Author Topic: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star  (Read 79489 times)

lowrolling

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #660 on: 06 November 2024, 16:06:14 »
Terrans is borderline funny to go along with him being beyond borderline psychotic.
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Daryk

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #661 on: 06 November 2024, 17:50:53 »
Terrens is a tool... of his aunt and probably Amelia Grace... ;D

EPG

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #662 on: 06 November 2024, 18:10:01 »
Terrans is borderline funny to go along with him being beyond borderline psychotic.

Terrans has the making of a good kid, and a good person in there - along with a whole bunch of other stuff. 

DOC_Agren

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #663 on: 08 November 2024, 21:45:32 »
I kinda like the kid.  But he right now is being used as a pawn by the older adults around him.
"For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed:And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!"

Hotpoint

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #664 on: 12 November 2024, 10:16:14 »
Part LXXII - Section 1 of 2

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"Setting off flash-bangs inside the pressurised dock is now strictly forbidden. We all know it's kinda fun timing the echoes coming back off the far side of the cavern when it's quiet in there, but it frightens the life out of people that aren't expecting it and think there's a hull breach. Just because screams of terror don't carry outside they sure as hell do in here."

Notice placed in the canteen - Arsenale Nuovo - 2852CE

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Arsenale Nuovo Station - Niops System – 2848

Now orbiting the dwarf planet Elizabeth that was situated within the Niops asteroid belt, woe betide you if you ever referred to the world as 'Niops VIII' even if it was larger than many official planets located in other systems, the construction of the Arsenale Nuovo shipyard had been accelerated over the last year or so. With luck it might be actually finished now before the end of the decade, maybe even before a decision had to be taken to put the most worn-out of the Star Lord jumpships into mothballs beside the three Tramp class vessels already there.

Essentially a roughly ovoid shaped asteroid measuring several kilometres along its long axis, with a big chunk of its internal volume now a vast cavern scooped out by mining machinery and the occasional blasting charge, freefall construction crews now worked round-the-clock inside the massive rock, making it air-tight and gradually reassembling within what had once been the yard at Camelot Command.

The need for a larger pressurised dock than Camelot had boasted had still complicated matters however, with the two Potemkin class vessels in the Niops fleet being nearly twice as long as anything that could have fitted inside the Camelot dock for a start. It meant that a decidedly non-trivial amount of modifications and extensions to the internal frames, the slipway and the docking clamps would be required before the revised 'kit' could be fully assembled inside the asteroid, though there was of course still plenty of other work that needed to be done in the meantime.

As a milestone of sorts for the ongoing construction efforts the fitting of the airtight external doors was enough of an occasion for Admiral Bremman to want to come see them being installed personally, and with Commodore Mbeki in tow the two of them had hitched a ride with a cargo dropship heading out to Elizabeth arriving only a few hours before.

On arrival the dropship had made a low pass over the asteroid to give the VIP passengers a good look at it from outside. While most of the engineers and technicians had been beavering away inside some of them had been digging into the surface preparing for the installation of myriad batteries of defensive weapons. Eventually most of the turreted naval lasers that had once guarded Camelot would defend the Arsenale Nuovo shipyard, a handful of them having been re-tasked to other projects, and these would be joined by a plethora of smaller weapons including a number of surplus Enhanced ERPPC's and Improved Large Lasers that had been retired in favour of the superior new model Extended-Range model.

Finding a role for weaponry that was too advanced, too secret, or both to sell to friendly neighbours like the Magistracy or Palatinate, but was conversely outdated by modern Niops standards, was always useful. Better to install them at Arsenale Nuovo, for example, than have them sitting gathering dust in a warehouse instead.

First generation clan-tech, the kind of gear that was first fielded in quantity for Operation Klondike, was just too good to export. Meanwhile mere Royal-grade SLDF equipment could of course be offloaded on mercenaries contracted to the Hegemony who themselves would be only too happy to have it. One man's trash is another man's treasure after all.

