Hey look, fluff! Not only detailing what a Caspar Domini is, but also hinting at just how bad the Jihad in the Pebbles timeline got!
(Thanks to Cannonshop for okaying me blowing up Kowloon)
Caspar Domini:
So we all know the Word of Blake was getting a bit desperate towards the end there. Actually, they were probably a bit desperate the whole time if you think about it. But really, as the war was making its way back to Terra, they were running out of dirty tricks to play. Stuffing a two gigaton bomb under a pile of ore in the hold of a merchant ship had worked on Orestes and a bunch of other worlds, but the Houses had figured out how to beat that by properly inspecting ships before they got to land. Spreading the Curse of Galedon to the Outworlds and unleashing the Alarion bug all across the Clan occupation zones had kept the clanners busy and out of the war for a while, but damn if clan SCIENCE! didn't just figure out how to treat those bugs. And throwing nukes at everything worked for a while, but in the end it just turned into a boom market for everybody making point defense systems and anti-radiation medication. Dropping a convenient asteroid on planets made a hell of an impression, and the Word of Blake would demonstrate they'd refined the technique considerably when they finally got Kowloon, but even they seemed to think that continuing to do that was crossing a line that might lead to everybody dying. Surprisingly that was a bridge too far.
(Given the great big hole some angry Kowloonese lady left in Mars at the end there, can you blame them?)
But let's get on topic. WarShips. WarShips were great for causing mayhem, and the Blakists had a lot of them. However, they never seemed to have quite enough for the task they'd set themselves upon. Even less so given their enemies kept blowing the damn things up.
And the Word of Blake had a big pile of ships to draw from. We don't actually know how many hulls they pulled out of ole Gabby before the facility was destroyed. Fog of War and all that, but we do know they had a healthy number still lying around at Titan waiting for their turn for service when the fighting ended. The first bottleneck was getting them ready for service. We now know that the Word of Blake might have had only a dozen and a half or so WarShips in service when they started things on Tharkad and New Avalon, and it was taking time to get more ships running. That's why they were so quick to grab the Free Worlds Fleet along with looting everything they could get their hands on when they hit the yards at Necromo, Alarion, Kathil, and Galax. We also now know that their superjumping trick actually burns out the jump drive. So every time they had to rush ships to the other end of the Inner Sphere right the hell now, that ship wasn't going anywhere unless they could spare a big damn repair ship and an entire new drive.
So yeah, they were desperate to get new ships into the field. As the war raged on, one of the ways they did that was cutting corners on getting their huge fleet of mothballed hulls fit for service. Towards the end, some of the Blakist ships were heading out with some weapons or other critical systems either non-functional or simply missing. This impaired their fighting power and partly explains why there just happened to be so many war prizes left for the houses to divy up.
But the other bottleneck is trained manpower. No matter how devoted to your cause, a WarShip needs a crew that is at least trained enough to operate it properly.
But... what if it didn't?
Nah, it still did. The Star League never got a drone system to consistently endure a jump without going batty, and the Word of Blake didn't have any better luck.
But what if you could bring that crew down to one person?
That was the Word of Blake's Caspar Domini program, and it was literally plugging a manei domini operative directly into the central computer of a ship rigged up with the Caspar II robotic control system. The theory was that the human mind could cope with the stress of the jump well enough to guide the computer through it, allowing the otherwise unmanned ship to come out the other end in a state fit to fight.
We know that actually keeping the drone sane through a jump was... Iffy. Maybe fifty/fifty? Actually it's a little hard to say, because a drone WarShip that goes psycho from a jump tends to shoot up anything and everything around it, and our first introduction to the Caspar Domini was a WarShip appearing somewhere and.... shooting up anything and everything around it. Anyway we know the Word of Blake knew the ship wouldn't always come out stable, because they would have a caretaker crew move the ship to one jump away from its target before actually turning the system on and sending it on its way.
