Chapter 47

Dear Willow,

You certainly have a way with words. Your description of your battle and bedroom scenes paint vivid and uncomfortable pictures for me. I'm glad you're loved, but I hope that you get a better commander soon. One thing that all Civil Service Officers seem to get very intimate with is the difficulties that a poor commander can cause. I don't see anything much here as we don't really have a true combat unit, but I have seen that even in situations that would seem to not be dangerous can become dangerous if a bad supervisor is in charge. I cannot help but imagine that in the marines a bad superior officer leaves a great many more broken bodies and ruined lives in his wake.

A couple of days have passed and I just got a note from one of the research teams. It seems that they need (or want) a few of my current rat population. That is not such a surprise, what is somewhat of a surprise is that they offered me cockroaches in exchange. They said they'd seen an extract of some of my ideas about how to use them and rats in exploring Sa'arm warrens. The idea that they might prove a vector for some disease that would devastate the Sa'arm is enough to warm the heart of Ebeneezer Scrooge. (Or something like that... :)) If they do nothing except become a source of harassment I think they should be forwarded ASAP to planets where the Sa'arm are the only things left living. Put them down and have the initial generation carry RFID chips which can help us track them. They'll go to ground, maybe even not be noticed and a small swarm of micro satellites to gather and forward the information that the RFID chips reveal.

You never told me and it isn't in the technical data I have for your tanks but answer this, do your tanks use the same sort of LENR that the pods use for power? If so I had an idea that might lighten the load (in a manner of speaking) that your gun represents. I'm working up a set of drawings that might turn your main gun into a small rail gun of sorts. I doubt that you could get much more than five thousandths of C from it and I'm not sure it would work. But if you have the raw power of an LENR available the possibility seems to exist. If so a much smaller and lighter main gun round might be possible. After all at some point the amount of energy that will be stored in the round due to its speed should eliminate the need for explosive charges to damage equipment or installations. I've tried to find a way to include a small guidance computer and a small payload of fuel for direction changes. I'm thinking of using the two rail connections to hide a couple of tail fins. Two more could pop out as I've shown in my drawing when the round left the 'muzzle' of the gun, they could provide small course changes.

Since I can only do computer simulations of my concepts I don't know if they'll work or not. There isn't a firing range here and I'm not certain enough of my designs to test them without a real weapons engineer to double check the work I've done. So far as I'm concerned these are a concept that I'm handing to Marissa to be forwarded to a working group to be tested. However if I'm correct then you may get some fancy new guns.

I know now that you don't have much say in how you're armed either in your tank or in your personal life so to speak. For the most part you will be constrained to arm yourself with whatever weapon some person in the rear echelon has decided looks the coolest or most lethal not with what works. What I'm trying to say is that you should be able to decide whether your personal arm is a laser rifle or a trench broom. I wouldn't (and no one who is not on the front line) be able to guess what weapon will work best for you. Even within units I would be willing to bet that there are differences in styles of fighting that make different weapons suitable for different people. I do understand the reasoning behind standardized weapons. That is that it is easier for the navy to only have to provide a few standard types of weapons and ammunition. I'm just not sure if that logic isn't a holdover from a time when replicators were not available to cut down the lead time that the supply chain needs in order to provide a diversity of weapons. I suppose the main thing that you'd have to be careful about when using a rail gun would be that you didn't end up sending your round into a suborbital arc and accidentally shoot yourself in the backside... ! Still by lightening the round by the propellent it should be possible to carry more rounds and make them somewhat easier to handle.