Currently observing proceedings from the compact bridge of an S-7A shuttlecraft now positioned a few hundred metres away from the asteroid was Bremman himself, watching the EVA suited engineers toiling away. Piloting the shuttle himself, being able to borrow one of the small craft the dropship had been carrying was a useful privilege of rank, it was a shame he was still too aggrieved that it had taken this damn long to get to this point to be as happy as he felt he should be. Despite his mixed feelings he still felt the need to crack a joke however. "If it just me or are they putting it in backwards?" he asked his companion sat in the co-pilots chair deadpan.

"Eh, even if they are it should still keep the air in" Sarah Mbeki replied, glad as ever to be out of the gravity well and up in space where he muscles and bones didn't ache so much, making her feel old.

She was old, but that didn't mean she was either happy about it or wanted to be reminded of it.

"Yeah, but if they are putting it in backward then the manual keypad lock to open it is on the wrong side" Bremman noted.

"Damn, you're right. We might accidentally get locked out and have to call a locksmith to get in" Mbeki played along.

"True, and the invoice for that callout fee will look really bad on next year's budget allocation request form" Bremman suggested. "Might be better just to cut a hole though it with an NL-55 and claim a negligent discharge."

"Have you seen the paperwork you have to fill in for something like that?" Mbeki asked him. "Back in seventy-three I once accidentally launched a Barracuda with an inert training warhead fitted and I'm still trying to complete filling in the incident forms. I'm just hoping I can finish soon or I'm worried they won't pay me my pension" she joked.

"You do know that the Star League Navy Administration building on New Earth that dealt with that sort of thing was blown up by Amaris right?" Bremman checked.

"If we survived the fall of the Star League then you can bet your ass the bureaucracy did too, Sir" Mbeki replied seriously. "I'm still waiting for the day one of our ships returns from a survey mission saying they found the planet where the SLDF administration department made its office supplies. You know, like Comstock, only with rubber stamps instead of boots" she continued, pursing her lips. "Warehouses full of requisition forms. Barrels of red ink stacked high into to the sky. Automated factories still churning out millions of paperclips every day…"

Bremman blinked. "I am horrified at how plausible that sounds" he admitted, truthfully. It wouldn't even be the weirdest discovery of Star League remnants they had run across, that would be either the dinosaur sized poultry, the people with gills, or that SLDF supply dump out in the deep periphery full of Terran uniforms, Terran Alliance uniforms. Seriously, how in the hell had they ended up way out there? It was the kind of thing that gave some plausibility to that tall tale from the Reunification War about the infantry battalion that was supposed to be receiving a shipment of pulse laser rifles and crates of Napoleonic era smoothbore muskets arrived instead.

"I know, right?" Mbeki responded, visibly shuddering.

As they continued to watch the massively oversized pressure doors being fitted into place Bremman decided it might be a good time to ask the question he had been planning to put to her before they headed back to Niops VII. "You served on a McKenna once, right?" he asked, knowing full well that she had.

"Yep. Gunnery officer on the Implacable. Third ship I served on." Mbeki confirmed. "My first posting out of the academy as a rookie Lieutenant JG was actually aboard a Farragut class if you can believe that. Only served on her three months before we delivered the old girl to the scrapyard" she thought back to the early years of her military career.

"Ever get to actually sit in the big chair on a battleship?" Bremman queried, again already knowing from her file that she hadn't.

"Nah, never got to captain a proper battlewagon" Mbeki replied. "Not that a Potemkin is exactly a lightweight" she added, smiling.

That was true enough. Although technically classified as a 'cruiser', a Potemkin like her old ship the Ulithi massed more than a Monsoon class battleship, was longer than a Texas and it also mounted a respectable array of battleship-sized guns. The way the SLDF designated warships could be a little arbitrary on occasion, another example being the Riga II class 'destroyer' which was really more of a light carrier.

"Want to? For a short while at least?" Bremman asked her. "Something to add to the résumé."

"We're bringing Zughoffer Weir out of mothballs?" Mbeki responded in surprise.

