned test. If she passed it, she’d be transferred somewhere else, wherever the personnel people thought she was needed, and after all that we’d been through she wasn’t willing to let me go again.

When I got this Governor scam, I decreed that she would never be transferred anywhere that she didn’t want to go. She immediately took the test, passed it, became a Volunteer eligible for two conks herself, and promptly took my conk LaRhonda away with her to help her with all the kids.

That was the only part of her promotion that bothered me, as LaRhonda was the conk I slept the best with. I still got all the sex I wanted, but I also needed sleep afterwards. I had to get two more conks to help with our birth rate, and I didn’t get to sleep with Hannah or LaRhonda as much I wanted to.

LaRhonda was the only conk on the Council, and she was there as another one of Hannah’s assistants. She was our children’s advocate. When she was one of my conks she was our family’s “Head Mommy”, and when Hannah took her she promoted LaRhonda to the Womb’s head mommy. Any human in the Beerat system who was under the age of 14 could address LaRhonda as “Mom”. And any human in the system who was over 14 had damned well better listen if LaRhonda had something to say about their kids.

Officially Hannah was in the Civil Service like Tina and Eric, but she usually wore the gold skinsuit she had earned as my Head Bitch on several ships. My first posting had been as a junior officer on a Castle, and she was just another conk, right? My second posting, however, had been as Navigator and ship-handling instructor on CNS Dublin, one of our first Europas.

Those ships were our first major human-driven warship design and they had been built for two purposes. Primarily, they were proof that we could build larger warships that were combat effective, and they did that well. A second major design consideration, though, was our desperate need for school-ships which could crank out competent officers and crews. We may say that two out of every three ships we built in Sol System were Castles, but it’s also just as true that four out of every five of our naval officers were trained on a Europa.

The ships were multi-purpose, and manning would change wildly depending upon use. At times, Dublin was considered a ‘warship’, part of Earth’s defending fleet, and at those times I had one concubine with me. The rest of the family would be in fleet housing on Ganymede. At other times, the ship would act as a ‘schoolship’, and be overrun with trainees. At those times, we were allowed to bring our whole family onboard to serve as an example of how things worked out in the fleet.

The reason I bring that up is that there were times when I had as many as 50 officers under me as students, and every one of them was a recent recruit with two or four women who didn’t know any more about being a good concubine than their men did about being a good sponsor. Hannah kept a good many of those families from exploding, partly by her counseling skills but also by showing our family off as a good example.