Author Topic: The SDS Network of the Bastion: Unappreciated in their lifetime (Read 2424 times)

Liam's Ghost · « **on:** 02 November 2023, 02:29:10 »

For the first eighty five years of its existence, the Bastion's sole practical defense was its SDS Network. Numbering between eighty to one hundred and twenty capital class drones, hundreds (or thousands) of smaller craft, and numerous defense platforms and control stations, this was initially seen as an impregnable defense force, able to repel any attacker. And while that reputation collapsed catastrophically during the Amaris Coup, the SDS network would still form a decisive element of the Bastion's defensive strategy for another generation, and while the capital drones are now gone, the network's vast array of defense platforms and control stations remain in service, a vital part of the layered defenses around each world of the Bastion. Indeed, the SDS, its design, and organization, would be the precedent that would set how the Bastion's navy continues to operate to this very day.

M-4-3 (M-4 Block III) Capital Drone

The first problem that needed to be solved was how to actually build a complete SDS network without compromising the Bastion's secrecy. One could not simply snap an entire shipbuilding industry into being overnight, particularly in a still developing colony with a population in only the tens of millions. The Bastion's initial fleet of drones and equipment would have to be delivered from the Hegemony. But even that raised problems. The first of these is that Hegemony firms were already backlogged filling orders for hundreds of M-5 Drones and the hundreds more drones and support equipment that went along with them. The Director General could not simply cut in line without raising questions about what these ships were for. There was also the more basic problem. The M-5 model drone wasn't even designed to make the kind of trip required to deliver them to the Bastion. M-5 drones required a caretaker crew to jump between systems, and did not have the facilities or the cargo capacity to embark a crew for months of travel.

The solution to both problems would be found through a combination of innovation and skullduggery. At roughly the same time as the Bastion was getting itself established, the SLDF was also in the process of removing the last of its Baron class destroyers from service, selling many to the Great Houses, keeping a portion for their own reserve fleet, and also signing over two hundred of the class to the Department of Maritime Reclamation for scrapping. Of course, this being the Department of Maritime Reclamation, one hundred and twenty of these would instead be routed to Bandon Station to join the Black Fleet. They wouldn't stay there long, however. The Baron class had originally been used as testbeds for the SDS program, and protocols and procedures to convert them to unmanned M-4 drones were already well established. As testbeds, the original M-4 simply focused on demonstrating that automating a capital ship with the SDS drone control system was possible, rather than building the sleek killer drones that would be the M-5s, but this also meant the M-4s still retained the same accommodations for its original crew, as well as enough cargo space to carry supplies (and industrial equipment for a developing colony) on a particularly long trip into the deep periphery.

Of course, simply converting more base configuration M-4s wasn't going to be good enough. After all, these ships wouldn't just be testbeds. Until the Bastion could get its own military industries going, they would make up the entirety of the Bastion's defense force. And a stock Baron, well, there was a reason it was being phased out of service, and many, many pointed questions about why it hadn't happened much earlier. Jonathan Cameron may have had one hundred and twenty off the books potential drones dropped in his lap, but it would take some work to turn them into something that he would entrust the safety of his Bastion to.

In theory, the engineers at Bandon Station now tasked with "fixing the Baron and making it a drone" could have done almost anything, so long as money and time was no object. With unlimited money and time they could have built shipyard facilities able to disassemble each ship down to its bare core and rebuilt to their wildest specifications. Something that was actually done with some of the Lola IIs used as prototypes for the M-5 program. But Bandon Station didn't have the facilities on hand to do that, and the Director General was particularly impatient about making sure his Bastion was safe. This meant engineers had to set their sights lower. The Baron's main problem, poor speed, would not be addressed, at least not in this production run. Instead, a general upgrade of the armor protection would be implemented, leaving the ship better protected than the SLDF's standard light destroyer, the Essex, and roughly comparable in protection to the Lola series fleet destroyers or the M-5s being built for Hegemony SDS networks.

Armament was somewhat trickier. The budget and design constraints didn't allow for significant redesigns of the weapon array, but engineers quickly discovered that the existing mounts could instead be upgunned, swapping the original naval lasers for larger dual purpose guns fine tuned to operate with the new fire control system, while the original naval cannons were replaced with the same Whirlwind twenty guns used by the Essex class. This armament is likely very familiar to those already well versed in the capital ships operated by the Bastion, and for a very good reason. The need to support this original force of drones is what would cause the Bastion to standardize on the Whirlwind/Imperator naval cannon as well as the dual purpose NL-45s, which would dominate the primary armament of every capital ship produced by the Bastion until the Impetuous class, and even to this day have only been supplemented, rather than replaced, by the famed Kreuss XXX PPC. Modernization of the Baron's cooling and power distribution system handily dealt with the demands of their new, trend setting weapons. Unusual compared to the M-5s, the refit would also retain the Baron's original launch bays, though these were consolidated into a single automated flight deck able to handle fighters or small shuttlecraft.