"Yes, and no, and also sort-of" Bremman replied confusingly, chuckling at her resulting expression. "Like I guess everyone expected to do since we found her we're going to disguise the Zug as the Thorin, change all the external markings, make the necessary minor cosmetic changes and swap her IFF over."

Mbeki nodded. "Makes sense to have her available for deployment without bringing the clans running, which covers the 'yes' and the 'no' but I'm still not sure what you meant by 'sort-of'?"

"We don't really have the manpower available to properly crew her, not until we manage to train up enough civilian spacers to take over from our people crewing the Invader fleet anyway, so you'd basically just be commanding her with a token skeleton crew for a few months, maybe a year or so at the outside" Bremman explained. "It's just politics really. "High Associator Murray wants something he can point to while saying that he takes naval matters seriously to get the public and the media off his back, and nothing says 'serious' like a McKenna."

"I assume you told him that a McKenna with a skeleton crew isn't exactly fit for combat?" Mbeki replied dubiously.

"Yeah, but I'm basically throwing him a bone here" Bremman told her. "He's still sore at me because he thinks I went behind his back to drum up public support for the fleet, so I offered up a way for him to demonstrate how seriously he was taking the issue in a way that wouldn't have to wait until after the next election."

"Because even with the extra resources being thrown at getting this place built a little faster, he still might end up going to the polls before so much as a single ship gets to fly out of Arsenale Nuovo with a serviced K-F drive and a fresh coat of paint" Mbeki correctly surmised.

"Bingo" Bremman confirmed. "Even when the shipyard is operational it'll likely be at least five years before it'll be doing anything other than overdue maintenance on cargo jumpships, which does at least give the Skunk Works a while longer to get that Laser AMS of theirs working and ready for production. I really want those things retrofitted to every warship we have ASAP, starting with Michigan. The Great Houses might not have much in the way of capital ships left these days, as far as we can tell anyway, but they've still got plenty of aerospace fighters they can sling an Alamo or two under, so until we can no-sell attempted strikes by volleys of dinky nuclear-tipped missiles we're still under threat."

Mbeki laughed. "You know, describing a five-kiloton warhead as 'dinky' is such a Succession Wars thing" she remarked. "I still remember a time before Amaris when the idea of slinging nukes around was the stuff of nightmares."

"Hey, compared to the multi-megaton bunker busters the Great Houses were routinely dropping on each other during the First Succession War our Santa Ana and Peacemakers stockpile is a heap of firecrackers" Bremman replied. "Let alone that freaking monstrosity the Marik's dropped on Old Kentucky" he added, rolling his eyes.

"I'm still not buying the reported yield on that thing" Mbeki replied. "Two hundred gigatons? What would even be the point? Surely, the blast would be so large you'd just lose half the energy to space? It would be a lot cheaper and a lot more effective to drop scores of hundred-megaton warheads if your goal was to flatten a continent."

"Atreus probably thought it would be so intimidating Sian would throw in the towel" Bremman suggested. "As if people worried about getting a hydrogen bomb dropped on them are all that fussed about what yield the thing that incinerates them is. Anything more than a hundred-megatons set to surface-burst is complete overkill for a ****** Castle Brian, let alone anything else" he argued before pausing. "Although a paper did cross my desk last year suggesting that one of the larger metallic asteroids in the AJC system was suitable for getting cracked into more easily harvested chunks by a trio of oversized thermonukes initiating simultaneously in the right places. The appendices to the paper even contained all the math."

"How big a rock are we talking about?"

"A lot bigger than the one out there" Bremman replied, pointing out the window. "Not big enough for its mass to have formed it into a sphere but getting there. Literally trillions of bucks worth of metal that could be scooped up and dumped into an orbital forge."

"SLDoME used to do it a lot, crack asteroids with nukes I mean, the Belter communities too" Mbeki recalled.

"Yeah, and if the paper wasn't from Ogbert Farnstrom and he wanted to lead the project personally I might have given it a little more of my time, but it was" Bremman told her.