(Yes, a drone can travel through hyperspace if the control computer is completely shut down, but the startup time is a little long to make this combat viable)
Captured Blakist records indicate that once a Caspar Domini vessel had completed its attack, it was supposed to return to a designated pickup point for recovery. Based on reports from those who survived a Caspar Domini attack, about two thirds of the drones that weren't destroyed in the battle would in fact eventually travel to a jump point and leave the system. The Word of Blake's records suggest that roughly fifty percent of Caspar Domini drones that made it to their pickup point were still stable. Certain Domini that proved especially resistant to jump psychosis would gradually be given more complex attacks, like hitting multiple worlds one after the other before coming home. The most famous of these was the battleship Maledictio Infernalis (Infernal Curse in Latin and High Domini).
(Also, is it just me or is it weird that the Republic started naming all their WarShips in Latin just after the Jihad? Maybe somebody should look into that?)
The Maledictio was a Stephan Amaris class battleship that the Word of Blake dug up somewhere or other. Unlike most Caspar Domini ships, it was fully refitted and updated before it was sent out on a grand tour that would leave a trail of destruction through Jade Falcon and Hell's Horses territory before reaching its final target, Spider Moon in the Kowloon system, because even after depopulating the system's habitable planet with c-fractional bombardment, the Word of Blake still held a grudge.
(It's also very likely that an infamous ship of Rim Worlds origin was deliberately chosen for the operation specifically to piss the Clans and the Kowloonese off)
The battle between the Maledictio, the Kowloon Coast Guard, and a couple Jade Falcon WarShips that had been chasing the Blakist all the way from Sudeten was a tense one. The Maledictio had expended its nukes and conventional munitions during its rampage through the clan occupation zones, and it appears the ship's last order was to use itself as the projectile, screaming on a collision course with Spider Moon. One Jade Falcon WarShip attempted to pursue, but its crew couldn't handle the acceleration needed to close the range. The second jumped ahead of the Maledictio and managed a high speed pass. They hit the ship hard, but couldn't actually stop it before it had passed them by. The Coast Guard got their own shots in with multiple waves of units. Anti-shipping missiles couldn't get through the Maledictio's point defense, but conventional fire took its toll, and clouds of space mines and gravel practically stripped away the outer hull.
It's hard to parse what happened next. Some witnesses claim the Maledictio actually started to turn away on its own, others claim that the ship simply lost control and was nudged away by all the debris striking the hull. Either way, the Maledictio failed to hit Spider Moon, and with its point defenses offline, the ship was nuked by the Coast Guard.
But this was the most successful of the Caspar Domini. Of the rest, maybe half would be destroyed or captured on their first mission. In a couple of cases this was because the ship's jump psychosis had caused it to completely shut down without doing anything (This was how the Capellans got their Soyal, doncha know). The Blakists got more successes once they started targeting worlds further out from the front line, away from the majority of their enemies' fleets, but even then most ships never managed more than a few attacks before either succumbing to psychosis, being destroyed or captured, or... simply disappearing.
And now we're at the fun part. Some of the Caspar Domini are still unaccounted for. It makes you wonder, don't it? Maybe they're still out there, half mad or totally mad, just drifting in space waiting for new orders from their handlers, or wondering why the corpse plugged into their core hasn't spoken to them in decades? Maybe they're pulling a Bright Star, moving from star
to star deeper and deeper into the void looking for something only their poor addled robot brain can make sense of?
Or hey, let's get real speculative. The connection between the Drone System and the Domini plugged into it is two way, with the Drone learning from the human mind. Incorporating information from it... maybe gradually emulating it. Maybe the Domini that were plugged into these ships so long ago aren't even aware that they're actually dead? Maybe they're still out there, watching us. Trying to figure out what to do next? Questioning what their purpose is now that the war is over and their faith came to nothing?
Okay, cold water. Obviously one way or another any ships left unaccounted for are probably long gone. Either the jump psychosis led to misjumps, shutdown, or the ship wandered into the middle of nowhere and just stopped functioning once their Domini died. And space is just so big that the odds of finding one of these things drifting about is probably zero.
But it's fun to speculate, isn't it? Either way, if you do come across a strange ancient derelict out in the middle of nothing, I'd avoid poking her too hard. She might be crazy.
~Starling