The refit's greatest weapon was buried deep within it, however. This was an ATAC system able to direct up to twenty other drones or squadrons of drone fighters. Originally intended to fill the command and control gap as the rest of the network was established, this capability would serve the ships well throughout their service life, and even see them reactivated in the Amaris War panic. Also notable, or rather notable by its absence, was the scuttling charge normally mounted in the M-3 and M-5 classes. While this was considered standard and appropriate equipment and some of those in the Director General's inner circle familiar with the program were concerned at its removal from the design, the engineers successfully argued that the extra weight compromised the long range capability desired, and it could be installed once the ships arrived at the Bastion.

These scuttling charges would not be installed once the ships reached the Bastion.

Bandon Station would begin launching the first of the completed drones, now designated the M-4 Block III, in 2720, and the first examples would arrive, packed full of supplies, industrial equipment, and technical specifications for SDS related technologies, by 2722. Ultimately, eighty of the one hundred and twenty M-4 Block IIIs converted at Bandon Station would be sent to the Bastion. While two would be retained at Bandon Station and eventually be converted to the Block IIIA standard, the fate of the remainder is unknown, and it is speculated that these ships were used for testing or distributed to other Hegemony Black Sites to serve as defense vessels. In Bastion service, the drones (re-designated the M-4-3 to correspond to the Bastion's own designation structure) would serve pretty much as expected, operating as the sole capital ship defense of Martin's Landing and command ships for vast constellations of Swiftstar and later Blackwasp drones for five years, before the first control stations, defense platforms, and M-5-1 drones began entering service, and even once these newer ships and installations came online, the M-4-s would remain in service providing secondary command and control support, before finally being retired in 2760. That retirement would only last seven years, however, as news of the Amaris coup led to an emergency reactivation of the class. This time, the ships would be paired with Mammoth Autofreighters hastily converted into so called "Hive Carriers" fitted out to carry eighteen squadrons worth of Swiftstar drones, meant to represent an additional last line of defense in the event that Amaris somehow found and attacked the Bastion.

As news about the conflict slowly filtered back to the Bastion, dual pressures would see an easing of this alert status. The first and most obvious was that it was clear that Amaris represented no threat to the Bastion. Kerensky had swept the Republic clear and was now tightening a noose around the occupied Hegemony. Second was precisely how Amaris had taken the Hegemony, and so easily subverted their own SDS networks. While it would not yet reach the fever pitch seen once refugees from the Hegemony began to arrive, distrust of the SDS had already begun to take root. New orders would see the alert status throughout the Bastion scale back, and the M-4-3 fleet in particular would start returning to reserve status. Twenty M-4-3s and their Hive Carriers would be reactivated again after the Amaris Coup, when fear of Amaris was replaced by fear of Kerensky, but even that would not last long as demands to decommission the SDS network grew in intensity. By 2785, as large numbers of ships from the Black Fleet had arrived in the Bastion, and the first brand new manned warships were entering service, the last of the M-4-3s would be taken out of service, and the entire class would be decommissioned and have their central control systems removed.

But, oddly enough, the ships themselves still remain. Seventy six of the original eighty M-4-3s that had been sent to the Bastion, not counting four that were lost due to mishap during their service life, are still retained, not under the military purview of the Mothball Fleet, but as a National Reserve Asset, based on the order issued by then Director General Elias Siemans in 2785. Because a Director General is not required to explain or justify the designation of National Reserve Assets, no explanation was ever provided by Director General Siemans for the decision, and none of his successors have shown any interest in revisiting the issue. In the absence of real information, only theories remain, ranging from the mundane: the ships are simply being retained because currently the Bastion has so many resources that there's no point in scrapping them yet, to the sinister: the Director General(s) is/are retaining them as their own private Black Fleet of killer drones beholden only to them, to the strange: the ships are being retained as part of some shadowy agreement with the artificial intelligences that once controlled them for the day when the AI choose to leave the Bastion. Whatever the real reason, be it some dastardly scheme or simple inertia, the ships remain.