"Farnstrom? I thought he was dead?"

Bremman shoot his head. "No, just retired, and also bored apparently" he replied. "The latest thing I've heard is that he's trying to get approval for a child via the iron wombs."

"Oh, come on!" Mbeki exclaimed. "He must be almost old enough to be my father."

"True, but he's found a former grad student that's willing to contribute her genetic material and actually raise the kid supposedly" Bremman told her. "From what I hear the authorities are less than keen on the whole idea, but they're struggling to find an exception to the rules that'll block it."

"They need an exception to the rules to block it?" Mbeki responded incredulously. "Didn't General Romanov need an exception to allow it in her case, because of her age?"

"Yes, and because he's even older the exception she got because she never had children wouldn't have likely been allowed but the problem is the other criteria they apply when choosing to allow it" Bremman explained. "It's a points-based system, you score high or low depending on age, family circumstances, whether you have children already, income and job security and, because this is Niops, also your academic qualifications and IQ because of all the genetic factors linked to intelligence"

Mbeki sighed. "And he may be old, and crazy, but he's still the smartest son-of-a-bitch in the Association, probably the entire Hegemony."

"Right" Bremman concurred. "He scores so well on that criteria that it outweighs how badly he scores on some of the other ones. If Niops ever has a breeding program for scientists, like the clan used to have for warriors, most of them will probably end up part Farnstrom, he's just at the extreme end of the bell curve when it comes to brains."

"I guess it's just a shame that not all of his marbles managed to make it over the peak of the slope to roll down the other side" Mbeki observed. "Makes you wonder if genius and insanity are closer than we'd like to think."

Bremman looked away from her for a moment to check the instrument panel. "Well, I'd prefer to believe that than accept that he's not crazy, it's just that the rest of us are too dumb to understand what's really going on" he said, flicking a couple of switches. "I need to start getting more hours in behind a joystick, I'm getting rusty" he muttered mostly to himself.

"Out of curiosity, when you finally let him borrow a naval laser for that experiment he wanted to run was it just an attaboy for coming up with that new fusion engine design or did you actually expect to get something useful from the results?" Mbeki asked.

"It was mostly just the Joint Chief's way of saying thanks, and maybe spurring him on to come up with something else nobody else had thought of, but optical tweezers, using high-powered lasers to manipulate objects, is a centuries old technology and might eventually lead to large-scale practical applications."

"While I do love the idea of an honest-to-God sci-fi tractor beam, I've got to admit that the notion of one that could accidentally burn a hole through the hull of my ship fills me with a little trepidation" Mbeki replied, grinning.

"I can't say I disagree" Bremman concurred with her thoughts on the matter. "When I read up on it and found out that even those loons at SLDoME R&D rejected it as a dangerously risky technology to throw money at I wasn't exactly expecting useful, or safe, practical applications" he said. "Hell, look at what those madmen were up to at McEvedy's Folly. I'm still not entirely convinced that Amaris didn't do us all a favour by bombing the place."

"They had vision, you've got to give them that" Mbeki opined.

Bremman shifted in his chair. "They had a blank chequebook and people that would look at a planet like Venus and think, 'day's too long, we'll build the biggest engines ever constructed and spin it up' just because they could" he said. "Makes that damn array Murray wants us to build look entirely reasonable."

Mbeki sighed. "Difference is the Star League had the money and resources to fund SLDoME and everything else at the same time, none of this 'prioritisation' nonsense" she said before adopting a quizzical expression. "If I turned down the Zug, or I guess we'll be calling her the Thorin, who would get her?"

"I'd probably offer her to Blüd, she's done good work commanding Dobrev, I mean 'São Gabriel', and a lot of our other experienced officers are aging out" Bremman replied.

"Why not Captain Whitfield on Buccaneer?" Mbeki queried. "He's pretty young. I mean by my standards he's just a kid. Must be barely into his fifties."

"Yep, considered the rising star of the Wolverine fleet during Klondike" Bremman replied. "Problem is if I put Whitfield into the Zug I'd have to shuffle more people around because if I tried to put Blüd on Buccaneer she'd either resign her commission or mutiny and turn pirate for real" he said, grinning.

"Avast. I be Cap'n Blood of the Buccaneer, lower ye colours and prepare to be boarded ye lily-livered swabs" Mbeki put on a better stereotypical pirate accent from the old movies than Bremman would have expected of her.

"Exactly. It's just a little too on-the-nose" Bremman responded. "I could transfer Jaime Meriño off Saratoga, but he'd probably want to take his Mariachi Band with him, and Yukon is practically the private property of Francis at this point" he said. "We've got some up-and-comers, as you know I've been making sure to train up replacements for the retirees, but dropping someone that only just got command of a destroyer, much less a cargo jumpship, into a McKenna is a hell of an ask. If you do take the job I'll probably assign a few junior officers to you just so you can show them how to handle something that size."
"A dread fear rests deep in the heart of Clan Coyote that one day a lawyer will arrive on Tamaron talking about intellectual property rights, the Mercury II and the Coyotl omnimech and this will herald the end of the Clan as the Not-Named sue their asses into bankruptcy for patent infringement" - The True History of the Clans (Dark Caste Press: 3050)

Hunted Tribes - Hotpoint's Battlestar/Battletech Crossover Series


Hotpoint

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #665 on: 12 November 2024, 10:19:01 »
Part LXXII - Section 2 of 2

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Mbeki nodded. "Who would I get as XO?" she asked, considering the offer.

"Probably Hollister transferring from James Sever, so it won't just be a mix of rookies and guys and gals coming up on retirement" Bremman told her. "Unlike a lot of our people these days he's actually seen some action, during Klondike and later against the Blood Rain, and he was on the Circinus and Terran expeditions so you can count on him."

"I thought he was lined up for promotion, getting the Badger?" Mbeki asked, frowning.

"That was the plan, but with the changes to the expected fleet composition I'm going to shuffle the deck" Bremman replied. "We might end up putting one of the officers currently commanding an Invader on the Badger, less of a step up. Then we put Hollister on the Cape Bon or the Protecteur, give the current captain of that ship on the Buccaneer and put Whitfield on the Michigan."

"Really? I thought Captain Brentjes on the Michigan was bolted to his chair?"

"Not to put too fine a point on it Sarah, but the fleet is going to need a new commodore to act as my second-in-command at some point in the not-too-distant-future and Brentjes is the only candidate with both the seniority and that isn't nearly as old as you are" Bremman told her. "Frankly, I need someone that can replace me when I reach mandatory retirement myself."

"Brentjes isn't that much younger than you are" Mbeki pointed out.

"I've got six years on him, not ideal but at least he's not a centenarian" Bremman replied. "Getting replacement personnel was always going to be a stretch for a while, give us another twenty or thirty years' worth of Tax Break kids and Ironborn and we'll be sweet, but demographics is a pitiless bitch."

"Would have been a lot better for us if the army hadn't scooped up so many of the kids from your breeding program" Mbecki correctly observed.

"Unfortunately the mechwarrior mafia are always going to see the world though the lens of a battlemech cockpit window and allocate resources accordingly" Bremman replied. "It was even worse in the clans, the only exception to the rule was the Snow Ravens. With them it was the ground pounders that bitched about all the best people and hardware going to the navy while the army lived on scraps."

"Those are the ones that have one of the McKenna family in charge, right?"

"Yup. Living the dream" Bremman said wistfully. "Hound of Dracula signed up with the wrong clan."

"Say what now?" Mbeki responded, confused.

"My cousin, Zoltan, his nickname was 'Hound of Dracula', painted it on his fighter and everything" Bremman explained. "It's an old movie, twenty-fifth century, although I think he once said that it was actually a remake of an even older one, anyhow the movie was called 'Zoltan: Hound of Dracula' and he loved it. Mostly because of the name" he continued. "Anyhow, Zoltan signed up with McEvedy instead of McKenna and I basically got dragged along for the ride. I probably wouldn't have made Star Admiral with the Ravens though, they started out with more fleet personnel so the competition to rise up the ranks would have been greater. Sarah McEvedy, well she wasn't exactly an expert when it comes to using warships effectively so she delegated, mainly to me, because she quickly realised I did and she was the pragmatic type that mostly cared about results, not personal aggrandisement."

"At least it sounds like she wasn't one of those bozos that thought because they knew how to command ground troops effectively that those skills transferred over to naval matters" Mbeki observed. "I never had that problem with Romanov, but some of the generals I dealt with before her during the war were… difficult" she said, greatly understating the reality. "They didn't really grasp that by treating the fleet as basically just a glorified taxi service for their precious battlemech regiments they were wasting the most valuable assets we had."

Bremman chuckled. "I know you mean 'valuable' in the sense of them being the prime strategic asset of the military, not to mention the sheer tactical utility of having a warship or two in orbit, holding the high ground and raining fire on ground targets, but I still remember the expression on High Associator Murray's face a few months back when he asked how much it would cost to build a small warship to placate the press."

"I'll bet" Mbeki replied, chuckling herself. "Tell him the sticker price of a McKenna did you?"

"Nah, told him that a Vincent class corvette like the Badger, the smallest warship we have, costs over five billion dollars to build, about as much as two brigade's worth of assault mechs which is why I didn't kick up a fuss when Olson and Romanov agreed we should prioritise the army for capital military spending for the first ten to fifteen years. Upgrading mechs and aerospace fighters with the latest gear just gives a lot more bang for your buck, initially at least."

Mbeki nodded. "Law of diminishing returns starting to kick in hard now though" she noted. The first wave of upgrades, replacing Star League era weaponry with first generation clan tech had massively improved the army's firepower, and the gradual development of even better hardware continued, but most of the relatively cheap wins were a thing of the past. Military R&D was fiendishly expensive and with lead-in times for the next generation of equipment often measured in decades.

The population boom and the expansion of the Hegemony's industrial base would allow for an increase in quantity as improvements in quality slackened off, but in financial terms the argument that money was far better spent on the army than the navy was fading as the Hegemony expanded.

You could also occasionally find jobs for warships to do that meant they weren't just expensive white elephants in peacetime, with an obvious case-in-point being the one that had facilitated building the Arsenale Nuovo station in the first place.

Moving the asteroid from its original orbit had been a task primarily undertaken by the corvette Badger, the big rock having originally rested almost as far away from Elizabeth as the other dwarf planet in the system Helena did. According to James Murray, that being James Murray the former SLDoME engineer and not James Murray the current High Associator, back in the day whenever they needed for borrow a ship from the SLDF to apply some thrust to a problem it had usually been a similar Vincent class ship that turned up so Badger finding itself being the craft doing all the pushing had been very apt, even if playing a glorified bulldozer wasn't exactly a glamorous job for a warship.

Whether it was as useful as the two brigades of assault mechs it was worth financially in the average military campaign was debateable, but all those mechs would have definitely had a hard time pushing the asteroid from where it was to where it was needed.

The Star League Department of Mega Engineering had shunted so many asteroids about over the years that there were even instruction manuals in the naval database as to how you should safely go about using a Vincent to push gigantic floating rocks about, much of the advice being to make sure to hollow them out as much as possible before you tried moving them, and not to try and rush things. As was often the case, the compact nature of the Niops star system had helped considerably as even though the corvette was a mere fraction the size of the rock it was pushing it didn't have to push it nearly as far, or as fast, as would have been generally required elsewhere. Accelerations of a mere fraction of a gee in the Niops system could get you from A to B in a fairly reasonable space of time, weeks rather than months for example, and a Vincent didn't lack for potential delta vee.

After carefully, very carefully, nudging the asteroid that was to become the Arsenale Nuovo shipyard into its new home in stable orbit over Elizabeth, academics at the university were practically queueing up to help with the calculations required, the Badger had then got to work helping to move cargo around, hauling equipment from the inhabited worlds of the system out to the construction site. That was another reason the Vincent class had been popular with SLDoME, they weren't merely the most common warship in the fleet, so there was usually one readily available when required, their exceptionally large size for corvettes converted into lots of cargo space as well as plenty of thrust.

Badger herself was scheduled for a very long overdue refit eventually once the shipyard was operational, so in a way she had been doing herself a favour. An older model Vincent that had been in mothballs when the Amaris War began, causing the old girl to be quickly brought back into service, she had never been upgraded to the latest Mark XXXIX standard and therefore lacked the state-of-the-art Ulsup AI Surveillance Computer that had made the last production model of the Vincent such a good picket ship. On the other hand the aging Badger boasted Medium Naval PPC's as her primary armament, instead of the usual NAC/10 autocannon of the Mark XXIXs, so she could reach out and touch an enemy further away than most potentially giving her a minor tactical edge against an unwary foe, albeit at the cost of some total firepower.

Her planned refit would keep the Naval PPC's, though it would add a number of anti-fighter and point-defence guns as well as upgrade her various electronic systems to something less Age-of-War vintage and more cutting edge circa 2750.

Rumours that they urgently needed to strip out the original computers on the Badger before her former captain Simon Mitchell died of old age, mostly because he was the only one that still knew how to fix the clockwork in the Difference Engine that calculated jumps if the gears stripped a tooth, were exaggerated.

Despite what he claimed when interviewed about his long, eventful naval career Mitchell had not been taught computing by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, and neither had he been taught jump physics by Thomas Kearny.

The even more improbable story about once going up against a squadron of M-3 Drones that had drastically outgunned his own vessel and winning was true though, he didn't BS when it came to how he won his medals.

When it came to turning the asteroid Badger had delivered into something more useful than just a tiny new moon for a dwarf planet that was now the task of engineers and technicians who had previously put together not only the Olympus Recharge stations but also the multiple smaller orbitals that now littered the system. Fortunately since much of Camelot Command itself had essentially been a gigantic kit, one that was produced by the SLDF in secret within the Terran Hegemony, surreptitiously transported in sections to the Dark Nebula within the Rim Worlds Republic, and then constructed there even more secretly, essentially repeating the whole process was much easier than it could have been. Other such shipyards, such as the enormous ones the Terran Hegemony had built over Titan, were not so readily transportable because they had never been intended to be moved.

More than half of those engineers and technicians were demobilised or retired naval personnel, many of them grateful for work that kept them in space or, like Mbeki, happy to just spend much of their time in freefall where the aches and pains of their advancing years mostly went away.

Apprenticeship schemes had eventually provided a steady flow of workers for the slowly expanding number of orbital factories that dotted the system, the majority still situated above Niops V but as time went on the bulk of them would be located in the asteroid belt, utilising automated mining robots to gather resources they would convert into materials needed to not only supply Arsenale Nuovo but to build the planned second shipyard over Helena.

The Helena shipyard wouldn't be a pressurised dock, and it wouldn't be intended to produce warships as well as transport jumpships, but it would in time be by far the larger station with multiple shipways enabling it to work on building several ships at once. These would not only be needed to meet the needs of the Niops Hegemony itself, given the state of the Inner Sphere in a few years excess jumpships could be exported for truly exorbitant sums.

If the projections were right, then by the turn of the century the Hegemony, with both shipbuilding capacity and the germanium required to utilise it, would be draining the coffers of the Successor States as they struggled to maintain internal trade.

That would have probably been the right time to start thinking about orbital telescopes and colossal astronomical arrays but there you are.

"I'm told that docking the Zug inside won't interfere with construction of the station, she's a lot shorter than the bay, we hollowed out the rock enough to build a Newgrange in there if we had to after all, assuming we ever get the blueprints, so if you accept the job you'll get the privilege of commanding the first new warship produced by the yard" Bremman told Mbeki.

"The Zughoffer Weir with fresh paint and a name borrowed from another old McKenna isn't really a new ship though, is it sir?" Mbeki replied sardonically.

"Eh, while she's in there we might as well spruce her up a bit too, there's probably some parts from Thorin that are in better condition than the ones in Zug and if it isn't going to be too difficult to swap them out we might as well do that at the same time" Bremman suggested. "If she's going to bear her name she might as well carry a few of her heat-sinks or whatever too."

Mbeki frowned. "Given that it's supposed to be bad luck to re-name a ship, then some parts from Thorin might be in order to ward off a curse" she suggested.

"Superstitious are we, Sarah?" Bremman asked, amused.

"I've served with too many Jonah's in my career to not be at least a tiny bit cautious about that kind of thing" Mbeki replied. "My ancestors would have talked about not angering their ancestral spirits, not sure if that applies to ships too, but why take the risk?" she asked rhetorically.

"Okay, but if you do take the job, if your beliefs in any way involve astrology then kindly keep that to yourself because the High Associator will insist on me having you relieved of command and placed in psychiatric care if that gets out."

"What if I suddenly get the urge to worship the Aesir once the IFF switches over from squawking Zughoffer Weir to Thorin?"

"Oh, that would only get you tagged as being eccentric, not unacceptably deranged" Bremman reassured her. They were okay with eccentric, it looked like they would even let really eccentric reproduce.

Sarah Mbeki thought about that. "Good to know" she replied, thinking that it would be nice to finally command a battleship for a while, even if it was mostly just as a publicity stunt to help out a damn politician.

She also wondered how Bremman planned to convert this 'favour' he was doing for Murray into something that benefitted the fleet in a more concrete way down the road. Maybe getting that stupid array shelved indefinitely? That would solve a lot of medium-term problems.


----------

Note from the Author:

Working on ships inside pressurised docks is easier which is why they are considered superior to yards open to vacuum despite being far more expensive to build. The Arsenale Nuovo Station in the process of being constructed above the dwarf planet Elizabeth in the Niops Asteroid belt is essentially the yard from Camelot Command with a great deal more internal space for building larger ships (although as yet they don't have the full blueprints for anything bigger than a Black Lion II).

Commodore Sarah Mbeki was attached to the 295th. Despite being somewhat older than Admiral Bremman, and having served against Amaris, she found herself only the second-in-command of the fleet though fortunately she was okay with that (she knew she was rusty after all those years stuck on Buffalo Meadows). Coming up on retirement, getting to captain the Zughoffer Weir/Thorin is a nice way to end her career.

The First Succession War was extremely nuke-happy. The two hundred gigaton bomb dropped by the FWL, that's
canon.

Laser based Optical Tweezers are very much a real thing. Work on them won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics (and they didn't have battletech naval lasers to play with). Any similarities between elderly scientist Ogbert Farnstrom ending up with offspring via a big glass incubator tube and anyone else is purely coincidental I swear... *crosses fngers behind back*

Warships, even small ones like the Vincent class corvette Badger, are very, very expensive.
"A dread fear rests deep in the heart of Clan Coyote that one day a lawyer will arrive on Tamaron talking about intellectual property rights, the Mercury II and the Coyotl omnimech and this will herald the end of the Clan as the Not-Named sue their asses into bankruptcy for patent infringement" - The True History of the Clans (Dark Caste Press: 3050)

Hunted Tribes - Hotpoint's Battlestar/Battletech Crossover Series


lowrolling

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Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #666 on: 12 November 2024, 11:36:20 »
Finally getting to solve the transportation and logistics issue at long last. They can now return those older Tramp jumpships to service and keep their exteriors looking rough and the mechanical parts nice and shiny. Very nice and somewhat terrifying update, thanks for sharing.
Have mercy on me, I refuse to go beyond 3075

Daryk

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  • The Double Deuce II/II-σ
Re: Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
« Reply #667 on: 12 November 2024, 17:13:31 »
Huzzah for the Navy finally starting to get their due! :)

 

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